The most important sentence in that piece by David Cay Johnston that Mistermix pointed us to is this:
What these stories have in common is a reliance on what sources say rather than what the official record shows.
That is modern journalism in a nutshell, isn’t it? Apply that truism to anything that has happened in the past decade, from “tax cuts increase revenue and create jobs” to Sarah Palin’s death panels.
It’s the Politico model of journalism- facts and reality need not apply.
WyldPirate
I’m confused. I thought St. Ronnie of Raygun gave us this basic tenet of economics back in the ’80s.
Ummm. Those nits sure were a good compliment to my breakfast.
Eric U.
I think that in the aggregate, things like crime look worse than the reality. I used to do field support for a particular type of airplane. From where we sat getting calls every day, it looked like things were falling apart. But when you look at it from the perspective of someone operating a plane, the planes never had any problems. Same thing with crime: there is a lot of crime if you look at it from the perspective of the police. But as a potential victim, your chances look pretty good.
General Stuck
All the news that’s fit to plant
jwb
Easier and cheaper to call someone up and get a quote than to look it up in the record and figure out what it means. One issue I have with Johnston’s piece is that he downplays the economics of news publication, simply asserting that doing proper journalism would solve the ills of the industry by regaining readership. I don’t dispute that corporations squeezing profits out of news has pushed down the quality, but the loss of readership is only partially explained by the decline in quality of news journalism. The loss of ad revenue, especially classifieds, has put a good number of newspapers under severe financial strain, which has meant cutting costs. That puts us back to the opening: it’s easier and cheaper to call and get the quote than to do the original research.
Villago Delenda Est
Cheap news is a major reason that every day we are failing in our core mission of providing people with the knowledge they need for our democracy to function.
No, no, no, no.
Your core mission is to create value for shareholders, and more importantly, the CEOs who benefit the most from “cheap reporting”.
Silly professional journalists. Ned Beatty wants to have a word with you.
burnspbesq
I would be curious to know how many reporters at the NYT, the WaPo, the three major networks, CNN, MSNBC, AP, or McClatchy have ever filed a FOIA request, or have Thomas or GPOAccess bookmarked.
WereBear
It’s simply part of a corporate trend towards giving people as little as possible for their money. If they all do it, no one has anywhere to turn.
However, if the army of the unemployed turn to journalism… profits!
jwb
@Villago Delenda Est: Who the fuck cares about the shareholders? All of these newspapers (which is just a microcosm of what is happening in corporations in general) are being driven into the ground to extract all possible short-term value so it can be appropriated by the senior executives, who jump ship leaving the hulk of liabilities to the shareholders.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I was thinking about this the other day when someone at Ta-Nehisi’s place pointed out that whereas the NYT was talking to “liberal sociologists” (or “social scientists,” or something along those lines) about why the South seceded back in the day, it took the fucking Daily Show to actually look at the articles of secession to find out what the seceders themselves said about it.
(And I wouldn’t be surprised if they did that because they saw the sources up at TNC’s place, but I imagine that short of meeting a Daily Show writer, I’ll never find out).
Hell, I check original sources on my blog, for which I am not paid, and which has a readership of 17 people and a dog. I learned to check sources when I was a reporter. I understand that no one is spending any money on print journalism anymore (oh how painfully I understand that!), and print feels the need to be faster to compete — but damn. Check your damn source material! Or what’s the point?
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
That’s true of every employee of every corporation. What’s your point?
People around here seem to believe in some golden age of journalism, when heroic reporters defied numerous obstacles to bring the straight shit to the people, and corporate bosses be damned. I’d like to know when that was, because I’ve been reading newspapers and watching teevee since 1961, and all I remember is Sy Hersh and Woodstein.
matoko_chan
No, it is the conservative model of journalism.
On the micro-lvl WL attacks the American security state. On the macro-level WL is attacking conservatism.
check out what zungu says.
The core meme of conservatism is that human nature is immutable– that is why the cudlips have to be protected from say…. the truth about A-stan, or what is in the diplo cables. The idea that state secrecy for example is good and neccessary. Essentially the conservative elite believe that their base is too stupid to learn or be educated about wrong, evil, or idiotic ideas: creationism, racism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, fetal personhood, climatology denial.
Consider Cole, Time Man of the Year. Times readers chose Assange, Time chose Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg is a conservative– he sold fb privacy data to the corporatists.
capitalisma si!
Assange is liberal– he believes in overthrowing the corporatists.
power to the people!
The media are ALL corporatists.
They are not our friends.
cleek
there’s an old saying: you get what you pay for.
how many of us pay for news?
Comrade Jake
I watched this play out this morning on CNN.
