Major professor crashes and burns!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29, 2017

Gitlin emulates Trump:
Almost surely, Donald J. Trump is our least articulate modern president—and you can start the "modern" era pretty much wherever you please.

Briefly, let's be fair. In part, the problem stems from the fact that Donald J. Trump rarely knows what he's talking about. During the campaign, he promised "something terrific" in health care, full stop.

Almost surely, Donald J. Trump was holding back no details. Donald J. Trump rarely seems to know what he's talking about.

For whatever reason, Donald J. Trump is highly inarticulate. At Bill Moyers and Company, and then again at Salon, Professor Gitlin has now pretended to discuss this state of affairs.

We say "pretended" for a reason. Professor Gitlin's critique of Trump is almost as weirdly incompetent as a typical Trump remark. When it comes to incompetence and disingenuinity, Professor Gitlin seems to be emulating President Trump.

We've often said that the liberal world has been failed by our professors. Professor Gitlin, a major professor, has now established us as a major seer.

Professor Gitlin starts his critique is a sensible way. The bulk of what's said here is accurate:
GITLIN (3/27/17): Once upon a time, there were presidents for whom English seemed their native language. Barack Obama most recently. He deliberated. At a press conference or in an interview—just about whenever he wasn’t speaking from a text—his pauses were as common as other people’s “uh’s.” He was not pausing because his vocabulary was impoverished. He was pausing to put words into sequence. He was putting phrases together with care, word by word, trying out words before uttering them, checking to feel out what they would sound like once uttered. It was important to him because he did not want to be misunderstood. President Obama valued precision, in no small part because he knew he lived in a world where every last presidential word was a speech act, a declaration with consequence, so that the very statement that the sky was blue, say, would be scoured for evidence that the president was declaring a policy on the nature of nature.

That was then. Now we have a president who, when he speaks, spatters the air with unfinished chunks, many of which do not qualify as sentences, and which do not follow from previous chunks. He does not release words into a stream of consciousness but into a heap. He heaps words on top of words, to overwhelm meaning with vague gestures. He does not think, he lurches.
The fawning about Obama's speech acts is overdone, but it's followed by an accurate assessment of the verbal lurches of Donald J. Trump. That said:

From this point on, Gitlin offers one of the most incompetent essays we've ever seen from a major professor. This guild has failed us persistently, but never in a more embarrassing manner than this.

From this point on, the professor undertakes to offer examples from Donald J. Trump's recent interview with Time magazine's Michael Scherer. These examples are meant to show how incoherent our president is.

Here's how Gitlin limns it:
GITLIN (continuing directly): Here are some examples from Time’s transcript of their cover story made out of their phone interview with the president of the United States. I have italicized the non sequiturs, incomplete propositions, indefinite pronouns and other obscurities that amount to verbal mud.
The professor says he has italicized the various parts of Trump's remarks which amount to verbal mud. Unfortunately, Gitlin's analytical effort is more incompetent than the bulk of what Trump is said to have said during his interview.

Why do we say "said to have said?" Let's mention some facts our ranking professor doesn't seem to know:

You can't automatically trust a news org's transcript! The contemporary journalistic transcript is frequently riddled with errors. Anyone who has ever tried to be fair about public figures' spoken remarks will, of course, already understand this.

In what ways can a transcript fail? Let us count the ways, reaching the number two:

First, news org transcripts frequently misstate the actual words which were said. The only way to guard against this possibility is to check the transcript against a videotape of the spoken remarks.

We routinely engage in that basic type of fact-checking at this site. It's time-consuming and annoying, but it's also important. News orgs frequently misrecord the words which were actually said.

In this instance, Time has provided no videotape of the interview. There is no way to know that the words which appear in Time's transcript are the words Trump actually said.

It may well be that Time transcribed Trump's words with special care, but there's no way to be sure about that. Such conduct isn't the norm.

In this instance, a second problem is transparently clear. Quite plainly, Time has made little attempt to punctuate the various things Trump said.

