Q: Where Does the Media Turn for Information & Opinions? A: Rightward

I suppose there is no surprise here. The figures are for 2008 and are from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [look here]. The FAIR folks are trumpeting the increase in media reliance on "progressive" organizations. But three things are important: (1) This may be a blip caused by the mistaken perception that the newly elected President was a progressive and the media seeking views or reactions "his" camp.(2) The top 25 list of sources is dominated by Centrist & Conservative outfits - indeed they nearly sweep the top 10. And (3) the left-right spectrum in American politics has hardly stood still in recent decades, the Republicans have dragged it inexorably rightward. So who knows what "centrist" means? (Thanks MSH!)

Waiting for Kryptonite

A documentary film is supposed to try, at least, to deal with realities - at least that is the way the genre conventionally has promoted itself. Otherwise it slips over the line into propaganda. Seems like the film Waiting for Superman has crossed the boundary - that is why we need a border fence! In NYRB this week Diane Ravitch, not a movie critic but a former enthusiast for right wing schemes for 'reforming' public education of the sort the movie peddles, has a go at the film. Let's just say, that she doesn't think it is a reality based effort. I have, in the past, posted on right wing educational proposals: the entirely mediocre record that charter schools have amassed, the anti-democratic nature of centralized control proposals and the generally wrongheaded nature of the clamor for "standards"; no need to repeat myself here.

ADL Takes Idiotic Stance (Again)

Today The New York Times is running this report on the stance taken by the Anti-Defamation League in opposition to plans for a "planned mosque and Islamic community center near ground zero" in NYC. And here is the blunt and entirely justified retort from the folks at The Economist. Abe Foxman and the ADL are becoming a caricature.

The Supreme Court, Right Wing Politics, and What Your Grandmother Knows

"The American people expect a justice who will impartially apply the law, not one who will be a rubberstamp for the Obama administration or any other administration ... " ~ Mitch McConnell (R Kentucky)

"Qualifications for judicial service include both legal experience and, more importantly, the appropriate judicial philosophy. The law must control the judge; the judge must not control the law. . . . Over nearly 25 years, General Kagan has endorsed, and praised those who endorse, an activist judicial philosophy. " ~ Orin Hatch (R Utah)

"The worst kind of thing you can say of a judge is he or she is results-oriented. It suggests that a judge is kind of picking sides irrespective of what the law requires." ~ Elena Kagan

I am not a fan of Elena Kagan. More precisely, I am not a fan of her nomination to the Supreme Court. I think that Obama ought to have nominated someone who might offset the ridiculously partisan gang of five right-wing justices who already sit on the court, someone who would not just vote against them, but call them out when that needs to be done (with, of course, all of the professional niceties that judicial discourse imposes). Obama would never do that. He nominated Kagan, to solidify the resolutely centrist coalition of justices who pass for "liberals" on the current court.

The problem is that no one involved in the current nomination proceedings seems able to grasp what your grandmother knows without too much thought: Kagan resembles a "progressive" only in the context of right wing judicial politics. You can find yet another example of the consistent right wing "activism" of the current court majority (for earlier ones see [1] [2]) in a recent report from the Constitutional Accountability Center. It documents the remarkable coincidence that the right wing of the court - Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy - vote to support corporate interests in an overwhelming majority of relevant cases. (Alito virtually never votes in any other way!) Here is a summary of the results:

"To test empirically the idea that the five conservatives on the Roberts Court tend to side with corporate interests, at least more than their colleagues do, we have examined, for those cases in which the United States Chamber of Commerce participated as a party or as an amicus curiae, every opinion released by the Roberts Court since Justice Samuel Alito began participating in decisions in early 2006 through May 2010 ‐‐ a universe of 53 cases ‐‐ and we tracked the votes of each Justice in each of the cases. Over that period, a cohesive five‐Justice majority on the Court has produced victories for the Chamber’s side in 64% of cases overall, and 71% of closely divided cases.

