The Year in Media: Part 1, Politics and Discussion

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at some of the more memorable media I've been digesting for the past year.  Aside from music, books and film, it occurred to me for a second that I might include media journalism in this category, but I quickly realized how daunting a task it might be to find and collate everything interesting I've read in the past 12 months.  I could however, simply list my sort of regular, go-to sources for information:


Online:
NY Times
Reality Based Community
Kevin Drum
The Awl
Science Blogs

Print:
The Week

Television:
Up w/Chris Hayes
Daily Show
Colbert Report
NBC Nightly News

Podcasts:
Bloggingheads
The Liberal Oasis
Little Atoms
New Yorker Outloud
The Slate Political Gabfest
On the Media
Fresh Air
Point of Inquiry
Vox & Friends

It's kind of interesting to see someone's little media universe.  I, of course, am not completely limited to these sources as there are always stories posted to my facebook feed, or otherwise linked somewhere.  And the NY Times doesn't tell you anything very specific about my information habits.  I will say that I've spent much less time reading about education.  Other than the fact that the level of public discourse around the subject is maddeningly misinformed, there just seems less and less to say.  Honestly, I don't know that I haven't said about all I have to say on the topic on this blog, and where I am at on the issue seems incredibly distant from where the front lines actually are in the debate, in terms of Democrats and Republicans largely thinking about the issue in similar ways.  And ultimately, the self interest of middle class Americans and the fact that the problem of education is at root a structural problem with capitalism itself makes the issue much more scary than most Americans are really interested in dealing with.

But back to media.  I listen to the bloggingheads podcasts a lot.  Doing dishes.  Mowing the lawn.  Driving to work.  The basic premise, for those who haven't checked it out, is to try and get really smart people on the left and the right to debate important issues of the day.  It tends to be moderates from both sides, with a good deal of libertarians sprinkled in.  Some of the regular participants are too annoying bother with, and my ears generally glaze over during the wonky foreign affairs discussions.  But overall I find the serious back and forth across partisan lines fascinating. 

Other mentions on the list: The New Yorker Out Loud podcast  is probably the closest I'll ever get to actually reading the magazine.  The authors themselves being interviewed is, while maybe not quite as good as the real story, a special thing in its own right.  I do most of my commenting on the Reality Based Community site.  The community of commenters there are top-notch, and often as interesting as the original post.  Up w/Chris Hayes is sometimes a bit too wonky, and for a supposedly inclusive talk show, gratuitously liberal, but Hayes is very sharp and fun to follow as he tries in earnest to pull out the substance from all sides.  Little Atoms is my most recent discovery and now one of my favorites.  The baseline is secular humanism and free thought, but the range of topics is vast and the conversations always intriguing.

I think I'll stop here and leave the "arts"  - music, books and film for next time.

Reality and Bias

 A new book purports to find evidence of widespread liberal "bias" in the media.

"In at least one important way journalists are very different from the rest of us—they are more liberal. For instance, according to surveys, in a typical presidential election, Washington correspondents vote about 93-7 for the Democrat, while the rest of us vote about 50-50 for the two candidates.
What happens when our view of the world is filtered through the eyes, ears, and minds of such a liberal group?
As I demonstrate—using objective, social-scientific methods—the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it really is. Instead, we only see a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see."

A longstanding critique from the right, the left's snarky rejoinder: “reality has a liberal bias”.  Yet this is often demonstrably true, not only in terms of whether liberal claims can be substantiated, but in the very way in which the left traditionally approaches truth questions.  Liberalism is biased towards expertise, towards scientific inquiry, critical deconstruction of cultural norms and dominant paradigms.

The extent to which any of these are the paths to truth, then truth can be said to have a liberal bias. Although that’s not really accurate. Better said, liberalism has a bias towards truth. So, for instance, when a journalist points out that a business is polluting a river, is it liberal bias? When most illegal aliens are found to be exploited when all they wanted was a chance at a better life, is it liberal bias? When global warming is found to likely have devastating effects, is it liberal bias? When evolution is found to be absolutely true, is it liberal bias? When gays are – newsflash! – found to be normal, healthy people, is that liberal bias?

