An ongoing review of politics and culture

In Which I Dare The Corner To Publish Quotes From Popular Conservatives

Arguments that the liberal community is less prone to reckless speech, or has far less tolerance for those within it who use violent imagery and language than does the Right, are unconvincing. I don’t remember a Krugman column or a Sen. Patrick Leahy speech on the toxic Nicholson Baker novel, the Gabriel Range Bush assassination docudrama, the Chris Matthews CO2-pellet-in-the-face/blowing-up-of-the-“blimp” comments about Rush Limbaugh, the “I hate George Bush” embarrassment at The New Republic, Michael Moore’s preference for a red-state target on 9/11, or the Hitlerian/brownshirt accusations voiced by the likes of Al Gore, John Glenn, Robert Byrd, George Soros, and so on. So why the disconnect? Politics for sure, but I think also the double standard has something to do with style, venue, and perceived class.

If a progressive imagines killing George Bush in a tony Knopf novel or a Toronto film festival documentary, or rambles on about why he finds his president an object of hatred in a New Republic essay, or muses in the Guardian (cf. Charles Brooker: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”), then we must certainly contextualize that hatred in a way that we do not in the crasser genres of commercial-laden talk radio, or an open-air demonstration placard. The novelist, the film-maker, the high-brow columnist, the professor can all dabble in haute couture calumny (cf. Garrison Keeler’s “brownshirts in pinstripes”); the degree-less, up-from-the-bootstraps Beck, Hannity, or Limbaugh behind a mike cannot. What is at the most atypical, out of character, or in slightly bad taste for the former must be a window into the dark soul of the latter.

— Victor Davis Hanson

There is something to this – many of the people VDH name-checks have uttered indefensible remarks, and maybe the veneer of respectability has helped some of them to obscure how flawed their words were. But I wonder if he would wager with me in the interest of testing his larger claim about who is more prone to rhetorical excess, the mainstream right or the mainstream left.

Rush Limbaugh began broadcasting to a large national audience in the early 1990s. So let’s go back 20 years to 1991 for the sake of simplicity. In the bet, Victor Davis Hanson can draw on every word spoken or written by all the people above that he mentions unfavorably: Paul Krugman, Nicholas Baker, Chris Matthews, Michael Moore, Al Gore, John Glenn, Garrison Keeler, Robert Byrd, Jonathan Chait and George Soros. In return, I will draw only on the words of Rush Limbaugh, the most popular conservative entertainer in America for much of the last two decades, recent national phenom Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin, the bestselling author, popular radio host, and sometimes colleague of VDH at National Review. (Even I can’t bear listening to Sean Hannity. Sorry.)

That’s ten people for him and three people for me – and mine are all very popular among the rank-and-file of movement conservatism. We’ll try to match one another, example of rhetorical excess for example of rhetorical excess. And the loser – the one who runs out of examples first – can donate $500 to the charity of the winner’s choice.

(Does anyone think I would lose?)

I’ll explain to you why this bet appeals to me, and why VDH will never agree to it. In truth, I don’t care whether the right or the left is more culpable on this issue: the point is that the guilty parties on both sides of the ideological divide should stop it, unilaterally if need be, even if the other side is worse. And as I explained in my last post, I wish everyone would start focusing on substance more than tone. But I can’t possibly lose this bet, even if VDH improbably finds more examples, because I have no problem acknowledging indefensible rhetoric on the left when I see it, or asserting that Paul Krugman (or his wife?) is sometimes a blowhard who makes claims un-befitting a person of intelligence, or affirming that Michael Moore’s documentary work is riddled with mean-spirited errors, etc.

Whereas Victor Davis Hanson has never forthrightly acknowledged the rhetorical excesses and inaccuracies of Limbaugh, Beck, or Levin. And if by some miracle he fully confronted what they’ve said over the years –– or even affirmed the disgusting words they’ve uttered by publishing a blog post at The Corner filled with nothing but direct quotations of their words! –– it would be a powerful moment on the right, because no one of his stature has ever so much as acknowledged the full extent of what is said on the conservative movement’s most popular talk radio programs.

So do we have a bet, VDH? I’m game. And if you’re not –– if you’re pressed for time, or if you’ve an objection to dealing with me for some reason –– here’s an alternative idea. Folks on the right think leftists don’t confront the indefensible speech uttered by their side. And vice-versa.

So why don’t the folks at The Corner enter into a bargain with a prominent blogger on the left. What do you say, Matt Yglesias or Kevin Drum or Jonathan Chait? Here’s how it would work. Every day for a week, Monday through Friday, The Corner’s designated blogger could draft one post for publication on the left-leaning blog. The catch? They’d be limited to offering five direct quotations per day of lefties engaged in indefensible rhetoric, however they define it (in context, of course).

In return, the liberal interlocutor could publish the equivalent post at The Corner. And every day for a week, the participants would have to read one another’s five examples for that day, and decide whether to acknowledge that they’re indefensible and assert that the source should apologize if he or she hasn’t done so… or else defend the remark(s).

Maybe I’m wrong. But I suspect that Yglesias, Drum, and Chait would all be game for this sort of exchange. And that it wouldn’t be approved at The Corner in a million years.

Why do you think that is?

(Or am I wrong?)

The Advertising Platform To Save Content Providers?

Okay, I’m probably missing something. But here ‘goes.

The great challenge for content-generators (writers, particularly) in an age of free digital reproduction is: how does anybody get paid?

The answer, typically, is: by attracting eyeballs that can be delivered advertising content along with the desired content.

This gives all power to the content aggregators – small fry like Andrew Sullivan, who have an audience that they feed content that is mostly produced by others (and mostly not paid for), but much more so great white sharks like Google’s search engine, which is the mother of all aggregators.

Content-generation becomes organized around feeding these aggregators, in the hopes of attracting eyeballs. But unless a regular stream of eyeballs is attracted this way, there’s still no way to generate income for the downstream content generator.

What you need is a micropayment mechanism, whereby downstream content generators get a tiny amount of money per eyeball for the eyeballs directed their way, in recognition of the fact that their content was the plankton, if you will, on which the great white sharks at the top of the food chain ultimately depend. But even if you had such a mechanism, why would the great white sharks agree? How do the downstream content generators get the leverage to force some kind of sharing agreement?

