Matt Yglesias

Changing the Tone

By request from Joseph Benaiah Cox:

As someone who frequently points out that Jonah Goldberg is a moron unsuited for any work in the public, let along public intellectual debate, how do you feel about calls to tone down the rhetoric? While obviously yours is not violent rhetoric, it probably doesn’t make anyone feel too charitable. I enjoy your candor, but as someone who has a blog award for bravery named after him I wonder if you could chew on your own role in the public discourse. Do you regret things you have said? Do you think that you contribute to the devil shift?

I have definitely said some things over the years which I regret. But I draw a distinction here. I don’t think people should pretend to like people they dislike or avoid saying what they mean. But I do think people should be careful to avoid a certain kind of tendentious rhetoric. Some of the participants in our political debate are quite stupid, some are corrupt, some are dishonest, and some combine multiple unattractive qualities.

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin. This stuff is mostly unserious, but I also think it’s potentially dangerous. If you really thought prominent American politicians were plotting to fundamentally subvert the American constitutional order tand supplant it with a totalitarian dictatorship, you’d be prepared to countenance some pretty extreme countermeasures.

The problem here isn’t really about “civility” or being nice, it’s about accuracy and not treating your audience like you respect them. Beck thinks of his audience as marks, which is just plain wrong, and some day I’m afraid the con may lead someone to do something equal in craziness to the yarn Beck is spinning.

The Seduction of the Secret

A smart observation from Spencer Ackerman:

It’s always fun to catch up with people about six months to a year after they go to work in the national-security apparatus. Some enter with visions of new worlds of secret information suddenly exposed to them, like the briefcase opening in Pulp Fiction. More often than not, it’s an endless stream of banality, reported in minute, picayune detail, telling you what you already knew from a halfway attentive scan of your RSS feed.

This is something I’ve talked about before, but in a world drowning with information it’s remarkably easy to get too caught up in the idea of finding out secrets. Just think of all the banal, publicly available factual information that’s relevant to foreign policy and that most of us can’t rattle off the top of our heads. What’s the age structure of the population of Egypt? Is the Christian population growing faster or slower than average? Because of differential birth rates or differential emigration rates? Does Okun’s law hold up there like in Canada, or has it broken down like in the United States? But if you tried to write an article about this in the popular press, nobody would care. A scoop about a “secret report” on Egypt would, by contrast, be a kind of news even if it didn’t amount to much more than embassy gossip or slightly informed speculation.

Is Spam Killing Google?

Brad DeLong offers Vivek Wadhwa’s argument that we desperately need a successor to Google’s core web search business:

The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.) This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”. [...]

Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.

In my experience, this is quite true but also a more narrow problem than Wadhwa makes it out to be. For almost everything, searching the web with Google works great. For product reviews, it doesn’t work very well except as a way to look up specific individuals’ reviews of things.

But developing a whole new search engine seems like an inordinately difficult response. For starters, the reason Google’s so spammed-up is precisely because it’s so popular. Any very popular search site will become a target for similar manipulations. The business innovation that’s needed isn’t so much a better way to search for product reviews, but instead firms that specialize in providing reliable product reviews. It’s a big problem, but a pretty specific one. Personally, I find there’s a lot to like about the Consumer Reports website.

Fear The Grasstops Not The Grassroots

Jonathan Bernstein observes that John Boehner thinks the feisty right-wing of the GOP base can be bought off largely with symbolic measures:

I think it’s an indication that Boehner believes that the Tea Partiers are going to be a fairly easy bunch to manage. Toss them some symbolic stuff, and then blame everything after that on Harry Reid and Barack Obama, and you’ve pretty much done what you need to do. Is he right? I’m not sure, but it’s not a bad bet. That’s partially because Boehner knows going in that he doesn’t have the votes (in the Senate and the White House, that is) to actually fulfill the Tea Party agenda. If that ultimately is going to sink him — if activists won’t, at the end of the day, accept a quarter of a loaf and cheer — then it doesn’t really matter what Boehner does. If, however, Tea Party concerns are really just symbolic anyway, then it makes sense to address them with symbolism.

