GATEKEEPERS GONE: The way it works with our gatekeepers gone!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2014

Part 5—Instant disinformation: Do we the people really need the services of gatekeepers?

Do we need philosopher kings to sift the claims we’re permitted to hear? You can bet your sweet bullroar we do!

That said, our gatekeepers are long gone. There are no figures like Cronkite and Brinkley to keep us from hearing The Dumb, The Inane and The Wrong.

In fact, we’re constantly hearing The Dumb and The Wrong! To see where this horrible process leads, consider one of the comments to Jamelle Bouie’s latest piece at Slate.

Bouie is a youngish writer (University of Virginia, 2009) who has tended to argue that Officer Wilson should be charged with a crime for shooting Michael Brown.

That might be right or that might be wrong. We aren’t trying to settle that question here.

In his brand-new piece at Slate, Bouie argues that “a new analysis of the official autopsy report—released by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch” fails to settle the basic questions which lie at the heart of this case.

As far as we know, that’s an accurate assessment. That said, we were struck by the many comments to Bouie’s piece which were, let us say, racially florid.

We were also struck by the way we the people have perhaps been misled by recent reporting about that autopsy report.

We were especially struck by a comment which appeared under the name Ernst Blofeld. Presumably, that’s a pseudonym, drawn from the old James Bond character.

Bouie’s commenter was anonymous, like the “sources” who have been spreading claims about the shooting of Brown. Working under his James Bond name, the commenter described some of the evidence which, he says, has emerged this week:

COMMENTER (10/23/14): ...Wilson shot Brown in the police car during a struggle over the gun, and the force was justified. Whether Wilson's eye socket was fractured is yet to be determined, but there was a fight in the car and Wilson was punched in the face. And "seven or eight" black witnesses, and who knows how many white witnesses, say Brown was charging Wilson.

According to this commenter, “seven or eight” black witnesses have said that Brown was charging at Officer Wilson when he was fatally shot.

If true, that would be highly significant.

For the record, that statement doesn’t track back to the report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It tracks to a profoundly incompetent front-page report in yesterday’s Washington Post.

(Bouie didn’t discuss the report in the Post, with which Slate has long been closely connected. We’re tempted to say that it just isn’t done, not even by fiery, supposedly idealistic young progressive careerists.)

Whatever! Fairly clearly, the commenter’s claim derives from the lengthy report in yesterday’s Washington Post (see text below). Here’s the problem:

The Post report doesn’t say that seven or eight black witnesses have said that Brown was charging at Wilson. In fact, the commenter greatly embellished a statement from yesterday’s Post.

That said, the actual statement in the Post was almost defiantly murky. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have known that the murky statement would quickly be embellished.

Below, you see the passage in question. Incomparably, we posted it yesterday:

KINDY AND HORWITZ (10/23/14): Wilson's attorney, James P. Towey Jr., did not return a call seeking comment.

Seven or eight African American eyewitnesses have provided testimony consistent with Wilson's account, but none have spoken publicly out of fear for their safety, The Post's sources said.

The St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI are investigating the shooting, and evidence gathered by both agencies is being presented to the grand jury, which started meeting in mid-August and is expected to conclude its work early next month.

The Washington Post did not report that seven or eight black witnesses say Brown was charging at Wilson. The Post reported something quite different—something so absurdly vague as to be virtually meaningless:

According to “The Post’s sources” (whoever they are), “Seven or eight African American eyewitnesses have provided testimony consistent with Wilson's account.”

For what it’s worth, we have no doubt that the statement is technically accurate. In large part, that’s because the statement is so vague that it’s virtually meaningless.

For precisely that reason, that statement begged to be embellished. Anybody could have foreseen where that piddle would lead.

Almost surely, other versions of that embellishment have proceeded through wide parts of our national discourse. By now, many people have heard that seven or eight black witnesses have said that Brown was charging at Wilson.

Plainly, that’s an embellishment of what the Post reported. But it was inevitable, given the roaring incompetence, of the Post’s report.

Go ahead—scan that statement again:

“Seven or eight African American eyewitnesses have provided testimony consistent with Wilson's account.”

Can you see what’s missing there?

That doesn’t tell us which part of Wilson’s account has been supported by those black eyewitnesses.

In fact, it doesn’t even say that their testimony supported Wilson’s account. It merely says that their testimony is consistent with Wilson’s account. That could mean that the witnesses said the shooting occurred near noon!

That statement was so vague that it said nothing at all. It didn’t belong in that front-page report. A gatekeeper should have killed it.

Years ago, that might have happened! We can imagine an editor—let’s call him Ben Bradlee—striking that pointless statement (and a great deal more) from that front-page report.

That didn’t happen this week. Indeed, most of yesterday’s front-page report was so absurdly vague that it told us nothing at all.

That said, its vague pronouncements conveyed the unmistakable sense that Wilson’s account of the shooting has been strongly supported. That front-page report reads like propaganda. It doesn’t read like journalism at all.

As we noted yesterday, that front-page was written by Sari Horwitz, who has won three Pulitzer prizes. Amazing but true:

Within our floundering public discourse, this is the way our elite “press corps” currently does its job.

Can we talk? Horwitz prepared an absurdly incompetent report. An incompetent editor put it in print. One of its absurdly vague claims is now being embellished by us the people.

A gatekeeper should have killed that statement. That pointless claim should have been kept far away from that commenter’s eyes.

That said, our gatekeepers are long gone. We the people are now in charge—and our judgments are often bad wrong.

While waiting for Ben and/or Jerry!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2014

You can play this game too: When we started this site in 1998, there were virtually no liberal organs.

Salon was a serious site at that time. It often presented good liberal journalism. But there were very few liberal organs, and this was the major problem:

Within the world of career journalists, careers went through the major news orgs like the Washington Post and the New York Times.

That’s why Gene Lyons’ book about Whitewater got disappeared. The book was published and promoted by Harper’s, but it bore this title:

“Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.”

You’re not allowed to say that! By “the media,” Lyons mainly meant the Times and the Post—and careerists weren’t willing to go there.

(For Lyons' new column on this topic, click here.)

We started this site in March 1998. We had no idea what we’d be tracking one year later.

Sure enough, though, there it was! In March 1999, the press corps’ war against Candidate Gore broke out. We discussed it in detail from Week One.

The lambs have never followed.

It’s very hard for people to grasp the size of the press corps’ code of silence. For liberals, it’s sometimes hard to grasp a related fact—some of our biggest liberal heroes were star players in the war which sent George Bush to the White House.

Some of them sat around and watched. The rest were active players. But right to this day, no one has been willing to discuss the way this war actually worked.

At our companion site, How He Got There, you can read the remarkable history of that war against Candidate Gore, up through the Love Canal disaster of December 1999.

The work is detailed and accurate. And, in a word, it’s astounding.

At that site, you can read the real history of the way Candidate Bush reached the White House. It would take a fool to deny the way it worked—or a professional journalist.

Isn’t it time that Ben and Jerry decided to sponsor that lapsed project? Most of the research for the remaining chapters has been done. But at some point, it simply became too painful to continue with all the work in the face of all the silence.

(Absolutely no one shuts up the way our “journalists” do.)

Isn’t it time for Ben and Jerry to put us back to work on that historical project? We’d even settle for Ben or Jerry! Or for some other sponsor!

Waiting for Ben and/or Jerry may turn out to be like waiting for Godot. In the meantime, if you want to kick in, we can’t stop you from that.

We’re going to pitch you for several weeks, explaining the state of the world in the process. In the meantime:

If you want to donate to this site, you can just click here.

Supplemental: Intellectual norms of the Washington Post!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2014

We’ve got your elite right here: Our gatekeepers are long gone. And alas:

Intellectually and morally, the watchdogs of our press elite have bad eyes and rotting teeth.

How bad is the work at the Washington Post? Consider what happened when Sari Horwitz—three Pulitzer Prizes!—tried to discuss Michael Brown.

Horwitz appears on this morning’s front page, sharing a byline with Kimberly Kindy. Her report is 1884 words long. It includes 44 paragraphs.

In our view, the work is amazingly bad. Whatever may have happened on the day Brown was killed, it seems to us that Sari Horwitz is pretty much getting conned.

Hard-copy headline included, this is the way she and Kindy started. The drift of the piece is quite clear:

KINDY AND HORWITZ (10/23/14): Evidence supports officer’s account of Ferguson shooting

Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown fought for control of the officer's gun, and Wilson fatally shot the unarmed teenager after he moved toward the officer as they faced off in the street, according to interviews, news accounts and the full report of the St. Louis County autopsy of Brown's body.

Because Wilson is white and Brown was black, the case has ignited intense debate over how police interact with African American men. But more than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony to a St. Louis County grand jury that largely supports Wilson's account of events of Aug. 9, according to several people familiar with the investigation who spoke with The Washington Post.

Some of the physical evidence—including blood spatter analysis, shell casings and ballistics tests—also supports Wilson's account of the shooting, The Post's sources said, which casts Brown as an aggressor who threatened the officer's life. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited from publicly discussing the case.

Right off the bat, right in the headline, important claims are made.

According to the headline, “evidence” support’s Officer Wilson’s account of the fatal shooting. Instantly, Horwitz and Kindy make similar claims.

“More than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony to a St. Louis County grand jury that largely supports Wilson's account of events of Aug. 9,” they report. Also this:

“Some of the physical evidence...also supports Wilson's account of the shooting.”

All that may be perfectly true. Beyond that, Wilson’s account may be perfectly accurate. For ourselves, we have no way of knowing what occurred that day.

That said, how does Horwitz know the things she’s reporting in that passage? In part, she has spoken to “several people” who are “familiar with the investigation!”