One sometimes-suggested solution would be to create an advertising platform that is content-independent. Ads would be delivered based on personal profile information that would be augmented by knowledge of browsing and search history. But there are two problems with this: first, how many people would consent to create such a profile (what’s in it for them?); second, how does this browser-based ad platform give any greater leverage to downstream content providers? Wouldn’t it, in fact, reduce their leverage?

Well, here’s one thought. Advertisers don’t like to compete with each other. A browser-based, profile-based ad platform would be more successful if it were an exclusive platform – if it made arrangements with websites to share revenue in exchange for disabling any other ad-delivery mechanisms that they had going when their “viewers” tuned in.

Instead of serving up whatever ad content Hulu or Salon or whatever want to serve up, the browser-based ad platform would take over and serve up something more tailored to your specific profile. And, in exchange for no longer competing with these other ad platforms, the browser-based ad platform would share revenue with the content site.

That creates an incentive for people to sign up with the platform – yes, you’re getting ads when sometimes in other circumstances you wouldn’t – but you’re also obliterating ads that, in other circumstances, you’d be stuck getting. And, all things being equal, you’re getting “better” ads – ads that fit your profile better.

Sure, lots of people still won’t sign up for privacy reasons. But probably most people won’t be deterred by privacy concerns. They rarely are when there is actually something in it for them. Which, in this case, there is. (You could even imagine a revenue-share of some kind for the recipient of the ads – something dependent on click-through purchases, presumably, but whatever.)

The heavy negotiation would be between content-providers with substantial ad revenue and the browser-based ad platform. But once that structure was in place, it would be logically extensible to content-providers generally. Not necessarily on identical terms, but the browser-based ad platform would have a reason to sign a contract with even marginal content-providers: they would need access to their code to assure their ads were disabled when browser-based-ad-platform-subscribers visited. Which would give even marginal content providers some marginal leverage to get the bargain-basement contract for downstreaming revenue.

The main people who would appear to be threatened, if such a mechanism really got off the ground, would be the content-aggregators themselves, particularly the search engines, who would for that reason be unlikely to sign any agreement with the browser-based ad platform. But Google ads are (a) relatively unobtrusive; (b) not designed to “distract” from content – rather, they are intended to be a form of content, to be relevant “answers” to search queries. As such, they aren’t really a competing platform. People don’t “hang out” at search engines distracted by the ads. So it’s not actually obvious that there’s any competition there. The competition would be with platforms that sell ads directly on websites. But what the existence of such a platform would do is free content-providers from their dependence on search engines for audience. They would be free to pursue an audience by more traditional means – directly, and via aggregators who are “taste-makers” (like Andrew Sullivan) rather than automated search functions – and would now have some basis for generating revenue from such activities. I suspect such revenue would continue to be very, very small for nearly all websites. But there is an enormous difference between small and zero. Add a lot of small numbers together and you just might get something. Zero never adds up to anything.

Ultimately, nobody gets paid unless somebody visits, to view or read. Content has to attract eyeballs, or there’s nothing to monetize. The question is first, how to capture whatever value is associated with that viewing/reading time, and, second, how to create a mechanism that would justify downstreaming some of that value-capture to the actual content provider. I think the mechanism I’ve outlined could do both things.

Anybody out there know if this idea is even technically feasible?

The New York Times' Phony Balance on Death Panels, Or When Can We Stop Quoting Wingnuts?

On December 26, the New York Times reported that the end-of-life consultations stripped from the health care law (and infamously dubbed “death panels“ by everyone’s favorite Alaskan reality-TV star) are being pushed forward through Medicare regulations:

When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

The story goes on to explain the regulation and Medicare’s justifications thereof, which draw on research from the British Medical Journal and the University of Colorado School of Medicine. As I understand, the goal of end-of-life consultations has always been to give aging people control over their future health care. Since many would rather not have their life prolonged by expensive medical treatment, particularly if they are in poor health, they can say so in advance and save the colossal medical costs that such life-prolonging procedures incur. The Medicare officials, according to the Times‘ reporting, are operating on the consensus of health care experts, who believe such consultations enhance the humanity of end-of-life care. (They also spare grieving family members the wrenching decision of when to “pull the plug.”)

So far so good. Then this:

Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, which describes itself as “a pro-life Christian educational ministry,” said she was concerned that end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death.

“The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Ms. Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”

Here is another unfortunate instance of the Times throwing in a social conservative to maintain “balance.” Look through the paper’s archives and you’re sure to find dozens of iterations of this formula, on issues ranging from abortion to women’s health to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. After the story lays out the expert or scientific consensus and the generally agreed-upon facts, a random social conservative—often one without any credentials on the issue or with a trail of insane statements to their name—will be trotted out to dispute them. (A prime example is Elaine Donnelly, who has been quoted prominently in several Times stories on DADT. Donnelly operates the right-wing Center for Military Readiness and argued that repealing would DADT would lead to “forcible sodomy“ and the spread of HIV in the military.)

Who is Elizabeth D. Wickham, anyway? A quick Google reveals she has a Ph.D. in…mathematical economics and international trade theory! She and her husband co-founded LifeTree, a local anti-abortion group in North Carolina. Its website is full of conspiratorial language like “culture of death,” and attributes said culture of death to things like “the concept of hospice” and “bioethics centers.” Even in her longer, written opposition to Section 1233, the “death panels” portion of the original health care bill, Wickham has simply smeared end-of-life consultations by associating them with assisted-suicide advocate Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). She has not attempted to explain how this measure will lead to the apocalyptic circumstances she constantly conjures.

This is enough, in my opinion, to cast significant doubt on her ability to give an opinion on this issue that serious readers should heed. She has no academic credentials in health care or bioethics and is disputing reputable experts without providing any facts or research. From a purely political standpoint, she is not a leader of religious conservatives, and has not, that we are told, been deployed by the provision’s political opposition. So how does quoting Ms. Wickham help Times readers understand this issue?