Ezra Klein comments that “It’ll be really interesting to see how the tea party does — or doesn’t — adapt to having allies in power.”

I think it’s really important not to engage in too much reification of “the tea party” in these kind of discussions. You don’t need to endorse the view that the tea party phenomenon is some kind of astroturf to recognize that that there’s a major grasstops element to the whole thing. Suppose there’s some sellout that John Boehner wants to implement. Boehner recognizes that he needs to pair this with a symbolic but meaningless gesture. Now suppose he sits down in a room with Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Donohue, and David Koch and persuades all three of those people that this is the right way to proceed. Then the next day, Boehner unleashes his symbolic gesture and his compromise, and the coverage of it on Fox News, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the fox-affiliated radio shows is all positive. That alone gets you the three most popular talk radio shows, the television network, The Weekly Standard, a dose of influence at every single conservative think tank in America, and the important organizing efforts of Americans For Prosperity.

How far is a right-wing challenger going to get with those forces arrayed against him?

Not far. And the basic principles of elite signaling indicate that support among that group will lead to more support. It wouldn’t be a smart move for Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney to get on the wrong side of Rush & Fox. Jim DeMint might or might not find it useful to act as a rightwing defector from dealmaking, but he wouldn’t actually get anywhere without conservative media to back him. In essence, coordinated action among a very small number of people can cut the oxygen off from the tea party fire any time they want to. So the question becomes not how “the tea party” will react, but how a relatively small number of influential conservative media figures will react.

It Only Counts If Your Party Cares

(cc photo by kevindooley)

Duncan Black: “I can instantly invoke, sadly, a looped memory of Cokie Roberts uttering what was the beltway chant at the time, ‘up or down vote up or down vote up or down vote up or down vote up or vote,’ a phrase which only appears to be operative when Democrats control the Senate.”

I sympathize with this, but I think this is an instance of blaming the media for what’s really a problem of political leadership. Barack Obama and his administration have made very little effort to stigmatize filibustering. Nor have the key members of the Democratic caucus in the United States Senate. Harry Reid has only mildly flirted with criticizing filibustering, moderates have strenuously opposed the use of the budget reconciliation process to pass key legislation, and in general Senate Democrats have spent the majority of the 111th Congress seeing the filibuster as a key tool for their own empowerment.

It’s been great to see a handful of newer Senators—most notably Jeff Merkely and the Udalls—take the lead in pressing for reform. But any time you see very junior senators taking the lead on something, the negative space speaks volumes. The effort to deligitimize anti-Bush filibusters was led by Majority Leader Bill Frist and President George W Bush, not by backbenchers.

Taibbi vs TAP

Matt Taibbi explains what’s wrong with American punditry:

Bai is one of those guys — there are hundreds of them in this business — who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning “centrist” pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing “unrealistic” liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it’s like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you’re in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you’ve got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won’t be long.

I appreciate what Taibbi is getting at in the piece overall, but not only is this a terrible description of The American Prospect, but as Adam Serwer points out Matt Bai’s actual resumé includes a stint at Rolling Stone and zero stints at TAP. Meanwhile, though I think it’s safe to say that Taibbi is somewhat to the left of the TAP alumni of the world it seems to me that a hypothetical universe in which Bob Kuttner, Harold Meyerson, Josh Marshall, Jons Cohn & Chait, Ezra Klein, Dana Goldstein, and myself dominated the public debate would be one that’s considerably more congenial to Taibbi’s policy preferences than is the actual world.

Anyways, I hesitate to say any more about this because I’m still eagerly awaiting my own call from The New York Times.

