FACTS AND LEGENDS: Where do facts come from?

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2012

Part 2—What Jay Carney said: If it wasn’t for facts which are bungled, misleading or false, would we have any facts at all?

Sometimes, it seems we wouldn’t. Bogus facts have come to play a leading role in our pitiful discourse, especially as the discourse has become more tribal.

Tribal groups like to generate “facts” which seem to support preferred policy goals. They’re too lazy to argue the genuine merits of their proposals. So they gin up a few helpful “facts.”

It seems that something like this occurred on February 2, when former journalist Jay Carney dispensed the following highlighted “facts.” Carney, now the Obama press sec, was discussing the administration’s original proposal concerning contraception coverage:

CARNEY (2/2/12): In some of the commentary about it, there's been some misstatements about what it actually does. No individual will be required to use or prescribe contraception. This rule does not force anyone with a religious objection, such as a Catholic doctor, to prescribe or provide contraception. It merely requires that insurance companies provide coverage for contraceptives to patients who want them, which is the recommendation of the non-partisan Institute of Medicine.

And it's important to note that doctors prescribe contraception for medical and health reasons, including helping to reduce the risk of some cancers.

It's also important to know, because I think this has not been clear in some of the commentary, that the policy maintains the religious-employer exemption. Churches are not required, they're exempt. Other houses of worship are not required, they're exempt, to cover contraception.

So it's also important to note that as we developed this policy and found what we believe is the appropriate balance, that 28 states, more than half—28 states in the country have laws with contraception-coverage mandates. Over half of Americans already live in those 28 states. Several of those states, like North Carolina, New York and California, have identical religious-employer exemptions. Some states, like Colorado, Georgia and Wisconsin have no exemption at all—no exemption for churches or other houses of worship.

At one time, Carney was a journalist. This may explain why he was comfortable offering those highlighted statements. At any rate, the highlighted part of Carney’s statement launched a thousand factual claims. It seems that many of these claims have turned out to be false or misleading.

If it weren’t for misleading facts, would we have facts at all?

Let’s be clear: The highlighted part of Carney’s statement can be defended as technically accurate. According to all the reporting we’ve seen, 28 states actually do “have laws with contraception-coverage mandates.” Over half of us rubes do live in those states. Some of those states do have religious-employer exemptions which are, at least on the surface, identical to the exemptions found in the original Obama proposal—the proposal Carney was discussing that day. According to the Washington Post, some states do have “no exemption at all—no exemption for churches or other houses of worship.”

At least on the surface.

As far as we know, every part of Carney’s statement can be defended as technically accurate. Unfortunately, the statement also seems to have been misleading in various ways. The Washington Post discussed some of these factual problems in a recent news report (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/21/12); a few days earlier, the New York Times had called attention to one apparent problem (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/17/12). But supporters of the Obama proposal quickly began repeating Carney’s factual claims, in a wide variety of ways. We rubes were told, again and again, the 28 states already make the kinds of demands encompassed within the Obama proposal. This alleged fact allegedly showed that the bishops’ objections to Obama’s proposal were hypocritical or bogus, we rubes were frequently told.

None of this has a thing to do with the actual merits of Obama’s proposal, whether in its original form or in the amended version. But you know how our discourse works! Supporters of various proposals are often too lazy, or too tribalized, to argue the actual merits. Instead, they look for shortcuts. They may be especially drawn to shortcuts which help us see that The Other Tribe is really a big gang of hypocrites! Unlike us! We’re OK!

In this case, supporters of Obama’s proposal were quick to help the proposal along with some bungled or misleading facts. The widespread claims about those 28 states track to Carney’s statement.

Within our discourse, where do facts come from? In this instance, Carney’s misleading factual statements launched a thousand ships. But a second statement, released the next day, was quite widely ignored. That statement came from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a group which tormented our earliest years, making Sunday the most horrible day of the week; their statement seems to have identified some of the flaws with Carney’s claims. In this part of their rebuttal, the bishops frisked one part of Carney’s statement:

U. S. CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS (2/3/12):
Claim: "Over half of Americans already live in the 28 States that require insurance companies cover contraception: Several of these states, like North Carolina, New York, and California have identical religious employer exemptions. Some States like Colorado, Georgia and Wisconsin have no exemption at all."

Response: This misleads by ignoring important facts, and some of it is simply false. All the state mandates, even those without religious exemptions, may be avoided by self-insuring prescription drug coverage, by dropping that particular coverage altogether, or by taking refuge in a federal law that pre-empts any state mandates (ERISA).None of these havens is available under the federal mandate. It is also false to claim that North Carolina has an identical exemption...

However a person may judge the merits of Obama’s original or amended proposal, that highlighted statement seems to be accurate (and relevant). But this rebuttal launched very few ships. Everyone heard about 28 states. Few people heard about self-insurance, or about the ways the proposed federal mandate would exceed the reach of the laws found in most (perhaps all) of those states.

Over and over, people were told about 28 states. It was only this week that the Washington Post did a first news report about the laws in those states. The New York Times still hasn’t bothered.

But then, what else is new? When it comes to the coverage of domestic politics, the Times is a long-running joke.

In the end, none of this speaks to the actual merits of the Obama proposal, however one may judge those merits. It does speak to the dishonest ways we generate “facts” in our culture. Indeed, bogus facts have played the key role in our debates down through the years:

In similar ways, we the people got conned into thinking that “no one was talking about Medicare cuts” back in the mid-1990s. In that case, the misleading facts were aggressively pimped by Newt Gingrich and his minions. These misleading “facts” were then widely advanced by the lost souls of our mainstream “press corps.”

(Bill Clinton got branded a LIAR in the process, although he was telling the truth. You see, conservative power was gaining force in DC—and our “journalists” wanted to serve.)

In similar ways, Fox News viewers are currently being told that “gas prices have doubled under Obama.” As with Carney’s claim about the 28 states, that claim is technically accurate—and it’s grossly misleading.

Where do facts come from in our world? Often, they come right out of partisan asses! Cable hustlers then shout them along, justifying swollen salaries. We the rubes begin to believe that we’ve heard the actual facts. We don’t understand that we’re being misled by folk who may not be real honest.

In this way, the dumbness spreads. So does the tribal division. At one time, this was an artifact of the right.

Our side has been catching up fast.

Tomorrow: Facts are dead—long live legends!

Back to Krugman’s extremely important column!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012

How should this story be told: In the past week, we have continued to read and reread Paul Krugman’s very important column from February 13.

We hate it here when Krugman snarks. In this case, we thought the snark he marbled all through his piece undermined its effectiveness (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/13/12).

That said, the column dealt with the most important fact in modern American politics. “Something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism,” Krugman wrote at one point in his piece. In the following passage, he asks a very important question, setting aside the snark:

KRUGMAN (2/13/12): How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

We think Krugman’s premise is right. In various ways, contemporary American conservatism really is “detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality.”

In our view, the corporate world is now creating institutions which are designed to take us liberals in similar directions. But in many ways, the conservative world has been devoted to disinformation and nonsense for three or four decades now. We liberals are working hard to catch up. But the other side has a large head start, and the process has created the state of affairs Krugman described.

It’s very important to explain these facts to the wider electorate. In our view, snark tends to undermine that process. Beyond that, we would offer three complaints about Krugman’s column, which had to be shortened because he burned so much time being snide:

Who’s to blame for this state of affairs: Krugman blames this state of affairs on Republican politicians. That’s part, but only part, of this story. How do you write a column like this without naming Limbaugh and Hannity?

When did this situation start: Krugman implies that this lunacy is a fairly recent manifestation. In the passage we have quoted, he implies that thing weren’t this way in the early 1990s, when the Heritage folk laid out that good solid health care blueprint. Please! Spin-tanks like Heritage had been active for many years at that point, convincing us rubes that (to cite one example) we were more likely to see a UFO than to ever get Social Security. Why understate this point?

What crazy beliefs are at issue: If you’re going to say that tens of millions of voters believe a bunch of crazy things, you ought to be careful when you list those beliefs. You also have to ask yourself who you’re trying to persuade. For our money, Krugman did a fairly lazy job listing the crazy beliefs in question. Question: How do you list crazy claims from the current GOP campaign without even mentioning Newt Gingrich? Gingrich’s lunacy got a pass. But Krugman did include this:

KRUGMAN: Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.

Can we talk? In reality, Ron Paul didn’t get popular among conservatives pimping those racist newsletters twenty years ago. This type of presentation may make us liberals feel good. But who are we trying to influence?

That was a very important column. It tells a very important story. We liberals should try to learn how to tell it.

Who are we trying to persuade? Assuming we aren't just pleasing ourselves, how should this story be told?