Even worse, it’s fairly simple to determine that Ms. Wickham is wrong about end-of-life consultations. Based on everything I read during the health care debate and since, these consultations are a humane and necessary part of health care reform, and the “death panels” logic is damnably false. Contra Ms. Wickham, there is no reason to believe voluntary consultations will result in patients “losing the ability to control treatments,” or that the legislators who supported the measure want to impose euthanasia and rationing on the country. So in effect, the country’s newspaper of record has given a no-name religious activist space to lie about a matter of public policy in which she has no apparent expertise. The Times has met its requirement to break the issue down into binary “sides,” but we’ve been subjected to the misleading spin of an ideologue.

My point here is not, of course, that dissenting or conservative viewpoints should be banned from the New York Times. In fact, this sort of drive-by citation of ideologues does a disservice both to conservatives when they actually have legitimate points and to readers who want to consider alternate perspectives. Wickham’s quote was transparently included just to establish “balance,” and readers are left without any clear idea of whether there is reason to doubt the consensus view. If there is serious disagreement, the reporter should find a credible source and thoroughly explain his or her position. If a prominent Republican or conservative leader vowed to fight the measure, then make note of it. But if there is no serious opposition, or if the serious opposition is dealing in paranoid cant, then I’d love to read a newspaper with the balls to say so.

Taking Her Seriously

In light of Matthew Continetti’s latest blog post about Sarah Palin, her presidential aspirations, and the media’s treatment of those subjects, I’d like to reiterate a question I posed but that he never answered: Do you, Matthew Continetti, think that Sarah Palin is qualified to be President of the United States?

And why not add a few more specific inquiries while we’re at it. Would you be comfortable with Sarah Palin as Commander In Chief of the United States Armed Forces? What do you regard as the most insightful direct quotation she has ever uttered? In the whole of her time in public life what is her most impressive policy achievement? During a foreign policy crisis, is she the Republican you’d most trust to lead the country? Is she in the top five? The top ten? The top twenty? If you were the owner of five Applebee’s restaurants in California’s Inland Empire, would you trust the managerial capacity of Sarah Palin enough to put them in her care while you took an extended vacation abroad? We know how seriously you take Sarah Palin as a candidate. How seriously do you take her as a policymaker? A diplomat? A responsible steward of civil liberties? An interviewee in foreign media outlets where she is the face of America? Pending a response, I’ll continue to find it telling that Sarah Palin’s most prolific defender in the American media has no answer for these questions.

Is Charitableness Desirable In Public Argument Always Or Just Usually?

Certain writers for whom I have the utmost respect, like James Fallows, Eugene Volokh, and Reihan Salam, manage to forcefully argue various matters even as they treat their interlocutors perfectly charitably. It’s a trait that always impresses me. On more than one occasion, I’ve cited the wisdom in the examples they set to young writers who’ve sought out my advice. In my own writing, I try hard to presume good faith in those with whom I disagree. When I succeed it typically strengthens the quality of my work; after failing I often regret it.

What I wonder is whether this approach to public discourse is prudent to adopt as a general rule. I want to think so. It’s nice to have a reliable standard to apply, even when living up to it is difficult. But I have my doubts. Take the theory Dinesh D’Souza is putting forth about The Roots of Obama’s Rage, as he titled the book length version. Were I to write an honest assessment of his argument, it would be no less scathing than the responses by Heather Mac Donald and Andrew Ferguson. I can’t help but cheer their essays. Would it be possible to make all the same substantive points while being more charitable toward the author? I actually don’t know… but assume so for the sake of argument.

Even given that hypothetical, how are we to respond to the letter Mr. D’Souza sent to The Weekly Standard in response to the Ferguson review? Here is the most egregious passage:

I cannot recall a more dishonest review in recent times, and would not have expected it of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. My friends tell me I should not worry about Ferguson’s Lilliputian arrows. This book is my sixth New York Times bestseller and my biggest book yet. The book’s impact can be gauged from the intensity of White House attacks on it, and also from the indignation of liberals from Maureen Dowd to Jonathan Alter to Keith Olbermann. Leading conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Steve Forbes, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich have lavishly praised the book. Interestingly, however, Gingrich’s remark that The Roots of Obama’s Rage is “the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama” seems to have rankled some lesser pundits on the right. What does Gingrich’s comment say about what they have been writing about Obama all this time? The implication is that these scribblers have completely missed the boat! Here we may have a clue to the roots of Ferguson’s rage.

In situations like these, I can’t help but think that the rule about subjecting the words of interlocutors to the most charitable interpretation possible fails. It’s possible that D’Souza lacks the critical distance or intellectual capacity to see that his theory is full of obvious, gaping holes, even subsequent to their being pointed out in venues across the ideological spectrum. Or maybe he sees them after the fact, but is too prideful to admit them? Alternatively, it’s possible that he’s a charlatan who knowingly wrote a hack book, but is so immoral, intellectually dishonest and ballsy that he’s nevertheless attacking his critics in uncharitable, self-righteous language.

I’m sure there are other theories that could explain his recent output, but I can’t think of any that don’t reflect very poorly on its author one way or another. Is it worse to innocently produce stunningly shoddy work in one’s professional area of expertise, or to cannily produce a dishonest product that earns you a lot of money? Judging by my own moral code, I’d say the latter is much worse, but some in the world of ideological book publishing clearly subscribe to a different system of ethics than I do. Were I trying to be a charitable reviewer, would I presume the motivation that I find least repugnant? What if my subject’s code is different than mine? Isn’t a journalist actually bound to follow the evidence in assessing what motivates an author? Or is it improper to even try because we can’t ever know for certain?

I don’t have answers to these questions, I sometimes wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to stop writing entirely about subjects that raise them; and other times I provisionally conclude, with fleeting conviction and in worse moments a bit of sanctimony, that it’s important for some people to subject the shoddiest journalists to critical scrutiny — even while giving thanks that lots of people ignore them, and spend their time on worthier subjects. Does it make sense that I’d pay money to stop the authors I mentioned at the beginning of this post to refrain from tilting at my windmill of choice, Mark Levin, even though I’ve clearly deemed it worthwhile to hold forth on the subject, and think that it was a good thing for Jim Manzi, another writer I admire, to issue his own scathing critique?

I can’t articulate a general standard that makes sense here, nor am I entirely clear on how I might improve what I’m sure are my flawed methods for engaging in this project.

What I can explain is how I react when I read sentences like this one:

My friends tell me I should not worry about Ferguson’s Lilliputian arrows. This book is my sixth New York Times bestseller and my biggest book yet.

