One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.
In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.
We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.
RIP.
November 2, 2009
A very good question
A friend who has worked in and written about politics for nearly 40 years writes with this question about assessments of Obama's "disappointing" first year:
"How can the MSM (what's left of it) not "get" that disappointment in Obama over "lack of change" is precisely the object of the GOP in blocking change? Does no one remember Newt Gingrich and the GOP strategy from 1992 to 1994, which actually worked? How can the GOP steal second and third in one play AGAIN and not get nailed this time? I want to scream. In any sensible society, instead of disappointment in Obama there would be intense anger at the GOP, and they'd be forced to knock it off."
The talk about "any sensible society" of course leads us into the realm of what is fancily known as counterfactual theorizing....
October 31, 2009
Now this is what I call thought leadership
National advertising campaign for the Atlantic, October, 2008:
National advertising campaign for The Australian newspaper, October, 2009 (billboard in Sydney, Circular Quay, today).
I take it as a compliment.
October 24, 2009
From an Airbus captain, about recent flight errors
A reader writes:
"I just thought you might like to know that while the airplane overflying Minneapolis received major headlines, the Delta airplane which landed on a taxiwayin Atlanta earlier this week received minimal coverage. As you can imagine the taxiway landing is much more of a close call (that is a greater chance of casualties) than overflying an airport at altitude. As I've come to expect from the press there is no perspective on the relative danger of either incident. Somewhat similar to focusing on shark attacks while we kill approximately 40,000 every year on our roads.
"As an A-320 captain I don't mean to throw stones at either crew (there but for the grace of God...)... As to the Atlanta taxiway incident there were multiple factors including a long overnight flight, a sick check airman who was in the back, and a change of runway inside the marker [well into the plane's final descent, shortly before landing] to a runway without approach lighting... But it is interesting that one incident is totally ignored while the other gets major media play."
Google Earth view of approach to runway 27R at Atlanta. Where they should have landed is the runway at center of this view, with the chevron markers on black background pointing towards it. Where they actually landed was the taxiway just to its right. This happened in the dark. At night the taxiway would have blue lights and the runway white lights.
Why a taxiway landing is potentially much more dangerous: another airplane could theoretically be turning onto the taxiway just as the incoming plane was touching down, raising the prospect of a repeat of the deadliest accident in aviation history, the collision of two fully-loaded 747s on the runway at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, in 1977. Why the current "overflight" incident, despite its safe conclusion, has gotten attention: for what it may show about pilot-fatigue and work-rule questions (plus the melodrama factor of passengers sitting, reading, dozing innocently while things in the cockpit are not as they should be; plus the melodrama factor of controllers, hearing nothing from the plane, not knowing whether it was another hijacking/terrorist episode). Why news coverage does not follow statistical risk of danger: this is life.
October 23, 2009
On the Fox News / White House dispute
I didn't see anything on Fox from mid-2006 through mid-2009; for better or worse, it's not carried in China. (The English TV news channels you can get there are BBC, CNN International, CNBC, sometimes Bloomberg.) I have seen it since coming back this summer. And in a way, I realize that I had been seeing it all along: except for more modern production values, it's the closest thing America offers to what it's like to be exposed to the Chinese government's 24/7 internal propaganda machine. When I saw the clip below from Media Matters, as highlighted by Andrew Sullivan, I thought: make it a little more boring, put it in Mandarin, and substitute "splittists" etc for the people Fox is talking about (maybe the Dalai Lama in place of Van Jones), and I could be right back in Beijing.
Are Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC comparably relentless and "biased"? Of course they are. But no one pretends their shows are "real" news operations or are "fair and balanced." And certainly they have become what they are as a market and political response to Fox's success. Indeed, the general polarization and spectacle-mindedness of the news ecology in part is homage to what Fox has figured out as a business and political model. Any fair person also has to acknowledge the better production values Fox brought to TV news over the past decade: it's lively, it's fast, it's interesting, the women on screen (to a shocking degree, if you've been away) set a new standard in physical looks, the whole thing gets your attention.
But a crucial part of this clip, and of the White House complaint, is that it's not just the out-and-out commentators on Fox -- the Hannities and O'Reillies who begat Maddow and Olbermann -- who supply a one-note politicized world view. It's the texture of the overall operation. I can think of honorable exceptions among correspondents and anchors, like Major Garrett (whom I do know) and Shepherd Smith (whom I don't). But this clip suggests the seamlessness of the Fox News outlook, which has impressed me on watching it. Again something it shares with China Central TV.
Main point: I disagree with my journalistic colleagues who are huffy because the Obama White House is treating Fox differently from the way it is treating other news organizations. Fox is different. As a practical matter, saying so could backfire on the White House. But as a matter of observing and stating reality, they're right.
October 22, 2009
A Rorschach test on Afghanistan
The NYT op-ed page that has just gone up, for tomorrow morning's paper, has as concise a paired description of options in Afghanistan as anyone could want. Each of the articles is by an American writer with experience in the region. One says we should send more troops; the other says that would be a mistake. Each is clearly written with a brief passage that distills the outlook and sensibility.
One says:
"The United States was born of our ancestors' nationalistic resentment
of a foreign power whose troops we saw as occupiers, not protectors.
The British never fathomed our basic grievance -- this was our land, not
theirs! -- so the more they cracked down, the more they empowered the
American insurgency....
"We have been similarly oblivious to the strength of nationalism in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly among the 40 million Pashtuns
who live on both sides of the border there. That's one reason the
additional 21,000 troops that President Obama ordered to Afghanistan
earlier this year haven't helped achieve stability, and it's difficult
to see why 40,000 more would help either."
And the other says:
"During 10 days spent in Afghanistan at the invitation of Gen. David
Petraeus, the head of Central Command, I observed that a difficult task
has been further complicated by the checkered results of the Afghan
election. But what seems to be conspicuously absent from the
conversation in the United States is the realization that Afghanistan's
corruption problem, like its security problem, can be best addressed by
additional troops.
"Given what I saw and heard on my visit, I
believe it is indeed possible to get Afghanistan's politicos to do a
better job -- you just have to watch them closely.... Poor governance is an argument for, not against, a troop surge. "
The writers' identities are after the jump. I'm concentrating on the arguments themselves because I think they represent an extraordinarily pure Rorschach test. There are cases where you can listen to various sides and think, "Well, they've all got good points." But in this case, I bet most people will think: one of these perspectives rings true, and one sounds tragically deluded. Certainly that was my instant reaction -- and for that clarifying power I am grateful to both authors. Read, react, reflect.
I love the English-language Chinese press (chap. 17,825)
An article now buzzing around the China-hand blogosphere: multi-shot photo feature on "Most beautiful Chinese female soldier" from the People's Daily today.
For later discussion: why the PLA often seems less fearsome inside China than when described in Western news reports. Bonus photo collage after the jump.
I emerge briefly from writing-induced blog exile to celebrate a well deserved honor for a comrade: our own James Bennet, editor of the Atlantic, being selected as AdAge's "Editor of the Year."
I have worked for five editors during my time at the Atlantic: Robert Manning, William Whitworth, Michael Kelly, Cullen Murphy, and now James Bennet. They have been different people with different styles dealing with different challenges in different times. But all have been absolutely committed to the idea that this kind of magazine, with its determination to deal with serious issues in as interesting and news-making a fashion as possible, has a role in national life and can find an audience that will value what we do. I feel very fortunate to have been part of this institution for so long -- and I know that what makes it special are people who really do think all the time about improving the magazine. That describes everyone on the staff -- now, and over the years.
Industry "honors" like this are highly unscientific, hit-and-miss propositions. But when they work out, that's worth celebrating, as I do now.
If you feel like joining in, a subscription always makes the ideal gift! I'll save the full pitch for another time. (Andrew Sullivan has made his case here.) But, seriously, in the long run, enterprises like this have to figure out how to pay for what they do, and subscriptions make a big difference. Plus, the layout and pictures make magazines much better to read in print. Meanwhile, as members of the extended Atlantic family, please enjoy this nice bit of news.
October 13, 2009
Festival of links, part 1
Before an impending "real," as opposed to false-alarm, absence from this site for a while, because of impending "real" writing, a variety of links about things I've meant to mention. Two now, two or three later in the day.
- Everyone on the China-media beat is aware of the turmoil at Caijing, a unique and important magazine in China. The title means "Finance and Economics"; an English site is here. (Disclosure: one of my sons worked there right out of college, during the SARS epidemic, and I know many of the staff.) Caijing has become a powerhouse in both the business and the journalistic sense. It publishes thick issues and holds big, influential conferences -- but it has also been a crucial leader in real business/financial reporting and exposes of financial chicanery, corruption, pollution, and other topics usually hard for the Chinese press to cover. Evan Osnos, who wrote a New Yorker profile of the founder and sparkplug of the magazine, Hu Shuli, has an update on the turmoil here. Other info from the FT here, from the AP here, from the WSJ (subscription wall) here, from the Guardian here, from the NYT here, and from Yahoo news here. None of this is good news.
- In their respective parts of the Atlantic's site, my colleagues Corby Kummer and Megan McArdle make opposite cases about the effects of New York City's calorie-labeling law. McArdle says it hasn't done any good; Kummer argues that it has already done something and, over time, will undoubtedly do much more. Read and judge for yourself, but one part of Kummer's argument seems obviously true and worth underscoring. He stresses (as did the authors of the original study) that calorie labels -- like mileage labels on cars or electric-consumption labels on appliances -- can make a difference even if customers don't think they're paying attention to them. As the original study said:
"Calorie labeling could result in changes that do not rely primarily on alterations in consumers' food choices. Menu
labeling regulations may encourage chain restaurants to offer more
nutritious or otherwise improved menu offerings, which could be
profoundly influential. [italics Kummer's] Public health experts have
shown that creating "default" incentives to improve well-being is
essential to improving public health. By indirectly influencing
restaurants to offer more lower-calorie items, menu labeling
regulations could help encourage such default options for consumers."
As Kummer added:
"Yuppie avatar Starbucks immediately
changed its default milk from whole to 2 percent, so it wouldn't have
to admit that a Frappuccino could amount to practically as many
calories as you should eat in a whole day... Just this week, [a NYC official] told me... Burger King began a new ad campaign
telling how customers could eat a full meal for 650 calories or less.
McDonalds took .7 ounces and 70 calories out of its standard portion of
french fries. Dunkin Donuts introduced an egg-white breakfast. KFC put grilled skinless chicken on its menu--not something anyone expected to see at KFC."
Again, decide for yourself, but this corresponds to effects I've seen in other areas over the years. Labeling and disclosure in itself has an influence, in encouraging organizations to offer more of what they think will look "good" and less of what looks "bad."
October 11, 2009
The speech Obama won't ace (plus, WaPo gaffe followup)
So far, as noted here, Barack Obama has faced mounting expectations through a sequence of high-stakes speeches, from the "race" speech that saved his campaign 18 months ago to the Joint Session address on health care that appears to have changed momentum for his proposal. So far he has met or beaten expectations just about every time, most recently here.
I confidently predict that this string will end with his address in Oslo on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. My argument is probabilistic: of the hundreds of addresses that have been given by Nobel laureates (last year's here), exactly one is frequently quoted or referred to. That is William Faulkner's address on receiving the literature prize 60 years ago. The transcript is here, including the best known line: "I believe that man will not
merely endure: he will prevail." It's only three minutes long, and you can hear him delivering it below:
Will Obama give the second-ever memorable speech? That would be impressive but seems unlikely. For context: Martin Luther King's quite long speech here; T.S. Eliot's here; Winston Churchill's here, which includes the Onion-esque line, "The world looks with admiration and indeed with comfort to
Scandinavia." ___ Also, to follow up on the WaPo Nobel editorial gaffe from yesterday: I mentioned soon after moving back from China that the New York Times looked like the same newspaper I remembered, while the Washington Post sadly did not. This is the kind of thing I had in mind. The NYT has its lapses and embarrassing errors (as do we all). But for this lengthy, lead editorial to have appeared in the Post yesterday, it had to have passed through at least three people's hands -- and probably many more. Those three would be: the editorial board member who wrote it; the editor of that section; and the copy editor who was on duty for the page as a whole. In reality, other people almost certainly saw it before publication.
The editorial as published -- with its recommendation that the Peace Prize should instead have been given posthumously to the martyred young woman Neda from the Iranian uprising -- required that none of those three people was aware that Nobel prizes are not given posthumously. That's surprising for people in those positions, on general-education principles, but in no sense negligent. We're all ignorant, just of different things. Before the current flap, I had never heard that Peace Prize nominations had to be filed by February, which would have ruled out figures from the Iranian uprising this summer.
But it also required that none of the three people was curious enough or worried enough to check, before publishing not a blog post or a real-time update but a major paper's main editorial. That is a surprise. I don't think we can imagine a similar gaffe in a NYT lead editorial -- other problems, sure, but not a general-knowledge fact-check howler. More to the point, I can't imagine a comparable error in the WaPo's own sports section, which has been outstanding for years and still is now. (The counterpart might be a column about the World Series noting that the NL pitchers looked better when at bat than AL pitchers did, and wondering why that might be.) FWIW the Neda editorial is still online, with no correction note or update.
October 10, 2009
Don't these people have The Google?
The Washington Post's lead editorial today argues that a more deserving winner for the Nobel Peace Prize would have been Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death during the Iranian uprising became a worldwide symbol, comparable to the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Defensible point, though obviously purely symbolic in its own way too. As the paper says, after arguing that the selection of Barack Obama is an expression of hope rather than a post-achievement recognition:
"The Nobel Committee's decision is especially puzzling given that a
better alternative was readily apparent.... A posthumous award for Neda, as the avatar of a
democratic movement in Iran, would have recognized the sacrifices that
movement has made and encouraged its struggle in a dark hour."
Would it have been so hard to mention the complicating fact that Nobel prizes are only for still-living people? And that this is a basic element of discussion when, for example, the literature prize rolls around each year? (After John Updike's death in January, one of the Post's own writers noted that among the sadnesses was that Updike would never be recognized with a Nobel prize.) And that therefore the omission of Neda is not "especially puzzling" at all? The FAQ page at NobelPrize.org (yes! there is such a site) makes this clear:
"Is it possible to nominate someone for a posthumous Nobel Prize?
"No, it is not. Previously, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously
if he/she had already been nominated (before February 1 of the same
year), which was true of Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Nobel Prize in Literature 1931)
and Dag Hammarskjöld (Nobel Peace Prize, 1961). Effective from 1974,
the prize may only go to a deceased person to whom it was already awarded
(usually in October) but who had died before he/she could receive the
Prize on December 10 (William Vickrey, 1996 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). See also par.
4 of the Statutes of the
Nobel Foundation."
And this paragraph is the very first thing that comes up on a Google search for "posthumous Nobel prize." According to Google's meter, it took 0.24 seconds to find that info, and it would have taken maybe another fifteen seconds to change the sentence in the editorial to say: "Although the Nobel committee ordinarily rules out posthumous awards, an exception in this case... [and make the argument]."
Maybe the no-posthumous-award rules make sense. (Otherwise, you could have a debate every year on whether Abraham Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi, or Gandhi was the most deserving choice.) Maybe they don't. Maybe they should have exceptions for deaths within the calendar year. Etc. But these are the widely-understood rules. Who is on the copy desk these days? Or writing editorials like this?
October 5, 2009
Press items roundup
- TNR/McCaughey watch. As mentioned here numerous times, starting 14 years ago, The New Republic made Elizabeth McCaughey a public figure in 1994 and has been trying to mitigate the damage ever since. Concluding installment, under the circle-closing headline "No Exit" [also the title of McCaughey's original article], from Michelle Cottle here.
- Unknown gigantic cities watch. In my story last year about the surprisingly intense struggles within China to improve environmental protection, I mentioned a visit to Zibo, a coal-and-ceramics center in Shandong province. Zibo is one of countless cities in China that few outsiders have heard of but that are larger than, say, Chicago or Milan. The always interesting Moving Cities site, a Beijing-based effort to document urban design in fast growing cities, recently took a trip to Zibo to show what it looks like. Description and four photo essays about Zibo can be found here. (Note: for me, the Javascript on this site always stalled with Firefox. Worked OK with IE, Chrome, and Safari.)
Downtown view, with housing from the 1980s onward -- horizontal black bar is part of the site's convention for presenting photos:
On the way into town:
Alley that I've walked down myself, with pre-1980s housing:
- Problems of the press watch. I am grateful to Jake Seliger, of The Story's Story site, for a retrospective of my 1996 book Breaking the News. He makes the discouraging but, I think, accurate point that the arguments and criticisms from back in that era are all truer now. I have thought several times about revising or updating the book but have held back for two reasons. One is the shark-like instinct that it's worth always moving ahead to new territory. The other, that the central points to make remain the same; the details would differ and be more depressing.
September 30, 2009
Beijing, 3am
Well, we're going to see a lot of these shots in the next 24 hours out of Beijing, as the 60th anniversary celebrations for the founding of the People's Republic take place. This is from a reader looking down Xidawang Lu, not far from our former home, at 3am local time October 1-- a few minutes ago as I write.
This item, "China's Looming PR Disaster," at the Interpreter site from the Lowy Institute in Sydney, makes the point I've made frequently (including once on a live Chinese government TV show in Beijing) since the plans for a gala military parade were announced this spring: In showcasing endless seas of Chinese soldiers and weaponry, the regime may make itself look stronger to its people -- at the cost of looking threatening to everyone else. (Versions of this argument here and here.) As Alistair Thornton says on the Interpreter site:
"I have a sinking feeling that this could turn out to be the worst PR
stunt of all time. To me, it screams, 'Hey! You in the West! How's the
recession? We just nailed 9% growth. Scared of a rising China? Check
out all of our tanks and never-seen-before missiles'. It's not really
the vibe you want to give off in the midst of unprecedented shifts in
geopolitical power."
But the other obvious point is that all politics is local, in China as well as anywhere else, and impressing the home crowd will always outweigh the hand-wringing concerns from the diplomats. So, the show begins. I will leave most further photos to the news services, but thought it was worth kicking off the observations with this pic.
September 29, 2009
Update on McCaughey and tobacco
Yesterday I reported this exchange with a representative of the Manhattan institute, where Betsy McCaughey was based when she wrote her "No Exit" attack on the Clinton health reform plan:
"I wrote back to Lindsay Craig asking which of these options the Manhattan Institute was saying:
"A:
The Rolling Stone contention that tobacco companies collaborated with
Ms. McCaughey and M.I. is totally false; there was no such contact or
collaboration.
"B: We are confident that Ms. McCaughey's
opinions were not influenced by tobacco companies, even though she may
have worked with them.
"Her immediate response: "A. Betsy never worked with Phillip
Morris."
As a followup, I asked Ms. Craig whether there was any significance in the distinction between "tobacco companies" in the question and "Phillip Morris" in the answer. She said: No. Her flat denial applies to "Tobacco companies (plural -- though the document in question is from Phillip Morris)."
Clear enough. So we now have documents, reported in Rolling Stone, in which a tobacco lobbyist claims in detail to have worked with McCaughey as she put together her articles -- and a categorical denial from the Manhattan Institute that she worked with tobacco firms. Yet again it would be helpful to have Ms. McCaughey address the specifics of the lobbyist's claim.
A nice offhand allusion in the NYT
The third paragraph of Sharon LaFraniere's story today in the NYT, about the Chinese government's obsessive over-preparation for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People's Republic, on October 1 (background on the celebrations here):
"China's government at times resembles an exasperated parent trying to
rein in a pack of rebellious children. Its edicts are persistently
flouted by censor-dodging Internet users, wayward local officials and
rioting Uighurs."
Two things strike me about this. First, it's good to see correspondents flat-out saying how things look to them, rather than having to rely on "Some observers say" or "Mr. X of YY think tank observes..." Second, this little context-setting aside is so much more realistic than the standard Western press references to a big, omniscient, all-powerful Chinese regime effortlessly working its will on the populace, whether in a good way by installing green technology or in a bad way by squashing dissent.
Over the past three years, I've emphasized maybe a million times how diverse, churning, individual-minded, and generally resistant to control much of today's China seems. If I were writing LaFraniere's sentence myself, I'd say "often resembles" rather than "at times resembles," and I'd replace the reference to the Uighur uprising (an exceptional, real emergency) with something about one billion rule-evading ordinary citizens. But this is a worthy step toward a sane perspective on China -- worth bearing in mind as we prepare to see the (deceptively) precise and orderly displays on October 1.
Photo from the NYT about the kind of precise pageantry we'll be treated to. Don't be misled.
September 28, 2009
Manhattan Institute replies (re McCaughey and tobacco lobby) UPDATED
In response to this item today, concerning Rolling Stone's claim that Betsy McCaughey worked secretly with tobacco lobbyists when preparing her 1994 New Republic article about the Clinton health reform plan, I have just received this note from Lindsay Craig of the Manhattan Institute:
"Below is a letter to the editor of Rolling Stone from Lawrence Mone, president, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
"In his article "The Lie Machine," Tim Dickenson asserts that former Manhattan Institute scholar Betsy McCaughey's work was influenced by Phillip Morris. This conclusion is false. Betsy McCaughey wrote two articles for the Wall Street Journal on the Clinton Health Care plan and an additional article for the New Republic which was solicited by its publisher. At no time were her ideas influenced or controlled by anyone but the author herself."
I have written back to Lindsay Craig asking for clarification on what, exactly, Mr. Mone is saying. The Rolling Stone documents say that Ms. McCaughey worked, in secret, with tobacco company lobbyists in preparing her articles. Mr. Mone's statement says that she was not "influenced or controlled" by anyone else. I have written to ask whether Mr. Mone is saying that she never worked with tobacco representatives (whether or not she was "controlled" by them); and whether the Manhattan Institute was aware of any such collaboration. More info as it arrives.
UPDATE: I wrote back to Lindsay Craig asking which of these options the Manhattan Institute was saying:
"A: The Rolling Stone contention that tobacco companies collaborated with Ms. McCaughey and M.I. is totally false; there was no such contact or collaboration.
"B: We are confident that Ms. McCaughey's opinions were not influenced by tobacco companies, even though she may have worked with them.
Her immediate response:
"A. Betsy never worked with Phillip
Morris."
Is this a question of a lobbyist grossly exaggerating his "influence" to impress bosses and funders? That's a very familiar pattern in Washington. On the other hand, the lobbyist's detailed knowledge of Betsy McCaughey's writing plans suggests some interaction. I don't know the underlying truth here. It would be valuable if Ms. McCaughey, who has specialized in detailed textual analysis, would address in specific what these documents contend.
One crucial B. McCaughey update
I have deliberately laid off the Betsy McCaughey theme for the past month-plus. I had my say; she continues to have hers; people can make up their minds.
But revelations late last week by Tim Dickinson, of Rolling Stone, are at face value so important that they deserve to be underscored. It's worth reading Dickinson's whole dispatch and studying the on-line scans of the documents he has found. But to me the real news is the evidence that tobacco lobbyists secretly worked with McCaughey to prepare her infamous 1994 New Republic article "No Exit."
As I argued back in 1995 in "A Triumph of Misinformation," everything about McCaughey's role in the debate depended on her pose as a scrupulous, impartial, independent scholar who, after leafing through the endless pages of the Clinton health proposals, had been shocked by what she found. If it had been known at the time that she was secretly collaborating with one of the main interest-group enemies of the plan, perhaps the article would never had been published; at a minimum, her standing to speak would have been different.
(For the record: Yes, I am aware that my friend and current Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was then TNR's editor, is the one who decided to publish this article. In the 15 years since the article's appearance, the magazine and its writers have, to their credit, repeatedly pointed out its errors and apologized for spreading its misinformation. Mickey Kaus was doing so immediately after the article's embarrassing selection for a National Magazine Award for "Excellence in Public Interest." Jonathan Cohn, author of the indispensable book Sick, did so early this year. The TNR site has a "link" to the original McCaughey piece, but it's not connected to the article itself.)
Now Tim Dickinson produces documents from a tobacco lobbyist about his efforts to derail the Clinton health bill, including this one involving McCaughey and her then employer, the Manhattan Institute:
In case that's blurry, here is what Dickinson says:
"What has not been reported until now is that
McCaughey's writing was influenced by Philip Morris, the world's
largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle
Clinton's health care reform. (The measure would have been funded
by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo
from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail
Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks,
front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company's strategy,
the memo observed, was an effort to "work on the development of
favorable pieces" with "friendly contacts in the media." The memo,
prepared by a Philip Morris executive, mentions only one author by
name:
' "Worked off-the-record with Manhattan and writer Betsy McCaughey
as part of the input to the three-part exposé in The New
Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part
detailed specifics of the plan." '
"McCaughey did not respond to Rolling Stone's request
for an interview."
Maybe there is another side to this story, but if unrebutted it is damning.