Gack: A depressing look at us the people!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012

The Los Angeles Times hurts our heads: The miracle lies in the fact that our nation ever made it this far.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times performed a dual service. First, it showed us how hopelessly dumb we the people are.

Second, it showed us the hopeless intellectual standards of the modern upper-end press corps.

The Times accomplished these depressing tasks by printing a pair of op-ed columns. Kevin Drum is to blame for the fact that we saw these head-hurting efforts at all.

What hath the L. A. Times wrought? On Sunday, it printed a matched set of columns: Charlotte Allen's "Why conservatives can't talk to liberals" and Diana Wagman's "Why liberals can't talk to conservatives."

What we can’t figure is why anyone would want to talk to either writer at all.

Allen is cookie-cutter conservative flyweight—has been for a good many years. She offered the standard flyweight complaints about how horrible (all) liberals are.

Wagman is a novelist. She may even be a good one. But she has been writing silly columns in the Los Angeles Times for years. On Sunday, she seemed determined to prove that liberals really are as hopeless as Allen said.

Here’s how her column started:

WAGMAN (2/19/12): I recently played poker with a bunch of Republicans. My husband and I, both bleeding-heart liberals, are part owners of a cabin in the Sierra outside Fresno, a very conservative area. The Camp Sierra Assn. president has an annual poker game, and this year we, the newcomers, were invited.

No one mentioned politics. We talked instead about our kids and Las Vegas and the odd warm weather. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of very good Scotch. I had fun even though I lost $4.

When the game was over, we walked home with our across-the-road neighbors and invited them in for a final nightcap.

They are the best neighbors in the world. Always ready with a tool, an ingredient or a jump-start for the car. Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it. They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.

How did our nation ever make it this far? Consider what Wagman said:

According to Wagman, her new neighbors are friendly and helpful. Their children are smart and polite.

Apparently for these reasons, Wagman “was sure they were Democrats.”

Go ahead! Break your hearts and hurt your heads by reading those two columns. But ask yourself this: How does anyone get dumb enough to write an opening passage like Wagman’s? And how did we ever reach the point where a major newspaper would even consider printing it?

Allen played the fool on the conservative side, as she frequently does. Wagman broke our hearts even more. That said, the actual question is this:

In what sort of world do columns like these ever get near a major newspaper? Those columns let you gaze on the intellectual standards of the guild we describe as our “press corps.”

How did we ever get this way? Is there a way to attone?

Dueling banjos: No banjos can be heard in these columns. But the columns appear beneath these dueling synopses:

Synopsis on Allen's column: Debating a liberal is maddening: They think conservatives are evil, while we think they're silly.

Synopsis on Wagman's column: We are not the same. I equate Republicans' political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. They're neither kind nor empathetic.

Gack! Noted in passing:

Wagman’s column tends to support Allen’s claim. Wagman does think conservatives are evil.

Allen’s column tends to refute Wagman’s claim. To a depressing degree, these writers are "the same."

FACTS AND LEGENDS: Facts aren't stubborn things!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012

Part 1—The Post visits 28 states: Within our hopeless political discourse, facts really aren’t stubborn things, despite what you may have heard.

Quite frequently, pseudo-facts are quite stubborn. Consider the news report in yesterday’s Washington Post concerning those 28 states.

For the past three weeks, a certain claim has been widely advanced within our political discourse. It dealt with those now-famous 28 states—28 states which already have laws like the new federal regulation proposed by President Obama. At least, that’s what the public has been told—in this fiery editorial in the New York Times, to cite one example. We’ll offer a fairly large chunk of what the editors wrote:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (2/11/12): In response to a phony crisis over ''religious liberty'' engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle—free access to birth control for any woman. That access, along with the ability to receive family planning and preventive health services, was at the foundation of health care reform.

Mr. Obama's new rule on birth control coverage lets institutions affiliated with a religion shift the cost of coverage to their insurance companies, but Mr. Obama assured Americans it would not result in other women, or the rest of the country, subsidizing that shift. By refusing to back down on Friday, Mr. Obama took an action that will help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, abortions and medical complications from pregnancy.

Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching.

If a religious body does not like a public policy that affects its members, it is free to try to change it, but it cannot simply opt out of society or claim a special exemption from the law. Besides, contraceptive access is already in place in 28 states, and has been the law in New York for a decade, without inflicting the slightest blow to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which has complied.

Mr. Obama had already gone too far out of his way to exempt churches and their religious employees from the preventative care mandate. It was not necessary to carve out a further exception for their nonreligious arms, like Catholic hospitals and universities, which employ thousands of people of other faiths.

Within the norms of the mainstream press, this editorial expressed an unusual view. The Times was saying that Obama shouldn’t even have exempted churches themselves from the mandate; very few others have taken this view. But the editorial included a version of the factual claim which has been widely advanced for the past three weeks. According to the Times, “contraceptive access is already in place in 28 states, and has been the law in New York for a decade.”

“Contraceptive access is already in place in 28 states,” the editors wrote, leaving readers to figure out what their murky statement might mean. For a clearer articulation of this claim, here was Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, presented on tape, two evenings before, on the Maddow Show:

TOWNSEND (2/9/12): I have four daughters, two of whom attended Catholic universities. And I want to say clearly that Catholic women of this generation know that they need contraceptive coverage. Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women use contraceptives—98 percent. Twenty-eight states already require that large institutions, Catholic institutions, cover contraceptive—28 states.

Maddow had offered a variant of the claim one night before. Al Sharpton did the same one night later:

MADDOW (2/8/12): The old boys club that dictates Beltway common wisdom has never been more unified than they have been this week in wagging their fingers at the Obama administration, saying what a political misstep it is to have health insurance cover contraception. To do what 28 states already do in a variety of ways, to give exemptions for churches but to otherwise say that anybody else who provides health insurance has to cover contraception as a basic part of health care. The old boys club that dictates common wisdom has also never shown more stupefying ignorance for the fact that they are an old boys club, and not everybody is an old boy.

SHARPTON (2/10/12): Bob Shrum is a Democratic strategist and professor at NYU. Bob, 28 states already have laws on the book requiring that health insurance covers contraception. How in the world do we get to this point where Republicans are trying to use the issue to demonize the president?

The claim was expressed in a wide range of ways. But those 28 states got famous real fast. This dates to a February 2 statement by Obama spokesman Jay Carney. It was that statement by Carney which launched a thousand variants.

Question: Do 28 states already have laws on the book requiring that health insurance covers contraception? Is contraceptive access already in place in 28 states? On February 8 and 9, guests on several cable shows said that these claims were false or misleading. On February 9, Lawrence O’Donnell said that, as far as he could tell, there were no state laws which bound Catholic institutions in the way the new federal mandate would do.

Who was right? Do 28 states already have laws requiring that health insurance covers contraception? Or was the actual number smaller, perhaps as small as none? Yesterday, a major newspaper finally made a first attempt to examine this widely-voiced assertion.

Do 28 states have laws on the book requiring that health insurance covers contraception? Yesterday morning, the Washington Post offered a detailed first attempt to answer that question.

Here’s the breakdown the Post reported concerning those 28 states:

According to the Post, nine of these states exempt almost everyone from the mandate. This includes “all types of religious institutions, and in some cases, other employers who object on moral grounds.”

If the Post is right about that, we’re quickly down to nineteen states. Why were we ever talking about 28 states if the number, at most, is nineteen?

Also according to the Post, seven of those nineteen remaining states exempt “churches and some religiously affiliated institutions (schools or charities, for instance).” Now, we’re down to only 12 states which have state laws resembling the rule originally proposed by Obama.

And yet, according to the Post, our problem is just getting started!

According to the Post, twelve states do have laws which resemble the federal rule Obama originally proposed. Indeed: On the surface, eight of those states have laws which are even stricter than Obama’s original proffer; these states have laws which don’t even exempt churches from the mandate. But uh-oh! As N. C. Aizenman explains in the Post, sometimes things aren’t as simple as they may seem:

AIZENMAN (2/20/12): Nearly a third of those [28] states don’t offer an exemption even for churches—let alone an exception for the church-affiliated charities, universities, hospitals and other employers that are pushing to be left free from the federal rule. (And even in states that have no birth control coverage requirements, some Catholic-affiliated institutions have chosen to offer it voluntarily—including Georgetown University in the District.)

Yet many religiously affiliated employers in the states with coverage mandates have found ways to keep contraception out of their health plans. They can self-insure, putting themselves outside the reach of state regulation. But they can also benefit from exemptions or vague language in their state’s laws, or from indifferent enforcement by authorities.

Those avenues would almost certainly be closed by the new federal rule, which, beginning Aug. 1, will require new health plans to not only cover all Food and Drug Administration-approved forms of contraception and sterilization but also to do so without out-of-pocket charges to employees.