Conservatism is ultimately about common sense. And sometimes common sense is right; even a broken clock is right twice a day. But to the extent that conservatism is biased against expertise, or critical analysis, or relativism, or the deconstruction of tradition – in other words the machinery of free thought – then conservatism is biased against truth. As Buckley put it, to “stand athwart history and yell stop”, even alas, when that history is truth.

In the end, there is no such thing as a bias towards truth, only away from it. To be biased is to be operating outside the parameters of truth-finding. To the extent that conservatism rejects the very process of truth-finding, preferring instead to rely on such subjective and non-rational epistemologies as tradition or common-sense, it is biased against truth. And to the extent that the media is concerned with truth, then conservatism is often biased against the media itself.

Smart Phones and Smart Kids

A story in the Times looks at the increasing phenomenon of smartphone use by toddlers.  Iphones and touch-screen devices have been revolutionary in that their intuitive interface is accessible to young fingers, and a vast array of cheap and simple educational games can be downloaded.  The general tone of the story is typical - a number of anecdotal stories of parents who can't resist the utility of giving the phones to their kids, and then some finger wagging by experts.

"Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who is a member of the academy’s council of communications and media, said the group is continually reassessing its guidelines to address new forms of “screen time".“We always try to throw in the latest technology, but the cellphone industry is becoming so complex that we always come back to the table and wonder should we have a specific guideline for cellphones,” she said. But, she added, “At the moment, we seem to feel it’s the same as TV.”

Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist in Vail, Colo. said: “Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat.’ You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none.”

"Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University who specializes in early language development, sides with the Don’ts. Research shows that children learn best through active engagement that helps them adapt, she said, and interacting with a screen doesn’t qualify."

She's right about the research.  But in a common fallacy, she applies it incorrectly.  Children do learn best in certain areas of development through active engagement.  But many computer games offer a complexity of interaction that would be hard to replicate in the physical world.  Much like the reading of a book stimulates specific types of abstract thinking and processing that could not be replicated in the physical world, the computer interface allows for expansion of certain skills.  And because games are designed to be played alone, without help, they offer a facility that a physical game can't offer without adult guidance.

Now, the critique here is often that this sort of auto-facilitation lets adults off the hook.  Instead of engaging in crucial adult-child interaction, the computer becomes a cheap proxy.  But the difference ought to be recognized by degree.  If computers are being used as a complete substitute for parenting, then the child is being deprived.  But any parent who opts for such a radical substitution would not likely be inclined to effective parenting otherwise.

What is often left out of child-development analysis is the broad range of parenting that exists, especially across socioeconomic demographics.  Stories such as the one in the Times routinely ignore this piece of the picture as they narrowly focus on the headline-grabbing main event.  The children spoken of in the story are solidly middle class.  And comments by the experts are assuming that there is anything like a standard early childhood.

But we know that early childhood varies greatly, generally by SES.  Two children of similar ages but from different socioecomic or environmental backgrounds usually will have had vastly different experiences with language, cognition and higher-order thinking skills.  When I taught kindergarten in a low-SES neighborhood, most of the children came to school on the first day hardly even knowing what letters or numbers were.  Few had been read to on a nightly basis, and their exposure to high-level vocabulary and thinking skills was likely limited.  I can only imagine that had they the use of a smartphone with educational games, their academic skills would have been remarkably better. 

The same could likely be said for television viewing.  No doubt most of them watched television at home, but it tended not to have been the sort of educational or developmentally targeted programming found on PBS or Nick Jr., instead being the more commercial-driven fare found on other channels.  This is a direct reflection of the parent's knowledge - vague as it might be - of media and child development.  Content was essentially being edited for them.  No doubt this schism would extend to smart phones, although I know of no research on the subject.  That would have been an interesting story.