Efficient Advertising

Tom Lee on the paradox of better-targeted advertising:

But Google’s a huge success in a landscape of failure. Online ads sell for pathetic rates relative to broadcast or print. This is because by all accounts online advertising doesn’t work very well. You can measure whether someone clicks on an ad, and often whether they buy something after that click. But it turns out they rarely do those things. So businesses aren’t willing to pay very much for ad space on websites.

Is it really a coincidence that the advertising medium with the best instrumentation also appears to be the least effective? I suspect it’s not. It may be that ads never worked as well as the industry had told us; or it may be that the eyeballs/clicks/conversions funnel is a naive conceptualization of how the system works. Either way, Google has succeeded by giving advertisers what they think they want, which is analytic tools that seem to reveal that the whole enterprise is horribly ineffective.

To those of us on the editorial side of online media this is a very frustrating dynamic. It’s hard to make money writing online because the advertising rates are pathetic compared to what was historically available in print. And the rates are pathetic because the utilization rates are pathetic. But what kind of click-throughs did those glossy magazine ads get? Something here doesn’t add up.

The Fallacy of Private Knowledge

This passage from Matt Bai illustrates a lot of what I think is wrong with conventional reportorial methods:

The body of Mr. Obama’s writing and experiences before he became a presidential candidate would suggest that he is instinctively pragmatic, typical of an emerging generation that sees all political dogma – be it ’60s liberalism or ’80s conservatism – as anachronistic. Privately, Mr. Obama has described himself, at times, as essentially a Blue Dog Democrat, referring to the shrinking caucus of fiscally conservative members of the party.

Obama is secretly a Blue Dog! But without breaking any confidences, I can tell you that it’s also true that Obama has privately described himself at times as a liberal frustrated with the timidity of more moderate members of the party. Because guess what: Barack Obama is a politician trying to assemble a broad base of support. The idea that his “private” words and deeds reveal his “real” approach is a tempting conceit, but it doesn’t really make sense. The real Obama is the public Obama and that Obama’s approach to his job reveals an ideology that’s similar to your average Senate Democrat. He’s like Patty Murray, but much more famous.

The Billion Dollar Man

Dean Baker really hates Pete Peterson. I don’t share Baker’s view of Peterson as an insidious figure, I think he’s a public spirited man who’s spent a lot of money—1 billion dollars it turns out—on a genuine effort to solve a genuine problem. But when you talk about spending a billion dollars on something, the question of priority-setting starts to become pretty urgent. And I agree with Jon Chait about “the establishment’s strange debt fetish” except for the fact that I don’t actually find it all that strange:

I do think the long-term deficit is a serious issue that I’d like to see addressed. I don’t understand the idea that this is an especially good political time to solve it. While many Democrats oppose any revisions to entitlement programs, the entire Republican party is in the grips of anti-tax dogma so powerful that not a single Republican in Congress has defied it for twenty years. Now, a moment of high Republican hubris, seems like a very unlikely moment to force the party to compromise its core policy commitment.

What’s truly bizarre is this idea that it’s the most urgent issue to address. Climate change seems clearly more urgent–and, what’s more, it’s probably irreversible. The economic crisis is also more urgent. But Washington elites are fairly removed from the cataclysmic effects of the economic crisis–they’re not losing their homes or living in economic terror. And climate change is a “partisan” issue, unworthy of the urgings of a non-partisan wise man. And so, by dint of the peculiar isolation and sociological demands of the members of the political and media establishments, the deficit must become the top priority.

Chait’s sociological observations are correct, but there’s also the small matter of the billion dollars! It’s very difficult to actually change public policy through pure force of monetary expenditures, but it’s relatively easy to focus the attention of the media on things simply by paying people to focus on it. Through the Fiscal Times and many other avenues, Peterson has directly subsidized the production of tons journalism and policy analysis on the subject he thinks is interesting. If he were a climate hawk instead of a fiscal hawk, we’d be in a better place. If he spent a bit less money on his fiscal policy endeavors and a bit more on the monetary ideas of Peterson Institute fellow Joe Gagnon the world would be a better place. It’s natural that the elite would disproportionately focus on something that a billion dollars is being spent on paying people to focus on. It’s just unfortunate.

