Tag: journalism (page 1 of 2)

November 10, 2025

the acceleration of misrepresentation

Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal says,

Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would pose genuine challenges to his ability to write about anything — or he’s a transparently disingenuous writer and thinker. I’m not sure which is worse.

I think what’s going on here is something more specific. My guess is that Coviello thought (a) David Brooks is a conservative and (b) this dumb dismissal of Foucault is just what a conservative would say. I think that also helps to account for the gleefully mocking tone of Coviello’s essay: though he claims to have “all but committed to memory” Brooks’s column, it seems more likely that as soon as he got the one sentence that fit his pre-existing caricature of conservative thinking he effectively stopped reading and certainly stopped thinking.

This is a very common phenomenon.

Recently the Telegraph of London did a kind of exposé of the BBC’s political biases, focusing on (among other things) a documentary that aired just before last November’s Presidential election. In it, Donald Trump’s words on January 6, 2021 were carefully edited and spliced to connect phrases that were not connected in his speech and to alter the timing of those words. When confronted with these facts,

Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, even tried to justify the doctoring of the Trump speech, telling a meeting of the broadcaster’s standards committee that it was fine because it broadly reflected the truth about Trump’s actions.

After all, it’s the kind of thing he would say.

Similarly, in 2024, when it was pointed out to J. D. Vance that there had actually been no reports of Haitian immigrants in Springfield killing and eating people’s pets, he replied,

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.

Maybe the Haitian immigrants didn’t kill and eat pets, but it’s the kind of thing they would do, or might do, and it calls attention to real problems. In short, “it broadly reflected the truth” about Haitian immigrants in America.

To be sure, the BBC’s reports came much closer to reflecting the truth about Trump than Vance’s lie-spreading did to teaching Americans about Haitian immigrants; but all the parties mentioned above are on a down escalator to the sub-basement, and once you step onto that device it’s extremely difficult to get off.

If you report that someone said X, not because she said X, but rather because X seems broadly consistent with what you take her views to be, then X becomes your new baseline for interpreting her. Then if someone tells you she said something much more extreme, say 2X, well, that’s plausible, isn’t it? After all, she said X, you remember that. And now 2X is the new baseline, so when you hear that she said 3X…. And before too long the escalator dumps you off in the sub-basement, where you’ll say anything at all about those you believe to be your Repugnant Cultural Other, because, after all, you have so much evidence against them.

June 17, 2025

the composer as ASS and other exasperations

In May of 1942, as Sayers was writing the eleventh play in the sequence called The Man Born to be King, she shot a quick letter to her producer, Val Gielgud:

As proof that I am doing something, and because it is urgent, I am sending you Mary Magdalen’s song to be set. You remember where it comes — the Soldiers will not let her and her party through to the foot of the Cross unless she sings to them — “Give us one of the old songs, Mary!”

The song is thus the, so to speak, “Tipperary” of the period, and must be treated as such. That is to say, the solo portion is nostalgic and sentimental, and the chorus is nostalgic and noisy; and the whole thing has to be such as one can march to. We want a simple ballad tune, without any pedantry about Lydian modes or Oriental atmosphere….

I want a tune that is both obvious and haunting — the kind that when you first hear it you go away humming and can’t get out of your head! And quite, quite, low-brow.

In September, when the company were rehearsing the play, DLS wrote to a friend,

We had an awful time with rehearsals. Everything seemed to go wrong — it was one of those days. Claudia’s Dream had been done badly (owing to my not being there to explain just what I wanted!) and the ASS who set the song disregarded all my instructions, and not only set it in ¾ time instead of march time, but had the vile impertinence to alter my lines because they wouldn’t fit his tune. I threw my one and only fit of temperament, and we sang the thing in march-time and restored the line, but it wasn’t a good tune anyway!

In another letter she wrote, “I’m still furious with the man who wrote that silly tune.” Who was this “ASS”? His name was … Benjamin Britten. Probably never made much of himself.

It’s fun to write about DLS in part because she is very entertaining when she is outraged by something. Some years after this incident she reluctantly gave an interview to a reporter from the News Chronicle, who then announced to the world that Sayers had declared that there would be no more Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Sayers to the paper’s editor:

Your interviewer appears to have misunderstood me. I did not say that I had given up writing detective stories. I did not say that there would be no more Peter Wimseys. I made no announcement on the subject one way or the other. I only said that for the next few years, I had another job which would take me all my time.

(The “another job” was translating the Divine Comedy.) The editor’s reply merely created further exasperation:

There is no need to wonder how your reporter came to misinterpret me. Your own letter provides the explanation, since it shows you to have fallen into a similar misunderstanding, and for the same reason; namely, that Fleet Street renders a man incapable of taking in the plain meaning of an English sentence. You say you are “glad to hear that there will, in fact, be further Wimsey stories”; how, pray, do you contrive to extract that conclusion from my statement that “I made no announcement upon the subject one way or the other”?

I have not said, and I will not and cannot say, whether I shall write any more detective fiction or not; for the excellent reason that I do not know. Is that sufficiently clear?

Three times your reporter tried to force me into promising that I would write more of this kind of story; three times I refused to commit myself to any such thing. This refusal he interpreted to suit his own fancy; you in your turn have done the same.

June 16, 2025

mind donation

Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad? – The New York Times:

ROOSE And then, of course, there’s the hallucination problem: These systems are not always factual, and they do get things wrong. But I confess that I am not as worried about hallucinations as a lot of people — and, in fact, I think they are basically a skill issue that can be overcome by spending more time with the models. Especially if you use A.I. for work, I think part of your job is developing an intuition about where these tools are useful and not treating them as infallible. If you’re the first lawyer who cites a nonexistent case because of ChatGPT, that’s on ChatGPT. If you’re the 100th, that’s on you.

NEWTON Right. I mentioned that one way I use large language models is for fact-checking. I’ll write a column and put it into an L.L.M., and I’ll ask it to check it for spelling, grammatical and factual errors. Sometimes a chatbot will tell me, “You keep describing ‘President Trump,’ but as of my knowledge cutoff, Joe Biden is the president.” But then it will also find an actual factual error I missed.

But how do you know the “factual error” it found is an actual factual error, not the kind of hallucination that Kevin Roose says he’s not worried about? Newton a little later in the conversation:

How many times as a journalist have I been reading a 200-page court ruling, and I want to know where in this ruling does the judge mention this particular piece of evidence? L.L.M.s are really good at that. They will find the thing, but then you go verify it with your own eyes.

First of all, I’m thinking: Hasn’t command-F already solved that problem? Does Newton not know that trick? Presumably he does, unless he’s reading the entire “200-page court ruling” to “verify with [his] own eyes” what the chatbot told him. So:

Casey Newton’s old workflow: Command-f to search for references in a text to a particular piece of evidence.

Casey Newton’s new AI-enhanced workflow: Ask a chatbot whether a text refers to a particular piece of evidence. Then use command-f to see if what the chatbot told him is actually true.

Now that’s what I call progress!

The NYT puts that conversation on its front page next to this story:

But as almost everyone who has ever used a chatbot knows, the bots’ “ability to read and summarize text” is horribly flawed. Every bot I have used absolutely sucks at summarizing text: they all get some things right and some things catastrophically wrong, in response to almost any prompt. So until the bots get better at this, then machine learning “will change the stories we tell about the past” by making shit up.

“Brain donor” is a cheap insult, but I feel like we’re seeing mind donation in real time here. Does Newton really fact-check the instrument he uses to check his facts? This is the same guy who also notes: “Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, said recently that he believes chatbots now hallucinate less than humans do.” Newton doesn’t say he believes Amodei — “I would like to see the data,” he says, as if there could be genuine “data” on that question — but to treat a salesman’s sales pitch for his own product as a point to be considered on an empirical question is a really bad sign.

I won’t be reading anything Newton writes from this point on — because why would I? He doesn’t even think he has anything to offer — but I bet (a) in the next few months he’ll get really badly burned by trusting chatbot hallucinations and (b) that won’t change the way he uses them. He’s donated his mind and I doubt he’ll ask for it to be returned.

April 9, 2025

standards

From a while back, Charlie Warzel:

There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards of traditional outlets.

I think Warzel’s framing of the issue is telling. Anyone skeptical of contemporary American journalism would instantly flag the phrase “the rigor and standards of traditional outlets”: “Hey Charlie, I think you mean ‘the rigor and standards that traditional outlets claim to uphold but in fact do not.’”

Similarly, later in the piece, a conversation with the journalist Judith Angwin, Warzel addresses Angwin thus:

You write that “journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding something when we aren’t.

But aren’t you? For instance, was there not a concerted effort on the part of many MSM outlets to hide the diminishment of Joe Biden, a diminishment painfully and relentlessly documented in this long WSJ piece?

Any real self-reckoning by American journalists should begin with the recognition that they do have “rigor and standards” but apply them in wildly inconsistent ways, depending on whether the reporting at issue flatters or challenges the beliefs of the assumed audience and of the newsroom itself.

And this is true of all of us, isn’t it? Which is why a blog post from eleven years ago still repays our attention: Scott Alexander’s “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor.”

