What’s the matter with everyone who isn’t as perfect as we are?

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

How not to speak to The Others: In this post, Kevin Drum gets peevish (his term) with young liberal writer Sean McElwee.

First, a bit of background. If we have the right McElwee (and we think we do), he’s in his second year out of college. It looks like he started as a libertarian in his teen years, then became a liberal.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. Not yet! Give us time!

Drum got peevish about this piece at the American Prospect. McElwee wants to build a political movement around the environment.

That would be a good thing to do. Toward that end, McElwee starts like this:

MCELWEE (3/10/14): For decades, thinkers on the left have wondered why the working class regularly votes against its own interests, upending what Marx believed would be an inevitable march from democracy to socialism. In his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argued that social issues obscure economic motives, and indeed the most salient non-economic one has always been race, at least in this country. In America, conservative politicians have exploited racism to their own benefit, first to disempower blacks with Jim Crow, then to undermine the union movement, and more recently to undercut support for welfare programs, as Ian Haney Lopez recently documented in Dog-Whistle Politics. Nixon’s “law and order campaign” played on racial fears, as did Reagan’s denunciation of “welfare queens.” Republicans played at race to win solid majorities for decades while actively working against the interests of the majority of Americans. The left has much to learn about this strategy. It needs to fundamentally re-align Americans around an issue with a deep and latent importance: the environment.

Presumably, he means the white working class.

Drum is peevish for two reasons, peckish even. First, he says the working class often votes against its own economic interests for a fairly sensible reason. It’s because the Democratic Party has done nothing much for them.

After that, he explains that it would be extremely hard to build a political movement around the environment.

We strongly agree with the second point, not so much with the first. But here’s another possible reason why white working class voters don’t vote for Democrats as much as liberals might prefer:

Right there in his opening paragraph, McElwee starts by R-bombing the voters in question. After that, he imagines building a movement in which those same people come around to his views about the environment.

Can you see why that might not work?

You really can’t build a political movement by holding potential voters in contempt—by thinking of them in the most negative way possible.

Yesterday, we mentioned how hard it can be for the liberal world to spread information across tribal lines. McElwee’s piece helps us see one possible source of this problem.

How does a person speak to The Others? Perhaps by training himself not to think that The Others are bad, extremely bad, nowhere near as lofty and fine as he is.

Can young liberals sidestep this inclination? We recommend Dr. King’s early portrait of the Montgomery city commissioners, in which he pities these men for the way they were raised.

Everybody should be in prison!

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

On CNN, Hostin expounds: CNN is undergoing major revisions. Many new programs are being tried.

Last night, the channel began testing a new weekly show, “Making the Case.” It featured two high-profile CNN legal analysts, Mark Geragos and Sunny Hostin.

Late in the show, Hostin made a remarkable statement. Her statement helps us understand one of the forces shaping our national discourse.

The exchange began with Geragos explaining why he became a defense attorney. At the age of 12, he saw an 18-year-old sent to prison on a very minor charge:

GERAGOS (3/10/14): The case that got me to decide to become a criminal defense lawyer was when I was 12. My father was a prosecutor at that point.

HOSTIN: I like that.

GERAGOS: He got the, he got the—he saw the light and became a defense lawyer the following year. But I went to court with him when I was 12. And I actually watched him prosecute an 18-year-old kid, who was only six years older than I was, and send him to state prison for being in a room where marijuana was smoked. That had the most unbelievable effect on me.

HOSTIN: Why?

Uh-oh! Already, we were worried by the tone of Hostin’s reaction. Here’s what happened next:

GERAGOS (continuing directly): I mean, I said to my father, “How in the world can you put an 18-year-old kid right out of the box into state prison for being in a room where marijuana was smoked?” I just could not—

HOSTIN: I completely understand that.

GERAGOS: That has completely changed the career trajectory of me.

Warning! When Hostin said she understood, she didn’t mean what you think she meant. As the exchange continued, she displayed a remarkable reasoning process:

HOSTIN (continuing directly): Well, I completely understand that. If someone is in a room where they're packaging cocaine, or someone's in a room where they are trading guns and illegally trading guns, and they do nothing about it and are, in fact, really participating in it, I don't see a problem with that.