Were political authors truly freed from worrying about anything but the market performance of their books, we’d be a lot worse off, not because the reading public is stupid, but because they’ve got jobs and lives that don’t allow the vast majority to make informed decisions about the titles they buy (a situation made worse by the fact that a lot of the people and institutions they imprudently trust are more than willing to tout books based on metrics other than intellectual honesty, accuracy, and overall quality).

It’s forthright reviewers like Andrew Ferguson, intellectually honest writers like Heather Mac Donald, and insofar as I succeed in this project, bloggers like me who make possible something that the ideological book market alone doesn’t: the possibility than an author who sells lots of copies, but falls below some minimal standard of quality, will be publicly embarrassed among his peers, and denied the respect of thinking people. Very few humans — even the worst sell-outs or least talented hacks — are fond of facing the rightful consequences of their defective output. Culpable along with substandard authors are the people who know damn well the poor quality of their work, but are complicit in investing their books with the veneer of respectability, whether because they are ideological allies or else fellow participants in the partly corrupt business of ideological book-selling. The sorry state of political non-fiction is on their conscience.

These are the most charitable words I can honestly offer on this subject, and although I’ve done my best, as always, to hit all the right notes, I can’t help but simultaneously worry that I’ve been too harsh and not harsh enough. I’d actually love to see a round table discussion on charitableness in public discourse that included Fallows, Salam, Volokh, Mac Donald, Ferguson, Michael Lewis, Katie Roiphe, Mark Oppenheimer, Jay Rosen, Christopher Hitchens, Bob Wright, Michael Kinsley, Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Chait, and Ta-Nehisis Coates. Damn. Is that too many people? But I can’t bear to cut any of them.

It Ain't About News Versus Opinion

Scanning his story archive, I see that New York Times reporter Brian Stelter has done a fair amount of writing about the news media. For that reason, it’s particularly surprising that his piece on the firing of Juan Williams is rife with confused analysis that is strangely common among newspaper journalists, but obviously wrong to most of us who’ve spent lots of time thinking these issues through.

Here are his opening paragraphs, where his questionable frame is introduced:

NPR’s decision on Wednesday to fire Juan Williams and Fox News Channel’s decision on Thursday to give him a new contract put into sharp relief the two forms of journalism that compete every day for Americans’ attention.

Mr. Williams’ NPR contract was terminated two days after he said on an opinionated segment on Fox News that he worried when he saw people in “Muslim garb” on an airplane. He later said that he was reflecting his fears after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks nine years ago.

After dismissing Mr. Williams, who was one of its senior news analysts, NPR argued that he had violated the organization’s belief in impartiality, a core tenet of modern American journalism. By renewing Mr. Williams’s contract, Fox News showed its preference for point-of-view — rather than the view-from-nowhere — polemics. And it gave Fox news anchors and commentators an opportunity to jab NPR, the public radio organization that had long been a target of conservatives for what they perceived to be a liberal bias.

Those competing views of journalism have been highlighted by the success of Fox and MSNBC and the popularity of opinion media that beckons some traditional journalists. That Mr. Williams was employed by both Fox and NPR had been a source of consternation in the past.

Note all the problems with this analysis. First off, there are a lot more than two forms of journalism competing for the attention of Americans. Second, the difference between NPR and Fox News isn’t that the former offers “the view from nowhere” while the latter prefers polemical points of view — and although I think that it’s impossible to actually find the view from nowhere in American media that isn’t even all I mean here. It would be one thing to say that the Associated Press of old, with its ideal of straight news reporting, represents one style of news coverage, whereas Fox News with its opinionated delivery represents another.

But NPR and Fox News are actually similar in some of the ways that Mr. Stetler says they’re different. Both media organizations broadcast a mix of coverage, some of which is labeled news and other coverage it labels opinion. At both places, the line between these two styles of broadcast are a lot muddier than management likes to acknowledge. The business models of both organizations depend on catering to the sensibilities of people with a certain world view. And I am not just talking about ideology when I say that.

Despite identifying as a right-leaning independent with conservative and libertarian sympathies, NPR is much more my style than is Fox News. Sometimes when I listen to the radio network, I’m attune to the ideologically liberal assumptions that inform its coverage. But more than a political ideology, I’d say NPR’s sensibility is informed by a sort of urban cosmopolitanism and a commitment to airing a diversity of viewpoints — a commitment that is certainly executed imperfectly at times, but that is nevertheless noticeable in the coverage that is presented. I also think there are people doing reporting at NPR who try their best to give facts without bias, and believe that’s what their superiors want them to do. There are times when I think NPR coverage doesn’t do justice to conservative insights, but there are other times when I think they’ve done their best to present strong arguments with which a majority of their audience will disagree.

Fox News is motivated not by a general preference for point of view polemics — it isn’t a network likely to hire Glenn Greenwald, an opinionated polemicist with a large fan base, to deliver analysis. Rather, its general preference is for news and opinion material that appeals to Red America. How is this different from NPR’s general preference for content that appeals to Blue America? Well it isn’t entirely different — like I said, it’s wrong to pretend that these media outlets neatly represent two competing styles of American journalism — but I think if you asked the average NPR listener if they want to hear and understand the strongest arguments contrary to the liberal consensus, they’d say yes (how they’d react if they were given that wish is another matter).

Whereas if you asked the average Fox News audience member if they want to hear and understand the strongest liberal arguments on that network, many would say, “We’re already awash in the opinions of the liberals of the mainstream media, which controls everything but Fox News and Rush. Why should we give liberals an outlet on the one network that is for us?” At its core Fox News is presented as an alternative to the MSM, a project that only makes sense operating in opposition to the cultural landscape that surrounds it. NPR is presented as a mainstream media organization that makes sense independent of the cultural landscape that surrounds it (even if that may actually be impossible).

Once you understand this, it’s easier to grasp why it wouldn’t be at all surprising to hear Will Wilkinson on NPR making a forceful, sophisticated argument for the free market… whereas it would be shocking if an intelligent liberal were given a commensurate shot at making a forceful argument on Fox News. The exception is someone like Christopher Hitchens, who might be put on a shout fest show and by sheer determination slip in a good lefty point, before reassuring the audience that he too is threatened by Islamic terrorism. But the typical liberal invited to appear on Fox is Alan Colmes, who for a long time served as the Washington Generals every night for Sean Hannity. If you have a network where Hannity regularly comes off as the more learned, persuasive interlocutor, you’re not trying very hard to give your audience an accurate view of the world.