The Wonk in a Time of Partisanship

Something I’ve noted with interest as we switched from the George W Bush administration to the Obama administration is that often surprisingly little in terms of policy analysis separates the “supporters” of a policy from a the “opponents” of it. When policymakers move to address a problem, they normally do succeed at coming up with something that would improve the situation they’re seeking to address at least a little. And yet the actual political process invariably turns up something less optimal than what you’d draw up around the seminar table. Consequently, two people with very similar views of whatever the issue at hand is can always manage to come up with divergent blog posts / columns / sound bites / whatever simply by choosing to emphasize the positive or the negative.

The result is to create a kind of exaggerated view of how much polarization there is about policy issues. Many people are strongly committed to the view that the United States both could and should bear a level of taxation more similar to what you see in Europe, whereas others are strongly committed to the view that democratic countries pathologically overtax their wealthiest citizens and this trend should be resisted with all possible force. This is a really important disagreement among people with serious ideas about economic policy. And it naturally drives divergent views about the merits of the two political parties. But then that starts to different takes on things like ARRA, quantitative easing (where Doug Holtz-Eakin seems to be saying it’s okay for monetary policy to be too tight because we really ought to do tax reform), the Waxman-Markey climate bill, etc.

Further exacerbating the trend, formerly marginal schools of policy analysis start to gain credibility as soon as they become the only way to generate the “right” policy outcome. Throughout the 25 years before Barack Obama’s inauguration, Republican Party officeholders and conservative media figures showed very little interest in real business cycle or “Austrian” accounts of macroeconomic stabilization. But these constructs produce very strong and clear critiques of some signature Obama administration initiatives, so suddenly you hear much more about them.

The result of all this is that people who follow politics in a somewhat casual way are likely to come away with a vastly exaggerated view of the level of practical disagreement about policy among the “experts” on both “sides” and to underrated the extent to which bad outcomes represent pathological elements of the system itself.

Kaplan, Inc

The Washington Post company is most identified with its newspaper, the Washington Post. But in fact its biggest source of revenue is its Kaplan subsidiary. Kaplan, in turn, is primarily identified with test prep work. In fact, however, its low-performing for-profit university unit is its biggest source of growth as Tamar Lewin points out in an excellent NYT piece:

Over the last decade, Kaplan has moved aggressively into for-profit higher education, acquiring 75 small colleges and starting the huge online Kaplan University. Now, Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test-prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company’s operations. And Kaplan’s revenue grew 9 percent during the last quarter to $743.3 million — with higher education revenues more than four times greater than those from test-prep — helping its parent company more than triple its profits. [...]

According to 2009 data released this summer by the Department of Education, only 28 percent of Kaplan’s students were repaying their student loans. That figure is well below the 45 percent threshold that most programs will need to remain fully eligible for the federal aid on which they rely. By comparison, 44 percent of students at the largest for-profit, the University of Phoenix, were repaying their loans.

So to clarify, the basic business model of the Washington Post Company’s key business unit is as follows. They say “in exchange for paying us money, we’ll provide you education services that pay off in the long run.” Potential customers think that sounds like a good proposition, and they avail themselves of taxpayer-subsidized loans in order to take the Post up on their offer. But 72 percent of the Post’s customers find that they’re actually unable to repay those taxpayer-subsidized loans.

Fairly reasonably, the Obama administration has proposed that taxpayers stop subsidizing programs with dismal performance rates. That way educational entrepreneurs at places like the Post will have to work on making sure they’re delivering some real value to their customers. Also quote reasonable, the Post would prefer to keep on getting free money from taxpayers and thus “spent $350,000 on lobbying in the third quarter of this year, more than any other higher-education company.”