In our view, “several people” aren’t very many—and Horwitz never makes any attempt to tell us who these people are, even as a general matter.

Do these “several” anonymous people have an interest in the outcome of the case? Horwitz never makes any attempt to answer that blindingly obvious question.

It seems to us that we’re already on shaky ground. But, before we go any further, a key distinction should be made:

Presumably, there were several parts to “Wilson's account of events of Aug. 9.”

You would have Wilson’s account of the initial struggle at the car. You would also have his account of the fatal shooting itself, which came later, after Wilson had gotten out of his car.

Presumably, that second event—the actual fatal shooting—is more significant than the first—the struggle at the car. We’ll only say this:

As Horwitz proceeds through her lengthy piece, she seems to spend a lot more time on the struggle at the car. She never really seems to get clear on the relative importance of these two parts of the tale.

In our view, Horwitz brings almost no focus to her lengthy piece. As she continues, she offers several odd formulations, then quickly returns to the car:

HORWITZ (continuing directly): The grand jury is expected to complete its deliberations next month over whether Wilson broke the law in confronting Brown, and the pending decision appears to be prompting the unofficial release of information about the case and what the jurors have been told.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch late Tuesday night published Brown's official county autopsy report, an analysis of which also suggests that the 18-year-old may not have had his hands raised when he was fatally shot, as has been the contention of protesters who have demanded Wilson's arrest.

Experts told the newspaper that Brown was first shot at close range and may have been reaching for Wilson's weapon while the officer was still in his vehicle and Brown was standing at the driver's side window. The autopsy found material "consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm" in a wound on Brown's thumb, the autopsy says.

Let’s start with a quibble. Wilson isn’t being investigated for “confronting” Brown. Presumably, he’s being investigated for shooting and killing Brown.

We don’t know if Wilson did anything wrong that day, but that was an odd formulation. So, in truth, is the next formulation, in which an analysis of the autopsy report “suggests” that Brown “may not” have had his hands raised when he was fatally shot.

Does that mean the analysis also suggests that he may have had his hands raised? Does that simply mean that the autopsy can’t settle that question?

Rather than work through that question, Horwitz runs back to the car, where we’re told that Brown “may” have been reaching for the gun.

Does that mean he may not have been reaching for the gun? Again, the question doesn’t get clarified.

In our view, things are going badly at this point. As she continues, Horwitz repeats a slightly puzzling quote from an expert, along with a puzzling paraphrase:

HORWITZ (continuing directly): Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist in San Francisco who reviewed the report for the Post-Dispatch, said it “supports the fact that this guy is reaching for the gun, if he has gunpowder particulate material in the wound.”

Melinek, who is not involved in the investigation, said the autopsy did not support those who claim Brown was attempting to flee or surrender when Wilson shot him in the street.

Let’s start with the quote from Melinek, the forensic pathologist:

It may well be that Michael Brown was reaching for Wilson’s gun when they struggled at the car. That said, did Melinek mean to suggest that this possibility has been established as a “fact?”

Last night, on The Last Word, Melinek said no one at the Washington Post called her to discuss what she said to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where Horwitz found that quote. Beyond that, she seemed to say that the Post-Dispatch did a poor job reporting what she told them, which it mainly did through paraphrase.

As she continued, Horwitz offered another such paraphrase. According to Horwitz, Melinek “said the autopsy did not support those who claim Brown was attempting to flee or surrender when Wilson shot him in the street.”

That claim is completely unclear. Does it mean that the autopsy somehow shows that Brown wasn’t trying to flee or surrender? Or does it mean that the autopsy simply can’t settle that question?

Horwitz doesn’t try to say. This is terrible journalism from an undiscerning mind.

Large chunks of the Post’s lengthy report are given over to statements by various teams of lawyers. When Horwitz returns to the question at hand, her work is persistently murky.

Consider this example:

HORWITZ: Wilson's attorney, James P. Towey Jr., did not return a call seeking comment.

Seven or eight African American eyewitnesses have provided testimony consistent with Wilson's account, but none have spoken publicly out of fear for their safety, The Post's sources said.

The St. Louis County Police Department and the FBI are investigating the shooting, and evidence gathered by both agencies is being presented to the grand jury, which started meeting in mid-August and is expected to conclude its work early next month.

That highlighted statement could very significant, depending on what it means. Did those witnesses “provide testimony consistent with Wilson's account” of the fatal shooting?

If so, how consistent was it? Or did they provide testimony consistent with Wilson's account of what occurred at the car?

Horwitz doesn’t try to sort those questions out. Later, after additional detours, she offers this murky stew:

HORWITZ: The officer said he reached for his gun to defend himself, but Brown grabbed it and let go only after it fired twice. Two casings from Wilson's gun were recovered from the police SUV, the sources said.

After he was shot in the altercation at the vehicle, Brown fled with Johnson, and Wilson testified that he ordered Brown to stop and lower himself to the ground. Instead, Brown turned and moved toward the officer, the sources said. Wilson said he feared that Brown, who was 6-foot-4 and weighed nearly 300 pounds, would overpower him, so he repeatedly fired his gun.

Brown was shot at least six times, according to all three autopsies that have been conducted.

With that highlighted statement—in paragraph 30!—we’ve finally reached the key question. Why did Officer Wilson fire the fatal shots?

In that highlighted statement, we will assume that Horwitz is presenting Wilson’s account of what happened. Our questions:

In Wilson’s account, how many steps did Brown take toward Wilson? How far away was Brown when Officer Wilson fired? These seem like obvious questions to us, but Horwitz doesn’t seem to have asked them. This is 1883 words of horrible terrible journalism.

On the Post web site today, a former intern boasts that she served as an intern with Horwitz, who is now a Pulitzer winner. Does this lengthy, garbled report seem like the work of a Pulitzer winner?

Sadly, it seems that way to us. This is very much the way our modern “elite” press corps works.

They've worked this way for a very long time. In part for that reason, The Dumb and The Crazy pretty much rule our world.

Right above Horwitz: Right above Horwitz on page A2, this column by Dana Milbank appears.

The piece is 100 percent “storyline.” Read in any other way, it simply doesn’t make sense.

(The very familiar storyline: Grimes has finally started to fight! If only she’d done this all along!)

Horwitz owns three Pulitzer prizes. Milbank’s a star outta Yale.

This is the way our press elite works. The Dumb and The Crazy are ruling our world because of the sloth of these ’dogs.

GATEKEEPERS GONE: A watchdog named Professor Cooper!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2014

Part 4—Atomization and Babel: In theory, a democratic society shouldn’t have gatekeepers.

We shouldn’t have a narrow elite which limits the things we’re permitted to hear. In theory, we the people should be able to handle The Crazy and Dumb.

We should deal with all that on our own.

In theory, we don't need gatekeepers. In theory, talented watchdogs can help us see where The Dumb and The Crazy are. We don’t need people like Walter Cronkite to keep such work from our eyes and our ears.

By now, the gatekeepers are gone. Today, our discourse overflows with The Crazy and The Dumb.

It also swims with loud watchdogs who are totally lacking in skill.

In our next post, we’ll look again at the horrible watchdog work emerging from our press elite—in this case, from two major figures at the Washington Post.

For now, let’s consider an emerging watchdog at the new Salon—a watchdog who sinks her teeth into bare flesh as part of our emerging new progressive world.

The watchdog in question is Professor Cooper of Rutgers.

Cooper may be a superb professor. For one small glimpse of her life, read a deeply human interview with Cooper on NPR last year.

Yesterday, Cooper played a bit of a watchdog role by way of her column at Salon. Her piece, and the reactions to it, display the problems which are widely observed as our new “progressive” sites continue to emerge.

The professor’s piece appeared beneath the headlines shown below. Warning! At the deeply irresponsible new Salon, eye-catching headlines often have little to do with the contents of the articles they advertise:

White menaces to society: Keene State and the danger of young drunk white men
As the Keene State protests showed, some people feel the freedom to piss on people. Guess who they are

Those were the headlines which caught readers’ eyes, baiting subsequent clicks. Beneath them sat the piece by the professor.

As we type, it has attracted more than 600 comments. In many of those comments, readers insult each others’ reading comprehension, insisting that the other commenters have failed to grasp Cooper’s point.

So what the heck was Cooper’s point? We can’t say we’re real sure. She starts with the recent disruptions at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, where rioting students made a mockery and a mess of the community’s annual Pumpkin Festival.

What happened at the pumpkin event? Cooper linked to an AP report by Holly Ramer, who we last visited when she was bungling a history-changing claim: Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal!

On Monday, Ramer reported the pumpkin chaos. This is the way she started:

RAMER (10/20/14): Keene State College students quickly cleaned up from a chaotic weekend on Sunday after violent parties near the city's annual pumpkin festival led to destruction, dozens of arrests and multiple injuries.

The parties around the school coincided with the Keene Pumpkin Festival, at which the community tries to set a world record of the largest number of carved and lighted jack-o-lanterns in one place. The violence prompted police in riot gear to use tear gas as they tried to control the crowds.

Sophomore Mallory Pearce, vice president of the student body, said she saw a car flipped over in a parking lot, another car being destroyed and people being pepper-sprayed.

"It got way out of hand. Everyone I talked to said, 'I feel unsafe, I'm going home.' They didn't want to be part of the riot, and they couldn't do anything to solve it," she said. "I honestly did not feel safe."

Violent parties, whatever they are, led to dozens of arrests. The violence prompted police in riot gear to use tear gas.

Cooper linked to that AP report. As she proceeded, she compared or contrasted those events to events in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown.