Let’s return to the NY Times article, having skipped down a bit:

Like many other news organizations, NPR expects its journalists to avoid situations that might call its impartiality into question — an expectation written into the organization’s ethics code.

That expectation can erode under television lights and on Twitter. At outlets like NPR, some journalists have found it difficult to not share their opinions, especially when they are speaking in forums that lend themselves to commentary, like “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, called the Williams case an “object lesson in how different news organizations have different values.” She said the ethics guidelines at many news organizations matched those at NPR.

“If you make some outlandish statement on your Facebook page or at a public event somewhere, you are still representing your newsroom,” she said. “So there are consequences to that.”

What bothers me about NPR and the way it’s handled this is the fiction that Juan Williams was fired merely because his impartiality was compromised — as if the higher ups there would’ve minded if he went on cable television to insist that the mosque and community center near Ground Zero would send a desirable signal of American tolerance to the Muslim world, for example. An NPR contributor can safely express lots of opinions without getting fired. I’d have a lot more respect for NPR if it said, “The NPR audience has certain values and sensitivities, and the particular viewpoints Juan Williams expressed transgressed upon those sensitivities. It therefore made it much more difficult for us to present him as a cohesive part of our brand, so we’re firing him.”

The problem is that NPR wants to preserve the illusion that open-mindedness and a diversity of viewpoints is its brand. Again, I think that NPR does this better than a lot of media organizations, and certainly better than Fox News. I can only laugh at Williams when he says…

This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff…

…and then proceeds to sign a 2 million dollar contract at a place where there is much less diversity of opinion. But if NPR were being honest, it would fess up that diversity of opinion is a competing value, and in its view a less important one than making sure it doesn’t transgress against the multicultural sensitivities of its staff and largely liberal audience.

Here’s the rest of Mr. Williams quote:

This is evidence of one-party rule and one-sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought.

Let’s be honest: that kind of rhetoric is a much better fit at Fox than NPR, so in the end everything has worked out.

(I’ve written about other aspects of the Juan Williams controversy here and here.)

UPDATE: See James Fallows here for an eloquent defense of NPR as a whole that I’d like to associate myself with.

Bloggers That Deserve A Wider Readership

Who are they?

I’d like to highlight them, and I trust the readership of The American Scene is always looking for new sites to read.

TAS Writing Assignments

The American Scene is an awesome place and thanks to Ross and Reihan we’ve managed to put together some of the smartest minds on the internet (and, well, me). Unfortunately, precisely because of the awesomeness of the Scenesters, most of us have outside gigs (guilty!) that prevent us from writing here as often as we would like.

But there’s stuff from us that I’d love to read!

So I’ve decided to just hand out writing assignments. Watch out, they will be graded and will be on your permanent record.

Ross: A book. What would a truly pro-life, modern society look like? Pro-lifers rightly make the case against abortion but I think it would be very useful to also make the case for what a pro-life society would and should look like. I also happen to believe that many “pro-life” politicians delude themselves about what true pro-life policies would entail. It would not simply entail outlawing abortion.

It would entail a massive public/private network of support for women who have unwanted pregnancies. A truly pro-_life_ society would also have different policies and attitudes toward end of life care. Ross is the writer who’s been one of the most lucid in hinting about this stuff in various interviews and blog posts, but I think we need an in-depth look at what, looking over the abortion law hill, true pro-life policies would be. It seems to me that Ross is the best-placed to do this, and it would be a true service.

Reihan: You need to write more books, dude! One a year should be a minimum. Here’s the next one: tomorrow, the US Constitution is amended, making Reihan Salam Secretary of Education for life, with dictatorial power to run roughshod over Congress, the courts, unions, states, etc. What does education in the US in 2030 look like? You have 300 pages.

Peter: an article. What percentage of GDP would an ideal libertarian state consume?

This ideal libertarian (as opposed to minarchist or anarcho-capitalist) state would presumably fund a well-functioning justice, police and national defense system. Note that Switzerland, a country that is rightly admired by many libertarians, is a heavily militarized country, precisely to ensure its neutrality/non-interventionism. An ideal libertarian state would also presumably provide some sort of negative income tax as well as school vouchers and vouchers for (catastrophic) health insurance. While such programs would mostly involve cutting checks and thus comparatively small bureaucracies, they would still be not-insignificant wealth transfers from Peter to Paul.

Also note that while you can reasonably argue that an ideal libertarian state would experience high economic growth, these kind of expenditures would hold relatively constant as a percentage of GDP. As libertarians are fond of pointing out, we spend more on health today than in 1900 because we’re much richer.

So, what would all of those wealth transfer schemes take out of GDP? 20%? 30%? …40%?

Bonus question: how would the ideal libertarian state raise that money? Libertarians don’t like corporate income taxes for a bunch of very good reasons. They also don’t like the VAT because it desensitizes the citizenry to tax increases. They don’t like taxes on capital. They certainly don’t like import duties. So how would this ideal libertarian state raise this not-insubstantial revenue? Would it be mostly through personal income taxes? If so, might the higher brackets of personal income taxes have… gasp high marginal rates?

POULOS: A 3-5 page explanation of what, exactly, “postmodern conservatism” means. That my grandmother can understand. My grandmother is not dumb, and not poorly read, mind you. But she needs things explained clearly. So do I, in this regard, evidently.

I will probably come up with ideas for the other Scenesters (and Scenesters are welcome to come up with writing assignments for me!).

Go!

The California Section RIP, Cont'd

The title on this post refers to the first thing I wrote for The American Scene. Looks like I was right.

But Enough About Me. Let's Talk About You. What Do You Think Of Me?

Just a short note of a personal aggrandizing nature.

In addition to blogging here at TAS, going forward I’ll occasionally be blogging at The Economist. I’m supposed to be at their Democracy in America blog but the first item I wrote for them – about the Basel III banking agreement – was posted at their Free Exchange blog instead. You can find it here. When I do post anything over there, I’ll be sure to link to it here as well.