September 27, 2009
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Besuboru dept
Update: Just after posting the item below I learned of the death of William Safire, who for three decades wrote the NYT Mag's language column, among his voluminous other works. Sorry for a querulous-seeming note under the circumstances. On the other hand, this is the kind of distinction that Safire himself reveled in. My condolences to his family. ___
There is a big risk in writing items on the lines of: "Everybody thinks X, but everybody's wrong. Actually Y is correct." The risk is that, as the corrector, you can be wrong yourself. I know! I've been there before, and no doubt will be again.
Unfortunately, I think that the estimable Jack Rosenthal of the NYT, in today's "Language" column in the magazine, is there too. Most of the column is devoted to correcting widely-practiced misuses of "phantonym" terms -- "disinterested" to mean bored (wrong) rather than impartial (right), etc. I'm with him on all of these! Then he adds this multilingual note:
"The Japanese love besuboru, reflecting the phonetic phenomenon of lallation, reversing "r" and "l." "
Not really. Rather, in keeping with my opening note of caution: to the best of my knowledge and experience, this is incorrect. Japanese fans of the Hiroshima Carp or the Nippon Ham Fighters do indeed refer to the sport as either besoboru or, more formally, 野球, yakyu. But they don't say besoboru because they are switching Ls and Rs. They say it because the Japanese language does not have the L sound. Where English speakers would use either L or R, the Japanese language has only R.*
Therefore when Japanese people speak English, they often have trouble with Ls and may even "lallate," mixing up Ls and Rs. Much as English speakers, raised in a language with no gender, often mix up le/la or der/die/das in gendered languages like French or German. But when they're speaking Japanese, they say besoboru because that's the way their language works. (And if Rosenthal meant that the change wasn't caused by lallation but simply illustrated the use of an R where there had been an L -- OK. But it's still a bad illustration, since both Ls and Rs in English will become Rs in Japanese. Saying that it illustrates lallation implies that Rs would become Ls in Japanese -- Balaku Obama, etc. That doesn't happen.)
OTOH, a very nice homage to one of my long-time Atlantic friends and colleagues in the Cox-Rathvon acrostic in the same magazine today, and a lot of unusually elegant clues. Check it out. ___ * Primer on Japanese sound system here and here. As anyone who has studied the language knows, its syllabary has the ra / ri / ru / re / ro sequence of R sounds, but nothing involving Ls.
Foreign words are often brought directly into Japanese and and converted to Japanese phonetics -- in contrast to Chinese, where the concept behind the foreign word is often re-rendered in Chinese. Thus "computer" is konpyuta (コンピュータ) in Japanese, but dian nao, "electric brain," (电脑), in Chinese. And thus in China I had a whole invented Chinese name with little relation to my original name, whereas in Japan, within the limits of Japanese sounds, my last name became ファローズ, Fuarohzu.
September 26, 2009
FT, Economist, and me
- Very nice brief review of my Postcards book today, by Rahul Jacob in the FT. I am grateful for his seeing just the points I was trying to make.
- From the Economist's online site, a thought-experiment designed to show the ultimate folly of protectionism. This item has also been picked up by the Atlantic's own Andrew Sullivan.
This isn't the place for a full discussion of the differences between the world as laid out in a first-semester ec course and the world as it actually operates. My unified field theory on the topic is in this Atlantic story, "How the World Works," from 1993.
But this is the place to point out the basic logic error in the "thought experiment." Here's what the Economist's site said:
"But the idiocy of the whole idea [of tariffs and protectionism] can be understood with a simple thought experiment, which I haven't seen used elsewhere.
"If
tariffs are such a good economic idea, then why stop at national
boundaries? If they make everyone richer, why not have customs posts
between New York and New Jersey? Cars entering and leaving the Lincoln
tunnel would have to pay, on top of the toll, a surcharge on all the
goods they contain. Why not, indeed, make New York and New Jersey
self-sufficient in all their needs, making all their own cars, growing
all their own food etc?"
Here's the difference between commerce involving New York and New Jersey, and commerce involving, say, the U.S. and China. New York and New Jersey are in the same country. Why does this matter? Let's try a little thought experiment.
Suppose you grow up in New Jersey. By the time you're looking for a job, the flow of capital, ideas, and innovation may mean that the best opportunities are in New York. Or Idaho, Or California. Sentimentally, perhaps you'd rather not move away from home. But in a pure economic sense, it doesn't matter in where the action is. You're free to move there. Within the national borders of the United States, there are only trivial, incidental impediments to citizens moving wherever they want. All "factors of production" -- money, material, people -- can flow freely throughout the country, for maximum efficiency. That's what the ec textbooks call for, and that's how it can work within a given country, or a free-movement zone like in Europe.
But it's not the same between countries. If you grow up in New Jersey and the real opportunities are in Shanghai, you can't necessarily move there. You may not be able to move there even if you grow up in Qinghai province, China. People do move across national borders, legally and illegally. Immigration is America's distinctive strength, so I'm glad as many move here as do. But in general, people's economic well-being depends very heavily on the industries and opportunities in the country where they are born.
Pointing this out doesn't prove protectionism right -- or wrong, as a strategy for developing a national economy. I'm on record as arguing that open Chinese-US trade has been good for both sides. But it does mean that the "thought experiment" makes no sense. There's a first-order difference between the flow of factors within a country and the flow between countries. I suspect this is the reason we haven't seen this powerful analogy "used elsewhere."
September 25, 2009
Reactions on Chinese tires
In this item two days ago, I mentioned that most of the mainstream economics press had gone (predictably) berserk in overreacting to the shock-horror nightmare of the Obama administration's tariff on imported Chinese tires.
First point: I neglected to mention the honorable exception of Andrew Peaple, reporting in the WSJ and playing down "Oh no! Smoot Hawley!" hysteria from the start. The online version of his initial story:
"WSJA(9/15) Heard On The Street: Tires, Chickens, Common Sense
(From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA)
By Andrew Peaple
"Fought over the likes of bras and bananas, trade wars always give off a whiff of the absurd.
"With a measure of good sense, a spat between the U.S. and China
involving tires and chickens won't devolve into a trade war as well."
Unfortunately, the version of the story that is now online has a much more alarmist headline, though the common-sense content of the article itself is still the same. Here's the new headline:
Next, from someone with on-scene experience, making a point left out of most of the reflexive, "Oh no! Smoot Hawley!" original coverage
"I was a senior International Trade consultant with 2 major firms in China 2003-2007. Approximately one third of the over 100 projects I managed during that four year period involved assisting foreign companies (US, EU, some Japanese) in defending themselves against either investigations by, or anti-competitive practices perpetrated by, the Chinese Customs authorities.
"I believe that I can safely say that without fail, each project of this type that I was involved in was predicated by a distortion or willful misunderstanding of both Chinese and WTO/WCO trade law and operational norms by the Customs authorities. Nor were these actions limited to provincial backwaters (though the most egregious did take place there); many of our projects involved Shanghai or Beijing Customs entry ports. Practices such as demanding improper HTS classification of goods (HTS classification determines applicable duty rate) or arbitrary valuation of goods (the Customs declared value upon which duty and VAT are assessed) are practiced daily throughout the country and cost foreign companies substantial amounts.
"I very seldom see this issue addressed in any article concerning China trade and thought I would bring it to your attention."
Main point: this is a far more complicated issue, with a far longer and more tangled history, than 95% of the western-press reaction would indicate. I urge everyone to keep up with this "China Financial Markets site before expressing heated opinions on the subject.
Update: there's actually no material after the jump; original posting included some background notes, by mistake. But our system retains the "continue reading" link even with nothing there any more.
It turns out that the "Chinese site" with dramatic photos of rehearsals for the 60th anniversary commemorations in Beijing on October 1, which I mentioned this morning, is a straight-ahead, flat-out, unblushing rip-off of this "The Big Picture" feature three days ago from the Boston Globe's site. I don't see any mention of the Globe on the Chinese site, either in English or what I think is the Chinese version (Boshidun Huanqiu - 波士顿 环球 ?).
I should have guessed. (Why would a Chinese site have bothered to include translated English captions? Why was there a semi-edgy photo of a lone man and a tank?) My reflexes must be going. I'll have to re-sharpen them with a visit soon. Thanks to C. Wang and others for the heads-up. Apologies to the Globe.
September 19, 2009
Harmonic convergence dept: frogs, China Daily, etc
I realize this may be more interesting to me than to the public at large, but: Somehow I feel fulfilled to find my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, taking my favorite factually-erroneous cliche, the boiling frog, and putting it to excellent and unexpected use. Today's China Daily illustrates the frog problem -- but, for once, in an accurate way! As the water is getting hotter, the little froggies are jumping right out. Just like in real life, except for the tiny backpacks. (Parachutes?)
The editorial is about universities in Australia making things "hot" (get it?? ho-ho!) for international transfer students, including those from China. Great headline too: Well done all around. Let's learn from Asia! Thanks to numerous informants.
_____ Harmonic convergence part deux: Article six years ago in another of my favorite publications, Legal Affairs, that melds boiling frogs and slippery slopes in a less factually scrupulous way.
September 18, 2009
Why the China Daily will always be my favorite newspaper
I miss the joy of opening it each morning so much!
Full story here; earnest Onion-worthy comments here; thanks to Shanghaiist, here.
September 6, 2009
Festival of updates #7: NYT hit-and-miss
Catching up on one NYT item that rang exactly (and surprisingly) true, and another with a different effect:
Sounds true to me: A "good news" item that stayed on the "most popular" list for a very long time. Its news was that years and years of running can actually protect and strengthen your knees, rather than inevitably pulverize and destroy them. I am here as a one-man long-term-longitudinal study to say: yessir!
Except for the past three years-of-smog in China -- lest we forget: Easter Day, 2009, in Beijing, shown at left -- I have been running many times a week for many decades. I shudder for various reasons to realize that I ran my first Boston Marathon 40 years ago. As the body-odometer has gotten into the tens of thousands of miles, I've logged problems with: Achilles tendon (too often -- hmmm, I wonder if there should be some term for a point of chronic weakness); hamstrings or calf muscles (periodically, including now); shin splints or ankle issues (rarely); etc. But knees, which I'd always been warned would be used up by running? No problems, at all. (As opposed to my dad -- who played college football and for the next 60 years coped with trick knees.) Now that actual medical research has confirmed that this is the expected result rather than a fluke, my knees feel even better. So can yours!
On the other hand: we have this story last month, which suggested that if young Americans couldn't find jobs at home, all they had to do was move to China and they'd shortcut into positions of responsibility. I'm here to say: Well, sort of.
Is China exciting enough that people should go there? It sure is. Can young people with no background in China or Chinese find work quickly? Probably so -- if they're willing to teach English. (And can get a visa -- whole different topic.) And if they stay and learn the language, lots of other opportunities often do turn up. Really, for Westerners in their 20s it's hard to think of a better investment of a few years than going to China, learning what it's like, becoming comfortable with Chinese ways and Chinese people, facing its discouraging realities but also sharing its sense of possibility.
But the idea that many non-trained grads will find "good" jobs -- eg, ones where the Chinese employer regularly pays them? Or that it's realistic to go from zero to "highly proficient" in Chinese language in a short time? Or that young foreigners will be insulated from the, ummm, idiosyncrasies of typical Chinese accounting and business practices? Those all seem a stretch. This kind of "land of gold!" account of today's China has a touching parallel to the "gold mountain!" accounts of prospects in America that have historically drawn Chinese migrants across the Pacific. Both are accurate in spirit, but potentially misleading on details.
September 4, 2009
Three updates: Hudson River, "false claims," origins of Iraq
Catching up on a variety of previous reports:
1) The FAA responds in a sensible, proportionate way to last month's tragic crash above the Hudson River. Following the lead of the NTSB, as mentioned here, it will soon propose clear, common-sense rules of the "road" to keep airplanes and helicopters safely separated in the busy Hudson River corridor. For instance, it will require -- rather than just expect -- that northbound traffic stay on the east side of the river, and southbound on the right; and that helicopters stay at a lower altitude than the airplanes; and all pilots stick to the same radio frequency; and other steps.
Why this matters: because it's a targeted, non-panicky response directed at the specific problem that has been revealed, rather than a sweeping exercise in TSA-style "security theater." It will no doubt create complications of its own, mainly through increased work for controllers. But overall, this is a victory for common sense.
2) Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, whose previous reporting about the health-care debate has been noted (in different ways) here and here, has a very strong story today about Elizabeth McCaughey and her role in these discussions.
Why this matters: the story straightforwardly does something that goes against the nature of mainstream coverage. It notes the influence that Ms. McCaughey's claims have had on public discussion, while also flatly saying that those claims are often false. It's worth recognizing what a step this is for the Times, prefigured in this story from three weeks ago. The natural reflex of mainstream publications is to finesse such disagreements with the "some critics claim..." approach. It seems more "objective," and it certainly is safer for the reporter and the news organization. And when we are talking about differences of opinion, judgment, or political creed, of course that's exactly the right approach to take. ("Is the Administration's approach to Iran likely to work? Some critics claim...") But there is a such a thing as plain misstatement of fact, and it is good when the press can point it out.
3) James Gibney of the Atlantic also has a very strong, short item about revisionism now being practiced by some of the architects and enthusiasts of the invasion of Iraq. In particular, the writer Max Boot and the former DOD official Paul Wolfowitz, the latter of whom I have written about here and here.
Why this matters: The edge to Gibney's argument will be evident to anyone who reads it. What most people would not realize is how particularly trenchant a judgment this is, coming from him. As a one-time Foreign Service officer (and former executive editor of Foreign Policy magazine), James Gibney is no one's idea of a hothead. He is more gentlemanly than most people who express views on this site (not to mention on the whole untrammeled web), and less known for harsh opinions. These words have weight.
September 2, 2009
The right kind of college rankings
As a one-time staff editor of the Washington Monthly magazine, I am biased in favor of that plucky enterprise and its approach to the world.
As a one-time editor of US News & World Report, I am all too aware of the fatuousness imperfections of its college-ranking system. Being a pioneer in ranking has been the economic salvation of US News. But the premise that vastly different institutions can be precisely ranked on overall quality has its obvious limits. What are the "best" ten lines of work, ranked one through ten, for your child to aspire to? What are the "best" twenty-five cities to live in -- or pieces of music to listen to, or food to eat? Or people to marry? The only sane answer is, "it depends," which is the answer when it comes to colleges and universities too. For more on this theme, the classic source is this 2001 article -- as it happens, in the Washington Monthly -- by Amy Graham, who came to US News on my watch to try to clean up the rankings, and Nicholas Thompson, who has a wonderful new joint biography of (his grandfather) Paul Nitze and George Kennan coming out soon.
The practical solution to ranking mania is not to try to eliminate them -- it's too late -- but instead to crowd the field so that no one "Best Colleges" list has disproportionate influence. Toward that end, the Washington Monthly's latest iteration of its college rankings is valuable simply for existing and adding diversity to the ranking field. It's more valuable than that, because of the way it carries through its analysis about the traits we really should value in universities, plus letting people tailor their own rankings based on the qualities that matter most to them. Here's a glimpse at its "National Universities" ranking, which is quite different from the familiar list in US News (this shows just a few of the elements on which schools are rated).
The introduction to TWM's approach to college ranking is here; a description of its methods is here; the interactive ranking system is shown here. As I've stressed time and again when reporting from overseas, America's vast and diverse university system is (along with its openness to outside talent) one of the advantages hardest for any other country to match, and therefore most important to protect. Among the threats to protect it from is a bogus and simplistic concept of quality. I welcome the Washington Monthly rankings as another step away from the brink of bogusness.
August 25, 2009
Will it never end? McCaughey v. Ezekiel Emanuel
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel should need no introduction to Atlantic readers. Among his many pursuits is writing a number of interesting articles for our "Food Channel," under Corby Kummer's auspices. He should need no introduction to anybody, since over the past decade-plus he has so often been involved in deliberations about the right future health-care path for America and the world. I stress "the world" since he has traveled widely and emphasized public-health challenges for poor nations too. I know him slightly -- just well enough that, a few weeks ago, I asked his journalistic advice for contacts in China on a public-health story I'm working on. He is an oncologist and bioethicist -- and, of course, older brother of Rahm Emanuel from the White House.
Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey also needs no introduction to Atlantic readers. She has brought more misinformation, more often, more destructively into America's consideration of health-policy issues than any other individual. She has no concept of "truth" or "accuracy" in the normal senses of those terms, as demonstrated last week when she went on The DailyShow. Virtually every statement she has made about health-reform proposals, from the Clinton era until now, has been proven to be false. It doesn't slow her down.
And now we have the New York Times, in a big take-out story, saying that Dr. Emanuel, in his role as Obama health-care advisor, is in an "uncomfortable place" because he is being criticized by*:
1) Betsy McCaughey ! 2) Rep. Michele Bachman (look her up) !! 3) Sarah Palin !!! 4) Lyndon LaRouche !!!!
McCaughey, Bachman, Palin, LaRouche -- shaping American debate and media coverage about health policy? Was Zsa Zsa Gabor not available?
To be "fair," the story puts the criticisms in "context," thus:
"Largely quoting his past writings out of context this summer, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, labeled Dr. Emanuel a "deadly
doctor" who believes health care should be "reserved for the
nondisabled" -- a false assertion that Representative Michele Bachmann,
Republican of Minnesota, repeated on the House floor."
"Out of context" and "false" are useful caveats. But why is the story about Ezekiel Emanuel being on the hot seat in the first place -- and not about the campaign of flat lies by McCaughey, Bachman, Palin, and LaRouche? Why are real newspapers quoting what they say any more? (Interestingly, LaRouche's claims rarely get NYT coverage. In in this case, he is apparently "legitimized" by ... McCaughey.) If I start a campaign of lies against somebody and get Soupy Sales plus Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme to agree with me, can I expect them to be regularly publicized in the mainstream press?
I do understand - and wrote before -- about how difficult it is for the mainstream press to decide that one party to a controversy is making things up, doesn't care about facts, and will keep saying whatever it wants. I also recognize that when a campaign of falsehoods has a political effect, the effect itself can be worth writing about. But does it have to be presented in a way that suggests that the McCaughey-Bachman-Palin-LaRouche team is just another participant in political discussion? This can give "fairness" a bad name. ___ * Here are paragraphs two and three of the story -- the "nut graf" passage establishing that there is a controversy:
"Largely quoting his past writings out of context this summer, Betsy McCaughey,
a former lieutenant governor of New York, labeled Dr. Emanuel a "deadly
doctor" who believes health care should be "reserved for the
nondisabled" -- a false assertion that Representative Michele Bachmann,
Republican of Minnesota, repeated on the House floor.
"Former Gov. Sarah Palin
of Alaska has asserted that Dr. Emanuel's "Orwellian" approach to
health care would "refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly,
the infirm and the disabled who have less economic potential,"
accusations similarly made by the political provocateur Lyndon H.
LaRouche Jr."
August 22, 2009
Today's McCaughey, euthanasia, and general falsehood update
Several more objections, clarifications, and additional bits of evidence following the much-bruited -- and to me somewhat anticlimactic -- Betsy McCaughey-Jon Stewart smackdown two days ago. (Previous reactions here.) On the origins of Betsy McCaughey's argumentative style: A reader suggests they have one obvious source:
The reader explains:
Cleese's character is armed with all that one could ask for: keen wit, boundless vocabulary, perfect presence of mind, and all the facts on his side. And yet, even he can be played to a draw by a liar who maintains a sufficiently unshakable facade of conviction.
On the details of why "death panels" are so preposterous A reader in Maine writes:
Another absurdity in the argument of Betsy McCaughey is her claim that there is something wrong with doctors having to follow a patient's wishes as expressed in a living will. There are two major problems here: 1) People can always change their living will, just as they can change their will at any point. The later living will supercedes the later one. So if a person makes a living will when healthy and sees things differently when ill, the sick person can express different wishes in the new living will. 2) Why shouldn't doctors have to respect people's wishes on end-of-life care? I have heard countless stories of living wills being ignored. The provision on living wills is effectively an implementation provision, providing for accountability and for the wishes of the patient to be respected.
Further on the Living Will point: Reader Zach writes:
I'm surprised you didn't mention this. McCaughy's twisted logic is
basically that after you draft a living will it will be enforced
ruthlessly by doctors seeking to up their quality rating even if you
personally object. Backing her up is an anecdote about her apparently
hearing a woman telling her to hurry up and help as a doctor suffocated
her with a pillow or something. Her point is that, by rewarding
adherence, we're making doctors stick with the patient's initial stated
intent. However, if you're conscious you can amend, annul, or
otherwise do whatever you want with your will, living or otherwise, at
any time you want. If you're conscious enough to tell someone not to
pull the plug, you haven't triggered your living will yet.
As I mentioned this morning, I thought Betsy McCaughey was even more blithely disconnected from the world of reality than I had expected -- but that she was weirdly "effective" against Jon Stewart, since there was no way to shame her by pointing out that what she said was untrue. She would just smile, mug at the audience in an "isn't he cute!" way, and say, No, I'm right.
Not all readers agreed. Below and after the jump, a sample of dissenting views, with brief retort at the end.
Objection 1: The Audience Is In on the Joke
...I disagree that talking over Jon Stewart the way people do in appearances on Fox News is an effective tactic for the guest. It might be better than some of the other options, but it backfires for a weird reason, one that might be harder to see if you don't watch the show regularly.
From its inception in 1997, the distinguishing shtick that makes the show unique is a type of edited interview segment in which the show's "reporters" interview obscure and completely crazy people. The subjects have received some local press attention for doing something bizarre and they're desperate for media attention. The reporters pretend to be mainstream press rather than comedians, and they use a deadpan style that allows the interviewees to provide most of the humor. What struck me about the McCaughey interview, and the recent interview of Orly Taitz by Stephen Colbert, was that Stewart and Colbert are clearly adapting the "crazy person" interview techniques to their live in-studio host interviews with guests that don't agree with them.
The normal host interviews vary a lot but they are always a two-way conversation with some socially well-adjusted give and take. In these two recent interviews, as the guest acts more unstoppable and enthusiastic unhinged when discussing "their" topic, the interview slides into the familiar "crazy person" style. That's a cue for the show's regular audience to frame the discussion and the interviewee in a very different way.
Objection 2: It Worked for Betsy, but It Won't Work for Others
I expect you are very right about this being an interview that
will be studied by right wing operatives for some time to come.
However, I feel like you overlooked a couple important pieces which may
make this scenario unrepeatable (particularly if those at the Daily
Show are paying attention).
Well, my TV-owning neighbors were all away last night, so I couldn't watch the McCaughey-Stewart showdown by peering through their windows and had to see it just now on the web. Clips below, starting with the first segment of the interview as broadcast. Three conclusions:
Conclusion one: I have been far too soft on Betsy McCaughey. Even when conferring on her the title of "most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 1990s. She is way less responsible and tethered to the world of "normal" facts and discourse than I had imagined.
Conclusion two: The exchange is significant, because it demonstrates that there is indeed a way to "handle" Jon Stewart. You simply have to ignore what he says, interrupt and talk over him, and keep asserting that you're right. You even can try to usurp his role as host by mugging at the audience and rolling your eyes in a shared "there he goes again!" joke with the viewers.
In retrospect, this is the crucial weakness that in their different ways both Bill Kristol and Jim Cramer revealed in their appearances on the show. They listened to Stewart and -- even Kristol!!?! -- revealed through their bearing that they recognized there was such a thing as being caught in an inconsistency or presented with an inconvenient fact. McCaughey did none of that. She is just making it up, as anyone who has followed her work over the decades will know. She was not even minimally prepared for her appearance on the show, flipping aimlessly through the giant briefing book (of legislative clauses) she brought on stage. But she didn't let it bother her. The exchange demonstrated that if the guest reveals no self-awareness or does not accept the premise of factual challenge, Stewart can't get in his normal licks. Future guests will study this show.
Conclusion three: A good point Stewart made, albeit not registered by McCaughey, concerns the unbelievable inconsistency of attention to "incentives" built into health care systems, today's and tomorrow's.
That is: when McCaughey admits that there is no literal "death panel" provision in the new health care provision, she goes on to say something similar to what other conservatives, most recently Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post today, contend: that the very act of reimbursing doctors for a discussion about "living wills" and end-of-life care will have a subtle bias in favor of an euthanasia-like outcome.
On the merits of this claim, I vehemently disagree. Having had, along with my siblings, first-hand, extended, and very painful experience with this process during my own father's decline and death last year, I would put reimbursement schemes for living-will discussions at the very bottom of the list of factors that make such decisions so wrenching for everyone involved.