What point was Cooper trying to make? Rashomon was clearer! In comments, antagonists struggled to locate her meaning. If we were looking for her nugget, this is where we’d start:

COOPER (10/22/14): But what the events in Keene suggest is that white folks often test the bounds and limits of public decency and order with little long-term reprisal. There were some arrests, and some tear gas. But no dead bodies. No stigma about white anger. No come to Jesus meetings about White America’s problem children. No public discourse about these “menaces to society.” As many commentators on Twitter pointed out, there’ll be no articles about the absence of white leadership, or about how white folks just need to learn respect for public property.

How does it feel to be white? Does it feel like freedom? Freedom to piss on people and property with impunity? Freedom to burn shit up and live to tell about it? Freedom to threaten old people and wake up the next morning and chalk it up to drunkenness? License to kill?

This isn’t just about civility. This is, as are most things in this country, about stark and disparate forms of racial treatment. This is about the ways that white threat is largely illegible as “threat.” This is about the fact that a band of wild, drunken black college kids could not have turned over cars, threatened old people, and shouted about killing the cops and lived.

According to the Rutgers professor, black students couldn’t have done what the Keene students did “and lived.” Presumably, this meant that the black students would have been shot.

The professor offered no examples supporting this assertion. Her frequent references to the demonstrations in Ferguson led many commenters to miss a fairly obvious point:

Whatever one thinks of the conduct of the various police agencies which dealt with the Ferguson protests, demonstrators who were mostly black staged those protests “and lived.”

In fairness to the Rutgers professor, she did include one “for instance.” Continuing directly from above, she cited a campus event from last year:

COOPER (continuing directly): For instance, this is also black college homecoming season, and my alma mater Howard University canceled the annual free concert at the legendary Yard Fest this year, because there were a few issues with crowd control last year. The Yard Fest is the stuff of hip-hop legend, and it is the annual event that most alumni look most forward to participating in. But as a federally funded entity, Howard is hyper-vigilant about making sure campus events are models of black respectability. It cannot afford the public scrutiny if the event were to devolve into a cabal like that which occurred at Keene. So it canceled a portion of the event beloved by all of us, because any appreciable amount of black unruliness could be met with an unfavorable and devastating federal response.

It is an institutional example of how powerful systems of white supremacy are, how much those systems hold everyone from the most venerable black institutions to the most vulnerable black youth in their death grips.

Presumably, the cancellation of the annual free concert at Howard’s Yard Fest is offered as an example of “stark and disparate forms of racial treatment,” including the use of those “death grips:”

At Howard, an annual event was cancelled. At Keene, the kids party on.

Or something! The Pumpkin Festival is a long-running community event in Keene, not a college function. Beyond that, it isn’t clear what percentage of the rioters were students from the college.

Meanwhile, since the rioting only happened last weekend, there has been no time for anyone to cancel anything in bucolic Keene, New Hampshire. And then, there’s the basic problem with the citation of Yardfest, which, on a smaller scale, featured some factual errors.

In fact, the annual free concert had already been terminated as of last year’s Yardfest. Under the new arrangement, 14,000 tickets to the concert had been sold; no one else was allowed to attend. This led to last year’s disturbance, in which people tried to force their way into the venue, producing injuries to citizens and police.

In no way was this disturbance comparable to the events in Keene. But guess what? A largely black crowd staged a bit of a public disturbance—and everybody “lived!”

Everybody lived at Keene State; everybody lived at Howard. Did the extensive Ferguson protests produce any deaths? Unless you’re counting Kajieme Powell, everyone lived there too!

What was Professor Cooper’s point in her piece at Salon? Commenters seemed to have no idea, in large part because the august professor hadn’t taken the trouble to articulate a clear central point.

Many commenters, speaking for Cooper, articulated perfectly sensible points on her behalf. But no clear point was found in her piece, which spilled with somewhat florid racial comments.

Several pumpkins were colorfully smashed as the professor vented.

At one time, the gatekeepers of the civil rights movement would have kept this unformed screed out of print. In those days, those people were deeply oppressed. In this case, the professor has a very good job at a major university—but she didn’t seem to take the trouble to articulate a clear point.

(To gain a fuller picture of Cooper, see that NPR interview.)

The professor chose to vent. In the comments to her piece, you’ll find a hint of where we go when our new progressive watch-dogs behave in such careless ways.

What happens when careless watchdogs vent? We break apart into name-calling groups. We live in an atomized Babel.

That atomized Babel serves the interests of the farthest of the far right. They want the society splitting apart (as is of course their right). Theoretically, we progressives want to build a functioning nation—a nation whose government can proceed to serve progressives ends.

The commenters screamed and yelled at each other. They insulted each other’s reading comprehension. They called each other names.

Some made perfectly sensible claims which the professor hadn’t bothered to make. Others cited unflattering crime statistics concerning our various “races.”

They engaged in standard Internet Babel. Do you know what they needed?

Good lord! They probably could have used a couple of very good gatekeepers!

Tomorrow: Two major watchdogs and us the people

The happiest time of the year continues!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2014

Keep history alive: There’s nothing we dislike quite like this time of the year.

On the other hand, fund-raising is necessary. For many years, we never asked. We’re kicking ourselves for that now.

That said:

As our fund-raising drive enters Day Two, we’ll link you to Gene Lyons’ new column at The National Memo. The column concerns Hillary Clinton, who you may not be supporting for president.

She isn’t our ideal candidate either. That isn’t the point of the column.

Lyons writes about the history of the Whitewater pseudo-scandal, which is being fancifully revived by Harper’s, of all publications.

Quite literally, Lyons wrote the book on the topic, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater. In the part of his column shown below, he refers to Doug Henwood, the writer who revives the Whitewater foofaw in the current edition of Harper’s.

He also cites an important newspaper, the New York Times:

LYONS (10/22/14): For that matter, why am I bothering with Henwood?

Two reasons. First, personal disappointment that such slipshod work could appear in Harper’s. Twenty years ago, the magazine stuck its journalistic neck out to publish my article and book, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.

Second, because Henwood’s piece signals the inevitable return of what I call the “Clinton Rules.” Particularly when it comes to the couple’s background in darkest Arkansas, no allegation of wrongdoing, regardless of how conclusively disproved, has ever disappeared from the national news media.

That such shoddy standards have become well-nigh universal in American political journalism is no excuse. Because everybody involved back in 1996 understood that calling out The New York Times—which originated and sustained the Whitewater hoax—was a serious business, Harper’s actually dispatched a fact checker to Little Rock, where we spent several days bulletproofing the manuscript.

Clearly, no such effort went into Henwood’s essay.

As Lyons notes, the New York Times “originated and sustained the Whitewater hoax.” The Times then played a leading role in what came next, the twenty-month war against Candidate Gore which sent George Bush to the White House.

Despite these facts and many more, it pains Lawrence O’Donnell to criticize the Times, a fact he restated this very week. Therein lies a remarkable tale.

It would be hard to overstate the code of silence which surrounds the workings of our political journalism over the past three or four decades. Lyons and his writing partner, Joe Conason, wrote two books on the Clinton-era part of this tale, Fools for Scandal (1996) and The Hunting of the President (2000).

At this site and at our companion site, we’ve chronicled where the virus went after that. As you may have noticed, we’ve done so to almost complete, total silence.

It isn’t just Lawrence! Everybody understands that these topics must not be discussed. In order to keep that discussion going, we’re asking for your support.

Tomorrow, we plan to bring Ben and Jerry, or possibly even Ben or Jerry, into this vital discussion. For today, we recommend the Lyons piece, however you feel about Hillary Clinton.

We’ll also ask for your support:

If you want to keep history alive, you can just click here.

Supplemental: The legacy of Ben Bradlee!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2014

Style section, then Richard Nixon: We never met Ben Bradlee. Manifestly, he seemed like a very impressive man.

Until today, we hadn’t realized that Bradlee was such a major swell. Before we praise his mother, let us record these unusual facts, from the world’s leading authority:

“Josephine de Gersdorff, Bradlee's mother, was a direct descendant of Heinrich XXIX, Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf, who was a lineal descendant of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, King John of Denmark and King John II of France and Bonne of Bohemia and John V, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. Bradlee's maternal great grandfather was Dr. Ernst Bruno von Gersdorff, who was a third cousin of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom through Heinrich XXIX.”

Our own mother wasn’t descended from the Holy Roman Emperor. She just thought she was.

Now, for that impressive claim. We don’t know if this is accurate:

“His mother, Josephine de Gersdorff (1896–1975), was awarded the French Legion of Honor for helping keep children safe from Nazi Germany during World War II.”

To state the obvious, that's a tremendous claim to be able to make.

We spent some time this morning thinking about Bradlee’s legacy. It seems that people who knew him admired him. Plus, he invented the Washington Post’s Style section, and he led the Watergate chase.

Style, and Nixon’s forced resignation! These are very important elements in modern newspaper culture, not necessarily in good ways.

That takes nothing away from their invention. We’re talking about where they led.

We were already planning to spend next week discussing the press corps’ coverage of White House campaigns post-Nixon.

We’ve become more and more intrigued by what happened to the coverage starting with Candidate Muskie. The invention of “Style section journalism” is fairly clearly part of that tale. So too for the pursuit of Nixon, in which, as far as we know, the work was respectable, good.

That said, even Maximilian I couldn’t have saved us from the culture which followed. Increasingly, we’re intrigued by how badly the trends have worked against presidential-level Democrats, even as we in the liberal world keep cheering those trends along.

As far as we know, Ben Bradlee was sharp. After Bradlee, the whirlwind?

GATEKEEPERS GONE: Three recent reports from the Times front page!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2014

Part 3—Incompetence of the watchdogs: How does our discourse get infected by The Crazy and The Dumb?