“Democrats say the tax cuts are giveaways for the wealthy, but Republicans say the tax cuts for millionaires are needed for small businesses. Seems like a real showdown!”
c u n d gulag
The New Journalism Motto:
All the news that’s print to fit!
New Yorker
I think this is a result of right-wing bullying of the media for 4 decades. After all the screaming about “lib’rul media” and “lamestream media”, the media copped out and decided that they’d be “even-handed” and quote both sides. Of course, that leads to the tragic situation where the findings of a climate scientist are treated with no more validity than the ravings of James Inhofe.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@cleek: Crap. I hate when you make sense. It’s like when John Cole is right — it’s always depressing.
jwb
@Comrade Jake: And that sort of framing certainly doesn’t happen by accident or because of poor training.
liberal
OT: another (libertarian?) fool who doesn’t understand the concept of “natural monopoly” (cf recent controversy here at BJ re municipal trash pickup):
liberal
@cleek:
Actually, we all do: advertisers pay for news, but we pay advertisers when we buy their shitty products.
liberal
AFAICT one of the journalists who tended to use the official record instead of sources was I. F. Stone.
Chris
Bit naive, that, innit?
I mean, once WikiLeaks releases the stuff, how many people are actually going to work their way through a thirty-page classified document? How many people do you know who do that today, to the unclassified ones? Not a whole hell of a lot (there just aren’t enough hours in the day to read and investigate everything that matters). Instead, they rely on people to read it for them and give them the CliffNotes over the evening news.
So I fail to see how WikiLeaks addresses the age-old problems – 1) who watches the
people who read the CliffNotesjournalists? 2) how do you prevent viewers from setting up a feedback loop of BS by only trusting the news station that tells them what they want to hear?matoko_chan
@New Yorker: no it is not.
it is the basic premise of conservatism….that human nature is immutable and humans have to be channeled and farmed by the oligarchs that “know best”.
Read this transcript from Assanges berkely interview again.
The media are corporatists, oligarchs…they want to tell us all what to think about their stories.
They must be forced to do their job. That is what Assange is doing by only giving the WL intel to SELECTED media. He is forcing them to do their job for access, he is making them compete. The Wapo got cut out early for lying and fudging data– i dont think Julian gives do overs.
He is severe.
gnomedad
And the strategy of the right is to breed “sources” of bullshit until they vastly outnumber sources of fact.
NonyNony
@burnspbesq:
QFFT.
“Golden Ages” of anything should be viewed with skepticism – it is very rare that a “golden age” in the past holds up to true scrutiny. Journalism is one of those – the misremembered “golden age” of journalism has more to do with the fact that from the stint between the end of WWII and the 1980s, the Establishment in the United States was run almost exclusively by Democrats. The media toed the Democratic line because Democrats held power. The shift in the media in the last few decades has more to do with Democrats losing the kind of political power they held from the 1950s through the 1970s than almost anything else.
And as you point out, even the “golden age” of journalism that folks are harkening back to was pretty goddamn tarnished. There are a handful of journalists who decided to put it on the line, throw the dice and make an impact, but they were few and far between.
(And I still have my suspicions both about “Woodstein” and Sy Hersch and about the handful of others. Woodward in particular has shown himself to be very comfortable writing for those in power, and so I wonder how much of taking down Nixon was really “independent journalists” and how much of it was “even the power brokers didn’t like Nixon and wanted him personally taken down”. And there have long been rumors swirling around Hersch’s reporting that suggest that he is an outlet for one of the factions in the intelligence community to score points against other factions.)
jwb
@cleek:
There’s also a corollary: if you aren’t paying for the news, you are not the customer, but the product. Ad-supported news is the business of selling eyeballs not reporting news, which is just the lure.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq:
In the modern meaning, “create value for shareholders” actually means “line the pockets of the CEO, so he can bail and move to Aruba, saying, as he boards the plane, ‘So long, chumps!'”.
The core mission SHOULD be as the article says. The value for the shareholders, in the traditional sense, flows from that core mission naturally. The returns are not spectacular, but you can make a buck at it.
But it’s not. It’s about, first and foremost, money. Fast. NOW. ROI rules, and short term ROI rules all. Even at the expense of longer term and greater ROI. Because, you know, you’ll be gone, I’ll be gone, in the longer term.
Bill E Pilgrim
@cleek:
Yeah, but on the other hand the Wall Street Journal charges for access.
I agree with whoever said that it’s ideological. Though I’m not even going to ask what “cudlip” means.
matoko_chan
@Chris: JULIAN SAID (you dumbass retarded cudlip)–
it is not naive. it was the intial experimental design.
it didnt work with the A-stan docs, so WL CHANGED STRATEGY.