No wonder then that the outcry has been so much greater over the federal rule than over state laws, said Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm that is representing employers in three separate legal challenges to the federal rule.

Even in the states whose laws appear most strict, self-insurance isn’t covered, if the Post is right. And Aizenman lists other provisions of these laws, or of their enforcement, which allow Catholic institutions to ignore the mandate.

None of this has a thing to do with the merits of the proposed mandate, whether in its initial form or in the less restrictive form Obama proposed on February 10. (Repeat: None of this has a thing to do with the merits of the proposed mandate.) Aizenman’s report concerns something else—the accuracy of a factual claim which has been widely offered in the past three weeks.

Aizenman’s report is only a start. He doesn’t do a very good job explaining what happens in the eight states whose laws, on the surface, permit no exemptions. But other news orgs have twiddled their thumbs as the claim about the 28 states was widely offered. Yesterday, the Washington Post got off its big fat ass and offered some real reporting!

In our brave new liberal world, we liberals know where we can go to hear the factual claims we like. Conservatives have had this option for decades.

Our tribe is catching up fast. Is this a good way to do business?

Tomorrow: Printing the legends

History ends! Long live history!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2012

On to the long hard slog of our forthcoming Chapter 7: Our third non-annual fund-raising drive has come to an end as predicted!

For everyone who participated, Oprah has agreed to give you a car! We’ll be letting you know how to pick up your prize. An extremely small additional fee will be required, of course.

Our thanks to those who took part! We’ll again suggest you read Chapter 6 at our companion site, in which the press corps established a punishing theme: Al Gore is a delusional LIAR!

In Chapter 7, we’ll be describing the way they established a second major narrative: Al Gore is a ruthless and brutal campaigner, willing to do and say anything!

Even as the GORE LIAR theme hardened, then turned to stone in New Hampshire, the “ruthless campaigner” theme was also taking form. Incredibly, this was Judy Woodruff’s opening “question” at the final Democratic debate of the 2000 New Hampshire primary:

WOODRUFF (1/26/00): The first question goes to Mr. Gore. Most people believe that you are an honorable man, but when it comes to electoral politics your critics, including some Democrats, say that you will do almost anything to win, including reinventing yourself, using consultants no matter what their reputation, and running not just a tough, but a mean-spirited campaign. Newspaper editorials here in New Hampshire and around the country accuse you of distorting Mr. Bradley’s record. Is this really necessary to win your party’s nomination?

Gore stood accused of a long list of crimes. By the rules of the evening’s debate, he had sixty seconds to respond!

Al Gore would do almost anything to win! By now, it was abundantly clear that this was an established narrative all through the mainstream press corps. In his February 3 Wall Street Journal column, Al Hunt would offer a startling assessment of the press corps’ attitude toward Gore. (Gore had won New Hampshire two days earlier, defeating Bradley by five points.)

How did the press corps view Candidate Gore by the end of the New Hampshire primary? Hunt described an historic level of negativity; there was “a cynicism toward Mr. Gore in the national press that may be more intense than at any time since Richard Nixon,” he quite remarkably wrote. Quite plainly, Hunt blamed Gore for this state of affairs. Like Woodruff, he accused Gore of having waged “a relentlessly negative campaign, engaging in distortions and misrepresentations.”

Had Gore really waged such a campaign? If anything, the ways the press corps advanced this claim were even more fraudulent than the long string of misquotations with which they established their GORE LIAR narrative. But there’s no real doubt about the view which now prevailed within the press corps.

Late in January 2000, Mickey Kaus had arrived on the scene in New Hampshire, and he’d been speaking with his colleagues. On January 31, Kaus explained why his colleagues in the press were trying to help Bill Bradley:

KAUS (1/31/00): What I underestimated–what, indeed, has startled me, is the extent to which reporters aren’t simply boosting Bradley for their own sake (or Bradley’s). It’s also something else: They hate Gore. They really do think he’s a liar. And a phony. They dislike the controlled, canned nature of his campaign events, and hate covering them.

“They hate Gore,” Kaus memorably wrote. He put the statement in italics, stressing it as his main point. Kaus said he was “startled” by extent of the animus—and as he continued, he further described the way Gore was viewed by his colleagues. They saw him as a “bully,” he wrote, as “an attack machine.”

Al Gore was a brutal and ruthless campaigner, willing to do almost anything!

The notion that Gore was a ruthless campaigner would shape press coverage from this point forward. (As with the LIAR theme, this nicely linked to the way these hopeless baboons had novelized President Clinton.) In Chapter 7, we’ll be describing the ways the press corps “established” this punishing claim during the New Hampshire primary. In a repellent bit of group misconduct, they took turns pretending that Gore had been involved in the Willie Horton racial war of Campaign 1988—and that this unseemly conduct showed how “ruthless” and “brutal” he was. Beyond that, they insisted that Gore had ruthlessly attacked Candidate Bradley about his health care plan—although, by the end of the New Hampshire campaign, the press corps had widely acknowledged that Gore’s critiques of the Bradley health plan had in fact been accurate.

Accuracy no longer mattered. A brutal range war was on.

In Chapter 7, we’ll describe the press corps’ conduct in detail. Simply put, they lied and they lied, then they lied some more, conducting an open assault on democracy. In the end, this remarkable mental/ intellectual/ moral breakdown sent George Bush to the White House.

Our non-annual fund-raising drive is done. Only the history remains!

Who else is going to tell it?

Journalists just want to have fun!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2012

Presidents Day is for lovers: How will you spend your Presidents Day?

Will you go shopping at the mall? Or will you devote yourself to remembering the things which actually matter?

Tonight and tomorrow, PBS will help us recall the tenure of the 42nd president, Bill Clinton. The program comes to us from the brilliant people at American Experience, an enterprise which bills itself as “American’s Most-Watched History Series.”

We ought to be grateful for such gifts. But uh-oh! In this morning’s New York Times, Alessandra Stanley rolls her eyes at the program’s dumb, empty focus:

STANLEY (2/20/12): Monica Lewinsky doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s remarkable, really, how little resonance that Clinton sex scandal has today. The White House intern who shook the world is barely ever mentioned in the 2012 presidential campaign…

The Monica Lewinsky imbroglio is nonetheless at the center of a two-part, four-hour documentary called “Clinton” that will be shown Monday and Tuesday on PBS. It’s a long, solemn and supposedly reflective look back at the life and times of Bill Clinton that feels as if it were made the day he left office in 2001.

Amid all the furor over the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and a stained blue dress, it was hard back then to see what really mattered. Eleven years on “Clinton” doesn’t try to find out. The documentary is still too distracted by the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and the stained blue dress.

We haven’t seen the program ourselves, but we’ll guess that Stanley is right. And this is what Stanley says: Even on brilliant PBS, you’re being handed a big pile of crap on this big-pile-of-crap program.

According to Stanley, the program takes “a long, solemn and supposedly reflective look back at the life and times of Bill Clinton.” When she calls the program “supposedly” reflective, she means that it actually isn’t.

According to Stanley, the program focuses on the sexy-time thrills provided by the famous “intern” who wasn’t an intern, the one with thrilling stained dress. Just for the historical record, that thrilling “21-year-old intern” also wasn’t 21; when she first spoke with President Clinton, she was already 22—almost 22-and-a half! Talk of the “21-year-old intern” was maintained to heighten the novelized fun—the fun Joe Klein apparently cites at the end of tomorrow night’s program.

According to Stanley, this PBS program is still all about that thrilling stained blue dress! She says the program skips the things which actually matter:

STANLEY: What the film doesn’t do is give viewers a more compelling reason to go back and relive that epoch. The film hits all the familiar Clinton milestones...without exploring the deeper happenings that turned out to have had a more lasting impact on the world.

Yet two of the major cataclysms shadowing our times, the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2008 credit collapse, have roots that reach back to the Clinton administration.

The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for Sept. 11, isn’t included in the narrative. The rise of Osama Bin Laden and the failed missile strikes against Al Qaeda training camps in 1998 are noted in passing and presented almost as a pesky foreign policy crisis that briefly distracted Mr. Clinton from the more enduring Monica Lewinsky scandal.

And there is no mention whatsoever of the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, one of several fateful steps that the Clinton administration—in concert with Republicans—took in the name of deregulation. Some policies, like making home mortgages more accessible, helped fuel the economy, but they also heedlessly left Wall Street and other financial institutions free of adult supervision.

If Stanley is right, this program gives us an unvarnished look at the empty soul and addled brain of the modern “press corps.” Even at brilliant PBS, it’s still all about that stained blue dress! Sexy-time sex thrills are still what counts! Salaries are good at PBS! The rest of that shit doesn’t matter!

