RED AND BLUE WITH RACE ALL OVER: Sirota’s point was easy to state!

THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2013

Part 3—Why did he state it so strangely: Shortly after the Boston bombing, David Sirota wrote a column at Salon with a slightly peculiar headline:

“Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American,” that slightly odd headline said.

Sirota’s piece is still being mocked on Fox. But in its essence, his column was built around an obvious and simple idea—an idea which is easy to state.

It’s easy to express the concern which lay at the heart of Sirota’s column. In today’s Washington Post, E. J. Dionne describes a basic concern he felt when he learned that the two Boston bombers were Muslims:

DIONNE (4/25/13): My faith in a tolerant, pluralistic America made me worry that hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Muslim citizens could become the victims of our anger—much as Italian Americans were stereotyped in the days of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Dionne’s logic is a bit garbled. Why would his “faith” is a tolerant country make him worry that his country wouldn’t behave in a tolerant way?

Whatever! In this case, it's abundantly clear what he means! Dionne was worried that innocent Muslim citizens might be blamed for the misconduct of the two lost souls who conducted the Boston bombings. Dionne was worried that thousands of innocent people “could become the victims of our anger.”

(Why would that be “our” anger? Let’s set that point to the side.)

In that passage, Dionne expresses a deeply sensible concern—and despite a few minor wrinkles, he showed that the point can be easily stated. Indeed, in yesterday’s Washington Post, Kathleen Parker stated the same basic idea, again in a clear, direct way.

“[I]t isn’t possible to characterize an entire religious group by the actions of two individuals who claim to belong to a certain religion,” Parker correctly wrote. It doesn’t make sense to punish whole groups for the actions of a few people!

This is a very basic idea. We’re lucky enough to live in a society where the vast majority of people now understand this basic idea—an idea which is easily stated.

You shouldn’t blame whole groups of people for the bad actions of a few! By now, almost everyone understands this idea. Dionne and Parker showed how easily this basic idea can be expressed.

This is the basic idea which lay at the heart of Sirota’s column. But when Sirota discussed this idea, he did so in a clumsy, confusing way.

Read literally, many of his basic statements don’t seem to make a lot of sense. Almost surely, his formulations would have seemed strange to many non-tribal readers.

“No more hurting people,” a 7-year-old boy once wrote, in a way which was brilliantly clear. Dionne and Parker expressed a different idea in a clear, understandable way.

But this is the start of Sirota’s column—and much of this doesn’t exactly make sense. What kept Sirota from stating his basic idea in a simple, coherent way?

SIROTA (4/16/13): Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American

As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing—the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity—the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are—and are not—collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.

This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings—even though most come at the hands of white dudes.

Even using Sirota’s language, it’s easy to state the basic idea which lay at the heart of this column. We shouldn’t “collectively denigrate or target” whole groups of people because of “the unlawful actions of individuals.”

As Dionne and Parker show, it’s easy to state this idea in a simple way. And yet, Sirota’s column is frequently quite hard to follow—and its logic is instantly fractured, in the following way:

According to Sirota, “the dynamics of privilege” will influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. We certainly wouldn’t say that’s wrong—though the phrase we’ve put in quotation marks will seem unfamiliar to many readers.

The larger problem lies in the puzzling logic this preferred phrase seems to impose on the writer of this piece.

Look at what Sirota says in just his second paragraph. At that point, he seems to be talking about the “recent mass shootings” conducted by white males like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza.

According to Sirota, “white male privilege” means that white men “are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings, even though most come at the hands of white dudes.”

The basic claim there is true, of course. No one has blamed Joseph Biden or Justin Bieber for the murderous actions of Adam Lanza. But when Sirota attributes this fact to “white privilege,” he takes us to a strange place.

Is it really a form of “privilege” when Justin Bieber isn’t blamed for Adam Lanza’s actions? On its face, that’s a very strange way to put it. It almost sounds like Sirota is saying that Bieber should have been blamed, but somehow wriggled off the hook due to his “white male privilege.”

Sirota’s a perfectly sensible person. Obviously, he doesn’t think Bieber should be blamed for Adam Lanza’s conduct.

But as he continues, again and again, that is the way his logic may sound. As this puzzling logic persists, readers who aren’t adepts within the blue tribe will tend to fall away:

SIROTA (continuing directly): Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats—the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”

Should white non-Islamic terrorists be “portrayed as representative of whole groups?” It’s unclear what Sirota actually means when he talks about “groups” at this point.

But by the time Sirota is quoting Wise, Wise is saying it’s a form of “privilege” when the Vatican isn’t bombed in the aftermath of a crime by an Italian-American Catholic. He describes it as a form of “white privilege” when the United States government doesn’t bomb the “stale suburb” from which Lanza hailed.

All through his column, Sirota’s prose tends to be unclear. But in this passage, Sirota keeps making it sound like whites actually should be collectively blamed for the heinous crimes of a few. Or something—it’s hard to be sure.

Sirota writes very unclearly, as people often do when speaking to the choir. Sadly, when tribal leaders speak in such ways to the tribe, they tend to lose everyone else. Everyone else is puzzled by their language and their logic.

That said, it’s certainly true! Had it turned out that the Boston bombings were committed by an Italian-American Catholic, the United States government wouldn’t have bombed the Vatican! And when it turned out that the Newtown killings were conducted by a white male, the United States government didn’t decide to bomb the his neighborhood.

But why would someone choose to describe these failures-to-bomb as forms of “privilege,” since the failures-to-bomb represent the most obvious common sense?

A true believer can explain the jumbled logic driving these passages. But many others will be baffled by these strained constructions.

To be honest, Sirota’s piece is hard to follow from its beginning to its end, partly due to his frequent failure to specify what he is talking about. But for us, his peculiar, strained logic stands out throughout. Eventually, he takes us here:

SIROTA: If recent history is any guide, if the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident—one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate the political debate from any fallout from the attack.

That passage isn’t exactly “wrong,” but its logic is very strange. According to Sirota, had the bomber turned out to be a white anti-government extremist, white privilege would have “insulate[d] whites from collective blame!”

The basic claim there isn’t false, of course.But it’s a very strange way to describe a much simpler state of affairs. It’s likely to leave non-tribal readers feeling puzzled and excluded from our tribe's curious logic.

No more hurting people, a clear-minded child once said. Dionne and Parker expressed a different idea. But each was able to state that idea in a simple, clear, direct way.

Sirota didn’t do that! Instead, he employed a peculiar logic, a logic which will only seem clear to those who live within his bright blue tribe.

Tomorrow, we’ll wonder why Sirota did that. We’ll see what happened when Salon’s Joan Walsh stepped into this fray.

That said, tribes have always behaved like tribes! Unless you want to live in tribes, it’s a very dumb and very unproductive way to play.

Tomorrow: Tribal leader instantly nut-picks

We’re asking for your overwhelming support!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013

These issues are worth pursuing: What will MSNBC be like in the coming years?

That is a very important question. For our money, Hayes and Maddow have done a good job reporting on the Boston bombing. Hayes seems to be moving to a discussion about the explosion in Texas.

There is a great deal to discuss about both topics, and about many others. It would be an enormously helpful thing if these people developed strong cable news programs.

As readers will know, we’ve often been critical of Maddow’s work. She still can’t stop the incessant clowning, but a lot of potential exists on this channel, Lawrence largely excepted.

(Chris is just there to spew the lines the owners want. In 1999 and 2000, they wanted George W. Bush in the White House. For twenty months, Chris delivered. Now he recites different lines.)

If liberals and progressives want good work from this channel, we should go out and demand it. Elsewhere, the tendency has been to take whatever the channel gives us.

The tendency is understandable. On balance, it’s a lousy idea.

Sometimes, Rachel isn’t real honest; she tends to get a bit tribal on us in various ways. Serious people with serious values have to push back at such times, unless this channel is just a place where we can go to spend some time with our imaginary friends.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss three more points of focus for us in the coming year. But we think liberals should be challenged as they developed a new liberal media.

Our analysts need several new pairs of shoes! If you want to support such improvements, you know what to do:

Just click here.

The problem with surveys of us the people!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013

This just in concerning background checks: Everyone and his great uncle has mentioned the fact that 90 percent of the public supported expanded background checks on gun purchases.

The polling seemed quite clear. Then, the gun bill got voted down, in a Senate vote where 55 senators would have supported the background check provision.

Today, Pew and the Washington Post have released a new survey of public opinion. Respondents were asked this question:

What word best describes how you feel about the Senate voting down new gun control legislation that included background checks on gun purchases?

Choices: Very happy, Relieved, Disappointed, Angry.

In the survey, 47 percent said they were disappointed or angry. Only 39 percent said they were very happy or relieved. Still, it’s hard to square this new result with the widespread polling which suggested that expanded background checks were wildly popular.

It’s hard to square this new result with the prior polling. For that reason, Chris Cillizza has simply dreamed up an explanation. To see his attempt, just click here.

Cillizza at least makes it sound like he has an explanation. Pending some fuller explanation, we will only say this:

This is the problem with polling us the people on anything more complex than who we plan to vote for in a two-person election.

As a group, we the people rarely understand policy questions. When we’re surveyed on such questions, we often produce baffling, contradictory survey results.