GERAGOS: This is exactly why prosecutors need like “Prosecutors Anonymous” or something. Because the idea that somehow you're going to go from being in a room where marijuana is smoked to international drug trafficking or gun trafficking—

HOSTIN: It's the same thing.

GERAGOS: I mean, it's not the same thing.

HOSTIN: It's the same thing. It's a crime.

GERAGOS: Ridiculous.

HOSTIN: I think your father was right. We'll be right back.

Wow, we thoughtfully said.

On air, Hostin is a very pleasant, very attractive person. She also thinks that everybody should be in prison.

Smoking marijuana, international gun smuggling? It’s all the same!

Cable has been full of such former prosecutors at least since the OJ days. During the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, the worst of them all, Nancy Grace, got Richard Ricci thrown into prison, where he died.

As it turned out, Ricci had nothing to do with the crime, but Grace just knew he had done it. She screamed and yelled, and he got jailed on some minor outstanding warrant.

A medical condition took over from there. Eventually, on Larry King Live, Geragos savaged Grace about what she had done, and she pretty much lied.

We were especially struck by Hostin’s performance because of the role she played in the George Zimmerman trial. From early in the case, she played a leading role in the invention of false information which helped whip up feeling against Zimmerman.

Set aside what you think about Zimmerman. Think about Hostin now.

We’re so old that we can recall when it was considered a very bad thing to invent false facts about people accused of major crimes. Remember when everyone agreed that they shouldn’t have made up those bogus claims against Tom Robinson? In that famous novel?

We do remember that!

Right from the start, a string of bogus facts were invented about the killing of Trayvon Martin. Last night, we got a look at the kind of thinking to which the liberal world surrendered in that tragic, unfortunate case.

Temperamentally, Hostin seems like a very nice person. For years, she prosecuted cases involving the sexual abuse of children.

Judging from what we’ve seen on cable, people’s perspectives may get warped if they spend too many years chasing too many horrible crimes. We thought that exchange should be posted.

Final question: Where do you think that 18-year-old is today?

(Geragos was born in 1957. The incident would have occurred in 1969.)

IN SEARCH OF EVEN THE MOST BASIC SKILLS: The Post and the Times both flooded the zone!

TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014

Part 2—The SAT’s a big deal: A wonderful moment occurred at the end of Tamar Lewin’s front-page report about the SAT.

In Thursday’s New York Times, Lewin was reporting the ways the test will change in 2016. At the end of her report, she described some changes in the essay section, which will become optional.

Note the wonderfully comical claim we highlight:

LEWIN (3/6/14): Mr. Coleman emphasized that the three-hour exam—three hours and 50 minutes with the essay—had been redesigned with an eye toward reinforcing the skills and evidence-based thinking that students should be learning in high school, and moving away from a need for test-taking tricks and strategies…

The revised essay, in particular, will shift in that direction. Students now write about their experiences and opinions, with no penalty for incorrect assertions, even egregiously wrong ones. In the future, though, students will receive a source document and be asked to analyze it for its use of evidence, reasoning and persuasive or stylistic technique.

The text will be different on each exam, but the essay task will remain constant. The required essay never entirely caught on with college admissions officers. Many never figured the score into the admission decision and looked at the actual essays only rarely, as a raw writing sample to help detect how much parents, consultants and counselors had edited and polished the essay submitted with the application.

That was the end of Lewin’s report.

Is that highlighted claim really true? According to Lewin, many admission officers have been using the SAT essay section—it was introduced in 2005—for one purpose only:

It was used to spot students whose application essays were written by Mom and Dad!

(Well actually, that isn’t quite what Lewin said. She said that many admission officers have engaged in this practice only rarely. So it goes when we fight our way through front-page prose.)

Problems of parsing to the side, is that claim by Lewin true? Have some admission officers really put the essay section to that use?

If so, how many have used the essay that way? And how does Lewin know that?

Lewin doesn’t say. The claim let her end on a comical note, as part of what may be her most detailed account of the way the SAT will change.

In the passage we’ve posted, Lewin offers specific information about the way the essay will change. This is, of course, the part of the test many students will no longer take.

