Eric Alterman | The Nation

The intense pressure on mainstream journalists to stick to the same narrative cripples our ability to conduct robust democratic debate. Read more at my Think Again column this week, "Of Groupthink and 'Groupthink,'" here. 

Now here’s Reed:

On Display, the Republican Party’s Empty Foreign Policy Toolbox
by Reed Richardson

In the middle of the night on September 22, 2010, a bomb planted outside the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, exploded. Fortunately, no one was hurt. (A second bomb that had been thrown over a security wall and into an embassy parking lot was disabled before detonating.) Months later, two men were arrested and convicted of the crime and, during their interrogation, they said that Yevgeny Borisov, a Russian major in the GRU, the country’s foreign intelligence service, planned the attack.

That you’ve likely never heard of this incident is no surprise or accident, for that matter. Foreign news bureaus being something of a luxury these days, not a single major American news organizations made mention of it in the days or months following, despite the story unfolding into such stuff of gripping, Cold War-era international intrigue. Even among Western foreign policy wonks, the attempted bombing passed by with little notice.

After nearly a year, however, the bombing finally appeared on the media’s radar. Sadly, that’s when the right-wing Washington Times ran an three-part series on the incident that—naturally—portrayed the Obama foreign policy team, which was downplaying the bombing, as weak and having ignored naked Russian aggression. The news hook to the story was the recent revelation of a CIA report that had concluded that Borisov was involved in the bombing; a subsequent National Intelligence Council report found “no consensus” on his involvement, though. This discrepancy, of course, did not stop right-wing think tanks and pundits from restarting their Cold War jingoism and making dire predictions about the impending failure of Obama’s ‘reset’ policy with Russia.

In fact, the reality of the diplomatic situation in Georgia was much more complicated than what appeared in the media. The U.S. embassy bombing in 2010 was actually but one incident in a series of broader attacks—stretching back for more than a year—that was clearly aimed at destabilizing Georgia politically and undermining its effort to keep the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. (See this study for a detailed account of two-year bombing campaign.) The onset of this violence could be traced back to the Georgian-Russian military battles in August 2008, the aftermath of which was still claiming lives despite a European Union-brokered ceasefire.

Despite neo-conservatives champing at the bit for a confrontation with Russia, the Obama administration chose a different path. Rather than publicly blast Moscow’s involvement in the embassy and other bombings based on shaky evidence—likely igniting a strong pushback and further destabilizing the situation—Secretary of State Clinton quietly engaged in several diplomatic, face-to-face meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to arrive at a more comprehensive solution. And guess what? It worked.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili extolling the U.S.’s diplomatic efforts to the Daily Beast in 2011:

“I know firsthand Hillary Clinton raised this several times with Lavrov,” he said. “This was not just raised for the sake of formality, she was very insistent and very tough on that one. On a public level, it was much less visible, but what we know from diplomatic considerations is that the administration was pretty tough. And you know the result is there. Since they started to do that...the bombings have stopped so far.”

Now, a year later, the political situation in that region is by no means settled, as Russian military forces continue to occupy South Ossetia and Abkhazia (and Borisov, though tried and convicted in Georgia in absentia, remains at large). But by firmly addressing the ongoing campaign of violence instead of merely seeking a narrow PR victory to trumpet, the Obama foreign policy team laid the groundwork for a more lasting peace without alienating either of the two major parties.

The point of all this? To demonstrate that this kind of quiet, grinding effort, through dialogue, cooperation, and—yes—tough negotiation may not make for macho headlines and punchy bumper stickers, but it is what reaps real foreign policy success and builds up our country’s reputation around the world. What’s more, it stands in stark contrast to the current bloodthirsty approach to all things foreign policy favored by neoconservatives, which might best be summed up by the old adage: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

This one-note foreign policy mindset was on full display yet again this week, demonstrated by the speed with which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney started swinging a “big stick” even before the smoke from the attacks on U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya had cleared. Prodded by a veritable Who’s Who of neocon advisors, Romney’s belligerent tone was eerily reminiscent of the blustering recklessness his predecessor displayed four years ago.

Back then, it’s worth recalling, GOP nominee Senator John McCain desperately tried to out-butch then-candidate Obama over, coincidentally, the military conflict between Russia and Georgia. In contrast to Obama, whose initial response to the crisis was a measured call for both sides to show “restraint,” McCain’s amped up indignation had him sounding like a rabid anti-Communist from sixty years earlier, ready to personally fly an airlift sortie into a besieged Berlin.

Moreover, who can forget that saber-rattling op-ed of his in the Wall Street Journal, resolutely proclaiming: “We Are All Georgians.” In it, McCain laid out a devastating case detailing the Russia military’s incursion into Georgia, burnishing his foreign policy credentials in comparison to the young neophyte Senator from Illinois. OK, that’s not really what happened, that’s only how he and most of the media were credulously portraying it, as the establishment press eagerly lapped up McCain’s machismo and tut-tutted Obama’s initial, “too cautious” approach.