But let's assume I'm wrong (though you'll never convince me of that) -- and that there is some third-order ripple-effect bias that comes from paying doctors for these every-five-year discussions. Why is the potential skewing effect of that payment the only thing we notice -- and not the thousand other life-and-death, rationing-and-queuing incentives that are built into every detail of the medical system now? And that David Goldhill -- no supporter of the Obama plan -- goes into so thoroughly in his cover story in this month's magazine? Yesterday I spent more than an hour on the customer "service" line for my own health insurance company, trying to get the answer to a simple "is this covered?" question. At the end of the hour, when I'd reached the queue to talk to a human agent, I got this recording: "Due to circumstances beyond our control, your call cannot be completed at this time. Please call again later." This has a kind of rationing/skewed incentive effect of its own -- even for someone fortunate, like me, to have good health insurance coverage. So, yes: I will listen to arguments about the hypothetical, subtle, psychological biasing effect of encouraging discussions about end-of-life decisions -- but only if they're in the context of the far more blatant, perverse, and destructive incentives built into today's system.
But see for yourself.
Second part of McCaughey's interview as broadcast.
Extended interview, with outtakes, part 1, is here; extended interview part 2 is here.
August 17, 2009
Ferguson, Obama, Felix the Cat -- and Pluto
Let me tell this one in order:
On August 11, last Tuesday, Niall Ferguson wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times whose theme was that Barack Obama reminded him of Felix the Cat? Why? "Felix was not only black.
He was also very, very lucky."
Later that day, I did an item marveling at the column. Its final line was, " I look forward to Ferguson's discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates."
Two days later, on August 13, I got an irritated note from Ferguson. Its subject line was "Rubbish." It included a quote from H.L. Gates saying that there was no problem with the Felix line -- the reported quote from Gates was "What a load of rubbish" -- and it ended with a request that I publish it. To be exact, a challenge: "I shall be interested to see if you post this on your blog."
Soon thereafter, I did indeed publish it. I sent Ferguson a note saying that I had done so, with the explanation that I took his note as a request that I share his views.
An hour later, he wrote back and requested that I remove the item from the Atlantic's site so that he could check further with Gates. Within minutes I did that, putting up this placeholder announcement instead. Since the original had been up for a while, it survived in many search caches. But I saw no reason to be difficult -- or to pretend I didn't get Ferguson's "please take it down" note; so I complied.
Over the weekend, I didn't hear from Ferguson, and on the "life is short" policy resolved to let the matter drop.
Then this afternoon, I received a followup note -- sent jointly to me and Paul Krugman, who had written in a similar vein. In its entirety it says:
Dear Paul and James,
As you both took exception to my comparison of the President
with Felix the Cat, my favorite cartoon character, implying it was racist and
recommending I consult Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I have now done so. He
has taken the trouble to consult others in the field of African-American
Studies, including our colleague Lawrence D. Bobo, the W. E. B. Du Bois
Professor of the Social Sciences, and has written to me as follows:
"None of us thought of Felix as black, unlike some of
the racially-questionable caricatures Disney used. Felix's blackness,
like Mickey's and Minnie's, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color. ...
You are safe on this one."
As he has made clear, you are free to publish this on your
blogs. I hope that you will, and that you will also add an apology to me for
the imputation of racism as well as, in Paul's case, the gratuitous and
puerile accusation of "whining" (i.e., defending myself against a
slur). I remain of the view that you took this line to avoid engaging with my
central points that President Obama's administration has no visible plan
for stabilizing the finances of the federal government even over ten years, and
that Congress will likely impede whatever steps he may take in this direction.
Yours,
Niall Ferguson.
On the requested "apology": Sadly, No. I don't think and didn't say that Niall Ferguson is a racist. Probably like him, I lament the way indiscriminate use of that label -- or "sexist," "anti-Semite," now "socialist" -- can shut down discussion. But there's no getting around the clumsiness of what he wrote. If Felix the Cat's blackness is a barely noticeable aspect of his identity, why on earth would anyone begin a comparison of Obama to Felix by saying "Felix was not only black"? Thought experiment: Suppose I wrote a column about Jackie Chan -- or Cabinet members Steven Chu and Eric Shinseki, or Yo-Yo Ma, or new PGA champion Y.E. Yang -- that began exactly the way Ferguson's did. "Jackie Chan reminds me of Pluto. One of the best-loved characters from the Disney studio, Pluto was not only yellow. He was also very, very likable."
I could go on to discuss policy aspects of Jackie Chan's controversial comments about democracy in China -- as Ferguson goes on to discuss Obama's problems with the budget deficit. But 99% of the readers would think, What the hell? And if asked what I was doing, I would not try to relitigate the case, as Ferguson is now doing in several venues, but would recognize that I'd blundered and back off. But apparently that's just me.
"I'm not sure if it has been pointed out yet, but the whole "Death Panel" bullshit is especially ironic given that the ability of insurance companies to grant/deny access to healthcare is effectively a death panel. Can't afford a plan? Tough luck. Not eligible for whatever reason? Tough luck."
This illustrates the biggest change in the rhetoric of health care reform over the past year. Last summer, during the campaign, Obama succeeded in focusing attention on the real problems of the patchwork insurance-and-care system as it actually exists: rising costs, bureaucratic inflexibility, perverse incentives, inevitable delays and de facto rationing, implicit decisions about life and death. Now, various opponents of a reform plan have succeeded in shifting attention to the imagined problems of a post-reform system: rising costs, bureaucratic inflexibility, perverse incentives, inevitable delays and de facto rationing, implicit decisions about life and death. It is an achievement to ponder.
August 15, 2009
Why the "death panel" claim is working
In this recent item about the apparent triumph of the McCaughey/Palin/Grassley/ Limbaugh tribe in keeping the false "death panel" idea going, I said I had been wrong to think that the modern blogosphere could act as a truth squad. Here are several reader hypotheses about why things are panning out this way, starting with the one that's most vivid and convincing and ending with a truly constructive suggestion.
Theory #1: Triumph of the 'Sticky' Image
Your last blog post sure was depressing: not that you could be wrong, but that the new media ecosystem still doesn't have the tools to keep lunacies like McCaughey's "death panels" from becoming part of the political debate.
That said, if you're familiar with Chip & Dan Heath's book "Made To Stick" (www.madetostick.com), you can see that the death panel idea is probably too "sticky" to be debunked, defused, and delegitimized. In their view, the six key principles behind sticky ideas (like the NYC sewer alligators, or the kidney thieves that drug you and leave you in an ice-filled bathtub [or boiled frogs, JF note]) are:
The death panel story contains virtually all of these elements. It's a simple, concrete concept that anyone can picture. It's certainly unexpected, it stirs emotions, and it's easy to tell -- or make up -- stories. (My grandma has Parkinson's, and I won't have a government bureaucrat telling me she's got to die!")
It's true that to a rational, dispassionate listener the idea of a death panel does strain the bounds of credibility. However, the complexity of health care reform, the sheer size of the legislation, and the history of bizarre government policies that have been twisted by special interests, does leave room in the imagination for, well, the incredible.
So, to your point: does the new media ecosystem have a greater ability to stop charlatans? Clearly yes. But I wonder if any ecosystem could have stopped such a "sticky" idea.
Other theories after the jump, plus somebody who embraces the whole idea. ___
When writing the previous item yesterday afternoon, about the pernicious works and thoughts of Elizabeth McCaughey, I had no idea that the NYT was planning to go into the same terrain with a very good story today:
But I mention the story mainly because of the way it is presented as a lead item on the TImes's web site, as shown at left. Using the word "False" is a big - and important -- step for an organization like the Times to make. I can't recall a time when the NYT used that word in a headline to describe the "birther" worldview.
In general, even on the most extreme, out-of-the-realm-of-fact political claims, every powerful instinct in the news media shies from calling something "false" in favor of adjectives like "controversial" or "disputed," or sometimes "partisan." As many people have noted, and as I discussed even back at the dawn of time in Breaking the News, the "objective" instincts of the news media can tie it in knots when one side to a political argument is perfectly willing to say obviously false things. It's hard for mainstream publications to say outright that something is false or a lie. So it is impressive to see that the NYT has taken that step.
Online at least. The front page of the print paper plays the story big, but under this headline: "Getting to the Source of the 'Death Panel' Rumor." Much to discuss later on about how the two versions of the paper came to their different decisions; about whether in the long-run there will be "web-appropriate" and "print-appropriate" versions of objectivity; and whether this labeling even by the NYT will have any effect on political discussion. It may be that we're so far into the era of separate fact-universes that having the NYT call something false makes others believe all the more that it is true. Nonetheless, it's a headline worth noticing.
August 13, 2009
I was wrong
Twice recently I've done brief interviews on NPR's On The Media show. Both times have concerned the pernicious influence of one Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey, below.
In the early 1990s McCaughey single-handedly did a phenomenal amount to distort discussion of health-care policy and derail the Clinton health bill. She did so through an entirely fictitious argument about what the bill would do. You can go back in the records here, here, and here, but the issue boils down to this: She claimed that the bill would make it illegal to go outside the government plan for coverage or pay doctors on your own. If a doctor took money for such outside-the-system services, she said, the doctor could go to jail. That was a flat-out lie. (One of the very first clauses of the legislation said, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1)
An individual from purchasing any health care services.") But her imaginary "no exit" claim was repeated so often by so many "respectable" media sources that it effectively became "true" and played a large part in stopping the bill. It would be as if the "birthers" had persuaded John Roberts to say, "Wait a minute, let's take another look at that birth certificate" and decline to swear in Obama on inauguration day.
McCaughey has been at it again this year -- twice, in fact. First was with an early, equally false claim that to compile "comparative effectiveness" data about medical care -- which drugs had which effects, which surgical procedures led to which results, the sort of data collected routinely about education, air safety, and everything else -- would lead to a Big Brotherish intrusion on individual medical decisions. That one seemed to get knocked out of contention fairly early. Then she was back with the "death panels" argument. And here is where I made my mistake.
In the On the Media interviews, I said that the "media ecosystem" was a lot different now from what it had been fifteen years ago. Back then, there was no blog world. The news cycle moved in days-long or weeks-long intervals, as newspapers came out each morning and newsmagazines each week. It was very hard to have instant feedback or correction in real time, so false stories could solidify before the truth squad had a chance. The early McCaughey was brilliantly matched to this system. Her unvarying pose is that of the objective researcher who has, selflessly, pored through the pages of a bill and emerged to warn us about what she has found. People took it at face value the first time.
But these days, I said, that wouldn't work as well. She personally now had a track record. (Republican politician with a turbulent history; proven distorter of the facts.) And thousands of other people could now look through a bill too and post their findings mere minutes or hours after her claim. Thanks to blogs, Wikis, and the rest, there was a more nimble check-and-balance built into the discussion of ideas these days. And indeed it seemed to work that way early this year, with her failed "comparative effectiveness" foray. She made a claim; "crowdsourcing" proved her wrong; she piped down. And so, I confidently said to Bob Garfield of OTM, we'd seen a good side of today's Web-based decentralized journalism. There were plenty of bad sides, but the new potential to stop charlatans was a plus.
But then came her claim about the "death panels." About the plain old facts here, there is as little room for rational dispute as with her previous phony contentions. The bill would not call people before panels to determine whether they had a right to live. Details from the conservative Republican Southerner who sponsored the plan, here.
Beyond the facts, anyone who has had first-hand experience with modern end-of-life issues knows this is not something to demagogue. The combination of what is eternal, namely man's mortality, and what is new, namely the frontiers of high-tech medicine, converts what has always been a painful, fraught, and central aspect of human existence into something with even more painful dilemmas and choices than in previous days. Seriously: I do not think that any decent person who has seen this process, up close, can imagine preaching to anyone else about the choices and consequences. It's just too complicated and painful. And certainly any fair reading of the legislation indicated that it was designed to give individuals and their families more rather than less control over what are inevitably impossible choices about our loved ones and ourselves -- to reduce the chances that anyone else could preach or dictate to them.
But the flow of argument makes it appear that "death panel" has won the battle of political ideas, as "no exit" did 15 years ago (and as the "birthers" have not done). For example, Charles Grassley seems to have bought it. I don't know which interpretation is more depressing: that Grassley actually believes in death panels (ie, he's irrational), or that he knows better but figures it's smart to say he believes (ie, he's craven). The political fundamentals, as I understand them, still favor the passage of some health-care bill. To that extent, Ms. McCaughey may indeed have been blunted. But I said two weeks ago that I thought today's communications systems had caught up with people who invented facts. I was wrong.
In my, umm, mature years, I don't generally see a point in going after people personally. I have enough adversaries already. But there are necessary exceptions. And the ability to have a civil discussion about central policy issues, in terms that are connected to the world of facts and realities, matters for reasons that go beyond any one person's involvement.
August 12, 2009
Even more on GDP, economics, and "rational insanity"
A number of China and technology issues in the queue (plus frogs), but for the moment, a few extra references on the "does GDP really matter anyway?" front. Previously here and here.
1) A group in Nova Scotia called GPIAtlantic has applied a "Genuine Progress Indicator" to social and economic developments in its region. The idea of GPI rather than GDP has a long history; for further information, see here, here, and here. (Yes, there are a variety of other "sustainability indexes" or measures of overall welfare; more info at sites above, plus here for another "can money buy happiness?" study.) Below, a sample GDP/GPI comparative graph from the Redefining Progress site.
2) Another in the ever-expanding cadre of first-rate Atlantic online Correspondents is Ben Heineman Jr., who has this very valuable post on the perils of paying attention to statistical indicators of any sort. Part of living in the modern world is accepting that opposite-sounding principles can both be true. (Hey, living in China makes such acceptance easy! The country is rich -- and it is poor. It is open - and it is closed. It is one ancient culture -- and it is a thousand little baronies. But I digress.)
In the area we're talking about now, the contradictory principles are: a) "big data" can reveal truths that would escape normal human reasoning power. Easiest illustration: hundreds of millions of people, all creating links among web pages, can together produce a vast and nuanced guide to what is where on the web, which Google put to use through its "PageRank" system. b) numerical data can lead to incredibly stupid mistakes, if users forget that numbers and models inevitably oversimplify real, messy reality. Easiest illustration: the apologia from Robert McNamara in Errol Morris's The Fog of War.
In his post Heineman talks about how the "idolatry of numbers" -- worship of the spurious precision of mathematical models -- can lead to terrible real-world misjudgments. This was a powerful lesson I took from my time in graduate school studying economics: the formulas were so neat and powerful, yet their connection to the real world was so hit-and-miss. In a way this is also a theme of Liaquat Ahamed's outstanding book Lords of Finance, about the way financial "experts" helped bring on the Great Depression. They had great faith in their models; unfortunately, the models and principles didn't match reality.
3) While I'm at it, here is my article "How the World Works" from the early 1990s, which was an attempt to explain the mismatch between the nice, clean models of Anglo-American economic textbooks and the brand of economics believed in by many governments in East Asia. Mainly Japan in those days and China now. Japanese and Chinese economic strategies differ from each other in very important ways, but in both countries governments have often applied a "strategic development" model of economics, not just the "consumer welfare" approach that arises from textbooks in Ec 101. More explanation in that article -- and for a bonus, this one from 2005, "Countdown to a Meltdown," about the imbalanced economic growth that the financial models of the "derivatives / subprime" era were creating and why it would end in tears.
August 11, 2009
More on GDP, airplanes (updated)
I mentioned yesterday that a good NYT op-ed this week on the limits of GDP-as-Holy-Grail paralleled a similar argument in an also very good Atlantic cover story from 1995. To round out the trio of excellence, I should mention a NYT column last year by the economist Robert Frank, of Cornell, on the ways in which money does and does not buy happiness. The column comes up as a PDF here. The three are worth reading together.
In the same item yesterday, I mentioned that an NPR correspondent had sounded Chicken Little-ish about the recent tragic aerial crash over the Hudson, the only such collision in the many decades in which planes and helicopters have flown that route. Miles O'Brien -- ex of CNN, now of True/Slant, and pilot himself -- is much less polite about such coverage, in two items, here and here. Eg:
"Those of us who fly through this airspace are responsible for seeing
and avoiding each other. There are no air traffic controllers serving
as traffic cops here.
"And before you get yourself all spun up about this (I am talkin' to
you Sen. Schumer! [and the NPR guy]), before this tragic crash there has never been a mid
air collision like this in New York City.
"Over the years, many thousands of airplane and helicopters have
successfully and safely plied their way through this corridor of
airspace wherein the responsibility for collision avoidance rests
entirely in the cockpit.
"And the real truth is it makes flying in the New York City airspace
safer - because all the aircraft who fly in this zone are not taxing
already maxed out air traffic controllers.
"If tour helicopters had to check in with ATC every time they
alighted with a load of tourists, the system would bog down in a hurry.
"It is NOT the Wild West up there... It is a busy place with a lot of traffic and you have to pay
attention all the time. But that's New York for you. When two cars
collide in Midtown Manhattan, do we instantly insist the traffic laws
be changed?"
I'm with him.
UPDATE: I am also with my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, here, in his life-extension maxim of "never take a helicopter ride for fun." I love airplanes and aviation; in the three China-based years that I've been away from flying I've actively missed the "aerial view," the particular perspective you get on the world from a few thousand feet up; like everyone who has thought seriously about flying, I know it brings risks. But helicopters are to me a different matter. If you've studied aerodynamics, you know that airplanes "want to stay in the air" -- if the engine fails, they turn into gliders, not plummeting objects. Helicopters "want to fall out of the air" -- yes, despite the limited ability to "autorotate" and avoid a direct plummet. I respect people who fly them, which is harder than flying airplanes. But I keep a respectful distance.
"Black, and very, very lucky."
I have had my disagreements with Niall Ferguson, as chronicled several times -- here, here, here, and here. But I had thought they were simply on the merits -- how to interpret the financial and strategic tensions between China and America, whether there was any serious historical parallel to be drawn between the rising China of Hu Jintao and the rising Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm. (Ferguson said Yes; I said No.)
Everything about such discussions is conditioned by Ferguson's constant reminders that he is a professional academic historian and therefore deserves deference for whatever historical connections he sees. This morning in the Financial Times he once again shows off the insight that professional training can bring. The essay on American politics begins:
President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the
best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black.
He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th
president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just
over six months in the world's biggest and toughest job.
Hu Jintao is Kaiser Wilhelm; Obama is a black cartoon cat. I look forward to Ferguson's discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.
Three news updates: GDP, airplanes, health politics
1. GDP department: The NYT yesterday had a very good, double-length op-ed about the folly of relying strictly on GDP and its growth as a proxy for human happiness, social progress, or overall national success. (Simple illustration: home security systems add to national economic activity, but the need for them may illustrate a decline in real human happiness and wellbeing.) Back in 1995, the Atlantic had a very good cover story to very similar effect. I don't know whether it's discouraging that the same case has to be made again and again or encouraging to see similar logic being applied. But if you were interested in the NYT piece, the Atlantic one (by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe) is a worthy complement.
2. Airplane department: I mentioned shortly after the tragic Hudson River aerial crash that a person who had never driven cars - let's say an Amish farmer -- might look at traffic on a busy roadway and think: how do they keep from hitting each other?!? How can it possibly be safe? Similarly, people with no experience in airplanes might look at areas like the Hudson River "VFR corridor" and think: how do they keep from hitting each other?!? How can it possibly be safe?
If you would like to hear how this perspective sounds when applied in a news broadcast, there was a specimen on NPR's (of course generally admirable) All Things Considered this evening, here. Contrary to general assumption (and the specific assumption of this segment), air traffic controllers are not what keep airplanes from running into each other. William Langewiesche, a long-time pilot and son of a revered aviation writer, explained this point in the Atlantic in a story about controllers several years ago. In brief: "controlled" flight is crucial when airplanes are in clouds or when for other reasons the pilots can't see where they're going; and when flights are being sluiced and sequenced into busy airports. It's also mandatory for all flights at the altitudes where jets fly. But otherwise, the pilots are the ones keeping their planes from hitting each other, as car drivers and boat skippers do. This crash was a tragedy that should be studied, but not from the perspective of a person on a buggy who views a collision as a sign that roads are inherently unsafe. (Minor factual-error complaint after the jump.*)
3. Health department: In response to this item yesterday, I have received abundant correspondence to the effect of: especially after you've come back from China, how can you possibly be against free debate? It would be so wrong to ram a bill right down the throat of an unprepared Congress and public.
Yes, yes, we're all in favor of free debate. But organized efforts to shout down public officials at "town meetings" are not my idea of what Thomas Paine, John Peter Zenger, Socrates, and the rest were trying to promote. Nor is propagation of demonstrably false information, including the "death panel" scare that has most effectively been debunked by a conservative Republican Senator from Georgia.
Below and after the jump, a note from a reader who has "genuine" concerns about the Obama plan but is worried that irrational "birther"-style opposition will keep the serious concerns from being aired. I don't agree with all of his concerns, as noted below; but I think his analysis of the politics is right:
I completely agree with the observations you and [Steven] Pearlstein make about the Republican positioning on the health care debate. I also agree with
Steven's statement that "Health reform is a test of whether this
country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can
trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require
everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off."
However, that does not translate into automatic agreement on the plan
as proposed--a presumption that the advocates of the current health
care bill would have us accept as true.
Let's mark this moment in the health debate as it happens
Nearly fifteen years ago, after the collapse of the Clinton health-reform effort, I spent a lot of time working on an Atlantic article (and subsequent book chapter) about how, exactly, the discussion of the bill had become so unmoored from reality and finally determined by slogans, stereotypes, and flat-out lies.
It's better to do that after the fact than not to do it at all. And, if I do say so, I think the article remains useful background reading for what's going on now -- including the return-guest-star role of the voluble but consistentlymisinformed Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey.
But if there's a chance, it would obviously be better still to keep the current debate from ending up in the same intellectual/political swamp in which the previous one drowned. That is why I was so impressed by this Steven Pearlstein column two days ago in the Washington Post. (Yes, despite changes noted recently in the WaPo, there are good people doing good work there.) Pearlstein, a longtime business and financial columnist and reporter (and last year's Pulitzer winner for commentary), is no one's idea of a predictable leftie. Thus when he says things like the following, they have weight:
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological
fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have
been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a
cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the
political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal
opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do
anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its
most serious domestic problems....
He goes through the most familiar talk show / Republican Caucus / Sarah Palin / protest group complaints -- "death committees," socialized medicine, end of innovation, "keep the government out of my Medicare," etc -- and shows how, as with all of McCaughey's complaints over the years, they're just not true. The current legislation has defects, but they're not the ones most often yelled about. Then he makes the point that, to me, matters even more than the legislation itself.
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again
as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the
big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in
order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see
us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies
they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come
together and get this done.
Pretty soon I will lay off the "As a Rip van Winkle returnee to your country, what I notice is...." approach. But I have to say that it is striking to come back -- from the world of controlled media and not-always-accurate "official truth" in China -- and see the world's most mature democracy, informed by the world's dominant media system, at a time of perceived economic crisis and under brand new political leadership, getting tied up by manufactured misinformation. No matter what party you belong to, you can't think this is a sign of health for the Republic.
Second day reaction on the Hudson River air crash
Why this crash happened, in a "who was thinking what" sense, may not be known for a long time if ever. But the mechanical description of the crash sequence now seems clearer. The NYT has another of its useful aviation disaster graphics attached to this story. The graphic itself is a pop-up that is tricky to link to directly, so with full acknowledgment that this comes from the NYT site and with encouragement to you go to there directly, here's what it shows:
The airplane left Teterboro and headed for the Hudson; it leveled off at 1100 feet, which is the maximum altitude along much of the "VFR Flyway" for "uncontrolled" flight (explained here) along the Hudson; and for whatever reason it made a left turn and hit the helicopter from behind and below. This is a terrible tragedy for all involved, and sympathies to those families. Two points about the reaction:
- I am impressed by the realism and the relatively calm tone of this NYT story about how planes usually operate in the Hudson corridor. Here's why I'm somewhat surprised:
To someone with no experience controlling cars or trucks, it would seem incredible that drivers could whiz past each other in opposite directions on a two-lane road and not have head-on collisions all the time. They're so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn't anyone in control? And in fact, tens of thousands of people do die in road crashes each year. But since most people know about cars, they understand how drivers can watch out for other vehicles, how two-way traffic can usually be safe, and what kind of mistake, misjudgment, recklessness, or sheer bad luck can lead to a head-on crash.
But when it comes to aviation, relatively few people have first-hand experience steering planes or watching out for other aerial traffic. And because air disasters, when they happen, are so gruesome, it's natural for most people to think: they're so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn't anyone in control? In fact, avoiding collisions in the air is, in terms of sheer reflexes required, less demanding than avoiding them on the road. (Landing an airplane is more demanding than most aspects of driving; simply flying an airplane is not.) If you lose attention for five seconds in a car, you can be in serious trouble. In airplanes there's usually a lot more time to see what's coming toward you and decide how to avoid a problem. It's more like operating a boat in a harbor than like driving a car on a road. This may be why Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- who has trained extensively as a helicopter and airplane pilot (his certificate info here) -- struck the calmest note in the NYT story. He said, essentially: this is a terrible tragedy, and while we have to look for causes, it doesn't mean we have to go crazy or shut everything down. More or less the way car drivers respond after a road tragedy.