Elsewhere in her front-page report, Lewin wrote in murky ways about the changes to the test, and about the reasoning behind them. She made no attempt to sift a conclusion to which many of her colleagues would jump—the belief that the SAT is being “dumbed down.”

Beyond that, we were left with little sense of how sweeping these changes will be, or who the changes will likely affect. First-day reporting can be a tough gig. but we thought Lewin’s work was quite hazy.

Judged as an essay, we’d say Lewin’s work was poor. Still, these changes were being made to the SAT, a matter of obsessive interest to many of the upper middle class people who form a key part of the New York Times’ world. Perhaps for the reason, the New York Times and the Washington Post were soon flooding the zone concerning this topic.

They provided extensive coverage of a set of changes which never got explained especially well.

Let’s start with the Times. In its hard-copy editions, the paper offered these treatments of the earth-shattering changes:

Thursday, March 6: Front-page report by Tamar Lewin, 1325 words
Friday, March 7: Analysis piece by Richard Perez-Pena, 809 words
Friday, March 7: Opinion column by Jennifer Finney Boylan, 870 words
Friday, March 7: Five letters to the editor, 741 words
Sunday, March 9: Magazine cover story by Todd Balf, 7050 words

The Times was flooding the zone! By Sunday, the Washington Post had perhaps surpassed its rival:

Thursday, March 6: Front-page report by Nick Anderson, 1653 words
Thursday, March 6: News report by Jia Lynn Yan, 727 words
Friday, March 7: News report by Anderson, 904 words
Saturday, March 8: Opinion column by Alexandra Petri, 730 words
Sunday, March 9: Editorial, 552 words
Sunday, March 9: Opinion column by Kathleen Parker, 747 words
Sunday, March 9: “5 Myths about the SAT,” Anthony Carnevale, 1187 words

For our money, Anderson’s front-page report in the Post was better than Lewin’s. In part, that’s because he made fewer claims about how “extensive” or “fundamental” the coming changes are.

That said, the Post’s three Sunday opinion pieces could best be described as egregious. The same is true of the one column published by the Times.

We’ll start reviewing the opinion columns tomorrow. For today, it’s worth marveling at the amount of coverage devoted to this topic.

The Post and the Times were reporting changes which will be made, two years hence, to a college admission test. How important will these changes actually be? This is the way the front-page reports in the two newspapers started:

LEWIN (3/6/14): Saying its college admission exams do not focus enough on the important academic skills, the College Board announced on Wednesday a fundamental rethinking of the SAT, ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong, cutting obscure vocabulary words and making the essay optional.

ANDERSON (3/6/14): The SAT college admission test will no longer require a timed essay, will dwell less on fancy vocabulary and will return to the familiar 1600-point scoring scale in a major overhaul intended to open doors to higher education for students who are now shut out.

Essentially, Anderson was repeating himself by the end of his opening paragraph. (The return to the 1600-point scale reflects the change in the status of the essay.) He said the changes were “intended to open doors to higher education for students who are now shut out.” Something like that may be true, but in the rest of his report, he quoted no one from the College Board making any such statement.

In her own opening paragraph, Lewin listed three specific changes to the test; this included the elimination of a “guessing penalty” she never tried to explain. We never saw her support the claim that the changes will be “fundamental” or “extensive,” although of course they may be.

In what ways is the test being changed? We’d have to say the news reports were unclear, especially in the Times.

Still, the sweep of the coverage in both papers suggested that this topic is seen as a big major deal. It’s worth comparing the sweep of the coverage to the egregious work which was soon being offered by journalists at both papers.

In the papers’ opinion pieces, speculation ran wild. Suppositions were hotly asserted in the absence of anything dimly resembling evidence.

In the Post, writers moaned about the way the SAT was being dumbed down. Will these changes make the test “easier” in some way?

Simply put, Lewin and Anderson did no reporting on that question. There was no sign that the opinion writers had even the slightest idea.

Are high school kids ready for college? In theory, the SAT is used to help answer that question.

As we tried to decipher the work in these papers, we found ourselves asking the very same question about an exalted guild.

Tomorrow: Egregious, horrible work

Gabe Sherman describes propaganda at Fox!

MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2014

And perhaps at that other channel: Earlier this year, New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman published The Loudest Voice in the Room, a strongly critical biography of Roger Ailes.

In January, Sherman discussed the book with Jane Hall as part of C-Span’s After Words series. We watched their discussion two weekends ago.

To watch the full hour, click here.

Late in the hour, Sherman and Hall discussed the nature of propaganda, especially as practiced by Fox. Sherman’s description was basic but interesting.

This is the way he began:

HALL (1/29/14): What about the idea of repetition, which is a classic in terms of driving a message. Do you see Fox as repeating the same message throughout the day?

SHERMAN: Yes, that is one of the principle techniques Fox uses is they develop story lines. You know, the health-care debate was a classic Fox News story line...

HALL: When you say story line, what do you mean? Good guys, bad guys?

SHERMAN: Yes, they develop it into simple plot lines. They develop adversaries...They develop these kind of, these characters who would be on the opposing side, and then they would build up their characters on the “pro” side. So George W. Bush as the president was the hero. They develop these story-lines and repeat them through the day. They start on Fox and Friends, they go through the news hour and then they’re continued in prime time. And you see that going back to TVN, they discussed how the repetition of stories can be a powerful propaganda technique.

Ailes worked for TVN, a Joseph Coors conservative media operation, way back in the mid-1970s.

In that passage, Sherman described a very basic type of “propaganda.” In this model, simple-minded “story lines” are created, with recognizable “good guys” and “bad guys.” These simple stories are repeated all through the day on Fox.

For what it’s worth, there’s nothing wrong with repeatedly covering a certain news topic throughout the day on a cable news channel. Sherman is describing something slightly different. He’s describing a process we ourselves have long described, in which simple-minded stories are handed to the public, with basic facts perhaps giving way to the need for simplistic script.

Is this the way Fox News operates? This is the way the whole press corps operated in the period on which we’ve done the most work, the late Clinton years and the twenty months of the Bush-Gore campaign.

As the conversation continued on C-Span, Hall seemed to suggest that MSNBC is perhaps developing a similar approach. It isn’t entirely clear what Hall meant, but this was Sherman’s reaction:

HALL (continuing directly): Well you know, you almost sense, if you watch MSNBC and Fox, sometimes you feel as if you’re watching parallel—

SHERMAN: It’s a fun house mirror.

HALL: —parallel universes...What do you see as the difference between what MSNBC is doing— Do they have, do they have—are they similar, or how are they different?

SHERMAN: Well, in many ways, they have outfoxed Fox on the left. I mean, MSNBC has decided that their business is as a progressive liberal talk channel. And I think that’s an interesting marketing strategy...

But what I think is interesting is that MSNBC is not as good as Fox. You know they—as, just as pure television producers, the programming is not as compelling, because they don’t have Roger Ailes’ unique talents. His ability to foster conflict, his ability to pick talent.

We don’t know what Sherman meant when he said that MSNBC has “outfoxed Fox on the left.” We don’t know if he actually meant that they have “out-Foxed” Fox in some way—if he meant they have adopted specific Fox techniques, or if our lower-case transcription is more appropriate.

At any rate, Sherman said MSNBC is not as good as Fox at the TV business. He said the liberal channel doesn’t have Ailes’ unique talents, though this was a bit of a left-handed criticism/compliment when you see one of the talents he cited—Ailes’ ability to foster conflict.

Shortly thereafter, Hall referred to a recent comment in which Ailes spoke well of Rachel Maddow’s work. For ourselves, we were already thinking of Maddow’s recent scandal coverage as Sherman sketched the outline of a type of cable news “propaganda.”

In our view, Maddow’s recent scandal reporting has been extremely strange. That said, we think her scandal reporting has always been strange. This isn’t always a party-line affair, although Maddow’s scandal coverage does tend to drift partisan.

When Maddow appeared with Bill Maher a few weeks back, she cited the amount of coverage she gave to the Rod Blagojevich trial. As we noted in real time, we thought her approach was peculiar in that case too.

What explains Maddow’s strangely repetitive scandal coverage, in which facts are sometimes invented or lost and guilt is assigned with great dispatch? We’ll spend some time the next few afternoons pondering that imponderable.