WL is evolutionary AND revolutionary.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
I can sum this up very succinctly, with an old saying from my Army days:
Amateurs talk tactics.
Professionals talk logistics.
Glibertarians are dilletants.
liberal
@burnspbesq:
I agree.
AFAICT US involvement in Indochina started around 1946 or so, and had really taken off before 1954. But Walter Conkite et al. didn’t really start questioning authority until the bottom started falling out in 1968. (That’s just one example.)
I do think there’s been a sea change, insofar as reporters themselves used to be more working class than now (at least reporters at the top outfits, now). OTOH, in the good old days, when the media was much less concentrated, a lot of those good-because-they’re-small media outfits (particularly local papers) were extremely right-wing.
liberal
@matoko_chan:
I thought WL played a role in the release of the ClimateGate emails.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’d pen a reply to the editor asking if the letter writer understood the economics of competition in electricity distr—every provider having their own sets of lines, etc. Not worth the bother cuz it wouldn’t get published.
Hunter Gathers
@liberal:
OK, I may be an idiot, but, um, how ? Seriously, how the fuck is that possible? Or do I need to bone up on my Randian Magical Thinking?
matoko_chan
@liberal: ARGHHH
Julian released the climategate mails as raw data.
THAT IS WHAT WL DOES.
you cudlips can decide for yourselves.
climatology denial != conservatism….it is a small part only.
ONE FUCKING MORE TIME!
cleek
@liberal:
see
@jwb:
Chris
@liberal:
Re government monopoly of utilites; I remember watching a documentary about how in the 1990s, a lot of French cities, taken in by the passion of the Thatcher/Reagan Washington Consensus, figured “hey, let’s try this out, it makes sense,” and privatized water utilities.
Within a matter of months, if not weeks, French citizens in those cities figured out the simple fact that they were now paying more money for shittier quality (maintenance wasn’t being done properly, the companies were protecting their profit margin rather than the service they provided)… So they demanded that the services be returned to the public sector. “But but but, Adam Smith! Milton Friedman! Our theories TELL US that the private sector is more efficient?” “THEN YOUR THEORIES ARE WRONG, DAMN IT!” – and now, water’s been re-nationalized in most of those cities, and no one minds it.
The story doesn’t end there. At one of the train stations in Paris, a couple people were detained for having a bag full of truncheons, clubs and other offensive weapons… and it turned out that they’d been hired by somebody in one of the private water supplying companies to go “pay a friendly visit” to the guy who’d lead the study on the efficiency of the newly privatized water services. Good times, eh? But remember, it’s the unions that have all the thugs.
El Tiburon
His books, FREE LUNCH and PERFECTLY LEGAL will make your blood boil.
Also, is it safe to assume that guys like Johnson and Krugman never get much face-time with the administration?
liberal
@matoko_chan:
That’s a strange way of looking at things—transparency above all, the predictable consequences be damned.
There’s all sorts of things wrong with that model. In the climategate case, we live in a world where the likelihood of someone hacking into climatologist emails is far greater than the likelihood of someone hacking into energy company executives.
Aside: matoko_chan, have you heard that the singularity has already happened? It’s called the “industrial revolution,” cudlip.
Sentient Puddle
I still have no clue what a “cudlip” is supposed to be. Even after reading the thread where John asked.
PeakVT
@c u n d gulag: I think it’s: “The cheapest news that fits between the ads.”
mclaren
@jwb:
This sounds righteous and convincing, but it happens to be a sideshow in this particular case. What’s destroying journalism isn’t evil corporations out to maximize profits.
What’s destroying journalism is Craigslist and the internet.
For more than a century, classified ads represented a money gusher that supported all the unprofitable parts of a newspaper — foreign desks in weird third world countries, muckraking dives thruogh official records, in-depth background research… All this stuff took tons of time and made very little money, compared to classified ads.
When craigslist hit the net, the money gusher dried up. At the same time, the internet meant people got the newspaper for free so subscriptions went into freefall.
This article nails it: “Let Us Pay,” London Rewview of Books, 2010.
Moreover, Clay Shirky was saying this stuff 15 years ago, back in 1995. Here’s his classic article “Help! The price of information has fallen and it can’t get up.”
It amazes me that you guys point your fingers at the symptoms instead of the disease. Yes, corporations are greedy, yes, the subsumption of news as a profit center into giant entertainment oligopolies like Fox Broadcast has had an evil and detrimental effect on the news. But how do you explain the fact that British newspapers are melting down and disintegrating and going broke? They don’t compete with Fox News. When Fox put Glenn Back on the air in Britain, he wound up with no advertiser at all. That crap may play in Buttmunch Georgia or Armpit Alabama, but it doesn’t fly in Britain. Yet news is degenerating and reportage is getting worse everywhere, from Cairo to London, from Madrid to Washington D.C.