We congratulate Stanley for her spunk, especially since she’s said to be an FOD. (A friend of Maureen Dowd, who lugged a Pulitzer out of this mess.) For ourselves, we will mention a few other “deeper happenings” from the Clinton era which “turned out to have had a more lasting impact on the world” than that exciting stained dress, the dress which still makes tired blood rush to press corps body parts.

Glass-Steagall did matter. So did the rise of Osama Bin Laden. But here’s another “deeper happening” from this era which changed the future shape of the world. During the Clinton era, the mainstream press corps bowed to rising conservative power in its coverage of Washington politics. The mainstream press corps helped create the era of pseudo-scandal covered by the generic term “Whitewater.” And after the Clinton impeachment failed, it staged a war against his vice president—a war which sent Bush to the White House.

You will never be told about those events by the lofty folk at PBS. You will never be told about those events by the rest of the mainstream press corps, including those in its new “liberal” wing. (At least two weeknight hosts on MSNBC were up to their ears in these wars.) You will never be told by our contemporary “historians,” including those who get branded as liberal.

By now, the mainstream press corps has largely backed away from its earlier marriage, its open marriage to conservative power. But its behavior during that marriage has been disappeared.

In her review of the PBS program, Stanley refers to "Whitewater” as one of “the familiar Clinton milestones.” She says this familiar milestone is included in this week’s program. But will the program attempt to explain the way this pseudo-scandal was introduced to the world, through those bungled front-page reports in the New York Times? Will this program examine the way the scam moved forward from there?

Of course it won’t! To understand how the “press corps” behaved, you will have to read Fools for Scandal and The Hunting of the President. The mainstream press corps will never tell you what the mainstream press corps did in that era. And the new “liberal” wing of the mainstream press corps will never tell you about those things either. Too many careers are at stake! Too many “liberals” were up to their ears in the trashing of Clinton, then in the war against Gore.

Rachel Maddow tells us that Chris is one of her very best friends! Joan Walsh kisses his fraudulent ass in much the way other folk breathe!

How empty is your modern “press corps?” If you want to hurt your brain a bit more, read this depressing post by Kevin Drum—and be sure to click on his links. (We will discuss that item before the week is done.) For many people, it’s very hard to understand how empty the press corps’ culture is—how empty are the various folk who prop this Potemkin structure.

Stanley seems to be right as far as she goes, although we’ll have to wait to see the program. A serious look at the Clinton years would consider the ways that era may have led to our present disasters. In our view, it was the press corps’ marriage to conservative power which forms the largest part of that story. But members of the modern “press corps” will never talk about that.

People! Members of the modern “press corps” mainly just want to have fun! Stanley helps us appreciate that point near the end of her piece:

STANLEY: Joe Klein, the author and journalist who wrote “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about the Clintons’ first presidential campaign, is cited more than most and is also given the last word.

He disagrees with historians and former aides who say Mr. Clinton squandered his gifts and hobbled his potential for greatness. “I don’t know if you can say of a president who served us well and improved our material good that it was a wasted opportunity,” Mr. Klein argues. “And it was sure a lot of fun to watch.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! They seldom fail to say it!

Pseudo-journalists just want to have fun! They constantly voice this gruesome conceit, in which they evaluate news events in terms of their own career enjoyment. Maddow does this virtually every night. It’s the worst of her several bad instincts.

Making millions isn’t enough. These horrible people just want to have fun! And chasing that stained blue dress was good fun! It was a lot of fun to watch for the course of a good solid year!

It also sent George Bush to the White House! Over the course of the next two nights, you won’t be burdened with the way that actually happened.

History has to be told more than once!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012

Expanding what Ezra Klein said: Everybody has said it—once.

Back in 2006, Ezra Klein sketched the remarkable history of the 2000 campaign for the White House. On its face, his sketch was simply astounding—although it was slightly soft:

KLEIN (4/06): [Gore’s] address was the keynote for the We Media conference, held at the Associated Press headquarters in New York last October [2005] and attended by an audience that included both old media luminaries and new media innovators. In attendance were Tom Curley, president of the AP, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, all leading lights of a media establishment that, five years earlier, had deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore.

Say what? According to Klein, the media establishment “deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.” According to Klein, organizations like the New York Times and CBS News “spun each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore.”

In essence, Klein was describing a press corps coup. Even so, his description is a bit soft. (In truth, the nature of the press corps’ misconduct went well beyond the level of “spin.”) In essence, Klein was describing an open assault on the workings of our democracy. But as far as we know, that was the last time he ever mentioned this topic. From this point on, he made himself busy getting hired by the news orgs whose disgraceful misconduct he no longer discusses.

At our companion site, How He Got There, we are recording the full story of the conduct Klein described. People like Ezra said it once—but no more.

You have to tell history more than once before the public will grasp it.

We hope you’ll read our newly-posted Chapter 6, in which that media establishment nailed down its portrait of Candidate Gore as a LIAR. It took a lot of outright misquotation for them to be able to do it. But this does explain how Bush reached the White House—how we all got to Iraq.

After that, we hope you’ll consider supporting our ongoing project. The American public should know what occurred.

To voice your ten cents worth, go ahead: Just click here.

Mandate watch: We seem to live in a magical world!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012

Who does Obama’s accommodation accommodate: Our public discourse rarely makes sense.

Often, twists and turns in the public discourse seem to happen by magic. For ourselves, we remain confused by the semi-magical solution Obama came up with last week—his “accommodation” on the birth control mandate.

His accommodation did work, as if by magic. The whole tilt of the public debate quickly turned in his direction. On the politics, that's the tilt we prefer. Having said that, we were a bit puzzled by the way the accommodation would work.

Explanations were few, as always.

Yesterday, our puzzlement grew. On the front page of the New York Times’ Business Day section, Katie Thomas wrote this semi-surprising news report. “Self-Insured Complicate Health Deal,” the headline said. Reading Thomas’ gloomy assembly of facts, it was hard to see how Obama’s accommodation was supposed to accommodate a fairly wide range of players:

THOMAS (2/16/12): The Obama administration thought it had found a way to ease mounting objections to a requirement in the new health care act that all employers—including religiously affiliated hospitals and universities—offer coverage for birth control to women free of charge.

It would make the insurers cover the costs, rather than the organizations themselves.

But the administration announced the compromise plan before it had figured out how to address one conspicuous point: Like most large employers, many religiously affiliated organizations choose to insure themselves rather than hire an outside company to assume the risk.

Now, the organizations are trying to determine how to reconcile their objections to offering birth control on religious grounds with their role as insurers—or whether there can be any reconciliation at all. And the administration still cannot put the thorny issue to rest.

We were surprised to learn that “most large employers” self-insure, since the accommodation doesn’t seem to accommodate folk in that situation. And good lord! When Thomas said “most,” she wasn’t kidding:

THOMAS: Nationwide, 60 percent of workers with health insurance were covered by a self-funded plan in 2011, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of employer health benefits. Among large employers, the number is even higher. Eighty-two percent of covered workers at companies of more than 200 employees had self-funded plans.

Insurance industry experts and Catholic groups said they did not know how many religiously affiliated organizations self-insure, but they said the number was likely to mirror the national trend. Many of the organizations are large employers, including hospital systems and universities.

Say what? As if by magic, the accommodation flipped the public debate. But based on Thomas’ report, it seems the accommodation has a ways to go. Or something.

We simply don’t understand this topic. We will guess the chances are good that you may not understand it either. Last night, we saw Rachel Maddow citing this Los Angeles Times report as she discussed the way those 28 states already have a mandate like the one Obama proposed.

We haven’t had a chance to review that report in detail. But we’ve learned to be very careful about accepting Maddow’s representations in matters like these. Meanwhile, in just a quick skim, we’ll have to admit that we noticed this paragraph:

GEIGER (2/16/12): The original Obama regulation, released in January, went further than any state by requiring that women receive contraceptive benefits without co-pays or deductibles, as required for all preventive care under the healthcare law. But in exempting only some religious organizations, the administration followed what had become the approach used by many states.

Say what? “Went further than any state?”

We don’t understand this topic. We will guess that you may not understand it either; we’ll be reading more about it this weekend. But our discourse often seems to work by a form of magic.

One thing’s for certain—information and clarity are rarely part of the brew.

Lizard brain reaction alert: We’re not discussing what you think should happen in the best of all worlds. We’re discussing the facts and the logic of the public discussion—a discussion we don’t understand.

Maybe you do! Having said that, where can we get down a bet?

We'll be studying that L. A. Times report. In our view, the New York Times has still been very sketchy when it comes to the basic facts of this case.