Of course, McCain’s bravado about an innocent Georgia trying to stave off an unprovoked invasion was, it turns out, simply not true. In fact, his impassioned pleas actually provided cover for Georgia’s aggression, which we now know involved conniving to manufacture a border skirmish and then using that as an excuse to unilaterally unleash a heavy artillery barrage on civilian seats of power in South Ossetia. That Russia, incensed, then struck back hard on Georgia’s capital Tbilisi and unapologetically aided and abetted localized ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia only further proved that both parties owned some of the blame and that Obama’s deliberate, even-handed reaction turned out to be the best judgment.

This time around, though, the Republicans haven’t been able to construct that same prevailing narrative of a weak, unsteady Obama in the press. (And if I were Romney, I’d find it particularly galling that Steve Schmidt, McCain’s 2008 campaign manager, who helped orchestrate McCain’s shamelessly inaccurate bloviating over Russia, found the time to tell a reporter this behavior is “very dangerous.”) Why? Well, no doubt this is partly because Obama now has a foreign policy record, which counts as accomplishments things like taking out Osama bin Laden and a heavy, rather cold-blooded reliance upon drone strikes against alleged terrorists (which I have serious objections to, I might add). But color me skeptical that the press has really learned to look past the dangerous siren song of the neoconservative worldview when it comes to covering foreign crises.

More likely, the press has comfortably internalized the old “incompetency dodge” that after-the-fact Iraq War critics used as justification of their changes of heart. Indeed, notice that it was primarily Romney’s admittedly crass and ham-handed execution that earned most of the condemnation from the pundits and the press. Not surprisingly, we’ve already seen some Republicans belatedly rally to his side using this rhetorical backdoor—that it was only the unfortunate timing of Romney’s critique that was problematic, rather than the bilious content or lack thereof. In fact, it’s hard to say which is worse—the way he flagrantly twisted the words of the U.S. embassy staff and Obama administration or that fact that when asked, point-blank, what he would have done differently, he could offer up no answer, only more spin.

By now this intellectual emptiness should come as no great shock to anyone. After all, this modern Republican Party, dominated as it is by hardline neoconservatives, has pretty much abandoned diplomatic tools like reason, nuance, and honesty in favor of a threatening, one-carrier-group-fits-all approach. As a result, when someone like Mitt Romney encounters a complex foreign policy situation, the shape of which doesn’t neatly fit the square peg of his narrow beliefs, the only way he knows to make the world fit together is to keep on swinging that hammer harder and harder until something gives. And the high price of what, or more accurately, who gives with this kind of doomed strategy, we’re still seeing today.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The Mail:
Rich Gallagher
Fishkill, NY
I appreciate the gusto with which you and Reed dressed down Glenn Kessler for his inept fact-checking. However, please do not let other fact-checkers off the hook. Note this jaw-dropper from factcheck.org:

Biden claimed Romney “believes it’s OK to raise taxes on middle classes by $2,000.” Romney actually promises to lower middle-class taxes.

Of course, Biden never claimed that Romney has said that he will raise middle-class taxes. but there is no way that he can cut taxes for the wealthy, eliminate capital gains taxes, eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminate estate taxes, increase defense spending and cut the deficit without raising middle-class taxes. Ironically, factcheck.org has made this very point in another article:

Romney’s experts predict about a 1 percent increase in growth. One of the authors of the Tax Policy Center study says that is “implausibly large” and even if it materializes it wouldn’t prevent a tax increase on middle-income taxpayers under Romney’s income tax plan.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My new “Think Again” column is called “Think Again: The Color of Hollywood Is Green.” It is a critique of a lazy an misguided argument about Hollywood’s liberalism by New York’s Jonathan Chait and it’s here.

Since I did not post last week, I need to note that last week’s “Think Again,” is called “Political Dysfunction Summer Reading” and it’s here.

My most recent Nation column is “Paul Ryan: The Man Who Wasn't There,” here.

There’s been a bunch of talk about “post-truth politics” in discussions of how the media should handle the lies of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and their surrogates and apologists, (like for instance CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and David Gergen). Perhaps it’s petty of yours truly to point this out, that while I don't know if I coined it or not, but I did use The Post-Truth Presidency as the title of the conclusion/chapter on the Bush administration in my 2004 book, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its Consequences, (the first half of which was also my dissertation). John Dean gave the book a nice review in The Washington Monthly which used that term as the hed... Gary Hart’s crappy review in the New York Times Book Review used the same hed.

One of my obsessions in life is when journalists offer confidentiality to people who have no reason to need it. Howard Kurtz, who is increasingly a font of practices that should not be allowed in a first semester J-School class, writes “What America wants, a Hollywood insider familiar with the syndication market tells Kurtz, is a confidante, 'She’s got to come across as relevant to people who are sitting out there. They’re like girlfriends. Oprah was everybody’s girlfriend.'"

Just who was going to blow that guy away for his brave truth-telling had he given his name?

Alter-reviews:
A few weeks ago a I mentioned a new series of Jazz “best-ofs” on Concord. They are not really “best ofs” which is a silly idea when it comes to jazz, but they do make convenient cds to keep around for dinner or drinks. I see the second round includes Monk, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Vin Guaraldi, Cannonball Adderly. More here, though you’ll have to search.