- I am less impressed by this AP story that tries to find a regulatory-negligence aspect to the disaster. The purported revelation is a recent Department of Transportation study showing that "on demand" air carriers, like the helicopter-tour company, are supervised less carefully than mainstream airlines are. Frankly, I would hope that airlines are always the most heavily-scrutinized part of the system, given how many more passengers' lives are at stake.
Let's agree that regulatory and safety-procedure issues may have played a large part in the terrible Colgan crash in Buffalo this last winter. And that there could be systematic problems in the on-demand flight business. Still: I'm willing to bet a lot of money that nothing whatsoever about this Hudson crash was related in any way to regulation of the helicopter company. After a disaster, it's natural to look for any factor that might in any way be related. But this is a huge logical stretch and a kind of scare-mongering.
On the other hand, the same AP writer did a very good story earlier this week about the latest development in the Air France crash over the Atlantic in June: the possibility that there is a systematic problem with the airspeed-sensing system in Airbus airplanes, which could have contributed to this and other incidents with Airbuses. More on that as it develops; no more on the Hudson crash unless there is new info. Again condolences.
August 3, 2009
A demur to my former Atlantic colleague Ross Douthat
All of us at the magazine wish our colleague/alumnus Ross Douthat well in his NY Times oped-writer role. The better he does, the more his success reflects on all of us, in addition to enhancing public discourse! Part of wishing him well is offering guidance, and in that spirit I have some thoughts about his column this morning contrasting Texas ("red state" / balanced budget / positive example) with California ("blue state" / fiscal disaster / cautionary example).
The column asserts that California's problems stem directly from its liberalism: "California, always liberalism's favorite laboratory... long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area." Yeah, sure, about the regulations and so on. But if you write about California's fiscal problems and don't even mention the role of "Proposition 13"* or similar revenue limits and distortions, you're not trying very hard to make an honest argument.
Pre-Prop 13 (as Benjamin Schwarz points out in his review of the great new Kevin Starr book), California dreamed big and spent big. Post-Prop 13, everything about California's fiscal situation has changed. It's not simply the cap on property taxes; it's also the legislative super-majorities and electoral contortions required to raise money for anything, which are part of a general dysfunction of government structure in the state. Proposition 13, of course, was an anti-tax "Red State" measure of the purest form. You can argue about exactly how crucial a role it plays in the current disastrous situation. But to omit any mention of the topic and pretend that California's problems reflect the outcome of pure liberalism is not trying hard or even respecting the reader.
For contrast, we have Texas: "But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks
like a model citizen.... Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It's one of only six states
that didn't run budget deficits in 2009."
Side point: "flash forward" is a prominent member of the list of journalese cliches that need killing. Bonus side point: Texas, like many states, is forbidden by its constitution to run budget deficits. What makes it unusual now is that it's doing so without raising taxes, eg as in this report. But here's the main point: to argue that state unemployment rates during a deep global recession differ mainly because of state tax rates -- and not because of different industrial structures, different banking practices, specific corporate decisions, lots of other factors -- is, again, not trying very hard. An obvious bit of proof is that the Economist, which ran a very similar California-v-Texas exercise a month ago, ended up much more equivocal about the new Texas supremacy. Eg, "To begin with, that lean Texan model has its own problems. It
has not invested enough in education, and many experts rightly worry
about a 'lost generation' of mostly Hispanic Texans with insufficient
skills for the demands of the knowledge economy."
There are points to draw from state experience, especially the agony of California right now. But they're important enough to be worth drawing with some care. ____ * For the record, Proposition 13, passed by an overwhelming margin at the polls in 1978, put a cap on property-tax rates in California and imposed new restrictions on legislative or electoral efforts to raise taxes of any sort in the future. More here and here and here.
July 30, 2009
Col. Timothy Reese on Iraq
Since, atypically, this appears not yet to have been mentioned by any of my on-the-news Atlantic.com colleagues, let me refer anyone who has not seen it to the full text of Col. Timothy Reese's memo urging a rapid exit from Iraq, "It's Time for the U.S. to Declare Victory and Go Home." I first saw it this morning at the Washington Independent site, here, and recommend the full thing to anyone who has read only news summaries.
Opinion has always varied widely within the professional military about the prospects and best options for America's presence in Iraq. So this obviously does not represent a new military "consensus." But it makes a big difference to have this case argued by a senior U.S. military officer on the scene. Well worth reading.
July 26, 2009
Climate pushback #2 (of 2)
After the jump, excerpts from a few more readers with thoughts to add, in response to this and this, about the notorious famed "hockey stick" chart and the general state of the climate-change debate.
I'll let these speak for themselves -- and also let them wrap up the discussion in this space for the time being.
But a note about a point that could use re-assertion What attracted me to Richard Muller's book "Physics for Future Presidents" and still does, despite varied complaints about parts of its argument, is that it tries to do something that too few experts and specialists bother with. It attempts to explain the way scientists approach complex issues of public policy. How they weigh evidence. What they're skeptical of and convinced by. How they think about data that never perfectly fits -- and how they try to discern general trends even when particular details are messy. I was using this in contrast to a George Will column breezily asserting that a decade of flat temperatures (a claim that itself is disputed, to put it mildly) said something significant about longer-term climactic trends.
How many other experts even try to do this? Explaining their manner of thinking -- which is more valuable than their judgment on any particular point? Rather than simply asserting that they are right on the basis of their expertise. Historians Richard Neustadt and Ernest May -- both unfortunately now dead, both men I admired greatly when taking their classes -- notably did so in their book Thinking in Time, which tried to explain how historical analogies could inform -- mislead. I have not yet read Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think, but the title is certainly promising in this sense. I have read The Art and Science of Politics, by Harold Varmus, and it's a fine example of this approach. Atul Gawande's justly celebrated New Yorker report (on why medical costs were so much higher in one Texas city than another) was great because he applied his knowledge as a physician to explain how other doctors did their work. The Galbraiths -- John Kenneth, and now his son James, especially with Predator State -- earned the suspicion (and envy) of many fellow economists by trying to explain what was right and wrong about economic reasoning to lay readers. To avoid the risk of offending by omission, I'll stop here (rather than talking about lawyers, engineers, biologists, teachers, etc.
The entire purpose of Richard Muller's book was to convey how people trained in the hard sciences make their way through the contradictory signals from the real political world. That is worth noting, no matter what you think about his view on the "hockey stick."
J. Bradford DeLong, of the once-proud edifice known as UC Berkeley, has provided as much info as any reasonable consumer might want on the global-warming "hockey stick" fracas. His post is not 100% flattering to moi-meme, but he gets extra points for working in frog references and for an account of an actual discussion with his UCB colleague Richard Muller. A fact-check on the recent claim from Al Gore's camp, too. It's all here.
Promised second climate-pushback dispatch later on.
Climate pushback #1, from Al Gore's office and others
I will try to do this in two omnibus posts, rather than opening up a running weeks-long discourse. After all, that treatment is reserved for frogs, the China Daily, "starchitecture," and similar topics, of which there is more in the pipeline.
But in response to two recent items, here and here, on how to think about climate change, I have received a ton of email, all in one mode: ie, telling me I am wrong.
The original reason I raised the topic was that I'd seen the latest entry in George Will's ongoing series on why global warming is a myth. In response, I mentioned a book by a UC Berkeley physicist about how to assess the evidence on climate change, and why the problem was indeed worth worrying about, if not for the reasons most often discussed.
My correspondents barely bothered to deal with Will. They were instead upset about the physicist, Richard Muller, and by extension me for being too complacent about climate-change evidence -- and too critical of those (including Al Gore) who had warned about it most prominently.
Below and after the jump, representative samples of this view. Later tonight, I'll put up a few more messages, and the appropriate meta-thoughts on my part. Unless I hear from Muller, or something else occurs, that will be it for now -- simply because I am well aware that detailed argument over studies, policies, and implications already occupies many sites full time. (For instance, this and this, with different perspectives.)
First up, Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress site and the book Hell and High Water, whom I have known for years. Because he wrote me privately, I won't go into his views of my judgment or Muller's. But here are the references he thinks people should instead read:
-Romm has written two critiques of Muller's book, here and here.
-According to Romm, "The 'hockey stick,' was essentially vindicated by the National Academy of
Sciences, and it is almost certainly correct." Cite here.
- "Gore's essential argument is correct and other than a very few technical
quibbling with word choice, pretty every one on his major carefully crafted
statements is accurate. His Nobel Prize will, sadly, be vindicated by
history." [Note from JF: 'An Inconvenient Truth' also included a particularly egregious display of boiled-frog madness, which maybe we will assign to the realm of "technical quibbling with word choice." Ie, if he had said, "if you remove a frog's brain and put him in a top of tepid water, then gradually raise the temperature..." he'd be square with the scientists.]
Move over, China Daily. I don't know how long The Onion can keep up its running version of how it will look after acquisition by the Yu Wan Mei fish salvage company (鱼完美, yu wan mei, "perfect fish"). Background on the sale here.
But as long as it lasts, it is a tour de force. I suspect that some veteran of the China Daily or allied Chinese "information" organs in English must have defected to the Onion and guided this exercise. It's as good an imitation of the original as are the standard Onion "area man" versions of American news.
Original (these are real China Daily headlines):
Improved version:
My general policy is: if something is already On The Internet, no need for me to mention it too, unless it is in some cranny where many people might overlook it. But the artistry here forces an exception to the policy. After the jump, an early indication of the Onion's prowess in the "learning from China" field.
UPDATE: It is worth going to the Opinion page, as illustrated below, and clicking on the "Internet allows free exchange" story.
The point of the previous item about how scientists think about public policy, which referred to Richard Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents, was that many scientific issues are too complex to be resolved in op-ed columns. Or even Atlantic website posts!
But several people have asked for elaboration of this sentence I quoted from Muller:
"An example of distortion is the melting of the Antarctic ice --
something that actually contradicts the global warming model but is
presented as if it verifies them."
What's the logic there? My main answer is, read the book! But to be more responsive, here's the reasoning in a nutshell (my paraphrase, alongside USGS map of Antarctica):
Higher temperatures (ie, "global warming") would mean more evaporation from the oceans. That would mean more clouds, which over Antarctica would mean more snow. (The air over Antarctica would be warmer, but on average still well below freezing.) More snow would mean more Antarctic ice, not less. Yet the Antarctic ice cover is decreasing, not increasing.
"Does the decrease in ice mean that the model is wrong -- that global warming is not taking place?" Muller asks. "No, not at all. It simply shows the inadequacies of the model. Even with global warming, local weather (even for a whole continent) can cause behavior that deviates from the computer calculation. One result is certain: the melting of Antarctica provides no evidence whatsoever in favor of global-warming predictions." He then goes on to discuss other evidence that does support the predictions. To be 100% clear about it: Muller is not at all a "denialist" about climate change. Eg: "Global warming is real. It is very likely caused by humans. By the end of the twenty-first century it will (if caused by humans) grow enough to be disruptive." He is just urging readers and policy makers to be precise about what the evidence shows and doesn't show.
You know where to go for more.
UPDATE: this site, from NASA, allows you to create your own maps showing how much the average temperature in different parts of the world has risen over any interval you choose since 1880. For instance, this map, below, shows surface temperature differences in June, 2009 versus a 1951-1980 average baseline:
More here from Michael Goodfellow of Free the Memes.
July 23, 2009
Compare-and-contrast reading on climate change
This morning George Will offered another in his series of reassuring columns about the "overstated" threat of climate change. Today's version:
"When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called
upon 'young Americans' to 'get a million people on the Washington Mall
calling for a price on carbon,' another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: 'If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult
life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global
warming since you entered first grade.'
"Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful
clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S.
government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the
sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a
closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was
dying."
Will presented the lack of youthful clamor as a sign of wholesome common sense. If you would like another way to think about the evidence, this one provided not by a columnist but by a physicist at UC Berkeley who has won a MacArthur grant, I recommend Richard A. Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents. I happened to read most of it on a long plane flight yesterday, so I was all set for Will's column today. So you can be ready before his next one appears, I recommend ordering the book now.
Muller is not at all in the most-alarmist group of climate scientists; indeed, he spends a lot of time explaining why he thinks Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth exaggerated the threat in several ways. You can see the beginning of his dissection of Gore's famous "hockey stick" chart of rising temperatures, which begins on page 292 of Muller's book, through a Google book-search excerpt here. (The hockey stick, below)
Muller says that the evidence behind the hockey-stick chart is wrong. (Read it yourself to see why.) "In fact, much of what the public 'knows' about global warming is based on distortion, exaggeration, or cherry picking," he says, adding:
"An example of distortion is the melting of the Antarctic ice -- something that actually contradicts the global warming model but is presented as if it verifies them. Exaggeration includes the attribution of Hurricane Katrina to global warming, even though there is no scientific evidence that they are related. Cherry picking is the process of selecting data that verify the global-warming hypothesis but ignoring data that contradict it."
The real purpose of his book is to set out as clearly as possible the way scientists approach the inevitably-conflicting evidence on big public policy issues like climate change (or the real risks of terrorism, or dealing with nuclear waste). Before the Iraq war, it would have been useful for intelligence officials to set out the way they balance their version of inevitably-conflicting and always-incomplete facts. Muller sets out the way climate scientists weigh the evidence pro and con concerning climate change and the probabilities for each explanation.
By the end of the process he has forcefully re-established the principle that real scientists view propositions as most convincing when all the doubts, caveats, and contrary bits of evidence are admitted -- whereas politicians and the public want to hear an all-or-nothing verdict with no hems or haws. Consistent with this approach, it is all the more powerful when Muller concludes that there really are reasons to worry about man-made climate change. He also provides guidelines about sensible and fanciful ways to deal with the problem. I am not equipped to judge this argument on purely scientific grounds; but the book is addressed to lay readers and is convincing in what it says about the process of scientific reasoning. If this latest George Will opus serves to drive readers to Muller's book, it will have done some good.
July 22, 2009
Two articles from Counterpunch (updated)
Two of my friends of longest standing (note how I avoid saying two of my "oldest friends") have articles online at counterpunch.org that deserve notice.
Eamonn Fingleton, who has been based in Japan for years and has been both contrarian and right in emphasizing the residual strength of Japanese manufacturing (even as the Japanese financial system collapsed), now has an article about the American media's coverage of Detroit. It is mainly a corrective to the automatic sneer at U.S. automakers that characterizes much political and press commentary about them. The article says:
As
press commentators have generally spun it, the Detroit story has been a
simplistic morality tale of "incompetent executives," "lazy workers,"
and "intransigent unions." Detroit in other words has richly deserved
its fate and, in the opinion of many of the more callous observers, the
sooner it is put out of its misery the better.
The real story is a complex one in which the American auto industry has often been more sinned against than sinning.
The article is very heavy on US-Japanese auto competition; for the record, I disagree with Eamonn on a few of the harpoons that he hurls. But the simple rarity of arguments on the automakers' behalf makes the article worth considering. Update: Another illustration of its approach, from the beginning:
To see how well -- or rather how badly -- you understand the background, try this quiz:
1.
What was the Detroit companies' share of the Japanese market in 1930?
(a) About 90 per cent. (b) About 20 per cent. (c) Less than 4 per cent.
2. How many models do the Detroit corporations currently make with the
steering wheel on the right (the standard configuration for Japan)? (a)
More than 40. (b) 12. (c) 3.
3.
What was the combined share of all foreign makers - American, European,
and Japanese - in the Korean car market in the last decade? (a) Less
than 2 per cent. (b) Around 15 per cent. (c) More than 70 per
cent.
The correct answer in each case is (a).
If you flunked, don't feel bad. Just cancel your newspaper subscription.
I don't buy Eamonn's "cancel your subscription" advice, since newspapers are just behind carmakers in their overall distress. But his overall pitch is significant.
Also we have Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, whose name is familiar to anyone who has read or thought about American defense policy over the last generation. Based purely on his study of conflict through the ages, last year Spinney made a call about Obama-McCain campaign tactics that proved far shrewder than that of many political "experts" at the time.
In his new article, he makes a call about President Obama's expanding commitment to Afghanistan that is convincing to me and should be alarming to anyone who reflects on what the U.S. is getting itself into. Both articles very much worth a look.
July 11, 2009
Weekend Xinjiang / Uighur / 愤青 update, #2
More from the mailbag:
1) A reader with a Chinese name points out another aspect of the story --
the extreme reaction inside Turkey, where the "reality" of events
appears to be as one-sided as it has been portrayed within China:
"Have you noticed the reaction in Turkey? Here's what appeared in today's two big papers.
"The nationalist Hurriyet reported
the riot "has claimed the lives of hundreds of ethnic Uighur Turks."
The other big daily reports the released breakdown of the death toll
but as background reported the retaliatory attacks by Han against
Uighurs but did not mention Uighur attacks against Han. And the Prime
Minister stepped in to declare that the riot was "almost genocide."
"I'm amazed that despite the free flow of information, open
parts of the world can still live in different universes. A reader in
London will read an article in The Times about the "butchered" Han
family while on the same day a Turkish reader will read about the
massacre of Uighurs."
The point about separate
fact-universes is one of the sobering marvels of the modern info-age.
It's true within the United States, as discussed long ago here;
and it's true between countries, as China, Turkey, and the rest of the
world all digest different versions of the Xinjiang "truth." Main
point: the internet, mobile phones, and other info technology, far from
eliminating the country-by-country differences in information and
belief, in some ways may increase them, as each little info-sphere is
able to reinforce its own view of the world.
2) From reader Yuan Song:
"To be frank, I'm astonished to see such a big post [the "Han Chinese only"] sign, explicit, yet cold. If I were a Uighur that could read Chinese, I would have felt so insulted. Last time, one of my Canadian friends told me he that when he traveled in Austria, he saw an advertisement to let room saying "no Jewish or Northern Italians" (I forgot the original German word he used that actually means people from Northern Italy.) My Canadian friend was obviously very much annoyed by that advertisement. So was I. Then I had worsening impression of Austria after that.
"Anyway, thanks a lot for giving me more insights in the situations in Xinjiang. I've never been there personally. The fact that I, being a native Chinese, rely on this source of information to understand Xinjiang, is funny, though. The Chinese media should have done better job. I don't know whether you have heard of Phoenix TV, a mandarin TV station. They have good reputation for giving objective and insight reports on different issues. [Agree]
"Are you from US? I heard in US, there is a law that guarantees the proportion of employees from different ethnic groups hired by each employer should resemble that of the whole society. Is it true?"
3) A reader with a Chinese name points out that the real news is not
the "Han Chinese only" aspect of the sign but rather the "ages 18-30 only"
part. The reader says:
"And, because the problem is bigger, discrimination against
minority (and favoritism toward minority, as adding grade points to
minority for "Gao Kao" [the nationwide university admissions exam]) is not actually that unique, or big,
a problem.
In response to three previous posts (here, here, and here), a series of reactions and updates. First, from a reader with a Chinese name*, a measured discussion of some of the reasons behind the frequently thin-skinned, defensive, 愤青 (fenqing, "angry youth") reaction from China to critical comments from abroad:
"You discussed Chinese people's "tone of response to outside criticism"
in recent posts. I agree that many Chinese people do not react well
to outside criticisms, and that's certainly something worth their
self-reflection. But around this particular event-time, it would be
helpful to put these people's emotions within the context of many
foreign media's portraits of the unrest in Xinjiang:
"1. Initial western media reports tend to gave readers/viewers the
impression that most of the dead must have been Uighur demonstrators
killed in police gunfire (this might have been most western
journalists' assumption, as Christian Science Monitor's Peter Ford
conceded). And when it was later discovered that actually most of the
dead were Han Chinese (often murdered brutally), many western media
reports only mentioned this crucial fact in passing (often buried deep
in the middle of their reports), or simply ignored it (e.g., NBC's July
10th Nightly News). The impact of such portraits on the public opinion
in the West is clear: numerous people on Twitter, perhaps the majority
of the commentators in the first couple of days, condemned the
perceived Chinese police's slaughtering or even genocide of Uighurs.
Wouldn't an ordinary Chinese person get emotional over such media
portraits and the resulted public perception?
A few hours ago I posted a picture from Kashgar of a Help Wanted ad that concluded, "Han Chinese only." Recently I've received a wave of messages, mainly from readers with Chinese names, similar in content to the one below. (In fairness, not all have been this huffy in tone*):
I came cross your website and read the article "No Uighurs Need Apply" written by Shannon Kirwin [ie, quoting S.K.], hinting the unfair treatment of Uighurs by Han. It showed how ignorant she and your web editors are, because you don't even know that Muslims don't touch any pork while Hans do. In addition it'd be a humiliation and insult to Muslims if you ask them to work in Han kitchens. I think it's typical that you Westerners are so unfairly to spread twisted information around the world, while smiling to your local Han friends.
Now, at the level of simple, cold logic, there are some obvious responses to this argument. If observant Uighur Muslims don't want to work with pork, then they're not going to apply for the jobsanyway. So why bother to say they can't? Or: maybe not all Uighurs are observant Muslims or even Muslim at all, and perhaps they'd like the job. Or: maybe there are other ethnic groups in the area who are not Han but would still be happy to work with pork. Why rule them out? Or: maybe some of the jobs listed, as supervisors, don't involve touching food at all. What about those? And so on.
But to me the responses are more interesting on two other, sociological levels. One is the theme that runs through much internal Chinese discussion of relations with its minority groups: that whatever is going on is obviously and overwhelmingly for the minority's own good. In the case of the Kashgar restaurant, sparing Muslims the sacrilege of dealing with pork. In the case of a Beijing exhibit on the history of Tibet I mentioned last year, bringing modern prosperity to a backward people. In this context, it doesn't make sense to ask, "Well, what if the Uighur wanted to work in the restaurant?" or "What if the Tibetans wanted to choose a different path," since the benefits to them are so plain. This attitude is obviously not confined to China: it typifies America's attitude toward its minority groups at many points in our history. But the attitude is more broadly shared and less internally-debated in China now than many other places.
(Beijing exhibit photo, showing a Tibetan woman grateful to have a modern fridge full of beer.)
The other theme this illustrates is the much-discussed readiness of the Chinese "netizen" population to take offense at foreign criticism. Being away from China even for a few weeks, I am aware of how this reaction can be mis-read in the outside world. Day by day over the past few years in China, I've been in a sea of highly varied, tremendously individualistic, and generally very good-humored and approachable people. This touchy, net-based tone did not at all characterize the daily life I observed anywhere in the country -- very much including interactions with foreigners. But it is part of the mix in China's dealings with the outside world, especially when "foreign criticism" comes up. ____ * It is possible in the case of this note that I have fallen for an elaborate hoax. The sender's email address contains the initials "LOL" repeated twice with numbers in between, and his or her listed Chinese name is 笑生, which also has a jokey connotation. So who knows. Many of the other notes seemed quite serious.
July 9, 2009
Cornucopia of updates #7: Great Firewall
Everyone on the China beat already knows this, but for bystanders curious about how China's internet-filtering system adjusts to breaking news, see this report from China Digital Times. It's an intercepted (and, to me, legitimate-sounding) new memo from state propaganda authorities about the items that search-engine companies must block from their results. The memo is of course in Chinese, with CDT's translation. Brief samples:
以下关键词请屏蔽无结果，不设相关搜索，今日(8日)19时生效。
Please screen out the following keywords, no relevant search results. Effective starting 7 pm today [July 8, 2009].....
"冲突 汉维""维冲突 汉族" "维族冲突 汉族" "维族冲突 汉人" "维族冲突 汉族人" "维族冲突汉族同胞""维狗冲突 汉族"
"维族狗冲突 汉族" "维族狗冲突 汉人" "维族狗冲突 汉族人" "维狗冲突 汉族同胞" "维族狗冲突汉族同胞" "新疆人冲突 汉族"
"新疆人冲突 汉人" "新疆人冲突 汉族人" "新疆人冲突 汉族同胞""新疆狗冲突 汉族" "维族狗冲突汉人" "新疆狗冲突 汉族人"
"新疆狗冲突 汉族同胞"
"conflict, Han and Uighur" "Conflict, Han and Uighur people" "Conflict, Han and Xinjiang people"
"Conflict, Xinjiang dogs and Han compatriots" "Conflict, Xinjiang people and Han compatriots"
For background on the Great Firewall, try here. In some other update, it will be worth talking about the Chinese government's press strategy during this emergency, which so far is strikingly different from past practice. During the Tibet turmoil early last year, the government tried its best to keep foreign reporters and outsiders in general away from the action. This time, it is conducting press tours of Xinjiang for foreigners. Rapid-adaptation to changing circumstances has been a hallmark of Chinese economic policy but not so much of its international diplomatic stance. We'll see how big a change this is.