But what’s more, Donald Graham has personally “gone to Capitol Hill to argue against the regulations in private visits with lawmakers” and just to make the full scope of his interest in the issue clear “[h]is newspaper, too, has editorialized against the regulations.” Meanwhile, it looks like the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives has decided that taxpayer subsidies to low-performing for-profit colleges like Kaplan is one of the forms of wasteful government spending they like. And presumably every member of congress is now on notice that the city’s most influential newspaper is prepared to go to bat for its corporate partners.

The Geography of Overexposure

The most-covered candidate of 2010 turns out to have been Christine O’Donnell, who definitely won’t be taking office as a United States Senator. By contrast, we’ve heard very little about the guy who’ll probably beat Russ Feingold or the dude who has at least an outside chance of winning of Washington.

Ezra Klein’s theory is that O’Donnell “just made for good copy.”

That’s true, but I think there’s more in play, namely logistics. The Alaska Senate race should be excellent copy. Joe Miller is nuts, Scott McAdams is fascinatingly amateurish, the Palin-Murkowski feud is interesting, everyone likes to talk about Sarah Palin, etc. But Alaska is also cold and remote. Sending a reporter there would be expensive and annoying. The time zones are inconvenient. By contrast, Wilmington is a 2 hour drive or 90 minute train ride from both Washington, DC and New York City. So if you want to get some “real reporting” done it’s convenient. And logistics count in life.

Our Heated Discourse

I’m not all that interested in in the details of John Burns’ response to critics of his somewhat critical profile of war-critic Julian Assange, but I did think this was interesting:

Burns said he doesn’t “recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation” following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used “language that I don’t think they would use at their own dinner table.” Such heated reactions to the profile, Burns said, shows “just how embittered the American discourse on these two wars has become.”

I think this shows less about American discourse on these wars than it does about how isolated from criticism writers at prestigious journalistic outlets have traditionally been. I don’t think American discourse about parking regulation or the definition of insider trading or the wisdom of consumption vs income taxes has become particularly embittered in recent years. Nevertheless, some of the responses I get over email and in comments to my posts on those subjects gets extremely vituperative.

A lot of people just like to be vituperative on the Internet. What’s more, for any given stance you can take on a political issue there’s always going to be someone who disagrees with you. For example, yesterday I found out that someone thinks Robert Greenwald is a huge sellout who recently “revealed himself as the sort of mendacious but quotidian monster who belongs lumped in with [Ezra] Klein, Yglesias, McArdle and Krauthammer. A real embodiment of the Compleat Suck.™ Someone I’d introduce to Guevara with the evidence in hand.” Weird, huh?

Well at least I think it’s weird. But it’s the world we live in and I suspect it’s the world we’ve always been living in, but the advent of modern communications technology makes other people’s reactions to your work much easier to find.

We Are All Pointy-Headed Elites

Via James Downie, it turns out that not only is Charles Murray generally full of it, but elitism is on the rise as NASCAR ratings mysteriously plummet:

“The simple fact is that people just are not tuning in,” said Julie Sobieski, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions. “We’re looking at everything to find out why.”

Top ESPN executives, including president George Bodenheimer, traveled to Charlotte for the fifth race of the Chase, the Bank of America 500, and engaged NASCAR executives during several meetings. A team of ESPN’s top editorial staff, including Rob King, ESPN digital media editor-in-chief, and Glenn Jacobs, senior coordinating producer of SportsCenter, also attended the race and were given a three-day, behind-the-scenes immersion into NASCAR operations.

Obviously, Barack Obama’s sharia socialism is to blame here. Decent people worry that if they watch NASCAR, their parents will be sent off to the death panels.

Meanwhile, David Frum has a good post on Murray and the real American elite.

Bloggers Are People Too!

Chopped liver (cc photo by peretzpup)

Writing about Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker, Amanda Fortini and the NYT manage to pull the classic MSM stunt of quoting a blogger without naming her:

Last April’s finale garnered a series high of almost 1.6 million viewers. Even those who generally consider themselves too refined for reality TV — the microwave dinner of the entertainment world — are closet fans. “Watching Patti rather savagely describe what’s wrong with these guys and why they have trouble getting/keeping themselves in real relationships is strangely invigorating,” wrote a blogger for the feminist magazine Bitch before fretting: “Can I continue to watch this show and write for Bitch in good conscience?”