For starters, our gatekeepers are gone. It never exactly made sense to think that a couple of high-profile men—Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley—were supposed to sift and edit the things we were permitted to hear.

As a matter of theory, that never made sense—but the system did work that way to a large extent. Thanks to those men, and others like them, The Crazy rarely got on the air.

Today, The Crazy is all around us. Selling The Crazy is big business now, and the gatekeepers are long gone.

In theory, though, we still have the watchdogs. In theory, we still have people who can debunk The Crazy and The Dumb.

That’s the theory, but our watchdogs tend to be quite unimpressive. Today, we’ll consider some recent work by the New York Times.

In a wide array of ways, the New York Times produces work which just isn’t real impressive. Simply put, the famous newspaper isn’t especially sharp.

The mediocrity of its work is a key part of The Way We Are. Consider three recent front-page reports in the Times, the regent of the American press corps elite:

Arrests for assault in Sayreville: This Monday, a 2333-word report appeared at the top of the Times front page. Inside the paper, the continuation of the report consumed the full expanse of page A20. The layout included four color photos and a map of New Jersey.

Nine reporters were named in the hard-copy byline for the report. And uh-oh! The lengthy report reads like it was written by nine different people.

The report concerns the recent arrest of seven football players at Sayreville (N.J.) War Memorial High School “on hazing and sexual abuse allegations.” In what follows, you are charged with making a distinction between the alleged criminal conduct, which isn’t under discussion here, and the quality of the journalism performed by the New York Times.

As we’ve read and reread the Times’ lengthy report, we’d have to say the journalism isn’t especially good. Chronologies are sometimes hard to follow; character profiles are puzzling. (The head coach of the high school team “had a prominent mustache and used phrases like ‘put a whupping on teams’ and ‘take your lumps.’”)

At times, the reporters write like natives of Mars: “The order of the attacks that week is not clear. The victim in one of them, who could not be reached for comment, did not smile or laugh.”

Also this:

SCHWEBER, BARKER, GRANT ET AL (10/20/14): One freshman said his classmates showed their discomfort with the attacks in their body language. ''They would look around like, 'What are they doing?' '' he said. ''It's weird.''

Most strangely, the report turns on a description of a type of sexual assault which, as described, doesn’t exactly seem physically possible. The nine reporters just cruise along, failing to see the oddness of their description.

This front-page report was very long. It was also very murky. Plainly, the nine reporters don’t know what actually happened. Given the length of the report, it takes a lot of effort just to tease out what is being alleged.

On the bright side, the long report is highly entertaining. If you don’t mind our saying so, the report lets subscribers read at length about very exciting charges.

Remember when this sort of conduct produced the New Jersey preschool child abuse scandal, with its later overturned verdict? We don’t know what happened in Sayreville. But we thought about that unfortunate episode as we fought our way through this nine-person front-page report.

Hysteria concerning Ebola: Next to the giant Sayreville effort, another front-page report concerned Ebola hysteria. Of the three reports we cite today, we think this was the worst.

How bad is the judgment at the Times? In our view, Jennifer Steinhauer (and her editors) showed amazingly bad judgment as she opened her report in the way shown below.

We say that for two or three reasons. This front-page report appeared right next to the Sayreville effort:

STEINHAUER (10/20/14): In the month since a Liberian man infected with Ebola traveled to Dallas, where he later died, the nation has marinated in a murky soup of understandable concern, wild misinformation, political opportunism and garden-variety panic.

Within the escalating debate over how to manage potential threats to public health—muddled by what is widely viewed as a bungled effort by government officials and the Dallas hospital that managed the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States—the line between vigilance and hysteria can be as blurry as the edges of a watercolor painting.

A crowd of parents last week pulled their children out of a Mississippi middle school after learning that its principal had traveled to Zambia, an African nation untouched by the disease.

On the eve of midterm elections with control of the United States Senate at stake, politicians from both parties are calling for the end of commercial air traffic between the United States and some African countries, even though most public health experts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a shutdown would compound rather than alleviate the risks.

Carolyn Smith of Louisville, Ky., last week took a rare break from sequestering herself at home to take her fiancé to a doctor's appointment. She said she was reluctant to leave her house after hearing that a nurse from the Dallas hospital had flown to Cleveland, over 300 miles from her home. ''We're not really going anywhere if we can help it,'' Ms. Smith, 50, said.

In our view, that passage displays extremely bad judgment, of a very familiar kind. Three quick reasons:

Editorialize much? Steinhauer lists three examples of the ways people have reacted to Ebola. In two of the examples, people in southern locales behave in ways which are completely crazy. In the third example, politicians support a policy Steinhauer doesn’t favor.

That’s just basically clownish. Also unfortunate is the statement that pols are adopting the position in question “even though most public health experts...said a shutdown would compound rather than alleviate the risks.”

That presentation is short, unreasoned, unexplained, cavalier. It helps explain the tribal divide which is badly harming the nation.

Here’s one more horrible problem:

Disapprovingly, Steinhauer says that “politicians from both parties are calling for the end of commercial air traffic between the United States and some African countries.” We looked to see if she cited examples. Horrifically, here’s all she wrote:

STEINHAUER: With fear riding high, Democrats, particularly those running for office, have supported a travel ban.

''Although stopping the spread of this virus overseas will require a large, coordinated effort with the international community,'' said Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, a Democrat in a tight race, ''a temporary travel ban is a prudent step the president can take to protect the American people.”

From that, a person might think that Hagan is “calling for the end of commercial air traffic between the United States and some African countries,” the formulation with which Steinhauer started.

In fact, that isn’t what Hagan has supported. But so what? Steinhauer and other Times reporters have spread that idea around. On-line, Mark Rappeport even claimed that Hagan had flipped last week from an earlier stand, a claim which was plainly inaccurate. Later, he posted a “clarification” and changed an antagonistic headline.

Times writers tend to be careless. In these ways, they keep getting “Democrats in tight races” defeated. They’ve been bumbling along in such ways for a good many years.

What Officer Wilson has said: It’s a basic part of The Way We Are. Journalists at the New York Times just aren’t especially sharp.

To a certain extent, we’d extend that judgment to last Saturday’s front-page report about what Officer Darren Wilson has said to “authorities” about the shooting of Michel Brown.

For the most part, Lawrence O’Donnell bungled his criticism of this report Monday night. Still, O’Donnell was making a valid point by the end of his ten-minute presentation, in which he told us that it pains him to criticize the Times.

What was wrong with that front-page report? The problem was a matter of emphasis, but it was very important.

To their credit, three Times reporters explained the problem at the start of their report. That said, the distinction is extremely basic, and it was quickly forgotten:

SCHMIDT, APUZZO AND BOSMAN (10/18/14): The police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., two months ago has told investigators that he was pinned in his vehicle and in fear for his life as he struggled over his gun with Mr. Brown, according to government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation into the matter.

The officer, Darren Wilson, has told the authorities that during the scuffle, Mr. Brown reached for the gun. It was fired twice in the car, according to forensics tests performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The first bullet struck Mr. Brown in the arm; the second bullet missed.

The forensics tests showed Mr. Brown's blood on the gun, as well as on the interior door panel and on Officer Wilson's uniform. Officer Wilson told the authorities that Mr. Brown had punched and scratched him repeatedly, leaving swelling on his face and cuts on his neck.

This is the first public account of Officer Wilson's testimony to investigators, but it does not explain why, after he emerged from his vehicle, he fired at Mr. Brown multiple times. It contradicts some witness accounts, and it will not calm those who have been demanding to know why an unarmed man was shot a total of six times. Mr. Brown's death continues to fuel anger and sometimes-violent protests.

That highlighted point is extremely basic. As O’Donnell eventually explained, the major question in this case concerns the reason why Wilson kept firing at Brown even after the struggle at the car was over.

Schmidt, Apuzzo and Bosman acknowledged that problem in the highlighted passage. But after that, they seemed to forget this basic point—and they only discussed what Wilson has said about the struggle at the car.

They didn’t offer Wilson’s account of why he kept firing at Brown after that, eventually killing him. As they continued, they injected Wilson-friendly interpretations into their work, while failing to note that their account has little to do with the key question at hand.

In recent days, we’ve struggled with each of these front-page reports. But on a very regular basis, the work performed by the New York Times just isn’t super-impressive.

Our gatekeepers are long gone. We’re left with newspapers like the Times to serve as back-ups—as watch-dogs.

Here’s a very basic fact about the troubling Way We Are. For some, this fact is highly counterintuitive:

Our elite newspapers just aren’t very sharp. O’Donnell may not be much better.

Tomorrow: The newer watchdogs at Salon

Supplemental: Our fund-raising drive has started at last!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014

Our least favorite time of the year: No one puts anything off to quite the extent that we put off our not-always-annual annual fund-raising drive.

It’s our least favorite time of the year! Despite the distaste, only a fool could ignore the need.

In the next week or so, we’d like to lay out our excuses for the past year’s work. We’d like to establish some goals for future work. And we’d like to seek out an actual sponsor for our companion site, How He Got There.

The half-told story at that site really ought to be finished. (Most of the research has been done.) At some point, it got depressing to beat on into the face of the wind—into the face of the code of silence which surrounds many of the topics we’ve explored since 1998.

(At that time, we weren’t really aware of the code of silence.)

Remember when the Irish saved civilization? Actually, we don’t either! Still, we think someone should record our recent political/journalistic history, just in case the time ever comes when people want to stop clowning around with their darling Rachel and learn how to fight to win.

(Last night, Rachel started her week with almost five minutes of funny dogs. In our view, a person could almost see an agenda in that remarkable choice.)

We’ll offer more of these mewlings in the days ahead. For now, though, consider the great season open, perhaps as an adjunct to the World Series:

If you want to support this site, you can just click here.