June 24, 2009
More on Chinese lack of interest in Iran
A reader makes a point (following this post) about why the Iranian drama seems so much less compelling from inside China than it does in much of the West. There is more, well, John Bull-esque swagger to this note than I'd probably have if making the point myself. But I basically agree with this perspective. It's not all government info-control and censorship.
"I think it's good to keep in mind that Chinese folks tend to have a certain antediluvian sense of detachment when it comes to foreign affairs, sort of almost pre-war British John Bull-esque isolationist vintage. They just don't care particularly about what happens in foreign countries. They really couldn't give a whistle if a foreign country is communist or democratic or whatever. They just want to be left alone to make their wages and buy their house and cars.
"And I think that detachment is probably much more powerful than any silly, heavy-handed government innuendo and propaganda, at the end of the day. Everyone paid more attention to Europe and America, that's true, but Europe and America are important and rich and to be emulated in their wealth; toward the developing world, the feeling is sort of a disinterested bemusement from the average man-in-the-street.
"So I think the best way to view the Iran coverage in China is, frankly, to ignore it. Government press might have (really stupid) agendas to pursue in relation to this, fighting the colour revolutions and so on, but the average man couldn't care less. And it's quite exactly the same thing when that clown Hugo Chavez is feted in the Chinese press; he's viewed more as a curiosity than as some glorious David, hero of the Developing World-cum-Israelites.
"And I personally think that, for China at least, this is not an unhealthy attitude. Splendid (Sino-)Isolation ought be cause for relief for the rest of the world.
"....Another thing I forgot, and this is I think how someone used to describe the pre-war British, is that the Chinese generally find foreigners funny. Not serious, not genuinely dangerous, not heroic and considerable (as an European might for MLK, or an American for Thatcher or both for Mandala), but nice and funny in a harmless sort of way."
Again, while the writer is deliberately heading into campy-Orientalism by the end of the note, and while a billion-person country has exceptions to any generalization (I know Chinese people who quite clearly are inspired by Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or Isaac Newton, or John Dewey, or....) the basic point rings true to me. Including the "not unhealthy" part -- worth bearing in mind when you hear the next "China as master of the world" scare-lecture.
June 22, 2009
Iran in China
I have been out of China for a week and away from internet contact most of that time, including the last day-plus. So I am behind the curve on the Iranian drama in general, and the way it's playing in China in particular. But in response to a number of requests for tips on how to judge the reaction of China's officialdom, media (controlled by officialdom), and populace, here are some guidelines.
1) Never underestimate the ability of the Chinese media to steer attention toward -- or away from -- stories both domestic and foreign. Over the past six weeks, as H1N1/swine flu has been waning as a front-line concern in most countries, it has been end-of-days news inside China. And right now -- Monday evening, June 22, China time -- when Iran's fate is dominant news in much of the world, it's a second- or third-tier item in the official Chinese media. The current front page of People Daily (in Chinese, here) has Iran as a fairly minor news item. English version of People's Daily Online, here, currenty shows the same understated play.
2) It is worth remembering that the elements of the Iranian story that give it such drama and importance in much of the world are less automatically resonant in China. One part of the narrative -- a massed populace standing up against state power -- is obviously anathema to Chinese authorities. And many of the other themes are also less immediate and compelling to ordinary people in China than they would be in North America, Europe, or parts of the Islamic world. To most Westerners, everything about this story matters. It involves a people's struggle to make their voices heard; it follows other "color revolutions" in former Soviet territories and indeed popular movements for democracy and rule of law in Asia and Latin America from the 1980s onwards; it potentially marks a crucial moment in the evolution of modern Islamic society; it can have war-and-peace implications for US foreign policy and Israeli actions; and so on. Ordinary members of the Western viewing audience feel a connection to these themes. I assert that they seem more distant to ordinary people in China -- even if the themes were featured on the news. People's own problems, and their business problems, and the country's problems, are enough to worry about.
3) The Chinese publications that are explicitly aimed at foreign readers, the redoubtable China Daily and its new complement Global Times, have taken a predictable but still interesting line. Right now the China Daily is, like the People's Daily, underplaying the story altogether. The new Global Times, generally seen as taking an edgier and more adventurous approach to advancing telling China's "soft power" presentation of its official perspective worldwide, went with this as its lead item today:
The themes of "outside interference" and "victimization by Western powers" are comfortable, reflexive positions for the Chinese government's foreign policy establishment to take, so are the natural positions here.
4) I don't think anyone in the foreign media has any clear idea of what the Chinese leadership really is thinking about Iran and its implications.
5) I have lacked online time to follow up on the Chinese blog world but welcome submissions by readers, which I will share.
June 18, 2009
Sigh, out of range again
I am no longer based in China, but am not yet actually based anyplace else. So this might be the last dispatch for the next week, and it's on the fly from yet another airport wi-fi site. Sketchy for-the-record remarks:
1) After 60+ hours in America (and on the way out again): Life is so abundant! Even in a downturn -- and, yes, in Washington, not Flint. Everything looks so comfortable and lush! The air is so clean! (Today's reading in Beijing: "Hazardous.") And the cell phone coverage is so crappy! I can barely recall a moment in China when I was out of signal range. Today alone in Washington, half a dozen dropped calls. Yes, yes, I know the reasons for this. But the difference is impressive.
1A) Bad part of my character as revealed by travel (part 2,847): When approached by spare-change panhandlers I have to bite my tongue to avoid giving the "do you know what people put up with in China?" speech. Yes, yes, I know why this is wrong.
2) Positive aviation development of the week: flight of a new all-electric plane, here.
3) Negative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.
4) "There will always be a China" anecdote of the day. This comes from a Chinese friend I know and trust but, for this person's own sake, will not identify. My friend asked a CCTV producer (whose name I also know) about the mystery I mentioned last week: what on earth the weird ... thing on top of the otherwise-clean CCTV tower was. Reminder:
Here is the report from my friend, recounting a conversation with the producer:
Me [my friend]: Do you know what that huge round thing protruding on the top of the main CCTV building is? Producer: What? Me: It looks like either a misshaped radar or a helicopter landing pad... Producer: Why are you asking? Me: Just curious. Producer: Well, don't be curious. You know it's a very sensitive period here at CCTV, because of Fang Jing's "spy-gate" incident. Don't ask such sensitive questions. Me: Why is it sensitive? That huge thing is right there on the very top of your landmark. Everyone could see it, even from far away. You've never thought about what it is? Nobody asks about it? Producer: No... No one. Seriously, stop asking about it!
Words to live by. With that, I leave you to my Atlantic colleagues for a week.
June 14, 2009
About the internet, the Atlantic, and Iran
In coverage of Iran over the past week and especially in these last few days, Andrew Sullivan has on his site illustrated the way the internet and related technologies have permanently changed journalism for the better. So have a number of other people at other sites, which have made themselves clearinghouses for information coming out of Iran in emails, blog posts, camera-phone and ad hoc video transmissions, and other forms including, yes, Twitter feeds. Collectively they've let the outside world know more about what is happening in a would-be sealed-off country, and given people inside that country a place to share and compare news as they could not possibly have done even a few years ago.
This fact is worth noting its own right, as a moment when we see that something truly new and positive has occurred. It's also worth observing in light of the many seemingly-permanent changes for the worse in journalism that have coincided with the internet era, whether or not they've been caused by it.
If I'm not mentioning anything about Iran at the moment, it's not because I think the news unimportant but rather because I have no contacts in the country and nothing to add to the discussion. As we follow developments there it's worth recognizing the different era in communications that has begun.
June 7, 2009
Last two about June 4
Numerous previous items (here, here, here, here, and others) have addressed the Chinese government's success in erasing June 4, 1989, from the collective memory of their country's next generation. Two more accounts, both from foreigners who have recently raised the issue with young Chinese people, and each of which shows some of the drama associated with the issue here.
First, from someone now teaching in a major manufacturing city in China. (Yes, I know, this really narrows it down.):
Today [several days ago], a few other foreigners and I were looking at an MSNBC retrospective (miraculously, not blocked) of the important day that happened recently, and just of reveling in the amazing photos and videos with lots of "wows" and stunned silences.
A 23-year old Chinese girl we know very well was sitting next to us and peered over, and said, "What's that? What's going on?" We tried to dissuade her; since in many ways it's not in her or our best interest for her to see, but she forced herself into our huddle and was looking, and noticed all the Chinese people wearing headbands, the blood, the violence, the shouting at the police, and so on. So she started asking, shocked by the fact that this had to be somewhere in her homeland, "What is this!? What's going on!? Who are these people?! Where is this?!" She was just awestruck and horrified.
So we told her the whole story from the W perspective, making diplomatic but honest allowances since most of us don't truly believe that "things" are generally that bad at all; certainly not here and now. But she just listened to us, staring at the videos and pictures, and none of us could see her face, which was bowed intently at the computer screen and veiled by her long hair. All of a sudden, she started weeping. Just weeping. She had had no idea that it had ever happened.
It can be really hard to live here, but it's something like this that makes me love this country and these people, especially here in my city of residence. Where others might see darkness, sadness and ignorance, it's often possible to see hope, beauty in the struggle, and real, unedited life.
The second account:
I am currently living in Shanghai, a recent US college graduate and
English teacher (born in '84). I have a Chinese girlfriend (born in
'89), and since we began dating some months back I have mentioned TAM
to her a few times.
I left the city this morning for a long-planned reporting trip 600 miles to the southwest, in Shaanxi province. As I implied yesterday, I was glad to have the option to leave Beijing. But updates I have received from various sources fall into these categories:
1) Several people have written to say that the going was surprisingly easy. For instance, this account from a Chinese-American man in his 20s whom I know in Beijing:
We were tourists and took many many photos, even asking the
plainclothed police who were keeping their eye on us to take one or
two. We didn't get hassled; in fact, aside from the ridiculous numbers
of cops, obvious and otherwise, there seemed to be no difference from
when I was there two weeks ago, showing friends around. Time: 8am.
Persons: myself, another Chinese-American, and two white guys. Just
wanted to add that data point to your blog, especially in light of the
note of caution you posted.
2) For fully authorized foreign TV news crews, the problem of the day was not so much frontal confrontations with security officials as -- well, you have to see the pictures to believe it. The Shanghaiist site has a roundup of photos and videos of the ever-so-suave "umbrella trick" as practiced on news crews from CNN, BBC, and AFP. This is the kind of thing that makes you hold your head and say: Rising major power in the world?
3) Speaking of the CNN/BBC blackout difference I mentioned previously, it's possible that our apartment house is getting its BBC feed through some outside-normal-systems satellite connection. I hear from other people in China that the normal, authorized (ie, subject-to-censoring) foreign satellite feed cut off CNN, BBC, as well as French TV 5 at all the predictable points.
4) My wife, lacking the excuse of travel to Shaanxi, and equipped with the multiple tools a woman can use to alter her appearance from one day to the next, went back to Tiananmen Square today looking like a different person from the one whose presence the authorities had noted the previous night. Her report on the day's activities is here and after the jump.
I went to the square at noontime, expecting to see pretty much what we
saw last night: the square off limits, people walking along the
roadside or staring at the flag and Mao's giant portrait.
As many people have reported, Twitter has been blacked out in China for the past few days (also, I hear, Flickr and Hotmail), apparently for June 4-related reasons.
BBC TV, weirdly and perhaps temporarily, is being let through loud and clear with quite startling and gruesome footage of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square 20 years ago this evening, plus an interview with one family whose child was shot dead that day, plus with the photographer who took the immortal "tank man" picture.
CNN, on the other hand, goes black-screen for several-minute periods, starting a few seconds after the words "In Beijing twenty years ago..." or "At Tianan...." The censors are just fast enough, or slow enough, to reveal what they are doing -- very much like last year, during the violence in Tibet, when you'd see an opening shot of Lhasa followed by black screen.
As nearly always in Chinese government management of the media, the apparent logic of these steps is hard to figure out. (a) Why hard-line on CNN and tolerance for BBC, which is one click away via the TV remote? (b) Why bother with English-language foreign media at all, since 99% of anyone who might be watching them already knows what happened 20 years ago? Memory-control has worked remarkably well inside China with Chinese language media. I have no explanation for the censors' decisions, just reporting the situation as of early June 3 in Beijing.
If you want to compare speculation with analysis...
...a good place to start would be with these two recent entries from writers within the Washington Post family, both trying to explain what China is, is not, and might someday be doing about North Korea.
For analysis, you would turn to John Pomfret, who actually knows quite a bit about China (as shown most clearly in his book Chinese Lessons). In an entry last week on his Pomfret's China site, he explained how the nutty regime in North Korea looks from the Chinese perspective, and how much power the Chinese actually have -- and lack.
For speculation -- really, paranoid hysteria -- you would turn to his colleague Anne Applebaum, who has just asserted in Slate that China is encouraging the North Koreans to keep testing nuclear weapons and thereby create an international crisis. She says, after entertaining several explanatory hypotheses:
Personally, I favor another scenario, equally speculative: Perhaps the
North Koreans have stepped up their war rhetoric and war preparations
because China wants them to do so. I can't prove that this was the case--no one else can prove any of his
theories about North Korea, in fact--but I can look at the evidence...
The "evidence" she lists will seem crude to the point of caricature to anyone with any familiarity with China. Even such familiarity as would come reading her colleague Pomfret's work. She ends with the flat-out statement:
North Korea is a puppet state, and the Chinese are the puppeteers. They
could end this farce tomorrow. If they haven't done so yet, there must
be a reason.
Many of the reasons -- other than deliberate Chinese war-mongering -- are precisely what Pomfret explains.
I'm not generally looking for fights with people, so why bother to mention this? The minor reason is that since the topic is the same and both writers are necessarily working with imperfect information about North Korea, it's a particularly stark illustration of the difference between informed analysis, explaining its steps of logic, and simply spinning out a snappy "hey, this could be interesting!" idea with minimal effort to reality-check.
The major reason is that this is dangerous. This is the kind of cocksure, half-informed assumption of the most threatening and moralistic interpretation of world events that has led to grief in our recent history. Applebaum herself has laudably cautioned against this view when it comes to Iran. A third member of the Post family, the columnist David Ignatius (disclosure: long-time friend of mine) has published a great new novel, The Increment, which among other themes concerns the danger of talking yourself into this view of the world. It's another worthy candidate for Ms. Applebaum's reading list.
June 1, 2009
Lost memory of June 4, update #1
I mentioned yesterday that a system-wide silence about what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago this week has left many young Chinese completely ignorant of that stage in their country's history. I meant this not as an original observation -- the phenomenon is widely discussed here by outsiders and by Chinese people who are aware of the events, plus in the NYT op-ed by Yu Hua I cited -- but as reinforcement of a point that might not be so familiar in the rest of the world.
Of many reactions that have come in on the lost-memory theme, I will quote a representative two. The first is from a Chinese person now based at a university in the United States. After the jump, a roundup of references and links on the topic.
From the academic in America:
Chinese government is embarassed by the incident 20 years ago. It is never a glorious thing to shoot at your own citizens. So it keeps silent on the issue.
But I don't think this is the main reason to students' indifference. There are plenty of resources about this on the internet. This is a staple topic in Chinese internet discussion forums, usually with great vehemence on both pro and anti government sides. The main reason I think is there was not really any support among general population for overthrowing of communist government even back in 1989. There was not any strike. (If there had been a general strike, the communist government would probably have fallen).
The general population watched the events unfolding in Beijing before June 4th warily but also with amusement. Unlike the participants in the demonstration, for the "silent majority", the events happening in those few months are far from the defining event in their lives. It is no great surprise people in China don't attach much importance to them.
And for most of young people, they don't have a lot of grievances against the government. People have lots of personal freedom as long as they don't touch politics. As for those political-minded, the communist party is always eager to recruit them. There are ample economic opportunities to absorb their mind and energy. They don't identify with the students 20 years ago the same way young people in US don't identify themselves with protesters during the Vietnam War. ___
As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of response on the "who's killing the press?" theme. Because the theme has been so very heavily worked over in recent months, I'm not reposting much of this. But here is a note that reflects a theme in a number of messages: that the newspapers are only the first casualties in what will be a more sweeping elimination of ad revenue in general. It is a response from a reader named Hal:
Among my friends, we've had this discussion before. Here's what I said then, edited to fit addressing you directly: *^*^*
The real problem is, advertising is dying. It's just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.
This is why I was warning anyone who would listen that traditional media's schadenfreude when the internet bubble popped in 2001 was probably misplaced. Because the reason it popped was one finally had the metrics to show Advertising Doesn't Work. Google has forestalled the inevitable by doing the Net equivalent of the "tiny little ads" schtick of a decade or two back, but I think they see the writing on the wall, which is why they keep trying so desperately to find something, anything, other than search that'll make money....
Thanks for numerous responses to yesterday's message from my Google friend about how newspapers could, and presumably still might, take advantage of the shift to web-based advertising. Short version: the need to have the business (as opposed to purely journalistic) swagger of predecessors like William Randolph Hearst:
Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
This is a very thoroughly discussed issue, so only a few reactions -- then back to queued-up reactions on Chinese education!
First, from a reader in Australia, about what brought on the crash and a hoped-for solution:
My wife owns a boutique real estate agency in Sydney, Australia. Every Thursday she'd have to submit the ads for her properties to the Sydney Morning Herald who had a monopoly on real estate advertising -- pre internet. The likelihood of the desired ad appearing in print, in the desired location, on the desired day was about 60%. (Imagine her customers looking through the ads for their house and not finding it!) The service was arrogant as well as unreliable and my wife wouldn't mind seeing the SMH go up in flames. On the news side, the SMH is now about splashing electronic ads right in the middle of a story I might be reading: equally arrogant! This feels very much like a fat monopoly that will be overtaken by something better.
I used to be a print subscriber to the SMH; when their internet site caught up and I upgraded to a decent LCD monitor, it was easier to read online without having to consume and recycle a broadsheet containing 90% unconsumed waste. I am a news junkie and I seriously worry about losing access to good journalism. However, I am willing to pay a few cents per story per day and I am sure that somehow, someday, someone will find a way to aggregate my pennies with everyone else's to give good journalists a good living.
After the jump, another reader's suggestion of a potential opportunity. It begins:
It seems to me there is a huge advertising hole that newspapers could
fill when they are ready to move past the blame game and start thinking
more creatively.
More on Google, Craigslist, and who's killing newspapers
A few hours ago I mentioned that a friend from Google had tipped me to a new Pew study showing how big a hole Craigslist (and similar services) had blown in the classified-ad portion of newspaper revenue. I signed off by saying that the distinction -- Google's not killing the news business, Craigslist is! -- was "worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting."
My friend, who was up in the middle of the night in California, immediately wrote back to say that I'd misunderstood the point. With his stipulation that he is speaking for himself and not the company, and with my clarification that he is not one of the household names at Google who by definition are always speaking for the company, here is his note:
It's not at all about blame-casting. It's about proper diagnosis for
treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified
revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, ...) but they falsely
self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then
they'll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news
aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won't hurt
Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new
visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously
infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick
faster, and journalism as democracy's conscience will weaken. That will
hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country.
The only blame belongs to the publishers.
Craigslist, like all startups, was originally funded with pennies on the dollar
compared with what media empires spend. It still is! Craigslist has not
been bought/co-opted/copied by any of the major publishers even though
doing so would have been a natural idea. Readers are moving online but
publishers act as though they will go there only if dragged rather than
racing to their only life saving destination. News is valuable, but you
can no longer get it in printed form as it is hours old by the time you
get your paper -- CNN and online news sites had it hours ago! Analysis
is worth waiting for, but that is what magazines like The Atlantic are
all about. Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again.
Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the
future of shopping.
These are the issues for papers to agonize about;
to wring their hands about; and maybe even to beg money to solve.
Unfortunately, they've been copying the ideas and technologies invented
and introduced by William Randolph Hearst for so long that they forgot
his example of how to innovate for the modern day. Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
Extra thought on my end: if this is what someone not in the writing biz can crank out at 4:40am his time, while up with eye problems and a splitting headache, maybe the publishing industry has even more to worry about from web-based competition than we thought!
Who exactly is killing the press
A friend who works at Google wanted to be sure I'd seen a new study from the Pew Internet Center* about what exactly is cutting the heart out of advertising revenues for the newspaper business. The headline on a CNET story about the study gets right to the point:
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting. ___ * Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
PR updates: NPR, Stanford Review, WNYC, plus NYT Mag
- On the Media interview with Bob Garfield, here, about the media-politics of health care reform. Back in 1995, I wrote this Atlantic article about the way the Clinton health-care proposal fell apart -- including the damaging role played by a hugely misleading article by Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. Interview covers whether it could happen again.
- Online Q-and-A with the Stanford Review's Bellum project, here.
- Interview last week about China with Brian Lehrer of WNYC, here. These all for the record.
Also for the record, let me join others congratulating the Atlantic's Megan McArdle for what she has reportedabout Edmund Andrews' gripping account of his descent into deadbeat hell.
Having had some experience with writing confessional, "here's a mistake I made, and what I learned from it" articles, I understand the fundamental premise of the tell-all bargain. You're asking for the reader's trust and, if not forgiveness or respect, at least forbearance because of your brave candor in facing unflattering truths. But in those tell-all circumstances, you really do have to tell it all. There would ordinarily be no reason whatsoever for Andrews to embarrass his wife by talking about her past financial problems (two declarations of bankruptcy) -- unless he undertook to write a warts-and-all book about how his household got into financial trouble. This is also connected to the first item, above, about the health care debate. For all the mixed effects of the internet on mainstream journalism, there is a fast-feedback loop now that can correct errors that would otherwise have stood.
May 19, 2009
In case you've been wondering about Macau
You should, of course, start by reading my description of the casino economy as it was fully opening up two years ago, here and here.
But on the remote chance that's not enough, it is surprisingly interesting to get the email updates from an operation called "Destination Macau." At first glance I thought it was just another local-booster site. But here is a representative passage from the latest newsletter:
"If a president of most companies we know were to stand up in public, after having recently posted a solid rise in quarterly earnings amid a bearish economic environment, and announce he is looking to cut nearly a quarter of his workforce, his audience might be forgiven a gasp of astonishment. Not when that president runs the Las Vegas Sands Corp.
"This week, the company's recently installed president, Mike Leven, announced in Las Vegas that he was going to cut another 3,000 to 4,000 jobs at the Macau subsidiary, taking the total workforce to around 13,000-14,000 from its current level of around 17,500, and down from a high that once scraped the 20,000 mark. This is despite the fact that the Venetian Macao posted a 10 per cent rise in first-quarter EBITDA and continues to hoover up the city's visitor market... Job cuts and the redrawing of organization charts seem to have become routine at Macau's most profitable gaming concessionaire as it struggles under the weight of a massive debt load.
"Needless to say, the Venetian Macao is not a happy camp for an expatriate to be in at the moment. Given that locals are protected by divine right to employment in an election year, every Filipino, Nepalese, Malaysian, Singaporean and, yes, American and Australian that walks the floors of LVS's Macau properties can be forgiven their long faces...
"A black joke doing the rounds yesterday was that all of these cuts could be made without having to go beneath the vice-president level."
For specialized tastes only, but engagingly done.
May 15, 2009
Not sure exactly which Chinese people Paul Krugman met...
... before writing his column today in the NYT, but:
While his conclusion -- that China has to be part of global efforts to control carbon emissions -- is obviously correct and important, his premise -- that no one in China admits this -- does not square with my observation over these past three years.* As it happens, I spent this very day at a conference in Beijing where the first five presentations I heard were about emissions-reductions and sustainability in one specific domestic industry. (Also, I wrote in the magazine, a year ago, about Chinese people and organizations making similar efforts in a variety of other fields.)
If blunt-instrument outside pressure like this column makes it more likely that Chinese authorities will keep making progress, then as a pure matter of power-politics I say: fine. But my guess and observation is that it is just as likely to get their back up -- and encourage the ever-present victimization mentality that makes it less rather than more likely that Chinese authorities will behave "responsibly" on the international stage.
As I've written a million times (most recently here and here and generally here), arguably the most important thing that will happen on Barack Obama's watch is reaching an agreement with China -- or not -- on environmental and climate issues. We'll see what's the best means toward that end. _____ * Krugman says:
"Each time I raised the issue during my visit, I was met with outraged
declarations that it was unfair to expect China to limit its use of
fossil fuels. After all, they declared, the West faced no similar
constraints during its development; while China may be the world's
largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions, its per-capita emissions
are still far below American levels; and anyway, the great bulk of the
global warming that has already happened is due not to China but to the
past carbon emissions of today's wealthy nations. And they're right...But that unfairness doesn't change the fact that letting China
match the West's past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it."
I've heard that Chinese response too many times to count. But it's mainly a throat-clearing prelude to talking-turkey discussions about what the country will and can do, and under what circumstances.
May 9, 2009
Nonfiction writing class: how it should be done
Suppose you were writing about the financial-policy mistakes that helped bring on the Great Depression. And you wanted to dramatize the damage done by adherence to the gold standard, which meant that the central banks of Britain, France, Germany, etc could issue only as much money as they happened to have gold in their vaults.