February 3, 2025

Areopagitica

Few works are more routinely misdescribed than Milton’s Areopagitica, which is almost always said to be a defense of “freedom of the press.” It isn’t. So what is it?

It is an argument, addressed to the House of Commons and House of Lords, against a proposed law mandating the licensing of any book before it can be published in England. Anyone wanting to publish a book would submit it to a governmental censor, who would read it and either approve or deny its publication. Milton thinks this is a terrible idea, for many reasons:

It imitates Catholic practice, with its inquisitors and Imprimaturs and Nihil obstats;
it has no ancient or biblical warrant;
it would only affect law-abiding people — the truly scurrilous would just print without license and seek to avoid capture;
it would not stop the spread of evil and false ideas, which have a long history of moving through even an illiterate population with lightning speed;
the job of reading everything submitted for publication would be so vast that the government would need an army of censors;
the job would be so tiresome that no one with the wit and judgment to do it well would agree to do it at all;
the law would discourage writers, many of whom would scarcely go to the trouble of writing a whole book when a dim-witted or ill-tempered censor could quash it in an instant;
it would insult the public by presuming them incapable of making their own judgments about truth and falsehood,
and would deprive them of the responsibility of growing in genuine virtue by exercising and testing their discernment.

That last point is expressed in one of Milton’s most famous outbursts of eloquence:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Above all, says Milton, such a law presumes that our possession of the Truth is complete, which it manifestly is not and will not be until our Lord’s return. Those who can add to our store of genuine knowledge and understanding will, inevitably, deviate from current opinion as much as will the mendacious and the mistaken, but the censors will be unable to know in advance which deviations are worthy of praise and which worthy of condemnation.

Thus, concludes Milton, there should be no law in England mandating the pre-publication licensing of books.

But what happens then?

Ah, now we’re getting to the good stuff. First of all, if a book is deeply controversial, the contest between Truth and Falsehood is fought out in the public square:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

(Another famous passage.To Milton’s question, by the way, I would answer: I for one have often seen Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.) And if a book is deemed false, or anyway dangerously false? Well, then, of course it is suppressed:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind — as who looks they should be? — this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that may be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.

Many shall be tolerated, but not Catholicism. Lines must be drawn, and the intolerable not tolerated but rather “extirpate.”

Milton doesn’t explicitly say so, but this would surely be done through the usual legal means in accordance with the laws of England — laws prohibiting blasphemy, for instance, or sedition, or libel (though libel had a rather different meaning in those days than it does today, a topic I explore in this essay). An author accused of crime would be given a fair trial, allowed to submit evidence and to make arguments on his behalf, and so on.

Moreover, while Milton is against government censorship of books, he strongly supports a law requiring that all books to be published are registered with the government. And if they are not?

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next before this, “that no book be printed, unless the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, be registered.” Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.

Burn the book and hang the printer and/or author. And even if a book is properly registered, what if it then “be found mischievous and libellous”? I think we can guess what Milton would recommend.

October 30, 2024

In (Partial) Defence of Jeff Bezos – by Ian Leslie:

In the early twentieth century, as information became more valuable, newspapers put more emphasis on being accurate reporters of reality. Journalism developed into a profession with a commitment to the truth regardless of political interests. These two roles, advocacy and objectivity, have co-existed somewhat uncomfortably ever since; embodied, in the US, by the separation of opinion and editorial departments.

But in the twenty-first century, the world is overflowing with opinion and activism, and desperately short on fair, objective reporting. Newspapers should still host individual opinion columns, which help people think about the news, but their most important and valuable function is to bring the news. The idea that they should endorse political candidates or positions as institutions makes as much sense as it does for universities. It’s not just that doing so is superfluous; it’s that, as Bezos says, it actually undermines journalism at a time when the profession is in crisis.

August 13, 2024

on deciding not to read a book

I had been thinking of reading Eliza Griswold’s new book Circle of Hope, but then a friend sent me a passage that included these sentences:

Franklin Graham was different from his father. Billy Graham preached broadly about God; Franklin Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, exemplifying the rightward political and cultural swing among most evangelicals in the late twentieth century.

Billy Graham “preached broadly about God”? Billy Graham??? That’s not an idea that would survive an encounter with one Billy Graham sermon — any one among thousands, but why not start with this one? Pretty much the only thing Billy Graham did for the whole of his long career was to preach the unique saving power of Jesus.

(Imagine someone claiming that Charles Darwin wrote broadly about knowledge rather than addressing himself specifically to biology. Imagine also someone writing that and then having it published by a big New York trade house.)

Here would be a more accurate (if not perfectly accurate) complaint:

Billy Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, but his emphasis was on Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Savior,” not on Jesus as the one who began his public ministry by claiming the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That Jesus’s message, rightly understood and heeded, would transform not just my heart but the whole social order is not something we heard from Billy Graham. Now Franklin Graham, along with many other evangelicals, has made a rightward political and cultural swing that has taken him even farther away from the whole message of Jesus — that message being neglected in favor of a Christian nationalism that seeks political power and social control, and is willing to tolerate any behavior or unbelief by politicians who promise such power and control. It’s for very good reason that today’s politically-minded evangelicals want to put the Ten Commandments on the walls of schools rather than the Beatitudes.

If journalists want to criticize evangelicals, well, evangelicals have done plenty that rightly incurs criticism. But for heaven’s sake, people, take the time to learn something about those you criticize — the most basic, most elementary facts. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then just don’t write about those people.

UPDATE: I have had good cause to say this many times in many contexts, but it bears repeating: If you’re going to say “It’s different now than it was then,” you need to know as much about then as about now. If you’re going to say “Franklin Graham was different from his father,” you need to know something about his father. If you’re going to say that American society is disintegrating and that we’re at one another’s throats in an unprecedented way, you need to know the actual precedents. If you’re going to say that Christians now live in a “negative world” whereas they once lived in a “positive world,” you need to know something about what it was really like to try to be a faithful Christian, say, sixty years ago. As Dogberry says, comparisons are odorous, and especially when they’re based not on careful study of the available facts but on vague impressions assumed to be infallible.

February 5, 2024

Ceci N’est Pas une Current-Events Post

No no no, this is not at all about a current controversy. Hang in there, you’ll see what I mean.

Recently some people — including grifters, but also a few people who want to have a reputation for responsible thinking and writing — have been promoting a re-interpretation of the death of George Floyd, an alternative account in which Derek Chauvin is not guilty of murder. So Radley Balko looked into the matter, and … well, as far as I can tell, after Radley has done his thing there’s not much left of the revisionist case.

Let me correct that: there’s nothing left of the revisionist case.

But I’m not writing here to refute that case, or rejoice in its refutation. I’m writing because if you read Balko’s piece you’ll see what it takes to do something like this the right way. It requires persistence, patience, extreme attentiveness, and the willingness to turn over every stone. Read that piece and you’ll see that Balko has studied the materials that the revisionists have never bothered to look at: he’s read police-procedure manuals — not just current ones, but also older ones, and has noted the changes from one to another; he’s watched police training videos; he’s surveyed court documents, and shared illustrations that were provided in court testimony, as well as the associated verbal testimony; he’s looked into the history of Minneapolis police actions against black members of the community; he’s watched with minute scrutiny the documentary that has made the revisionist claim popular, and has found the hidden seams in the presentation. Basically, he has done it all.

It’s hard to find journalists as thorough as Balko has been here — and in many other writings over the years — because journalists know that almost no one cares. Well more than 99% of readers/viewers/listeners have one question about a work of journalism: Does it or does it not confirm the views I already have about this case? That is all they know on earth, and all they (think they) need know. But if you’re one of the <1% who care about the truth, a journalist like Radley Balko is an invaluable resource.

And not just because he’ll help you find out what really happened — no, there’s another benefit to reading pieces like this one. It’ll will help you to a better understanding of where, when, and how other journalists (or “journalists”) cut corners. You’ll see the very particular consequences of motivated reasoning: selective attention, question-begging, concealment of evidence, faulty logic of every variety. And that’s an education in itself, whether you care about the particular case at hand or not.

October 20, 2023

periodicity

This piece from the Dispatch (possibly paywalled) on how The New York Times misled its readers with an overly “Hamas-friendly” headline makes a valid point, I guess — but I think much of the problem here is baked-in to minute-by-minute journalism. You don’t have to be a hard-core opponent of Israel to get a headline like that wrong — in the heat of the moment even a slight lean towards the people living in Gaza might be enough to influence your headline. If you have to post something on your website, and post it right now, you’ll not be consistently judicious and fair-minded.

[UPDATE: The Times has published an apology.]

I didn’t know that the Times had perpetrated this headline because any political crisis strengthens me in the habits I have been trying to cultivate for some years now: to watch no TV news at all — that part’s easy, I haven’t seen TV news in the past thirty years, except when I’m in an airport — and to read news on a once-a-week rather than a several-times-a-day basis. My primary way to get political news, national and international, is to read the Economist when it shows up at my house, which it does on Saturday or Monday. (I don’t keep the Economist app on my phone.) I have eliminated political sites from my RSS feed, and only happened upon the Dispatch report when I was looking for something else at the site.