In the days to come, we’ll try to speculate about where such support could take us.

Last night, Lawrence recalled his astonishing statement from eight weeks back:

“In 30 years of studying the New York Times coverage of these cases, I have never been critical of their work until yesterday.”

In that statement, you can see the undisguised heart of the problem we’ve described down through the years.

Lawrence gets paid for conduct like that.

To even the score, click here!

Supplemental: Lawrence O’Donnell challenged the Times!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014

Then said it pained him to do so: Did Lawrence O’Donnell even read that New York Times report?

In our view, he cast himself in the watchdog role, then quickly floundered and flailed. Even worse was something he said midway through his performance.

For background, see our previous post.

Good God! The analysts cried and ran from the room when they heard Lawrence make the highlighted statement:

O’DONNELL (10/20/14): Remember—if you’re on the scene on the street as an eyewitness and a gun is being fired, your ability to flawlessly report every distinct sound while trying to protect your own life might be imperfect.

And the courts understand that. Juries understand that. The law and juries do not demand perfect consistency between circumstantial evidence and eyewitness evidence,

But the New York Times does.

The New York Times has demonstrated that its reporters and editors have been woefully incompetent in evaluating the evidence in this case. It pained me to have to say as much on this program eight weeks ago. The next day, the New York Times public editor agreed with my criticism of the Times article that I ripped apart for you that night, right at this desk.

In that passage, O’Donnell was grossly misstating the type of consistency discussed in last Saturday's New York Times report. For unknown reasons, he was focusing on the number of gunshots which were fired when Michael Brown was killed, a point the Times report didn’t address or discuss.

There was plenty to clarify in the Times report. Near the end of his ten-minute segment, O’Donnell made a key point—the Times article focused on the struggle at the car, not on the later shots which actually killed Michael Brown.

By the nine-minute mark, Lawrence was making a very strong point. Along the way, he had floundered and erred, offering absurd criticisms of the Times report.

Can we talk? The New York Times routinely does horrible work. Much of the most consequential bad journalism of our era has come from the New York Times.

But so what? Despite this rather obvious fact, Lawrence felt he had to say that it pains him to criticize the Times! Eight weeks ago, he made truly hideous comments when he offered his original criticism of the Times’ reporting about Michael Brown:

“In 30 years of studying the New York Times coverage of these cases, I have never been critical of their work until yesterday.”

Believe it or not, Lawrence actually said that. Last night, he went there again.

According to the civics texts, it’s Lawrence’s job to criticize the New York Times when it gets things wrong. According to the civics texts, that would be part of his basic civic duty.

That said, you almost never hear the powerful New York Times criticized on MSNBC. Lawrence and Rachel simply don’t go there. When Lawrence does, he’s careful to say how much it pains him to do so.

That was a horrible moment last night. But it tells you something very important about the way our discourse actually works—about The Way We Are, about our floundering culture.

“In 30 years of studying the New York Times coverage of these cases, I have never been critical of their work until yesterday.”

A major TV star actually said that! That pitiful comment is very much a part of The Way We Are.

GATEKEEPERS GONE: Lawrence O’Donnell in watchdog role!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014

Part 2—Competence gone: Was there ever a time when the theory was accurate?

On balance, we’d say there was. At one time, we had a pair of powerful gatekeepers—Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.

Neither man was crazy or dumb. If you or your message was crazy or dumb, it wasn’t likely that you could get it on the air.

Today, that gatekeeper system is gone. What Dr. Keith Ablow did last week is, by now, completely the norm.

What did Ablow do last week? He aired twelve minutes of manifest lunacy on John Gibson’s mid-day show on Fox News Radio.

For yesterday's post, click this.

Ablow played the shrink all through the hideous segment. With manifest lunacy, he described the America-hating thoughts which have been running through Barack Obama’s America-hating head.

Anyone can gin up stories like that. But when such stories are ginned up by a fairly well-known commentator on a major radio network—by a man who once had his own syndicated TV show!—many citizens won’t understand that they are hearing The Crazy.

In the days of Cronkite and Brinkley, people like Ablow weren’t allowed on the air. Performances like his weren’t broadcast by the nation’s major news organs.

Today, heinous work of this kind is completely the norm. For better or worse, our gatekeepers are manifestly gone.

Work like this is completely the norm. Salon pushed back against Ablow and Gibson, but major news organs did not.

Our biggest news organs can no longer keep such craziness out of the discourse. Nor are they inclined to challenge such conduct—to cast themselves in the secondary role of the vigilant watchdog.

For years, we’ve argued that our biggest news organs should treat such events as news. It’s news when major figures like Ablow toy with the public in such ways. It ought to be reported as news—but organs like the New York Times shrink from providing that watchdog service.

In one way, it may be just as well. It isn’t just that the New York Times lacks the will to play that role.

On balance, the newspaper also lacks the smarts. But then, so do the liberal watchdogs who are now part of our sprawling, incompetent corporate media.

What happens when major liberal stars cast themselves as watchdogs? Consider Lawrence O’Donnell’s attempt to challenge the Times last night.

Lawrence challenged a front-page report in Saturday’s New York Times. In that report, Michael Schmidt described some of what Officer Darren Wilson has reportedly told “investigators” about the killing of Michael Brown.

Schmidt cited anonymous government sources. This is the way he started:

SCHMIDT (10/18/14): The police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., two months ago has told investigators that he was pinned in his vehicle and in fear for his life as he struggled over his gun with Mr. Brown, according to government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation into the matter.

The officer, Darren Wilson, has told the authorities that during the scuffle, Mr. Brown reached for the gun. It was fired twice in the car, according to forensics tests performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The first bullet struck Mr. Brown in the arm; the second bullet missed.

The forensics tests showed Mr. Brown's blood on the gun, as well as on the interior door panel and on Officer Wilson's uniform. Officer Wilson told the authorities that Mr. Brown had punched and scratched him repeatedly, leaving swelling on his face and cuts on his neck.

This is the first public account of Officer Wilson's testimony to investigators, but it does not explain why, after he emerged from his vehicle, he fired at Mr. Brown multiple times. It contradicts some witness accounts, and it will not calm those who have been demanding to know why an unarmed man was shot a total of six times. Mr. Brown's death continues to fuel anger and sometimes-violent protests.

Schmidt sourced his information to unnamed government officials. He later said that his account of Wilson's statements did not “come from the Ferguson Police Department or from officials whose activities are being investigated as part of the [federal] civil rights inquiry.”

If it’s accurate, Schmidt’s report seems to include some new forensic information. Meanwhile, the reporter stated an important point in his fourth paragraph:

Wilson’s account of the struggle at the car does not explain why he fired at Brown multiple times after he left his car. That remains the major question in a potential criminal case. Wilson’s account of the fight at the car doesn’t resolve that question.

On last night’s program, O’Donnell cast himself in the role of watchdog concerning the Times report. In the course of a ten-minute monologue, he even made some accurate statements about various questions surrounding this case.

To watch the whole segment, click here.

That said, it didn’t take long for Watchdog O’Donnell to go substantially wrong. Instantly, he battered the Times for “pretend[ing] it had a scoop” in its front-page report.

Now that our gatekeepers are gone, how competent are our watchdogs? Barely two minutes into his segment, this would-be watchdog said this:

O’DONNELL (10/20/14): The useful information in the New York Times article is the circumstantial evidence leaked by the government officials who told the Times that the FBI forensics tests show that the officer’s gun was fired twice inside the car, with the first bullet hitting Michael Brown in the arm and the second bullet himself him completely...

The Times then gets very confused about what those forensic findings mean. The article says it “contradicts” some witness accounts, but then fails to point out any contradictions, because the New York Times and its reporters do not seem to understand what an actual contradiction is in eyewitness testimony.

How competent are today’s high-profile corporate media stars? With our gatekeepers dead and gone, just how competent are our potential watchdogs?

Lawrence O’Donnell is very well-paid. He likes to say that he went to Harvard. He has been a major media figure for more than fifteen years.

But alas! Less than three minutes into his watchdog report, O’Donnell was flatly wrong:

In the passage quoted above, he mocked the Times for getting “very confused” about those forensic findings. More specifically, he said the Times “failed to point out any contradictions” in its report.

He said that the Times doesn’t seem to know what an actual contradiction looks like!

Gack! The Times report does specify at least one “direct contradiction” between Officer Wilson’s reported account and an eyewitness account. That contradiction is specified in the passage below. Did Lawrence read this report?

SCHMIDT: Few witnesses had perfect vantage points for the fight in the car, which occurred just after noon on Aug. 9. Mr. Brown was walking down the middle of the street with a friend, Dorian Johnson, when Officer Wilson stopped his S.U.V., a Chevy Tahoe, to order them to the sidewalk.

Within seconds, the encounter turned into a physical struggle, as the officer and Mr. Brown became entangled through the open driver's-side window.

[...]

Mr. Johnson's description of the scuffle is detailed and specific, and directly contradicts what Officer Wilson has told the authorities.

Mr. Johnson has said that Officer Wilson was the aggressor, backing up his vehicle and opening the door, which hit Mr. Johnson and Mr. Brown and then bounced back.

''He just reached his arm out the window and grabbed my friend around his neck, and he was trying to choke my friend,'' Mr. Johnson told reporters after the shooting. ''He was trying to get away, and the officer then reached out and grabbed his arm to pull him inside the car.''

Officer Wilson then drew his weapon, Mr. Johnson said, and threatened to shoot.

''In the same moment, the first shot went off,'' he said. ''We looked at him. He was shot. There was blood coming from him. And we took off running.''

Never, Mr. Johnson said, did Mr. Brown reach for the officer's weapon.