I put the quote into Google, and swiftly unearthed the post in question by Anna Breshears. Would it be so hard to use her name? To include a link to her post in the online version of the article?

The New Elite

I think Charles Murray’s latest Washington Post op-ed decrying the rise of a new elite is one of those classic instances of “provocative” journalism that manages to meld the banal and the false in a superficially appealing way.

For example, what is one to make of this?

Talk to [the New Elite] about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.

Of course this paragraph doesn’t make sense to publish unless you assume that a large proportion of Washington Post readers know that “MMA” stands for “mixed martial arts.” And the non-NASCAR Jimmie Johnson isn’t just some former coach, he’s familiar to 100 percent of NFL fans thanks to his ubiquity on Fox’s Sunday broadcasts. And pro football is hardly a pursuit of the narrow elite—it’s the most popular sport in America and one of the relatively few endeavors that, in this era of media fragmentation, united people (or men at a minimum) across race and class lines.

For the record, a map of pilates instructors in Branson, Missouri.

How the CPB Subsidizes National NPR

I think the case for getting the federal government out of the public broadcasting business is pretty straightforward—a given sum of money could be given to public radio or it could be going to preschool—so I’m not sure why National Review has come up with this somewhat misleading editorial on the subject:

NPR’s supporters argue that what it provides is not “media,” but news and journalism that consumers would otherwise be unable to find anywhere. NPR itself does not receive any direct federal funding, but its supporters howl whenever Republicans try to defund the CPB, because 40 percent of NPR’s revenues come from station programming fees, and many of its member stations, especially in rural areas, are dependent on CPB largesse. In this sense, NPR is sort of like Amtrak: Self-sufficient in urban areas where it has lots of listeners but dependent on taxpayer subsidies to broadcast its programming nationwide.

If listeners in Dubuque want NPR content, let them pay for it. We are tired of kicking in contributions so that coastal liberalism may find an audience in Ogallala. NPR offers many fine programs, but it is towering arrogance to imply, as some supporters of public funding do, that residents of Big Sky would be left stranded on an island of ignorance if forced to do without Morning Edition. If it’s really that important to them, they can increase their yearly contributions to Yellowstone Public Radio. If not, why should taxpayers in other parts of the country make up the shortfall?

This tries to make it seem like eliminating federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have no impact on NPR listeners in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or whatever other enclaves of decadent coastal liberalism you care to name. But if the only thing at issue were the availability of NPR programming in rural areas, the whole thing would be almost totally a non-issue. The point, however, is that not only do rural stations depend on CPB largess to keep broadcasting, but they kick some of that money back upstairs in fees to the producers of NPR (and PRI) shows. Thus, the CPB’s subsidies to rural stations are, in part, subsidizing the creation of some of the programming that big city NPR listeners hear.

Meanwhile, over at Reason Jesse Walker has an excellent piece about why the CPB never actually gets de-funded—conservatives just like to wield this threat in order to intimidate public broadcasters into changing their programming decisions.

Note that conservative politicians lacked principled opposition to the CPB during the Bush years when they were in a position to do something about it. After all, that coincided with their period of maximal influence over the system. Then, once Juan Williams got fired conservatives rediscovered their principled objections as part of one of their periodic fits of anti-anti-racist passion. At the end of the day, this repeating farce and the leverage it gives the right over NPR mostly strikes me as reason to favor moving toward privatization. NPR is a major 21st century media success story and I think that if given a reasonably scheduled phase-out of government support could certainly find a way to keep operating and then be free of political interference.