Can’t explain squadoosh: The Buffett Rule changes again!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012

If you don’t like the tax code, just wait: If you don’t like the tax code, just wait!

At one time, this bromide concerned New England’s famously changeable weather. Now, it applies to the tax code too—and it is especially true if you read the New York Times.

Three days ago, we thought the Times had finally explained the much-discussed “Buffett Rule.” Jackie Calmes limned the rule in a coherent manner. We figured she knew her shinola:

CALMES (2/14/12): Mr. Obama’s “Buffett Rule” would set a minimum 30 percent rate on income above $1 million.

That at least made sense. If you had income above $1 million, you would have to pay 30 percent on that part of your income, unless you owed a higher rate under the prevailing tax code. But this morning, the Times has flipped again! Right in her opening paragraph, Annie Lowrey re-reconfigures:

LOWREY (2/17/12): President Obama has made the Buffett Rule, mandating that millionaires pay at least 30 percent of their incomes in taxes, the centerpiece of his campaign for “fairness.” But look for it among the myriad tax changes the White House detailed in the 2013 budget proposal it released this week, and you will not find it.

When it comes to what a person would owe, Lowrey’s highlighted explanation is massively different from Calmes’. And people do care about that!

This is very basic stuff, but the Times just can’t get it right. From one day to the next, the great newspaper can’t even find a way to be consistent.

That said, Lowrey’s report is built around some actual news: There is no Buffett Rule! The Obama Admin has included no such provision in its new proposed budget. Lowrey quotes some bafflegab from the Admin about this rather surprising fact. Deep in her piece, she describes a real proposal which was introduced in the Senate:

LOWREY: While the White House has declined to make the Buffett Rule a concrete proposal, Democrats in Congress have forged ahead. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, independently came up with the idea for a minimum tax for the wealthy, and made a proposal after Mr. Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union address.

The proposed law, the Paying a Fair Share Act, eliminates all deductions for the wealthy except their charitable contributions. After that, they must pay a 30 percent minimum tax on the balance of their income.

The law includes a phase-in, to avoid taxing Americans making $1 million at much higher rates than others making $999,999. If the taxpayer makes between $1 million and $2 million, the tax bill is only a fraction of the difference between taxes owed under current law and taxes as determined by the Buffett Rule.

We’re not sure what language that final highlighted passage is in. Later, we’ll run it through our Bing translator and see how it comes out in English. In fairness, if you fight with it for a while, you can possibly figure it out. But what a giant bowl of murk that whole final paragraph is!

("After that, they must pay a 30 percent minimum tax on the balance of their income?" Exactly one paragraph later, that statement turns out to be wrong. Or so it seems.)

You live in a nation of 300 million. Given that rather large number of people, the intellectual skills at the top of the heap are often quite surprising. Writers at the New York Times have a very hard time explaining things, even things which are very basic. Meanwhile, Willie Geist seems to think this about federal taxation: "Most Americans pay a rate of around 35 percent.”

He's on the TV machine thingy.

We’ve sometimes said they can’t explain squat. You’re right! We should add squadoosh!

VERY POOR CHILDREN: An assignment for Nicholas Kristof!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012

Part 4—It’s time for the royals to act: Are black kids doing better in school?

How about Hispanic kids? Low-income students? Very poor children in very poor neighborhoods? How about students whose families are at the tenth percentile in income?

Are those kids doing better in school? If we lived in a decent society, we would want to find out.

At present, we don’t live in that kind of world. That’s why we issue today’s assignment to Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about public schools again in yesterday’s New York Times column.

First, a bit of disclosure during this Valentine’s week: We aren’t in love with the Nicholas Kristof who writes about public schools.

The Kristof who writes about third-world poverty issues seems to have a lot of knowledge. We respect him for that. Nobody’s judgments are perfect, of course. But we often get the idea that he knows what he’s talking about.

The Kristof who writes about public schools just doesn’t strike us that way. He doesn’t seem to bring personal knowledge to his work. There is no reason why he should have such knowledge, of course.

But in lieu of personal knowledge or real reporting, the Kristof who writes about public schools often seems to rely on those tired old “educational experts” with their tired old talking-points. Full disclosure: To our ear, those “educational experts” don’t always seem to know what they’re talking about either—and they often seem highly scripted. (One example: A nation which rates work like this as “expertise” is a nation that's destined to fail.)

What strikes us as wrong when Kristof does schools? Consider yesterday’s column.

The column was headlined, “The New Haven Experiment.” That wasn’t a reference to Stanley Milgram, who once conducted a famous experiment in that city about deference to authority. But Kristof’s column performs a deferential type of reform-by-the-numbers, as his work in this area frequently does.

That doesn’t mean that his views are “wrong.” It does mean that they seem scripted:

He starts by banging the teachers unions around, railing against them for five or six paragraphs. Then, he declares his own personal greatness. Incomparably, our analysts groaned when they reached the point we’ve highlighted:

KRISTOF (2/16/12): New Haven has arguably become ground zero for school reform in America because it is transforming the system with the full cooperation of the union.

One of America’s greatest challenges in the coming years will be to turn around troubled schools, especially in inner cities. It’s the civil rights issue of our age, and teachers’ unions have mostly been an exasperating obstacle.

Yet reformers like myself face a conundrum. Teachers’ unions are here to stay, and the only way to achieve systematic improvement is with their buy-in. Moreover, the United States critically needs to attract talented young people into teaching. And that’s less likely when we’re whacking teachers’ unions in ways that leave many teachers feeling insulted and demoralized.

“Reformers like myself!” In this way, the know-nothings of the educational discourse crown themselves as its royals. “Teachers’ unions are here to stay,” these giants then sadly lament.

Have the unions sometimes erred? Presumably, yes they have. Does Kristof know what he’s talking about? We see few signs of that. As he proceeds, he recites the gospel of “reformers like himself,” a gospel built around one commandment: Thou shalt hire better teachers!

Thou shalt hire better teachers! It's hard to dispute such advice. But in the modern age of reform, it’s the only “idea” the “experts” know. And this one idea lies at the heart of Kristof’s ministry:

KRISTOF: A couple of years ago, the [New Haven] school district reached a revolutionary contract with teachers. Pay and benefits would rise, but teachers would embrace reform—including sacrificing job security. With a stronger evaluation system, tenure no longer mattered and weak teachers could be pushed out.

Roughly half of a teacher’s evaluation would depend on the performance of his or her students—including on standardized tests and other measures of learning.

Teachers were protected by a transparent process, and by accountability for principals. But if outside evaluators agreed with administrators that a teacher was failing, the teacher would be out at the end of the school year.

Last year, the school district pushed out 34 teachers, about 2 percent of the total in the district. The union not only didn’t object, but acknowledged that many of them didn’t really belong in the classroom.

[...]

So far this year, administrators have warned about 50 more teachers that their jobs are in jeopardy because of weak teaching. That’s out of 1,800 teachers in the district.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. of New Haven says that the breakthrough isn’t so much that poor teachers are being eased out, but that feedback is making everyone perform better—principals included. “Most everybody picked up their game in the district,” he said.

Does the mayor know what he’s talking about? Like Kristof, we have no idea. But please note: Reformers like Kristof knows only one trick. He says nothing about curriculum, textbooks, teaching methods. He only knows about firing bad teachers—and he’d fire just two percent!

For what it’s worth, we would fire bad teachers too. In principle, we’d be willing to use standardized tests as part of that process, although that’s very hard to do without invalidating the testing process. But we wouldn’t assume that this is enough—and Kristof, cribbing from the cheat sheets of “experts,” seems to know nothing else.

There’s nothing here about what should occur when kids enter kindergarten years “behind” their middle-class peers. There’s nothing here about how you teach a fourth- or fifth-grader who may be reading “on second-grade level.” There’s nothing here about how you teach math to middle-school kids who may be deeply confused by that point. Kristof’s “experts” don’t seem to know about such topics. Therefore, such topics disappear.

At the end of his column, the royal is frustrated. “The New Haven model still doesn’t go as far as I would like,” he sadly says, “but it does represent enormous progress.” He even says this at the end of his piece: “If the American Federation of Teachers continues down this path, I’ll revisit my criticisms of teachers’ unions.”

Our royals are often quite generous.

When we read this great reformer declaiming about the public schools, we rarely get the sense that he knows what he’s talking about. But great men declaim anyhoo. Here at THE HOWLER, you don’t see us sounding off about third-world poverty issues; we simply don’t know about such topics. Such shortfalls rarely stop the great men who may someday stop building their columns around those infernal unions (which are “here to stay,” of course).

Does Kristof know what he’s talking about? We never get any real sense that he does. But then, he may have a solid excuse. He reads the New York Times!