The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress.

It’s important to remember this: businesses that rely on constant online or televisual engagement — social media platforms, TV news channels, news websites — make bank from our rage. They have every incentive, whether they are aware of it or not, to inflame our passions. (This is why pundits who are always wrong can keep their jobs: they don’t have to be right, they just have to be skilled at stimulating the collective amygdala.) As the intervals of production increase — from hourly to daily to weekly to monthly to annually — the incentives shift away from being merely provocative and towards being more informative. Rage-baiting never disappears altogether, but books aren’t well-suited to it: even the angriest book has to have passages of relative calm, which allows the reader to stop and think — a terrible consequence for the dedicated rage-baiter.

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe, though I have in the past made the case for idiocy. But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated. Try giving yourself a break from it. Look at this stuff at wider intervals, and in between sessions, give yourself time to think and assess.

UPDATE 2023–10–23: One tiny result of the Israel/Gaza nightmare, for me, is that it has revealed to me those among the writers I follow via RSS who are prone to making uninformed, dimwitted political pronouncements. Those feeds I have deleted without hesitation.

September 30, 2023

I’m with “the bloggers”

Noam Scheiber’s report on the controversies surrounding the work of Francesca Gino is … well, it’s terrible. Let me count (some of) the ways.

Let’s start with the title: “The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers.” Now, journalists typically don’t title their own pieces, but throughout the report Scheiber refers to the people who run Data Colada as “the bloggers.” The point seems to be to contrast a Figure of Recognized Authority (“the Harvard professor”) with her online critics (“the bloggers”) — a tactic reminiscent of the days when journalists sneered at people who sit around in their pajamas typing on their laptops. But these critics are also professors, at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, the Wharton School at Penn, and the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley. It’s only late in the report, after an extensive and fawning portrait of the suffering Professor Gino, that Scheiber acknowledges the academic credentials of those who have called attention to apparent anomalies in Gino’s research. But he still calls them “the bloggers.”

Second: Scheiber writes, “Even the bloggers, who published a four-part series laying out their case in June and a follow-up this month, have acknowledged that there is no smoking gun proving it was Dr. Gino herself who falsified data.” What does “even the bloggers” mean? There’s nothing unusual or noteworthy about “the bloggers” not directly accusing Gino of dishonesty, because that’s not what they do. They point to apparent anomalies — often, inconsistencies between (a) the conclusions drawn by scholars and (b) the data they claim to be drawing on — in research papers; it is not their job to figure out how the anomalies got there. They aren’t looking for a “smoking gun” in the hands of Professor Gino.

In general, Scheiber seems to have seen it as his job to take up Gino’s sense of outrage. He says very strange things, like “She did not present as a fraud.” Well, of course. One cannot succeed in deceiving people if one presents as a fraud. The statement is an irrelevance. Similarly, Scheiber says that Gino often provided “a plausible answer” when he questioned her. But what his questions were, what her answers were, why he found them plausible, and how all that relates to the evidence provided at Data Colada — we’re not told any of that.

Finally: Scheiber seems not to have asked what, to me, would be the single most obvious question: Why is she suing “the bloggers”? Apparently the cause is “defamation,” but how does the think they have defamed her simply by pointing to anomalies in her published research papers? The closest Scheiber comes to approaching the issue is in this passage:

… the bloggers publicly revealed their evidence: In the sign-at-the-top paper, a digital record in an Excel file posted by Dr. Gino indicated that data points were moved from one row to another in a way that reinforced the study’s result.

Dr. Gino now saw the blog in more sinister terms. She has cited examples of how Excel’s digital record is not a reliable guide to how data may have been moved.

“What I’ve learned is that it’s super risky to jump to conclusions without the complete evidence,” she told me.

Nothing about this makes sense. First of all, what is “sinister” about noting a manipulation of data in an Excel sheet? If that’s wrong, what’s wrong about it? What “conclusions” did the Data Colada investigation “jump to”? And above all, even if all of her criticisms are correct, why not offer a rational refutation rather than file a lawsuit? Suing her employer, Harvard, makes obvious sense, since Harvard has suspended her from her job without pay and is seeking to revoke her tenure. Faced with similar circumstances I might also sue. But suing people for writing that the data meant to support certain conclusions seems to have been manipulated by person or persons unknown? That requires some explanation.

Scheiber doesn’t ask any of these questions. He’s not interested in anything except a profile of a wounded person. But I agree with the lawyer for “the bloggers” who says that such a lawsuit is “a direct attack on academic inquiry.” What Gino is doing certainly looks like a straightforward attempt to intimidate into silence anyone who might ask hard questions about her research. I came away from Scheiber’s pseudo-inquiry thinking that I need to contribute to Data Colada’s legal defense fund. I don’t believe that’s what Scheiber intended.

August 31, 2023

an exercise in branding

I decided to take a flyer on this — and am kinda wishing I didn’t. It’s fun to get a newspaper in the mail, and I like the look; the parodies of the way headlines were written 125 years ago (several layers deep) are well-done, though they’re imitating what Harry Smith did better in his famous Anthology of American Folk Music:

(That’s a photo of my copy.)

The problem is that in this first issue the writing is largely indifferent, and once I saw the puff piece on RFK Jr. I knew that this is an exercise in branding — and trolling — more than a serious attempt to finding a new (old) way of doing journalism.

Yeah, I get it, you want to own those smug coastal elites. And that’s fine, I guess; but I’m not interested in subsidizing it. I’ve read some excellent writing from David Samuels, but this really is a puff piece, and any responsible editor would’ve asked Samuels to tone down the worshipful rhetoric or at least to ask some serious questions. Unfortunately, Samuels is the editor, or one of them, along with Walter Kirn. Other pieces (some of them also by writers I’ve enjoyed in the past) lack clear structure, or are poorly paced, or succumb to sentimentality and cliché. Maybe things will get better, but I’m not exactly looking forward to the next issue.

April 14, 2023

Reporting World War II

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This is the two-volume Library of America anthology of World War II journalism — reports sent back from the field, or written on the home front, tracking the war week by week — and these books have given me one of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. It has taken me a long time to get through them; sometimes after only twenty or thirty pages I had to set the book aside for a while, for a few days or a week, and return to it when my nerves had settled.

That war is arguably (I want to say “surely”) the worst thing to have happened to humanity — any true account of it features horror after horror after horror; so much so that after a while you wonder whether you should be reading about it at all. Something James Agee wrote about watching documentary footage of the war — originally published in The Nation in March of 1945 and included in the second of these volumes — is compelling about its specific topic, but also about even reading these accounts of the nightmare:

I am beginning to believe that, for all that may be said in favor of our seeing these terrible records of war, we have no business seeing this sort of experience except through our presence and participation…. Perhaps I can briefly suggest what I mean by this rough parallel: whatever other effects it may or may not have, pornography is invariably degrading to anyone who looks at or reads it. If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be quite as profoundly degrading ourselves and, in the process, betraying and separating ourselves the farther from those we are trying to identify ourselves with; none the less because we tell ourselves sincerely that we sit in comfort and watch carnage in order to nurture our patriotism, our conscience, our understanding, and our sympathies.

A necessary point powerfully put. Yet on balance I do think the war is worth reading about, if for no reason than to cure the reader of the sheer frivolity endemic to our current political discourse, especially the discourse of our politicians. Our political world is a room in which there are no grownups, and if it does nothing else reading these accounts will bring that fact quite forcibly home to you. But it also reminds us of — here I want to avoid the all-too-common phrase “what human beings are capable of,” because the real point to be noted is not what we can do but what so often we gleefully or determinedly do. What we seem hard-wired to do, and to do more effectually as the power of the nation-state (supported by its corporate allies) increases. But that’s a topic for another day.

Some writers appear frequently here, and two stand out most vividly in my mind. The first is A. J. Liebling — after reading a few of his pieces I was so taken by their brilliance that I stopped reading them and bought the LoA volume devoted to his war writing. I’ll read that one straight through when I can. The other is Martha Gellhorn, who spent much of the war writing for Collier’s.

I’ll end here by quoting one passage in particular, in part because it reminds me that even in the midst of the horror there were dignity and grace and … something still more. In the immediate aftermath of D-Day Gellhorn, having been denied a press pass, disguised herself as a nurse and slipped onto the first hospital ship sent to gather and treat the wounded from the beaches of Normandy. Having been loaded with injured soldiers, Allied and German alike, the ship moved back into open water, headed for England. As the doctors (four of them), nurses (six), and orderlies (fourteen) worked desperately and nonstop to treat hundreds of men, German fighters swarmed overhead trying to kill them all. Gellhorn:

The American medical personnel, most of whom had never been in an air raid, tranquilly continued their work, asked no questions, showed no sign even of interest in this uproar, and handed out confidence as if it were a solid thing like bread. If I seem to insist too much in my admiration for these people, understand that one cannot insist too much. There is a kind of devotion, coupled with competence, which is almost too admirable to talk about; and they had all of it that can be had.