As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way -- or you could write this:
"Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy -- a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton -- that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to 'earmarking' the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain's gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d'Abernon, Britain's ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, 'This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.' "
This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the "small rubber tires" detail and mot juste "trundling" term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.
May 5, 2009
One more on China, India, and the Western media
In two previous posts, here and here, overseas Chinese readers have presented very different views on whether Western press outlets were ganging up against China, and whether India was by comparison getting a free ride.
As a worthy complement to these arguments, an email from reader Shreeharsh Kelkar, giving an overseas Indian perspective:
I was pleasantly surprised to read the email you published from an
overseas Chinese citizen who thinks the western media treats China
unfairly and that he would like to see China being treated the way
India gets treated. As an Indian who lives in the US, I have many many
Indian friends who complain that the media here only talks about the
poverty in India, that they emphasize only what's wrong with the
country and not what's going right with it, that they talk only of the
poor and not of the middle class. Etc, etc.
I think both these complaints -- the Chinese and the Indian -- are, in some sense, two sides of the same coin.
Where did the swine H1N1 flu virus come from? I certainly don't know, and I gather that epidemiologists are not yet entirely sure. Maybe the US? Maybe Mexico? Maybe someplace else? But for the official health ministry in China to treat the question as a matter of national dignity.... Sigh. It is a reminder of the point raised here, and of the ways in which the government is still learning the basics of expressing itself to the outside world.
(The Chinese-language version of the story, here courtesy of Danwei, seems to have a similar tone -- as best I can make out. This is the Chinese version of the stalwart concluding quote: "对此, 我们坚决反对.")
After the handling of SARS in 2003 and of the "blue ear" pig virus two years ago, who could possibly doubt assurances coming from the Ministry of Health?
Here's free PR advice from an actual foreign media person: All nations get defensive and try to make things look good for themselves -- as the Mexican governor could well have been doing. But go easy on terms like "driven by ulterior motives" and "ruin China's image" when you're dealing with a scientific matter. Especially if you're representing the Ministry of Health! Just stick to facts and say you're eager to help fellow scientists in other countries get to the bottom of this case. (And the Chinese government is giving $5 million to Mexico to help in anti-flu efforts, which is commendable.) But, please do keep saying "resolutely opposed" ("坚决反对"). Something will go out of the world when that kind of starchiness is lost.
April 5, 2009
Mea culpa
Here's the difference between writing on a web site and writing for a monthly magazine, as I usually do, or in books: on a web site the crucial "hmmm, did I really mean to say that?" delay cycle has less chance of guarding you against something you didn't really mean to say. (Yes, I know, in the hands of genuine bloggers this is part of the medium's spontaneous charm.)
On reflection, I really did mean to say that Barack Obama's top-of-his-head answer to the "Do you believe in American exceptionalism?" question was extraordinary in its combination of comprehensiveness and concision. As argued here and here. But I've been convinced by the person who posed the question (plus the Yank journalist who recommended that he ask it) that there was no lost-Empire hauteur intended in it. So I didn't really mean to make that cheap joke, and I'm sorry that I did -- and apologize to the man in question, Edward Luce.
Think how many more of these excesses our magazine would contain if it were published every hour rather than every month!
That tricky old language barrier (China, Tibet, and France)
As I so often say, my favorite newspaper is the (state-controlled) China Daily. It's possible that the French ambassador in Beijing, Herve Ladsous, now has a different view.
Ladsous was the star of yesterday's newspaper, thanks to his observation in a China Daily interview that Tibet had been a "slave society" before the arrival of Mao's liberators 60 years ago. Below, the lead story on the front page, and the lead paragraphs in that story:
The front page:
The story:
The man himself, as shown in the China Daily:
Such observations would be heartily welcomed by officials and many citizens in China. That Tibetans lived as slaves under the lamas is one of the Three Unappreciated Truths about Tibet, as propounded by the Chinese government and endorsed by most of the public. The other two: that Tibet has since ancient times been an acknowledged and inseparable part of China; and that the Dalai Lama, despite having gulled naive foreigners into thinking him a "spiritual" figure, is actually a cunning "splittist" bent on breaking up the Chinese state.
Was this simply...what is the mot juste? Oh, yes, kow-towing by the government of France, in awareness of how many fences it has to mend in China? The complaints on the Chinese side are numerous but mainly seem to involve Tibet (eg, protests in Paris against the Olympic torch relay, mainly about Tibet; Sarkozy's initial claim that he would boycott the Olympics, and his recent meeting with the "splittist" leader). Carrefour, Airbus, and other big French names have felt the heat of Chinese popular ill will.
So perhaps the French representative had gotten the signal to truckle make nice? I wondered when I saw the story -- and also saw no related item at the sites of Le Monde or Figaro, nor at Agence France-Presse. But it appears -- zut! -- that it was all a misunderstanding, accidental or otherwise. Just now, France-Info has posted an item in which the Ambassador says that the story "did not reflect the tone of the interview" and that "this was not the first time that China Daily" has misrepresented a discussion. I will try to deal with the disillusionment.
More on Obama, exceptionalism, and impromptu speaking
The transcript of the NATO press conference I mentioned a few hours ago is now available here, via CQ Politics. For some reason, I don't see the transcript at the official WhiteHouse.Gov site, though a blog item about the conference is here. Ie, if the transcript is there, at the site run by this famously tech-hip White House staff, it is not in an immediately obvious location, like via a link from the aforementioned blog entry, nor does it come up on a "NATO press conference" search of the site.
After the jump, the text of what Obama actually said when asked about "American exceptionalism." To my relief, it more or less resembles the way I characterized it from memory! On re-reading, I'm more impressed by how terse it is -- and, as mentioned earlier, how hard it would be to improve on it in the same space, especially in real time.
Also after the jump, two other excerpts, prompted by this comment from reader Edward Goldstick:
I think two other moments were even more 'remarkable' than the one that caught your attention (though it is, too):
1) In response to the provocative Major [Garrett] of Fox News who asked about Afghan laws that supposedly endorsed spousal rape and other dubious practices, I found that Obama walked confidently between the moral imperatives that the questioner presented so blithely and the primacy of the post 9/11 mission and the complex and uncomfortable realities in which the United States and NATO are currently operating.
2) Perhaps it was a setup, but I thought the question to the audience about US journalists getting questions from the other heads of state was a sly move... though I won't hide my lack of surprise (nor my glee) when he used Sarko as a target.
On #2, the context of which will be apparent in the excerpt, what I noticed was his light use of the term "Sarkozy" -- not "President Sarkozy" -- which had the same cheeky effect as the reference to "the Brits." Details below. ___
Just catching up with the April 1 story in the English-language Taipei Times, about the shocking revelation that Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, the two pandas mainland China had sent to Taiwan as a good-will gesture, were actually fakes. Clip from story below.
The Onion-worthy part of the story, IMHO, is the setup for discovering the fraud. Unlike real pandas, this pair was extremely randy ("children screamed and parents became irate"). When zookeepers tried to maintain order ("whenever the moaning from the panda enclosure gets too loud we gotta go in there and hose 'em down with cold water") the painted-on panda markings wore off, revealing the truth. Many similar nice touches. See for yourself: online version here, full page PDF here, followup here and here. Thanks to Daniel Lippman.
Obama on exceptionalism
It's after midnight in China, but I wanted to mention in real time an oratorical performance that deserves a second look. It's from Barack Obama's NATO press conference that just wrapped up, and the part worth studying is the two or three minutes that followed a question by Edward Luce of the Financial Times.
I have nothing against Luce, who wrote a very good recent book about India, but here he asked in what can only be called plummy tones whether Obama still clung to the idea of "American exceptionalism." The general phrasing of the question held that idea out at arm's length as a kind of yahoo colonial oddity.
"I believe in American exceptionalism," Obama said after one beat for thought. "Just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism..." I don't have a transcript here, but what was impressive was how rapidly he seemed to have figured out the full shape of his answer; how effortlessly the term "the Brits" (and the instant pairing with "the Greeks") offset the seeming Oxbridge hauteur* of the question; and how he went on to give so balanced a response that no one, Yank or otherwise, could fail to be satisfied.
Of course he was proud of his country, Obama said. But it was also objectively exceptional in several ways: it still had the world's largest economy; its military power was unmatched; and -- with emphasis here -- its Constitutional principles enshrined values and ideals that truly were exceptional. Therefore it should be proud of its role in the world, and embrace its responsibilities.
Then came the pivot, introduced as usual with the word "Now..." Of course America's strength didn't mean it could do things wholly on its own. And of course Obama's pride in his country didn't blind him to the fact that it sometimes could be wrong, nor to the idea that other people from other countries had good ideas that had to be heeded. Indeed, the very fact of American leadership made it all the more important to show respect and listen attentively. He wrapped it all up by saying he saw "no contradiction" between the idea that America was exceptionally strong and had an exceptional leadership role, and the reality that it needed to work with others as part of a team.
When a transcript or YouTube clip comes out, give it a look. The thoughts may seem banal, but I challenge anyone to come up with a clearer explanation of American exceptionalism to an international audience in the same number of words -- not to mention doing so on live TV with maybe five seconds to figure out what your answer will be. In a world where evidence mattered, these few minutes would put an end to the "can't talk without a teleprompter" madness. More important, they're a way of explaining to Americans the potential and limits of our international role.
And, yes, Obama did end the press conference by ducking a question about Kosovo. But knowing what not to answer is a part of rhetorical effectiveness too. Update: He also appeared to refer to the language of Austria as "Austrian," thus: "I don't know how you say it in Austrian, but we call it wheeling-dealing." If this had been GW Bush, it would have been taken as an obvious gaffe, as in his calling the residents of Greece "Grecians." Here you can't be sure whether it's a plain error or a knowing casualism, as in saying that Australians speak "Australian" -- eg, in the ad that says, "Foster's: Australian for 'beer.' " * UPDATE #2: The questioner has convinced me that he didn't really mean it that way. See this mea culpa.
4) Boy, if some of the questions from reporters were examined as mercilessly for their logic, factual basis, clarity, coherence, emotional tone, etc as Obama's answers were.... I know, they're not the most powerful people on earth with the might of the presidency behind them. But unlike him, the reporters are not reacting on the fly but instead have hours and hours to think of exactly the way they want to make their point. Just an observation.
Three-sentence instant reaction to Obama press conference
1) After seeing a session like this, it is hard to understand how right-wingers can keep up their "Obama can't talk without his teleprompter" theory -- although it's hard to know, given his campaign-debate performance etc, how anyone could have advanced this view in the first place.
2) All successful politicians know how to turn a question to the answer they want to give ("The real point is..."), but Obama showed several times exactly how that should be done -- eg, when asked about changing tax rules for charitable deduction, he brushed that aside and said "what does affect charitable giving is the economy, and..."
3) Explicitly, in his closing comments about being in it for the long haul "even though" he had not brought peace to the Middle East or solved the economic problem in his first 60 days, and implicitly in his manner, he conveyed the same, steady, 'let's keep plugging along and we'll make it' message that had run through his presentations through the campaign.
OK, those are very long and ungainly sentences, but there are only three of them.
March 18, 2009
Correction: Chinese coal mine deaths
In my story about the Chinese economy in the latest Atlantic, I say, "You never know which statistics to believe in China, but in January a local official in Dongguan told me..." The never-know problem is a real challenge here, and a reason to view any number concerning China with skepticism.
Part of the problem arises from what we might call a "transparency" issue. The government has committed itself to a growth rate of at least 8 per cent this year. Whatever else happens, it is safe to assume that at year's end the reported growth rate will be about 8 per cent. Part of the problem is the sheer impossibility of really knowing what is going on in so vast a country containing such geographic, economic, and social extremes. Is China's population closer to 1.3 billion -- or 1.4 billion? It's a difference of 100 million, and I don't think anyone knows for sure.
And for foreigners there's a particular problem of having your usual standards of judgment mismatched to China's scale. I have been in cities that looked middling-size. Based on the street grid and downtown area, I would have estimated the population at maybe 100,000 -- then I'm told that two million people live there. (True? I don't know.) Every reporter in China knows about the government statistics reporting 60,000 to 70,000 mass disturbances throughout the country each year. Could that possibly be true? Two hundred a day? It doesn't seem plausible, but I see the figure quoted all the time.
Very late in the process of writing my latest article, I saw a release from the government-controlled Xinhua news agency, saying that coal mining fatalities had declined to a total of over 90,000 in 2008. Could that possibly be true? Two hundred and fifty people per day? So I double-checked with Xinhua, and so did our fact-checker, and that was the number the government was officially putting out. As a result, one passage in my story said:
So if China's rise is not undone by the risks that have been evident for years--pollution, water shortage, corruption, the widening rich-poor social gap, safety standards so primitive that on average more than 250 people die each day in coal-mine accidents--might China prove vulnerable to Soviet-style discontent born of a slowing economy?... My guess is No. [And on to the main argument of the article.]
Twelve days later, Xinhua put out this correction.
In the corrected version, ninety thousand people had died in accidents of all sorts in China last year, not just in coal mines. The coal mine fatality rate was more like nine per day, not 250. I was out of China when this correction was posted, and I didn't see it until just now. (You don't routinely go back to sources you've already checked, to see if they've happened to change their figures.) If I'd seen it immediately we could have made a change just before our issue went to the printer, but I probably wouldn't have seen it even if I were sitting in Beijing.
I regret the error, though I am glad for the differential 240 coal miners per day, and wanted to take the initiative in putting the revised number on the record. The larger points about workplace safety -- and the resilience of the Chinese economy, and the shakiness of statistics -- remain.
March 17, 2009
Interviewing tips from a novelist
Apropos of nothing, I was struck by this passage from Lisa See's The Interior: A Red Princess Mystery, which I was reading this morning on Beijing's subway Line 1. See's novels, like the "Inspector Chen" series by Qiu Xiaolong, are meant to convey the texture of modern China via crime procedurals. From my perspective, great excuse to do "research" while enjoying noir fiction.
In this passage, See's protagonist, inspector Liu Hulan, has gone back to the rural village where she spent the Cultural Revolution years to investigate a suspicious death. In civvies and without identifying herself as a cop, she interrogates a village couple. The young man had been the fiancee of Miaoshan, the woman who has recently died; he is accompanied by his new love interest, a hot number named Siang. The investigator taunts Siang about her cozying up so quickly to the young man:
"I'm sure that Miaoshan's mother will be comforted to hear of your grief and that you have come to offer solace to her daughter's fiance."
Siang's cheeks reddened, but she said nothing.
Hulan [the cop] let the silence stretch out. She was in no hurry, and the longer she kept quiet, the sooner these two would wish to fill the void. Siang noiselessly etched a groove in the dirt with the edge of her tennis shoe, while Tsai Bing [the man] looked around nervously. Finally he said, 'I didn't see Miaoshan so much anymore...'"
The "let the silence stretch out" approach, which is not discussed as often as it should be, can be a surprisingly valuable interviewing technique. The truth is that most people who are being interviewed would like to think that they are providing you with "interesting" information, which reflects well on their knowledge, insight, sense of humor, general bonhomie, etc. People want to be liked and to feel as if they're holding up their end of the conversation. Obviously this doesn't apply in a 60 Minutes-style hostile interrogation, but in most non-adversarial interviews, the subject wants to feel that he is holding the interest of the questioner.
Thus informal body-language signs that you're getting bored or disappointed usually prompt an interviewee to try harder and say more. The strategic use of silence can send such a signal, since people become uncomfortable and think that the silence is their fault. You can't do it very often, but every now and then it works great.
In only one circumstance have I found the "I'm getting bored" approach to be ineffective. That is when interviewing Japanese corporate or political officials. If I act as if they're telling me what I've heard a million times before, generally they've seemed more satisfied than uncomfortable. If someone's goal is to stay On Message no matter how it makes him look -- think, Scott McClellan handling questions about Scooter Libby in the late Bush years -- these psycho-warfare tricks will be futile. But for you aspiring young interviewers: remember to give strategic-silence a try.
March 14, 2009
This actually is suprising (Cramer/Stewart followup)
If you had been through the treatment that Jon Stewart administered to Jim Cramer last night, try to imagine what your next day's program would be like. I will confess to being surprised by the approach Cramer actually took -- not necessarily the initial "joke" but what follows it, in the second half of this short clip. Wow.
One theory is that Cramer looked uncomfortable on Stewart's show because he knew he had something to answer for. This clip suggests that we need some other theory, since it's hard to find anything resembling the contrite. (Thanks to Terry M.)
March 13, 2009
It's true: Jon Stewart has become Edward R. Murrow (updated)
Through karmic guidance, I sprang awake at the exact moment Jon Stewart was beginning his merciless demolition of interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money."
Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the "true" voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC. If you want to feel sorry for me, CNBC = 25% of the English-language TV news offerings available in China, the others being CNN, BBC, and the Chinese government's own CCTV-9.
But I found this -- the Stewart/Cramer slaughter -- incredible. (Updated update: Previously had links here, but they kept going bad. I assume anyone who wants it can find it by now.)
Although, improbably, I share a journalistic background with Cramer*, I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud.
Just before leaving China -- ie, two days ago -- I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn't have been easy to do what Stewart just did. Seeing this interview justified the three-day trip in itself. ___ * At different times each of us was editor of the same college paper.
March 12, 2009
In fairness...
... After learning something about the now-resigned Chas Freeman, I came to disagree with, and think tendentious, Jon Chait's opening salvo against Freeman in the Washington Post. And I have received enough pro-Freeman letters from his working associates in the last two days to make we wonder: is there anyone who actually dealt with the man who considered him a crackpot, an anti-Semite, a menace -- terms thrown around by his critics? Obviously Dennis Blair -- Naval Academy graduate, Rhodes scholar, former CINCPAC, Asia/China expert, no one's idea of a nut -- thought Freeman's irreverent perspective so valuable that he sought it out. Personal knowledge isn't everything, but it is dramatic to me that people who have known Freeman seem so solid in support for him, in contrast to those who don't. It's all moot now.
Still, in fairness: Chait's take-down of the absurd Amity Shlaes interpretation of the Great Depression and the New Deal is both important in its own right and a model of the systematic demolition of a flawed though alluring argument. Among the admirable aspects of this essay is that it it painlessly conveys some of the Ec 101 principles that somehow have been assumed out of existence in day by day political discussion.* This is very well done; worth reading; and worth learning from. I look forward to more from Chait in this area. ___ * Eg that critics of a stimulus bill can denounce it because it means "more spending" suggests that they don't understand anything that has been written about economics in the last 70+ years. The point of a stimulus bill is to spend extra money and therefore bring total economic output to a higher level than it would otherwise attain. Even having to mention this point is like having to explain the connection between caloric intake and body weight, or the role of gravity. But Chait nicely and non-condescendingly lays it out in his article:
Prior to Keynes, the economy was held to be self-correcting. The only cure for a recession was to let wages and prices fall to their natural level. The prevailing attitude, as Paul Krugman writes in his recently re-issued book The Return of Depression Economics, was "a sort of moralistic fatalism." Keynes upended the orthodoxy in a way that was every bit as dramatic as Galileo challenging geocentrism. He insisted that recessions are not a natural process, or the invisible hand's righteous judgment against our sins, but a simple failure of consumer demand.
When people worry about losing their jobs, they sensibly cut back on their spending. But that decision, in turn, reduces demand for goods and services, which results in reduced income or lost jobs for other workers. Keynes called this phenomenon "the paradox of thrift": what makes sense for individuals turns into a disaster for society as a whole. The recession was therefore a failure of collective action that required government action. Government needed to encourage spending by reducing interest rates or, failing that, to inject spending into the economy directly by deliberately running temporary budget deficits.
March 10, 2009
The end for Freeman
As I mentioned originally, I had no intention of getting into the Chas Freeman matter. It has ended in an ugly way -- Freeman's departure statement is intemperate, but even calmer people might sound testy if they had been accused of "hostility toward Jews generally" without, to my knowledge, any evidence for that claim.
I want to think carefully before saying much more about this episode. For the moment my sentiments are closest to those expressed by David Rothkopf, friend and stalwart supporter of Freeman, in this post at the Foreign Policy blog:
The genesis of that crisis is that we have lost perspective on
what the criteria for selecting and approving government officials ought to be.
Financial trivia, minutiae from people's personal lives and political litmus
tests have grown in importance while character, experience, intelligence,
creativity and wisdom have fallen by the wayside. Ridiculous threshold
obstacles stand alongside obscene ones and when taken with the relentless
personal attacks associated with high level jobs in Washington -- the low pay,
and the extreme difficulty of getting anything done -- we are seeing even those
selected for senior jobs turn away in droves. We are at a moment of not one but
an extraordinary array of great crises and challenges for America and we are
effectively keeping the people we need most out of the positions we most need
filled.
Emphasis mine. The friend I quoted when I first raised this topic said that, in his view, the controversy over Freeman's appointment amounted to the "self-lobotomization" of the US policy-making apparatus. He was talking just about Freeman, but the problem is clearly broader, as Rothkopf points out. Thought experiment: Steven Chu, our new Secretary of Energy, was previously director of the UC-run Lawrence-Berkeley Lab. The Lab receives a tremendous amount of funding from the US government, largely through the DOE. Chu himself is recused from being involved in such deals for a ceratin period. Suppose instead that this background had been considered a "conflict" that would bar him from office. You could imagine people making the argument, if Chu's reputation were less bullet-proof or if he had offended some interest group.
One other point. Rothkopf ends his post this way:
The
result [of problems described above] is not a government of people without conflicts of interest or troubling
ties, rather it is a government full of people whose conflicts and ties are
with groups powerful enough to protect them. This among other reasons is why I, as
a Jew with a memory, was so opposed to the attacks on Freeman. But for the
record, the most compelling reason I found for believing Chas Freeman would
have been a superb Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was one that
seldom came up in all the articles I read. I actually know him.
As I initially pointed out, I do not know Freeman and had never paid attention to him before this controversy. But it turns out that nearly twenty people I know well enough to respect and trust have themselves known and worked with Freeman. Every one of them supported his nomination. And -- as it is unfortunately relevant to point out in these circumstances -- most of them are Jewish.
We'll all think about this episode for a while.
Two brief media notes about Tibet
Like most other people, I don't know for sure what is going on in Tibet, and in ethnic-Tibetan regions in nearby provinces (Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, etc) right now. It does look ominous. For the moment, here are two semi-surprising media notes, as of Wednesday morning, March 11, Beijing time:
1) CNN and BBC are just now running extensive reports on crackdowns and extra Chinese troops being set to Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas. Plus, historical footage of Chinese soldiers "liberating" Tibet 50 years ago. The surprising aspect: the transmissions are not being blocked or cut off, as happened routinely last year with far less sensitive material. Even footage of an old interview with the Dalai Lama is coming right across the airwaves. Oversight? New strategy? Just too busy? Don't care what people hear in English? Impossible to say.
2) The official Chinese media usually take the sledgehammer approach when explaining China's Tibet policy to the outside world. "Jackal in a Buddhist monk's robes" as an epithet for the Dalai Lama, etc. But yesterday's editorial in my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, instead tried... the light touch! The editorial, in the form of an open letter to the D.L, was mock reverent (rather than blusteringly condemnatory), consistently addressing him as "Your Holiness" and asking him if he would be so kind as to explain various mysteries and problems. It began this way:
Full text, again, here. A new approach? An aberration? Something that will be shelved now that the D.L. has taken a much harsher, "hell on earth" tone? I don't know. We all will watch.
March 6, 2009
Own worst enemy, Tomorrow Square edition
I've mentioned once or twice, or maybe fifty times, my wonderment at the contrast between the sophistication with which Chinese officialdom can address domestic audiences and sensitivities, and the comic-if-it-weren't tragic cluelessness of many official efforts to explain China's views and "feelings" to the outside, non-Chinese-speaking world.
I don't have time for a full presentation-and-gloss at the moment, but see if this recent item, which I found while leafing through back copies of my favorite newspaper, the China Daily, rings any bells. It was about the nomination of Gary Locke, former governor of Washington, as US Commerce Secretary, and it featured "inside" analysis from an experienced Chinese diplomat:
Story as it looked on the page, showing the local Chinese angle:
Near the end, the experts step in, displaying their perfect ear for the nuances of the way race is lived and discussed in Obama-era USA. Analytical conclusion of the story, from someone with that indispensable on-the-ground knowledge of America:
Ah, the talents with the yellow skin. In a similar development, the new issue of the local That's Shanghai magazine has a rundown of events for the Shanghai International Literary Festival, including a talk I'm giving at 3pm today. Most of the items list the writer and the name of his or her most recent book. In my case, that proved to be awkward -- since the title, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, includes the now-sensitive word "Square," which officials feel might stir up emotions about unpleasant events that happened twenty years ago this June in another Square. I am not kidding (and I'm also not just guessing about this). A friend has suggested that perhaps the Tomorrow Square building, 明天广场, in central Shanghai -- right on People's Square, as it happens -- will have to have its nameplate removed during the sensitive period ahead. It is sometimes unbelievable but never dull here.