In this omission, Time flirts with journalistic malpractice. Especially with a herky-jerky speaker like Trump, you have to try to be fair in punctuating the stops and starts which are common in extemporaneous speech.

Plainly, Time made virtually no attempt to do that. For that reason, the muddiness of Time's transcript falls on Time itself, as well as on Donald J. Trump. And again:

There is no way to feel sure that you're reading the words Donald J. Trump really said.

Professor Gitlin shows no sign of knowing any of this. He proceeds to author his own remarkable howlers—howlers he generates by pulling bits of Trump's (reported) remarks completely out of context.

(This resembles the slippery practice, familiar to cable viewers, known as "the Maddow edit.")

In a rational world, Gitlin's work would earn any college undergraduate a failing grade. (Just for the record: He doesn't just italicize chunks of Trump's remarks. He publishes two separate words in bold type without ever explaining why.)

In puzzling fashion, Gitlin offers slivers of the transcript, including two slivers by Scherer. He doesn't show where he has made omissions in the transcript, a transcript for whose accuracy he can't vouch in the first place.

Having engaged in these schoolboy errors, our laziest, least competent major professor then proceeds to tell the world that he has let us see the incoherence of Trump!

Trump is often barely coherent. In this embarrassing essay, Professor Gitlin is worse.

We'll limit ourselves to one example. Below, you see Gitlin's first example of Trump's alleged incoherence. Italicization by Gitlin:
SCHERER: So you don’t feel like Comey’s testimony in any way takes away from the credibility of the tweets you put out, even with the quotes?

TRUMP: No, I have, look. I have articles saying it happened. But you have to take a look at what they, they just went out at a news conference.
There you see the professor's full example. And sure enough! From that sliver of text, it's hard to tell what Donald J. Trump was talking about in the italicized passage.

Below, you see the fuller chunk from Time magazine's transcript (bold emphases by us; bracketed insertion by Time). Just like that, Trump's allegedly murky meaning becomes remarkably clear:
TRUMP: And today, [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Devin Nunes just had a news conference. Now probably got obliterated by what’s happened in London. But just had a news conference, and here it is one of those things. The other one, election, I said we are going to win, we won. And many other things. And I think this is going to be very interesting.

SCHERER: So you don’t feel like Comey’s testimony in any way takes away from the credibility of the tweets you put out, even with the quotes?

TRUMP: No, I have, look. I have articles saying it happened. But you have to take a look at what they, they just went out at a news conference. Devin Nunes had a news conference. I mean I don’t know, I was unable to see it, because I am at meetings, but they just had a news conference talking about surveillance.
We've asked our analysts, and several agree. It's possible that even Maddow herself wouldn't doctor a statement that badly!

(For the record, Time's printed text would probably be more clear with a stronger attempt at punctuation.)

Amazing, isn't it? The meaning of Trump's reference was made perfectly clear, right before and immediately after the sliver of text Gitlin offered. To help us gape at Trump's incoherence, Gitlin simply omitted the words which made his reference clear.

As presented, Trump's remarks are still choppy and grammatically imperfect. But that's routinely true of the extemporaneous speech of politicians and journalists—and there's no way to know how that transcript would look if it could be edited against the actual videotape.

The liberal world tends to run on fuel presented by major professors. For years, we've tried to tell you that you've been failed by these major professors.

Few professors have misbehaved as badly as Gitlin now has. That first example was an outright con. Similar nonsense followed.

Our culture suffers under the regime of these overpraised, overpaid professors. Our culture is being destroyed by the Trumps, but by the Gitlins as well.

The professor's typos: Many of Gitlin's examples gain by this type of editing. If an undergraduate performed such work, it would merit a failing grade.

Then too, we have the professor's typos. After his doctored examples are done, he launches into the passage shown below. We have inserted two [sic]s:
GITLIN: So it goes.