February 17, 2023

Nick Catoggio:

Dominion might win its suit notwithstanding the general truth of what Kevin [Williamson] said in his piece, that “nothing short of a signed and notarized statement of intent to commit libel seems to satisfy judges or juries” in modern defamation litigation. What the company aimed to show in its nearly 200-page brief is that, by word and deed, Fox personnel from management on down did all but openly confess their intent to commit libel. They acknowledged privately that Trump’s conspiracy theories were false; they were warned repeatedly that those theories were false; they pressed ahead on the air with the big lie anyway.

But even if Dominion loses, it’ll have extracted a measure of moral compensation. Whatever else one might call programming that suppresses the truth if it might offend the audience, “news” ain’t it. (“Propaganda” sounds about right.) No one who reads Dominion’s pleading will ever look at Fox the same way. That’s why the company filed it.

I’ve been reading the pleading and … it’s something else. If Dominion doesn’t win this suit, then there is no law against defamation in this country, and “news” outlets can say anything they want about anyone at any time with absolute disregard for the truth. Which, come to think of it, is what they do already, I guess. Does anyone really believe that the NYT didn’t demonstrate “actual malice” against Sarah Palin when it repeatedly lied that she played a role in Gabby Giffords’ shooting? Of course not. It’s just that a lot of people believe that Palin is an official Bad Person and therefore deserves to be lied about.

Which is why Operation Diogenes must go on!

February 9, 2023

Operation Diogenes

I don’t usually think much about things I have already published, but I have continued to meditate on the subject I wrote about here — and there’s good reason for that, I believe. You read a story like this one and you realize how pervasively the people who profit from minors who (supposedly) suffer from gender dysphoria lie. They lie about the conditions of the children who come to them, they lie about the likely effects of their interventions, they lie about what they do and don’t do — they lie about everything and it seems that they never stop lying. But then, we in this country also spent four years with a President and a White House staff who lied virtually every time they opened their mouths — lied even when there was no clear advantage to lying, evermore pursuing the preferential option for bullshit.

I could provide ten thousand examples, but I don’t think it’s necessary: we all know that this is the situation we’re in. There’s a lot of talk right now — thanks to this op-ed by Leonard Downie — about “objectivity” in journalism, which term I think is a red herring: nobody has any clear idea what it means. I have never asked whether a journalist is objective; I have often asked whether a journalist is telling me the truth. And when Downie says that renouncing objectivity is a newspaper’s path to “building trust” with readers, what he clearly means is that you gain your readers’ trust by sending a strong message: We will never tell you truths you don’t want to hear; we will always tell you consoling lies; and that’s how we’ll get you to give us your money. He means nothing more or less or other than that.

So I think there is no more important question for us to ask than this: Given that almost everyone in the media is lying to us constantly, how can we discover what is true — especially when the truth hurts?

Many years ago there was a huge investigation in Chicago into systemic corruption in the judiciary. It was called Operation Greylord, and it had several offshoots, because more and more corruption was uncovered. My wife ended up on one of the grand juries — for eighteen months she took the train into Chicago every Wednesday to hear testimony — and one of the occasional topics of discussion was what the prosecutors should call their inquiry. They ended up calling it Operation Lantern, because someone thought the original suggestion too fancypants: Operation Diogenes. The prosecutors felt that, like Diogenes with his lantern, they were looking for, but apparently failing to find, one honest man.

That’s what we need for journalism in America: our very own Operation Diogenes. And if we can’t find anyone willing to tell us the truth, then how can we discover it on our own? That’s the question we ought to be asking.

January 30, 2023

The Media Very Rarely Lies – by Scott Alexander:

Suppose Infowars claimed that police shootings in the US cannot be racially motivated, because police shoot slightly more white people each year than black people (this is true). This is missing important context: there are ~5x as many white people in the US as black people, so police shooting only slightly more white people suggests that police are shooting black people at ~5x higher rates. But I claim it’s also a failure of contextualization when NYT claims police shootings must be racially motivated because they happen to black people at a 5x higher rate, without adding the context that police are called to black neighborhoods at about a 5x higher rate and so have no more likelihood per encounter of shooting a black person than a white person. Perhaps the failure to add context is an honest mistake, perhaps a devious plot to manipulate the populace — but the two cases stand or fall together with each other, and with other failures of contextualization like Infowars’ vaccine adverse response data.

But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other. But I would argue this is honest disagreement — exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas, rather than by there being some easy objective definition of “enough context” which a censor can interpret mechanically in some fair, value-neutral way.

I think the difference between Infowars and The New York Times is fairly clear. Because Infowars only covers issues that its editors and readers are exercised about, its stories are reliably dishonest. By contrast, the Times covers a much broader range of stories. When those stories don’t touch on the deep prejudices of the newspaper’s staff and readers, then they can usually be trusted; but on the hot-button issues, the Times is no more trustworthy than Infowars.

January 29, 2023

I’m not crazy about David French’s going to the NYT, because I think we need more excellent writers — and David is an excellent writer — outside the orbit of the Big Media. I guess the upside is that he’ll find some new readers. Still, no real credit to the NYT here. Over the past few years they’ve hired a fairly wide range of opinion columnists, but they suffer from a lamentable shortage of reporters who will discover and report truths that the Times’s audience doesn’t want to hear. Hiring David French is nothing; hiring Matt Taibbi or Chris Arnade would be something.

January 2, 2023

When did this practice of writing accusatory and dictatorial headlines begin? It’s universal now. It must get clicks, but why would people want to read stories whose headlines accuse them of error and demand that they change their ways? I never read stories that are headlined in this way.

December 16, 2022

I’ll believe in AI when I can say, “Hey Siri, please hide from me all references to AI. Also every conversation in which journalists snark at other journalists. And, no references to Twitter or Mastodon.”

December 9, 2022

In my experience — and I do have some experience with this phenomenon — when a journalistic outlet responds to criticism by saying “We stand by our story,” that always means that (a) they know they have been caught red-handed in either dishonesty or incompetence, (b) they cannot stage a proper defense of their work, but (c) they are unwilling to confess their shortcomings.

December 2, 2022

I like my job

Derek Thompson:

“These language models enable the automation of certain tasks that we’ve historically considered part of the creative process,” Olson told me. I couldn’t help but agree. Writing is less than half of my job; most of my work is reading and deciding what’s important enough for me to put in a paragraph. If I could train an AI to read as I do, and to determine significance as I do, I’d be essentially building a second mind for myself.

So Derek Thompson wants to oursource his research, and, as we saw yesterday, Noah Smith wants to outsource his writing. Is this boredom or frustration with the basic elements of their work universal among journalists these days?

I hope I’m not the only one, but just for the record: I like researching, and I like writing. I like the hard work of making my prose more clear and vivid. I like overcoming my ignorance. I like synthesizing the disparate things I read and then trying to present that synthesis to my readers. I like it all.

UPDATE: As I was walking this morning I suddenly understood the most fundamental thing that’s wrong with the way Smith and Thompson think about these matters: Smith assumes that at the outset of a writing project he already knows what he wants to say and just has to get it said; Thompson assumes at the outset of a writing project that he understands what he needs to know and just has to find a way to know it. But for me writing isn’t anything like that. For me writing is discovery, discovering what I need to say — which often is something I had no intention of saying when I set out. And some of the most important research I have ever done has been serendipitous: I have been looking for one thing and instead (or in addition) found something quite different, something I didn’t know I needed but, it turns out, is essential to me.

November 10, 2022

stats

Just a quick reminder that the use of statistics to mislead is a never-ending thing: The Guardian, in an attempt to cast a skeptical eye on Ron DeSantis, notes that Florida “had the third-highest death toll of any US state.” Now, I am no fan of Ron DeSantis, to say the least, but come on: Florida is the third most populous state, so it would be very surprising if it didn’t have one of the highest death tolls. Plus, it has a very high percentage of elderly residents, and as we all know, the elderly are significantly more endangered by Covid than any other age group.

The relevant statistic here — if you’re interested specifically in deaths — is number of deaths per 100,000 residents, and by that measure Florida is 12th. Nothing to boast about, certainly, but better than Michigan and New Jersey and only slightly worse than Pennsylvania and New York — again, despite having an older population than any of those states. It’s also 21st in percentage of residents vaccinated.

I’m calling attention to this not because I want to defend DeSantis, but merely to note a reliable journalistic practice: If the relevant statistics don’t tell the story you want to peddle, then choose irrelevant statistics that do. Most readers won’t ask questions.

The actual story of Florida and Covid is extremely interesting, I think, precisely because the evidence doesn’t yield clear answers. Derk Thompson has a good piece on these complexities.

October 4, 2022

seed funding for the arts

The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing – by Ted Gioia:

There are a hundred non-profit foundations in the arts that could solve this problem with a modest allocation of resources. If the Duke Foundation, for example, funded 50 people in 50 cities with $50K per year to cover their local music scene it would cost a grand total of $2.5 million. And, if they got ambitious, they could place 4 writers in each city, and still only spend around $10 million.

Did you get that? You could have in-depth arts coverage in every major city for less than the cost of a sneaker endorsement from a third-tier NBA star or the salary of the University of Alabama’s football coach. That’s chump change for those well-funded arts institutions, and it would have an immediate positive impact on culture and arts everywhere in this country.