For the last few months, we have been told, again and again, about the very high percentage in favor of expanded background checks. And yes, the polling really existed. Over the weekend, Fox News asked this survey question:

Do you favor or oppose expanding background checks on gun buyers?

In that survey, 82 percent said they favored expanding background checks. But how do we square results like that with this new result?

An explanation may emerge. Maybe Pew and the Post screwed up. Until then, this is the problem with polling us the people on policy questions like this.

The absence of the intelligentsia!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013

James Gleick chats with Dowd: James Gleick started out at the New York Times, then moved upward from there.

He spent ten years at the Times, then began writing highly-regarded, widely-praised books on scientific topics. As such, he is part of the intelligentsia, to the extent that we have one.

That’s why it’s instructive to see Gleick’s presence in today’s New York Times.

Over the weekend, Gleick wrote a piece for New York magazine about the way information spread concerning the Boston bombing. He noted the failures of cable news and the shortcomings of new, faster media.

The things he said made perfect sense, although they were hardly earth-shattering.

Gleick’s piece caught Maureen Dowd’s eye. “I asked Jim to elaborate over coffee,” she writes today in today’s New York Times.

Strikingly, Gleick said yes. (At one time, he was Dowd’s editor.)

Let’s start with a cynical thought about one part of Dowd’s column. In the passage which follows, she quotes Gleick praising the New York Times for its reporting of the Boston bombing.

In this passage, Dowd is quoting Gleick. We don’t disagree with what he says. But Dowd is advertising the Times, just as Margaret Sullivan did in Sunday’s public editor column:

DOWD (4/24/13): [Gleick said,] “People on Twitter were crowing about how superior Twitter is to old media. What they meant was, ‘See, we’re faster than TV.’ And I’m there. But I’m also still an old-media guy, because the information that matters sometimes comes the next day or the next month, when there is time to digest and interpret. The best reporting in Boston last week was not in cyberspace. It was in the two great daily newspapers that were on the scene, The Boston Globe and The Times.”

We largely agree with what Gleick said. But as the battle for market share burns, does it seem like the Times is now advertising itself in a whole new set of ways?

Whatever! We were more stuck by the criticisms of various media which emerged from this conversation. More precisely, we were struck by the fact that Gleick would voice these criticisms to a cipher like Dowd.

As Dowd quotes and paraphrases Gleick, perfectly valid complaints emerge. Gleick complains that “crowd-sourcing quickly turned into witch-hunting” in cyberspace last week. (That was a paraphrase by Dowd.) He is quoted complaining about the “new forms of banality” which he encountered on-line.

“The battle lines are being drawn between the crowds and the experts,” he is quoted saying. “The crowds are fast and can be smart, but sometimes they’re horribly wrong, like the Internet vigilantes on Reddit who thought they could do better than the F.B.I. in looking at photographs and exposing the guilty.”

Near the end of her piece, Dowd presents Gleick saying this:

DOWD: “We have all these new channels and tools to understand the world as it happens, but there’s no reliable algorithm for sorting through the morass. It used to be to read the morning paper on the way to work and read the evening paper on the way home. Now we have to invent a new personal methodology every day. And if we’re waiting for things to settle down and become simple, that’s never going to happen.”

We don’t disagree with any of that. But we were struck by the fact that Gleick would say these things to Dowd.

James Gleick is part of the intelligentsia, to the extent that we have one. Does he understand the world in which he has been living?

Over the past twenty years, Maureen Dowd has set the standard for journalistic “witch-hunting.” She has been the leading inventor of the “new forms of banality.”

Has anyone ever been “horribly wrong” quite as often as Dowd? Has anyone in the nation been a bigger “vigilante?”

“There’s no reliable algorithm for sorting through the morass?” Dowd has played the leading role in creating the “morass” which has taken the place of a public discussion. No one has been less reliable as an algorithm for sorting through the swamp which she herself created.

In 1992, one brave journalist warned her colleagues about the perils of “Creeping Dowdism.” Since that time, Dowd has helped instruct the nation in our new forms of banality.

She has relentlessly taught her readers that politicians should be judged by their hair and by their clothes—and by their spouses’ hair and clothes. She has invented a string of bogus quotations, then offered inane accounts of what these faux statements supposedly mean—what they mean about the pols who didn’t make them.

In 1992, Katherine Boo noted where things were heading with Dowd. From that time to this, the nation has been desperate for someone from the intelligentsia to stand and renew that complaint.

But as we have long tried to tell you, we don’t have an intelligentsia at this point in time. Instead, we have a bunch of self-dealing celebrities who are trying to sell us more books.

Do we have an intelligentsia? Obviously no—we do not.

No intelligentsia could have sat by for twenty years as Dowd simpered, invented, cooed and played, dragging our discourse way, way down with her banal with-hunting. No intelligentsia could sit by as people like Jal Mehta present scripted, cherry-picked accounts of our students’ test scores.

In what kind of nation can work like that be the expected norm?

Maureen Dowd has invented the new and the banal! What does it mean when a lauded fellow like Gleick joins her for a discussion which, just to be perfectly honest, isn’t much sharper than that?

RED AND BLUE WITH RACE ALL OVER: Red and blue fight about black, white and Muslim!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2013

Part 2—Murky, inane, unhelpful: Last week, before the photos emerged, no one knew who had committed the terrible Boston bombings.

Murky, unfocused, unhelpful work soon appeared from the leaders of both major tribes. Red and blue were quickly fighting about concepts like black, white and Muslim.

Let’s start with some murky, unfocused work which emerged at a red tribal site.

Newsbusters is one of the many sites maintained by the Media Research Center, a long-standing conservative press critique site. Over the years, the MRC has produced a ton of horrible work, though some of its work isn’t awful.

Last Friday, a minor blogger at Newsbusters responded to a more prominent figure at Salon. Earlier in the week, Salon’s David Sirota had written a column whose headline said this:

“Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”

It’s hard to find a paragraph in Sirota’s piece that fully makes sense. That said, his column was built around a premise which was perfectly sensible: Different repercussions might flow depending on who had committed this bombing.

According to Sirota, some racial, ethnic or religious groups are “collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals.” Other groups are not subjected to collective action when some member of the group commits a heinous crime.

For that reason, Sirota said he hoped the bomber would turn out to be “a white American.” In that case, the bomber would be pursued as an individual, with no consequences for innocent members of his group.

“It will probably be much different if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a foreigner from the developing world,” Sirota gloomily predicted.

Sirota expressed his sensible notion quite poorly, as we will see tomorrow. But our modern red and blue tribes simply love to fight. Warring tribes have always felt this way, in the Caucasus and elsewhere.

Warring tribes love to fight! In that spirit, Portnoy offered a fuzzy, unintelligent response to Sirota in this, his unfortunate Newsbusters blog post.

By now, the Tsarnaev brother had been identified as the bombers. (One was already dead.) In his unfortunate tribal post, Portnoy gloated about the fact that Sirota’s wish hadn’t been granted.

Was Portnoy right in that perception? Had Sirota’s wish been denied? We’d pretty much have to say yes. The Tsarnaev brothers pretty much aren’t “white Americans” in the sense Sirota seemed to have meant, even though both brothers are “white” and even though the younger brother is an American citizen.

As noted, Sirota had worried about what might or would happen “if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a foreigner from the developing world.” But uh-oh! As it turned out, the two bombers were Muslim. Beyond that, they were both foreign-born. They and their family had come to the United States from an unfortunate, war-torn region which might even be said to belong to the developing world.

In truth, the Tsarnaevs weren’t “white Americans” in the sense Sirota had seemed to have in mind. Indeed, ever since their identity surfaced, concerns have been voiced that the Tsarnaevs’ conduct might produce repercussions for Chechen-Americans or even for Muslims in general.

This is a perfectly valid concern, although, within our own blue tribe, our tribal leaders love to assume that such bad conduct will happen.

In his column from inside blue nation, Sirota dealt with a valid concern, although he expressed this concern rather poorly. Now, Portnoy played the red tribal fool in his gloating response.

Because his writing is jumbled and murky, it’s hard to tell just what Portnoy thought about several key points. But he gloated at the idea that Sirota’s wish had been denied. He also stated some bogus information.

Most strikingly, he weirdly seemed to suggest that if you’re Muslim, you can’t be white. Below, you see how dumb it can get within our modern red tribe:

PORTNOY (4/19/13): Fox News fills in some of the missing “character” details of the brothers Tsarnaev. The two came to the U.S. from Chechnya about a decade ago. They are believed to have undergone military training overseas. Tamerlan, the brother killed in the shootout, told a photographer in 2009, “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.”

Oh, and they have been confirmed to be Muslim.

These details are at least a setback for David Sirota, a blogger at Salon.com, who headlined a post earlier this week “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” After taking much-deserved flak for his outrageous post, Sirota doubled down, crafting a second column titled that might have been titled “I’m Dreaming of a Whiter American.” Instead he opted for the more banal “I still hope the bomber is a white Americam.” After another round of well-aimed barbs, you’d think Sirota had had enough. And you’d think wrong.

Early this morning, around the time the police were shooting it out with the bombers, Sirota engaged in a shootout of his own on Twitter, attacking what he called the “white media” and defending his previous positions against the forces of “bigotry.”