A Better Dialogue on Race

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are back with their usual arch commentary on race in a recent Bloggingheads.  Both express great boredom with the endless cycles of this hoary American Dialogue.  I grant that it is perpetually juvenile and superficial.  But when John calls the whole enterprise "unnecessary", I entirely disagree.

I would distinguish between what could be learned and the tendency for little to be learned.  I agree that much of it tends to be theater - but that doesn't mean there isn't anything of substance to be learned, or discussed.  The problem is that so much of our political discourse is simply hackish in general.  Partisanship, talking points and scorekeeping take the day.

So when Glenn and John say there is nothing to be learned (again, I prefer "discussed"), I think that's really not true.  For instance let's take the Rand Paul flap.  The libertarian/tea party willingness to even entertain such foolishness speaks volumes about their priorities, and especially their view of race and class in America. 

This is how I see it being important: Paul's anti-civil rights view diminishes the legacy of racism, resulting current social and human capital in minority communities.  He and Tea Party's homogeneity and claims of "government intrusion" largely framed around minority/welfare issues, specifically in regard to social programs.  Granted these are pieces of a puzzle, but I think you can draw a pretty straight line from his statement to his party platform.  Ditto the Macaca (?) comment.  And generally the large number of racist Tea Party crap ever published.

Glenn points to "structural problems" driving minority poverty.  But how can he divorce this from Republican opposition to government intervention?  He can't seriously by the BS notion that these communities will pull themselves up without targeted government help?  And that's exactly what modern conservatism does not want.  They may pretend that they want smart government - but they never show any platform but cuts.  They basically have zero to offer minority communities.  Their one proposal for ending generational poverty through education - vouchers/charters - is aimed solely at parents motivated to escape the ghetto.  This is not a scaleable solution, it is a band-aid for certain parents who already have enough human/social capital to succeed and are stuck sending their kids to school with other ghetto kids.

The dialogue on race needs to be better.  It is definitely stuck in a sort of racist vs. non-racist framework that is absurdly inadequate to what we're dealing with in the 21st century.  Race is no longer just about racism, but about justice.  Most Americans want to be there, but they have no idea how to get there.  There are still many unconscious assumptions and prejudices that will eventually need to be exorcised.  We need to get back to looking at causality and practical steps we can take to move the country forward.

Dialogue and Democracy

I've been troubled for a while by the suspicion that Americans are largely uniformed and uninterested in political philosophy.  Of those who even bother to vote, most seem to do so more out of tribalism than a real understanding of the differences between the two major parties, the difference between liberalism and conservatism.  As far as this goes, they likely really on intra-party/movement talking points, culled from friends and family with whom they agree.  The remaining portion of voters, the ones who take an active interest in politics, are likely the consumers of political news and information.  These people absorb the messaging and then pass it along to the former group.  These tend to be each party's "base", with more extreme views, and more of an interest in campaigning for particular representatives and issues.  They are very influential in essentially driving each parties narrative.

According to a 2009 Pew survey, most people get their news from television.

Now, if people actively interested in politics are going to be more influential among the wider population of voters, it is important to determine what kind of news they are getting.  According to the Pew research, the largest portion of news consumption (40%) by all Americans came from major cable news outlets.  I think it is safe to say that a large proportion of these viewers are going to be the politically active folks.  The survey didn't break down which portion of cable news people were watching.  Although much of the daily programming could be considered softer, more objective and less partisan news coverage, I think it's probably safe to say that a much larger portion of these news watchers are going to be political active, and paying particular attention to the partisan stuff.

So what you have now is a relatively small, but highly influential group of viewers digesting partisan news coverage, sharing it with peers, and then getting representatives elected and issues voted on that information.  Thus, the importance of the media in general, but major cable news outlets in particular.