But they don’t do it. They don’t even consider doing it, as far as I can tell. Who can say why. Maybe journalism isn’t glamorous enough for institutions that prefer to anoint geniuses.

This is a brilliant idea by Ted, and I desperately hope some foundation leaders will read it. Throwing money at “geniuses” — the great majority of whom are already well-fixed — is like giving your money to Yale or Harvard, AKA hedge funds with universities loosely attached. It does nothing to nurture or generate a culture of creativity — and a culture is precisely what we need.

September 28, 2022

fighting the good fight

Some initial axioms:

The U.S. has some genuine conservatives and genuine liberals, but not enough — or maybe it’s just that they’re not vocal enough;
Our attentional commons is dominated by a perverse so-called Right and a perverse so-called Left, people with profoundly deformed sensibilities and broken moral compasses;
These people are doing terrible damage to that commons and at least some degree of damage to our polis (they are sometimes restrained in the latter endeavor by a still-functioning legal system);
It’s very difficult to write or speak about what these people are doing without falling into some of their own rhetorical excesses;
Therefore those who think and write and speak seriously and responsibly about the flailings of our Imps of the Perverse do the Lord’s work (whether they believe in the Lord or not).

So if you want to understand what’s going on — rather than be subjected to endless mutual recriminations or the gentle ministrations of those low-lifes who make bank when we hate one another — then here are some of the people I believe you should pay attention to.

If you want roughly equal attention to pathologies across the political spectrum, then I don’t think you can do much better than Andrew Sullivan. And while I am not in general a podcast guy, Andrew turns out to be a wonderful interviewer, and his conversations with his guests often take delightfully unexpected turns.

Regular readers here will know that I have long been concerned by Christians who are willing to sacrifice obedience to Jesus if it will get them political power and/or cultural influence. Well, their gentle and equable scourge is David French, whose work you can find many places, but especially here and here.

There’s an extremely vocal school of trans activism that has come to control much our our media and a large part of the academy as well. To put it bluntly, in these matters we are regularly being lied to by our media, and a troublingly large number of scientists appear quite willing to cook their books in order to satisfy the demands of this movement. Jesse Singal does yeoman work digging into the details of this pervasive mendacity and putting hard questions to the perpetrators — but he does it in a consistently measured way and is always forthright in admitting when he gets something wrong. If you’re a podcast person, then you may well enjoy Blocked and Reported, the podcast he does with Katie Herzog, AKA “the last lesbian.”

By the way, the special report on sexuality and gender produced by The New Atlantis six years ago (!) is still very helpful. And of course, as a long-time contributor, I love that journal. A new issue came in the mail today and I leaped into it.

On the problems that arise when academics don’t care about what’s true any more, but only about what serves their political ends — and their careers — a couple of people are key, and they’re both named Jonathan. The first is Jonathan Haidt, who is prolific and sometimes seems omnipresent; I’d start with the essays listed here. The other is Jonathan Rauch, whose work is more scattered but just as valuable. His book The Constitution of Knowledge is essential, but you might want to begin with this recent essay on politicized science.

If Katie Herzog is the Last Lesbian, Freddie deBoer may be the Last Socialist.

Finally, here are a few newsletters on (broadly speaking) political topics that I find consistently useful — and useful because they’re not shilling for anyone or anything, a rare virtue these days:

John McWhorter
Yair Rosenberg
Zeynep Tufecki
Damon Linker
Noah Millman
Leah Libresco Sargeant (though Leah is more culture-oriented, like me)

A lot of this stuff is on Substack, but maybe Substack is just where you have to go when you need to make a living but won’t toe the party line at one of the established media outlets.

I’m grateful to these writers because they do the hard work that makes it possible for me to focus on arts and culture. I care about the things they care about, but I don’t have their very particular set of skills, and the skills (the knowledge, the sensibilities) I do have are best employed in other venues.

P.S. Sometime I’ll do a list of arts/culture/technology blogs and newsletters that I like. Or maybe I’ll go totally retro and make a blogroll!

September 8, 2022

I know this kind of thing is totally normal now — one of the most characteristic ways for journalists to use Twitter — but let’s be clear what it’s saying: I already know what the thesis of my story will be, so please write if you can confirm my thesis. He doesn’t want to hear from anyone who might offer an alternative account to the one he has already settled on.

May 4, 2022

Andrey Mir (note Mir’s definition: “Postjournalism is journalism that is economically forced to take a political side and produce polarization and anger in order to trigger the audience’s loyalty and donations in the form of subscription”):

There are two parallel and intertwining processes defining the conditions of agenda-setting. First, journalism is mutating into postjournalism, and the largest news media orgs are turning into the crowdfunded ‘Ministries of post-truth’. Second, old media in general are becoming a part of the digital media environment dominated by social media with their own intrinsic polarization bias. As a result, old and new media are conjointly and interdependently contributing to polarization. The mechanisms and motives, however, are different. Social media polarization is a side effect of better user engagement for better ad targeting. Old media polarize the audience for better soliciting of support. But both produce polarization because of the very design of their business models.

Fake news is not the principal problem in this new media environment. The impact of fake news is already mitigated by the users’ growing immunity and also by the growing noise that diminishes the potency of fake news’ impact. The critical issue of the new media environment is polarization. It is systemic and profound; no ecosystem factor is seen on the horizon that might limit or counteract the polarizing effect of new and old media. Even the ongoing decline of old media will not solve the problem, as they will remain the discursive platform for the public sphere for another 5–10 years. This is sufficiently long enough to cause significant damage in the area where the affective and agenda-setting polarization of social media gets articulated and transferred into political discourses that shape the public sphere, politics, policies and electoral outcomes.

April 23, 2022

a tiny rant

Recently I listened to a highly-regarded political podcast in which some of the participants referred to Senator Fine-Stine while others spoke of Senator Fine-Steen. I have several thoughts:

Any journalists who plan to talk about a person for half an hour in public have a positive moral obligation to decide in advance how that person’s name is to be pronounced.
It is not difficult to discover how Senator Feinstein pronounces her name, so what does it say about journalists’ commitment to their job when they can’t be bothered to find out?
The mispronunciation some of them chose is not just wrong but indefensible, because the syllable -ein cannot legitimately pronounced one way in the first half of a name and a different way in the second half of the name.
I blame Leonard Bernstein for this confusion. As far as I know, he is the first famous American with a name ending in -stein who chose to pronounce it -steen. Now it’s a question for everybody in the same nominative condition.
Note, though, that there’s never a debate when someone’s name begins with Stein or simply is Stein.
I think we should all pronounce names that end with -stein the correct way (the Einstein Way, let’s call it) (the Ein Steinway?) and if anyone with such a name wants to pronounce it -steen we should tell them that they’re wrong and refuse to comply.

UPDATE: Matt Stover has written to inform me that — as Tom Wolfe has informed others — Leonard Bernstein pronounced his name Bern-Stine and corrected those who called him Bern-steen. I had always heard his name pronounced in the latter way and thought him responsible. Turns out I was, unforgivably, blaming the victim. On the other side of the ledger, my friend Joe Mangina — who shall be cited in a forthcoming post — reminds me of this.

April 19, 2022

Welles and the newspapers

From the Preface to the first volume of Simon Callow’s biography of Orson Welles:

He publicly constructed himself, from the earliest age — my first press clipping is headed ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST AND ONLY TEN — in a medium that he courted and denounced in equal measure; and the press returned the compliment. Together they concluded a sort of Faustian pact wherein Welles was meteorically advanced by sensation-hungry newspapers, to whom he pandered shamelessly, until at the height of his fame he fell foul of them; saddled with a preposterous reputation and a personality drawn by him and coloured by them, he found himself unemployable, his work overshadowed by his ever-expanding Self. Even his body became legendary, out of control; whatever his soul consisted of protected from the world by wadding. Locked in a personal relationship as complex and curious as that of Lear and his fool, Welles and the newspapers needed and abominated each other in a co-dependency that only his death dissolved. It is no coincidence that his most famous work is the apotheosis of the newspaper film.

An interesting addendum to my argument that one can profitably see Citizen Kane as a comedy about newspapers.

March 28, 2022

Invasion of the Fact-Checkers – Tablet Magazine:

The pandemic would shine an especially harsh light on the role of fact-checkers as information cops for America’s power elite—and the dangers of that role. Far from identifying “dangerous misinformation,” fact checkers were instrumental in the multipronged effort to suppress inquiries into the origins of the global pandemic that has killed nearly 6 million people. In February 2020, The Washington Post chided Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton for promoting a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” that COVID-19 had escaped from a lab. In May 2020, the Post‘s Glenn Kessler, who is a member of the IFCN advisory board, said it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. Those were the facts … until a year later, when Kessler published a new article explaining how the “lab-leak theory suddenly became credible.”