The newest old Dead release Dave’s Pick’s Vol. 3, is from the “Auditorium Theater”—a really stupid name for a beautiful place--in October 1971, which was right when Keith Godchaux jointed the band as Pigpen was almost done drinking himself to death. It’s a great setlist and the first two cds constitute the whole show, while the third disc culled from the previous night's show has yet another terrific Dark Star/St. Stephen going on with lots of songs in-between. It was recorded around the same time as the splendid Skull and Roses album and my guess is that it’s impossible not to like. Jerry is particularly good here, because he is just beginning to take over the band and working as hard as he ever did and my guess is, the absence of Pigpen, while sad, was a relief for all concerned.

Being the old man I am, I’ve also been spending some time with “Steve Martin: The Television Stuff,” a 3-DVD with lots of fond memories along with people you’d expect like Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Paul Simon, Carl Reiner and Johnny Cash. Bonus features include a new interview with Martin and a 24-page booklet with an essay by my friend Adam Gopnik. A little goes a long way so it will last you a long time, I’m guessing.

The Mail
Don Schneier
Northampton, MA

Having begun seeing the Grateful Dead in 1969, these days I often find myself have to correct revisionist history of the band.  Or, better yet, let Phil Lesh, himself, in his book, explain why the loss of Pig Pen was not a "relief".  So, I'll settle for pointing out that the recent addition of Godchaux significantly distinguished the October 1971 edition of the band from the April 1971 edition, the source of most of Skull and Roses. Furthermore, if there was a guitarist in the band who began to assert himself between 1970 and 1972, it was Weir, not the perpetually dominant, except for 1995, Garcia.  That said, now I can return to our more pressing problems.  D. S

Now here’s Reed, who is great, yet again, (disproving the adage that you get what you pay for…)

The Innocence Project: Media Bias Edition
by Reed Richardson

Up until quite recently, it was a well-established principle among jurisprudence experts that a getting a suspect’s confession was among the strongest types of proof one could obtain of an alleged criminal’s guilt. After all, how many people would knowingly admit to something that they didn’t actually do when the consequences might threaten their very survival? Well, it turns out the disturbingly real answer to that supposedly rhetorical question is quite a few. In fact, through 20 years of litigating cases, Yeshiva University’s Innocence Project has found that almost one out of four of its successful exonerations have involved people who falsely confessed to a crime that DNA evidence later conclusively proved they did not commit.

This troubling disconnect between what’s being professed and what’s actually provable doesn’t just plague our criminal justice system, however. It’s also symptomatic of a Washington press corps that willingly confesses to a professional transgression—liberal bias—when a closer examination of the facts says otherwise.

Why this is relevant became clear last week, when ABC News’ Jake Tapper echoed a favorite right-wing trope to conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, that the “media helped tip the scale” for Obama in the 2008 election. This conversation and Tapper’s subsequent admission was no coincidence, however. It was a well-calculated ploy by Ingraham, prompted by a rather damning comment made by Time political reporter Mark Halperin a day earlier. On the NBC’s Today show, Halperin had doubted the public’s interest in the saga of Mitt Romney’s unreleased tax returns and suggested the story was only kept alive due to favoritism toward the president, saying the “media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants.”

So, within the span of 24 hours, two prominent—and ostensibly objective—political reporters had publicly delegitimized Obama’s first presidential victory and planted the seeds for doing so again if he were to win reelection in 2012. (Halperin’s also wrong on the issue at hand, by the way, as several polls have shown the public does want them to be released.) Coupling these mea culpas with a recent Rasmussen poll that found 59 percent of public thinks the president’s been getting more favorable treatment from the press, the usual conservative suspects proclaimed the case against media’s liberal bias to be closed.

But there’s a whole lot more going on here besides the inherently partisan ammunition Tapper and Halperin handily provided to right-wing conspiracy theorists. First of all, it’s not entirely accurate of me to say the pair offered mea culpas because, notably, Tapper and Halperin never admit to bias themselves. This, you will find, is a common phenomenon among these instances of self-criticism and garment-rending by members of the Beltway media. (And Halperin, it should be noted, stands out as its most unctuous and egregious practitioner.) What they are actually doing is throwing the whole rest of Washington press corps under the bus, to preserve their own reputations. Just once I’d like to hear one of these “courageous” reporters or editors offer up concrete evidence of this bias from their own body of work. But strangely, it seems that this widespread liberal favoritism on the part of the media, which is allegedly infecting everyone else, never infiltrates those journalists who have the courage to point it out.

In effect, statements like those made by Tapper and Halperin amount to conflating confession and accusation. It’s akin to cutting a quick deal with the public—or, more accurately, the right-wing noise machine—to be a cooperating witness in an indictment of the press in general. But whether one is irrationally condemning oneself or conveniently calling out one’s professional peers, the true merit of these charges shouldn’t be judged by who makes them but by their veracity. Yet time after time, the same journalists who proclaim to follow strict codes of objectivity and adhere only to the facts in their daily workload willingly abandon both when it comes to claims about the own profession’s liberal bias.