Replacement-Level Punditry

Jon Chait disagrees with me about Juan Williams:

Matthew Ygelsias applauds the firing because Williams is a mediocre, “replacement-level” commentator. That strikes me as a total dodge. Most commentators — most members of every profession! — are average. The question here is whether we want to create an atmosphere where commentators need to live in fear that even contemporaneous comments will be scrutinized by the strictest standards of tolerance, and a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy is generally applied toward their employment.

I didn’t call Williams “average.” Obviously being average can’t be a firing offense. I accused him of “general lameness and lack of valuable contribution to their programming” and on Twitter accused him of offering “replacement-level political commentary.” The latter was intended as a reference to baseball’s VORP concept and means that Williams is well below average.

Which is just to say that I don’t think I’ve dodged anything. Like Jon Chait I don’t like the idea of hair-trigger firings of people who step in it while making on-the-fly comments. At the same time, I’m against non-interesting non-insightful political commentary. And I’m very much against the idea, all-too-prevalent today, that certain kinds of punditry perches should be treated like tenured professorships from which people can only be let go for some kind of egregious misconduct. So while I wish this series of events hadn’t gone down in this way, I can hardly say I’ll miss Williams once he’s gone from NPR.

On Juan Williams

Since my ThinkProgress colleagues are sort of “part of the story” in terms of Juan Williams getting sacked from NPR I’m a bit hesitant to comment on it. But as in the case of Rick Sanchez it seems to me that if you assume Williams has been doing valuable work all these years, firing him over this single incident is excessive. But as an NPR listener, I’m a good deal more familiar with Williams’ work than I am with Sanchez’s and it seems clear to me that Williams has not, in fact, been doing valuable work all these years. If Williams had never made these remarks about Muslims and NPR announced his firing this morning on the grounds of general lameness and lack of valuable contribution to their programming, I would have applauded the move so I’m hardly going to deplore what actually happened.

At any rate, my local NPR affiliate WAMU is one of the charitable organizations I normally donate to and their currently in the middle of a pledge drive. All things considered a Williams-less NPR is one I’m more inclined to support than a Williams-full one so I just re-upped my membership.

Pharma’s Doctors for Hire

(cc photo by rodrigo senna)

Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, and Dan Nguyen have an excellent ProPublica feature out today examining the conflict-of-interest ridden nexus of pharmaceutical company marketing and medical doctors. In particular, it looks like a lot of pharma’s favorite speakers aren’t exactly the best and the brightest:

Drug companies say they hire the most-respected doctors in their fields for the critical task of teaching about the benefits and risks of their drugs.

But an investigation by ProPublica uncovered hundreds of doctors on company payrolls who had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists.

This story is the first of several planned by ProPublica examining the high-stakes pursuit of the nation’s physicians and their prescription pads. The implications are great for patients, who in the past have been exposed to such heavily marketed drugs as the painkiller Bextra and the diabetes drug Avandia — billion-dollar blockbusters until dangerous side effects emerged.

“Without question the public should care,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine who has written about the industry’s influence on physicians. “You would never want your kid learning from a bad teacher. Why would you want your doctor learning from a bad doctor, someone who hasn’t displayed good judgment in the past?”

To take this in a new media direction rather than a health care direction, the need for someone to undertake projects like this is why it’s important for at least some philanthropic effort to be dedicated to ventures like ProPublica that aren’t working on the minute-to-minute news cycle. The good news is that thanks to digital technology the funds that were invested in the reporting of this feature have a dramatically higher payoff than they otherwise would have.

For one thing, people all over the country—all over the world, in fact—now have the opportunity to read it rather than the audience being restricted to one metropolitan area. For another thing, the research at the core of the article isn’t sitting around in a filing cabinet somewhere—ProPublica’s created an online searchable and sortable database that will be useful to the public and to other researchers and reporters. Last and probably most important, people who don’t read this story today will be able to find it tomorrow and next week and next month and even next year. Lots of important journalism isn’t really about “the news” in the sense of “stuff that happened yesterday” and the Internet makes it much more viable to put things out there that kind of float independently of specific timing.