As well, I’m in the process of setting up a site, currently called “Millman’s Shakesblog,” to talk about Shakespeare, and theatre more generally, and literature and the arts even more generally, but it’s going slower than I had hoped owing to my general technical incompetence. In any event, once it’s fully up-and-running I’ll put this year’s theatre reviews from Canada (and future ones from New York, Chicago, and anywhere else I go to the theatre) there, and instead of posting future Shakesblog stuff here I’ll probably just post there and put a link here. Or maybe I’ll cross-post in both places. We’ll see.

Anyway, look forward to seeing you in both new venues, as well as here.

Explaining Intellectual Honesty

Matt Yglesias is puzzled by the term. I’ll have a go: “Intellectually honest” means you make arguments you think are true, as opposed to making the arguments you are “supposed” to make and/or avoiding making arguments that you think are true that you aren’t “supposed” to make.

Advocates, by contrast, make the best arguments they can think of for the position that they are obliged to take by their position. They are still supposed to be honest – they are not supposed to actually lie. But they are not expected to follow their own consciences with respect to the arguments they make or the positions they advance.

I’m not 100% sure that’s what the phrase is supposed to mean, but given that a substantial fraction of people who opine for a living behave as advocates, it does seem there ought to be a phrase to distinguish those who don’t. “Intellectually honest” fits the bill for me.

"It Hurts Her Cause, It Doesn't Help It"

In the ongoing story of Shirley Sherrod, the one thing that is broadly agreed upon by everyone from Ann Coulter to Barack Obama is that the two-minute version of Ms. Sherrod’s speech, as published by Andrew Breitbart, casts her in a significantly more negative light than the full, unedited version of her forty plus minute remarks. That is the only conclusion that can be reached by a person of sound judgment who watches the full video.

But imagine that you’re not someone who gets their news reading stuff on the Internet. You’re an American who heard someone discussing this story at the office, found your interest piqued, and tuned into the radio on the way home in hopes of learning more.

If you listened to this radio show — and a lot of people do — here is the version of events that was presented to you:

By the way, I have to make a comment. I’m watching this relentless assault on my friend Andrew Breitbart. It’s disgusting to me. He got a video. He made it public. Turns out the video was edited. The full video was always available at the NAACP because it was at their event. And they took the video. They could’ve released it immediately. And all this attack on Breitbart because he didn’t have the full video.

And yet I’ve now watched the full video. My buddy Brent Bozell watched the full video. We broke the story here about what the rest of the video actually shows, and what the audio says.

And she’s a race-baiter.

In other words, it hurts her cause, it doesn’t help it.

Stunning, isn’t it? The host tells his trusting audience that if you watch the whole video of Ms. Sherrod’s speech — a story he claims to have broken! — she comes off looking worse.

He says this too:

And I watch some people in the conservative media just, just – it’s pathetic. You can make your point about being accurate. We get that. What about the rest of the video. ‘Well, she has a story to tell.’ SO WHAT!? That doesn’t justify her attacks on millions of other Americans who also have stories, by the way. Black, white, brown and in between. Some of whom have been discriminated against, some of whom have been Holocaust victims, or had all kinds of challenges that they’ve overcome. They’re not racists because they oppose government run health care. They have stories to, you know. This is sickening to me.

Now that we have the whole video, nobody wants to talk about the whole video. Instead they want to trash Breitbart.

Stunning, isn’t it? He tells his audience that now that we have the whole video, “nobody wants to talk about the whole video.” I ask you, people of the Internet, is that true in the reality where you live? It seems to me that people are pretty keen to discuss the whole video! Are the listeners of that man — especially the ones who rely on him as a primary source to stay informed — well-served by being told “no one” is talking about the full video, because it does more harm to Ms. Sherrod than it helps her?

I try the patience of some readers by regularly writing about talk radio hosts. It isn’t a fun beat, for all the obvious reasons (hate mail, gratuitous insults, having to listen to their shows), and an additional one too: there’s precious little opportunity for inventive prose — I’d much rather write about beers I like or the Marquis de Lafayette’s return visit to America or places I’ve traveled (and I swear, I’m going to do more of that, especially since I post for free on this time-consuming subject far more often than I sell magazine pieces).

It is nevertheless important to engage prominent talk radio show hosts by setting down their words on blogs, because otherwise their most indefensible nonsense just drifts off into the air unchallenged, a convenience that allows them to grow lazy in their call-screener-maintained cocoon while retaining more respect than is deserved from their ideologically friendly colleagues outside of it. The good folks at National Review or The Weekly Standard, which have covered this story well from various perspectives, might read Liberty and Tyranny, and being people that work a lot during the day, assume without ever thoroughly checking that the quality of argument on Mark Levin’s radio show is comparable.

Given the discussion at The Corner over the last several days, however, it’s unlikely that they’ll see the talk radio host say that the full video makes Ms. Sherrod look worse, that since its release no one wants to talk about it, and even that conservatives (like many of them) who covered Sherrod sympathetically are being “pathetic” — and to take his judgment quite as seriously as they once did, or not worry just a little bit that his audience of loyal conservatives are being given bad information

It isn’t that they’re the victims of lies. But they are being misled by an intellectually arrogant man too think-skinned to accurately gauge when his critics are making sense, incapable of self-correcting, and unable to persuasively defend his work in any medium except one where he has call screeners and a mute button.

If nothing else, I hope I am making it increasingly untenable to retain stature as a serious thought leader while simultaneously saying things on the air that cannot be persuasively defended online — which isn’t to say that all Web outlets are created equal:

In closing, I dare Mark Levin to engage in a written online debate with Slate’s Will Saletan on the Sherry Sherrod story.

UPDATE: Incidentally, even Andrew Breitbart himself now says, “I grant her that she had her redemptive transformation.”

He's Still Calling Her Racist

This is damning.

And I hope that it spells the end of Andrew Breitbart as an oft-lauded, influential voice on the right.

Note particularly the charge of racism he still levies against Shirley Sherrod, the ongoing invocation of turnabout is fair play, and the fact that he himself says he wasn’t duped by his source.

I’m sure he’ll be back on cable debate programs. His interlocutors should prepare:

Thoughts on the ongoing JournoList story

— Contra some members of the defunct e-mail listserv, its contents aren’t boring and innocuous, though Jonathan Chait persuasively demonstrates that The Daily Caller is misleading in some of its characterizations (see the additional e-mails he posts).