So have Sirota and pals lost the battle? Not necessarily. Some on the left have already hit upon a new self-serving narrative: that the attackers were Muslim but that they were also white (shades of George Zimmerman?). Cenk Ungyur [sic], of Current TV fame, who subscribes to this view, seems to wag an affectionate finger at Sirota in a tweet of his own...

Portnoy didn’t seem to understand what Uygur (correct name) had written. He never bothered explaining why Sirota's piece was “outrageous.”

Meanwhile, were the Tsarnaev brothers “believed to have undergone military training overseas?” Someone may have believed that claim. But the younger brother hadn’t even been out of the country in recent years. And there is still no evidence that the older brother received military training when he went to Russia in 2012.

Portnoy’s work was awful. That said, the second passage we have highlighted constitutes the crowning dumbness of his unfortunate post.

By all accounts, the Tsarnaev brothers were Muslim. By normal census classifications, they were also white. But Portnoy somehow seemed to think that a person can’t be both Muslim and white. The reference to Zimmerman suggested that he thinks a person can’t be both white and Hispanic, although we’re forced to guess.

In fairness, Portnoy is a minor figure at Newsbuster. But in that passage, he helped us see the ginormous dumbness that often emerges from red nation orgs in our modern tribal wars.

But how about the work of our own blue nation in this particular skirmish? At Salon, Joan Walsh seized upon Portnoy’s post—and her work was almost as murky and unhelpful as his work had been.

Meanwhile, how about Sirota’s column itself? Tomorrow, we’ll start with that.

Alas! The red and the blue were soon talking race in the aftermath of Boston. Much work from the right was unhelpful, inane.

Some of our blue leaders weren’t hugely better. Tribal war makes humans dumb.

Tomorrow: Nut-picking, plus tribal logic

Breaking: Most of the adults couldn't play Blickets!

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013

Despite that, our species is great: David Dobbs’ piece in today’s New York Times had us right at hello.

The piece appeared in the Science Times section. It began with a hook we’re always intrigued by—the famous old hook where we humans explain how “great” our species is:

DOBBS (4/23/13): When it comes to play, humans don't play around.

Other species play, but none play for as much of their lives as humans do, or as imaginatively, or with as much protection from the family circle. Human children are unique in using play to explore hypothetical situations rather than to rehearse actual challenges they'll face later. Kittens may pretend to be cats fighting, but they will not pretend to be children; children, by contrast, will readily pretend to be cats or kittens—and then to be Hannah Montana, followed by Spider-Man saving the day.

And in doing so, they develop some of humanity's most consequential faculties. They learn the art, pleasure and power of hypothesis—of imagining new possibilities. And serious students of play believe that this helps make the species great.

We human beings were made in God’s image! Man [sic] is the rational animal! From the dawn of the west, the western self-concept has always been built around the notion of human exceptionalism. And sure enough:

This morning, there was Dobbs, reassuring Times readers that their species is “great.” With apologies, our species didn’t seem so great to us by the time Dobbs and his editor finished.

Dobbs’ piece is 1200 words long; it includes some very jumbled attempts at psychological cogitation. At its heart, it describes an intellectual puzzle presented to a bunch of adults—and to “an extremely alert 4-year-old” named Esther.

Dobbs is blown away by Esther’s ability to solve the puzzle. We aren’t sure why, but that’s not the key point.

Here’s what the 4-year-old did:

According to Dobbs, a professor of psychology named Alison Gopnik asked Esther to play a game named Blickets. In the passage which follows, Dobbs starts to describe the way Blickets is played:

DOBBS: In the game, which has the fetching name Blickets, players try to figure out what it is that makes an otherwise undistinguished clay figure a blicket...

Last summer I joined Dr. Gopnik behind a wall of one-way glass to watch her lab manager, Sophie Bridges, play the game with an extremely alert 4-year-old, Esther.

Seated at a child-size table, Esther leaned forward on her elbows to watch as Ms. Bridges brought out a small bin of clay shapes and told her that some of them were blickets but most were not.

''You cannot tell which ones are blickets by looking at them. But the ones that are blickets have blicketness inside. And luckily,'' Ms. Bridges went on, holding up a box with a red plastic top, ''I have my machine. Blicketness makes my machine turn on and play music.''

It's a ruse, of course. The box responds not to the clay shapes but to a switch under the table controlled by Ms. Bridges.

Even at the age of 4, Esther finds herself being conned by a professor's assistant! At any rate, Esther will have to determine which of the clay shapes are blickets.

The game can be played two different ways. For the sake of clarity, we will include Dodd’s full description of the two different versions. Try to screen out the unneeded confusion that is included here:

DODD: Now came the challenge. The game can be played by either of two rules, called ''and'' and ''or.'' The ''or'' version is easier: When a blicket is placed atop the machine, it will light the machine up whether placed there by itself or with other pieces. It is either a blicket or it isn't; it doesn't depend on the presence of any other object.

In the ''and'' trial, however, a blicket reveals its blicketness only if both it and another blicket are placed on the machine; and it will light up the box even if it and the other blicket are accompanied by a non-blicket. It can be harder than it sounds, and this is the game that Esther played.

In the version of the game Esther played, the machine lights up if a blicket is placed on the machine with a second blicket. The machine will light up even if a third non-blicket is placed on the machine with them.

After watching a bunch of clay shapes get placed on the machine, Esther has to figure out which of the shapes are blickets.

How hard is this game? To some extent, it all depends on how clearly the rules are explained. But at its heart, this game is about as complex as playing tic-tac-toe. Two blickets turn on the machine. One blicket or fewer will not.

If you understand the rules, the game is rather simple. As it turns out, Esther was given a straightforward set of three observations from which to draw her conclusions:

DODD (continuing directly): First, Ms. Bridges put each of three clay shapes on the box individually—rectangle, then triangle, then a bridge. None activated the machine. Then she put them on the box in three successive combinations.

1. Rectangle and triangle: No response.
2. Rectangle and bridge: Machine lighted up and played a tune!
3. Triangle and bridge: No response.

Ms. Bridges then picked up each piece in turn and asked Esther whether it was a blicket.

Duh. The rectangle and bridge are plainly blickets, as we see in observation 2. Plainly, the triangle can’t be a blicket, as we see in observations 1 and 3.

If you understand the rules, these deductions just aren’t complex. How many 4-year-olds could figure this out? We have no idea. (Again, that would partly depend on how clearly the rules were explained.)

But good God! For an adult, this just isn’t a complex undertaking! Unless you’re a science writer at the Times, in which case the stunning complexity of this task leads to reams of jumbled cogitation, as you can see by reading Dobbs' complete piece.

Here’s the weird news: According to Dobbs, Esther and a bunch of other kids were able to figure this puzzle out—but Dobbs and a bunch of other adults could not! This is his fuller lab report:

DOBBS (continuing directly): I had been indulging my adult (and journalistic) prior bias for recorded observation by filling several pages with notes and diagrams, and I started flipping frantically through my notebook.

I was still looking when Esther, having given maybe three seconds' thought to the matter, correctly identified all three. The rectangle? ''A blicket,'' she said. Triangle? A shake of the head: No. Bridge? ''A blicket.'' A 4-year-old had instantly discerned a rule that I recognized only after Dr. Gopnik explained it to me.

Esther, along with most other 4- and 5-year-olds tested, bested not just me but most of 88 California undergraduates who took the ''and'' test.

Most of the children figured it out. Dobbs and most of the adults did not. Dobbs goes on to pen a large amount of gobbledegook about the reasons for this outcome.

This gobbledegook is much more striking than the fact that Dobbs was stumped by this game in real time. Here’s why: Even after contemplating this game as it was presented to Esther, Dobbs and his editor still couldn’t see how simple the puzzle was. Despite his obscure ruminations, he doesn't see how odd it is that a bunch of adults couldn’t figure it out.

We will offer a simpler synopsis than the one Dobbs provides in his piece:

This journalist for Science Times isn’t as smart as a bunch of 4-year-olds. And even after the fact, he still couldn’t see how simple this game really was.

In line with that, we have to say that our species may not be all that “great.” But then, we often think that after reading the Times. Kidding aside, this represents a major social problem.

Why can’t Times readers see through Maureen Dowd’s steady-state nonsense? We’re not sure, but one of the paper’s science reporter couldnt even figure out which of the shapes were blickets!

Most of the adults couldn’t do it! Despite that, our species is great!

The glories of untrammeled income transfer!

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013

And our plans for the upcoming year: At this time of the year, we ask you to consider supporting our site. For the record, this is our fourth or fifth “annual” fund-raising drive in what is now fifteen years!

We pledge to be less unpleasant this year, especially about our own tribe’s leaders. That said, we see four basic areas we plan to explore this year.

This is the first of the four:

The ongoing growth of liberal media: The liberal world was asleep in the woods when we started this web site during the Clinton/Gore years. No matter how much bullshit the mainstream threw, you simply couldn’t raise a complaint from the liberal world.

That’s how George Bush got to the White House. To this day, the career liberal world refuses to discuss or explain the process by which this happened.

In the aftermath of Iraq, a liberal world began re-emerging. We think this is still the most important ongoing development in our political media.

What will MSNBC turn out to be like? What sorts of issues will end up on the liberal world’s play list? To what extent will the liberal world eschew the practices of Fox? What kinds of forums will we build for outreach to non-liberal voters?

We still think these are the most important issues floating around in political media. We’re going to continue to ask you to critique and challenge the work of your team as the liberal world reinvents liberal media.