Conservatives have long felt that most media outlets - the "mainstream" media has for a long time had a liberal bias.  While this is likely true, liberals have had their own critique that the media is biased towards established interests, which tend to be the powerful.  The reality is that - whatever the bias - the major cable outlets are having a substantial impact on political discourse.  In recent years, FOX news has taken a dominant place as the go-to news source for politically active conservative voters.  More recently, MSNBC has sought to carve out a similar niche for itself among politically active liberal voters.  Interestingly, the actual daily ratings for each news outlet are a very small segment of the population.  FOX news averages around 2 million viewers, while CNN and MSNBC average about a quarter of that.  Of the 2008 voting population of 130 million, this represents 1.5% and .4% of voters, respectively.

So like it or not, these news outlets, as small their audiences may be, have a lot of influence over what becomes politically important.  This is evidenced by the regularity in which talking points that come out of these outlets, whether from the mouths of politicians or pundits, seem to "take on a life of their own", and quickly enter the national conversation.  Therefore for those interested in a national political discourse that is reasonable, honest and well-informed, what goes on on these shows should be very important.

So where can you find reasonable political debate today?  Unfortunately, not many places.  This is basically what you'll find on news outlets:

• Political horseracing (CNN)
• One-sided, unreasonable polemics (FOX, MSNBC)
• Airing of talking points (weekend shows, PBS)
• Occasional references to political dischord (ABC, CBS, NBC nightly news)

Where is the back and forth, point for point discussion by reasonable partisans, where not only are principles understood in context, but parties are remotely open to new ideas?  Sadly, this doesn't really exist.  Whether it is because of constraints of the format (the rapid news cycle, lagging audience interest), lack of reasonable punditry or simple incompetence and disinterest, this just doesn't exist on television.  Even the shows in which the format was supposed to encourage two partisan sides to debate, the dialogue often devolved into both sides simply spouting talking points and partisan rhetoric, neither side interested in context or assumptions, or truly understanding the other's point of view.  The end result is that the public is no more informed, and in fact may have had their own misguided partisan views hardened by the increased acrimony they now feel as the "other" side seems ever more out-of-touch with their ideas.

So what is the antidote?  I'm not convinced that the format won't allow for reasoned debate.  I think there is  a strong audience for it.  Many people say they can't stand watching cable news because it is either A) dumbed down and uninteresting, or B)shrill and unproductive.  I think people inclined to be interested in politics have a natural hunger for engagement with the issues, and would love to see not only their side well represented, but the other side respond with genuine interest and understanding.  If a network really wanted to offer this format to their viewers, they could easily do so.  But first they would have to find capable pundits. 

Unfortunately, most on air pundits - either because they have been trained to do so or it is simply in their nature - do not engage in reasonable debate.  Chances are a new slate would have to be found.  Fortunately, the blogosphere is the perfect antidote.  While many bloggers may not be "ready for prime time", as it were, there are at least a great variety who are thoughtful, reasonable, and often quite expert.  They could be recruited quite easily, simply by setting up a skype connection you could have them broadcasting in minutes.  The added bonus of blogger punditry is that, while most will not have the sources that established pundits do, this would seem more of a benefit than a drawback.  Often times what passes for commentary is simply cynical insider horseracing on who has the advantage over who, instead of what is true and what isn't, or whether it should even mater.

A good place to start this model is a super vidoqo favorite, bloggingheads.tv.  While they do have a somewhat liberal bias in their selection of bloggers, they always tend to be reasonable, and they attempt to have good dialogues between opposing views.  In particular, their weekly show ("diavlog") The Week In Blog, hosted by Matt Lewis and Bill Scher, offers a great look into the development of political commentary on the internet from both the right and left.  While they generally don't get into philosophical debate, allowing the commentary to speak for itself, they do offer a broad analysis of where the political thought on the internet is at.  This format could be a sort of jumping-off point for a variety of more in-depth and substantive conversations on political philosophy.  At the very least, it would serve to diffuse the rampant misinformation and spin that currently dominate major cable news outlet programming.