— It’s telling that so far there haven’t been any journalists who claim to write with neutrality who’ve been caught in a lie. As yet, all the people urging different coverage on colleagues have been opinion folks. I think that it’s perfectly fine for openly opinionated journalists to argue that the merits of a situation demand different coverage, but objectionable to urge a certain kind of coverage for purely tactical reasons — stepping outside the world of “objective” reporting doesn’t absolve you of the journalistic imperative to put pursuit of truth and accurate renderings of reality above all else, no matter the ideological results. Leave information trickery to activists.

— Spencer Ackerman is a talented reporter whose work on the War on Terrorism and related issues I very much value and admire, even if I don’t much care for his least temperate outbursts.

It vexes and disappoints me that he wrote this:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes them sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

There’s a lot to object to in there. Let’s zero in on the worst of it. It is inexcusable to advocate targeting someone as a racist not because there is truth to the charge, but because it might improve the left’s chances in ideological battle. It isn’t merely that cynically using race as a political cudgel weakens the charge so that there is skepticism even when racism is actually happening. The worst thing about this — and other things are very bad indeed — is that Mr. Ackerman’s strategy inevitably involves persuading minorities that more people bear racially motivated animosity toward them than is in fact the case.

— Insofar as I know, neither Mr. Ackerman nor anyone else on Journolist actually followed through with cynical race-baiting, which is to their credit. Ironically, their staunchest critic, Andrew Breitbart, is engaged in that kind of behavior right now.

— Readers might recall that the Jeremiah Wright story was rather well covered during Election 2008. In other words, the most activist inclined members of JournoList weren’t very influential in shaping coverage even given a private forum to lobby a bunch of their colleagues.

— Here is the entirety of Kevin Drum’s role on The Daily Caller’s story:

Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”

Here is how Mark Levin characterizes Mr. Drum’s role: (drum roll) link.

— It’s also worth observing that the Spencer Ackerman approach to political discourse as articulated above (though not practiced in his published work that I’ve seen, which isn’t nearly all of it), and the Andrew Breitbart approach, contain a striking similarity: Does the truth or relevance of racism accusations matter? Actually, it’s just a propaganda tool to be used in the ideological battleground of public discourse, where my side is right, we must send the other guys a message, and the ends justify the means because this is war, blah blah blah.

But American journalism isn’t merely an arena where progressives and movement conservatives battle it out for rhetorical supremacy. And everyone who views it that way is part of the problem — they persuade themselves that any behavior is justified, because the other side started it. But that’s nonsense. This scorched earth, activist approach to public discourse began long before any of us were born, the guy who “started it” is a long forgotten member of an indeterminate side, and his approach hasn’t yet overwhelmed us only because most people who participate in America’s ongoing conversation aim higher.

— Finally, I can’t help but reflect that beyond being wrong, the race-baiting that Mr. Ackerman rants about once on a private list-serv, and that Mr. Breitbart ostentatiously engages in on public sites, is basically pointless even as political strategy. Why don’t more people realize this? Does it seem at all plausible that accusing Fred Barnes of racism would actually advance the long term prospects of progressivism? Is it really plausible that any insult Mr. Ackerman offers is going to leave hack conservatives “sputtering in fear”? Come on. Being attacked by strident progressives helps people like Karl Rove, just like a virulent, unfair attack by Karl Rove would be about the best thing that could happen to Spencer Ackerman.

Similarly, consider the output of Andrew Breitbart. Ultimately, is it a victory for conservatism to make the NAACP look bad, or to force ACORN to reorganize under a different name, or to force the resignation of Van Jones, or to target this poor woman at the USDA? Hardly. The short term tactical victory is a distraction that gives the feeling of victory without actually shrinking the size of government or accomplishing any other conservative end. As far as I can tell, this is how politics works in the United States.

And if conservatives want to actually improve the country, rather than satisfy a trumped up lust for inconsequential victories in the culture war’s most absurd corners, they’d do better to focus on stories like this one. As I’ve noted before, journalism is a profession overwhelmingly populated by liberals, so they can afford to have some of their talent spending energy targeting Fred Barnes and doing other inconsequential bullshit — meanwhile the New York Times still gets published every day and the New Yorker comes out every week. The right doesn’t have this luxury. Unfortunately, many folks on the right think that battling the most vitriolic folks on the left is productive, despite the absence of any evidence for that proposition. Now I am going to eat a delicious peach from Trader Joes.

The Thorny Issue of What's Not Covered

Over at Hot Air, there is a post up that challenges some arguments I made after The Washington Post accepted Dave Weigel’s resignation. Those unfamiliar with my take can make due with this summary: A reporter ought to be judged on the merit of the work he or she publishes, rather than his or her privately expressed opinions, rants, etc. Press critic Jack Shafer has a similar take. This middle manager disagrees.

In his response, Blogger Karl complicates my “it’s about the work” argument:

In practice, questions of journalistic ethics often involve issues of what does not appear on the page or screen. When former CNN honcho Eason Jordan revealed that his network suppressed stories about atrocities in Iraq, it raised questions. When Reuters spiked a story about hedge fund trader Steven Cohen, it raised questions (for a variation on this theme, check the WaPo). When the L.A. Times told its bloggers not to write about the National Enquirer story on the John Edwards – Rielle Hunter affair, it raised questions (as did the fact that Mark Halperin and John Heilemann kept quiet about it while writing their book on the 2008 campaign). When the NYT slow-walked the ACORN and Van Jones stories, public editor Clark Hoyt opined that the paper risked “looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.” Thus, when a journalist uses a professional forum to encourage his colleagues to boycott The Washington Examiner, curtail coverage of Sarah Palin’s “death panels” comment (including criticism thereof), and to spin the Massachusetts Senate election as a function of Martha Coakley’s awfulness — because doing so would help the Democratic Party — ethical questions are definitely on the table, even if Friedersdorf wants to continue to blind himself to them.

A few caveats. I hate the formulations “raises questions” and “questions are definitely on the table.” I dissent from some of Karl’s examples — for example, the New York Times was absolutely right to react slowly to the ACORN story considering the factually misleading presentation that turned out to be given on Andrew Breitbart’s sites. And I don’t think that Karl is accurately characterizing what Dave Weigel was trying to do on JournoList (though I think he is being earnest and honorable in his inadvertent mischaracterization).