How to understand the epistemological process that could lead a seasoned fact-checker to do a 180 on a matter of utmost public importance in less than a year? The simple answer, which has nothing to do with Kessler’s individual character or talents, is that when it really counts, the fact-checker’s role is not to investigate the truth but to uphold the credibility of official sources and their preferred narratives. Kessler’s mind changed at the very moment when the Democratic Party machinery began charting a new course on an issue that was hurting the party at the polls.

March 10, 2022

Graeme Wood:

Various journalists complained that I described MBS as personally “charming” and “intelligent.” To this my reply is twofold. First, MBS was indeed charming and intelligent, and if you want me to say otherwise, then you want to be lied to. Second, if you think charm and intelligence are incompatible with being a sociopath, then your years in Washington, D.C., have taught you less than nothing.

Any publication bragging that it is too sanctimonious to accept an invitation to interview the crown prince of Saudi Arabia is admitting it cannot cover Saudi Arabia. The Atlantic is not in the business of sanctimony, and it expects its readers to understand, without being told, that someone who dwells on his own indignities as the result of a murder, rather than on the suffering of the victim, might not be the perfect steward of absolute power.

Three points in response:

This is precisely correct.
Wood’s profile of MBS is absolutely brilliant.
The complaints about it are yet further evidence of Twitter’s ability to transform intelligent people into complete idiots.

January 26, 2022

your questions answered

Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint? No.

Was the Life of Dorothy Day Too Catholic for the New York Times to Grasp? Yes.

October 1, 2021

news as religion

Matt Taibbi:

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

I know I have been banging this drum for a long time — here, here, and in greatest detail here — but I think it’s better to consider these systems of beliefs as myths, as emerging from what Kołakowski calls “the mythical core of culture,” rather than religion.

UPDATE: This from Sally Satel is relevant:

An ambitious new study … by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues … proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld — with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

But before conservatives start up the “the left is worse” chorus, note this:

I asked Costello whether left-wing and right-wing authoritarians exist in equal proportions. “It is hard to know the ratio,” he said, making clear that a subject’s receptivity to authoritarianism falls on a continuum, like other personality characteristics or even height, so using hard-and-fast categories (authoritarian versus nonauthoritarian) can be tricky. “Still, some preliminary work shows the ratio is about the same if you average across the globe,” he said. In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada.

June 8, 2021

not giving up

One way to describe the Invitation and Repair project is to say that it’s for people who haven’t given up. One should always be hesitant to make broad social generalizations by haunting social media platforms or the websites that have become parasitical on social media — i.e., most newspapers and magazines —, but it’s clear that that world, at least, is dominated by people who have given up on some things that no healthy society ever gives up on.

People drag supposed racists or transphobes or whatever on Twitter because they have given up on achieving real social change.

Politicians strut and fret their hour on the social-media stage because they have given up on meaningful legislative work.

Partisans smear and mock those who disagree with them because they have given up on persuasion.

Journalists default to advocacy because they have given up on finding and telling the truth.

Readers and viewers of journalism seek and share misinformation because they have given up on learning the truth.

Violent thugs assault the U.S. Capitol or loot their own neighborhoods because they have given up on democracy.

All of the good things given up on require hard, patient work; none of the replacements do. They’re easy and quick; they promise immediate rewards (though whether what they in fact give amounts to “rewards” is a matter for debate). But when we invite and repair we manifest hope: we look towards a future of cooperative endeavor — cooperative discovery, cooperative healing.

The hopeful refuse mindslaughter; the hopeful join the United Front Against Bullshit.

May 27, 2021

the death of journalism

From Charlie Warzel’s newsletter:

Julia Marcus: I’m fairly new to Twitter but it’s felt to me that the people who are amplified in news media as experts are often the people who have large followings on Twitter, which creates this feedback loop that can build a false sense of consensus. And that makes it very difficult to put forth alternative perspectives. It’s hard to imagine how the pandemic would’ve played out without social media but it feels to me that social media contributed to an unhelpful polarization of the discussion.

Charlie Warzel: I’ve heard public health people say that before everyone flocked to social media a lot of these scientific discussions were happening on private listservs or messageboards and in those spaces there was room for disagreement or to express a greater spectrum of doubt. It was a safe space. And then the discussion moved into the public and it was distorted. Is that true in your experience?

JM: Twitter rewards certainty. How often do you see a tweet go viral when somebody is unsure about something? And it’s an addictive process. Certainty is rewarded, high emotion is rewarded, especially anger and fear, and it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon. When the scientific discourse largely moves onto social media it begins to degrade. I think it moved to social media because it was the easiest way to get the word out, and because so many scientists were working at home and social media provided a forum for conversations in their fields. But sometimes it has felt more like a middle school cafeteria than a scientific discussion.

From Zeynep Tufekci’s newsletter:

Many top media outlets took this group of critics’ dismissal of a version of the lab leak hypothesis and then acted like that dismissal was universal and a scientific consensus, which it wasn’t, or was conclusive, which it couldn’t be simply because we … don’t know. We certainly didn’t have the evidence we need to be so conclusive, especially not at the time.

In addition, press reports suggested that everything that fell under the umbrella of the term ‘lab leak,’ which has been a conceptual mess, had also been dismissed, although it hadn’t been, even by some of the original opponents of that particular version.

Then, for a whole year, the coverage implied that any question or statement skeptical of the lab leak critics, broadly defined, was essentially unscientific and could only be motivated by racism. Social media sites took down posts, and even news articles that made such claims.

In the meantime, the reporters did not do the leg work to separate the pieces of the question or seek a broad range of experts. If they had, they might have realized that many experts were quiet on the topic partly because they didn’t want to die on this hill last year, and partly because many were actually eminent experts very very busy doing work on the pandemic itself. Unfortunately, many media outlets failed to do the work necessary to pull themselves out of the tight Twitter/media feedback loop that dominates so much of our media coverage.

Twitter has absolutely killed journalism. Killed it stone dead. And there’s not one journalist in a hundred who has brains enough to realize it.

April 27, 2021

Re: the Substackfication-of-journalism stuff I’ve been writing about lately, this interview with Ted Gioia is fascinating.

And I now see that the always-smart Megan McArdle has weighed in. One small dissent, though: She writes, “There are some reasons to think that Substack might survive a march of the incumbents” — and by “incumbents” she means (a) the major social-media platforms and (b) the major newspapers and magazines, because both (a) and (b) are getting into the newsletter game. But I’d argue that in relation to paid newsletters, Substack is the chief incumbent. The genre has been around long enough for me to say that, I think.

March 15, 2021

the new heretics

Last July I wrote that we were just a few weeks away from a #BoycottSubstack hashtag, and while things have moved a little more slowly than I thought they would, they’re moving in the direction I predicted. The increasing volume and shrillness of the attacks on Substack are a direct result of frustration and anger by people who work for magazines and newspapers that some of the most widely read Substack writers are producing journalism.

Most people who write for newspapers and magazines, especially those who call themselves “reporters,” don’t do journalism anymore; they practice what Andrey Mir calls postjournalism:

Postjournalism is journalism that sells the audience to the public by soliciting donations in the form of subscription. Classical journalism pretended to be objective; it strived to depict the world-as-it-is. Postjournalism is openly normative; it imposes the world-as-it-should-be.

Similar to propaganda, postjournalism openly promotes an ideological view. What distinguishes it from propaganda, however, is that postjournalism mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business imperative required for the media to survive. Postjournalism is not the product of a choice but is the consequence of the change in the media business model. […]

The media practicing postjournalism produce nothing else but the donating audience through the manufacture of its anger. Their agenda production entails no consumption. Nobody learns news from this agenda. It does not even have any impact on the assumed audience. Real propaganda involves the proliferation of ideas and values. However, postjournalism cannot do even that. Those whom it is supposed to reach and convert are already trapped in the same agenda bubble.

Glenn Greenwald has written brilliantly about the wrath of the postjournalists here. Greenwald is a prickly character, to be sure, and hasn’t been reluctant to make enemies. But about this matter he is correct, and profoundly so:

Do you see how these online journalists have been taught to think about themselves and the world? Do you see the bottomless sense of entitlement and self-regard and fragility that defines who they are and how they behave? They specialize in trying to ruin people’s reputations and wreck their lives — not just other journalists but private citizens — but the minute someone objects to their journalism or what they say or do, they summon a team of teachers, psychologists, therapy dogs, digital police officers and tech executives to demand that their critics be silenced and their anguish be treated. They really do believe that the world should be organized so as to authorize them to attack whoever they want, while banning anyone who criticizes them when they do it.

The anger of the postjournalists at the Substack journalists like Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Taibbi is the anger of those who have abandoned their historic role, and the ethical constraints associated with it, and do not want to be confronted by anyone who declines to make that move. People like Glenn Greenwald practiced journalism before the postjournalism movement fully took hold, and they are continuing to practice journalism now. This is an intolerable offense to the postjournalists.