Now, TIME’s cover headline for this mishmash is pointed as well as clever: “Is Truth Dead?”—clever, at any rate, in the eyes of readers old enough to remember the 1966 prototype: “Is God Dead?” A still more pointed treatment is that of Ellie Shechet at Jezebel—a redaction, or what be [sic] called reporting by subtraction. In the words of headline [sic], “We Redacted Everything That’s Not a Verifiably True Statement From Trump’s Time Interview About Truth.” Unsurprisingly, Jezebel ended up having to edit the transcript so that the passages blacked out were lengthier than the words left in.
Everyone makes typos, of course. That said, Professor Gitlin's typos remain in print, at the Bill Moyers site and at the new Salon.

Given his doctored claims about Trump's vast incoherence, the professor's uncorrected bungles may carry a special weight.

Long ago and far away: In November 1999, Cal Thomas "quoted" Naomi Wolf in a similar way. In his nationally syndicated column, he removed all punctuation from one of her spoken remarks, inviting readers in hundreds of newspapers to marvel at her incoherence.

Wolf was being viciously, misogynistically slimed at the time, all across the American "press corps." We can't name a single professor who ever returned from the south of France to issue a word of complaint.

The sliming of Wolf sent Bush you-know-where. The sliming itself was an oozing disgrace. Did any professor complain?

24 comments:

  1. Trump is incoherent, even if you can occasionally use context to project meaning onto his word salad. Gitlin is held to a ridiculous standard so that Somerby can castigate all professors. Why is it incompetent to assume that a transcript is reasonably accurate? Somerby treats Gitlin the same way.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Perhaps Bob is suggesting that the professor's motive and conclusion is petty and ill-advised. It betrays that same old superiority our tribe is known for. We geniuses. Of course, I could be wrong.

      Delete
    2. I don't see his analysis as based solely on grammar. Somerby chose that to focus on. Disordered speech and writing do reflect disordered thinking and they do mean something, independent of lapses in spelling or minor grammar errors. Trump is failing at the level of meaning, not breaking trivial grammar laws. Reducing Gitlin's analysis to that is massively wrong.

      Somerby knows how to parse meaning; semantics and semiotics are important to philosophy. This is beneath him.

      Delete
    3. Deterioration of language ability is part of how they traced Reagan's Alzheimer's back through his public appearances when the family would only admit he had it in the late stages. Trump is worse.

      If the average person identifies with someone who is as abnormal in his mental functioning as Trump, there is something very wrong with our country. The average guy on the street does not speak like Trump. If he did, his friends would be treating him as "special."

      Delete
  2. I like Bob's attacks on librarians better.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The more the media invites "professors" to critique Trump's lack of proper grammar, the more his support will grow.

    You still refuse to learn.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you don't think it is a problem that this man's grown children must go everywhere with him to keep him out of trouble, you don't care who holds the office as long as it is someone from your party.

      Trump uses the word "stuff" so often, and words like "great" or "beautiful" because he has an impoverished vocabulary and cannot think of specific words to describe his thoughts. I believe he has dementia and cannot process any kind of complexity. He repeats patterns and fragments he has memorized and never responds explicitly and specifically to anything. It is very sad but he is clearly incompetent mentally and it will get worse, to the point that it becomes obvious to even his family and supporters, if he doesn't resign first. It was unkind to put him into this situation.

      Delete
    2. maj is right about one thing. You need to keep hammering on Trump and his voters that we know they love bigotry.
      Anything less is a dereliction of duty (to progress).

      Delete
    3. One of Trump's handlers told him he overused two words, and it would be better if he didn't use them so much. One was tremendous and the other was terrible.
      Trump said he would try to cut down, then asked what the two words were.
      Yeah, I know it's old.

      Delete
  4. Someone here keeps suggesting that Somerby is jealous of Rachel Maddow's career. I think he is jealous of people who went on in graduate school and pursued academic careers. His buddy Al Gore didn't earn high grades. Probably Somerby didn't either. Being smart, he thinks he could do what professors do, but just didn't want to, and he never misses an opportunity to dump on some person who dared to express an opinion based on their academic expertise. Somerby has no area of expertise, he has no respect for other people's hard work, research or learning, and he thinks professors should be something they are not, while complaining when they exhibit human errors.

