|
|
March 4, 2008
"An Attractively Against-the-Grain Enterprise..."When editors try to provoke and newspapers dance in front of the mirror: the perils of misguided contrarianism. "If the Post is willing to smash idols like that--women's equality--it must be a pretty broad-minded place, right?"Thursday I posted a little exercise in pattern recognition. Today I am back with the answers I received. I spoke of three “vetting” stories that went awry at the New York Times: Obama’s youthful drug use (Feb. 9). Hillary’s marriage as Topic A among prominent Democrats (from May, 2006.) And of course McCain’s friendship with a lobbyist. (Feb. 21. I wrote about it here, and here.) Each story left people scratching their heads: what were the editors thinking? Each was part of the “vetting” ritual in which the press imagines itself asking the hard questions of politicians who actually could be president. As Time’s Michael Scherer wrote, each is “a story that doesn’t exactly say what it is saying, or only says part of what the reporters seem to believe, or seems to be saying something it is not, or something like that.” What is going on here? Where’s the pattern, if there is one? My plea ran at PressThink, the Huffington Post, and the Letters column at Romenesko, the news trade’s online gathering place. Brad “Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps” DeLong also ran it. Advertisements for the paper The best answer I got was at Romenesko’s Letters. It’s from a former newspaper journalist, Larry Kart. The common thread here, and the main reason for the bizarreness, is that the real subject of all these stories is the Times itself, [the] image the Times thinks it’s creating or would like to create for itself when it runs an ostensibly major story about a subject that is or will become of common interest. I agree with this. The quirks in editing have to do with self-image at the Times. The same is true of many other broken-backed stories in the Times and a host of other papers since, probably, the mid 1970s or early 1980s. At least that’s the time when I began to see that sort of stuff in action at the paper where I used to work. A particularly revealing early warning sign was when that paper, with a long tradition of rock-ribbed Republicanism, began to seach for some attractive, young, fairly liberal candidates for local offices that it could endorse, while it never dreamed of endorsing (and hasn’t done so to this date, I believe) a non-Republican for president, governor, or senator. It slowly occurred to me that these seemingly against-the-grain local endorsements were in effect advertisements for the paper, a way of signaling to a body of potential readers that the paper very much wanted and needed to attract that the paper was an attractively against-the-grain enterprise, a place of supple independent thought rather than a stern grandfatherly GOP bastion. …an “attractively against-the-grain enterprise.” That is so right. …The Times is dancing in front of a mirror here, trying to move in ways that telegraph to a somewhat imaginary audience that it is a truly supple paper — iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image (if the “facts” of a story require that it be so) and certainly capable of seeing all sides of all issues. Thus these Times stories were mis-conceived and mis-edited so as to incorporate and express the paper’s own image-shaping needs; and the “facts,” such as they were, were pushed about one way and another toward the end. The paper is not so much a paper anymore; it is itself a candidate. And here’s a poll showing how that candidate is doing. (High negatives.) “To provoke, but not to offend.” “Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image” was, I think, the variety of mischief afoot at the Outlook Section of Washington Post Sunday when it published We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?, a dubious essay by a dim woman about how dumb most women really are. This was a deeply foolish act of publishing. The editor responsible, John Pomfret, told Laura Rozen that he “ran Charlotte Allen’s piece to provoke, but not to offend.” But if that were the case, he would not have chosen as provocateur a political opponent of the people who needed to be poked. Let’s provoke people by suggesting that women really are dumb is supposed to scan iconoclastic. I mean, what other logic could it have? If the Post is willing to smash idols like that—women’s equality—it must be a pretty broad-minded place, right? This is not only a crude and formulaic way of demonstrating independence of mind; it misreads the cultural politics of the thing. Thus, Glenn Reynolds demurred, Ed Morrissey fled in disbelief, Jessica Valenti and Jezebel seethed on behalf of millions who might, Jay Newton-Small of Time found the editors judgment “unbelievable,” Jane Hamsher gave a shout out to Posties: “clue me in to what happened here,” and the Post ombudsman started scribbling notes with an angry look on her face. (Rachel Sklar has more. And Lisa Schiffren at National Review is not impressed. The Post’s ombudswoman did weigh in: thumbs down.) John Pomfret, you misread. But what did you misread? Good provocations do not begin with an intention to provoke, but with an author who has something real to say, and an editor willing to provoke in order to see that it gets said. Find something on everyone “Candidates create narratives of themselves, which are almost necessarily not wholly accurate portrayals of themselves, ” writes Christopher Colaninno at Brad Delong’s blog. “I think the media gets tripped up when they can establish that candidates narratives are not accurate in someway.” Because what could be bad about that, right? “They’re committed to the process of anti-veneration and creating an alternative narrative for these political figures, but they don’t actually have the goods. So they write these half-baked stories, not realizing that they’re narrative is a lot easier balloon to pop then what any of the candidates have put out there.” Anti-veneration is not a guarantor of truth but an invitation to truthiness. At the Huffington Post, tdbach: “I think the Times has undertaken this project, if you will, to demonstrate their fair-and-balanced bonafides… rather than really dig deep and unearth God knows what, where one candidate may end up with a much bigger scandal to deal with than other candidates will (and thus appear to be out to get him or her) they float a vaguely suspicious story on each, and each story is comparably weightless but apparently critical…. You’re the journalism professional, not me. Does that make sense?” The pressure to “find something” on everyone? Yeah, makes sense. Could be a factor. Times people would say no, I’m sure. But let me show you something… The candidates with the biggest noses The Washington Post has this nifty “truth watch” feature called The Fact Checker. It’s Michael Dobbs putting questionable campaign claims to the test. The Post is bold: it has a scale for falsehood-peddling: one to four Pinocchios. (Two for “significant omissions and/or exaggerations.”) If you want a press that calls bullsh*t on claims that are bullsh*t, then you have to like the Pinocchios, and the fact that a Post journalist stands behind them: reporter Michael Dobbs. Way to go Post! Now try to find at The Fact Checker a chart, tab, feature or widget listing who’s ahead in total Pinnocchios. This would tell us which campaigns the Post has thought to penalize for being loosest with the facts. I couldn’t find such a running total anywhere. Can you? If you’ve got the information, but you’re not displaying it that way—the candidate with the biggest nose—some of your more attentive readers might think you don’t want to advertise any imbalanced results, even when they emerge from a fair-minded procedure. There’s a politics to that decision that remains undisclosed. (See Andrew Cline on it.) Howard Kurtz is concerned about hostillity to Hillary in the press. Let me ask him: Has the Post’s Pinnochio test shown her with a bigger nose than Obama in the aggregate this year? Or is he ahead in bad truth claims? Do you know why I can’t find out from the Fact Checker home page, but I can read about the top ten fibs of the year, which is more entertaining but lesss important? Please advise. Newsroom cuts are responsible In Long Winter for the Media, Jim Hoagland, columnist for the same Post, tries to explain what happened with the McCain story, which he called a “seriously undersourced account.” What effect did a string of well-publicized, morale-damaging crises in the newsroom, as well as the industry’s darkening economic skies, have on the decision to print before the story was ready? Here’s what he’s saying: Used to be that lots of good reporting never made it into the (expensive!) newspaper, and editors kept everyone in line that way. Now in a new economy there is pressure on the editors to run the story if a lot of (expensive!) staff time has already been invested. It’s morale-sapping, as well as a sign of an investment gone bad, to have to conclude: sorry, people, we just haven’t got it. Maybe that explains how an under-sourced story got through. I did like Matt Welch’s exasperated reply to Hoagland: “How ‘bout just doing a better job next time?” Absence of a finding Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings over at Delong’s joint: “I actually liked the Obama drug use piece, except for the ‘did he exaggerate?’ bits, which were silly. But the actual information the reporter came up with was quite interesting. I think they should have had the guts to just report it straight — it’s interesting the way scientific studies that fail to find an effect can be, and I suspect people have the same kind of reluctance to just report the absence of a finding straight.” Could be. “We checked into his drug use and didn’t find much…” does not reflect back to Times-people their ideological suppleness or intent to vet. “Maybe he exaggerated” does. Or what Hoagland said: There’s a kind of silent economic pressure to run the story whether you found anything or not. A few other reactions:
“It’s not hard to recover from a mistake,” writes Laura Rozen today, reacting to this post. “It takes just a small dose of humility and sense of accountability and frankly good business sense.” Well, yes. But when the mistake involves the peculiar style of misguided contrarianism I’ve talked about here, fixing it becomes a complicated dance with the newsroom’s self-image as a fighter for truth beyond faction. UPDATE, March 5. Laura Rozen today is angry about something new: The Post is sending Charlotte Allen out to face the music, rather than one of the editors responsible for publishing the piece. Check out the intro to her online chat at washingtonpost.com… On Sunday, The Washington Post’s Outlook section published a piece by Charlotte Allen under the headline “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Responses, most of them angry, flooded in — hundreds of letters to the editor, more than 1,000 comments on the article on washingtonpost.com and more than 10,000 related blog posts. The thing drew ten thousand blog posts? Wowzer. (And someone check that math.) This Allen chat is a deeply confused act. What are the chances that Allen is not going to start defending her arguments as real arguments, her evidence as real evidence? Very slim. And that will undermine the editor’s explanation: this was tongue in cheek, we were just having a little fun with you guys, sorry if we offended…. Besides, where has all the criticism focused? On the Post’s decision to publish the piece. The writer cannot be faulted for that. Not a good sign if you are a fan of the Post. More bad news: the Daily Howler’s critique of Sunday’s Outlook section, which is dead on. UPDATED AGAIN: Well, the first question kinda proves my point. Allen isn’t high on the official story. Washington: When I read this, I immediately thought it was written ironically. Were you surprised that so many people took it literally? In other words, it wasn’t a parody in the Stephen Colbert style. Elsewhere she says, “I’m not sure whether I’d characterize the piece as satire….” I’m sure of it: this wasn’t satire! Let’s review: What John Pomfret told us: Allen’s piece might look like its saying, “take me seriously as social commentary,” but really it’s supposed to be funny. Tongue in cheek. (Therefore the reactions are rather… misplaced or at very least pitched the wrong way.) What Allen herself told us: it’s supposed to be funny, sure, but I’m making a serious point! You know, social commentary! (Which means the reactions are on point. Well bowled, as it were.) What a “well placed, top tier, MSM journalist” who wrote to Laura Rozen says: “her denial that the piece was satirical makes Pomfret a liar.” What Slate’s XX Factor says: “She started off the chat by poking a huge hole in Outlook editor John Pomfret’s rushed insistence that the piece was satire.”
Posted by Jay Rosen at March 4, 2008 1:11 AM
Comments
The dim-women story began with the phenomenon of women fainting--it is said--at Obama rallies. There are reports of the same thing happening at concerts by The King and The Chairman of The Board. If it were not for the latter two, this would be a completely different issue; a medical issue, possibly. Instead, it seems more an issue of hyperexcitement at an entertainment event. Which says what about some women's view of Obama? Men don't faint at concerts. The IQ tail issue is empirically correct, and, although relevant for Larry Summers' argument, not so here, AFAICT. My question is who would be turning themselves inside out if the story were equally dismissive of men, written either by a man or woman. The problem here is not what was said, but that it is not supposed to be said about women. A taboo was broken. Whether it is true or not, it is not supposed to be said. It can be said of men, white men, straight men, businessmen, fraternity men, southern men. But not women. IMO, it's not the facts, factoids, or exaggerations which are the point. The gasp-making is that the taboo was broken. And the response says a good deal. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 4, 2008 8:30 AM | Permalink Jay - Fine job of summarizing this entire discussion. I found it interesting, revealing, and useful. Keep it up. Richard - First, I disagree that a similar story about men would not provoke a reaction. I've been around the Web and found people pick things apart pretty well - they see b.s. and call the b.s.'er on it. Second, it is rather unlikely that such a story would appear because it is culturally assumed that men are not prone to these reactions because they don't have uteruses. Remember that the word "hysteria" derives from the Greek word hystera (womb). Thirs, IQ is just a test created by people to measure something somewhat nebulous. It's not physics. Ferdy. IQ? IQ isn't physics. It isn't bricklaying, either. But it does have a correlation with certain academic results. Which is the point. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 4, 2008 10:53 AM | Permalink "You can't picture an ombudsman getting concerned about such a piece on men." Actually, I can. The hew and cry would come from readers responding to the print and web versions of the story. The internet is definitely driving MSM responses. I'm not impressed with IQ results. They are only "true" if we accept that the design is flawless and that testing conditions are the same for every individual. So much depends on study design, which usually includes test designer bias. See IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea. Ferdy's ever-so-delicate -- and oh-so-Charlottypically-feminine -- misrepresentations are just more evidence supporting Richard's points. 1, It is not 'a' reaction in question, but a *comparable* reaction. There would not be a *comparable* reaction. How do we know? We know from experience; far more objectionable statements are made about men on a regular basis, and virtually nowhere near a *comparable* reaction is ever seen. 2, 'Such a story' means a *comparable* stereotyping of men, not an 'identical' one. A *comparable* stereotyping might involve the tired old cliche of 'testosterone poisoning', for example. Which has become a tired old cliche because so many in the mass media have used it so often, which has occurred because virtually no one ever complains about it. 3, IQ measurements don't need to be as precise as physics to be reliably useful as predictors of performance -- which they are and have been for many years. Ferdy's right about one thing, though: people online do indeed recognize BS for what it is, pick it apart, and call the BSer on it -- as has just been directly demonstrated. I presume you think you're calling me on my BS. Perhaps you'd like to provide evidence of how well IQ predicts performance in an of itself and how much IQ results have created teacher/parent expectations of performance. Even saying that teachers and parents can be objective, what about the designers. Test bias is a very well-known phenomenon. AS to comparable response, those who have been out of power must protect their gains or they will lose them. Those in power don't take such attacks so seriously, unless the ideas are serious. I'm in education, so we take very seriously the prejudice that men aren't interested in their children's education and do everything we can to debunk that myth. Men have also made great gains in child custody cases, where a negative stereotype exists. I think you could find comparable reactions if the issues are comparably important. More: More detailed notes about the WAIS-R