I think a closely analogous situation obtains in the relationship between the Bible teacher Beth Moore and the Southern Baptist Convention. Beth Moore continues to hold the views that she held before Donald Trump came on the scene, and has never seen any reason why the rise of Donald Trump should cause her to abandon the biblical standards by which she has tried to govern her life, and by which she has expected other Christians to try to govern theirs. Just as the postjournalists changed course and despise those who have not changed with them, so also many leaders of the SBC shifted from their traditional conviction that “character counts” in order to enable rank idolatry, and cannot forgive people like Beth Moore for not shifting with them.*

I’m old enough to remember when heresy was understood to be deviation from long-establish beliefs and practices. But in a social-media environment that issues new commandments every fortnight or so, the heretics now are the ones who don’t deviate when told to do so. And they are hated with particular intensity because they are a living, breathing reproach to their colleagues’ complete lack of ethical standards.

February 17, 2021

two quotations on journalism

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

[James] Poulos holds that the old mass-media mandarins are trying to “encode” their ethical dreams into the new digital-media world, before it is too late. One can see this most clearly in the moral panic about social media and which speakers get a platform on it. The New York Times doesn’t report on what is being said on new social-media networks such as Clubhouse; it reports on what shouldn’t be said there….

The new digital media has its own biases. It also has elements of fantasy. But its currency and legitimacy — its value as a business — comes not from ethical dreams, but the secure database management of events, which it interprets as truths. Many Silicon Valley founders and thinkers have intuited this and tried to make themselves fall in love with the idea of hard and unpleasant truths — the things that cannot be uttered ethically at places like the New York Times.

The conflict between one clerisy and another is just beginning.

Freddie deBoer:

I try to avoid looking at Media Twitter as much as I can; spending more than a few minutes in that space leaves one needing to decontaminate as if recently exposed to radiation. So I don’t know for sure if this is true. But I’m going to make the easiest bet in the world and say that media Twitter loves [Cade] Metz’s [hit] piece [on Scott Alexander]. And they loved it because, again, Alexander is not one of them. He’s not in the New York media social rat race, so he’s not a part of their culture. He’s not on Slack. He doesn’t tell the same tired, shitty jokes that journalists make on Twitter literally from the minute they get up to the minute they go to bed. He’s not performatively filling his feed with only women writers and artists, because he’s just not that interested in cishet men anymore, man. He doesn’t make references to whatever shithouse bar in Nolita media people used to go to after work to snort coke. He doesn’t use Twitter as an outlet to scream his dedication to BIPOC to the world, knowing this will look good on his resume. He’s not a thirty-three year old white person who speaks like a Black teenager, like half the journalists on Twitter. And most importantly, he jumped the line. He didn’t get paid $250 a week by Refinery79 for 60 hours of work for two years to climb the latter. He had the audacity to think that he could circumvent the system and challenge the official narratives….

Again: Alexander is an outsider. His readers don’t pay the Times for access to their shitty recipes. He’s probably never heard of Clubhouse. Unlike everyone on Media Twitter, he’s got a real job. He’s a lost cause. They will always hate him because he’s indifferent to climbing their rancid social hierarchy, the thing they care about the most in the whole world.

February 13, 2021

mendacity on Eighth Avenue

The other day I posted what I thought was a rather witty little aside in which I said that the New York Times might have more interesting material than Fox News but might also have lower journalistic standards. It was meant as a joke, because, of course, Fox News doesn’t have any journalistic standards. But now that I’ve read the Times’s smear of Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex, I’m not sure that I see my post as a joke any more. The profile, which I don’t even want to link to, is astonishingly dishonest from beginning to end. What’s not an outright lie is a wild distortion; what isn’t a wild distortion is an undisguised attempt to mislead. It is a festival of mendacity.

If you want more details, Scott Aaronson has them. (And Aaronson doesn’t think as badly of the hit job as I do.) Aaronson’s key point:

The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements [ED: I think it does], but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present. I repeatedly muttered to myself, as I read: “dude, you could make anything sound shady with this exact same rhetorical toolkit!”

Jesse Singal has more on the piece’s straightforward dishonesty. And here’s Scott Alexander’s own response.

Alasdair MacIntyre once called the New York Times “the parish magazine of self-congratulatory liberal Enlightenment.” Now, despite having some of the best columnists in America, the paper’s reporting side is just the Fox News of the semi-literate left.

February 11, 2021

weighed in the balance

I have never watched Fox News, but I used to read the New York Times. I therefore view both from a distance. But based on what I’ve seen, it seems pretty clear that I would find more to interest me in the Times, but Fox News has slightly higher standards of journalistic ethics.

January 25, 2021

three quotations on journalism

Matt Taibbi:

People like [Margaret] Sullivan would have you believe that “balance” is a mandate to give voice to clearly illegitimate points of view, but it’s really about not falling so completely in love with your “values” that you stop caring to avoid mistakes about those who don’t share them, or even just mistakes generally.

By any standard, the press had a terrible four years, from the mangling of dozens of Russiagate tales to scandals like the New York Times “Caliphate” disaster and the underappreciated Covington High School story fiasco. Still, many in the business can’t see how bad it’s been, because they’ve walled themselves off so completely from potential critics.

Damon Linker:

The point is not to try and convince the most hostile Republicans to tune back into mainstream media outlets. Many of them are unreachable by this point, showing less interest in doing or seeking out better reporting than in using accusations of double standards and hypocrisy to help build support for the right and attempt to tear down liberal institutions. Some go even further, to use the failings of professional journalism as a justification for pedaling deliberate distortions on alternative platforms. Those who take this position view all so-called news as a form of propaganda or information warfare and defend the deliberate promulgation of lies as a tit-for-tat response to the actions of their enemies: “If the left does it, then so should we, and with even less restraint.”

But there are plenty of Americans situated between the burn-it-all-down hyper-cynical right and the journalists and Democratic Party politicos who naively or enthusiastically passed around the CNN story last week. Whether the right succeeds in persuading more and more people to join them in tuning out mainstream journalism will depend in large part on whether its accusations of dishonesty and bad faith look accurate to observers. Does the media seem fair-minded and scrupulous in what it labels news? Or does it seem highly invested in enhancing the power of one side in our country’s deep political divide?

Andrey Mir:

The media practicing postjournalism produce nothing else but the donating audience through the manufacture of its anger. Their agenda production entails no consumption. Nobody learns news from this agenda. It does not even have any impact on the assumed audience. Real propaganda involves the proliferation of ideas and values. However, postjournalism cannot do even that. Those whom it is supposed to reach and convert are already trapped in the same agenda bubble.

The only “others” for the agenda bubble, made of the donating audience and their media, are the inhabitants of the opposite agenda bubble on the other side of the political spectrum. Paradoxically, postjournalism supplies not so much content but, rather, the reason for the foes’ existence and their motives, which justify their outrage and mobilization. However, there is also no expected agenda impact on opponents. The opponents do not consume ‘opposing’ content as information. They regard it as a source of energy to feed their anger. Polarization is the essential environmental condition and the only outcome of postjournalism (besides the earnings of the media that practice postjournalism).

Because of its self-containment and the need for energy input, postjournalism exists in a binary form in which the strength of the one side depends on the strength of the other. Their confrontation strengthens their audience-capturing power and maintains their business.

January 6, 2021

Planet Earth

I have a policy that I recommend to you. When I hear a politician who wants my vote, or a pundit who claims to explain what’s happening in politics and society, I ask one fundamental question: Does this person live on Planet Earth? And if the answer is No, which quite often it is, then I pay no further attention to that person.

December 13, 2020

sifting the words

I have decided that reading the news in America is like listening to Gollum. Gandalf:

“What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his ‘birthday-present’, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way, but to talk of her possessing many Elven-rings was absurd, and as for giving them away, it was a lie. But a lie with a grain of truth.”

Every time I read a news story I ask a series of questions:

Whom is this account trying to please?
Whom or what is it afraid of?
What pre-existing narrative is it meant to confirm?
What conclusions is it trying to prevent me from drawing?
From what inconvenient truths is it meant to distract me?
What is the “grain of truth” to be plucked from all the lies and distortions?

November 12, 2020

mistrust

An update on this post:

I occasionally read NYT news stories now, for a very particular reason: the newspaper’s two chief religion reporters, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, are former students of mine, and I am so proud of the careers they have made for themselves — they are both outstanding at what they do.

So I read whatever they write, but not much else, from the news side anyway. (Sometimes friends send me links and I will usually read those stories.) In general, I simply can’t rely on the NYT, any more than I can rely on Fox News, to tell the truth about anything that I really care about — and my suspicion has increased, if that’s possible, in the year since I wrote that post, thanks to the gradual conquest of the NYT newsroom by “insurrectionists” who openly disdain fair-minded reporting in favor of whatever stories and angles they think will serve their political agenda, AKA Justice.

Recently Elizabeth and Ruth were interviewed in the Times itself about “the challenges of covering religion during a pandemic in a campaign season,” and one thread that ran through the whole interview was reporting under conditions of mistrust. Elizabeth: “I’ve found conservatives are increasingly wary of talking with us no matter what the story is.” Ruth: “The rising distrust of the media among a lot of conservative religious people is a major challenge, and one that is not going away.”