Instead, what they offer up is a lot of anecdotes, generalizations, and gut feelings. For example, Halperin loudly complained of an “extreme pro-Obama” media bias during a post-election symposium at USC in 2008. His damning proof? Two competing profiles of the presidential candidate’s wives by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor late in the campaign cycle (here and here). The one on Cindy McCain, Halperin claims, was too harsh, while the one on Michelle Obama, was too soft. Taken in a vacuum, he might have a point about a single reporter’s views, but as a sweeping accusation against the profession, it’s ridiculously inadequate. What’s more, to trade in outrageous anecdotes would be a losing effort on his part, since I strain to remember a cable news anchor speculating about Cindy McCain’s “terrorist fist jab,” or a mainstream news organization posing questions to McCain about a rumored, but non-existent videotape purporting to show his wife repeatedly using a racial slur. What Halperin is relying upon here is the journalistic equivalent of circumstantial proof, the kind that often gets innocent men and women unfairly convicted in a courtroom.

In fact, the hindsight judgment of Halperin and Tapper and other liberal bias accusers is most definitely not 20/20 when you dig into real aggregated data of the 2008 campaign coverage. For instance, the early general election coverage of Obama on evening TV network news shows was noticeably more negative than that of McCain—72% vs. 57%, respectively—according to a contemporaneous study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Of course, when these findings didn’t jibe with the instincts of Fox News conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly, he labeled them as “misleading.” This despite his having championed a previous 2006 CMPA media study that found favorable press coverage for Democrats in the run-up to that year’s mid-term elections. When the evidence disputes the theory, dispute the evidence, I guess. 

Likewise, a comprehensive Project for Excellence in Journalism study during the final two months of the 2008 campaign found that the overall tone of media coverage for Obama was the picture of supposed objectivity, as positive, neutral, and negative stories were published in roughly equal amounts. Even more striking, the press’s even-handed coverage of Obama roughly mirrored that of none other than Sarah Palin. Surely, Obama couldn’t be simultaneously enjoying press favoritism when the tone of his coverage matched that of someone who prominent conservatives love to claim was unfairly persecuted by the elite media?

Personally, I don’t believe that press coverage should strive to rigidly enforced ratios of positive, negative, and neutral—that’s an editorial prescription for the same kind of false equivalence that turns individual articles into worthless, misinforming mush. So, I’m less disturbed by the fact that the PEJ study found the tenor of John McCain’s coverage eroded sharply over the final weeks of the ’08 campaign. The reason? Upon closer inspection, one finds a close correlation between the rise in negative McCain stories and his self-inflicted wounds, like the ungainly reaction to the financial meltdown, the awkward and brief suspension of his campaign, and his disastrous performance in the first debate with Obama. And lest you think this tilt was all just a plot among supposedly left-wing news outlets, consider that even Fox News was running nearly twice as many negative McCain stories as positive ones in the run-up to Election Day. To put it bluntly, that a candidate doesn’t get as much positive press coverage when they’re screwing up a lot isn’t bias, that’s reality.

Unfortunately, these same, damaging and unsubstantiated caricatures of widespread liberal bias have not relented during Obama’s first term. This notion that, in 2008, the press somehow didn’t properly report on the president has become so ingrained into conservative thinking over the past few years that even the Romney campaign has dabbled in language about how Obama “really hasn’t been vetted.” And it carries on as a bubbling undercurrent today.

That the Romney folks would exploit this meme isn’t surprising—it plays into the aggrieved resentment held by many die-hard members of their Republican base toward both the president and the press. It is nonetheless ironic, though, since a PEJ study of press coverage during the 2012 GOP primaries finds that Romney enjoyed the most favorable coverage of any presidential contender. Obama, meanwhile, spent this past winter and spring getting beat up in the press, never once experiencing a point in time where his positive coverage outweighed the negative. This pillorying is to be expected, though, as incumbent presidents running for reelection always cede many months of the political news hole to opposing party challengers, all of whom can be expected to say unflattering things about him. And Obama is no different. But if that’s evidence of liberal media bias, then the old adage that begins “with friends like these…” must apply.

The tale hasn’t changed much once the campaigns kicked into general election mode. Yes, the bloom certainly fell off the rose of Romney’s press coverage once his primary victory faded, but at the same time Obama’s hasn’t recovered. Indeed, to look at the PEJ’s master tracking of the campaign from May up through last week is to see both candidates locked into similarly ugly narratives. And the media’s role in shaping these narratives has shrunk noticeably as campaign ads have deluged the discourse.

Still, if you dig down into the media sector details the bias just isn’t there. Newspaper coverage of both candidates breaks down almost precisely the same way—two-thirds negative, one-third positive. Obama does enjoy an edge in network TV news coverage, but loses out on the 24-hour cable TV nets, as Fox News and CNN air more negative stories on the president—86% and 71%, respectively—than MSNBC and CNN run on Romney—89% and 62%, respectively. Try to build an intellectually honest argument for media bias out of these neck-and-neck numbers and it just won’t hold water.