The fundamental economic model that used to support beat reporting is going away. And it’s not coming back. It’s like the offshoring of American jobs. You can point the finger at GM or GE or IBM, and sure, let’s do that…but don’t kid yourself that those offshored jobs are coming back if you picket IBM or boycott GM vigorously enough. There are vast structural forces at work here. High-wage U.S. jobs are getting offshored and those jobs aren’t coming back because of fundamental structural aspects of the 21st century economy — it’s happening because the internet + automation lets companies big & small destroy U.S. jobs that pay workers $32,000 a year and replace ’em with jobs in China or India that pay workers in those countries $2700 a year.
You guys are missing the takeaway in this story, the big lede, the headline. The headline is CAPITALISM EATS ITSELF, NOT EXPECTED TO SURVIVE.
As Bruce Sterling put it, “We’re rapidly heading toward a world where everything is sort of free and no one has a job.”
If we want to discuss the pros and cons of something, that’s what we should discuss. Not this or that evil corporation. Sure, corporations are evil, but they’re like cockroaches — destroy one and ten more take its place. You need to fight the corporations but that’s just the first step. Unless you change the structure of the system, you’re not going to get anywhere.
liberal
@Chris:
Right. Though that’s a slightly different issue: privatizing a public utility, and (presumably) leaving it as a local monopoly.
Sometimes private utilities can be pretty good, e.g. Ma Bell in the “good old days”. (Not saying that model for telecomm would be appropriate now, of course.)
SFAW
Unfortunately, yes. So the question(s) then become(s): what can be done to fix it? And who will do it? Most Democrats with a national audience are too scared to say anything. (Other than Grayson, of course, and look what it got him.) Kay Graham is gone, and the WaPo isn’t a ton different from a Scaife- or Murdoch-owned rag. (Well, in absolute terms, it is, but compared to its past glory, it isn’t.) The Times seems to be getting wimpier by the day. The Boston Globe – for a long time it was more liberal than the Times – is starting to act like they want to get bought by Rupert. (You know they’ve lost it when a numbskull like Joan Vennochi gets two-a-week space for parroting the “centrist” line, and when Jeff Jacoby – who has not been right about ANYTHING – gets Sunday space.)
And the Great Hungarian Satan is not a kid any more.
It would be nice if leftwing blogs could get heard outside of their target audience. It would also be nice if my hair grew back, but I’m not holding my breath.
It’s going to take a 20-plus-year effort to fix things, and that’s only if whoever is doing the fixing works very hard at it. So, who’s able to do it?
Sentient Puddle
@liberal: I don’t know the specifics right off hand, but I’m almost certain there’s an example somewhere in how America handles Internet access. That’s something that we might as well consider a utility these days.
liberal
@mclaren:
I think that people here (and e.g. Atrios) claim that news corps are making matters worse. But unfortunately I have to agree wtih you that it’s a second-order effect, and the first-order effect is the internet.
Though let’s be clear here: the internet merely makes the marginal cost of distributing the information essentially zero. The fixed cost of accumulating it in the first place (doing original reporting/research) is still there. The problem is that those fixed costs aren’t being recouped.
The Moar You Know
@liberal: Apparently the fool you quoted didn’t know, or conveniently is ignoring, that we did exactly that in California back in the late 1990s. Competition worked, all righty. Instead of three regulated state utilities ripping us off, we now had about twenty, plus the original three, all newly deregulated, ripping us off.
The ensuing disaster lead to Enron – the folks who somehow got themselves appointed as the clearing house for the whole mess – blacking out the state and holding our state government hostage for billions of dollars. They told Grey Davis straight up that he could pay them off or they’d take out all of Southern California during all ensuing heatwaves and let everyone know he was responsible.
Davis caved.
For keeping the lights on, California voters kindly recalled him and replaced him with a washed up, steroid using ex-actor who couldn’t even speak English.
Also, that was the last year that California didn’t run a running deficit. We’ve been paying the interest on the blood money given to Enron ever since.
That’s what competition did for California.
geg6
@El Tiburon:
Not just safe, but written in stone. You really think that the likes of Summers, Geithner, and Orszag want dirty hippies like that around to point and laugh at them?
jwb
@mclaren: “What’s destroying journalism is Craigslist and the internet.” Yup, which I mentioned here: @jwb: “The loss of ad revenue, especially classifieds, has put a good number of newspapers under severe financial strain, which has meant cutting costs.”