WAIS-R Psychometrics So what are some of the psychometric properties of the test? Well firstly a large standardization sample was used of 1880 Americans. This sample was 50% male and 50% female. The individuals who formed the standardization sample were aged from 16 years 0 months to 74 years 11 months. The standardization sample was highly representative of the US population in terms of age, sex, race, geographic region, occupation, education and urban-rural residence. The individuals in the standardization sample were tested between Nay 1975 and May 1980 at 115 testing centres across the U.S. The scaled scores were based on a reference group of 500 subjects in the standardization sample aged between 20 and 34. Although scaled scores for each of the 11 subtests are obtained using a single table based on the reference group, IQs are derived separately for each of the age groups (there are nine e.g. 16-17, 18-19, 20-24, 25-34….70-74). The test can be used for people aged 16 and up. It has found to be appropriate for use with those over 74. So the WAIS has a good standardization sample and it is also considered to be reliable and valid. The reliability coefficients: (internal consistency) are .93 for the Performance IQ averaged across all age groups and .97 for the Verbal IQ, with an r of .97 for the full scale. Reliability for the 11 substests is not as strong. Very precise measures of reliability. If you take the test over and over, you will score the same each time. Split half reliability: .95+ (very strong) Evidence supports the validity of test as a measure of global intelligence. It does seem to measure what it intends to measure. It is correlated highly with other IQ tests (e.g. The Stanford-Binet), it correlates highly with empirical judgements of intelligence; it is significantly correlated with a number of criteria of academic and life success, including college grades, measures of work performance and occupational level. There are also significant correlations with measures of institutional progress among the mentally retarded. One concern we discussed in some of my tutorials was with reference to the comprehension subscale on the Verbal Scale. Was a question such as “What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed and addressed and has a new stamp?” a valid measure of intelligence. The only fully correct response to that question (i.e. score of 2 is if you mail it or return it the post-office or a postman. You get one point if you recognise it belongs to someone else and try to give it to say a policeman and you get 0 points if you suggest opening it, which frankly is not morally correct in our society but may be a clever thing to do especially if you see some cash in it! So it’s a culturally and morally loaded question. Hmmm, you mean questions don't always have one perfect answer? Noooo; before you may have citations, you need to first admit to and apologize for your own misrepresentations. That will -- provisionally -- demonstrate your ability to start behaving in a manner sufficiently adult to be worth any more of my valuable time and energy. Why do we need to argue about IQ tests? The editor of the article himself said the Post article was not a serious assessment of such, but a tongue-in-cheek piece. Jay - Tongue-in-cheek really means shopworn cliches, outmoded measurements of intelligence (including size counts when it comes to brains), and idiotic choices (stupid or weak/emotional) to get people to comment on their website. This is tabloid-style opinion. And when speaking of IQ, this graf seems pretty NOT tongue-in-cheek: The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid. The editor is being disingenuous. The editor is being stupid. But it does free us from debating whether the evidence in the article should be taken seriously. He's not willing to stand behind it as a serious piece of social commentary. He is willing to stand behind it as an amusing tongue-in-cheek satire. I don't see what sense it makes to argue about any of the truth claims in the article. It's like asking, "did any of that stuff happen in your memoir?" and the editor of the book comes along and says, "We mislabeled it, this is a fiction. Future copies will make that clear." Your concerns kind of evaporate at that point, even though you may still wonder: did any of that stuff happen? The Post abandoned the article to the category of confection. Understood. This is a media site, not a social science site. But I do think it is worth pointing out that if this article can be torn to shreds on both a factual and a bias basis, there probably was something more to it when coupled with Linda Hirshman's piece on the fickleness of women for supporting Obama rather than voting their supposed bloc and trying to elect a woman. By running pieces that tear down women--one by a conservative and one by a liberal--I think we can see an agenda forming. The decision to run these stories seems like another version of Hillary-bashing. One story can be disregarded as absurd, the other moves in under the radar to do the real damage. If you can look at this in a meta-analytical way rather than a political way, I'd love to hear what you have to say. Oh I definitely think the Allen-Hirschman couplet was part of it, yes. I didn't go into that in my post. One is a kind "fairness warrant" for the other. Most of the factual assertions in the dim-women article can be empiracally addressed, one way or another. The characterization of various groups--excluding white men--has an odd requirement. You can--and I recall this from physical anthro forty-plus years ago--discuss various physical issues which conduce to superiority. For example, the structure of the calf muscle, including the proportion of quick-twitch muscle fibers, in Bantu Africans, which excludes many East Africans, helps in explosive speed. So far, so good. Because that's good. But the reduced subcutaneous fat, denser bone structure and smaller lungs cause a higher specific gravity and make learning to swim difficult. Which may not be said, even if you've spent time trying to teach swimming to African Americans. Because that's not good. It can be said that slightly more women show up at average IQ than men, because that's good, but not that slightly fewer show up at the high tail, because that's bad, but you can point out that fewer show up at the low tail because that's good. And since you can't talk about the higher end, that means fewer physics profs at top tier unis is a matter of discrimination. That being all that's left. All very simple. Anyway, the problem with this dim-women article is that taboos were broken. These things must not be said. No public editor would be staying up nights trying to deal with a similar screed directed toward men. Because that's not taboo. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 4, 2008 3:35 PM | Permalink The funny thing about the Hirshman part of the couplet is that had it run alone I believe it would have gotten a stronger negative reaction. Many of the feminists I work with do not want her representing "the feminist" point of view and feel that the Post even using her as part of the couplet was unfair. The Hirshman piece isn't great but since the Allen piece stunk up the joint no one even noticed the smell. Richard - Since when has it been taboo to call women fickle or dumb? I believe the dumb blonde is a still very much a stock character in films, TV shows, and the fairly recent Broadway hit, "The Producers," and the film made from it. It's not going away any time soon. Ferdy, Films are not opinion pieces in newspapers. True, you couldn't get away with Stepin Fetchit today, while you can with the dumb blonde. But nobody's even making the vaguest connection between the Stepin Fetchit archetype and voting choice. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 4, 2008 4:37 PM | Permalink Now the National Review's Lisa Shiffren is expressing gape jawed astonishment at the Post Outlook Allen piece:At some point, when is Downie going to wipe the egg off the Post's collective face and stop hiding behind his door and apologize?
Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image sounds like a fancy way to describe capitulation to conservative pressure in the Culture Wars in an attempt to inoculate oneself against the accusation of having failed to be Fair & Balanced, as the saying goes. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at March 4, 2008 7:07 PM | Permalink From Jay Rosen's wipe the egg link: What is the editorial standard? Richard Aubrey says: But nobody's even making the vaguest connection between the Stepin Fetchit archetype and voting choice. Stepin Fetchit isn't an archetype, it's a stereotype. But there you have it. It seems that the Post has, so far, not chosen to correlate negative African-American stereotypes in voting choice. Does this decision finally confirm John Lennon's assertion that women are the niggers of the world? Let's not forget they also have accused women of being fickle and superficial. The Washington Post. The paper that broke Watergate. Sad. Posted by: Ferdy at March 4, 2008 7:14 PM | Permalink Ferdy. Stereo vs. arche. right. Still, this was an opinion--light and supposedly funny--column. Not hard news. Not an editorial. IOW, there was no earthly need for it, except a riff on the fainting phenomenon. However, it is interesting that women are not niggers of the world as St. (not) John Lennon put it. They're the white men of the world. Probationary. You can say anything about them--the columnist did--and get away with it. The columnist didn't. But the point is, she thought she could. Somewhere in her connection to all that is hip, new, rippling in society, she found a hint that this was acceptable, just as if she'd been writing a similar piece on white men. So...she was a bit previous. Not necessarily wrong. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 4, 2008 9:20 PM | Permalink I love how white men are the aggreved ones is the real message Richard Aubrey takes away from this case. How he got from "women are stupid" to "boy white men are oppressed, you can get away with saying anything about them" is beyond me. NewsCat. The key is the response to the column. But that you can say anything about men is a given. You don't have to use this column to "get there". Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 4, 2008 11:34 PM | Permalink “Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image” But when the mistake involves the peculiar style of misguided contrarianism I’ve talked about here, fixing it becomes a complicated dance with the newsroom’s self-image as a fighter for truth beyond faction. the people who run the paper live in an alternate reality from most people. The perception that the NYT or WaPo newsroom is liberal is factually correct. Therefore that prception can't be changed on the cheap by running mindless anti-liberal iconoclasm or a few token unfair hit pieces against Democrats. Changing the perception would require changing the reality, which means radical action, like actually hiring some conservatives for a change. Or they could give up the pretenses of objectivity and universality, and just try to run a paper that is factual, informative, and unashamedly biased in story selection and perspective. Which is what the Times and Post currently do pretty well most of the time. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 1:03 AM | Permalink Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image sounds like a fancy way to describe capitulation to conservative pressure in the Culture Wars in an attempt to inoculate oneself against the accusation of having failed to be Fair & Balanced, as the saying goes. But a totally failed attempt because the people making it don't actually understand conservatives. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 1:11 AM | Permalink If one were a total cynic, one might suggest that the publication of pieces like "women are Dumb" & the McCain hit, that the vast majority of readers response to which is WTF?!?!, were not an honest mistakes, but rather deliberate attempts to gin up some controversy and buzz: the old "there's no such thing as bad publiciy" philosophy in action. Of course such a tactic, which burns up the brand's long-term credibility for a temporary ratings bump, is short-sighted. But managers beetraying their duty to maximize sharefolder value by doing something long-terrm destructive to their company in a desparate scramble to meet this quarter's numbers is not unheard of in the business world.... Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 6:57 AM | Permalink Clever people on the discussion thread at Crooked Timber have manage to distill the thesis of my 6:57 post down a mere two words: "Print trolling" Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 7:07 AM | Permalink I think it was a kind of trolling, and that you got close to the dim-witted logic of it with, "Saying women are dumb will piss off feminists and liberals, so that means conservatives should like it, right?" By the way, I am criticized for this post over at Dean Esmay's site. Apparently I believe in censorship or something because I told the Post they published a dumb article. I couldn't figure the rest of it out. Maybe some of you can. Phelan -- Your observation that liberal attempts to capitulate "to conservative pressure in the Culture Wars in an attempt to inoculate oneself against the accusation of having failed to be Fair & Balanced" usually end up as total failures because those liberals "do not actually understand conservatives" rings true. The selection of Bill Kristol for The New York Times' Op-Ed pages falls into this category. Kristol is Exhibit A as the type of caricature of conservatism that might appeal to insular left-leaners when, in reality, he is a fringe representative of conservatism proper. William Bennett on CNN often seems to me to represent a liberal's unthinking cliche of a conservative -- snide, self-serving, pompous, unimaginative -- more than the genuine article, too. Similarly, on the other end of the political spectrum, Alan Colmes appears to be a "totally failed attempt" to represent a dynamic, muscular liberalism to the viewers of Fox News Channel. Concerning The New York Times McCain-Iseman story, however, I am mystified by how that can be shoehorned into the category of "iconoclasm against the newspaper's perceived liberal image." In what way does publishing gossip and innuendo against the senator make the Times seem to be more Fair & Balanced than its conservative detractors believe it to be? Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at March 5, 2008 8:36 AM | Permalink It doesn't fit that category, Andrew. This part of the post might explain it: “Candidates create narratives of themselves, which are almost necessarily not wholly accurate portrayals of themselves, ” writes Christopher Colaninno at Brad Delong’s blog. “I think the media gets tripped up when they can establish that candidates narratives are not accurate in someway.” But I am not presenting an over-arching explanation for all four stories discussed here. Just different ideas. I would be curious, Andrew, what you thought of my argument about the Post's Fact Checker. I say: small but telling sign of a chickening out by the Post. Jay -- point taken about "anti-veneration." Yet it is hard to unpack Colaninno's argument. Take the narrative that John McCain has created for himself: the reformed Keating Five influence peddler who learned the lessons of the evils of corporate lobbying and defied his own party to join with arch-liberal Russ Feingold in the interests of good government. It seems to me that reporting on McCain's dealings with K Street goes beyond kneejerk anti-veneration. That beat is legitimately assignment #1 for a backgrounder on McCain. There was nothing wrong with the Times' topic, in my eyes; on the contrary, everything right with it. My questions would only be about execution -- did they have it? Colaninno seems to make a different argument. He seems to advise against covering that topic because it is so inherently difficult to create an alternative narrative, inevitably resulting in half-baked stories and poppable balloons. Is "anti-veneration" a synonym for scrutiny? If so, why use it as a pejorative? Or does it refer to wrongheaded scrutiny that is reflexively contrarian? In which case, into which category does an examination of McCain's self-created K Street narrative fall? Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at March 5, 2008 9:25 AM | Permalink Andrew: The logical end-point of Bill Kristol & William Bennett is "The Colbert Report." He's a liberal's image of a conservative, and in the several hours of his show I've wound up watching because someone else had it on, I have only once* heard him crack a funny that was actually on-point from a conservative point of view. (* A Randite singing to a baby "Go to sleep, go to sleep, it's in your rational self-interest...) Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 9:25 AM | Permalink Dean Esmay seems to making the same mistake I attributed to the WaPo editors, and that Richard Aubrey seems to be making from the other side: the problem isn't just that this article was taboo-breaking, it's that it was crap*. One of the principles of civil debate is supposed to be engaging the other side's best arguments. This was not the "anti-feminist" or "feminist skeptic" side's best: not anywhere even close. Publishing something substantial that breaks taboos shows that you're open minded. Publishing total crap that breaks taboos shows that you're closed minded and trying desperately to pretend otherwise. If you knew it was crap it's cynical posturing, if you didn't know it was crap it's a revelation of your intellectual limitations. For a consumer to tell the difference between cynicism and ignorant self-delusion on the WaPo's part is difficult to impossible. Fortunately it's also irrelevant: either way they just printed crap, and the value of their brand just dropped a teeny bit more. * [Much as I dislike taking the article seriously for even a few moments, I'll do so anyway to give Esmay and Aubrey a reason other than PC why it didn't deserve to run. Since misuse of statistics is one of my pet peeves, I'll go with this: women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. "Even though?" If men are driving more miles than women, they're getting more experience, which should reduce their accident rates; and they're taking longer trips with more highway miles, which should also reduce accident rates. The expected effect of the extra mileage is the opposite of what she's implying. Dumb! Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 9:46 AM | Permalink Is "anti-veneration" a synonym for scrutiny? If so, why use it as a pejorative? Or does it refer to wrongheaded scrutiny that is reflexively contrarian? The latter. Not just "contrarian" but an impulse to tear people down which activates reflexively whether they deserve it or not. In which case, into which category does an examination of McCain's self-created K Street narrative fall? That's the problem! We don't know, and have to do a lot of independent research to figure it out for ourselves, because we can't trust the press to pass up an unfair tear-down, be it against a Republican politican, a Democratic politician, a sports star, a businessman, or an actress. (Though I do believe the reflex triggers a bit more easily when the target is a Republican, so even more skepticism than usual gets applied.) Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 9:56 AM | Permalink I think the warm glow of an anti-veneration vibe might explain why they went with it when they didn't have it. That was my suggestion. I agree it was a legitimate topic to examine, and smashing the facade of "McCain disdains lobbyists" is not a misguided act at all. Laura Rozen today is angry about something new: The Post is sending Charlotte Allen out to face the music today (via on online chat with Post readers) rather than one of the editors responsible for publishing the piece. Check out the intro... On Sunday, The Washington Post's Outlook section published a piece by Charlotte Allen under the headline "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" Responses, most of them angry, flooded in -- hundreds of letters to the editor, more than 1,000 comments on the article on washingtonpost.com and more than 10,000 related blog posts. 10,000 blog posts? Wowzer. This strikes me as deeply confused act, and likely to add to the confusion. What are the chances that Allen is not going to start defending her arguments as real arguments, her evidence as real evidence? Very slim. And that will undermine the editor's explanation: this was tongue in cheek. Besides, where has all the criticism focused?... on the Post's decision to publish the thing. The writer cannot be faulted for that. Concerning the Wasington Post's Fact Checker. You call it a "small but telling sign of a chickening out by the Post." I would add futile. This is the sort of chore -- collating and summarizing published information -- that is tailormade for bloggers, readers, activists to do independently. There is no need to rely on professional journalists to count those noses. Someone among those Formerly Known As The Audience can do it and attract buzz as a result. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at March 5, 2008 10:24 AM | Permalink The Washington Post is acting like a house on fire. They're throwing Allen out the window. I agree completely that the editors are hiding in the closet on this one. How can we "trust" them to uncover candidate wrong-doing when they won't even admit mistakes. In this case, they are showing exactly how unsavvy they really are. I checked on Fact Checker, which I think is a valuable service. There was not promise that they would aggregate the data, and that is probably a wise decision for a paper that wants to protect its appearance of objectivity (if that's what they want to do). Ralph. If I understand you, the problem with the dim-dame article is that it is crap and shouldn't, therefore, have run. That's true, but ignores the crap that runs every day. Being crap doesn't seem to mean much. My interest is in the reaction. Some crap is more equal than other crap and this crap is definitely not allowed. I reiterate; it broke the taboo, crap or not. I am interested, however, in the author's apparent belief that it was okay. Was she entirely wrong, or just premature? I'm not sure about the accident point you make. Men are more likely to drive in bad weather, a phenomenon unknown to many in the nation. My father, visiting my sister in Houston, remarked that nobody says, "We'll be there tomorrow if that storm they're forecasting swings south." Whereas in Michigan and many other states, for several months a year, travel plans are "flexible". Spent two hours on the side of the expressway Friday with a lady I pulled out of a pickup truck on its side, waiting for help. The towtruck driver said he'd been working fourteen hours straight. I could see others in distress in my mirrors. So if the weather is bad, guys are more likely to drive--I'd rather my wife not get the sour belly trying to interpret the pavement's coefficient of friction--and more likely not to stay home. Experience is good but becomes a diminishing benefit. After a certain level, experience maxes out its utility while exposure continues to accumulate. We see that in insuring pilots. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 10:55 AM | Permalink I agree it was a legitimate topic to examine, and smashing the facade of "McCain disdains lobbyists" is not a misguided act at all. And there you illustrate the problem. It's just another example of the lazy "write the story first, then do the research to back up what you already 'know'" approach that leads to so much bad journalism. It's also the biggest single cause of bias, as it results in stories that reflect the author's initial prejudices and assumptions rather than what they learned out in the world. It's also a variant of "gotcha" journalism: "We found an inconsistency! Hooray! Hooray! The hero has feet of Clay!" I would prefer to see an investigation into how closely McCains narrative matches the truth that is initially agnostic as to what the result will be. If the project is funded from day one as "smash the facade" rather than "find out the truth" then after all that time and money has been spent you just have to print something facade-smashing, even if it's total crap, like some unnamed source saying he was worried that there might be an affair in the future. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 11:23 AM | Permalink 10,000 blog posts? Wowzer. This strikes me as deeply confused act, and likely to add to the confusion. If the "print trolling" hypthesis is correct, that would be considered a feature rather than a bug. It will be interesting to see if the Post's behavior continues to be consistent with that explanation. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 11:29 AM | Permalink Some crap is more equal than other crap and this crap is definitely not allowed. You can publish unremarkable crap and noone will notice; it flies in under the radar. You can publish a good, taboo breaking piece, and people will notice and a genuine debate will ensue. If you publish something that's both taboo-breaking and crap, people are gonna notice, and notice that it's crap, and noone will want to defend it. I find all the above unremarkable. There is an interesting question as to whether they published this piece because: (1) & (3) are consistent with lots of previously observed media behaviors. (2) Strikes me as both novel and unlikely. Can you think of any other incidents or occurrences to suggest that taboo is fading, or that lots of people wrongly think it's fading? Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 11:38 AM | Permalink Ralph. My point wrt #2 is that the author may have thought the taboo was fading. Whether she thought that or not, I'd be interested in just what, exactly, she thought about the get-away-with-it thing. I speculate she may be on to something. As I've said before, writing a dim-somebody article is unremarkable if the somebody is a man. That includes referring to fake, or irrelevant stats and authority. So the reaction can't be about the fact that it's crap--we see so much anyway--and it can't be that it's mean, since we see that, too, directed at men. Has to be something else. IMO, that's the taboo. She's more connected than I to the undercurrents of the allowable. Maybe she knows something. But, to answer your question, this is the first example I can see that the taboo might be fading. Not the reaction to it, but her thinking it was okay. Last, I think the fainting phenomenon is a legitimate area of inquiry. WTF? These people are going to vote? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 11:59 AM | Permalink Re: "Dean Esmay seems to making the same mistake I attributed to the WaPo editors, and that Richard Aubrey seems to be making from the other side: the problem isn't just that this article was taboo-breaking, it's that it was crap." It's Esmay's site, but the post was by Trudy Schuett. And you are right, Ralph. That is why writers at National Review and Hot Air objected, saying, in effect: I'm all for countering liberal group think, but this is crap.... About "the mistake [Aubrey] seems to be making from the other side," part... I do wish people would understand that in talking to an internet troll you never get anything back but trollish behavior upon a new set of words. There is no discourse there, there are no "sides," there is no opinion. It's not commentary, it's not argument, it's not even ego inflected fighting. Troll logic is simple, elemental: I dispute, therefore I exist. I exist, I exist, I exist. See? Some sap just responded to me. I exist, I exist, I exist. If you actually reply to one of the disputations, you are the troll's dupe. Trolls are power freaks in that sense. They can't get over that they have the power to annoy, and trick people into reacting. Most of all, they hate you for falling for their tricks. Point our a "flaw" in a point a troll made, and, laughing at you, they just shift the ground ("oh, I know the article is crap, my point was...") and then present a new flaw so they can hate you again for responding to that one. Want a blast of pixelated hatred? Answer a troll. The phrase "troll" comes from "trolling for newbies," meaning people who haven't seen the pattern yet and so they fall for it. Don't fall for it. This is how a writer who thinks the reactions are a bit much does it when he's not being a troll but just, you know... a human being. From the American Scene... Now, I wouldn’t have chosen to run Sunday’s Charlotte Allen piece on how women are dumb in the Post or any other publication, but I do think the near universal outrage over the piece is a bit much. The piece was clearly intended to be a light hearted send-up of dumb, offensive views about female behavior rather than an actual dumb, offensive piece. In theory, it should’ve worked in the same way as when incredibly brilliant, driven, and successful women with some sort of conservative pedigree dryly say things like, “Of course I support the patriarchy. This country was fine till women got the right to vote.” (Just trust me when I say this happens.) It’s obviously ludicrous and self-negating, and somewhat amusingly allows for some playful jabbing at the stereotype of conservative women. It’s not epic humor, but it works in conversation as a quick aside. The problem is, Allen’s piece is neither particularly funny nor particularly clever and doesn’t do a very good job of indicating that it’s basically satirical. Satire can be a tough thing to pull off, no doubt, but the Post’s editors should at least be smart enough to know they don’t have the ear for it and stick to running pleasantly bland columns about political affairs as usual. When life itself is satirical, how can a poor writer compete? As a middle-aged person, I'm finding that much of what seems designed to be funny is, for me at leaast, incomprehensible. I end up saying, "Huh?" an awful lot these days. Maybe WaPo is just trying to update their style of humor for a new audience... "Smashing the facade" is not a misguided act if it is indeed a facade. But if McCain really is an exceptionally clean politician, it would be smashing the truth, and therefore quite misguided. I agree with that. (1) Not having written off Aubrey as a troll, I actually had a conversation that turned up and clarified an interesting new hypothesis - are women getting ahead enough in the world that middle class white women will join middle class white men in the "not protected from bigoted group-based mockery" category? Probably not, but it's a trend to watch out for. Might that be why Obama's Teflon coating held up longer than Clinton's? (2) re: your 12:22. The probability of that sort of "misguided" story being published is increased by the fact that journalists seem to enjoy smashing things almost as much as the guys on Mythbusters do. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 1:16 PM | Permalink Jay. The column you quoted does not address the reactions to the dim-dame piece. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 1:34 PM | Permalink About smashing things... Balloon popping is the payoff for the labor that goes into hype, and therefore closely related to it. Both are ways to avoid the costs of acquiring a genuinely detailed understanding. Thus, different aspects of the same thing. Alexandria, Va.: Loved your column -- you spoke honestly about things that most people are reluctant to discuss openly for fear of being labeled sexist or anti-feminist. I think most of the critics don't seem to realize that you were not saying that women were the only ones who could be stupid -- men can be just as clueless, but men and women are usually stupid in different ways, and you just happened to be discussing some of the congenital flaws of the fairer sex. Certainly there have been no shortage of columns in the past dissecting the shortcomings of men! Charlotte Allen: Yes, men are fair game, and it's considered perfectly OK to make all the fun of them we want. But make a joke at a woman's expense, and--woo! So, as I was saying, some crap is more equal than other crap and Ms. Allen knows it. I guess my question is slightly modified: Did Ms. Allen expect to get away with this because the taboo is fading, or did she expect to get away with this because it was so clearly a fun piece? It could be that the reaction indicates the taboo is far from fading, presuming this is taken as a fun piece and even fun pieces are not allowed. So perhaps the taboo also includes fun pieces. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 2:22 PM | Permalink It appears that the screeners are letting through mostly those who are struggling in "Feminism 101 for Non-Majors" It seems probable that Ms. Allen knows about the taboo and thinks it's outdated. Would like to know what she and the editor expected. IOW, were they surprised? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 3:06 PM | Permalink woops. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 3:08 PM | Permalink Rosen, you were right on about Allen defending her piece in the chat. Read the transcript for yourself guys; she meant every word. Posted by: Xanthippas at March 5, 2008 3:31 PM | Permalink Maybe you have some other reason the chattering classes have jumped all over this particular piece of crap as opposed to all the others let go with, at most, a condescending smile? For stuff published on a major, "respectable" newspaper's op-ed page, it's unusually un-PC *and* unusually poorly reasoned and/or a failed attempt at satire. I doubt a piece that scores that high on both scales simultaneously has been published in a long time. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 3:36 PM | Permalink Ralph. Sounds like a challenge to find its like with minimal effort. The screeners let through mostly complainers who resembled batting tees. Or maybe it was batting tees who mostly wrote in. You'll note she hopes the taboo will weaken, possibly partly as a result of her column. Still like to know what she and the editor were expecting. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 3:41 PM | Permalink did she expect to get away with this because it was so clearly a fun piece? I guess humor is in the eye of the beholder. Satire is no excuse for rambling incoherency. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 3:42 PM | Permalink The screeners let through mostly complainers who resembled batting tees. Or maybe it was batting tees who mostly wrote in. Given that the above is consistent with the "trolling for attention" theory ... Still like to know what she and the editor were expecting. I'm gonna guess they expected pretty much what they got, though maybe not that it would be quite this successful. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 3:46 PM | Permalink I don't know what was intended. Would this be an attempted lampoon of a hard-fact piece? Probably not, since the desired result of a lampoon is to make fun of the original. Her defense was not that she was making fun of anything like her piece, but that she was referencing things she though made women dicey voters. There are, no doubt, serious pieces with the same intent which could be lampooned, but she doesn't say this is it. Looks more like a combination of exasperation (Fainting!?!?!?) and a fun piece. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 4:01 PM | Permalink Charlotte Allen: This is a genre known in geek culture as "Ha ha. Only serious." It is very difficult to pull off, and the difficulty increases nonlinearly with the diversity of the audience. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 4:10 PM | Permalink I don't know if I'm a geek. I have a 17 1/2 neck, which probably disqualifies me. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 4:27 PM | Permalink "The editor is being stupid. But it does free us from debating whether the evidence in the article should be taken seriously. He's not willing to stand behind it as a serious piece of social commentary. He is willing to stand behind it as an amusing tongue-in-cheek satire." Uh, Jay, etc.? You realize that Allen is a shill from the IWF, Katie O'Bierne's outfit? This whole thing is about mainstreaming really misogynist talking points and moving the Overton Window. It has zip to do with 'breaking taboos' or 'teh funny' or anything else of the kind. Interesting to see how much this just fascinates Ol' Dick Aubrey, ain't it? Good for your world-view, ain't it, son? Tyndall had it mostly right, although its not about right wing innoculation. It's that Pomfret and Brady are right wing. Posted by: Max Renn at March 5, 2008 5:31 PM | Permalink This whole thing is about ... moving the Overton Window. It has zip to do with 'breaking taboos'... Huh? The whole point of "breaking taboos" is to move the Overton Window (A term I was previously unfamiliar with despite having used the concept. Thanks for educating me!) If the WaPo is trying to expand the Overton Window so that conservative ideas about sex-roles go from "unspeakable" to "radical" then I must give them kudos for honestly trying to fix their bias problem, rather than clumsily trying to and failing as I had previously assumed. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 5:46 PM | Permalink You know, Max, feminists and their sympathizers get right to the ad homs. Like there isn't much else in their magazine. The point is, as I keep saying, that pieces like this, if the gender in question were different, could be fired off by the half-dozen without raising any ire from the Professionally Incredibly Wonderful. In fact, some of the opposite stuff--violent men and so forth--appears not only in puff pieces but in textbooks. So, if Allen is trying to make it just as easy to taunt women as to taunt men, good for her. Might reduce the taunting. You wouldn't want things to be unequal, would you? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 7:09 PM | Permalink Not to mention, RIchard, how this comparative hyperprotectionism towards women itself retards women's progress. The silver lining for men within the comparative amount of negative sexist characterizations directed against them is how it helps to mature them and teach them to behave like autonomous adults. The problem, of course, is that the sexism against men is being taken much too far -- as demonstrated in objective reality by the comparative suicide rates by gender (4.5 male to 1 female) and lifespan (6 to 7 years shorter for males than females), among other benchmarks. Far too many North american women, in comparison, live in hyperprotected social bubbles where even the slightest criticism of their behavior, let alone their character, is utterly forbidden. And the sad sorry stupid consequence of this is how it keeps them comparatively weaker and less competitive with their male peers. Too many North american women live in a comparative endless adolescence of spoiled bratdom, and are much the worse for it. One can even observe this process repeatedly throughout the course of these comments, Charlotte's chat transcript, and the blogospheric and monosource media reactions that Jay cites. So Charlotte's critically wrong about one thing: it's not that women are comparatively 'dim'; it's how their behavior is comparatively juvenile. Ferdy's blatant refusal to take responsibility for her original misrepresentations of all this serves as direct documentation -- as does Jay's blatant refusal to criticize her for it. If you protect the little children too much, they never grow up to be autonomous adults. And that's what Charlotte is really addressing: the failure of her female peers to grow up and behave like autonomous adults in comparison to their male peers. I'll start taking Jay Rosen seriously on matters like this when I see him taking his responsibility to criticize blatant misrepresentation seriously. Because unless and until that happens, he's just another sexist enabler of comparative female infantilization and incompetence. re: smashing and avoiding the costs of acquiring a genuinely detailed understanding. This reminded me of Weldon's comment analogizing press politics to "the politics of the rhinocerous [sic] in the china shop" and getting it "right when bodies start piling up". It's a comment worth revisiting, but such press politics has (rightfully, IMO) resulted in the press reputation as arrogant, out of touch and untrustworthy. Acksiom, My kids were jocks, as were their friends. My son was, for example all conference tight end--I thought he was a better linebacker, all conference basketball and tennis, captain and MVP of the latter two. You will note--read Pandagon or Feministe or some other of the leading femblogs--that feminists often take disagreement in the most unpleasantly personal way. The bubble is supposed to protect them. After all, they are victimized by the patriarchy and are supposed to get a break or something. The progression from unpleasantly inconvenient facts being presented to sputtering obscenities is, as with Max, about fourteen seconds. Whatever Allen was intending, her remark that she hoped the taboo would be weakened is interesting. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 5, 2008 10:08 PM | Permalink Jay - would you say it's fair to describe Max Renn as a culture warrior? Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 5, 2008 11:12 PM | Permalink Don't know the gentleman, but it was a culture war comment. For example, the description of Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, as "right wing" so as to improve on--and fatally exaggerate--Andrew's observation. And yes, Max, I do realize Charlotte Allen's affiliation. That's why my post linked to her profile page at the IWF's site. Sure sign of a culture warrior: Posted by: Richard Aubrey at March 6, 2008 7:52 AM | Permalink I agree with the Slate piece that Allen, while trying to play it cool, was really up against the wall her editors stood her next to. I do think she should have to answer her critics, especially if, as she says repeatedly, she was serious about the premise for the article. The history of letters to the editor suggests this is an appropriate dialogue. I'm not sure a live chat, however, is the best format because it doesn't allow for much consideration. But since the piece itself was ill-considered and sloppy, perhaps that's all for the best. Jay, do you know when or if Pomfret will conduct a similar chat? Her back is clearly up against the wall—she might be the most hated woman in the feminist blogosphere right now— Let's have a little perspective here on what it means for a write to be "up against the wall." When the government of Iran puts a price on your head, that's "up against the wall." When Jane Hamsher calls you bad names, not so much. A whole lot of people who had never heard of Charlotte Allen now have. Probably more people than had ever heard of her before up to this point in her live. If 80% of them say "yech," 19% say "meh," and and 1% like her work, this kerfuffle will be a net positive to her career. What's amusing about this whole thing is the mountain of attention being paid to this molehill of an offense. I've got to assume the rage is over the perceived apostasy of the previously reliably liberal WaPo. Posted by: Ralph Phelan at March 6, 2008 10:41 AM | Permalink According to Laura Rozen's source Len Downie wasn't told of the controversy until Thursday. In the parlance it "didn't reach his desk." And (also from Rozen) that the "bad headline" was all Washingtonpost.com people and not Washington Post (brick and print). I'm very well-aware that they are two separate newsrooms, editors, but the Washingtonpost.com could have acted as a moderation for this problem and instead threw gasoline on it. While I understand that the ONLINE headline was worse, the Washington Post headline wasn't any better. Actually I'm rather annoyed that Washington Post (via Rozen's source...?) is trying to place a lot of blame on WashingtonPost.com. Jim Brady didn't help the situation, but the problem originated in Washington Post's offices. Aside from all that I'm frankly shocked that the second newsroom (WashingtonPost.com) didn't help the situation but compounded it. The Post's Fact-Checker exercises a rightward-leaning editorial judgement. Michael Dobbs selects the items to fact-check. HIs rating scale also has a +1 if Hillary and -1 if Republican, so counting noses isn't all that useful. I would like to see him fact-check more evenly so that it wasn't only Democrats that were 'analyzed'. His most recent post on a GOPer ended: "Whether or not favors were granted is another matter, but his claim that he is the only presidential candidate not to receive money from "special interests" is patently false. I was tempted to award four Pinocchios, but I am subtracting one because it is an old quote. " (The quote was from November 2007). You can see his candidate count at the link here: Posted by: ftfc at March 6, 2008 9:50 PM | Permalink Thanks for that link. Andrew Cline at Rhetorica looked at the Fact Checker: Rosen, however, laments that the feature does not have a chart comparing candidates and their Pinocchios. He wonders why. I have a guess, and it has to do with the strange way journalists understand objectivity... Journalism is uncomfortable asserting facts that appear to make evaluations. Ferdy: I don't think Pomfret is going to do one of those chats. I think he's hanging tough til Sunday when they run the letters and Deb Howell goes to work. Oh, and I believe you said Laura Rozen when you meant Charlotte Allen, above. If you want I can change it. I agree that Allen is having the time of her life. “The paper is not so much a paper anymore; it is itself a candidate.” Candidates make stupid decisions all the time about who they have represent them (just look at Obama’s and Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power and Sandy Berger) but if they make too many stupid decisions and lose their supporters, well, then, they’re out, as they should be. Posted by: Kristen at March 7, 2008 9:43 AM | Permalink I don't think that the Allen piece should be considered part of a pattern; op-ed are handled differently from new stories. And I think the only "pattern" revealed in the Obama and McCain stories is that the paper invested resources for these stories, and despite not finding much that was newsworthy, devoted column inches to the stories because the investment had been made. In other words, stories are given play not because they are important, but because the Times spent money on them, and editors who OK'd the allocation of resources are so worried about their bottom line that when money is spent, "results" have to be published, lest management question their allocation of resources. Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 8, 2008 7:07 PM | Permalink But my umpteen years of experience have taught me to be wary of using humor, satire or irony about gender, race or religion. Humor can easily go awry or be misunderstood; it deserves extra care in editing and labeling. The Allen piece was offensive because it was a broadside against all women, despite her weasel words here and there. And the piece had the fatal flaw of not being funny. At all.... Just Give It a Shot, Girls One editor -- a woman, it so happens -- offered the opinion that members of her sex are just less comfortable expressing pure opinion. Of course the critics weren't buying, retorting that the problem is simply discrimination by male editors who still dominate editorial page staffs. But -- not so, countered the editors' champions. Because if that's all it is, then how do you explain the bloggers? Yup -- turns out there are way fewer females than males firing off-the-hip convictions into no-entry-barred cyberspace, too.... I read part of the Charlotte Allen chat on the web site as it unfolded. Allen essentially began by prevaricating over whether the article was truly satirical, and then dropped into a pattern of sniffy, glib and dismissive defensiveness. After reading half a dozen or so of her replies I gave up in frustration. While some of the questions and comments from participants were not works of genius, I was left with the uncomfortable impression that Charlotte Allen had been told to be online to respond, regarded the whole exercise as rather less enthralling than a root canal, and really cared not one iota for how she might be perceived by the readers. In short, she did herself and the WaPo no favours. Posted by: Graham Shevlin at March 10, 2008 12:52 PM | Permalink "The best answer I got was at Romenesko’s Letters. It’s from a former newspaper journalist, Larry Kart." Jay, I hate to say it, but "the best answer" appears to be the one that corresponds to your own biases. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at March 13, 2008 7:12 PM | Permalink |
|
Print