That doesn’t stop some from trying, of course. A popular tactic right now is to assert that a kind of gaffe gap exists, and is dispositive evidence of the media’s bias toward the president. As a result, you get a contorted column that bemoans the press’s shallow obsession with this kind of campaign ephemera while it simultaneously labors to prove the “underreported” nature of these very same harmless misstatements by Obama. This kind of whinging shouldn’t be given the time of day, but the implicit stamp of approval it gets when Tapper and Halperin throw out their fact-free, faux outrage means that the media bias myths live another day.

But there’s a long-term price for this reckless self-sabotage of journalism. If the media itself accepts the fact that bias no longer needs to beproven but merely asserted, if our democracy comes to believe (as polls increasingly show is happening) that this mythical bias is simply a given, then the public’s trust in the profession will be irreparably harmed. Once defanged, the press will discover what it’s like when it can no longer effectively function as a champion of the truth—politicians will be free to brazenly campaign and govern based purely on dogma and ideology, without regard for facts at all.

Right here, right now, and especially after what we've seen the past few nights down in Tampa, the press is facing this frightening prospect. So, it must make a choice and make it quickly. Should the media continue to give in to a mistaken sense of professional guilt by avoiding controversy and seeking penance for partisan transgressions that it hasn’t really committed? Or should it be willing to stand firmly with the facts, whatever they are and whomever they afflict, and let the evidence ultimately prove it right?

 Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. 

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

Reed here, Eric’s away on vacation this week, enjoying the warm Mediterranean sun, I’m told. But go read his long Nation article on what America might expect out of a “President Romney.” I warn you, however, that afterwards you might need a stiff drink, or another kind of diversion. 

As such, here’s my favorite, probably overlooked, performance of these London Olympic Games so far. Yes, golden girl Abby Wambach can work the refs with the best of them and, sorry my friends from north of the border, but yes, your keeper had it coming. (Let’s just hope Wambach doesn’t start using these keen powers of persuasion for nefarious purposes, like being a political spokesperson, since it seems a certain campaign might be in the market for a new one quite soon.)

Now here’s, well, me.

Forgive Those Who Press Pass Against Us?
by Reed Richardson

Recently, the folks at the Poynter Institute have been debating editorial strategies for protecting against journalism malpractice, in general, and, more specifically, identifying dangerous habits in young, promising writers before they snowball into career-wrecking episodes. Episodes similar to what we’ve seen (and, I suspect, will continue to see) with the rapid downfall of wunderkind Jonah Lehrer.

Their discussion, however, has been mostly focused on the journalistic equivalent of mortal sins—plagiarism, fabrication, lying, egregious quote doctoring, and so forth. But as Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark argues, a news organization shouldn’t bother training new reporters to avoid this kind of flagrantly unprofessional behavior, it should simply expect it, and then police them to make sure. And save for those extremely rare instances such as Lehrer, Jayson Blair, or Stephen Glass, they do. That’s why I’m more curious about the media’s more venial sins—those smaller, daily transgressions and subconscious bad habits that, while they don’t violate any laws or professional ethics codes, can still exact a reputational cost on the press over time. And there is perhaps no better crucible to observe some of these journalistic peccadilloes in action than the highly charged atmosphere of a political campaign.

So, I’m starting a kind of occasional, ongoing series to identify, document, and classify these sins as I run across them. As I am but one man, I welcome outside input, so feel free to send in the best (worst) examples you might find as well.

The betrayal of “false balance”

It was with piqued interest that I read this New York Times piece from Tuesday. In it, none other than President Obama eloquently sounds off on what he perceives as the biggest failings of the political press.

“Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a ‘false balance,’ in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.”

If I may say, it’s about damn time these faults were acknowledged by the president. Sadly, for far too much of his first term, he ignored the first while falling victim to the second in his legislative efforts. As I wrote in this space in December 2010, Obama’s continued willingness to play against his own party as well as the Republicans threatened to leave him vulnerable come reelection time, which, of course, he now is.

“I do know that that wavering resolve and hectoring, a-pox-on-both-houses language ominously left open a lot of doors to compromise down the road. To a future where [Obama’s] speeches, press conferences, and ultimately, campaign stops will have to present half a loaf, a slice or even a few crumbs as the best way, given the circumstances, to satiate the American people, while acknowledging that it actually satisfied no one. Seeking out an intellectually denuded center, whether it’s in pursuit of some falsely contrived sense of objectivity or a quixotic attempt at postpartisanship, is a prescription for more than just poor journalism or a difficult reelection campaign, it’s potentially a recipe for disaster for our democracy.”

So Obama, having finally learned these lessons, has come around. The press, as exemplified in that very same Times story still doesn’t get it, though. For example, here’s the passage that directly follows the earlier description of Obama’s media analysis:

“Mr. Obama’s assessments overlap with common critiques from academics and journalism pundits, but when coming from a sitting president the appraisal is hardly objective, the experts say.

“‘I think we’ve learned through history to beware of presidents playing press critic,’ said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. ‘They’re not press critics—they’re people trying to advance a political agenda.’”