We don’t know what happened at the car, but that sounds like a fairly direct “contradiction” to us! But as he continued last night, O’Donnell acted as if the Times was only claiming contradictions concerning the number of shots which Officer Wilson fired.

On and on the watchdog went, explaining that witnesses are often wrong about the number of gunshots which get fired. He acted as if he hadn’t read the actual Times report.

O’Donnell has been a high-ranking media figure for fifteen years. Did we mention the fact that he went to Harvard?

Despite serial proclamations of greatness, Lawrence bungled quickly last night. In our world, the gatekeepers are gone—and the watchdogs are often incompetent or heavily biased.

Having said that, let us also say this: There was plenty to clarify about that Times report.

The Times report focused heavily on the struggle at the car. After the initial disclaimer shown above, it largely abandoned the central question which remains in this case—the question of why Wilson fired a large number of gunshots, killing Brown, after the struggle at the car was over.

There was a great deal to clarify in that report. But when he tried, our liberal watchdog was almost instantly wrong.

Cronkite and Brinkley are gone, long gone. For better or worse, no one can play the gatekeeper role at this time.

Our gatekeepers are gone, and even worse, our watchdogs just aren’t very sharp! That’s certainly true of the New York Times, a point we’ll examine tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Horrible front-page reporting

The Way We Are: We’re in Week 3 of our current award-winning series, The Way We Are. The series examines the way our discourse actually works, as opposed to the way we might hear it described by major media figures.

To us, The Way We Are seems grim. For all previous posts, click here.

Links to all posts: The Way We Are!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2014

Read each thrilling installment: In our award-winning series, The Way We Are, we explore the way our national discourse actually works, as opposed to what schoolchildren read in their civics books.

Be sure to read each thrilling installment! We’ll post all links below:

Week One—The Way We Are
Part 1: Bill Clinton discussed those “storylines,” like Krugman and Shipp before him
Part 2: When Cillizza failed to respond, it was classic press behavior
Part 3: Breaking (almost) all the rules, the New York Times discussed the sexist trashing of Hillary Clinton
Part 4: Storyline ahoy! Maureen Dowd is still upset about 1994!
Part 5: Cokie pretended to name the scripts which drove Campaign 2000

Week Two—The Way We Argue
Part 1: Bombs away! Ben Affleck and Bill Maher staged a televised fight
Part 2: Affleck’s trio of bombs proved listening can be hard
Part 3: Affleck kept repeating his script, the way fundamentalists do
Part 4: Kristof agreed with Harris and Maher. And yet the bombs still fell
Part 5: Increasingly, our liberal world leans toward the dogma rules

Week Three—Gatekeepers Gone
Part 1: The doctor was IN—and was out of his mind. No dimwit need not apply!

Supplemental: Concerning a powerful photograph!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2014

Post reader gets it right: Each Saturday, the hard-copy Washington Post includes a full page of letters from its readers.

The page is called Free for All. This Saturday, a Post reader from suburban Gaithersburg, Maryland got something very right.

She had written in praise of a photograph which ran ten days before. This is what she wrote:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (10/18/14): Michel du Cille’s photo of Esther Tokpah, the 11-year-old Liberian whose parents died of Ebola [“A new generation of orphans,” front page, Oct. 8], deserves the highest award possible. It told a story of haunting bewilderment and grief in the face of tragic reality. The courageous presence of physician Jerry Brown, offering words of comfort, added poignancy to this extraordinary window into one of our world’s unspeakable nightmares. I am humbled, heartbroken and grateful.

K— J—, Gaithersburg

“I am humbled, heartbroken and grateful.“ Those are unusual things to say about a photograph. But there the photo in question was, published again by the Post.

Especially in black and white, it’s an astonishing photo. On-line, the Post presents the photo in color, in which it loses some of its remarkable power.

On Saturday morning, we looked at the photograph in question in black and white:

It shows the 11-year-old girl who had lost her parents. Tears are streaming from her eyes. Her lips are pursed extremely hard against her grief.

We’ve looked at that photograph quite a few times since we first saw it Saturday morning. We’re not sure we’ve ever seen a more penetrating photo. It’s the kind of photo which makes you wonder why any of us ever do any of the things we do.

We can’t show you the photo in black and white. In color, we think it shows us much less.

Still, we’ll suggest that you give it a look. In our view, the reader from Gaithersburg had a good eye.

The photo does deserve the highest commendation, if we’re still able to think that commendations matter. It may also make a person want to look away. Especially in black and white, its power explains the unusual set of reactions the reader described.

Why do we do the things we do? That very unusual photograph left us asking that.

GATEKEEPERS GONE: The doctor was IN—and was out of his mind!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2014

Part 1—No dimwit need not apply: At one time, it couldn’t have happened.

Or so the theory goes.

At one point, the theory says, we had competent gatekeepers. They kept our discourse on track.

They kept The Crazy out of the discourse—The Crazy and The Big Dumb.

They restricted the things we the people could hear—the ideas we were allowed to ponder. It was hard to hear crazy shit at that time, thanks to the work of our gatekeepers. It was highly unlikely that you would get scripted by people who were well-intentioned but basically dumb.

Did such a golden age ever exist? There’s no easy way to answer that question. But when you hear this theory advanced, you’ll typically hear two gatekeepers named:

Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.

There were lots of newspaper back in that day; some of them left a great deal to be desired. But there were only two, or possibly three, TV networks doing news. And TV had perhaps become the major medium guiding the American discourse.

Cronkite and Brinkley were different people, but neither man was crazy or dumb. They restricted the things we the people could hear. They sifted out the crazy and the dumb.

It couldn’t have happened, the theory says, when they were sifting the things we got to hear. Americans couldn’t have heard last week’s radio interview with the heinous Keith Ablow.

We’ll grant you this—Dr. Keith Ablow isn’t a giant figure in the American discourse. He isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly. He isn’t as significant as Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes.

That said, Ablow is a regular contributor on the Fox News Channel. Last week, he was interviewed on John Gibson’s Fox News Radio program.

Gibson once hosted the 5 P.M. program on the Fox News Channel. Last Tuesday, he spent twelve minutes letting Ablow discuss Ebola in much the way Luke Brinker described at the new Salon:

BRINKER (10/15/14): Psychiatrist Keith Ablow, a member of Fox News’ Medical A Team, embarked on an unhinged racial rant against President Obama this week, charging that Obama wants Ebola to spread in the U.S. because his “affinities, his affiliations are with” Africa, “not us.”

Speaking with Fox News Radio host John Gibson yesterday, Ablow discussed his conspiracy theory at length. Attempting to channel Obama’s inner thoughts, Ablow imagined that the president opposes sealing America’s borders to travelers from Ebola-stricken countries because Obama believes, “if only unconsciously,” that the U.S. has inflicted a “plague of colonialism” on the world and that travel restrictions would therefore be unfair.

“You miserable people have destroyed so much in the world in terms of good things, and now you’re going to build a wall?,” Ablow pictured Obama saying. “Really? To insulate yourself from things that are devastating other nations when your gains are ill-gotten? And the very fact that you can build a wall—you’re using wealth that you never should have had to build it. This is just another manifestation of you didn’t build that, business.”

Ablow’s armchair psychiatry grew particularly disturbing when he speculated that Obama hasn’t implemented a travel ban for west African countries because the president’s “affinities, his affiliations are with them. Not us. That’s what people seem unwilling to accept. He’s their leader...we don’t have a president.”

If you click here, you can listen to Gibson’s twelve-minute discussion with Ablow. As his source, Brinker cited this earlier report by Eric Hananoki of Media Matters.

At one time, the theory goes, that interview couldn’t have happened on major radio stations. There were gatekeepers in the media who didn’t allow such lunacy on major broadcast outlets.

Is Keith Ablow really that crazy? Or does he just play a crazy doctor on TV?

We can’t answer that question, though it’s fairly clear that Gibson knew that Ablow’s presentation was nuts. That said, there was a time when such ludicrous presentations would not have been allowed on major media outlets.

Those days ceased to exist a long time ago. Today, we live in an age of The Crazy and The Dumb—in an age with the gatekeepers gone.

All around the countryside, you can see and hear the effects of having our gatekeepers gone. You can certainly hear the effects of their absence if you listen to Ablow’s twelve-minute discussion with Gibson.

Here’s the problem:

Many people who listened that day couldn’t tell that Ablow’s presentation was basically crazy. They may have thought the heinous Ablow was basically making sense.

In an earlier age, those people wouldn’t have been misled that way. Ablow’s lunacy wouldn’t have been allowed on a major radio outlet.

When we listened to that tape, we heard the effects of having our gatekeepers gone. But then, we see and hear the absence of competent gatekeepers all across our broken American discourse.

It’s easy for liberals to sense their absence when we hear the lunacy broadcast by Fox. It may be harder for us to sense the gatekeepers’ absence when we watch MSNBC, or when we read the work at the new Salon, or when we read the New York Times.

That said, competent gatekeepers are generally gone from all those sites. All too often, they’ve been replaced by men in suits—by corporate producers eager to sell us The Crazy and The Dumb.

This morning, Salon was selling The Dumb in this, its featured report. (Some commenters could tell how dumb it was.) Chuck Todd and Willie Geist were selling The Dumb on yesterday’s Meet the Press.

MSNBC was selling The Dumb on several of last Friday night’s shows. And all around the emerging liberal world, highly passionate, young liberal writers keep selling versions of The Dumb—well-intentioned but clueless theoretics which are destined to make laughing-stocks out of the liberal world.

We have an important secret to tell you—we the people aren’t always tremendously sharp. This is very much part of The Way We Are—and, with our gatekeepers gone, no one can protect us from our credulous reactions to waves of dumb ideas.