Shawn in ShowMe
@burnspbesq
When the future looks bleak, a lot of folks begin to idealize the past. Hence the characterization of FDR as a progressive champion when the progressives of that day considered him a marginal improvement over Hoover, the characterization of white supremacist warmongers like William F Buckley as “reasonable” conservatives and the idea that Edward R. Murrow typified mainstream American journalism.
matoko_chan
@liberal:
in the alternative conservative universe perhaps. the technological singularity that is relevent to the chanese and geek culturists, as defined by Vinge and Kurzweil, involves the advent of Strong/Friendly AI. perhaps that was A singularity…a singularity in the past….it is not the one relevent to the future.
you see…you are evaluating the value of the leaked info. you are no different than politico.
liberal
@Sentient Puddle:
Internet is _nearly_ a natural monopoly, but not as much as electricity distribution.
I could be wrong, but e.g. right now I can choose between Verizon FiOS and Comcast for broadband. There might be other alternatives (e.g. something wireless). In a way there’s an inefficiency there, insofar as both Verizon and Comcast have to string wire through neighborhoods, but I doubt it’s as grotesque as the inefficiency of having two separate power distribution networks in the same place.
You’re example is a good one, in that it illustrates this thing is a spectrum. Internet is towards the monopoly end of things, close but not quite as close as a pure natural monopoly as power generation, IMHO.
Ash Can
@Chris: Bingo. The key is to find a filter comprised of people who ask the right questions, which in turn makes them home in on the right pieces of information. Uncovering the information is all well and good, but then what? If everyone is overwhelmed by it, they’ll turn their backs on the information. And if the people who do actually comb through it end up highlighting for the masses little more than things like who uses what kind of toothpaste and who has a penchant for drinking cold coffee, then people are going to turn their backs on Wikileaks altogether. Wikileaks could go on to reveal that Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, and Vladimir Putin like to get shitfaced on grain alcohol and Diet Pepsi, break into USSTRATCOM, and have three-ways in the main control room, and no one would bat an eye, because, yanno, it’s only Wikileaks.
Chris
A LOLworthy headline, if not especially reassuring if it’s true.
Say, that sounds kind of like… what they accuse socialism and librul “something for nothing”ness of being, innit? How ironic would it be if capitalism became its own nightmare like that.
Of course, it would still all be the left’s fault. You know. Death panel via fluoridated water made everyone lose their minds, or something…
liberal
@matoko_chan:
LOL. The industrial revolution was the second biggest change affecting humankind (after the advent of agriculture). You’re just too unintelligent to understand that.
As for Vinge, he writes great scifi stories. Kurzweil is a blowhard. And AI? The entire field of “true” AI is a laughingstock—all the original predictions totally flopped. I wouldn’t put much faith in this vague theory about singularities.
Maybe there’ll be GOFAI, maybe not. I’d bet we’ll extinguish ourselves through non-AI means before we get there.
No, I’m evaluating the consequences of choices and actions.
jwb
@liberal: My recollection is that the subscription price of a newspaper has traditionally covered the costs of hard-copy printing and distribution. All of the cost of news gathering has traditionally been paid for out of ad revenue. So the loss of classified ad revenue in particular has been extremely hard on papers—though I understand that general ad revenue is also much lower for websites than hard-copy circulation.
c u n d gulag
@PeakVT:
Well, in that case, there should be a Hell of a lot of cheap news in print, and more coming. Readership is dying because of the BS they write, so less ads are being sold, so, we’ll get more crap.
THE
@matoko_chan:
But any state that feels itself to be endangered, whether from internal or external enemies is going to want to keep aspects of its operations secret.
All warfare is based on deception.
Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable;
When using our forces, we must appear inactive;
When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away;
When far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu – The Art Of War.
liberal
@The Moar You Know:
Agreed. Though I think distribution didn’t really have true competition, right? It was the suppliers who “competed”.
IMHO though California was basically f*cked by Prop 13, which meant a humongous giveaway to landowners for doing absolutely nothing, as real economists have understood for centuries (since Ricardo, and even perhaps Smith).
burnspbesq
@liberal:
“we pay advertisers when we buy their shitty products.”
Exactly. But if you know the product is bad, why buy it?
liberal
@jwb:
Agreed.
liberal
@burnspbesq:
Don’t know the product is bad, or costs too much to find out: information asymmetry. (Cf Stiglitz Nobel prize.)
matoko_chan
@liberal:
exactly. you are deciding what has value. you are deciding what is “safe” or “good” for the public to know. you are the same as Politico. WL does not judge. Assanges goal is to make a thousand leaks bloom..he is empowering the leakers…they judge the value of the leaked data THEMSELVES.