Now, I’m not one of the conservatives they’re talking about — QAnon true believers, MAGA-hat wearers — at least I don’t think I am; maybe Elizabeth and Ruth would disagree. But in any case, if in the highly unlikely event that either Elizabeth or Ruth wanted to interview me about religion, I would be really hesitant. I trust them — I trust them both implicitly — but I don’t trust their editors or the newsroom in which they do their work. I don’t feel I could reasonably expect the final published version of any such story to be … well, to be anything but driven by an ideological urgency in which any white male small-o orthodox Christian such as myself is an Enemy of the People.

This is I think the inevitable outcome in a journalistic world increasingly shaped by Manichaean binaries of the kind that the Right used to specialize in (remember RINOs?) but that the Left now owns the rights to. Consider for instance an idea that I’m sure is highly popular in the NYT newsroom, Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that everyone is either a racist or an antiracist — with the implicit but necessary corollary that he and people who agree with him wholly get to (a) establish the categories, (b) define the categories, and (c) put any given person definitively in the category they choose. What category do you think I am going to be in, regardless of what I have written or said?

In such an environment it’s hard for me to see what good would come of my being interviewed in the New York Times, at least about matters Christian — even if I were being interviewed by people with the honesty and integrity that Elizabeth and Ruth possess. I just think that’s where we are right now.

September 25, 2020

bundles

I wonder how long before Substack starts offering discounts for subscriptions to bundles of thematically-related newsletters? They could be called, just spitballing here, magazines.

September 18, 2020

advice for journalists

Andrew Sullivan writes,

Online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of that is work-related. But the idea that I have any real conscious life outside this virtual portal is delusional. And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by algorithmic practice. And you cannot get out, unless you fight the algorithms to a draw, or manage to exert superhuman discipline and end social media use altogether. […]

In the past, we might have turned to more reliable media for context and perspective. But the journalists and reporters and editors who are supposed to perform this function are human as well. And they are perhaps the ones most trapped in the social media hellscape. You can read them on Twitter, where they live and and posture and rank themselves, or on their Slack channels, where they gang up on and smear any waverers. They’ve created an insulated world where any small dissent from groupthink is professional death. Watch Fox, CNN or MSNBC, and it’s the same story.

Point out missing facts or context, exercise some independence of judgment, push back against the narrative — and you’ll be first subject to ostracism and denunciation by your newsroom peers, and then, if you persist, you’ll be fired. The press could have been the antidote to the social media trap. Instead they chose to become the profitable pusher of the poison.

This is precisely and tragically correct.

I immediately wrote to Andrew to tell him that he needs my new book, stat. But even Andrew, who writes on a weekly basis, who has stepped back from the moment-by-moment insanity of journalistic Twitter (and from the hour-by-hour insanity of the old Dish), probably doesn’t have time to step back a bit further still over the next few weeks and read some old books.

Or doesn’t believe he has time. Maybe, and maybe for journalists more than for anyone else, this is in fact the perfect, the ideal, the necessary moment to recover “real conscious life outside this virtual portal.” One might begin with the epistles of Horace, a man who in exile from Rome learned to love the countryside. Just a thought.

July 23, 2020

more on the Dish

Since I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s renewed Dish, Andrew has reported that subscriptions are near 60,000 — probably over that mark by now — and David Brooks has weighed in with a smart take. As always, David is hopeful:

Mostly I’m hopeful that the long history of intellectual exclusion and segregation will seem disgraceful. It will seem disgraceful if you’re at a university and only 1.5 percent of the faculty members are conservative. (I’m looking at you, Harvard). A person who ideologically self-segregates will seem pathetic. I’m hoping the definition of a pundit changes — not a foot soldier out for power, but a person who argues in order to come closer to understanding.

And as always, I’m a little less hopeful than David — or maybe I place my hope in slightly different places — in ways that I can explain by quoting another passage from his column:

Other heterodox writers are already on Substack. Matt Taibbi and Judd Legum are iconoclastic left-wing writers with large subscriber bases. The Dispatch is a conservative publication featuring Jonah Goldberg, David French and Stephen F. Hayes, superb writers but too critical of Trump for the orthodox right. The Dispatch is reportedly making about $2 million a year on Substack.

The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling. A young, talented heterodox thinker doesn’t have to worry that less talented conformists in his or her organization will use ideology as an outlet for their resentments. The next good thing is there are no ads, just subscription revenue. Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.

Is it really true that there’s “no canceling” on Substack? I think we’ll only know that in time. We’re about two weeks, by my reckoning, from #BoycottSubstack becoming a prominent hashtag on Woke Twitter. It would be stupid for Substack to care. But in the past year or two a whole lot of organizations have been stupid enough to fold in the face of a few red-faced social-media scolds.

So maybe there will be canceling on Substack — but there are many alternatives to Substack. And the really good thing about all this is that newsletters are built on email, and email is transmitted through a series of open protocols that no one controls. It would be perfectly possible for people like Andrew and Matt Taibbi and other independent thinkers, if they got canceled by Substack, to hire someone to build out their own distribution system and continue as though nothing had ever happened.

The woke mobs are apoplectic, but not always stupid: they have reliably gone straight at the gatekeepers of culture, and the gatekeepers of culture, faced with a handful of people with plenty of spare time and no rhetorical restraint, have reliably folded like a cheap tent. So what’s the point of reading, much less paying for, a magazine or newspaper where, as Bari Weiss has rightly said of the NYT, “Twitter is the ultimate editor”? You know that almost everything you read will have been vetted to ensure that it conforms to the Authorized Narrative, so why bother? Even if you actually believe in the Authorized Narrative, do you really need to pay money to have your opinions confirmed, day after day?

No; I think even some of the woke, or at least the wokish, will send their money to venues,and writers, who say what they actually think. What a concept! And what makes this possible is the open web and the pre-web internet. How cool is that?

One of the greatest things about the open web and the pre-web internet is that they work at any scale. There is no difference, from the reader’s perspective, between reading a newsletter with 250,000 subscribers and reading one with ten subscribers. As I wrote a while back,

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace…. Whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

And in case you don’t know, my own little contribution to the Republic of Newsletters may be found here.

July 17, 2020

return of the Dish

I’m really glad to learn that The Dish is returning — especially in a form that will allow Andrew to write fewer but longer pieces than he did in the old days, and, I trust, by such means to retain his sanity. The former Dish was pedal-to-the-metal every single day, and even Andrew, the hack than whom no sharper can be conceived, couldn’t over the long term flourish at that pace, either emotionally or intellectually.

A slower-paced Dish of his own is surely the best venue for Andrew, who is the most independent of thinkers and therefore a constant threat to the “safety” of any colleagues whose mental cabinets have just two pigeonholes, Correct people and Evil people. (Apparently at New York most of his colleagues were two-pigeonholers.) I subscribed instantly, and I know I won’t regret it.

But Andrew is not the only thoughtful and unclubbable journalist who’s going indie these days, and that poses a problem for me. In that introductory message I linked to above, Andrew mentions the similar Substack-based endeavors of Jesse Singal and Matt Taibbi, and while I think both of those guy as are superb journalists, if I were to subscribe to their work as well as Andrew’s that would cost me 150 bucks a year. I still might do it — but that’s a lot of coin for three voices.

There’s an economies-of-scale problem here. At a newspaper or magazine, writers share an editorial and technical infrastructure, so costs of production are distributed. Those who go it alone don’t get to benefit from that, and neither do their readers. So the cash outlay for those readers can escalate in a hurry.

On the other hand, it’s nice when the money you send to pay the writer actually pays the writer (minus Substack’s cut, of course). I have long wished that places like the New York Times and Washington Post had tip jars for the good writers — if I subscribed to the damned things I would have to subsidize the clueless, pompous, self-righteous, yappy-dog incompetents who dominate those once-distinguished institutions.

One hand, other hand, one hand, other hand. The work of the subscriber-supported solo practitioner doesn’t get seen by nearly as many people as something on the open web — but maybe that’s a feature rather than a bug! Fewer morons to insult you without reading what you write.

Given the hostility of our major media venues to anything that even resembles thinking, there’s no easy solution to this problem. Perhaps some kind of non-partisan, non-ideological journal of ideas will eventually emerge — Lord knows there are enough tech zillionaires to fund one — but in the meantime what does a reader do? This reader is gonna look for some fat to cut from his media budget and pay one or two more writers.

June 19, 2020

unsolicited advice

Here in America, it’s a news week like any other.

The President retweets, for political effect, a doctored video.
Tucker Carlson says that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is “a special carve-out Google has received from the United States Congress,” even though, as Senator Mike Lee points out, Section 230 was passed by Congress in 1996, two years before Google was founded.
The ACLU says that “The death penalty evolved from lynching.” Yes, really. Read the tweet and see.

I could go on. And on, and on. And there will be more of the same next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, ad infinitum and especially nauseam.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, and what I would encourage you all to do the same: First, take note of the people, like the ones listed above, who do not care whether what they say is true, but only about whether it serves their preferred narrative.

Second, look for people — politicians, journalists, academics — who do care whether what they say is true.

Third, studiously ignore the people in the first group and pay close attention to the people in the second one.

It won’t be easy to find those truth-concerned people. Sometimes you’ll feel like Diogenes with his lantern. But it must be done, for the sake of our collective sanity.