Ablow was selling The Crazy last week. The Crazy is a big industry now. Unfortunately, so is The Dumb.

Tomorrow: We’re sorry, but this was just dumb

Coming later today: Links to all previous posts in our current award-winning series, The Way We Are

Supplemental: The New York Times loses consciousness!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2014

The paper’s essential culture: In last weekend’s Sunday Review, the New York Times published a very peculiar piece.

In our view, this peculiar piece captured the famous newspaper’s peculiar essential culture.

We refer to this peculiar essay by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton.

Despite his pair of middle initials, Graziano is an American. According to the leading authority, he was born in Bridgeport and raised in Buffalo.

According to the Times identity tag, he’s also the author of “Consciousness and the Social Brain.”

Graziano’s piece last Sunday bore this headline: “Are We Really Conscious?” Such headlines signal Times readers—they're in for some very deep thoughts.

Snark to the side, are we really conscious? Speaking for ourselves, we’d pretty much have to say yes.

That said, it’s always possible to imagine that everybody else is not. And as we’ve noted down through the years, we sometimes wonder about the life-forms found in the upper-end press corps.

Let’s return to the piece in question.

In our view, this was a very peculiar essay to run in a general newspaper, even in as lofty a paper as the Sunday Times. As Graziano started, he said this:

“Of the three most fundamental scientific questions about the human condition, two have been answered.”

Two of those questions have been answered. But, according to Graziano, the third question hasn’t:

GRAZIANO (10/12/14): Third, what is the relationship between our minds and the physical world? Here, we don’t have a settled answer. We know something about the body and brain, but what about the subjective life inside? Consider that a computer, if hooked up to a camera, can process information about the wavelength of light and determine that grass is green. But we humans also experience the greenness. We have an awareness of information we process. What is this mysterious aspect of ourselves?

Many theories have been proposed, but none has passed scientific muster.

According to Graziano, we humans experience the greenness of grass (his italics). From that, he derives an extremely murky question:

“What is this mysterious aspect of ourselves?”

Does Graziano’s question make sense? We’d say his question is murky, hard to paraphrase, just extremely unclear. But when it comes from our top professors, the Times loves work of that type. In that sense, we’d say this piece captures one part of the paper’s essential culture.

Moving right along, what is the relationship between our minds and the physical world? As Graziano proceeds, he pens a murky thought:

GRAZIANO (continuing directly): Many theories have been proposed, but none has passed scientific muster. I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.

“We don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do?” That statement is loaded with qualifiers, possibly even with a “weasel word” or two.

Graziano isn’t saying we don’t (actually) have (inner) feelings. He’s just saying we don’t have (inner) feelings in the way we think we do!

That said, as Graziano proceeds, he seems to make a stronger claim. Citing the work of Professor Dennett, he is soon saying this:

GRAZIANO: The brain builds models (or complex bundles of information) about items in the world, and those models are often not accurate. From that realization, a new perspective on consciousness has emerged in the work of philosophers like Patricia S. Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett. Here’s my way of putting it:

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t.

There’s more. But in that passage, Graziano seems to say that the brain doesn’t “become subjectively aware of information.”

Do you have any idea what that means? Neither do we! Neither does anyone who obtained and attempted to read last Sunday’s New York Times!

(We do know this. In normal parlance, we don’t say that “the brain” becomes aware of some piece of information. We say that some person becomes aware. Just that quickly, Graziano has wandered off the normal pathways of our language. Can such initial steps actually matter? You can bet your sweet bippy they can!)

Trust us! Of the millions of people who saw last Sunday’s New York Times, no one has the slightest idea what Graziano is talking about. No one could paraphrase his remarks in a way which could survive simple scrutiny.

In fairness, many people may have said each word in his piece to themselves as their eye moved down the page. As they did, they may have had the subjective sense that they were tracking the expression of some sort of deep thought.

That doesn’t mean they had any idea what, if anything, was being said. It doesn’t mean that Graziano himself could explain his various statements if exposed to competent questioning.

People inclined to defer to authority may recoil at that last proffer. Of course Graziano understands what he’s saying, such folk may reflexively think.

Don’t be so sure, Times subscribers. Wittgenstein’s later work was all about dismantling the kinds of murky statements found in Sunday’s peculiar piece. However much academic authority may stand behind such statements, Wittgenstein kept saying that they’re incoherent—that they just don’t stand up.

This doesn’t mean that Graziano isn’t doing highly useful research of some kind. It may mean that he gets tangled up, in the ways Wittgenstein described, when he starts “philosophizing” about his own work.

However one wants to judge those questions, we’ll confidently return to our basic premise. As you can easily see for yourselves, no one who purchased the Times last Sunday had the slightest idea what Graziano was talking about.

This leads us to a basic question: Why was this peculiar piece in the Sunday Review?

Here’s our answer:

On the upper end, the New York Times simply loves this kind of fuzzy, high academic work. On the lower end, its editors also love the low-brow inanities of Maureen Dowd, the pabulum of a Nicholas Kristof, the fifty references to Mitt Romney’s dog penned by the high lady Collins.

Dowd’s inanities make no sense, except as crude political insults. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, no one has the slightest idea what certain professors are saying.

At the Times, top-ranking editors can’t seem to discern either fact.

“Are we humans really conscious?” Thanks to the work of the New York Times, we’re not quite sure what to say!

The professor’s prior appearance: Professor Dennett was also cited in the Sunday Times of September 28.

(Full disclosure: His sister, little Charlotte Dennett, was our grade school pal!)

In our view, Dennett’s work is very murky. At a paper like the Times, that qualifies him as a star.

Supplemental: This is what “liberal” pandering looks like!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014

Chris Hayes bombs Bill Maher: Do liberals get pandered to on MSNBC?

Sometimes, yes, they do. Consider Chris Hayes’ handling of the epic debate between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck.

Affleck appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday evening, October 3. Three nights later, Hayes devoted a segment to the discussion.

He teased the topic right at the start of his program:

HAYES (10/6/14): Plus, the epic Ben Affleck/Bill Maher smack down.

AFFLECK (videotape): Because it’s gross! It’s racist.

HAYES: All In starts right now.

Ben Affleck had called Maher a racist! It was an epic smack down!

Later, Hayes teased the excitement again:

HAYES: Ben Affleck calls Bill Maher “gross and racist.” We’ll play you the tape ahead.

Plainly, the excitement was building. And the R-bomb was flying again.

After a break, the segment ran about the epic smack down.

To watch the full segment, click here. What did viewers get in that segment?

They saw a highly selective set of video clips from the HBO show—clips in which Affleck is hurling accusations at Maher and Sam Harris. They then saw Hayes display his own moral greatness.

After playing those rather selective video clips, Hayes began with this:

HAYES: All right. Two things. First of all, the definition of Muslims as people who “just want to go to the store, eat sandwiches and pray five times a day” is basically perfect and can’t be improved upon.

Admittedly, that was cute. But Hayes bungled what Affleck had said on the tape, and it isn’t a “basically perfect” definition of anything in the first place.

Mainly, it’s just silly. Presumably, Hayes must know that.

Whatever! That was simply a cable host pandering to his viewers. But as he continued, Hayes did something that was flatly dishonest—and perhaps just a tiny bit vile:

HAYES (continuing directly): Second of all, put me down on the Ben Affleck camp on this, strongly. I think to suggest that what is happening in the most extreme form in some Muslim countries is representative of the views of all Muslims is gross and racist. Or to obsess over what the particular problem with Islam is.

For the record, Harris’ name was never mentioned by Hayes. He only mentioned Affleck and Maher when he described the smack down.

That said:

Had Maher “suggested that what is happening in the most extreme form in some Muslim countries is representative of the views of all Muslims?” Plainly, that’s what Hayes implied in that statement. Is that suggestion accurate?

We’d have to say it isn’t. In fact, when Harris made his most definitive statistical statement on Real Time, he said he was discussing the beliefs of roughly twenty percent of Muslims worldwide.

Twenty percent isn’t all! If a person actually wants to be fair, neither Maher nor Harris said or suggested that “what is happening in the most extreme form in some Muslim countries is representative of the views of all Muslims.”

This distinction was perfectly clear on Real Time. It wasn’t in the selective clips Hayes played for his viewers.

To be honest, Maher didn’t say or suggest that. But so what? That had been Affleck’s hysterical claim, as shown in the tapes that Hayes had just played.

Now, Hayes implied that this was what Maher had actually said—and he went on to say that Maher’s supposed suggestion really was “gross and racist.”

In short, Hayes dropped an R-bomb on Maher’s head after playing selective tapes and offering a grossly tilted account of what he actually said. By traditional norms, this is ugly behavior. More and more, though, this is our “liberal” norm.

As Hayes continued, he played one last rather dumb card. He criticized Maher for holding his discussion without any Muslims on his panel. He then played tape of Reza Aslan discussing Islam on CNN, leading to this pronouncement:

HAYES: It turns out, as a general rule, that asking people to explain what they believe, and why, is a whole lot more enlightening than speculating about their beliefs as if they’re not in the room.

“As a general rule,” that may or may not be right. It all depends on what you're discussing and who you choose for your panelists.

The fact that Aslan is a Muslim doesn’t automatically mean that he can or will explain the views of Muslims worldwide. It doesn’t mean that he can explain those views more accurately than Harris.

Similarly, the fact that a Muslim panelist can explain his own views doesn’t mean that he can explain the views of Muslims worldwide. Still, this let Hayes exit the segment with a final lofty pronouncement.

Including Muslims in such discussions may well be a good idea. In the meantime, how about this:

Hayes had just conducted a monologue about Bill Maher without Bill Maher in the room! He misrepresented what Maher had said, then said his statements had been gross and racist.