As the nations seems more partisan than ever, with people literally geographically separating themselves along political lines, the opportunities for real political dialogue seem to be shrinking.  The effect this has on democracy is corrosive.  The citizenry is too caught up in acrimony to compromise, and begins to lose sight of what really matters.  Political thought becomes more easily manipulated, and echo-chambers grow stronger.  When faced with the big questions, we seem paralyzed by mistrust and cynicism.  Most people may never have more than a passing interest in politics.  But to the extent that their opinions are formed in tandem with the more politically active consumers of news and information, honest and reasonable political dialogue is more important than ever.

Blogging and Authority

A quote by Al Giordano, on the modern media world, has been making the rounds:

You’re expected to write or talk or shout about every crisis of the week, so you — I'm talking to you, fellow and sister media workers! — run to Wikipedia and the rest of the online library to pull up some factoids and buzzwords that fool the crowd into thinking the reporter or communicator really knows what he and she are writing or talking about.

The authority of any blogger is an interesting question. In the good old days, when all we had were news stories and opinion pieces, the two remained somewhat separate, and each was confined to much tighter parameters of coverage. To the extent that opinion writers weighed in on varying subjects, they generally did so in a broad way.

But now with popular bloggers publishing anywhere from 5 to 25 different pieces a day, often covering as many subjects, the authority can get spread pretty thin. What this often results is kind of cheap parroting of the thoughts of others, adding little in the way of real insight or expertise.

For instance I read Yglesias daily and while I appreciate much of his work, I find his ideas on education to be incredibly hackish. And I doubt mean to say I merely disagree, it's that he consistently misses crucial pieces of the debate that those of us who actually teach, or are in other ways quite involved with the surrounding issues, are much more aware of.

So while I appreciate the opportunity for diversity in thinking, it can also come at the expense of authority. And to the extent that it does, it results in at best the propagation of misinformation, and at worse its creation.

Groupthink Tank

While reading a bit of commentary on education policy recently, I was directed by the author to view what was referred to as a "study" by a major think tank, which he cited to support his argument.  It occurred to me that the study was flawed in a number of ways, and that reason behind this was simple: the "study" was really just a polemical, ideological argument dressed up in academic clothes.  It had researchers who went out and collected real data, analyzed it, and then presented conclusions.  By coincidence(!), it fit perfectly into the ideological narrative of the think tank that funded it.  I wondered whether if the study had reached different conclusions, it would have ever been published.  Of course not.  That would be at cross-purposes to the mission of the think-tank, which is generally to advocate for a particular political philosophy.

I then became interested in how common this practice was among other think tanks.  We're all familiar with them as their representatives are frequently used by the media, generally to provide quotes for news articles or television pieces.  Frequently, reporters will even cite these so-called studies the tanks put out.  To the extent that they are thought of as anything more than propagandists, there is a serious ethical concern.  These "studies" are designed to present entirely one-sided arguments that fit perfectly with the tank's pre-conceived ideology.

I took a brief look at four major think tanks to see how prevalent this practice of publishing biased "research" papers is.  The Heritage Foundation, The Center for American Progress (CAP) , The Hoover Institute, and The Cato Institute, each had sections devoted to "publications".  Both Hoover and Heritage offer what they call "research", while Cato presents "studies" and CAP presents "reports".  Each publication presented an entirely predictable argument strictly in line with the organization's politics.  Want an article in favor of stricter regulation?  The liberal Center for American Progress has you covered.  Opposition?  The libertarian Cato Institute has everything you might need. 

Though they may resemble academic papers in appearance, they have an obvious agenda and a close examination bears this out.  No good scholar would cite any of this research.  For example, the original cited article I spoke of was a report issued by the Center for American Progress titled, Supporting Effective Teaching Through Teacher Evaluation: A Study of Teacher Evaluation in Five Charter Schools.  The article, supportive of stricter teacher evaluations and firing practices, a type of reform popularly touted as key to closing the achievement gap among schools, cited the "report" as evidence of the efficacy of this approach in fundamentally changing education. 