My goal is to make a thousand trails of carnage bloom in the Pastures of the Cudlips….empowering the cudlips. :)
shrug. that is uninteresting to me. and actually, google Satan and the black box if you want to learn something.
singularities that occurred in the past are also uninteresting to me.
im interested in the future.
The Moar You Know
@liberal: California’s deregulation/competition bill was AB 1890.
Info here.
It was a total disaster.
Stillwater
Took the liberty of fixing this, to make it reflect reality.
Chyron HR
@matoko_chan:
Yes, by all means, kill the cudlips. 4chan told you to. Singularity ho!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@burnspbesq:
A good point as others have noted. I can think of two “golden moments” (not ages) of journalism that stand out.
The more recent of these moments was during the Civil Rights Movement when newspapers and TV started to show northern readers/viewers what was happening in the Jim Crow South (but not in their own backyards mind you).
The older example I have in mind is the progressive press circa 1900 – McClures and other muckracking magazines for example. Much like the better quality political blogs today the latter did not have a huge circulation, but they did have an impact on policy debates out of proportion to the size of their readership because the elites in that era could see that some aspects of their society were broken and needed to be reformed, or else nach uns anarchissimus. The blogs today do not enjoy the same sort of positive influence in driving forward a reform program largely because our contemporary elites do not know fear.
So some of the problem is with the product (shoddy research and writing) but I think the audience is also responsible for the failure of journalism today. If the American people, especially at the elite level (even in very modest numbers) really wanted a better product then somebody would be filling that need. Instead we are getting, like democracy, the journalism we deserve.
matoko_chan
WL is an INFORMATION CONDUIT.
they dont choose the signal…..the leakers choose.
matoko_chan
@Chyron HR: i want the cudlips to wake up, learn to read, learn to think.
i dont want to kill them.
i want to find a way to switch on their embedded demodynamic nanotech.
:)
The Moar You Know
@liberal: Yes, we were, but we’d adjusted. California is so goddamned wealthy that even freezing property taxes for landholders – something that wouldn’t have worked anywhere else, I don’t believe – didn’t dry up the state income stream like Jarvis and his foul brood of proto-Norquist government killers thought it would. It just brought our state services down to the level of all the other states.
We could have dealt with that, but Pete Wilson – one of the most evil politicians of our modern age, and one of the most unrecognized – decided to pile on, wrecking our state utility systems and taking out the Hispanic vote. He gravely miscalculated on the last one, thankfully. If he hadn’t, he’d have been President, and would have made Dick Cheney look like a damned Boy Scout.
Chyron HR
@matoko_chan:
Gee, that’s admirable of you.
By the way, I only have the previous generation iPod Nano (the one that doesn’t look like a condom packet). Can I still use it to link up into the singularity hive mind and become a godlike being of pure information, or do I need an iPhone for that?
Mnemosyne
@jwb:
The last time this came up, people pointed out that corporate mergers have also vastly reduced advertising income for newspapers. Here in Southern California, it used to be that Bullock’s, Robinson’s and the May Company would all buy huge ads in the LA Times. Now they’ve all been taken over by Macy’s, which means that now the LA Times has to beg a single company to take out ads where before they had three companies competing for the best ad space.
burnspbesq
@El Tiburon:
“His books, FREE LUNCH and PERFECTLY LEGAL will make your blood boil.”
You’re right, they did. Bias and inaccuracy always make my blood boil.
As I said in the earlier thread, in his books Johnston is a polemicist, not an analyst. His mission in writing those books was to inflame, not to enlighten. Which wasn’t what I was expecting, based on the good work he did at the Times.
matoko_chan
@Chyron HR: you just need to learn to read and think for yourself.
Chyron, this is how the conservatives elites control their base. you are mad at me because i think you’re stupid. well you are stupid. but that doesnt mean you have to STAY stupid. i think you can learn.
THE
@matoko_chan:
BTW speaking of WL, I don’t know what to make of this story.
burnspbesq
Shorter Matoko-kun:
Julian said, “let there be light,” and there was light. And on the seventh day, He rested.
FlipYrWhig
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Sadly, I can’t imagine images like those having much effect if it were all happening now. We’d be hearing a lot about the usefulness of firehoses in keeping public order.
Mnemosyne
@matoko_chan:
So what’s to prevent governments from using WL to disseminate false information? Say the Bush administration had been able to fake up plausible documents showing that Saddam Hussein had nukes, and had someone “leak” them to WL. Does it still prove that it’s a paradigm changer once the people you’re trying to use it against start manipulating it to their own ends?
matoko_chan
@THE: screaming anti-semite is a pretty common way to try to discredit someone.
it happens here in the US constantly.