Results

The data support the proposition that there is a strong ideological component to the Justices’ rulings in business cases, with the Court’s conservatives tilting more decisively toward the Chamber’s position than the Court’s remaining justices tilt in the other direction. The members of the Court’s conservative majority (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) were very close together in their overall support for the Chamber’s position. Justice Kennedy does not “swing” much in business cases: he supported the Chamber 67% of the time, close to the voting pattern of Justice Alito, who had the highest percentage support for the Chamber ‐‐ voting for the Chamber’s position in 75% of the cases. This cohesion has produced an overall success rate for the Chamber of 64% (34 victories in 53 cases). The Court’s moderate/liberal “bloc” (including former Justice David Souter, who was on the Court for most of these rulings) was more centrist: collectively, the Court’s conservative “bloc” (Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy) cast only 29% of their votes against the Chamber, while the moderate/liberal bloc cast 41% of its votes in favor of the Chamber.

Cases Decided by a Narrow Majority

Obviously, not all business cases are the same. Some of these cases apparently were not difficult for the Court to decide, at least in terms of the ability of the Justices to reach consensus. Indeed, more than one‐third of the business decisions we examined were decided by a unanimous Court; the Chamber won 11 of those 19 cases (58%). At the other end of the spectrum, about one‐third of the cases in our survey sharply divided the Court, and it is in this subset that ideological voting is most pronounced. These cases include all of the blockbuster rulings decided during the period of this study, including Citizens United v. FEC (2010), Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007) and Massachusetts v. EPA (2007). Of the 17 cases decided by a five‐Justice majority, 12 (71%) resulted in victories for the Chamber. In these cases, the conservative bloc voted for the Chamber 84% of the time, compared to only 15% for the moderate/liberal bloc. Strikingly, in these close cases, Justice Alito never cast a vote against the Chamber of Commerce’s position."

No doubt our Republican Senators will decry the "rubberstamp" quality of that voting record! And soon-to-be-Justice Kagan will simply sit on her hands while her colleagues continue "picking sides" more or less solely in keeping with their conservative ideology.

This pattern of voting will surprise no one. Not grandma, anyhow. The study documents the pro-business voting pattern of the right leaning justices and it suggests that while their voting is extreme and partisan, the "liberals" tend to be centrist. Once again we can finger the Republicans as the source of political extremism. My point is not to suggest that we should expect the right-wingers to vote any other way. What we should expect is for a putatively "progressive" president to appoint a progressive justice. Everyone else is playing politics; why can't Obama advance a progressive agenda? Hint: Because he is not a progressive.

Orwell's Shadow (2) ~ How "Torture" Disappeared From (or, Was Banished By) American Journalism

"Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute (sic) experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language." ~ Robert Fisk

In my last post (here) I recommended the essay by Robert Fisk on journalism and the language of power from which I've lifted this passage. The "we" and "our" he refers to are journalists. His complaint is that the press (print and broadcast) have embraced the language of the powerful. Sometimes this is because of the putative need to retain "access"; sometimes it reflects the convention of being "fair" or "neutral" or "objective." Either way, capitulating to the powerful and their claims leads, as Fisk indicates, to decidedly partial and political reporting.

As if on cue, yesterday Glenn Greenwald posted on a newly released report on the U.S. media entitled "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media." The study finds that the four largest circulation national print news outlets - The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today - capitulated more or less completely to the campaign by the Bush Administration to redefine interrogation techniques commonly recognized to be torture as something other than torture. They did so in a sharp break from their own historical practice, reaching back nearly a century, and from their own descriptions of practices in other countries. ("They" torture, "we" don't; we simply rely on "enhanced interrogation techniques.") These outlets, thereby, did not maintain "neutrality" or "objectivity" or "fairness" but actively connived in legitimating the torture policy that the Bush administration implemented.

This is a damning report. We are not talking about the clowns at FOX "News" here. We are talking about the purportedly "liberal" media. Fortunately, as Fisk notes, people are not stupid. They know torture when they see it and can call it by its name.
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P.S.: While I don't want top ring my own bell on this one (too loudly), this is a pattern that I have posted about repeatedly - see here and here and here, for instance.

P.S.(2): You might want to see Andrew Sullivan's post on this, and the reply issued by the lackeys at The New York Times. Why read Pravda, when you can read the American mainstream media.