In our view, our tone has been too negative in this area—but liberals should challenge the conduct of liberal media. We’ll still regard that as Mission One in the coming year.

Tomorrow, we will continue our list of emphases for the coming year. But we’re asking you to support this site. Nexis ain’t free, to cite one example. We’ve used it for all these years.

Analysts need a new pair of shoes! If you want to support our theoretically less caustic site, you know how to do that: Click here.

Were four Republican senators brave?

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013

Courage and the gun vote: Shortly after last week’s gun vote, Dana Milbank helped us see who had, and hadn’t, been courageous.

We think this sort of thing is usually fairly dumb. Your results may differ:

MILBANK (4/18/13): Courage was in short supply at the Capitol on Wednesday. The overwhelming majority of Americans favor the sort of background checks that Manchin and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) had proposed to keep weapons from the felonious and the insane. A majority of senators supported it, too. But too many cowered in the face of fierce opposition from the National Rifle Association.

[...]

There were moments of courage on the Senate floor Wednesday. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), seriously ill with cancer, had traveled to Washington to cast his vote. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) gave an uncharacteristically moving speech explaining why he was reversing his position and would vote for a ban on military-style assault rifles (the proposal failed, 40 to 60). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) defied most in his party to speak, and vote, in favor of the background-check measure.

Bravest of all were Manchin and Toomey, both risking their "A" ratings from the NRA to follow their consciences. "This isn't gun control, this is common sense," Toomey told his colleagues in the closing minutes of Wednesday's debate.

Pundits love to tell these stories—but were these senators brave? Was McCain brave, or has he decided that the will never run again? Was Toomey brave, or was his stance the smart political move in a blue-to-purplish state?

Did Harry Reid show courage? Or would any other approach have been politically crazy?

We don’t think the answers are always obvious. For us, it’s hard to see how Manchin wasn’t bucking the politics given the nature of his state—though we’re willing to be corrected. But when pundits start handing out badges of courage, their work often seems a bit childish:

DIONNE (4/23/13): But the vote also demonstrated for all to see a Republican Party walking in lock step behind its commanders in the gun lobby. Only four Republicans bravely defied the NRA’s fanatical opposition to a very mild measure: Toomey and Sens. Mark Kirk, John McCain and Susan Collins.

This should send a message to all who keep looking for new signs of Republican moderation.

Republicans who cultivate a reputation for reasonableness—their ranks include, among others, Sens. Johnny Isakson, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker, Kelly Ayotte, Saxby Chambliss, Lisa Murkowski and Rob Portman—could not even vote for a watered-down proposal. This tells us that the GOP has become a coalition of the fearful. In a pinch, the party’s extreme lobbies rule.

Are Kirk (from Illinois) and Collins (from Maine) really in the same position as solons from Georgia or Tennessee? Did they “bravely” defy the odds? Or were their odds just somewhat different?

“Ardent for some desperate glory,” pundits frequently let us know who was and wasn’t courageous. In this passage, Jonathan Capehart reacts to Heidi Heitkamp’s recent votes, including her vote against Manchin-Toomey:

CAPEHART (4/22/13): Heitkamp’s response shouldn’t have been too surprising. She has an A rating from the feared National Rifle Association. She hails from a red state that went for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney over President Obama by 20 points. And she won her seat by one percentage point. Still, her comments left many Democrats to wonder if Heitkamp was a Democrat in name only. So, when the parade of Democratic senators coming out for same-sex marriage got underway, Heitkamp must have seen it as a way to prove her Democratic bona fides to the national party.

After considerable pressure from activists and the media, Heitkamp said yes to marriage equality on April 5. But she was hardly courageous. Heitkamp was the fifth of six senators to do so that week and the 52nd senator overall to support same-sex marriage. More importantly, anti-gay groups no longer have a NRA equivalent to keep politicians in line. The arguments against civil rights for lesbians and gay men as espoused by the Family Research Council have lost their power. And groups such as the National Organization for Marriage have been discredited.

To the highly punitive Capehart, Heitkamp wasn’t even “courageous” when she voted for marriage equality. Meanwhile, Capehart is shocked when a Democrat from a state which buried Obama last year doesn’t vote all the votes he would like.

To our taste, liberal pundits tend to be wasting everyone’s time when they hand out citations for bravery in the wake of such votes. By way of contrast, we will recommend Kevin Drum’s reaction to the failed gun safety vote.

We’ve been outworked by the NRA down through the years, Kevin Drum basically said. In effect, he urged a long-term fight to persuade more voters about the need for stronger laws—in part, to drive up voter intensity on our side of this fight. In truth, ten percent can beat ninety percent if the ten percent strongly care.

We will recommend Drum’s post, including its long-term graph from Gallup concerning public opinion about the need for tougher gun laws. (That said, do we still trust long-term graphs from Gallup? Discuss.) In the meantime, let’s consider one more part of Dionne’s column:

DIONNE: [Gabrielle] Giffords’s frustration echoed sentiment all across her side of the debate. In the past, Democrats who support gun safety had reacted benignly to members of their party from rural states who opposed sensible gun measures for expediency’s sake. Not this time. The response to Democrats who opposed background checks—Sens. Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Heidi Heitkamp and Mark Pryor—was indignation.

Translation: “In the past,” we liberals haven’t worked or pushed very hard on gun issues. Our team has been outworked on this topic, as on many other topics and issues.

Not unlike the city mouse, we get angry when we lose after all those indolent years.

Today, our pundits rise to call people names. Is there any topic on which these folk have been brave or courageous down through these mush-speaking years?

RED AND BLUE WITH RACE ALL OVER: We’re all the same, Obama said!

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013

Part 1—Fred Hiatt begs to differ: Is American becoming a nation of tribes? With a red tribe opposing a blue tribe?

Fred Hiatt says we are becoming a nation of tribes. And he thinks that’s a lousy development.

At the start of his recent column, Hiatt recalls what Obama said on the evening he became famous. Obama’s claims are less and less true, the columnist glumly declares:

HIATT (4/22/13): A red state/blue state chasm

In the week since modest gun control died in the Senate, those of us who don’t think guns make the country safer have been inclined to blame a few cowardly senators whose votes could have shifted the outcome.

Unfortunately, the problem is bigger than that. Contrary to what then-Sen. Barack Obama told us in his inspiring breakout speech to the Democratic convention of 2004, there is a blue America and a red America. And the colors have been deepening over the decade since Obama spoke.

Back in 2004, Obama stressed the values held in common by those in so-called red and blue states. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” he said.

“We coach little league in the blue states. And yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.”

Obama’s claims about shared values produced an amazing response that night. Yesterday morning, nine years later, Hiatt said the nation has drifted strongly away from this hopeful vision:

HIATT: Journalist Bill Bishop coined the phrase “the big sort” in 2004 to describe the increasing political homogeneity of American living patterns. It comes as no surprise that some 60 percent of households in Montana own guns, compared with 13 percent in Rhode Island; or that, with similar populations, Missouri has six abortion providers and Maryland 34.

But the red-state/blue-state fissure seems to be turning into a chasm in the months since President Obama won reelection. After the Newtown massacre, Connecticut and Maryland enacted sweeping bans on assault weapons and other gun-control measures. South Dakota enacted a bill authorizing school employees to carry guns.

Hiatt listed other social issues concerning which the red and blue states are drifting sharply apart. But “the chasm doesn’t run only through social issues,” he said, noting the way some blue state governors are engineering tax and spending increases while governors in red states are cutting to the bone.

“There are still a handful of purple states,” Hiatt declared. But he noted that “only four (Florida, Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina) were decided by five percentage points or fewer” in the 2012 election.

That strikes us as a surprising statistic, especially since the overall vote was reasonably close. In Campaign 2000, there were twelve such states, with Maine and Michigan ticking in at 5.1 percent.

Is the nation sharply dividing into the red and the blue? “The encouraging news, if there is any,” Hiatt says, “is that these patterns aren’t as immutable as they were...before the Civil War.”

We take that to mean that there isn’t much encouraging news on the red/blue tribal front.

It’s hard to maintain a continental nation without succumbing to tribal division. There will always be regional culture in a nation as large as this one. (You could ask the Soviet Union, except it no longer exists.) At times when the center ceases to hold, cultural clashes can tear at the fabric of the society, can leave it unable to function.

For that reason, sensible people should look for ways to permit the center to hold. With that in mind, we’ve been struck by the way certain parts of our own blue tribe have performed in the last week.

Hiatt wrote his gloomy column in the wake of the failed gun bill. As he began, he lamented the “cowardly” conduct of those who voted the “red America” way.

For ourselves, we’re not sure we liberals have done a good job deciding who exhibited “courage.” Did Pat Toomey exhibit courage, for instance, as so many have said? Or was his stance a smart political move for a hard-right senator in a blue-to-purplish state?

Whatever! There is no doubt that regional culture played a strong role in the gun safety fight. But we’ve been more struck this past week by the way the two tribes have fought about race in the wake of the bombing in Boston.

In the wake of the bombing in Boston, predictable political fights have broken out around the web. In these fights, various people in red and blue tribes have argued in rather predictable ways about matters concerning race.

In the next few days, we’re going to consider the arguments made by some leaders in our own tribe. As always, some red tribe players have made silly claims—but what about people like us?