Politically, the neoliberal Center for American Progress (along with Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan) has embraced the notion that accountability, standards, charters and testing are the key reforms needed to close the achievement gap - which is universally agreed as being profound.  The implicit assumption behind this view is that what is standing in the way of progress is poor teachers and the unions that protect them.  One would expect then, that any CAP study would seek to provide evidence that reinforces this narrative.  If evidence is found that does not support the preconception, it is not allowed.  This is evident in the fact that 100% of think tank publications fall strictly in line with the organization's philosophy.  This means either that data is thrown out, or that so-called research is designed in such a way that unwanted results are never found to being with.

This was certainly the case in the report I looked at.  The goal of the study was to show how charter schools performed better effectively used teacher evaluation data to improve student performance, often by circumventing union protections.  But the study began by choosing charter schools that were already effective.  While the reported differences in evaluation procedures were assumed to be different than in public schools which, it was again assumed, were limited by union protections, there was no evidence offered to support or deny this claim.  It could very well be the case that most charter schools have ineffective evaluation systems, or that most public schools have just as effective evaluation systems.  I doubt this is the case, but you wouldn't know either way from the report.  It could also be the case that what these schools were doing to increase student achievement had little to do with their evaluations.  But again, you could not tell from the report. 

In a truly academic study, these variables would need to be be addressed for the study to be taken seriously.  But the purpose of academic study is to find objective, peer-reviewed truth.  The purpose of think tank studies is to support the organization's stated philosophical agenda.  The word for this is propaganda.  When representatives of think tanks are cited by the media, they need to be understood in these terms.  Just as studies from an oil company should not be cited in news reports, as their intent is entirely dubious, or industry spokespeople should be understood not as objective authorities but as in service to a particular agenda, so too must think tank resources. 

While their contribution to debate should be welcome - after all, their purpose is to make as good a case for their side as possible, they must under no circumstances be treated as objective, or necessarily intellectually honest.  When journalists are presenting them in this light, or citing their "research" as authoritative, they are not doing their job.  In these politically-charged, partisan and highly polarized times, it is more important than ever to get quality, objective information.  While words are relative, the truth is not.

Technological Relativism

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber sums up what is likely a widely shared response to the flurry of recent commentary on what effect the internet is having on the ways we think about the world.

 I can’t help imagining some grouchy old-timer saying something like “Damn cave paintings. In my day, we told stories about the sacred mammoth hunt, and you really had to use your imagination. Kids these days just want to stare at a wall all night. No wonder they can’t throw a spear straight”.

The NY Times is asking what technology is doing to us, especially all these gadgets.

It isn't new.  Last year Wired made the bold claim that Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains.  What really got this ball rolling seems to be credited to Nick Carr's 2008 piece in the Atlantic, in which he asked, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.

To those familiar with the historical development of just about any new technology, fears about what each new step might be bringing are nothing new.  As Quiggin notes, new technology brings with it new ways of doing things - and this inevitably means losing old ones.  The trick is in assessing the cost/benefit ratio.  However, because there is no way of knowing what the future really holds, attempts to prognosticate will always suffer - whether resulting in pessimism or optimism; we just don't know.

I'm reminded of James Burke's classic television series Connections.  Here's the implications of the thermos flask:


So, obviously this doesn't mean we can't make informed predictions, or notice changes in society that are occurring around us.  It simply suggests that there are often unforeseen consequences of technological innovation, and that we ought to be very careful not to get ahead of ourselves.

A commenter at Crooked Timber writes:

Socrates also IIRC was cranky about those young whippersnappers who think they can understand something by reading it, instead of memorizing it and actually holding in their heads where understanding happens. And if you base your knowledge on what you read, then of course you can flit from book to book, without the true discipline and concentration needed to study in an oral tradition.

Socrates was right, of course. If wisdom is based on what is in your head, then reading is pseudo-wisdom, a cheat. I prefer to think of it as off-site storage, and that reading is a way to access lots of information and ideas without having to keep them on-site. The Internet does the exact same thing, but it pumps the process up another couple of orders of magnitude.