P.S.(3): Update 7/6/2010 ~ See this follow-up by Glenn Greenwald on the vapid response of editorial higher-ups at The Times.

Orwell's Shadow: Fighting talk: The new propaganda ~ Robert Fisk

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda
Robert Fisk

The Independent
21 June 2010

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. ... more ...

A reader, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, emailed the other day, calling my attention to this essay - both acute and astute - by Robert Fisk in The Independent. I thought I'd pass along his recommendation. Fisk argues, I think persuasively, that the news media - journalists, editors, publishers and producers, networks - are hostage to language and concepts that are peddled for political purposes and that they, the media, are relatively oblivious to the history and purposes of that language and those concepts. If we need always ask 'who is using this photograph and for what purpose,' the same is true too of words. Thanks Stanley!

Self-Defeating Economic Orthodoxy and Its Media Moutpieces

At the end of last week I posted on a guy called Neil Cavuto at FOX "News" who (as frequently seems to happen there) managed to first simultaneously hector a guest rudely and demonstrate a dim understanding of economics and then whine about the guest's reply. In that instance the guest was Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO. Cavuto insulted Blackwell, questioning his qualifications in totally adolescent ways. Blackwell rightly got pissed and called Cavuto an "asshole." And, unsurprisingly enough, Cavuto still has Blackwell's 'outburst' posted prominently on his FOX page, complaining that Blackwell had been of so terribly rude. FOX also still has this clip of Blackwell running under the headline: AFL-CIO Wants to Drown Out 'Deficit Hysterics.'

So much for the background. Over the weekend, of course, the G20 leaders got together and managed to embrace the conservative point of view, namely that deficits are out of control and, at the risk of suppressing economic recovery, they are going to cut government spending. See the story here. Cavuto no doubt feels vindicated. But he might want to check the gloating. On Sunday Paul Krugman offered this assessment of the G20 decision:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending. [. . .] you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.

[. . .] Why the wrong turn in policy? [. . .] I don't think this is really about . . . any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Given his lack of economic acuity, it seems to me that Neil Cavuto ought to be the one looking for a job. Yet, his fight with Ron Blackwell isn't about economic analysis, its about politics. That is what FOX "News" is mostly about - rationalizing policies that screw the poor, the working class and the otherwise vulnerable. So Cavuto will continue to shill for the sort of right wing policies that the FOX folks peddle. Listen, I think I just heard him shout "Hey Paul, where did you get that Nobel Prize?" I know what Krugman's reply should be.
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P.S.: (Added 30 June 2010) This morning The New York Times is running this story on the resurgence of conservative orthodoxy. The author seems to find the move to cut deficits pretty dubious. He writes:

"The reasons for the new American austerity are subtler, but not shocking. Our economy remains in rough shape, by any measure. So it’s easy to confuse its condition (bad) with its direction (better) and to lose sight of how much worse it could be. The unyielding criticism from those who opposed stimulus from the get-go — laissez-faire economists, Congressional Republicans, German leaders — plays a role, too. They’re able to shout louder than the data.

Finally, the idea that the world’s rich countries need to cut spending and raise taxes has a lot of truth to it. The United States, Europe and Japan have all made promises they cannot afford. Eventually, something needs to change.

In an ideal world, countries would pair more short-term spending and tax cuts with long-term spending cuts and tax increases. But not a single big country has figured out, politically, how to do that."

Some remarks. First, the ability to shout effectively is pretty much reserved for the right these days. It perfectly describes the spectrum from FOX to "Tea Party" types. Second, no one thinks massive deficits are sustainable indefinitely: not Ron Blackwell, not Paul Krugman, not me. Everything rides on the word "eventually." And the right is simply willing to dump risk and hardship on the vulnerable. Finally, here is something the Times piece gets right. This is about politics. If you asked me how to best cut the U.S. deficit (or at least most, yes most, of the growth therein) I'd say (1) get the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan and (2) start repealing the idiotic right wing tax policies that favor the rich. Tomorrow. No one on the right is willing to look at the real sources of our deficit woes. They are too busy shouting to drown out the data.