When the center fails to hold, that can be a dangerous thing. We saw that in the 1860s, then again a hundred years later.

It’s easy to mock the other tribe as the tribes pull away from each other. But how have our tribal leaders performed?

In the days since Boston was bombed, much of the public discourse has been red against blue with race all over. Starting tomorrow, we will ask:

How well has our tribe performed?

Tomorrow: Instant nut-picking

You can’t buy votes with earmarks now!

MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013

The Post’s prebuttal to Dowd: Even after all these years, the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin doesn’t “get” Maureen Dowd.

On Friday, Eilperin joined Sean Sullivan to offer these thoughts about Obama’s inability to pass gun legislation. According to Eilperin, no one could accuse Obama of something Maureen Dowd would soon be accusing him of:

EILPERIN AND SULLIVAN (4/19/13): No one can accuse President Obama or Vice President Biden—whose office oversaw the White House strategy on gun legislation—of sitting on the sidelines when it came to the compromise bill authored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.). Biden made calls and held meetings with state, local and national politicians each week since his office issued the Administration’s gun plan more than three months ago. The White House worked with lawmakers to help craft the bipartisan compromise, according to White House officials, and Obama personally called undecided Republicans and Democrats both last week and then on Tuesday and Wednesday—right up until the Senate vote.

They also tried to ramp up pressure on senators through outside groups...

"No one can accuse Obama of sitting on the sidelines," the Post pair said. Two days later, Maureen Dowd accused Obama of that very sin, as seen in our earlier post.

In fairness, one can always say that Obama could have done more to get the bill passed. Dowd’s column became an instant classic because of the way she made her case:

She said Obama should have played it the way Michael Douglas did in The American President.

The American President was a Hollywood movie. In Hollywood movies, things work out the way the screenwriter wants. In real life, it may not happen that way. Dowd seemed hazy on this distinction in her ridiculous column.

Why did Manchin-Toomey fail despite widespread public support? We will be exploring that question a bit more this week. For what it’s worth, Eilperin offered a semi-intriguing take on this rather obvious question. The headline on her column said this:

“How the ban on earmarks killed the gun bill”

A president can’t buy votes the way he could in the past, Eilperin says. Along the way, she quotes John Boehner lamenting the end of this hoary old practice:

EILPERIN AND SULLIVAN: It’s not just Democrats who miss this sort of negotiating tactic at times. A year ago House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told a reporter he missed earmarks because they made it so much easier to pass legislation.

“When it comes to things like the highway bill, which used to be very bipartisan, you have to understand it was greased to be bipartisan with 6,371 earmarks,” Boehner said. “You take the earmarks away and guess what? All of a sudden people are beginning to look at the real policy behind it.”

Could Obama have used the old approach with earmarks to get the gun bill passed? We doubt it, but we can’t really say.

How did it work in the movies?

Breaking: The happiest time of the year is upon us!

MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013

The time when you rush to take part: With the immediate miseries of Boston behind us, we have decided to proceed with the happiest time of the year.

People will suffer in Boston for years. Others will suffer around the world.

None of us ever do enough. But in the next two weeks, we’re going to give you the glorious chance to contribute to our efforts.

Each day this week, we will lay out our plans for the coming year. We will define four large interests we plan to pursue. And we’ll make our annual promise to be a bit less unpleasant!

By now, you know that the various things we say have no effect on the wider discourse. One obvious example:

People don’t want to discuss the rising test scores achieved by American kids. No matter how many times we report the relevant data, absolutely nothing will make other people discuss them.

People, it just isn’t done! The gods of the scripts must be honored!

That said, you may decide that our efforts will be of some value in the long run. If so, we hope you’ll contribute to our efforts. Analysts very much need new shoes!

Last Monday, we advised you to start liquidating your assets as this exciting fund drive approached. After the destruction in Boston, we didn’t advise you further.

But if you do watch to pitch in, you can do so by just clicking here. Did we mention the fact that we plan to be a bit less unpleasant this year?

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss four areas of focus. One of the four will hurt.

Why can’t Obama be more like President Douglas?

MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013

Maureen Dowd's mind want to know: Maureen Dowd may be the most influential print journalist of the past thirty years.

As early as 1992, the highly prescient Katherine Boo was warning about the trend she described as “Creeping Dowdism.” But Dowd was already a very important player at our most influential newspaper.

Career players wanted to work for the Times, or at least to attend their galas. In part for that reason, people like Dowd are rarely criticized in the mainstream press or in the career liberal world.

We’ve told you these things for years by now. By now, such insights are totally boring. But yesterday, Dowd’s column was so bad that it can’t be ignored.

Dowd discussed a contradiction that is genuinely important. According to a string of polls, ninety percent of the public favors universal background checks for those who would buy a gun. But despite this amazingly high degree of support, legislation to expand background checks just failed in the Senate.

Few people could write a column on this topic without so much as mentioning the influence of the NRA. Yesterday, Dowd accomplished that task, in a familiar way.

According to Dowd, the failure of the legislation was all Obama’s fault! Dowd could see that this is true because she once saw a movie:

DOWD (4/21/13): The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in “The American President.” Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling.

Instead of the pit-bull legislative aides in Aaron Sorkin’s movie, Obama has Miguel Rodriguez, an arm-twister so genteel that The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker wrote recently that no one in Congress even knows who he is.

The president was oblivious to red-state Democrats facing tough elections. Bring the Alaskan Democrat Mark Begich to the White House residence, hand him a drink, and say, “How can we make this a bill you can vote for and defend?”

Good God, that’s an embarrassment! Or at least, it would be anywhere except at the New York Times.

(Presumably, she saw the part about giving Begich the drink in some movie too.)

Why did legislation fail when it had such widespread public support? That is a very important question. But Dowd never mentioned the NRA in her lengthy musings. She never discussed the = harm small groups of committed voters can wreak, especially in low-turnout primary votes.

She never explained why 54 votes weren’t enough to get the amendment in question passed, although she did offer this odd construction: “Even House Republicans who had no intention of voting for the gun bill marveled privately that the president could not muster 60 votes in a Senate that his party controls.”

Earth to Dowd: If a bill needs 60 votes to pass, the president’s party doesn’t exactly “control” the Senate. They’ve been missing that point on Fox for years. Yesterday, Dowd glossed it too.

Whatever! In a remarkably clueless column, Dowd fell back on a favorite old theme: It was all Obama’s fault! She no longer mocks him as Barry or as Obambi or as a debutante—that largely stopped when the Times public editor scalded her in 2008.

But Dowd seemed to be picturing scenes from various movies as she described the various things the president should have done, starting with that good stiff belt he should have handed to Begich:

DOWD: The president was oblivious to red-state Democrats facing tough elections. Bring the Alaskan Democrat Mark Begich to the White House residence, hand him a drink, and say, “How can we make this a bill you can vote for and defend?”

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

Obama had to persuade some Republican senators in states that he won in 2012. He should have gone out to Ohio, New Hampshire and Nevada and had big rallies to get the public riled up to put pressure on Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte and Dean Heller, giving notice that they would pay a price if they spurned him on this.

Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill.

Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

Couldn’t the president have given his Rose Garden speech about the “shameful” actions in Washington before the vote rather than after?

After giving Begich that drink, Obama should have held a big rally in Ohio. He should have pressed his buddy, Tom Coburn. He should have given his Rose Garden speech before the vote, not after.

Yeah, sure! Those were the tickets!

Dowd seems to have seen a lot of movies, some of her own imagining. That said, it defies comprehension that nonsense like this represents the level of “thinking” which is presented on Sunday morning at our nation’s most famous newspaper.

Dowd has been a cipher for years. More than twenty years ago, Boo was already warning her colleagues about the earlier forms of this creeping inanity.

Twenty years later, Dowd is still there. At our most famous newspaper, this nonsense now counts as “analysis.”

Why can’t Obama be more like Michael Douglas? Rather famously, Maureen Dowd has dated Douglas and Sorkin and she wants to know. But good God:

Obama should have set up a war room, “like they had in The American President.” Our smartest newspaper is so slow they didn’t even make her cut that!

MEDIOCRITY ALL THE WAY UP: Public schools meet managed news!

MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013

Conclusion—The New York Times needs to report: In yesterday’s column, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan disagreed with a reader’s complaint.

The reader thought a certain photograph from the Boston bombing had been too disturbing to publish. As she agreeably disagreed, Sullivan saluted the flag of her noble profession:

SULLIVAN (4/21/13): I respect this view, which I heard from many others, but I found the photo choice reasonable. If it had shown one of the dead, or gruesome detail of a severed limb, I would have felt differently. The journalistic imperative is to give readers an accurate sense of what happened—simply put, to tell the truth.

Shortening that up a bit, Sullivan said this: “The journalistic imperative is to give readers the truth.”

It would be hard to disagree with that principle. The New York Times and other news orgs should feel that imperative. They should feel that it’s their obligation “to give readers an accurate sense of the truth.”

But alas! That is exactly what the Times didn’t do on April 13 when it published a very long op-ed column by Harvard professor Jal Mehta. Cherry-picking his facts with reckless abandon, Mehta gave readers a grossly distorted sense of the progress which seems to be occurring in our public schools.