I used to say that Aristotle was undoubtably smarter than I, but I plus the Columbia Encyclopedia know more than Aristotle. Today, I plus Wikipedia know way more than that, but the essential process is the same.
If you want to talk about how the Internet is changing the way we think, first look at how literacy changed the way people think.

I think that is well-put.  I’d also add that when reading a book you’re also stuck in that author’s head. Now, this may be a marvelous place to be. But it can also be insidious. I’m thinking of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages develop false feelings of fealty towards their captors. One of the most marvelous aspects of reading the classics is the availability of annotation.


I’ve yet to read a book on one of these new-fangled e-readers, but the addition of subtle hyper-linking might be interesting. But then of course, if they’re created by the author you’re still in his grip. Maybe one day we’ll have open-sourced editions, whereby anyone can publish their own hyper-link annotations for a particular work.

In the meantime, having the computer handy is often just a brilliant reference tool. For instance, right now I’m reading Donald Worster’s biography of John Muir (which is excellent, by the way... and come to think of it, quite ironic) and I’ve popped over to Wikipedia more than once.  I won't try to argue that the internet hasn't had a profound impact on the way we engage with media.  But I think it is still much too early to say whether the bad outweighs the good, or that shifting attention spans is necessarily a bad thing.

Finally, and I feel guilty for waiting until the end to say this, but I'm afraid that, in the interest of full-disclosure, I must admit to having always had a horrifically short attention span.  When Carr describes the uncomfortable feeling he gets as he realizes that becoming immersed in a novel is no longer as easy at is might have once been, my first thought is, "Welcome to Super Vidoqo's world."  I realize that my own anecdotal experience may actually be clinical.  But I know I've never been alone.  And for those of us out here in la-la land, the internet presents a way to engage with media in a way that is certainly more satisfying, if not a net gain in intellectual development.  Maybe it will turn out for the worse.  But I, for one, am enjoying the ride.

The Inherent Immorality of Health Insurance (cont.)

A Media Matters video is making the rounds that demonstrates the absurd levels of dishonesty that some pundits are willing to go to to advance their ideological agenda.  In it, Bill O'Reilly claims to have found no evidence that his FOX co-workers ever promoted the idea that people will be jailed if they don't buy health insurance - even offering that they had "researched" the matter.  A long succession of clips are then shown of them saying exactly that, culminating with O'Reilly himself.  Crazily enough, O'Reilly is generally considered to be one of the more reasonable FOX pundits.



The really crazy thing, however, is how willing Americans are to go along with the idea that paying over $10,000 a year for health insurance (if you can get it) is something to be happy about. That's an absurd percentage of income - for a middle class family, it's over 10%!


If it were looked as a tax, the expenditure would not only be huge, but very regressive. People struggling to get by would be paying through the nose while those with higher incomes would pay a very small share.

The argument for a private system is of course that it offers higher quality care. From an outcomes standpoint that is irrefutably false. There may be some merit to claims it is more convenient. But that is debatable.
In the end, fighting to pay twice as much for similar care that (until the AHCA) millions were locked out of, and is horribly regressive in cost, is quite a pathetic portrait of ideological pathology.

A Republic of Disinterest

Kevin Drum has some thoughts on the radio listening habits of conservatives and liberals.  He points to an article showing how NPR has been enormously successful in the past decade.

NPR's listenership has nearly doubled since 1999, even as newspaper circulation dropped off a cliff. Its programming now reaches 26.4 million listeners weekly — far more than USA Today's 2.3 million daily circ or Fox News' 2.8 million prime-time audience. When newspapers were closing bureaus, NPR was opening them, and now runs 38 around the world, better than CNN. It has 860 member stations — "boots on the ground in every town" that no newspaper or TV network can claim.

He writes that it basically comes down to taste.

A common question on the left is, "Why is there no liberal talk radio?" That is, no wildly popular liberal version of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Laura Schlesinger. And the answer is: there is. It's called NPR. When lefties listen to the radio, that's what they listen to.