So, here the Times reporter dutifully notes that some experts side with Obama while others disagree, but the public never really hears the merits of his argument either way. (And the subtext here is striking: Obama’s position is tut-tutted as “hardly objective,” and, thus, to experts like Rosenstiel, is easily dismissed as inherently flawed. In other words, one cannot be trusted to both have a point of view and be right at the same time.) This exchange presents an almost laughable meta-moment—in a discussion about the political media’s penchant for enforcing balance at the expense of context, we witness the political media enforce balance at the expense of context.

Who might have a valid point about the media’s habitual behavior? What might be the consequences for the public? Who knows? But at least the reader can keep score of who’s on which side. If that sounds all too familiar, then you have been paying attention to the coverage of political Washington these past few years. Then, to further illustrate the point that making qualitative judgments about sources is often sacrificed on the altar of expediency and a snappy quote from the other side of the ideological fence, the Times reporter has the gall to innocently quote a critique of Obama’s press strategy from the chief executive of Newsmax. (For more on the ignominious history of conservative propaganda mill and birther-friendly website Newsmax, go here.)

To be fair, the article does later cite some specific examples of Obama’s disappointment over the falsely balanced coverage of the stimulus and healthcare debates. But, again, there’s no effort on the part of the author to refute or substantiate his assertions. (Even though there’s ample evidence of the latter.) And while there are a couple of more voices supporting Obama’s point included at the end of the piece, they are predictably couched within a volley of intellectual rebuttals.

Why does this matter? Well, as Eric’s piece up top demonstrates, the consequences of this presidential election, to stoop to a cliché, might be the biggest of our/my lifetime. Yet, a political press corps handicapped by the mistaken impression that fair coverage must necessarily be equal coverage will be hard pressed to live up to its civic duty. This is especially true if one campaign boldly decides to dispense with pleasantries like intellectual honesty, proof, and substance and merely run on hyperbole, innuendo, and secrecy. Or, as NYU’s Jay Rosen observed: “If Mitt Romney were running a ‘post-truth’ campaign, would the political press report it?”

Prompted by this recent and fairly typical post at the Washington Post’s “The Fix” column, the answer Rosen arrives at isn’t one we should want to hear. Indeed, the Post’s conclusion that the Romney campaign’s naked distortion of Obama’s words will still “work” as a political tactic is to almost get the sense that it presupposes the absence of an independent press corps altogether. Then, when the Post author weakly laments: “The problem is the gray area is just too gray,” one can see just how deeply a learned helplessness has gripped our nation’s “objective” news organizations. But perhaps the most damning indictment of how media misdemeanors like false balance can eventually add up to a capital betrayal of the public trust is found in the column’s final paragraphs:

“Romney may be attacked in the days ahead for running an out-of-context campaign, and some objective reporters might even say it has gone too far.

 “But the fact is that these two comments further clarify a picture (or caricature, depending on where you stand) of Obama that’s already out there. And plenty of — nay, almost all — people who don’t dissect this stuff as much as we do are going to take the pulled quotes at face value.

 “Is it warm and fuzzy? No. Does it work? Yes. And that’s why they do it.”

In other words, context is dead, the press corps is chronically ill, and, more and more, our democracy ain’t looking so good either.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.  

My new Think Again column is called “Bad News About the News” and it’s here.

My Nation column is called “Let's Just Say It: The Republicans AND the Media Are the Problem” and it’s here.

I did a list of my favorite Springsteen covers for David Remnick to accompany his 17,000 (or so) word Bruce profile and that’s here. I did it kinda fast, so I forgot to suggest these two gems. And also the wonderful acoustic “I Don’t Want to Go Home” he did with Steve in Jersey in 1996, here.

Not everything got included. Here are the ones for which there was no room, or good audio or whatever, I dunno, but I also strongly recommend:

Back in the USA ,The Main Point, 1975
High School Confidential, MSG, 1978
It’s My Life Passaic, 1978
Heartbreak Hotel, Roxy, 1978
I Fought the Law, Palladium, 1978
Follow That Dream, Stockholm, 1981
Drift Away, Meadowlands, 1984
Across the Borderline (Christic Institute, LA) 1990
I Don't Wanna Go Home with Little Steven, Count Basie Theater, 1996

And in retrospect:
Angel Eyes from that Sinatra tribute
Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For with U2 at U2s Hall of Fame Induction
And any version of “Up on the Roof” and “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.”

Phew.

And you know, if you watch the Bruce/McCartney video on backstreets, you get pretty much all of Twist and Shout. I didn’t realize that the song was pretty much over when the Live Nation guy killed the sound. Anyway, Im pleased with the song choice. I think “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist” are two of the most pristine, nearly perfect examples of what a rock song is, say for martians, that have ever been written or performed. Having Paul and Bruce pick those was right on (though I know Paul’s been doing that all over, still.) And if you want my other three nominations for this category I’d go with: Double Shot of My Baby’s Love, Do Ya Love Me, and the Beatles’ version of “Money.”

Oh, and I see new dates have dropped here (I think I’m goin’ to Kansas City…)

Enjoy.