Mehta cherry-picked a set of facts from international testing programs. More dramatically, he cherry-picked facts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP), the federal program which is the widely-praised “gold standard” of domestic educational testing. (For details, read part 4 of this series. After that, read part 5.)

How did Mehta handle his facts? He presented sets of facts which conveyed a very gloomy impression about the progress, or lack of same, being displayed in American schools.

In publishing his lengthy column, the New York Times didn’t just fail “to give readers an accurate sense of the truth.” The Times gave its readers a grossly distorted understanding of the relevant facts.

How are things going in our public schools? That is a complex question. But here’s the good news, the news Mehta chose to withhold from the Times’ misused readers:

In reading and in math, black students have shown large score gains on the NAEP over the forty-year life of the program. So have Hispanic students.

White students have shown strong score gains too. In all three groups, the gains have continued to be strong in the past two decades.

Mehta should have told Times readers about those impressive score gains. If you want to discuss NAEP test scores at all, those large, continuing test score gains are an obvious part of the story.

What does it mean to cherry-pick facts? Mehta presented the gloomy news, citing data which show that achievement gaps still exist on the NAEP. But he withheld the dramatically upbeat news:

He hid the fact that those gaps persist because all three major student groups are recording much higher scores.

As he cherry-picked his facts, Mehta grossly misled Times readers. Today, we petition the Times:

Mehta should have told Times readers about those large score gains. At long last, so should the New York Times, in a series of front-page reports.

In short, the time has come for the New York Times “to give readers an accurate sense of what” the data from public schools seem to show—“simply put, to tell the truth.”

This request may see obvious, absurdly mundane. But this simple request is necessary due to a remarkable, long-term pattern of journalistic misconduct.

In the past decade, our big newspapers have constantly discussed the test scores attained by American kids on international and domestic tests. But during that period, these newspapers have persistently fed the American public a diet of cherry-picked facts.

What Mehta did is completely routine! For whatever reason, it represents the norm in modern American journalism. When journalists discuss the NAEP, they persistently cite basic facts about the “achievement gaps” between our largest student groups.

They discuss the gaps, but they hide the gains! The public is never told the good news. We’re never told about the large score gains exhibited by all three groups.

This represents an act of fraud against the American public. Why do our major news orgs keep behaving this way?

We can’t answer that question. But when newspapers behave this way, they baldly deceive the American people. In the process, they further the interests of powerful advocates of certain types of “education reform.”

Alas! For whatever reason, advocates of certain types of reform want the public to think that our public schools are an ungodly mess. This has enabled waves of attacks on American teachers and their infernal unions.

This claim has served the interests of those who want to privatize public schools.

Those advocates are entitled to their own views about public schools. But they shouldn’t be entitled to their own set of facts.

But within the mainstream American press corps, these powerful people are routinely allowed to present their preferred set of facts. It’s done in the way Mehta did it:

Readers are told about the achievement gaps which persist on the NAEP. They aren’t told about the large score gains achieved by all three major groups.

How can this steady deception persist? Let’s create a bit of perspective.

Decades ago, during Vietnam, a certain concept became familiar—the concept of “managed news.” Powerful interests were restricting the facts the public was allowed to hear, thus managing public opinion.

Noam Chomsky has a different name for this general process. He has referred to this general process as “manufactured consent.”

But whatever you call it, one fact is clear. In the past decade, this particular chicken has come home to roost when it comes to the public schools.

Black and Hispanic students have made large score gains on the NAEP. But given the managed state of our news, the public is never told this.

The time has come for the New York Times to stop deceiving its readers. It needs to do a series of front-page reports about a topic which is widely discussed—the performance of American students on international and domestic tests.

The time has come for the Times to report on the full range of international tests—on the TIMSS and the PIRLS as well as the PISA. Even more significantly, the time has come for the New York Times to tell the truth about the full set of data which have emerged from the NAEP.

Can test scores from the NAEP be trusted? That basic question should be part of this series of front-page reports. But please understand: In Mehta’s lengthy column, there was no suggestion that NAEP data aren’t reliable.

Mehta never said or suggested that something was wrong with the NAEP. He simply withheld the data which suggest that American schools are producing much better outcomes in reading and math. Through the act of cherry-picking, Times readers were baldly misled.

It’s always possible that something is wrong with the NAEP. If so, it’s time for the Times to report that fact as part of a larger effort “to give readers an accurate sense of what” the data from this program suggest.

In its own education reporting, the Times routinely cites the NAEP. If something is wrong with the NAEP, it’s time for the Times to say so. If not, it’s time to report the full set of data from the NAEP—the gains as well as the gaps.

Readers, we’re going to tell you a secret: In reading and in math, black kids have been recording much higher scores on the NAEP. So have Hispanic kids. White kids are recording higher scores too.

Unless something is wrong with those data, this is very good news—and this news should be reported.

But over the course of the past dozen years, these basic facts have been kept from the public in a truly shocking manner. Very few people have ever heard about those rising test scores.

Mehta is a bright young fellow from Harvard—and he committed an act of fraud in his recent column. But in fairness to Mehta, many others have committed this same act of fraud. In the process, our public schools have run head-first into our managed news.

A group of “reformers” want you deceived about the state of the public schools. This helps them attack our teachers and push for privatization.

Those advocates are entitled to their views. But as any civics textbook will tell you, the American people are entitled to a full set of facts.

As any civics textbook could tell you, “The journalistic imperative is to give readers an accurate sense of what” is happening in our public schools—“simply put, to tell the truth.” For the past dozen years, the New York Times has refused to do this.

The time has come for the New York Times to get off its ass and do some reporting. Simply put:

When will the New York Times tell the truth about our public schools?

The managers’ willing enablers: The time has come for the liberal world to insist that the Times tell the truth.

If you watched Melissa Harris-Perry attempt to discuss public schools on April 14, you saw the fruit of thirty years of liberal indifference. Liberals quit on these topics a long time ago. Our liberal heroes have been silent—complicit—as the journalistic scam we’ve discussed has misled the public.

Harris-Perry and her panel are hardly alone. We liberals don't know how to discuss public schools. Our “leaders” don’t have the slightest idea what the data show—or if they do, they aren’t talking.

Someone needs to tell the public the full set of facts about public schools. When will Rachel or Lawrence or Revered Sharpton decide it’s their job to do this?

When will your favorite liberal bloggers add this topic to their play list? When will liberal journals accept this obvious task? When will Digby or Drum or Walsh or Chait insist that this full story be told? Does Jonathan Alter exist?

Black kids’ test scores are way up. As their teachers are trashed and reviled, when will the public be told?

Public editor praises the work of the Times!

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013

This just in from the best of all possible worlds: A newspaper isn’t required to have a public editor.

Press criticism is everywhere now. You might say there’s no particular need for a public editor/ombudsman at a big newspaper. Indeed, the Washington Post has just eliminated the position.

That said, the New York Times does have a public editor. Although at this time, she only publishes two columns a month.

This morning, we were struck again by the oddness of her column.

Two weeks ago, Margaret Sullivan wrote an utterly silly column, answering utterly pointless questions from three New York Times readers. (Click here for our previous post.) Today, she uses her column to tell the world how brilliantly the Times performed in its coverage of the marathon bombing.

The Times didn’t make any major mistakes! This may seem like a small achievement, but Sullivan is running with it as he begins her new column.

She’s also boasting about the hardware the Times carted off last week:

SULLIVAN (4/21/13): The Times, it is safe to say, had a very good week. On Monday, it won four Pulitzer Prizes—the third most in its history and twice as many as any other news organization this year.

On Wednesday, it stayed on the safe side of “the Rubicon of inaccuracy”—in the words of Jill Abramson, the executive editor. That regrettable river was crossed, in a bizarre chain of events that was painful for any journalist to watch, by CNN, by the normally cautious Associated Press, and by many others who cited unnamed law enforcement sources.

The Times wisely sat tight and did not report, as the others did, that an arrest had been made or that a suspect was in custody in the deadly explosions at the Boston Marathon. And when the police did pinpoint the suspects in the bombing at week’s end, The Times was on top of the story quickly.

Unlike CNN and the AP, the New York Times did not report that an arrest had been made! For Sullivan, this is a major part of the way the Times “had a very good week.”

The New York Times didn’t make a gigantic reprting mistake! This may seem like a minor achievement. But as she continues, Sullivan continues to pile on the praise concerning this failure to fail:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): I’ve been critical of The Times in many ways over the past eight months. It can be self-satisfied, too willing to circle the wagons, too ready to cooperate with the government. It made some bad factual mistakes in the breaking coverage of the Newtown massacre, and it sometimes chooses to ignore or underplay important subjects. I could go on.

But right now, let’s give credit where it is due. The Times proved itself worthy of its reputation as journalism’s gold standard and served its readers well by staying away from unconfirmed reports. Its reporting from Boston all week was fast, deep and accurate.

By contrast, for more than an hour on Wednesday afternoon, other news organizations took the bait. They excitedly reported an arrest, then they backed off, saying reports were conflicting, and made retractions. A one-word Twitter message from The Columbia Journalism Review summed up the mess: “Sigh.”

According to Sullivan, the Times is sometimes “self-satisfied.” She then proceeds to prove this point, saying the Times justified its reputation as journalism’s gold standard when it didn’t make a gigantic error last week.

From there, Sullivan interviews Abramson, the executive editor. The pair explore the source of the brilliance which kept the Times from making that gigantic reporting mistake.