THE
@Mnemosyne:
I agree, in time WL will inevitably become the vehicle of disinformation warfare.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@matoko_chan:
Are you perchance familiar with Lu Xun’s metaphor of the sleepers in the iron box?
SFAW
Were that to happen, I would be shocked! SHOCKED!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
Alex, I’ll take the category: Unanticipated side effects following from the fall of the USSR for $500 please.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Let’s not even go that far. Targeted leaks of only certain bits of data that lead a reader to a particular conclusion. It can all be real and true, just not complete.
Chris
I’ll put the Vietnam War pictures up there as well in terms of “golden moments” – actually bringing people the grizly reality of war into their living rooms for the first time. Not a bad idea.
Unfortunately, that was one of the triggers for the patriotic anti-media backlash. So the next time we went to war, we had CNN obediently covering the smart bomb hits and projecting the image of a humanitarian, “surgical,” efficient 21st century fighting force – never bothering to report that 1) while 3% of the bombs dropped in that war were indeed “smart” and “surgical,” the rest were good old fashioned Vietnam munitions, and 2) you can’t do surgery with bombs, regrettable as that may be.
And for all that, they still got slammed for “not reporting the good news” and have ever since. That’s justice for you.
matoko_chan
@Mnemosyne: i dont think they can be successful, because counter-leakers would tear their stories apart. Assange believes that spoof leaks like the one you postulate will create more leakers to counter the fakes, which is one of his goals.
your particular example (of WMDs) would be extremely hard to fake classified data from national assets to support.
i worked in image understanding.
matoko_chan
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: NO! tell meh please.
Shawn in ShowMe
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I’m kinda slow, so please elaborate. Thanks.
THE
@matoko_chan:
But it’s not taken from US sources. It claims to be based on Swedish and Russian sources.
The writer is a frequent commenter on Swedish media.
matoko_chan
@Chris: exactly! that is why i hate that fucktard warpimp Exum. he and his homies are just tabletop wargaming in A-stan so he can finish his dissertation before the shitstorm hits.
Martin
Fixed that. And I don’t mean to pick on this blog, as every political site is in that business. Every time someone shits their pants because Obama was talking to some folks in Ohio rather than personally calling everyone to whip DADT is precisely the same phenomena.
What happens is what matters, not what might happen, or what someone is reporting is going on behind closed doors, or ‘ZOMG! Obama put this guy who once voted for a tax cut on his tax commission and now we’re going to get nothing but tax cuts on the rich!’ bullshit. We have really smart people that could use their energy to inform rather than doing their daily freak-out over why Obama hates gays or wants to sell the voters to corporations to be used as giant batteries.
matoko_chan
@THE: irelevent. no one cares.
stalling tactic.
right now the Keystone Kops of Amerikkka are trying to suborn the judicial branch to come up with espionage charges against Assange.
the judiciary was suborned by the Bush Torture Presidency….how long do you think they can hold out this time?
i think this is really a test of the founders and framers model against Assanges system-killer. How robust is the Grand Experiment?
Will America become a police state on its way to non-linear system collapse?
Interesting times.
THE
@matoko_chan:
Universal suffrage representative democracy is only around a century or so old.
Historically there have been many ways to run a country.
Maybe USA will go back to monarchy.
The growing gap between rich and poor suggests a return to aristocracy.
matoko_chan
@Mnemosyne: the big problem is the technology gap. STUXNET? a fucking worm. 20 year old tech.
the US has to hire skiddies and spammers …..cyber-mercs, to atttack jihadi websites and wikileaks….but a lot of the chanese are now part of Assanges fifth column since he was jailed..they have been radicalized.
the US cant beat insurgents on their own turf.
not in A-stan, not in Vietnam, not in Iraq.
and not on the internet.
burnspbesq
I hope everyone got to hear Don Gagne’s interview with Mike Graetz this morning. Graetz co- wrote the definitive book on the politics of the estate tax, and he did a very nice job of providing context for the current debate. Good work by NPR.
Note: I am not objective where Graetz is concerned. He was my law school tax prof, and I think he is both brilliant and a great teacher.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@matoko_chan:
Lu Xun was the pen name of one of the major intellectual figures of the May Fourth Movement in early 20th Cen. China. His Wiki article is here. He is an interesting figure because he had a complex and ambivalent relationship with the CCP, echoing in some ways that between Orwell and the western Left.