What has been happening in our schools over the past twenty years? “Reformers” like Kristof give the impression that things are a big howling mess. And yet, the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress seem to tell a substantially different story. The NAEP is persistently praised as the gold standard of educational testing—and scores by black kids are way up on the NAEP! Last August, this is the way Richard Rothstein described the matter in Slate:

ROTHSTEIN (8/29/11): The only consistent data on student achievement come from a federal sample, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Though you would never know it from the state of public alarm about education, the numbers show that regular public school performance has skyrocketed in the last two decades to the point that, for example, black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago. (There has also been progress for middle schoolers, and in reading; and less, but not insubstantial, progress for high schoolers.) The reason test score gaps have barely narrowed is that white students have also improved, at least at the elementary and middle school levels. The causes of these truly spectacular gains are unknown, but they are probably inconsistent with the idea that typical inner-city teachers are content to watch students wrestle on the classroom floor instead of learning.

“Black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago?” If true, that is an astonishing fact—and that’s what the NAEP data seem to show. (Black fourth-graders are now scoring higher in math than white fourth-graders did.) But Rothstein’s remarkable observation has gone unrepeated by our reformers. Very few people have ever been told. The public is unaware of such facts.

“Black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago?” New York Times readers have never been given a whiff of that remarkable fact. If you subscribe to the New York Times, you read that the NAEP is the gold standard. But you never learn what the NAEP data show!

Nicholas Kristof could change all that! To do so, he’d have to walk away from his experts—which could be a liberation. Our educational experts rarely seem to have any idea what is happening in our schools. They’re constantly taken by surprise—by the way the state of New York had to throw out a decade’s worth of test scores last year, to cite one gong-show example. But this would be our assignment for Kristof, should he choose to accept it:

Editor’s assignment for Kristof:

Get off our goddamned ass for once and write about the real world in this country. Stop preening about your hatred of unions and explain those rising test scores. NAEP officials will answer your calls. Call them up. Start talking.

Is something “wrong” with those data from the NAEP? Have black kids (and Hispanic kids, and low-income kids) really made the degree of progress that the data seem to suggest? If so, what might explain this progress?

As Brother Gaye might have put it: Kristof! What’s goin’ on?

To accept this assignment, Kristof would have to throw away his membership in the guild of the scripted royals. He’ll have to renounce his Harvard degree, the Rhodes Scholarship he then schmoozed his way into, even his Pulitzer Prize. He’ll have to break with the world of the lords—the lords who won’t stop with the insufficient shit he marbled through yesterday’s column.

Kristol likes telling the truth about the Sudan, which is just as it should be. Here’s his assignment if he’ll accept it:

In the case of America’s very poor kids, will he deign to examine the truth about them? Are very poor children in very poor neighborhoods actually doing better in school? If so, why has that occurred? (We don't prejudge any answers.)

NAEP officials will answer his calls. Will Brother Kristof call them?

When reformers reason: Reformers like himself seem to know in advance that their genius ideas are correct. Incomparably, the analysts howled when Kristof offered the highlighted thought:

KRISTOF: Mayor John DeStefano Jr. of New Haven says that the breakthrough isn’t so much that poor teachers are being eased out, but that feedback is making everyone perform better—principals included. “Most everybody picked up their game in the district,” he said.

It’ll take years to verify that students themselves are benefiting, but it’s striking that teachers and administrators alike seem happy with the new system.

Shouldn’t Kristof have put it like this: “It’ll take years to find out if students are benefiting?” Sorry! Our royals give us the world in advance.

They’ve absorbed great ideas from the experts—from the folk who were caught by surprise, as they constantly are, when the state of New York melted down.

Our third non-annual history drive!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012

There’s only a few days left: We know. We said we’d preview our upcoming Chapter 7 over at our companion site, How He Got There.

We may do so in the next few days. For today, we’ll again suggest that you read our recently-posted Chapter 6. In it, we describe the way the press corps turned Candidate Gore into a LIAR in December 1999.

They did this through an endless succession of misquotations and other misstatements and burlesques. From that point on, the theme never died. And this is the way George Bush reached the White House. This is how you got to Iraq.

Our suggestion: As you read that appalling chapter, ask yourself how this could have happened. The misquotations went on and on. We were writing about it in real time—and we were sending weekly mailers to about a hundred journalists.

We even e-mailed Howard Kurtz about one of the more clownish manifestations—about the way the Washington Times began using the main misquotation six days in, apparently as a matter of choice.

No luck!

How is it that none of these people stood to protest while these misquotations flourished, driven along by major scribes on our biggest news programs? (By Brian, by Tim, by Chris?) How on earth could that have happened? Also this: How is it that no one wants to discuss these events right to this present day?

All your heroes know about it—and everyone knows that it can’t be discussed! This is a truly remarkable story. As you read Chapter 6, ask yourself this basic question: How could this have happened?

We want to record the full story for future generations—for American citizens who won’t be burdened by the current group of fixers. If you want to support that effort, you’ve made the right call!

Go ahead! Read Chapter 6—we dare you! And why not just click here.

Confection watch: The 35 percent promulgation!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012

What makes Willie Geist run: This morning’s New York Times is a mess. But let’s close with Willie Geist.

This morning, he was reading the news on his eponymous show, Way Too Willie. Yes, we know—it was 5:30 in the morning. Very few people were watching. None of this really matters.

But is there anything people like Willie Geist know? He sidekicks on Morning Joe every day, pretending to discuss the news. But does he know anything at all? How about his writers?

What did Willie Geist tell the world? He was discussing the new report about Rick Santorum’s income taxes. Santorum paid 28 percent, Willie said, way more than Mitt Romney’s 13.9 percent.

Not a hair was out of place. Then, Willie Geist said this:

“Most Americans pay a rate of around 35 percent.”

Truly, that’s just astounding. And yes! Word for word, that is what Willie Geist said.

When Willie was running with Tucker: Back in 2006, Willie was regular sidekick to Tucker Carlson on the latter's nightly MSNBC show. In December of that year, Al Gore's film about climate change was maybe up for an Oscar.

To watch Willie complain about all the high boredom, go ahead: Just click here. This was and is your "press corps" at work.

In fairness, Frank Rich was worse.

Politifact: Dewey DID beat Truman!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Pulitzer Prize-level work: We hate to say it, but Rachel Maddow has done some good reports this week.

If you omit the first and last moments in the segment, one such report involved the latest fail by Politifact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning site. To watch Maddow’s report, click this.

As we continue, let’s ask ourselves a basic question: What type of intellectual skill is found at the Pulitzer level?

In the report in question, Politifact was evaluating this statement by Marco Rubio: "The majority of Americans are conservatives." Rubio did make the quoted statement at CPAC, although Politifact’s full report leaves this point in some doubt.

Rubio said it. Is his statement true? After some opening bafflegab, Politifact got to work. As usual, the fact-checking site put no name and no date on its work:

POLITIFACT: The Gallup Poll has been regularly asking Americans about their political ideology since 1992, and they compile the results of many polls each year and release an annual report.

For 2011, Gallup found that the largest group of Americans identify as conservative, at 40 percent. Another 35 percent identify as moderate, while 21 percent identify as liberal.

That trend has fluctuated a bit over the years, with moderates sometimes slightly outnumbering liberals. But liberals have consistently numbered much less.

From that, you might almost think that Rubio’s quoted statement was false. For those accustomed to working with numbers, forty percent is not a majority. From that passage, it’s rather clear that a majority of respondents in 2011 didn’t identify as conservative. And 2011 is the most recent year for which Politifact has data.

This isn’t the biggest deal in the world. But the statement does seem to be false.

Soon, Politifact seemed to drive the point home: “In Gallup’s poll, the number [identifying as conservative] has never crossed the 50 percent threshold,” the fact-obsessed web site said.

Forget about the most recent year. There has never been a year when 50 percent of Americans said they were conservative! But at Politifact, facts like these didn’t make Rubio’s statement false! In the judgment of the Pulitzer Prize-winning org, Rubio’s statement is “Mostly True!” Just watch as the judges reezun:

POLITIFACT: Rubio said that the majority of Americans are conservative. A respected ongoing poll from Gallup shows that conservatives are the largest ideological group, but they don’t cross the 50 percent threshold. So we rate his statement Mostly True.

No, conservatives aren’t a majority—but they are the largest group. So the statement is mostly true!

Truly, that’s pathetic work. We'd love to see Politifact rate that famous old bungled headline:

DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN? Mostly true! He got 45 percent!

This is one of the weakest reports we’ve ever seen from Politifact. At one point, the unnamed writer explained the thinking behind his or her undated judgment. We’ll repeat a bit of text from above. Truly, this is sad:

POLITIFACT: For 2011, Gallup found that the largest group of Americans identify as conservative, at 40 percent. Another 35 percent identify as moderate, while 21 percent identify as liberal.