In theory, however, I agree that a reporter must be held responsible not only for what he or she publishes, but also for ignored stories, withheld facts, etc. Were there evidence that Mr. Weigel was guilty on this score — had he written an e-mail that said, “I’m not going to cover this Tea Party speech because I think it makes the movement look too good, and I want them to fail” — that would indeed be a firing offense.

But there isn’t any evidence of that. Even what Karl alleges — and what doesn’t seem true to me — is that Mr. Weigel was engaged in serial attempts to get other reporters to cover things in ways that made their work epistemically closed. As I wrote previously, “For what it’s worth, I do disapprove of anyone, Dave Weigel included, encouraging journalists ‘to operate as a closed media ecosystem that excludes competing political narratives.’” So if, contra my perception and his public assurances to the contrary, he did that, I object! Similarly, if he encourages his friends and family to only read The Washington Independent for all their news, and ignore every other media outlet on the planet, I object! I just don’t think it bears on the quality of his work, his employment at The Washington Post, etc. Similarly, should Karl go to a bar after work with a bunch of other conservative journalists, and tell them, “Damn you all, stop linking that Conor Friedersdorf, his writing is given too much attention, and he ought to be shunned,” I’d object, but I wouldn’t think it tells me anything about the quality of his posts at Hot Air.

As it happens, Karl also thinks that Dave Weigel is guilty of ignoring actual stories relevant to his beat. He writes:

Weigel may be a talented and hard-working writer, but selective reporting is his stock-in-trade. The signature of his body of work at the WaPo was his disproportionate focus on what he deemed to be the fringe of the Right. Thus, during a period where the biggest story in America was the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Weigel wrote a number of pieces about birther Orly Taitz and virtually nothing about Gulf state Governors Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour, either of whom could seek the GOP presidential nod in 2012. Taken as a whole, Weigel’s portrait of the GOP and the conservative movement for the WaPo (and the Washington Independent before that) was about as fair and accurate as “A New Yorker’s Idea of the United States of America” is as a map of the nation.

I disagree with this assessment. Did Mr. Weigel cover the fringe of the conservative movement? Yes. I’d argue, however, that every story he covered (or at least every story I saw) is clearly justifiable as a news item, and I haven’t heard any account of news he came across but refrained from publishing in the same way as Eason Jordan in pre-war Iraq. It’s telling that the example Karl offers in the excerpt above is so weak. Yes, the oil spill was the biggest story in America for awhile, and I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Mr. Weigel didn’t write about Governors Jindal and Barbour. But the news media was all over the oil spill story. There are plenty of beat reporters covering it already, and political reporters who’ll exhaustively cover 2012 hopefuls, and statehouse reporters who cover the two governors in question.

Dave Weigel is covering lots of conservatives who get play in movement press, but who are ignored in the mainstream media. It’s long been a complaint among these people — the grassroots, lets call them — that they’re ignored by the establishment media. Starting covering them exhaustively, however, and a reporter is accused of focusing on the fringe. Suddenly the complaint is that Mr. Weigel takes them too seriously. There is simply no way to strike a balance in a way that doesn’t make someone on the right unhappy.

I’ve noticed this same phenomenon when I engage talk radio hosts in argument about the substance of what they’re saying. Suddenly, the complaints about the mainstream media ignoring Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Glenn Beck despite their enormous popularity among conservatives cease, and the new complaint is that they’re just entertainers or satirists whose words aren’t to be criticized in the same way as other people.

In the end, it amounts to saying, “Cover the politically marginalized among us when it makes us look good, or advances the conservative movement, or the electoral chances of Republicans, because it isn’t fair that we’re so powerless and ignored — but ignore fringe stuff that makes the movement look bad, or hurts its electoral chances, because the people doing that stuff are ignored, powerless, and on the margins.”

Were I covering Mr. Weigel’s beat, I’m sure I’d have chosen a somewhat different mix of things to report on, and the same would be true for any reporter given the job. It involves a lot of subjective judgments about news, a sense of what one’s colleagues and one’s competitors are covering, the information needs of the audience etc. The fact that so many serious people found Mr. Weigel’s blog an indispensable source that offered information no one else was reporting suggests that, all things considered, he was doing a damn good job choosing what to cover, and certainly not so bad a job that he should’ve been forced out.

Friedersdorf wants to gloss over the questions raised by Weigel’s behavior on JournoList. However, Weigel’s disproportionate focus on the fringe of the Right, and his apparent double standard when it comes to coverage of the Leftist fringe, demonstrate that Weigel’s work on blogs was (and is) wholly consistent with his unofficial activism and anti-conservative invective on JournoList. It is not surprising that Friedersdorf cannot see that, given the degree to which Weigel’s selective reporting confirms Friedersdorf’s pre-existing attitudes about the Right.

Someone trying to gloss over a story doesn’t address it in multiple blog posts over several weeks or create YouTube parodies that attract 30,000 views. I appreciate that Karl and I disagree about this subject, and even that he thinks my biases are leading me astray. Perhaps he’s right! Everyone has biases that lead them astray. I don’t think that’s what is happening in this conversation, but I would think that, right? Nevertheless, I take steps to guard against my biases, so that even if I’m wrong, here or elsewhere, I do a minimal amount of harm.

I try to be transparent about my reasoning, avoid logical fallacies, read widely, link to people who disagree with me, and engage even forceful criticism from people hostile to my views. I’m sure I do a less than perfect job living up to all that, but I try hard, and I’m confident enough to put my record up against anyone online — even though I am hardly unique, and would do no better than a whole bunch of writers I admire from all parts of the political spectrum. It’s just the expectation in parts of the blogosphere, and I never ask anyone to meet standards that aren’t already achieved by many hundreds if not thousands of other writers.

When I complain about epistemic closure, I am talking about folks who do few or none of these things — and whatever his strengths and weaknesses as a journalist, that’s not Dave Weigel.

Comments can be e-mailed to Conor dot friedersdorf at gmail IGNORETHIS TEXT dot com — I’ll post concurrences and dissents as appropriate.

UPDATE:

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Orientation Day in the MSM