Noticeable absent is figures for Rush Limbaugh's audience.  Clearly the largest conservative draw on radio, the Washington Post puts him at somewhere around 14 million.  What's interesting is that if you combine the numbers for your average conservative and liberal audiences, you're still at under 50 million.

Yet according to the US Census Bureau, about 131 people voted in in the 2008 presidential election.

So the question appears to be: where are people getting their news?  My hunch is that most people aren't all that interested in news.  They have opinions, but they're largely based on vague ideological narratives that thrive in an environment devoid of factual information.  Because they are already uninterested in politics or political philosophy, actively listening to the news would require a critical analysis that would then require more even more listening. 

Modern political philosophy is complex - involving numerous competing premises.  The more one learns, the more one finds out one doesn't know.  And not knowing is uncomfortable, especially if you possess no natural curiosity to begin with.  So the easiest thing to do would be to forget the whole thing entirely.  This sort of political carelessness makes for a much more conciliatory and socially lubricious attitude.  Conflict is kept to a minimum, and happiness ensues.

Interestingly, this dynamic can also apply those who do, for some reason, have an interest in politics.  These people actively consume media, and engage in subsequent discussion with others.  However, the problem remains that political philosophy still rests on a complicated set of premises.  In order to take a particular position on the political spectrum, one must have confidence in their choice. 

It seems this can happen in one of two ways: either one has done the heavy lifting of understanding the array of premises across the spectrum, from which they rationally choose their own opinion, or they simply hew dogmatically to one perspective, and avoid contact with views that might cast doubt on the correctness of their choice.  The former model requires both perseverance and critical thinking.  As the time is taken to digest the entire spectrum of premises upon which competing political philosophies are built, one must also possess the capacity for self-reflection and evaluation, as new information will no doubt present dissonant challenges to one's accepted truths.

The latter model is much easier, and a better fit for those who do not wish to invest the required political intellectual rigor.  There could be any number of reasons for this.  Perhaps they aren't that interested in politics, or intellectualism in general.  Maybe they have difficulty accepting the self-criticism required to properly digest inevitable cognitive dissonance.  Maybe they have strong cultural traditions that dissuade them from making the tough choices that critical reasoning often requires.  In the end though, they will no doubt tend to be much more dogmatic and partisan, as their lack of broad political knowledge puts them at a disadvantage when faced with the prospect of leaving their narrow, scripted narrative.

All of this seems to point towards a depressing portrait of democracy.  A relatively informed electorate is the fundamental premise under-girding its viability as a political ideal.  Yet even if we were to some how get every citizen to some basic level of political and social education, the intellectual work required to grapple with important issues in a serious way seems something only a small minority of voters will ever be capable of performing.  This elite class of individual with have an extraordinarily outsized influence over the rest.

Currently, if we are to assume that barely half of voters consume news media on a regular basis, and of that group, maybe half still are operating from a non-dogmatic, non-partisan perspective in which new information is critically consumed and old premises are challenged, we're down to a quarter of the voting public.  That's about 13 million people, on the left and right who engage the issues with patient and determined objectivity.  There are about 218 million adults in the US.  That's 1 in 4 voters, and about 1 in 16 people.


Now, that may be all it takes to effectively drive public thought.  But I doubt it.  How much influence do these people really have.  Of the 3 in 4 voters, how many are really paying attention - as driven by partisan dogma as they are?  The grim reality is that politics is fumbling blindly forth, with no rational direction.  Is it any wonder then, that so many are outraged by colossal nature of our failings?  This despite the hypocrisy of having no one to blame but ourselves. 

In the end, the question seems to be how we manage to do as well as we do.  Within that small elite of individuals who truly possess the capacity to drive serious discussion, there does exist robust debate.  And our literature is filled with examples of wonderful political thought.  As long as this process is allowed to continue - and in the modern world it thankfully has been enshrined as a human right, we will no doubt continue to prosper.  Yet to the extent that people are not engaged in a serious way in the issues that they vote on, they present an obstacle to progress.