Alter-reviews:
Columbia has been putting out a nice, relatively inexpensive series of “complete” box sets with reproductive covers and decent notes, especially for the price. The three most recent in the jazz series include Weather Report’s early, pre Jaco work. Weather Report: The Columbia Albums 1971-1975, contains Weather Report, I Sing the Body Electric, Live In Tokyo, Sweetnighter, Mysterious Traveller and Tale Spinnin' with remastered sound plus Live In Tokyo, which was previously unreleased, except as part of I Sing the Body Electric and features the band at its best, in 1972.

The Thelonious Monk Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums is a goldmine, bringing together Monk's Dream (1962), Criss Cross (1962), It's Monk's Time (1964), Monk (1964), Straight, No Chaser (1966) and Underground (1967). This was arguably Monk’s most fertile and creative period, and really, if you don’t have these albums, you should. Nice photos, too.

Charles Mingus: The Complete Columbia and RCA Albums Collection is a more demanding collection but intensely rewarding as well. Stretching from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the 10-CD set includes Tijuana Moods (1957) (now 2 CDs); Mingus Ah Um (1959), Mingus Dynasty (1959), Alternate Takes (1959), Let My Children Hear Music (1971) and the double disc, Charles Mingus And Friends In Concert (1972). The addition of Epitaph (1989), which captures an all-star ensemble led by Gunther Schuller interpreting Mingus's epic composition, rounds it out. The booklet features photos from the various recording sessions as well as liner notes by Sue Mingus, Charles's wife and keeper of his flame. An education in and of itself.

And our pal Harry Shearer has a new cd called “Can’t Take a Hint,” and being such a great guy and so he got Dr. John, Nicholas Payton, and the Fountains of Wayne and a bunch of other people too. Harry plays the bass on many of the songs. It’s the only album this year that has a song from the point of view of a BP executive who wants his life back after the oil spill. More here.

Now here’s Reed.

Who Gets What?
by Reed Richardson

As far as marketing strategies goes, naming one’s book Who Gets What bespeaks a rather insightful understanding of the American condition. We, as a nation, have long suffered from a love that dare not mention its salary, so to speak. “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, and that was roughly 150 years before the first collateralized debt obligation ever appeared.

Near the end of the introduction to his new book, Who Gets What: Fair Compensation after Tragedy and Financial Upheaval (PublicAffairs, $26.99), mediator Kenneth Feinberg cites a line from Democracy in America as well. But his chosen quote from de Tocqueville seeks to make the point that our country’s fondness for cold, hard cash even extends into our court system, where it has always been the preferred form of judicial redress. Righting wrongs here in America is a mostly a matter of leveling out account balances. And when it comes to putting an exact dollar figure on an individual’s tragic circumstances, one could argue that Feinberg, best known for his role as the special master overseeing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, knows more about this unfortunate process than anyone else. There is a reason, in other words, that his book’s title is not posed as a question.

Nevertheless, Feinberg makes it clear he is no cold-eyed, green-shade-wearing automaton. In fact, he comes across as a fairly dyed-in-the-wool liberal. Of his youth growing up in Brockton, Massachusetts, he says he was a devoted JFK fan and gained an appreciation for good citizenship, the collective goodwill, and a “notion of communitarian reinforcement and obligation.” Thus, by page two of his book, he has already lost the 27 percent of the country who will read those comments as tantamount to someone foreswearing the free market and insidiously humming the “Internationale” during the national anthem. Then, on page three, Feinberg no doubt makes matters worse when he speaks of “socializing in Greenwich Village” during his years attending law school at NYU.

Perhaps his strongest liberal credentials can be traced back to an interesting historical anecdote from his days working in the federal government. In it, he explains how the current Supreme Court might be much different had he not convinced his former boss, Senator Ted Kennedy, to go along with an idea of his in the last weeks of 1980. Only days after Reagan had trounced Carter at the polls, Kennedy suggested that 68-year-old Archibald Cox of Watergate fame fill a vacancy on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, in the hopes that the lame-duck Congress would approve a bipartisan choice. Carter shot down the name, however. Seizing the opportunity, Feinberg says he convinced Kennedy to nominate a Senate staff colleague of his instead—the then chief counsel of the Judiciary Committee, a 42-year-old jurist by the name of Stephen Breyer.

After this brief biographical business of name-dropping, however, the book’s narrative engine takes over, driven by Feinberg’s five separate stints—organized in five separate chapters—as special master during his career. Whether it be the Agent Orange lawsuit settlement, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, whenever national calamity has struck, it seems Feinberg has been called in to sort out the aftermath and, inevitably, cut the checks.

Though the book’s emphasis remains firmly rooted in the specific, sometimes arcane, details of each case, as a whole, it nonetheless functions as an interesting prism through which to view what kind of lives and livelihoods our democracy sees fit to value. Due to their unique circumstances, each of these payout funds Feinberg has commanded should be considered sui generis, yet a common thread to their existence can be detected: Only those disasters created by the hand of man are deemed worthy of extra-judicial reward. Thus, Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina don’t enjoy additional payback, while Gulf Coast victims of BP’s negligence do.