The building formerly known as Tomorrow Square. Maybe everyone will agree not to notice it:
March 4, 2009
Better news out of the midwest: Mischke back in business
Previous bad newsentries reported the dethronement of St. Paul's own Tommy Mischke as a radio talk-show host. My profile of Mischke from eight years ago in the Atlantic is here; it included this photo of the artist at work:
As reported in MinnPost.com and Czerniec.com, Mischke is back in business -- as of today. Details of the first webcast, which will be weekdays from 2pm to 4pm Central time starting March 4, are in the two previous links plus at CityPages.com, which will host the show. Enjoy.
February 24, 2009
美国欢迎您!
Or, more simply, "America welcomes you!" The China Daily, beloved staple of my life in China these last few years, has just opened its US edition! Huzzah!
Where, in today's downcast news environment, are we going to find headlines like this except in the China Daily?
To understand why I love this paper so much, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and passim. Or put down that copy of The Onion and see for yourself. Welcome!
February 23, 2009
Chinese viewers' guide to the Oscars! (updated)
In my earlier report, I should have noted that it's for the benefit of the billion-strong local viewership that the Chinese broadcast of the Academy Awards is being tape-delayed some 12 hours, until airtime 10:30 tonight on CCTV-6. Bigger home audience than if it were shown live during the working day! And, of course, it takes a little while to add the Chinese subtitles and... how do we put this ... to harmonize* the program for domestic tastes.
It would be unfair and surprise-spoiling to use my crystal ball (aka The Internets) to predict the Best Actor-etc winners. But I confidently make this prediction about harmonization:
In the version of the Oscars shown in the US a few hours ago, Steven Spielberg got a lot of face time announcing the nominees and winners in the Best Picture category. This is the same Spielberg who one year ago very publicly backed out of planning the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, in protest of China's policies in Darfur. ("I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual.") The eventual opening ceremony, under China's own Zhang Yimou, hardly lacked in spectacle -- but people here remember! My prediction: whatever CGI magic can be applied to make a presenter disappear from a presentation ceremony will be employed on Mr. Spielberg. This gives me an excuse to stay up tonight and find out if I am right.
(From Reuters: the face they won't see) _____ * "Harmonization" = in local lingo, closing down or censoring web sites, publications, or broadcasts to avoid the spread of unwelcome views. Especially important for Oscar ceremonies, because who knows what these crazy Hollywood people will say.
Update: I'll never know. Wasn't at a place that had CCTV-6 during the show. Update #2: According to Nathan Jackson of Shanghai,
My wife and I watched the Oscars on CCTV6 last night and Spielberg indeed had his entire appearance cut. You can hear his voice for about 1 second, but the whole introduction of nominees is very crudely cut out of the show. Sean Penn also had a few cuts to his speech
1) It turns out that the Senate Finance Committee has put out a set of FAQs addressing some of the problems E. McCaughey "discovered" in the fine print of the deal. It specifically knocks down the central Big Brother claim McCaughey makes -- namely, that federal health bureaucrats will use new electronic records to monitor your doctor's decisions about your care, and then penalize any doctors who deviate from federally-defined standard practice. The FAQ says:
Q: Will the health IT director have any influence on the decisions doctors and patients can make together about tests and treatment? A: Absolutely not. This position's function is to make sure that doctors and other health care providers use good, secure technologies as they change their record-keeping systems from paper to computers.
And
Actually, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is not even new. President George W. Bush created the office by Executive Order a number of years ago. The bill simply codifies the office and gives it a specific job.
There are a bunch more, all in "absolutely not" or "actually" spirit. In fairness to McCaughey, she couldn't have seen this FAQ before she wrote. It came out on Tuesday of this week, after her column on Monday. But it makes you wonder: Did she bother to call anyone to check out her claims and inferences? Did she consult anything apart from her own imagination?
2) As numerous readers have written in to remind me, there is an in-house Atlantic angle to all of this. My current Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan was the editor of The New Republic in 1994, when the original McCaughey story came out. I like Andrew very much personally; I am very glad he's on the Atlantic team; I agree with him on most issues and disagree on some, including whether this article should ever have been published. Notwithstanding all or any of that, my beef here is with McCaughey, not with him.
I understand enough about both the editor's and the writer's role to understand that at a certain point, an editor has to trust the writer's basic honesty and operational competence. Good magazines have good fact-checking departments -- and our magazine has a great one. But you can't "check" a reporter's basic honesty. There is a difference between re-confirming facts to be sure the writer didn't miss something and having to treat a reporter like a defendant, whose every motive, claim, and observation is subject to doubt. When a publication -- or any organization -- gets into that position, as the New Republic eventually did with Stephen Glass, the normal precautions do no good. To put it differently, the 10% of an article you can check rests on faith that the other 90% you can't check, starting with the author's claim to be reading evidence honestly, is also true. If that faith is misplaced, you can easily get burned.
So: this is explicitly not an invitation to revisit the merits of publishing the original article 15 years ago. My complaint is with people who would believe or repeat similar claims from the same source (McCaughey) now.
Also: I see now that Rick Ungar, of Culture11.com, put out a line-by-line demolition of McCaughey's claims immediately after her column ran, here.
Thanks also to Neil Mackenzie for a lead. (And, for the final awkwardly-timed installment of my family-duties saga of recent weeks, I am about to leave internet range for another four days. At least this final duty is a pleasant one; next posting here likely to be in the wedding-announcement category.)
Let's stop this before it goes any further
The award for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" for the 2000s, so far, goes to Dick "no doubt" Cheney. ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002. Of course, this is a career-achievement award, not limited to this one event.)
My nominee for the winner in the 1990s would be Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the American public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.
In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.
After the jump, a passage from my 1995 Atlantic article "A Triumph of Misinformation" about McCaughey's article and its effects. More on this topic in my 1996 book Breaking the News -- and especially about why sloppy press coverage did as much to thwart health-care reform under the Clintons as it did to bring on the Iraq war under Cheney and Bush.
Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. Buried inside the new stimulus bill, she has discovered, are new big-brother tactics similar to those she warned against years ago. In a recent Bloomberg.com opinion column she wrote:
One new bureaucracy, the
National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective....Hospitals and doctors that are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face penalties. "Meaningful user" isn't
defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who
will be empowered to impose "more stringent measures of
meaningful use over time" (511, 518, 540-541)
For what is wrong with her "analysis" this time, check out this
in The Washington Monthly, which also has a chronology of how
the (right wing) press -- led by Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge -- is again
picking up flatly disprovable lies. (Eg, the "new" bureaucracy she
warns about already exists, and was established under GW Bush.)
Seriously, every one of McCaughey's statements about public policy from
this day forward should be subjected to the "Oh yes, and how did it
turn out last time?" test. We are in OJ territory here. Stop this new
claim before it gets real traction. ___
As mentioned earlier, the devastating fire in Beijing two days ago was indeed caused by fireworks and firecrackers on the final night of the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year celebrations. For positional reference, the building that burned down is behind, and mostly obscured by, the distinctive asymmetrical CCTV tower in the two shots below:
On a nice day last fall (edge of hotel barely visible behind left leg of CCTV tower): On the second day of the Olympics (hotel just visible behind and to the left of CCTV tower; this was before the air cleared up on the following day, thanks to a powerful cold front that moved through from Mongolia):
Night of the fire, photo from UK Telegraph (this view from east; others from the south):
People in and interested in China already know this, but for those who don't: Danwei.org has one-stop shopping for links and explanations about the cause of the fire, and coverage inside China, here. Similarly with the current set of links and headlines on EastSouthWestNorth, here.
Apart from the disaster/tragedy itself, the interesting aspects are: that the perils of the fireworks and firecrackers are more than a joke (it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have); that people responsible appear to have been CCTV employees; and that the whole subsequent matter of investigating, publicizing, making sense of, and drawing omens from an unignorable spectacle involving the country's leading propaganda/communication outlet and the city's most distinctive new landmark will say a lot about the emotional and political state of China right now. (Update: interesting LA Times story, which I see before me in paper version here in the LAX airport, here.)
February 6, 2009
Update on Chinese coverage of dam/earthquake connection
Last night I mentioned the NYT story suggesting that a dam recently built near a major fault line in China could possibly have triggered the devastating Sichuan earthquake last May. I said I would like to see how -- if at all -- the story was being covered and interpreted inside China. (I'm still away.)
One fascinating early answer comes from the Mutant Palm site in this post. The headline of the Chinese press report it quotes (and translates) gives the general idea:
Foreign Media Stir Up Trouble, Speculate "Sichuan Earthquake was Man-Made"
Original version of that headline:
Full Chinese report (in Chinese) here. Even from afar it will be interesting to watch this develop.
January 24, 2009
Un-$%&%ing-believable! (China's censoring of Obama's speech, cont.)
I mentioned yesterday that even though the censors at China's CCTV apparently panicked in real time, and cut off coverage of Barack Obama's inaugural address when he started talking about "dissent" and "communism," the editors of People's Daily, with more time and calm to reflect, had provided a full, translated version of the speech -- including this touchy passage:
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not
just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and
enduring convictions.
(Reminder: China is still officially ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, even though much of its economy runs on wide-open market principles.)
I just got a note from Donald Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University in DC, acting on a tip from David Kelly, of the China Research Center at University of Technology Sydney, asking whether I was certain about the link I had provided, here. Because he had checked the People's Daily version -- and he didn't see any mention of the struggle against communism.
So I went back and checked -- and he's right! The same link to the same page with the same official translation of Obama's speech is virtually the same as the original, except that someone carefully removed the word "communism." ("Dissent" is still in there.) Here's the play by play:
1) Sentence in Obama's speech:
"Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not
just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and
enduring convictions."
2) Version in People's Daily yesterday, which (as best I can judge) is a pretty faithful rendering of Obama's statement. I should note that I directly cut-and-pasted this from the PD site, as an indication that it actually was there at some point:
回想起先辈们从容地面对法西斯主义和共产主义的时候，并不仅靠导弹和坦克，还靠强健的联盟和持久的信念
3) Same sentence from the same translation at the same site today, with no notice of any change:
回想起先辈们从容地面对法西斯主义的时候，并不仅靠导弹和坦克，还靠强健的联盟和持久的信念。
And what's the difference? The disappearance of these five characters, 和共产主义, meaning "and communism." So now Obama talks only about the victory over fascism and about no other foe.
Which in turn means: in calm deliberation, after initially deciding the Chinese readership could stand to hear an American president talk about struggles over fascism and communism, the editors went back a day later, altered the translation, and gave no indication that they were doing so. (Update. Alternative hypothesis suggested to me: someone at PD "accidentally did the right thing" by translating the whole speech; then this "error" was corrected as soon as people in charge realized what had happened.)
If I had the time right now to call up the internet way-back machine and get the version of People's Daily from yesterday, I could prove that 24 hours ago it included the now-missing five characters. But, again, the indirect proof is that the part I quoted yesterday was cut-and-pasted directly from what the People's Daily was showing at the time.
To repeat: un-$#$#()&$-believable -- in the insecurity, the hamhandedness, and the immaturity this reveals.
January 22, 2009
A little more on the Chinese censorship of Obama's speech
Maybe it's the jet lag. Maybe it's the culture shock of being back in DC for the first time in a year. Maybe it's my inborn crabbiness. Whatever the source, I find myself more more incredulous with each passing hour that Chinese media authorities could have thought it as necessary or smart to censor live coverage of an event being watched intently in every other corner of the world: the inaugural address of America's first black president and current champion orator.
I have been trying to think: in what other country might this occur? Burma, perhaps. North Korea, no doubt. Perhaps other tinhorn states. But a real, important, powerful, rich country that in many ways (eg, finance) is America's most important partner? It is almost literally incredible.
It's all the more surprising because of something that might not be obvious to the average US viewer. I have met a lot of Chinese people in the last few years, in lots of stations of life. Big shots, farmers, dissidents, factory workers, party bosses. And I cannot think of a single one of them who would have been put off his or her feed by hearing a new American president talk about the virtues of dissent or America's struggle against Communism. Even if they don't agree with those sentiments themselves (and many would agree), all of them know that this is the way Americans talk and think. How on earth could it seem threatening to hear an American president talk about basic American beliefs?
Here is the "there must be an explanation" explanation. As I tried to explain in this recent article in the Atlantic, the people in charge of China's propaganda apparatus are among the least worldly and most rigid-minded people in the entire country, with absolutely the least feel for how people in other countries might react or think. So apparently some of these ignoramuses considered it a good and prudent idea to cut off Obama -- even if the vast majority of their fellow citizens would consider such paranoia to be extreme and bizarre. Also, within a part of the government where orthodoxy is everything, an official takes no risks by being too hard-line, but could get in trouble by being too permissive. Still; it is an incident whose importance may grow as time goes on. They couldn't even stand to hear Barack Obama speak!
After the jump, in the same spirit as the previous post, a couple of interesting reactions on this theme from people in and around China. Maybe this will all make sense to me when I catch up on my sleep. ____
Not from the Atlantic, but worth reading all the same!
1) A very interesting collection of very short essays from the Washington Monthly, in which 19 writers and academics answer the question: what book do you really hope our new reader-president will take time to read? Disclosures: I am a proud alumnus of the Washington Monthly, and I have a brief item on the list. But I was surprised and impressed by the recommendations in general and in turn recommend that you read it.
2) An extensive "Oral History of the Bush White House," by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum, in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This is a timeline recreation of the last eight years -- not all the big moments and turning points, but a lot of them -- in the words of original participants. I read this two days ago on the flight from Beijing to Washington (don't worry, it only took 20 or 30 minutes of the 13 hours of reading time, with plenty left over to watch the Chinese pirate video of Pineapple Express) and was both riveted and newly shocked about our recent history. Several of my Atlantic Voices colleagues have already reported similar reactions.
If I had been shown this project with no names attached, I would have guessed immediately that Cullen Murphy was involved. During his twenty years as the Atlantic's managing editor, I worked with Cullen on dozens of articles. He had many inspired, favorite approaches, of which one of the most favorite was the careful recreation of "familiar" events, which usually led to surprising results. Two of my Iraq-policy articles -- Blind Into Baghdad, and Bush's Lost Year -- grew out of exactly this approach. This latest package shows the power of this simple idea.
I've written several times, in this article and and this book and various posts like this and this, about the strange difficulty Chinese institutions face when dealing with the outside world. Individual Chinese people get along very well overseas, at least in my experience. But companies and public institutions often act as if they have no clue about how foreigners think, reason, or react. The twin symbols of this difficulty are signs and brochures rendered into an "English" no foreigner can make sense of, and the official agitprop statements, from "jackal in a Buddhist monk's robes" to "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" that undermine rather than advance their intended cause.
My job is not to help Chinese organizations advance their intended causes. But it doesn't help anybody, as I argue in the book and article, if China's clumsy public diplomacy makes the country seem more menacing, opaque, hyper-controlled, and overall bad than it really is. For another time: how different the experience of living and traveling here is from what you'd expect by just reading about the place, and generally how much better.
Thus my fascination with the much examined news this week that the Chinese authorities plan to spend 45 billion RMB, or well over $6 billion, on a new effort to explain China to the world. The original stories were in the (non-government-controlled) South China Morning Post, of Hong Kong. They're for subscribers only, so I won't link to them. (By the way, for about $1 per week, a SCMP subscription is a bargain for people interested in China.) An account in the ZhongnanhaiBlog site has many details. It also has a bracing critique of the whole idea that money is the main cause of the government's difficulties in explaining itself. Cam MacMurchy of the ZhongnanhaiBlog says:
The problem isn't lack of TV channels or media outlets that present
China's case to foreigners, it's the lack of any media outlets that
present China's case well. If Xinhua's new TV endeavor is
run in the same manner CCTV is, with the same group of life-long
communist party members in bad suits calling the shots, it will be
doomed to failure. In fact, I'd go one step further: any mainland Chinese run media outlet will be taken less seriously as long as general media controls are in place.
The post also contains (rare) good news for English-speaking journalists: these Chinese media outlets are going on a hiring spree! At least someone is sure to benefit from this plan.
December 22, 2008
Oh, never mind (NYT.com blackout dept)
NYTimes.com is working fine for me once more, and I hear from friends in varied corners of China that it's up and running across the country, after three or four days of (apparent) nationwide blackout. Background here and here, with links to other stories. Who can explain. As I mentioned earlier, it's the miracle and mystery of Christmas.
December 21, 2008
Atlantic readers: once again ahead of the news!
Thomas Friedman tells us in his column today about the art village of Dafen, and how it has been affected by the housing collapse in the US:
I had no idea that many of those oil paintings
that hang in hotel rooms and starter homes across America are actually produced
by just one Chinese village, Dafen, north of Hong Kong. And I had no idea that
Dafen's artist colony -- the world's leading center for mass-produced artwork
and knockoffs of masterpieces -- had been devastated by the bursting of the U.S.
housing bubble. I should have, though.
True to the Atlantic's motto -- "this year's news, last year!" -- our own readers knew all about Dafen exactly 12 months ago, for example here, here, and here, plus a very good Feb, 2007 Chicago Tribune story by Evan Osnos here. The "village," by the way, would be considered a real city any place but China. Here is one of my favorite artists there, responsible for much of the varied work around him (many more pics at the links above):
No larger point here, just glad to see Dafen make the big time. It's also an interesting counterpoint to Adam Minter's recent observations about the changing ecology of the news.
Last words on NYT.com block in China
With apologies in advance for the self-referential quality* of what I'm about to say, I recommend this recent entry by fellow Atlantic Monthly contributor Adam Minter on his ShanghaiScrap blog. He makes a point that is obvious once you think about it, but which I hadn't seen laid out quite this clearly anywhere else:
The point is that a nationwide firewall-block on the NYTimes.com site, if that is indeed what's happening, is not simply questionable as a PR strategy for the Chinese government. It also emphasizes how much the information ecology has changed.
The NYT is, in my view, indispensable as a source of reported news around the world. One of the big and really alarming trends of 2008 is the hugely-accelerating economic pressure on organizations like the NYT that support reporting rather than pure opinionizing. But as Minter details, blocking this flagship site means a lot less than it used to -- and a lot less than the censoring authorities may assume -- no matter how good a job the NYT's team is doing, because of the rise of reported blogs:
What's curious to me - in fact, what's astounding to me - is that the
Chinese authorities either haven't picked up on this phenomenon, or
they don't care. Instead, they are doing what Chinese officials always
do: focusing their attention on the entity with the most prestige.
Quite honestly, I think most Chinese officials would have a hard time
believing that the rather rag-tag unwashed mass of (for the most part)
young, male, poorly compensated bloggers could actually drive news
coverage.
* The self-referential part is that Adam Minter originally sent this as an email to me, which I encouraged him to spread more generally. I hope you agree that it's worth reading.
December 20, 2008
NYTimes.com in China: Sunday morning update
1) For me, back in Beijing, the main NYT site is fully blocked, if I'm using the plain Chinese internet without a VPN or other burnishment.
2) Anyone who really wants to can find what's on that site -- with a VPN, by going through the International Herald Tribune site, by trying mobile.nytimes.com from a hand-held device, or with one of the tech workarounds mentioned here yesterday.
3) Without the relatively fast, informal-but-informative polling made possible by the internet, it would have been harder to establish that this was happening all over the vast country all at once. So thanks for writing in.
INTELLECTUAL RIGOR BONUS POINT 3A) As a matter of logic, one cannot be absolutely certain that this is a purposeful, country-wide blackout. Conceivably there is some other technological or accidental explanation. I consider this extremely unlikely, given: that the same computer that won't load the pages while using a normal connection loads them instantly when a VPN is turned on; that the pattern is reported in every corner of the country, from Urumqi to Dalian to Zhuhai and points in between; and that it involves a site about which the government has complained before and that has recently carried some sensitive items. But logically, we cannot exclude the possibility that it's all an accident.
4) While the porous nature of the current NYT block is consistent with past Great Firewall practice, the motivation for this episode remains unclear at the tactical level and puzzling at the strategic. I won't review the tactical possibilities, some of which were mentioned earlier. The real question concerns the strategy.
As i argued last month in the Atlantic, China's official PR machinery often succeeds mainly in making the country seem far more closed-off, impenetrable, defensive, and difficult to deal with than it actually is most places most of the time. By that logic, what exactly will China gain through this episode? The vast majority of Chinese net users would never look at NYTimes.com anyway -- it's in the wrong language. Those who really want to see what's on there can find a way to do so, despite the block. And how confident, open-minded, rules-abiding, modern and so on will the episode make the Chinese government look in other countries' eyes? Governments everywhere are annoyed by the press, but a mark of being in the big leagues is viewing press criticism as a necessary annoyance. This just is strange.
December 19, 2008
Tech followups on NYTimes.com blockage in China (updated)
On December 19, the NYTimes.com site was apparently blocked all across China. For the sake of completeness, these followups.
1) Could the problem be related to a recent physical break in three of the four main internet cables connecting Asia to North America? (As reported here and elsewhere.) Maybe -- but at face value that wouldn't seem to explain why the NYTimes.com site loads at normal speeds when you're using a VPN but times-out when you try it through the plain, old, Great Firewall-screened Chinese internet. It also wouldn't explain why most other international sites seem to behave normally.
When the main undersea cable off Taiwan was cut in an earthquake nearly two years ago, you knew it immediately. Internet traffic in most parts of Asia was either interrupted altogether or brought to 300-baud dialup modem speeds. But maybe this recent break somehow contributes to the NYT problem?
2) After the jump, tech details on an important point I didn't mention: Consistent with hit-or-miss, far-from-airtight nature of Great Firewall censorship, even when the site www.nytimes.com is blocked, http://nytimes.com is not. Go figure. Also, various mobile web devices seem to be able to reach any site they want.
3) I mentioned yesterday that exactly one person, from Guangdong province, had written to say that he could reach the NYT site with no problem. I heard from him again just now. Today his connection is blocked. The change in my situation is the reverse. I started having NYT problems last night -- but at the moment, it's working fine, even with the VPN turned off. It's the mystery and miracle of Christmas. Tech details below.
UPDATE: From a friend who knows the nuances of high-level Communist Party maneuvering far better than I do, this hypothesis about what's going on:
I suspect that while the reason behind this blocking is not yet clear, the process--and thereby the motivation--might be a bit less obscure. That is, given that consensus drives policy decisions here, it is very likely that different parts of the bureaucracy weighed in and officials each had a gripe with the NYT coverage of some or another issue. Collectively, they were able to push through a directive to block it.
The people here overseeing foreign journalists also know that there will soon be a new contingent manning the desks of the NYT bureau here. Those officials want to send a clear signal that they expect more positive ("objective") coverage of China.
I suppose all will be revealed in due time. Or maybe never. _______
Poll among readers in China: is NYTimes.com now blocked?
Even without using my VPN, I've had no trouble reaching NYTimes.com or similar Western news sites in recent days from Shenzhen or Beijing. And that's from my same old apartment-house ISP in Beijing that is subject to all the standard Great Firewall strictures. (For chapter and verse on how the Great Firewall works, go here.)
But today I heard from one reader in Chengdu, another in a different part of Beijing, and another in Guangzhou that they were suddenly not able to reach the NYT site. Very few things in China happen in a consistent, everywhere-at-once way. But I am curious about whether something larger is underway.
If you're within Chinese territory could you try NYTimes.com without using a proxy or VPN and see whether you can get through? If you send me a note, via the "email me" feature on this site, and tell me what city you're in and whether you got through, I'll post the accumulated results when there are enough to show some pattern. All I'm looking for is: "Xian, YES" if you CAN get through, or "Shenyang, NO" if you can't. I won't reply to those messages but will tally them up and report later. Thanks!
UPDATE: I have already heard from several people that the main page of the NYT comes up but the links are disabled. (This is consistent with one of the patterns of GFW blocking I mentioned in an article on the topic.) So could you click a link, too, to see if it works? I have gotten a lot more "NO" replies, indicating problems, than YESes so far.
December 18, 2008
Coda (for now) to the Mischke saga
David Brauer, of MinnPost.com, has posted a two-part Q-and-A with Tommy Mischke, the recently-deposed radio humorist-genius of KSTP in St. Paul. (Previously on this subject here, here, and -- eight years ago in an Atlantic article - here.) (Mischke, as "shown" in our magazine story in 2000:)
The really surprising part of the interview is Mischke's description of exactly why he was fired "for cause" and with no warning, severance, benefits, phase-out period, etc. That's in Part 1 of the interview. In Part 2, he talks about the economic future of radio, the choices available to people like him who don't fit the standard AM political-talk mold, and various other challenges that will sound uncomfortably familiar to people in print journalism. Worth reading for culture-of-media purposes even if you've never heard of Mischke and don't care about life in "good old St. Paul, big-time Minneapolis" as Mischke always refers to "The Cities" on his show.