That trend has fluctuated a bit over the years, with moderates sometimes slightly outnumbering liberals. But liberals have consistently numbered much less. (See Gallup’s chart for the clear contrast.)

We have two nits to pick with Rubio’s statement, though.

First, he said a majority of Americans are conservatives. In Gallup’s poll, the number has never crossed the 50 percent threshold. Technically, he would be more accurate if he said a plurality of Americans are conservative.

Let’s translate: Technically, Rubio would be more accurate [sic] if he had something different! If he had made an accurate statement, his statement would be correct!

He would have been right if he’d said something different. So his statement is mostly true!

(Please note: In that passage, Politifact describes the fact that Rubio’s actual statement is false as a "nit to pick.”)

This report is truly pitiful work. Right from its opening paragraphs, it’s a genuine D-minus effort. And here’s the point we want you to ponder: This work was published by a Pulitzer Prize-winning news org!

We know what you’re thinking: Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer too! And she’s the one who wrote those disgraceful columns in 2004 about Dr. Judith Dean’s mousy wardrobe.

That said, we often ask you to ponder the depth of the press corps’ intellectual breakdown. In truth, you live in a deeply broken world—in a broken intellectual culture.

Update—a poll grows in Brooklyn: In this post, Kevin Drum locates a poll which could be taken to support the claim in question. He says this lets Rubio off the hook.

Sort of. As Drum notes, the poll in question is highly specialized in several ways. Since there's no great way to answer a question like "what percent of the public is liberal/conservative," this was always a fairly shaky type of statement for Politifact to tackle.

But tackle it they did, in the manner they did, and their analysis doesn't make a lick of sense, even on its own terms. It was dumb of them to act as if the annual Gallup survey represented an absolute measure of such a question. But that's just one more part of the story here—their lack of intellectual skill.

If this is Pulitzer Prize-level work, just think how the average scribe reezuns!

VERY POOR KIDS: Falling for the gap!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Interlude—Irate academics speak: Is man (sic) the rational animal?

That’s what Aristotle is said to have said. But how much did Aristotle know? He also “defined motion as the actuality of a potentiality as such!” And he suggested that “the reason for anything coming about can be attributed to four different types of simultaneously active causal factors.”

According to Wikipedia! Just click here.

Did Aristotle have his head in the clouds? We suspect he’d temper his claims about rationality if he could see the way we modern men (and women) discuss low-income kids.

Last Friday, Sabrina Tavernise did a front-page report in the New York Times about the educational achievement of low-income children. She highlighted an undesirable trend. The achievement gap between rich and poor kids has grown in recent decades, she said.

What did she mean by “rich” and “poor?” By how much has the gap widened? In this passage, Tavernise described a study by Stanford professor Sean Reardon:

TAVERNISE (2/10/12): In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income—the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted—and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said...

Reardon compared kids from the tenth percentile by income with their peers from the 90th rung. From 1960 to 2008, the achievement gap between the groups grew by 40 percent, he found.

This morning, the Times published four letters about Tavernise’s report. Each letter comes from a muckety-muck; one even comes from a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School! None comes from a regular person who might even know something.

This doesn’t mean that the letters are “wrong;” we would even tend to agree with some of their observations. On balance, we thought the letters were unimpressive. We were most struck by the letter from a pair of academics at Gotham universities.

These writers advanced a familiar set of views, views you might describe as somewhat partisan. We were stuck by the dog which didn’t bark, perhaps from the roof of the car:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (2/16/12): Studies showing an increasing achievement gap between rich and poor students come as no surprise. As early-childhood educators who spend time in classrooms, we have been shaken by the changes of the last decade, changes that have had a particularly devastating effect on children in poor communities.

Young children have been deprived of essential experiences—art, music, open-ended discussion, dramatic play, exploratory use of materials—that we know contribute to well-rounded development and engaged learning.

The pressure for narrow academic advancement is a direct result of the No Child Left Behind law. Policy makers, divorced from the lives of young children and disdainful of the knowledge of experienced teachers, have left the learner out of the equation.

These studies point to the complete bankruptcy of the No Child law, but we wonder if policy makers will draw the logical conclusions. Improvements in children’s real achievement will come only with broader reforms: the development of a strong corps of teachers, in early childhood as well as in upper grades; increased support for teachers; emphasis on curriculum that is cognitively challenging and developmentally appropriate; and social reforms that support families and allow families to support their children’s learning.

The writers say they weren’t surprised by the studies which show an increasing gap. In their mind, these studies point to “the complete bankruptcy” of the No Child Left Behind program.

On balance, has No Child Left Behind been a failure? Has it been a massive failure? Truth to tell, we don’t know—but we have an excuse. You see, we read the New York Times every day. This includes the letters from outraged academics.

In our view, something quite basic is wrong with that letter. Here’s what it is:

Rather plainly, the writers assume that the growing gap reflects decreased achievement by tenth-percentile kids. But nothing in Tavernise’s report says that achievement has dropped among low-income kids, whether in the past fifty years or just in the No Child era.

Reardon’s study says the achievement gap has widened. That doesn’t mean that achievement itself has dropped among low-income kids. It may be that the low-income kids have shown gains in achievement—but the high-income kids have simply gained more.

That too would widen the gap.

We haven’t read Reardon’s study, and Tavernise didn’t explain this very basic point. But everything in the public domain suggests to us that something like that is most likely what has occurred. Since the writers cite No Child Left Behind, let’s look at achievement by low-income kids in just the past ten years.

To access the latest report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, click here. Scroll down to page 19, where you will see math achievement by fourth-graders who are eligible for free lunch. This would include a lot of kids from above the tenth percentile by income; as of 2011, a walloping 43 percent of public school kids were receiving free lunch, according to the NAEP data. (This was up from 33 percent in 2003.)

These aren’t the tenth-percentile-by-income kids. But this is the best we can do from the NAEP data—and the NAEP is widely cited as “the gold standard” in American educational testing.

What has happened to this larger group of low-income kids? From 2003 to 2011, their average score in fourth-grade math rose by eight points on the NAEP scale. Using a very rough rule of thumb, this means that these low-income kids gained almost one academic year in math over that eight-year period.

If we accept this judgment as valid, it represents a very large gain in math achievement during that period. But uh-oh! The achievement gap stayed right where it was during those eight years! As you can see from that same graphic, kids who didn’t qualify for free or reduced-price lunch gained eight points in math too. Both groups of kids were achieving more, so the gap stayed where it was.

If you click down to page 44, you will see free-lunch eighth-graders showing even larger gains in math during that eight-year period.

(Does ten points on the NAEP scale really equal one academic year? As we always say, we regard that as a very rough rule of thumb. But as we’ve often noted, this rule of thumb is widely applied by the New York Times when it leads to gloomy conclusions.)

Let’s return to that letter. Quite quickly, the gloomy academics were blaming Bush for the widening gap. They showed no sign of knowing a basic fact; according to our most reliable data, achievement has seemed to grow, by a lot, during the No Child years! Did that happen because of No Child Left Behind? In spite of the controversial program?

Like the irate academics, we have no real idea.

What has happened to achievement by tenth-percentile kids? Tavernise should have explained this basic fact; it represents a key omission from an important report. But please understand:

Over and over, again and again, journalists and academics keep falling into a basic logical gap. When they hear the achievement gap has widened (or stayed the same), they assume that achievement itself must have suffered.

This is a major logical bungle. Professors love to make it!

For ourselves, we would guess that achievement has grown at the tenth percentile by income over the past fifty years. We would base that guess on our knowledge of NAEP scores, where achievement has grown by very large amounts during that period. We would also base that guess on Tavernise’s report. This is what she says has happened for high- and low-income kids:

TAVERNISE: One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.

A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Low-income parents are spending more on their kids—but high income parents are spending much more. Presumably, this is an artifact of growing income inequality, but we don’t really know. The quote from Furstenberg suggests a world in which the gap is growing because of large gains by the wealthier kids—not because low-income kids are somehow achieving less.

Not because they’ve been destroyed by President Bush’s vile program.

Tavernise should have reported on achievement itself, not just on the achievement gap. But our society’s massive disinterest in these topics is always a sight to behold. That letter is a bit of a partisan document. To us, it suggests a familiar but almost pathological indifference to the actual facts on the ground.

The NAEP says that achievement has grown. How can it be—that our journalists and our academics remain innocent of such fundamental facts? We don’t know how to answer that question. But their indifference simply reeks.

Their indifference stinks to high heaven.

What would Aristotle say if he saw the way these discussions unfold? Again and again, our journalists and academics conflate achievement itself with the achievement gap. Again and again, they show no sign of understanding what the NAEP data show.