His metaphor of the iron box (IIRC it was first published in his collection of essays Call to Arms) is an ambiguous and vaugely pessimistic one, like much else in Lu Xun’s writing. He argued that Chinese intellectuals like himself were like somebody outside of an iron box, inside of which are numerous sleepers who will inevitably suffocate if left undisturbed. The ethical question he poses is: should you wake them? If woken, perhaps they will find a way to break the walls of their prison and escape – but perhaps not, in which case all you will have accomplished is to make them conscious of their predicament and to increase their suffering, without changing anything for the better.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
It’s not just mergers. The entire landscape has changed as companies have gone out of business or moved out of Southern California. No FEDCO or Adrays, or the slew of electronics stores that used to advertise in the Sunday Calendar. Fewer supermarkets, fewer jewelry stores. And on and on. New media has challenged old models, with TV and radio taking over more ads that previously had been allocated to newspapers. Newspapers like the LA Times and others began shifting away from display ads as the primary source of revenue beginning in the late 70s.
They began to depend more on Classified Ads. And then Craigslist and others started taking that away.
And the Internets. Who needs paper ads when you can go to the Best Buy or Target or WalMart site and get up to date information on products and prices. Discount shopping? There’s an app for that.
Now newspapers don’t know what to do and the clock is ticking as they scramble to try to come up with new solutions before declining revenue and circulation puts them out of business.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Shawn in ShowMe:
I’m using shorthand for a topic we’ve discussed before, which is the idea that during the 20th Cen prior to 1991 the presence of an external threat (the USSR) and the possibility of an anti-capitalist ideology gaining traction internally here in the US forced our domestic elites to share power and wealth with those below them, and to pursue at least moderately rational policies, so as to maintain the stability and coherence of our society in the face of tangible threats. Since 1991 those threats have evaporated, which helps to explain why since that time our elites appear to have gotten drunk on power and wrecked the country which what appear to be objectively stupid and counterproductive policies.
Specifically, the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 60s benefited from a sense on the part of the anti-Communist establishment in the US that the Jim Crow regime in the southern states was making the US look bad and hurting us in our competition with the USSR for prestige and influence in other countries – essentially that whole world was watching, and it mattered to other important policy objectives of the establishment what they thought. As a result there were realpolitik constraints on how much domestic repression could be directed against the Civil Rights Movement. See any one of numerous books about interactions between foreign and domestic policy during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations for further details.
burnspbesq
@matoko_chan:
Ahh, now we’re making progress.
Now that you’ve acknowledged that Assange is a political actor who wants to break shit, perhaps you would be so kind as to explain why he should bre allowed to do this without first gaining the consent of those whose shit he is breaking. Or do you reject rule one of post- Enlightenment Western political thought, i.e. That legitimate exercise of political power can only flow from the consent of the governed?
Brachiator
@jwb:
Yep. The decline in revenue means that increasingly newspapers can no longer afford good editors, columnists and reporters. And they cannot budget for long investigations. A reporter settles for the quote because he or she isn’t given the time to do the legwork for a more complete story.
Strangely enough, the Internets and the blogosphere does not always redress this problem. Too many people don’t want news or information, but instead search for “analysis” which confirms their biases, and edgy, and for God’s sake, short, snarkbites. Because people want to be entertained far more than they want to be informed.
Comrade Kevin
@burnspbesq: One of these days you may get around to demonstrating it, too.
matoko_chan
@burnspbesq: Assange is a revolutionary.
he doesnt need your permission Mr. Burns.
it doesnt matter if you think it it should be done.
he is doing it because he can.
matoko_chan
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: wallah that is wonderful.
but i have no compunction about trying to wake the cudlips.
their boxes are not made of iron.
their boxes are made of paper.
they just need to see that….they have the power to free themselves if they want to.
Mnemosyne
@matoko_chan:
Good luck with that. At least 30 percent of the American public still believes that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and that’s only from mass media sources.
Again, good luck with that. Assange seems to have a much rosier view of human nature than I do if he thinks that real leakers will somehow be able to release more information than fake leakers, or that the fake leakers will not be able to swamp the information from the real leakers.
Like it or not, Wikileaks is destined to become an instrument of what it claims to be trying to stop. You notice that it happened already with the “climate change scandal” where someone with a grudge tried to claim that climate change scientists were lying about the whole thing by leaking their e-mails. Things like that will happen more and more often as conservatives and right-wingers with a grudge decide to get in on the action.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@matoko_chan:
Well that’s really the crux, isn’t it? If there is no doubt about the strength of the materials from which the box is fashioned, then there is no dilemma.
Unfortunately I think you are going to learn that small-c conservative aspects of human culture are often much stronger and more durable than they appear to be at first glance and that the strongest walls are those which the imprisoned have themselves helped in the forging of.
burnspbesq
@matoko_chan:
So then you would have no issue with me blowing Assange’s brains out if I got a clean shot, just because I could?
Can’t have it both ways, yanno. Those who place themselves outside and above the law forfeit its protections.
Hobbies is a strange place to start building a political philosophy