Actually, one other point. I hadn't looked at my article on Mischke for lo these past eight years, but I did so just now. After the jump is one passage that tries to convey the on-air effect. And, for another long interview with Mischke from three years ago, go to the MischkeMadness site here. ________
Many people in the blog-o-world, including several of my Atlantic colleagues, have noted the, umm, similarity between Barack Obama's most famous poster and the recent "SarkObama" campaign by Nicolas Sarkozy in France.
Loyal Atlantic reader Edward Goldstick sent me a note suggesting that I read what the posters actually say. As soon as you do so, it becomes evident that they're not pro-Sarkozy posters at all! They're an elegant little bit of jiujitsu to both mock and pressure Sarkozy by appearing to commit him to positions more progressive/leftist than he in fact holds.
"Produce clean and sustainable energy for Europe," the one on the upper left says. "Yes we can!" "Make polluters pay," says the next one down. "Yes we can!"
Others are in the same vein. And, as it turns out from a story in Le Monde (in French, here) published five days ago, this is part of a guerrilla campaign by Greenpeace to push its climate-change programs during EU talks on the summit in Poznan, Poland, this month.
Ah, the subtle French. But at least we know that Sarkozy is not as derivative as he seemed -- and that it takes much longer for material to make its way from the mainstream French press into English than the other way around.
December 4, 2008
Harping on the RMB
I truly love the (state controlled, voice to the outside world) China Daily. There is a wonderful purity to the worldview it conveys. It never disappoints -- as with this front page story yesterday setting the stage for the latest meetings in the US-China "Strategic Economic Dialogue" series.
Those urging the U.S. to stop harping on currency values turn out to be two Chinese analysts, one at a government agency. Who needs to hear from financiers, business people, economists, or, ahem, experts from any other country!
As it happens, I too have been continually urging American politicians to stop harping on beating their gums about the "rigged" Chinese currency, notably here and here -- mainly because, until quite recently, it was already rising in value. Moreover, the obsession with the RMB seemed mainly to show a failure of imagination on the US side: it was the only thing Americans could think of to "do" about China's trade surpluses.
Yes, the Chinese government was obviously "managing" the currency's rise and keeping it unnaturally low to help exporters (as explained blow-by-blow here). But U.S. discussion seemed based on the assumption that this was the secret of China's export boom. As I heard constantly from the foreign and Chinese business people I visited in factories and export shops and quoted in those stories, it was at best a secondary factor.
Now things are different. China's exporters, like businesses in every part of this recession-slowed world, are losing orders and laying off workers. This is tough for them -- as the counterpart is tough everywhere else. In response, governments elsewhere in the world are taking steps that, at a minimum, should not worsen conditions for other economies. That is, they mainly are mounting stimulus programs to keep people buying, whether from domestic suppliers or foreign sources. China too has of course announced a huge stimulus program.
Yet there are increasing rumbles of China's desire/intent to do something that would in fact aggravate problems elsewhere: trying to help its exporters by pushing the RMB's value down again, after two-plus years of letting it rise. In essence, this would be a game of exporting unemployment -- yes, yes, with all caveats about Chinese people being on average so much poorer than Americans or Europeans and suffering so much more when laid off.
Some very interesting economic discussions in and around China concern exactly this issue. Will the government try to devalue the RMB again? Should it try? Could it succeed? And if it tries, how will other countries respond? Could this be the step that turns a "contained" international economic crisis into something worse?
This subject is so complex, deep, and fast-changing that there are countless angles to explore. For now, as a first installment, after the jump are excerpts from my friend Andy Rothman's "Sinology" newsletter for CLSA, arguing that on balance the Chinese authorities won't take this step. (Proprietary newsletter, so no web link.) More on this theme to come. ______
Reading the NYT on line just now, I see a review of a "historical documentary" movie of something I can remember vividly but that apparently happened forty years ago this week: the Harvard-Yale football game in which Harvard scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds to "win," 29-29. (Touchdown with 2-point conversion; onside kick with recovery; another touchdown as the clock ran out and 2-point conversion.) Tick-tock footage of the game, from a Harvard athletic department perspective, here:
I mention this dawn-of-time occurrence for two reasons: I was excited during the game itself because one of the big stars for Harvard was tight end Bruce Freeman, who caught two crucial touchdown passes. We had grown up and gone to school together in the Western hinterland, where our fathers were doctors in the same small clinic. Also, I was about to take over as the editor of the Crimson and so was part of the squadron responsible for our post-game special edition.
I have never been 100% sure of exactly who in the small group was first to say that the special-edition headline needed to be: HARVARD BEATS YALE, 29-29. It wasn't me; and I think it was my classmate Bill Kutik. But everyone instantly recognized a stroke of genius, and so it was set in hot lead, on Linotype machines, and was on the streets in a matter of minutes:
Maybe if the movie makes its way to Beijing's pirate video stores I'll find out what really happened.
(I have seen the image above on several sites. Somewhere in the attic of my real house in the US, I have the special edition itself, which I suppose I should scan or preserve in amber someday, given its status as a treasured antiquity.)
UPDATE: I have heard from Bill Kutik, who was indeed centrally involved, and even more so was the person I thought to name, but didn't: Tim Carlson. Further background (complete with Rashomon-like conflicting memories and accounts) here.
November 19, 2008
Who says there are no good jobs left in journalism?
Here is exciting news. The (state-run) China Daily may be opening a US edition!! Clues here, with thanks to Michele Travierso. If you're an experienced but job-threatened native speaker of English who can see the wry possibilities in writing headlines like the front-pager below, your time may have come. I might look into it myself.
A few other keeper headlines shown here, here, here, and here; and an exploration of the thinking behind this form of journalism here. (Update: via Charlie McElwee of Shanghai, more info from the China Daily-USA web site.)
How it should be done: Terry Gross with Bill Ayers
It's conventional chattering-class wisdom to say that Terry Gross of Fresh Air is a "great interviewer." In the early days I think that wisdom originated to some significant extent in male-listener fascination with the sound of her voice. But a broadcast I just heard was not only a reminder that she is, in fact, truly a great interviewer but also a demonstration of what that means in practice.
The broadcast in question was her 43-minute session yesterday with Ayers, the person presented by GOP campaigners as Barack Obama's closest and most influential friend. Ayers himself came across, inevitably, as a more complex character than the campaign caricature: more sympathetic in some ways, not necessarily in others. But much of what Ayers "reveals" comes out precisely because of the way Gross posed and sequenced the questions. If he had just been parked in front of the microphone by someone who said, "Well, how can you hold your head up?" or "So, tell us about Barack Obama," the results would have been much duller.
At the most obvious level, Terry Gross succeeds in this interview simply by avoiding the two most common, and laziest, styles of today's broadcast interviewers: surplus aggressiveness, long ago made familiar by Mike Wallace and now lampooned by Stephen Colbert; and lapdogism, most recently on display in Greta Van Susteren's sessions with Sarah Palin and the default mode of Larry King Live. Both of these extremes reflect the confusion of toughness of manner -- do you interrupt, are you scowling, are you borderline impolite -- with toughness of inquiry, which is something altogether different and can happen under the most polite and civil auspices.
She also avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.
What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads ("Now, that's an intriguing idea, tell us more about..."), to look for interesting tensions ("You used to say X, but now it sounds like..."), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said ("It sounds as if you're suggesting..."). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.
If you have this standard in mind -- is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? -- you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.
November 18, 2008
A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China
Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.
I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.
This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry. (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:
1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).
2. The local government suppresses all information.
3. All media reports are censored. (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)
4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.
5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)
6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.
7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.
Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:
Back to business, and back to China: Why we love the English-language Chinese press (cont.)
A mere 22 hours after we started driving toward LAX at 4:15am through what seemed to be snowfall but in fact was ashfall from Yorba Linda version of the recent SoCal fires*, my wife and I are back in our apartment in Beijing. And reassuringly, we have the joys of the English-language Chinese press to welcome us home. Front page of today's (state controlled) China Daily:
Apart from the picture of the baby-holding Premier Wen Jiabao in his now-iconic role as Beloved Grandpa of the Nation, I invite attention to the headline in the top right corner of the front page:
On line and in print, I have oftenmarveled at why Chinese organizations make so many careless and unintended errors when rendering material into English for foreigners to read. (Locus classicus, discussed here: the huge signs outside an art museum in Shanghai last year. They announced a big exhibit of photos from the Three Gorges dam area and read: THE THREE GEORGES.)
With the China Daily and sister publications, it's a different matter. Judging from the result, it's obvious that native English speakers have a final pass at the stories, headlines, and captions there. They have very few unintended, "Three Georges"-type errors. But it also seems obvious that the British, Canadian, American, Australian, Indian, South African, Singaporean, etc subeditors hired for this role can have a slyly subversive bent. Often little touches show up in the publication that will seem Onion-like to any native speaker but that even very capable English-speaking Chinese supervisors would likely miss. At least that's what I hope is going on here -- intentional wry precision rather than unaware imprecision. I'm applying an Intelligent Design model in my newspaper reading. ______ * For those who know the LA Freeway system: this was along Highway 91 west of I-605, which we were detoured onto because signs said that I-105 was closed, apparently for fire reasons. The fires were of course aggravated by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds. On the weather report we heard while passing through the ashfall, the reported atmospheric humidity was six percent.
November 2, 2008
Proof that John McCain has reached the "acceptance" stage
His appearance in the opening skit of SNL last night. (Clip from official NBC site here, with intro ad.)
The premise and execution of the skit were very funny. Much funnier, except for the physical-humor thrill of seeing Tina Fey and "the real" Sarah Palin on screen on the same show, than Palin's appearance a few weeks ago. This time, McCain and Fey, in the roles of McCain and Palin, were QVC hosts shilling for fine election-related collectibles, like Joe the Plumber action figures. The setup, which poor McCain himself had to lay out, was that airtime just before Election Day was essential -- but while Obama could pay for a wall-to-wall half-hour special, McCain and Palin couldn't afford anything more than a spot on QVC.
I just watched it again right now, and it's even better than I remember. The only thing we'll miss when this campaign is finished is seeing Fey in her Palin role. "OK, now I'm goin' rogue..." McCain himself was also a charming performer. Not a bit of the crabbed, offended, uncontrollably angry man we saw during the debates. Instead, a little reprise of the "I know this is all bullshit, and I can laugh at myself" McCain as he consistently presented himself in the 1980s and 1990s.
But no candidate who thought he had a prayer of winning would have appeared on this show.
For a candidate coming from behind, every second of the final week of the campaign is like a second in cardiac-surgery operating theater, with absolutely no room for fooling around or wasting time, money, or effort that could be used to sway that last crucial vote. (Think: the last days of Gore-Bush in 2000.)
For a candidate who thinks he's ahead, and might actually become president, inevitably there's a tone of new seriousness right at the end: What we've been working for years is within our grasp, let's not screw this up, and let's be sobered by how different the world is going to look in a few days.
So if McCain really thought he had a chance of catching up, he wouldn't have wasted time on an audience that might repair his reputation among liberals and journalists but does him no good with the crucial swing votes. And if he thought he were secretly ahead, he wouldn't comport himself this way. He would be more like the stiff character we saw in the debates.
Great TV! But also an unmistakable message.
October 30, 2008
An essay by someone who has never worked in a political campaign (updated)
There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics
about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign
trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American
politics.
What??? A general-election presidential campaign consists, roughly speaking, of appearing before one crowd after another all day long. I know this from having worked in one, but all you have to do is watch TV to get the idea.
I know, it is hardly shocking that the WSJ would publish a piece suggesting that Barack Obama is the wrong man for the times. (This one by Fouad Ajami.) Nor that it would reach, Pravda-like, to find the latest argument against him. Haven't looked, but I bet that when Sarah Palin was drawing big crowds the Journal's editorialists noted this with approval.
But doesn't a certain self-protective "wait a minute, can we really say that?" instinct kick in at some point? Are there no copy editors any more?
Update: Actually, there are no copy editors any more! Marge duMond, head of the crack copy editing team at our own Atlantic Monthly, reminds me of this dispatch soon after the Murdoch takeover of the WSJ, which disclosed that the WSJ was laying off large numbers of its editors. The Journal's new managing editor said:
The reformed structure means that it is essential for reporters and bureau chiefs to ensure that copy filed to the news desk is clean...
Yes, that's a foolproof plan.
October 19, 2008
Three colleagues
Often I make some explanatory or background comment about my own article in each new issue of the Atlantic. But I don't like to say much about other articles, because on the merits I'd end up saying: Hey, read them all, they're all great! Usually, and especially in this issue, they are.
For special reasons I want to mention three current items by my colleagues.
1) Jeffrey Goldberg's hilarious-but-serious takedown of the TSA. The wasteful spectacle of "security theater" has been on my mind for a long time, as the folly of this system was evident from pretty near the start. Very soon after 9/11, the only two airline-security measures that really matter -- fortified cockpit doors, and the vigilance of a flying public that now knows what a hijacking can mean -- were in place. Since then we've erected an edifice that imposes a huge indirect cost on the traveling public while (as Jeff points out in the article) doing very little to discourage serious terrorist threats. Two years ago in the Atlantic, I quoted John Mueller, author of Overblown, to similar effect:
The widely held view among security experts is that this airport
spending is largely for show. Strengthened cockpit doors and a flying
public that knows what happened on 9/11 mean that commercial airliners
are highly unlikely to be used again as targeted flying bombs. "The
inspection process is mostly security theater, to make people feel safe
about flying," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State
and the author of a forthcoming book about the security-industrial
complex.
But there seems to be a ratchet effect in "security theater" projects. Once a "safeguard" is adopted, no one dares propose taking it down. Here in Beijing, X-ray screening for all handbags, briefcases, and other parcels taken onto the subway was introduced as a special Olympic-security measure last July. The games are gone, but the screeners (and the long lines of people waiting in front of them) are still there. If logic and evidence had any power to change a system, Jeff Goldberg's article would have some effect.
2) Barbara Wallraff, in the latest entry in her new Atlantic blog, asks for a word to describe people whose street etiquette takes a certain form. My nominee is "the people of Beijing and Shanghai." I was actually planning to write something about the mysterious difference between Chinese and Japanese walking-styles on the street. (Pedestrians in Tokyo, in general, act as if they're aware that ten million other people need to fit onto the same streets, and make themselves small. Pedestrians in Shanghai or Beijing, in the same overgeneralization, act as if they're the only ones walking and make themselves big.) Details, theory, evidence, and photos for another time.
3) Andrew Sullivan, in this item, has very nice and accurate things to say about the Atlantic's elegant redesign, and about the virtues of actually subscribing to the magazine. He is right on all counts -- and also has a very polished and non-bloggish essay about blogs in this issue. As for subscribing, in the short term the physical magazine really is an important complement to the (ever more important) web site, in that it can combine photos, art, and text in a way not matched on screen. I feel this difference very keenly overseas, where I get print issues five or six weeks late. It's simply different to read a magazine like this on a designed page. And in the long run, this is part of how businesses like ours survive.
October 16, 2008
Jackal with a human face (updated)
The new issue of the Atlantic, just up on line (and available with great photos and new design for subscribers) has among many other offerings my article about the ways in which Chinese officialdom so often makes the country look so much worse than it really is. It also includes an explanation of the "jackal" headline here.*
I just know this will be taken by all concerned in the spirit of constructive criticism! That's what I'm saying to friends here in Beijing.
UPDATE: Interesting to see, in this BBC dispatch, that China's former ambassador to France is making a similar on-the-record constructive criticism of his own government. (Thanks to reader T.H.):
[Former ambassador] Wu Jianmin says China's image problem is caused at least in part by
its own officials because they do not know how to communicate with the
outside world.
He says they waste time using political cliches, talking nonsense, and making empty or outrageous claims.
_____
*Hint: when trying to discredit a Nobel Peace Prize winner also seen as a religious leader in much of the world and by some important sub-groups within China, what subtle imagery would some Chinese leaders choose?
October 13, 2008
Last word on my "ignore the DJIA" crusade
In the last few days I've made a quixotic complaint -- that we spend too much time thinking about stock-market prices -- and proposed a wildly quixotic solution. It is that we devise real time credit-congestion maps, showing where companies are about to be financially starved out of viability for lack of working capital, modeled on real time traffic-congestion maps now popular around the world. For visual amusement, here is the traffic situation in greater Melbourne, Australia just now:
Obviously my proposal is in the "thought experiment" category, rather than something that is actually going to occur. (Thus it is in the same category as another longstanding crusade I'll rev up again soon: to get rid of what is commonly but erroneously referred to as the "Nobel prize" in economics. More on that another time. Interim reading here.) One problem with the real-time credit map is that the underlying data points -- the countless daily business decisions based on available credit, among other factors -- can't quickly or easily be tracked down, and are held by people who often have a strong interest in keeping them private.
After the jump, a reader's note that spells out some of the further complexities of amassing and publicizing such data. But the reader also underscores my main point: the need to find some way to dramatize the reality that today's financial crisis involves things more serious than collapsing share prices. _______
I have argued for decades that the press pays too much attention to daily stock market movement. Their immediate fluctuations are of interest mainly to day traders (ah, remember when that was a popular pastime). Their longer term connection to real national wealth, welfare, and happiness is imprecise, to put it mildly. This is especially so in the volatile and panicky mood of the moment.
Obviously my effort to get the daily market reports pushed to the inside pages is a doomed crusade. But in the short run, I wish that, instead of the DJIA / S&P 500 / NASDAQ etc, we had some comparably precise seeming, attention-getting, publicized* measure of credit availability. From all evidence, that is the real emergency driving real destruction of real companies creating real products and about to eliminate real jobs.
While waiting to see what President Bush (ah, remember him!) might have to say on the topic, anecdotage that is getting my attention:
Three weeks ago, I mentioned that DayJet, the pioneering air-taxi company, was shutting down not (it claimed) because of overt business problems but because of the impossibility of getting short-term finance. At the time, the credit squeeze might have seemed an excuse for the inevitable diceyness of the air travel business.
But just in the last few days, I've heard separately from three friends who run objectively "viable" businesses that they are on the verge of closing permanently, or laying off much of their staff, because they can't get short-term working capital. One said he was on the verge of having to close a manufacturing facility in the Midwest that, as he put it, "realistically will never open again." And this is from a group of friends that is heavy on writers, political people, academics, etc rather than a lot of business owners. I have never heard stories like this before. When I was living in northern California during the tech crash early this decade, the story was about the relatively slow deflation of (mostly) unrealistic plans rather than the widespread destruction of enterprises with a future.
My minor point: mainly because they're so precise and fast-moving, financial-market measures crowd out attention from what we really need to worry about, the imminent destruction of businesses and jobs that "should" survive.
My major point: the United States is near a moment of fundamental political choice. To have the discussion distracted by -- well, it would be nice to be even-handed about this, but the truth is that the distraction has been 99% from the McCain side, with the ongoing crap about the Weathermen in the 1960s -- is suicidal. A few weeks ago Senator McCain "suspended" his campaign because of what now seems a mild early phase of the financial crisis. Maybe he and Barack Obama could agree over the weekend to suspend discussion of any topic other than avoiding real economic devastation for the time being, at a minimum until their debate next week on economics.
Now waiting to hear Bush. ___ * The LIBOR, the London Interbank Offer Rate, is one well known proxy; my point is that the DJIA gets 100 times the attention but is not 100 times as important right now.
October 9, 2008
A day of conciliation
Before these items get too far out of date, let me say:
1) I generally am on the opposite side from David Frum on questions of politics and public policy. But I have to admire the sobriety and fairmindedness with which he makes this case about the future of the Republicans.
2) As Thomas Friedman knows, I am more impressed by the many ways in which the world is not at all "flat" than those in which it is. (When I asked him about this on TV two years ago, he quite charmingly explained that "In the columnist game, you don't sell things 51 - 49.") But having complained about the broad brush he used in that case, let me do homage to the very great precision of his column yesterday on patriotism a la Sarah Palin. It is an achievement to bring into exact focus something that other people have been generally talking-around for a while. He did so in that column.
The 28th Amendment to the Constitution (draft form)
"No Person shall be elected President or Vice President without accepting a session of questioning by the press, such session to last no less than one hour and to be open to normally accredited members of the press in the same fashion as at Presidential news conferences. The questioning shall occur and the results shall be made freely available to the public at least one week before an Election is held."
Three weeks to get it enacted.
October 5, 2008
A comment that dumbfounds me
I know the Washington Post's David Broder slightly, and I've always respected and liked him and enjoyed dealing with him. But what can he have been thinking when writing this, about the VP debate, in his column today?
Those of us who know and admire Joe Biden were happy that a big
national audience got to see him at his best -- a sentimental, smart,
decent and generous guy.
But he was no better than Palin. She appeared cool as a cucumber,
comfortable with her talking points and unrattled by anything that was
thrown at her.
I've added the emphasis, my way of conveying a reaction of WHAT???????????!!!!!?????? Such an assessment can be true only if you have decided to assess debate performance on one factor alone, perky self-assurance, and to assign no weight whatsoever to such items as logic, responsiveness to questions, clarity in explaining views, factual knowledge, sentence by sentence coherence, and so on.
As everyone else including me has observed, Palin managed to pass her own particular test in this debate -- which was to improve on her alarmingly ill-informed and paralyzed appearances with Katie Couric. Biden's test was to "do well" in the normal, not the making-special-allowances, sense of that term. Each passed the respective test, but that doesn't mean there was no difference in how they performed.
In his famous 1960s book Paper Lion, George Plimpton described the thrill of running a few plays as quarterback during a Detroit Lions scrimmage. He rightly considered himself a success simply because he didn't get pulverized. That he avoided being killed by the opposing linemen was indeed impressive, but it didn't mean that they were "no better" at what they did.
The title of one of Plimpton's other books, about what happened when he got to pitch to several major league batters, gets across the idea of the different standards being applied to his appearances in pro sports lineups -- and to Palin's performance in the debate. It was called Out of My League.
October 2, 2008
The main thing I will say about the Veep debate in real time
The loser 38 minutes in is Gwen Ifill, who is doing nothing at all to keep the discussion on track or having the candidates engage.
The circumstances don't allow her to do anything close to what Katie Couric achieved, but she seems not even to be listening to the answers when moving to her next question.
UPDATE: Forty minutes in, Ifill completely missed the followup on the gay marriage / civil rights question. Where is Katie C?
September 29, 2008
Something you don't see every day (Chinese leadership dept)
It's not posted at the CNN archives site yet, but in a day or two look for and watch Fareed Zakaria's TV interview today with China's premier, or #2 leader, Wen Jiabao. (In the meantime, printed transcript is here. Update: video clips are now available.) Interview appearances by Wen or president Hu Jintao are so rare, let alone with the foreign media, that this session is noteworthy simply for its existence.
It's interesting beyond that for Wen's relative openness and non-defensiveness on a variety of issues, including the Dalai Lama and China's role in Darfur. (I am grading on the curve.) I have an article coming out pretty soon in the Atlantic about how very closed and defensive official Chinese spokesmen usually are when dealing with the outside world. This is an intriguing exception.
Given China's new role as America's banker, U.S. citizens should also pay attention to passages like this:
ZAKARIA: There is another sense in which we are interdependent. China
is the largest holder of U.S. Treasury bills. By some accounts, you
hold almost $1 trillion of it. It makes Americans - some Americans -
uneasy. Can you reassure them that China would never use this status as
a weapon in some form?
WEN (voice of interpreter): As I said,
we believe that the U.S. real economy is still solidly based,
particularly in the high-tech industries and the basic industries.
Now, something has gone wrong in the virtual economy. But if this
problem is properly addressed, then it is still possible to stabilize
the economy in this country....
Of course, we are concerned about the safety and security of Chinese
money here. But we believe that the United States is a credible
country, and particularly at such difficult times, China has reached
out to the United States.
I am not sure I buy the claim that Wen has read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 100 times. Still, that he can talk about it at all is impressive. Also, the small-d democrat in me wishes that Zakaria had not wrapped up the interview by addressing Wen as "Your Excellency." (I didn't hear the way the interpreter rendered that to Wen in Chinese.) That's my only cavil with a very impressive and useful interview.
September 24, 2008
Worst self-inflicted campaign move ever?
Candidates have made a lot of unforced errors over the years. Richard Nixon promising to campaign in all 50 states when running against John Kennedy in 1960 -- and getting sick, tired, and cadaver-looking as a result. Nixon again thinking he had to get those crucial Democratic National Committee records from the Watergate building in 1972. (He obviously made it through the election, but then....) Dukakis getting into the tank in 1988.
But compared with John McCain "suspending" his campaign and trying to postpone the debates? Puh-leeze. None of the reasons below is original, but it's worth adding them up to see how risky McCain's propo