A newspaper isn’t required to have a public editor. At the Times, the position has been scaled back of late.

That said, when a public editor’s columns get this foolish, it may be time to let the position go altogether. Sullivan’s last column was utterly silly. This column is an advertisement for the greatness of the newspaper she is supposed to critique.

Ombudsmen used to challenge the work of their newspapers. At the self-satisfied New York Times, is it time for this job to go?

The confluence of two events: We’re not saying that what follows involves inappropriate conduct. But still:

SULLIVAN: Beyond the facts, readers had other concerns about the Boston coverage. I heard from some who reasonably objected that The Times was sending e-mail alerts and Twitter messages about its Pulitzer Prizes at almost the same time it was sending notices about the grim news from the marathon.

It should be noted that the confluence of the two events was extraordinary. In the Times newsroom, hundreds of employees had gathered for the Pulitzer celebration just as the news of the Boston explosions was becoming known. The lengthy speeches went on as planned, even as other reporters and editors scrambled—right in the midst of the same crowded room—to start posting on the excellent live blog known as The Lede, to write an initial news article, and to dispatch reporters. The surreal scene in the newsroom was dissonant, but it didn’t keep the job from getting done.

Should those “lengthy” speeches have stopped? Not necessarily, no, although a major external event had occurred.

That said, nothing isn’t wonderful as Sullivan surveys the scene at the Times. Even as the paper continued to praise itself in lengthy speeches and short tweets, work began on “the excellent live blog known as The Lede!”

Public editors used to challenge their newspapers. Two days before the Boston bombing, the Times had published a lengthy column which offered a remarkably misleading picture of the state of our public schools.

Sullivan didn't mention that gruesome performance. In Sullivan's columnn, a brilliant newspaper was doing everything right, even as it delivered speeches about its own manifest brilliance.

Is Sullivan starting to sound a bit like Dr. Pangloss? This column seems to come live and direct from the best of all possible worlds.

Presenting the filibuster challenge!

SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2013

What should the Post have written: Kevin Drum almost always loses us when he starts talking semantics. This doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

But so it was when he extended the recent discussion about last week’s gun bill votes. This is the question at issue:

When Manchin-Toomey got 54 votes in the senate and failed, should that have been called a filibuster? Drum says yes, thanks to the “academic” definition of filibuster he offers in the second highlighted part of this passage:

DRUM (4/19/13): The key question is a semantic one. What's the definition of a filibuster in the U.S. Senate? There are basically two approaches to this:

The strict rules-based approach. During the early 70s, in response to the increasing complexity of Senate life, a set of procedures emerged for conducting and resolving filibusters. Senators (usually from the minority party) were no longer required to actually speak to sustain a filibuster. Instead, they signaled their intent to filibuster by notifying their party leader to place a hold on a bill. Once this was done, the majority leadership would either negotiate a compromise or else schedule a cloture vote. If the cloture vote succeeded, the bill would proceed. If it failed, the bill died.

The broader academic approach. In the academic literature, the definition of a filibuster is broader. Here's Gregory Kroger: "Filibustering is delay, or the threat of delay, in a legislative chamber to prevent a final outcome for strategic gain. The key features are the purpose (delay) and the motive (gain) and NOT specifying the legislature or the method."

Under the strict rules-based definition, what happened last week wasn't a filibuster. There was no hold and there was no cloture vote. Under the broader definition, what happened was clearly a filibuster. The method wasn't the classic one, but there was certainly a threat of delay in order to prevent a final outcome (passage of the background check amendment). The resolution was a unanimous consent agreement rather than a cloture vote, but that's immaterial. It's still a filibuster.

According to Drum, what happened was a filibuster, based on that second definition from “the academic literature.” But the definition he offers from Gregory Kroger strikes us as extremely vague and very hard to parse. Aside from Kroger himself, who ever said that “filibuster” could be defined that way?

Hence, our incomparable question:

Isn’t it time for participants to take The Filibuster Challenge? Last week, the Washington Post made no attempt to explain why Manchin-Toomey failed in the senate despite getting 54 votes. Readers of the Washington Post had to decide for themselves.

The New York Times tried to explain, but its attempt at explanation was extremely fuzzy.

With that record of mainstream failure behind us, why not take The Filibuster Challenge? How should the Washington Post have written its front-page report?

In the Post's report, O’Keeke and Rucker discussed the failure of a series of amendments to the gun bill, including Manchin-Toomey. But they never explained why the 54 votes for Manchin-Toomey wasn’t enough.

How should that report have been written?

We’re not sure we understand this topic well enough to make a submission, although we may give it a try tomorrow. But obviously, the Washington Post should have explained this point.

What should the Post have written?

Final requirement: No fair describing the defeat of Manchin-Toomey only. Several Republican amendments also lost that day with more than 50 votes.

O’Keeke and Rucker report one such failure as follows: “An NRA-backed measure that clarified gun-trafficking laws fell short, with just 58 votes.”

In the case of that amendment, why wasn’t 58 votes enough? If we’re taking the Buster Challenge, that needs to be explained too.

What should the Washington Post have said? This is a question that needs resolving. Please take the Buster Challenge!

Four lessons learned by Chris Cillizza!

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013

Frankly, we’re sorry we looked: “What the Boston bombings taught me about journalism.”

That was the headline on a new post by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. Instinctively, we knew we should pass it up.

Despite those better angels, something made us look.

Cillizza was especially thoughtful in the wake of the Boston bombings. Here’s the way he started:

CILLIZZA (4/19/13): What the Boston bombings taught me about journalism

The events in Boston over the last four days have riveted the nation—and put journalism, the profession that I love, under the microscope. I’ve been thinking about what lessons I can learn as a political reporter from everything that has happened over these last 96 hours. My reflections are below—in no particular order other than when they occurred to me.

Cillizza listed four lessons he learned from this week’s events—four lessons about journalism, the profession he loves.

We ended up being sorry we looked. We should have obeyed our initial impulse.

Some posts are better left unread. That said, will you have the discipline to resist the temptation to look?

Kevin Drum explains the senate two-way!

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013

Was that a filibuster we saw, or were they just happy to be there: Was that a filibuster of gun bill proposals we saw in the senate this week?

Before we read yesterday’s major newspapers, we thought we knew. After we read the Post and the Times, we were no longer sure.

For background, see yesterday's post.

Was that a filibuster we saw? We asked, and Kevin Drum answered. This is what he said:

DRUM (4/18/13): Here's the answer: over the past few years, as the use of the filibuster has become routine, it's become common to speed things up a bit by adopting unanimous consent agreements under which both sides agree that a piece of legislation will require 60 votes to pass but won't require all the usual procedural hurdles of an actual filibuster. This is often convenient for both parties.

That's what happened in this case. The party leaders negotiated a unanimous consent agreement which specified that 60 votes were required to proceed to debate on Manchin-Toomey. It didn't get those 60 votes, so it failed.

Based on what we read in the Times, it seems to us that Drum left something out:

According to the Times, it wasn’t just Manchin-Toomey that had to get 60 votes. Under the “agreement between both parties” (redundancy alert!), highly undesirable Republican amendments also had to get 60 votes.

One of Drum’s commenters noted this part of the deal:

COMMENTER (4/18/13): OK, suppose there had been no 60 vote threshold, and amendments and the bill were only subject to a 51 vote majority. The watered down Manchin-Toomey compromise would have passed with 54 votes, but Cornyn's national concealed carry amendment would have passed with 57 votes. Democrats would either have to kill their own bill, or pass a law authorizing concealed carry permits nationwide. A person could carry a concealed handgun in Times Square, and the police couldn't do anything about it if he had a permit that was valid in Texas.

The NRA would have endorsed that bill.

That seems to jibe with the way the Times reported it. According to the Times report, this was a two-way deal. In effect, each party got to “filibuster” the other party’s proposals.

The GOP “filibustered” the Dems. But the Dems “filibustered” them back.

The Times report was very poorly written. As he continues, Drum reviews the various ways this agreement could have been described in news reports. We don't think the task is as hard as he suggests, but that’s neither here nor there.

That said, no one in the Washington Post even tried to explain why 60 votes were required on this high-profile senate vote. The New York Times did try to explain, but it did so very unclearly.

Does anything ever get explained? How much does anyone care?

MEDIOCRITY ALL THE WAY UP: Reporting the gaps while hiding the gains!

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013

Part 5—The public will never be told: For obvious reasons, we should state the obvious.

Presumably, Harvard assistant professor Jal Mehta is a perfectly decent person—a person who is kind to his family, to his students, to his neighbors and friends.

It’s also true that Mehta made some sensible points in his lengthy op-ed column in Saturday’s New York Times.

How might we improve our public schools? Mehta noted that charter schools aren’t some sort of magic solution. Neither Michelle Rhee nor Diane Ravitch has a magic solution, he said.

That said, much of what Mehta said in his column just wasn’t gigantically sharp.

Mehta wants public school teachers to teach many fewer hours—and he wants public school students to have a longer school year.

He wants “rookie teachers” to be “carefully overseen by experts as they move from apprenticeship to proficiency, and then mastery.” But uh-oh! Having trashed the teaching profession within an inch of its life, our brilliant professor fails to explain where all those “experts” will come from.