    There is no excuse for this. Gitlin is right and Somerby is making a fool of himself with his distortion of Gitlin's argument and petty complaint that the transcripts were wrong (how exactly is that Gitlin's fault?).

    Phooey on this, Somerby.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not realizing and disclosing that your source is extremely likely to be problematic is quite fundamental.

      Thinking you can overlook that be invoking an appeal to authority is pathetic.

      Delete
    2. Perhaps if there were surviving video tape anywhere of Trump speaking extemporaneously at some other point in time Gitlin would not have had to make his case using this particular transcript. This is a problem historians who analyze nineteenth century politicians run into all the time.

      Delete
    3. Somerby dislikes professors and he dislikes Maddow. The intersection of those two sets is possession of a PhD.

      Delete
    4. I have read transcripts by people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and decided they we gibberish. When I listened to the tapes, however, I understood the points they were trying to get across. I didn't agree with their conclusions, and noted errors in facts and logic. But the pauses, inflections, sarcasm, etc. came across in speech, but often not in transcripts.
      Whether you understand or not the denotation in transcripts doesn't mean Trump's listeners don't get the message he is sending.

      Delete
  5. Bob's deterioration seems to be advancing. I just hope someone is looking after him.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Rachel Maddow’s a real piece of work!

    The silly dissembling rolls on: Rachel Maddow’s a real piece of work.

    We don’t mean that as a compliment.

    Her ridiculous clowning on TV never seems to stop.
    ----------
    Maddow had uncovered more lying! According to Maddow, Baroni’s failure to tell the truth in this instance was “really egregious.”
    -----------
    For ourselves, we located those 77 pages this morning because of last night’s TV show. We were surprised by what we found—although we didn’t find Baroni denying that backups occurred.

    Here’s what we did find:

    We found Baroni making a tedious presentation about a traffic study he said Wildstein and others had conducted. We found him making detailed claims about what the study had found.

    We found members of the legislature challenging the wisdom of the idea that one or more access lane from Fort Lee should perhaps be closed. But we found no one claiming that Baroni had denied the fact that traffic backups occurred.

    Most surprisingly, we found no one who seemed to doubt that some sort of “study” occurred."

    Bob Somerby
    1/18/2014

    Bill Baroni today was sentenced to two years in prison.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not reported by Somerby, was it? He's like Trump: never back down, always attack, never admit error.

      Delete
    2. Also like Trump - when challenged, doubles down.

      Delete
  7. Professor Todd Gitlin is indeed a major professor. Here are his credentials:

    "He holds degrees from Harvard University (mathematics), the University of Michigan (political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War. During 1968-69, he was an editor and writer for the San Francisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the underground press. He is presently a member of the board of directors of Greenpeace USA.

    He was for sixteen years a professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, and for seven years a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. During 1994-95, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Toronto. He is now a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University."

    Bob Somerby is nobody compared to this guy. This major professor said some true things about Trump. Somerby ignored those true things in favor of a major nitpick about the unfairness of critiquing Trump based on an imperfect transcript. Somerby has a point, but instead of considering whether Gitlin's points are valid despite the transcript, Somerby decided that those nitpicks invalidate Gitlin's whole message because in the past Wolfe was treated unfairly by a biased media. But the larger reason is that Somerby routinely attacks professors because they are imperfect human beings and they have feet of clay.

    In this case, the professor in question has a very strong record of involvement in social change. This is not an effete intellectual sitting by the sidelines. This guy has a great deal of liberal cred. Somerby is wrong to keep doing this and he is making himself look pathetic. If it eats at him that his own accomplishments are outshone by guys like Gitlin, he should see a therapist. They really can help.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Two interesting items in the news today:

    1. Calexit appears to be a Russian ploy.
    2. Obama prevented Comey from releasing info about the investigation of Trump's campaign before the election, thereby putting Trump in office.

    ReplyDelete
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