We’re going to say there was a time when Hayes wouldn’t have done that. But the suits have gotten ahold of Hayes since they put him in prime time, and Hayes has become a somewhat different cable performer.

Liberal viewers were pandered to and misled this night. As those viewers were misled, the R-bombs continued to fall.

THE WAY WE ARGUE: The liberal world and the dogma rules!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014

Part 5—Increasingly, we want our Maypo: Just for the record, we aren’t big fans of Sam Harris’ anti-religionism.

For ourselves, we don’t have any religious or cosmological views, aside from the view that we humans are very poorly equipped to answer cosmological questions.

That said, we the humans have always been religious. It’s kind of silly to think that we the liberal intellectuals can find a way to stamp that out.

As a political matter, the impulse toward that approach also seems counter-productive.

What about Harris’ interest in the views of Muslims worldwide? We have no particular thought about that, in part because of Ben Affleck.

Uh-oh! On October 3, Harris began discussing his views on Real Time with Bill Maher. To watch the whole segment, click here.

The gent didn’t get very far. Eighty-seven seconds into the segment, Affleck staged his first interruption. Excluding Maher’s introduction, Harris had spoken for 43 seconds at that point.

Seconds later, Affleck grossly misparaphrased something Harris had said. (Affleck: “You’re saying that Islamophobia is not a real thing.”) And alas!

Before two minutes had passed in the program, Affleck had dropped the first of the several R-bombs he would unloose. This is the type of racist statement Harris had made at that point:

HARRIS (10/3/14): I’m not denying that certain people are bigoted against Muslims as people. And that’s a problem.

“That’s big of you,” Affleck sarcastically said. Seconds later, his first bombs were dropped.

Affleck’s remarkable sense of grievance created a striking discussion. As we noted yesterday, it’s hard to find any factual disagreements between the allegedly racist Harris and the aggrieved racist-hunter Affleck.

Nicholas Kristof supported Affleck in the televised discussion, and in a later New York Times column. He dropped his own R-bombs in both settings—but in his column, he kept repeating the sorts of things Harris and Maher had said during the TV program.

For these reasons, we think that October 3 “TV brawl” provides a fascinating picture of The Way We Argue.

Alas! Increasingly, we liberals argue in the ways we long derided among those in the other tribe. Increasingly, we insist on hearing our treasured frameworks and dogmas to the exclusion of everything else.

Increasingly, we drop our bombs on those who refuse to comply with our desires, even when we seem to agree with every word these Others have viciously said.

Increasingly, this is The Way We Argue. In our view, a modern nation can’t function this way. It’s hard to believe that progressive advances will result from this unimpressive conduct.

Why was Affleck so aggrieved that night? On a rational basis, we’d have to say there was no obvious cause.

Once again, we’ll suggest you review the full road to the first of his several bombs. This is the full discussion by Harris which led to “You shifty Jew:”

HARRIS (10/3/14): Well, liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. They’ll criticize white theocracy. They’ll criticize Christians. They’ll still get agitated about the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984.

(Maher chuckles)

But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us. And the crucial point of confusion—

(Audience applauds)

HARRIS: Yes. Thank you. The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people.

MAHER: Right.

HARRIS: And that is intellectually ridiculous.

AFFLECK: So hold on! Are you the person who understands the officially codified doctrine of Islam? You’re the interpreter of that, so you can say, “Well this is—”

HARRIS: I'm actually well-educated on this topic.

AFFLECK: I’m asking you! So you’re saying, if I criticize— You’re saying that Islamophobia is not a real thing. That if you’re critical of something—

MAHER (ironically): Well, it’s not a real thing when we do it.

AFFLECK: Right.

MAHER: It really isn’t.

HARRIS: I’m not denying that, that certain people are bigoted against Muslims as people. And that’s a problem.

AFFLECK (sarcastically): That’s big of you.

HARRIS: But the—

MAHER: But why are you so hostile about this concept?

AFFLECK: Because it’s gross, it’s racist.

MAHER: It’s not. It’s—but it’s so not.

AFFLECK: It’s so— It’s like saying, “You’re a shifty Jew.”

Somewhat pitifully, that was all it took.

It didn’t take much to set Affleck off—to persuade him to unloose his bombs. By the end of the ten minutes, Kristof had also signed on for the fight, though he was more refined than Affleck.

“This does have a tinge, a little bit, of the way white racists talk about African-Americans and define blacks by black criminals, which are not representative,” Kristof said at the nine-minute mark. Our advice?

Beware of pundits who claim that they can detect “tinges!” More importantly, beware of scribes who will drop our most sensitive bombs on the basis of such perceived “tinges.”

Warning! Such pundits will often be looking for ways to state their own preferred frameworks and dogmas. There may be nothing “wrong” with those frameworks. There may be something we can gain from hearing those frameworks advanced.

But there is something wrong—something badly wrong—when pundits are willing to drop our most consequential bombs on the basis of small disagreements. Affleck did that all through the ten-minute “brawl.” Kristof followed suit in his subsequent column.

In truth, Harris had said nothing even dimly racist when Affleck dropped the first of his bombs.

When Kristof wrote his subsequent column, he included an R-bomb and a B-bomb. But it’s amazingly hard to find the place where he actually disagreed with anything Harris had said.

What explains the willingness to strike that way on the basis of small disagreements? (To the extent that any disagreement can be found at all.) The answer lies in the realm of dogma—in the attractiveness dogma may have for our small little brains.

We liberals are good at mocking conservatives when they repeat the tedious scripts they’re handed by Rush and Sean. As Harris noted in the passage above, we’re often good at mocking the dogmas of white Christians.

It’s harder for us to see how dumb we liberals are when we insist on our own treasured scripts. Increasingly, though, that is The Way We Argue over here in our own “liberal” world. And uh-oh:

Historically, when liberals start behaving this way, it leads to conservative triumphs.

Where can this “liberal” trend be seen? We’ll offer two suggestions today, although we’ll put off the analyses till next week.

For starters, we’ll suggest you consider the types of analyses emerging from young liberal writers concerning a range of sexual questions. As we noted last week, we think Salon’s Katie McDonough is the most interesting of these young writers, though we don’t necessarily mean that as a compliment.

To liberals like Affleck, every wayward statement about the world’s different populations will quickly be scored as “racism.” To writers like McDonough, sexual encounters which go bad will almost inevitably be scored as “rape.”

In our view, this dogmatic reaction leads McDonough to judgments which sometimes tilt toward being quite dumb. Here’s the problem:

Pleasing though such judgments may be to a certain strain of liberal, people in the wider world will perceive these judgments as dumb. In such ways, writers like McDonough have often triggered counter-reactions which badly harm progressive causes.

It can be hard for liberals to see this. But these counter-reactions are often justified on the merits.

Here’s a second suggestion. For another example of dogmatic liberal writing, consider Margaret Sullivan’s recent posts about the Shonda Rhimes flap.

Sullivan is the New York Times public editor. Rhimes is the highly successful TV producer whose most recent series is called How To Get Away with Murder.

Here's the background to the recent debate:

On September 21, Times TV writer Alessandra Stanley offered a 1500-word review of Rhimes and her work.

As Sullivan correctly noted, the piece was “intended to be in praise of Rhimes.” That said, the piece struck many readers as offensive and racist. Sullivan offered two long posts about the furor, in the course of which she endorsed the complaints.

(Sullivan: “The readers and commentators are correct to protest this story. Intended to be in praise of Ms. Rhimes, it delivered that message in a condescending way that was–at best–astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.” For her second post, click here.)

Was Sullivan right in her judgment? We’re not sure. In large part, this is why:

In her two long posts about this matter, Sullivan makes no attempt to justify or explain the judgment she stated. It was clear that she sided with those who complained. But at no point did she attempt to say why.

(Warning! Simply calling something “tone-deaf” isn’t an explanation.)

We were struck by the lack of explanation or argument in Sullivan’s lengthy posts. Still, the analysts didn’t start to cry until they saw the piece in praise of her work at Salon.

In the lengthy piece, Simon van Zuylen-Wood went on and on about the way Sullivan has changed the role of the ombudsman. Here’s the way he started:

VAN ZUYLEN-WOOD (10/13/14): When Alessandra Stanley published her now-infamous essay on Shonda Rhimes in the New York Times last month, the backlash was swift and furious...Through it all, there was one consistent voice of reason: New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan.

“Intended to be in praise of Rhimes,” Sullivan wrote, “[the article] delivered that message in a condescending way that was—at best—astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.” Sullivan, thanks to that sentence, became a Twitter hero. Emily Nussbaum called the column “thoughtful and balanced”; novelist Gabriel Roth tweeted: “I don’t envy whoever has the public editor gig after @sulliview.” At every turn in the controversy, readers and critics seemed to be waiting for her to weigh in.

To van Zuylen-Wood (and others), Sullivan’s statement made her the bomb. He didn’t seem to notice that Sullivan never argued for or justified the judgments she had stated.

Next week, we’ll look at this matter, along with McDonough’s judgments. But it’s hard to miss an obvious point:

Increasingly, we liberals love to hear our dogmas stated. In Affleck’s case, the gentleman couldn’t wait two minutes before he began to recite.

For years, we liberals laughed at conservative talk for its clueless lines of reasoning. We laughed at talk radio’s ditto-heads, at the way they recited their tribe’s dogmas and storylines.

Increasingly, though, a problem obtains: Dogma isn’t just for the right anymore! Increasingly, that's also the way we argue.

Affleck and Kristof point to a problem. Increasingly, we liberals want our Maypo too!

We suspect this will lead to no good. More on this problem next week.