He wants teachers to be drawn from the top thirty percent of college graduates. (This is one of the most familiar of all standard “reform” proposals.) Presumably, this will require substantial increases in teacher pay, even as we keep laying off teachers because we can’t afford them.

In fairness, Mehta includes a catchy hook. He says our schools are working from an outmoded “industrial-factory model.” In his mind, good teaching “requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields.”

This fuzzy construction is hard to parse. But pleasingly, it makes it sound like this professor has a Big Idea.

Might we borrow a mocking construction which has been making the rounds of late? In many ways, Mehta’s extremely long column represents a dumb person’s idea of a smart person’s proposal. (This may explain why it appealed to the suits at the New York Times.)

We don’t see a lot in that column. But whatever one thinks of Mehta’s proposals, however nice he may be as a person, there is one aspect of this column which is simply disgraceful—a fraud. That is the cherry-picking in which he engages, giving his readers a bogus idea of the state of play in our schools.

Again, we’ll ask you to consider the start of Mehta’s column. As he starts, he paints a very gloomy picture of the state of the public schools.

This is the way Mehta’s column began. Below, we will consider two basic ways he deceives his readers in this disgraceful passage:

MEHTA (4/13/13): In April 1983, a federal commission warned in a famous report, “A Nation at Risk,” that American education was a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The alarm it sounded about declining competitiveness touched off a tidal wave of reforms: state standards, charter schools, alternative teacher-certification programs, more money, more test-based “accountability” and, since 2001, two big federal programs, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

But while there have been pockets of improvement, particularly among children in elementary school, America’s overall performance in K-12 education remains stubbornly mediocre.

In 2009, the Program for International Student Assessment, which compares student performance across advanced industrialized countries, ranked American 15-year-olds 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math—trailing their counterparts in Belgium, Estonia and Poland. One-third of entering college students need remedial education. Huge gaps by race and class persist: the average black high school senior’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress continue to be at the level of the average white eighth grader’s. Seventeen-year-olds score the same in reading as they did in 1971.

As the education scholar Charles M. Payne of the University of Chicago has put it: “So much reform, so little change.”

Yesterday, we reviewed some of the ways Mehta cherry-picks his data from those international and domestic testing programs. In fairness, this cherry-picking is thoroughly standard among our “educational experts” and our education journalists.

By now, it almost seems that Mehta’s cherry-picked deceptions are somehow required.

That said, Mehta is baldly deceiving the public, like so many others before him. Let’s consider two of the ways he does this:

Reporting the gaps while hiding the gains: It’s true! Large “gaps by race and class” do persist in the data which emerge from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-praised federal testing program Mehta selects as his source.

It’s true! Black students still score well behind their white counterparts. It would be a much better world if this were not the case.

But Mehta engages in ugly cherry-picking when he hands his readers that fact without alerting them to another:

Today’s black students are scoring much better than black students scored in the past! In math and in reading, scores by black students are way up on the NAEP.

The same is true for Hispanic students, although you’d never guess such a thing from Mehta’s cherry-picked work.

On their face, those score gains by black kids are tremendous. For good or for ill, those “gaps in race and class persist” because white students are scoring better on the NAEP too.

But in his passage about “gaps by race,” Mehta does an ugly thing, an ugly thing which is cruel and deceptive:

He tells us black kids are still behind without telling us that they’re doing much better! He reports the gaps but hides the gains.

The public gets deceived in the process.

In fairness, this cherry-picking is totally standard within the class from which Mehta emerges. That said, the practice is grossly deceptive—especially when Mehta quotes an alleged educational expert moaning about “so little change.”

This conduct is an open disgrace. In reporting the gaps while hiding the gains, Mehta has conducted a fraud against the Times’ misused readers

Refusing to break up those test scores: “Seventeen-year-olds score the same in reading as they did in 1971,” Mehta sadly moans.

That isn’t quite accurate. If we adjust for a minor change in testing procedure adopted in 2004, 17-year-old students gained four points in reading on the NAEP scale from 1971 to 2008, the most recent year for which relevant data exist.

Still, that represents a very small gain. Why aren’t these statistics a sign of “so little change?”

For now, let’s ignore the problem with cherry-picking by age—with citing the scores of 17-year old students while ignoring the scores of younger students. Let’s consider something much simpler: Mehta’s refusal to “disaggregate” those test scores.

“Seventeen-year-olds score the same in reading as they did in 1971!” When Mehta offers that observation, he is discussing the average score in reading for all American students. But if we’re trying to evaluate the performance of our teachers and schools, we have to adjust for demographic changes those teachers and schools have faced.

Everyone understands this fact. Until they try to please Bloomberg types by telling the mandated tale of woe you see in Mehta's column.

What has happened to the student population in the past forty years? In the hope of restraining people like Mehta, the NAEP includes highly relevant warning passages early in its reports.

The passage which follows appears in the most recent report on the NAEP’s Long Term Trends Assessment, the very report Mehta uses. In this passage, the NAEP explains one major way things have changed in our public schools. Click here, scroll down to page 4:

NAEP MANUAL: Changes in the student population over time show a decrease in the percentages of White students in 2008 compared to 1971 at all three ages. In contrast, the percentages of Hispanic students increased in 2008 compared to 1975 at all three ages. For example, the percentage of White 9-year-olds decreased from 80 percent in 1975 to 56 percent in 2008, and the percentage of Hispanic 9-year-olds increased from 5 to 20 percent over the same period (see appendix table A-1). The percentage of Black students did not show a significant change from 14 percent of 9-year-olds in 1971 to 16 percent in 2008.

Alas! Due to our brutal racial history, our student population contains three large groups which are still quite distinct as populations. As Mehta notes, black students still don’t score nearly as well as white students (although the gaps have narrowed).

Hispanic students also score well below the level of whites, in part because many of these deserving students arrived in the country sometime last week, coming from low-income, low-literacy, non-English speaking backgrounds.

Those beautiful kids are here for two reasons: So their parents can serve our needs for low pay. And so their own educational challenges can be used to beat up on our unionized teachers.

By far, white students remain the highest-scoring group among these three major cohorts. But their portion of the student population has massively dropped over the period Mehta pretends to survey.

In 1975, this highest-scoring of these three groups comprised 80 percent of the student population. By 2008, the percentage had dropped all the way down to 56 percent.

Obviously, this change in demographics will tend to depress overall average scores. Everybody understands this blindingly obvious fact.

But because he wants to deceive you, Mehta gives the overall average scores for 17-year-old students, then gasps when he sees that there has been "so little change" in that overall score.

In truth, “no change” in the overall average is pretty good when you consider the challenge involved in our changed demographics. But guess what happens when you consider the scores of each large student group on its own?

What do we see when we “disaggregate” scores? We see black and Hispanic students making large gains in both reading and math! From 1971 through 2008, these are the (mammoth) score gains recorded by our black students. Again, we’re adjusting for that minor change in procedure in 2004:

Score gains in reading, black students only, NAEP Long-Term Trends Assessment, 1971-2008:
9-year-old students: 37 points
13-year-old students: 30 points
17-year-old students: 29 points

As we explained yesterday, those are gigantic score gains. Among black students, the large gains exist even among 17-year-old students, where there is a further potential statistical problem (see yesterday’s post).

It’s hard to look at score gains like these and moan about “so little change.” For that reason, Mehta didn’t show you these data. Even though everyone knows you must, he didn’t disaggregate scores!

This is ugly conduct. It keeps Times readers from understanding the shape of their world. It keeps them from drawing hope from those large score gains. It keeps them from admiring black kids and their public school teachers.

In fairness to Mehta, modern “educational experts” all engage in this type of deception. That said, the “change” displayed by those disaggregated test scores is simply astounding. For that reason, those disaggregated scores are constantly being deep-sixed.

When the Times puts garbage like this into print, it commits a vast fraud on the public. Mehta should be ashamed of himself for hiding the data we have just shown you, while quoting an “expert” who sadly moans about “so little change.”

Let’s offer three final points about this horrible column:

Mehta’s deception of the public is completely conventional: When it comes to matters like this, overt deception of the public is the familiar norm.

Citizens are constantly handed some version of that pitiful cry: “So much reform, so little change.” The NAEP is constantly cited, with its data cherry-picked.

Mehta is distressed by the mediocrity of our teachers. As an academic, his own work in this column is completely incompetent.

His academic performance is a disgrace—but this is completely the norm. The American public is constantly played in precisely this manner.

Our fiery liberals show no sign of caring about these deceptions: Whatever liberal precinct you may inhabit, you haven’t seen a single word about Mehta’s column this week. Nor have you ever seen your liberal heroes push back against these standard deceptions.

Pushback from liberals doesn’t exist. The liberal world doesn’t care.

Rachel and Lawrence have never helped you with this, and you can feel sure that they never will. We liberals quit on black kids (and on public school teachers) a very long time ago.

None of this will change: No one you know will say a word about this deception of the public, or about the denigration of black students and their public school teachers.

In its towering incompetence, the Times will keep printing this type of material. These scripted deceptions are quite overt, but they will surely persist.

Alas! In our current form, we Americans are a poorly-functioning people. And when it comes to the lives of black kids, the liberal world just doesn’t care.

Black kids have made a shitload of progress on this, the gold standard of educational testing. On their face, their score gains are remarkable.

But Rachel and Lawrence don’t care for black kids. The public will never be told.