Tomorrow, we’ll return to Sherman’s portrait of propaganda—a portrait which neatly captures the simple-minded, repetitive way Maddow has covered the Fort Lee matter. We’ll also look at the Q-and-A in which Ailes voiced his admiration for Maddow’s work.

Later this week, we’ll look at some of the early profiles of Maddow, looking for other explanation for her peculiar approach to scandal reporting.

In her scandal reporting, Maddow tends to be free with her accusations, and rather free with her basic facts. In the current instance, liberals have been cheering her on.

We think that’s a bad idea. Your results may differ.

The latest very important key fact!

MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2014

In our world, facts don’t matter: As we’ve often noted, facts play almost no role in our national discourse. We’ll give you four quick reasons:

The facts we hear are often wrong. Other key facts get disappeared.

When people in our tribe make up facts, we tend to applaud them for it. And in a highly tribalized culture, it’s hard to convey basic facts across tribal lines, even if the facts in question are accurate and important.

We’ll now offer a fifth, more specialized reason. Some key facts about the looting of the middle class tend to get disappeared by corporate-paid liberals and by our upper-end news orgs.

For these reasons, the latest very important fact will play no role moving forward. This basic fact comes from Philip Longman in The Washington Monthly, by way of Kevin Drum.

This basic fact concerns tax rates in Texas, the famous low-tax state:

LONGMAN (5/14): It’s true, as the state’s boosters like to brag, that Texas does not have an income tax. But Texas has sales and property taxes that make its overall burden of taxation on low-wage families much heavier than the national average, while the state also taxes the middle class at rates as high or higher than in California...The top 1 percent in Texas have an effective tax rate of just 3.2 percent. That’s roughly two-fifths the rate that’s borne by the middle class, and just a quarter the rate paid by all those low-wage “takers” at the bottom 20 percent of the family income distribution. This Robin-Hood-in-reverse system gives Texas the fifth-most-regressive tax structure in the nation.

Several facts are involved in that passage, which we’re assuming is accurate, based on Drum’s good reputation. But let’s boil it down to this:

Texas is a low-tax state—but only for the highest earners. Low-wage families are taxed more heavily in Texas than elsewhere in the nation.

Given the hype about low-tax Texas, that’s a remarkable fact. It should be useful to progressives.

For some of the reasons we cited above, we’ll consign that fact to the bottom of a deep, cold Texas lake.

Data about the nation’s rising test scores have also been thrown in deep water to drown. So too for basic facts about the remarkable looting involved in American health care.

Still and all, that’s a striking new fact. It’s too bad facts don’t matter by widespread guild agreement!

IN SEARCH OF EVEN THE MOST BASIC SKILLS: Reporting the new-and-improved SAT!

MONDAY, MARCH 10, 2014

Part 1—Could our journalists get into college: If we might borrow from our Camus:

The SAT was massively changed last Wednesday. Or maybe not, we’re not sure.

Is the SAT being changed in some major way? Even now, we’re not sure—in large part, because of the blizzard of reporting and punditry which followed Wednesday’s announcement.

The SAT is a very big deal to upper middle-class readers of our major newspapers. Perhaps for that reason, the New York Times and the Washington Post reacted to last week’s announcement as if V-S Day had occurred.

That said, much of the reporting was fuzzy—and the punditry was much worse. A familiar irony thus played out as the adults of the press corps examined this test of the nation’s teenagers:

Our journalists seem to lack the skills this test is built to explore.

In what way will the SAT be changed starting in 2016? Consider the Day One news report on the New York Times’ front page. As she started, Tamar Lewin seemed to say that the changes were large:

LEWIN (3/6/14): Saying its college admission exams do not focus enough on the important academic skills, the College Board announced on Wednesday a fundamental rethinking of the SAT, ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong, cutting obscure vocabulary words and making the essay optional.

The president of the College Board, David Coleman, criticized his own test, the SAT, and its main rival, the ACT, saying that both had “become disconnected from the work of our high schools.”