In the process, we show few signs of caring about the actual facts concerning actual low-income kids. We prefer to advance familiar novels, including some of a partisan bent.

We say we care about low-income kids. More often, we care about the tribe. Low-income kids can pretty much hang.

What we really seem to love is hate for that vile other tribe.

Tomorrow: Words from a reformer

Our third non-annual fund-raising drve!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2012

We hope you’ll help history proceed: It would be hard to overstate how broken our news culture actually is.

We’d say the culture is so broken that its problems can be hard to spot.

Example: When people aren’t told about certain events, they may not know that they aren’t being told. And a long code of silence has been observed concerning leading aspects of the Clinton-Gore years.

When Bill Clinton entered the White House, conservative power was gaining strength all through elite establishment Washington. Presumably, this helps explain the pseudo-scandals which dominated the Clinton era—and the failure of the mainstream press corps to challenge these pseudo-scandals.

Fools for Scandal came and went; the pseudo-scandals simply dragged on. The elite establishment press didn’t emerge from this fugue until they began to break with Bush about Iraq from July 2003 on.

In March 1999, the era of Clinton pseudo-scandals made way for the war against Gore. Two weeks ago, Melinda Henneberger made a first halting attempt to say that something strange occurred in the way the press covered Candidate Gore (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/2/12). This was a serious break with tradition. The code of silence surrounding this history-changing episode has been extremely strong.

With few exceptions, your liberal heroes were involved in this madness. For that reason, the silence is strong.

Information travels very slowly within such a broken culture. We hope you’ll read Chapter 6 at How He Got There, with apologies for the fact that it’s long. The press corps’ misconduct went on and on during that twenty-month White House campaign. Due to the size of the misconduct, the silence has been very strong.

The story is simply astounding. For that reason, no one wants to discuss it. We hope you’ll contribute to our ongoing effort! To do so, just click here.

This is how George Bush got to the White House. We think the story should be recorded. We know the silence is strong.

Tucker Carlson sets a new standard!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2012

The dumbest report of all time: We’ve seen a lot of dumb cable “news” segments. Who hasn't?

On Monday evening, Tucker Carlson’s segment on the O’Reilly Factor may have been the dumbest of all time.

This was also Mr. O’s fault, but Tucker took the cake. He was discussing a hapless report at his web site, The Daily Caller, about the workings of Media Matters.

Mr. O established the fact that the whole report was done through unnamed sources. (They’re also unnumbered. Assuming these sources really exist, there may only be two.) At that point, Tucker began to complain about Media Matters. But what was his complaint?

O'REILLY (2/13/12): I just wanted to point out that they are unnamed sources. OK, let's get to the headlines. MSNBC, you say in your reporting, is pretty much taking what Media Matters puts out, and what Media Matters does is propaganda.

CARLSON: Yes.

O'REILLY: And they're taking it, and they're basically throwing it on NBC's air without any kind of fact-check on whether it's true or not. They just take it and throw it on the air.

CARLSON: The line that we had from someone who worked at Media Matters for a long time was, and I'm quoting now, "We basically write their prime time. Anything we write, particularly anything that pertains to Fox News." And a lot of what Media Matters writes does pertain to Fox News, they run it basically verbatim.

So far, an obvious question hadn’t been asked: Has MSNBC been running reports from Media Matters which turn out to be inaccurate? Claims of “propaganda” to the side, it’s hard to see what the problem is if a news org runs material which is actually accurate.

Why wouldn’t you use a report by Media Matters if the report was accurate? Isn’t this how news works?

So far, the complaint didn’t quite make sense. But uh-oh! As the segment went on and on, Tucker never cited a single report by Media Matters which turned out to be wrong! He named a lot of journalists who were said to be shills for Media Matters. But what had these journalists ever written that turned out to be wrong?

No examples were given. Good grief! Not even one!

Tucker Carlson went on and on with his naming of names. It never seemed to enter his head that he might want to claim that the people he named have been getting things wrong. We sense there’s plenty of room in that head—but this rather basic thought didn’t seem to intrude.

Incredible! Through the lengthy name-naming segment, Carlson never cited a single thing Media Matters ever got wrong! We were somehow supposed to be outraged that the organization exists. In the next segment, Bernie Goldberg's review of this matter made much more sense, though we didn’t even see the ultimate logic in what he said:

GOLDBERG (2/13/12): When mainstream journalists write things that—about you or me or anybody else on this network, if it comes from Media Matters, if it's totally true, then I have no problem. But what about when it's half-true or totally false?

[...]

GOLDBERG: You raise an interesting point about is there something on the other side. Look, on the right, there's the Media Research Center. They do God's work when it comes to exposing liberal media bias. Nobody is better. But they do go deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to exposing conservative bias.

Bernie made several sensible points. He doesn’t care if it comes from Media Matters “if it’s totally true,” he said. He failed to note that Carlson had cited no errors by Media Matters—none at all.

Later, Bernie noted that the Media Research Center is ideologically one-sided, much like Media Matters. The MRC goes after the left; Media Matters goes after the right. As he continued, Bernie complained about this arrangement, saying he would like to have a single org which went after the right and the left.

We’d like to find gold coins out in the woods. But if the two different groups did accurate work, this would be a useful system.

So how about it? Does Media Matters do accurate work? (The MRC is often terrible.) In two segments on this topic, not one single error was cited. And no one seemed to notice the fact that this lapse had occurred.

We’ve seen a lot of dumb cable segments. On Monday night, Tucker Carlson may have set a new standard.

Wormhole watch: Sometimes, the Times arrives late!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2012

If you read all the way to the end, you learn that Romney was wrong: We’ve often said the news is a novel.

Sometimes, it’s more like a dream state. Chronology may get tangled up. Familiar events may appear, but they’re strangely out of place.

So it seemed when we scanned page A15 of this morning’s New York Times. Were we back in 2009? Perhaps in 2008? This was the headline which sprawled across the top of the page:

“Conservatives Sowed Idea of Health Care Mandate, Only to Spurn It Later”

It isn’t Michael Cooper’s fault. But his report seems to have emerged through a worm hole.

Good grief! We don’t see anything “wrong” with Cooper's report. But the Times has arrived at the scene of the fire, tires squealing, about three years too late! The topics Cooper discusses have been old hat on the web for years.

Today, these topics arrive in the Times, in something resembling a dream state.

Readers of the New York Times think they subscribe to the nation’s most informative paper. This morning, do they know that they’re getting their information three years after its due date? In a rational world, Newt Gingrich’s very recent endorsements of a mandate should be explained in much more detail; this should have happened months ago. But overall, this morning's report is just amazingly late.

We had a somewhat similar reaction to this report by Michael Shear, a report which is much more current.

Shear reports on Mitt Romney’s past stance regarding the auto bailout—more specifically, on the stance he took in November 2008. Can we talk? This really isn’t a complex story—except at the New York Times, where everything’s hard to explain:

SHEAR (2/15/12): Mr. Romney’s explanation is a complicated one, especially given the industry’s remarkable turnaround in the last three years.

Mr. Romney says he always favored what he calls a “managed bankruptcy” for the auto companies that would have allowed the businesses to restructure and emerge stronger than before. He criticized Mr. Obama for choosing what he called a “bailout” of the industry that benefited big labor unions.

But Mr. Romney next acknowledges that General Motors and Chrysler did in fact go through a “managed bankruptcy” at the urging of Mr. Obama’s administration—and he takes credit for being the one to have the idea first.

Maybe we’re being too critical here. But Romney’s explanation just isn’t “complicated.” He says the restructuring would have gone better without the “bailout” (read the full piece). Obama says that’s bunk.

That simply isn’t complicated, though Shear was eager to warn his readers about the shoals which lie ahead. And by the way: One major part of this story isn’t complicated at all. And it’s extremely salient, given Romney’s repeated claim to financial expertise.

This part of the story is very basic. But Shear buries it deep in his piece, starting in paragraph 18:

SHEAR: Democrats also accuse Mr. Romney of trying to rewrite the history of his earlier positions.

In the first paragraph of his 2008 opinion article, Mr. Romney made an unmistakable prediction: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”

Obviously, that prediction by Romney was just flat wrong. Mitt Romney, the famous turn-around genius, was totally wrong about that. We don’t know why readers had to fight all the way to paragraph 18 to learn such a basic fact.

In fairness, Shear deserves credit for citing that passage, which is highly salient. By happenstance, we reread Romney’s column last week. We too were instantly struck by that blatantly bungled prediction.

That said, this story just isn’t complex. Except at our greatest newspaper, where almost everything seems “complicated”—where the news may arrive three years late, with readers being warned to fear the confusion ahead.