Feinberg’s last two examples—which cover his tenure running the TARP executive compensation board and the BP Gulf Coast claims fund—provide the most compelling parts of the book, by far. This is mostly because of the grand scale involved and their ongoing relevance. (A successor to Feinberg continues to set executive pay at TARP recipients AIG, GM, Chrysler, and Ally, and a subsequent, court-managed fund still pays claims to Gulf Coast residents affected by the BP oil spill.) Still, it’s worth a brief aside to point out the sad poignancy, at this particular moment, of his work on a much smaller in scale man-made disaster—the mass shooting at Virginia Tech five years ago.

Indeed, to read Feinberg’s short chapter on running the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund is to be frustrated at the shocking sameness that incident shares with last week’s gun-driven massacre in an Aurora, Colorado theater. Then, as now, compassionate donations poured in after the fact through a variety of platforms. (For a list of those supporting the victims of the Aurora shooting, go here.) And Feinberg’s decision to distribute this money in equal amounts to victims and/or their families was a masterstroke, one that served to unite rather than divide the community and facilitated healing. Yet what he leaves unsaid is the failure of the policymakers to address the root cause of these types of tragedies and to prevent adding yet one more place name to the tragic roll call of places like Columbine and Virginia Tech, a list to which Aurora will sadly now be added.

The gun lobby will, shamefully, survive this latest outrage, as the political willpower to staunch these self-inflicted wounds simply doesn't exist. Likewise, this hunker-down-until-it-all-blows-over mentality colored the Wall Street mentality Feinberg encountered when he took over the TARP executive compensation board. Even as the nation's financial structures teetered on the brink of collapse due to rampant negligence, many of the people who had been a big part of creating the problem wanted to be paid as if, J. Pierrepont Finch-style, they thought they could still do no wrong.As a result, Feinberg explains how the seven biggest TARP-funded companies that fell under his purview “spent millions of dollars” to justify their executives’ exorbitant pay to the Treasury’s overseers. This whining from the boardroom, he notes, concluded in thinly veiled threats—give us what we want or we might just leave for the competition, either here in the U.S. or abroad. One quickly gets the sense that, if there was a market that traded on these executives' sense of honor and patriotism, one could make a lot of money selling short.

I discovered that contrary to public perception, compensation meant much more to a senior corporate official than mere material gain. Although not minimizing the benefits of wealth—a second home at the beach, a second (or third) automobile in the driveway, private schools for the children—most corporate executives who came to see me emphasized that adequate compensation was a symbol of self-worth. Compensation mirrored individual fulfillment, that without generous pay, company officials would view themselves as failures. Individual success could be determined only be comparing oneself to the competition, and dollars paid would be the deciding factor. By comparison, family, friendship, and community respect paled in significance.

This peek into a world 99 percent of us will never experience is perhaps the most powerful lesson of Feinberg's book. It reveals how our society's values have been radically skewed to greatly reward those who take excessive risks in creating impenetrable 'vehicles' that have almost no intrinsic societal value. Just how steeply the scales are tilted toward the rich is hard to fathom. In fact, a recent "Building a Better America" study by behavioral economist Dan Ariely found that when showed two anonymized national breakdowns of 'who gets what,' 92% of Americans (which, presumably, includes a whole lot of 'free market conservatives') preferred the actual distribution of wealth that exists in Sweden rather than the lopsided one here in the U.S.

That this broad, almost unheard of level of bipartisan agreement on a political issue doesn't generate more news coverage is, of course, unfortunate yet old news. Case in point, the overwhelming stilted and sneering tone of most of the journalism covering the recent Occupy movement. And given enough time, the well-funded forces of excess count on a fickle public, an easliy distracted press corps, and an overweening punditocracy from dwelling too long on such a substantial, but often unsexy topic. And despite coming down firmly on the side capitalism and the free market in his book, Feinberg's time dealing with corporate America has clearly opened his eyes and taught him a lesson that we all should heed:

In past times of public anger over financial industry excesses, Wall Street has played a waiting game, lying low until the political storm subsides. History is on Wall Street’s side, at least when it comes to government fine-tuning of corporate internal decision-making. Add to this the government deregulation philosophy that followed in the wake of the Reagan administration, and it is easy to see why American businesses are emboldened when it comes to pay. To most on Wall Street, the seven companies had only themselves to blame forTreasury’s interference. They assumed that such interference would never, ever apply to them. And they’re almost certainly right.

Though the "they" at hand in the passage above is more narrowly defined, the larger point can and should be taken. Perhaps, then, it is no great mystery why Feinberg entitles the epilogue of his book "A Sense of Entiltement." Seen as a microcosm of our nation's larger and ongoing discussion about wealth, his book underlines the dichotomy of our democracy: A tiny portion of it currently enjoys almost uninterrupted access to power and freedom from accountability, yet when those of us who don't find ourselves (increasingly, because of who are parents are) in this moneyed class finally do get some sort of recompense—only after having suffered horrendous tragedy, I might add—it is ironic that the latter get all the scrutiny and opprobrium for "getting something for nothing." So maybe the point here is that it's time to stop thinking about "Who gets what" in our democracy as mere statement, something that merely is and cannot be changed. Instead, it's time start talking about how our nation’s wealth should be distributed and to put the question mark back on the end of “Who gets what?”

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.