So far, does it sound like “a fundamental rethinking” of this test has occurred? According to Lewin, the SAT had announced three things:

*The SAT is going to “end the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong.” In her 1325-word report, Lewin never explained how that “penalty” has worked in the past. She never explained why this practice is being dropped or what sort of difference this change in procedure will make.

*The SAT is “cutting obscure vocabulary words.” Lewin never explained how these obscure words are used in the current SAT, or how much of the test is involved in their use.

*The SAT is making the essay optional. This is definitely a change in the test. But the essay has only existed since 2005, and students may continue to take it. Does this really constitute “a fundamental rethinking of the SAT?”

To us, those changes didn’t necessarily sound all that massive. As she continued, Lewin explained them further, taking another pass at the claim that the changes are a big deal:

LEWIN: The changes are extensive: The SAT's rarefied vocabulary challenges will be replaced by words that are common in college courses, like ''empirical'' and ''synthesis.'' The math questions, now scattered across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking. The use of a calculator will no longer be allowed on some of the math sections.

The new exam will be available on paper and computer, and the scoring will revert to the old 1,600-point scale—from 2,400—with top scores of 800 on math and 800 on what will now be called ''evidence-based reading and writing.'' The optional essay, which strong writers may choose to do, will have a separate score.

In much of that passage, Lewin elaborates on the fact that the essay will now be optional. Readers still weren’t told how those “rarefied vocabulary challenges” actually work in the current SAT, or how large a part of the test they constitute.

Meanwhile, why will the SAT’s math questions “focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking?” Lewin never explained. Nor did she explain why this sort of change should be seen as “extensive.”

As she continued, Lewin continued to convey the sense that these changes are large and significant. She even quoted one college official praising David Coleman, the head of the SAT, for his “heartfelt ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ approach to improving the SAT.”

For ourselves, we weren’t sure we understood the sweep of the changes, their intention or their significance. In part, that was because of fuzzy writing like this:

LEWIN: Mr. Coleman came to the College Board in 2012, from a job as an architect of the Common Core curriculum standards, which set out the content that students must master at each level and are now making their way into school.

He announced plans to revise the SAT a year ago and almost from the start expressed dissatisfaction with the essay that was added in 2005. He said he also wanted to make the test reflect more closely what students did in high school and, perhaps most important, rein in the intense coaching and tutoring on how to take the test that often gave affluent students an advantage.

Coleman “wants to make the test reflect more closely what students did in high school?”

Does that mean he wants the SAT to measure what students know about the high school curriculum? If so, what has the SAT been measuring prior to this? Lewin never explained.

We thought Lewin’s front-page report was marked by fuzzy writing and imprecise thinking. It left us feeling that we didn’t know much about the changes the SAT is making, or about their significance.

That said, first-day reporting can be a tough gig. And Lewin’s report was an absolute jewel compared to the punditry which follow.

On Friday, the New York Times flooded the zone with opinion and analysis pieces about these changes. On Sunday, the Washington Post followed suit.

In our view, the opinion columns constituted failing work.

In a lovely irony, the embarrassing piece which ran in the Times was written by a college professor. In the Washington Post, a syndicated columnist soon matched the professor’s work.

In the Post, Kathleen Parker’s column appeared beneath another column which flatly misstated a basic fact about reading scores in D.C. Does the Post require any competency in its published work?

Within our journalistic culture, does anything ever get explained at all? Is there any reason to think that the facts you encounter are actual facts, not silly claims which Rachel dreamed up or flatly inaccurate data?

Are even the simplest basic skills required of the lofty guild which churns our “journalism?”

These high priests run our “national discourse.” If the SAT offered a rigorous test, could these famous, lofty figures get their keisters admitted to college?

Tomorrow: Embarrassing, wall-to-wall pseudo-coverage for the upper middle-class

The American people just sit there and take it!

SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2014

Way to go, Obama: Have you noticed anything different today?

Thanks to Obama, the country “lost an hour” last night. This so-called “weekend” is going to be exactly one hour short!

They say we’ll get it back in the fall. We’ve all heard that one before!

They make the change at 2 AM, assuming that no one will notice.

Fox can’t fight this all by itself. When will the rest of us notice?

Guess who’s getting their full 48: Needless to say, Hawaii was excluded from this. So too most of Arizona.