“The Trouble With Optics”: Talking About Image When We Should Be Talking About Substance
I’ve been writing about politics for a long time, and it’s a tribute to the dynamism of our glorious democracy that every time I think that things couldn’t get any stupider, I’m proven wrong yet again. While we face a genuine humanitarian and policy crisis on our southern border, with thousands of children making their way across hundreds of miles to wind up in the arms of the Border Patrol, the news media allowed Republicans to turn the focus to the deeply important question of whether or not President Obama would travel there to mount a photo op. Seriously.
Then because it wasn’t removed enough from reality already, people in the media are now talking about whether Barack Obama does photo ops and how often, because if he rejected a photo op on this particular issue but has photo-opped before, then I guess he’s a hypocrite and therefore…um…therefore something.
I’m not saying that “optics” are, per se, a bad thing to discuss. I certainly agree with Kevin Drum that as a general matter, “how something will look to other people” is often worth contemplating; After all, that’s a good portion of what politicians and those who work for them spend time thinking about. And I write about it plenty myself. The problem comes when we’re dealing with times when choices are being made and events with consequences are occurring (unlike an election campaign, which is purely an exercise in persuasion), and some people—in this case, both politicians and reporters—act as though the optics of a situation are the only thing that matters. It’s particularly crazy when there’s a genuine crisis happening and we’re trying to arrive at a solution.
Another problem is that when we talk about “optics,” we do it so poorly, in particular by ascribing all kinds of power to rhetoric and images that they don’t actually possess. People are still convinced that the president can give a single speech and utterly transform the dynamic of a political situation (he can’t), and that a particular image isn’t just a useful encapsulation of events that occurred, but the thing that caused events to occur the way they did.
So for instance, in trying to argue that Obama should go stage a photo op at the border, many people have pointed to that picture of George W. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One at the devastation of New Orleans, to argue that a photo can have significant negative consequences on a presidency. But not only do they have the Katrina comparison exactly backwards (as I argued over at the Post yesterday, the problem there was that Bush wasn’t doing anything, while the problem now is that Barack Obama wants to do some things but Republicans in Congress don’t want to do anything), they don’t seem to understand why people found the picture of Bush resonant and memorable. It was because for many people it accurately captured his government’s failure (Bush was soaring above the ground, too removed to understand the human suffering going on below). But people weren’t persuaded to believe that by the picture, they were persuaded to believe that by the actual events that occurred; the picture just became a symbol of it. Let’s not forget that thousands of people died in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath (estimates vary from 1,400 to 3,500). Bush would have suffered in the public esteem whether he had pictures taken of him or not. Reality was the problem, not the optics.
And that’s what will matter in this case too. Either the administration will succeed in dealing with this problem (with or without Congress’ help), or it will just get worse. And no picture is going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 10, 2014
“In The Name Of All That’s Good”: Why Can’t The Media Just Ignore Dick Cheney?
It is said that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Unfortunately in politics one of the oldest tricks in the book is to say and do something so insulting to the common sense and intelligence of the opposition that they completely abandon reason and strike back in an irrational and ultimately self-defeating manner. Dick Cheney is an old dog and is up to his usual dirty tricks, but I will not allow him or the bile that exits his mouth to incite me to irrational words or actions. Imagine a world without Dick Cheney in it. What a better place it would be. Well, at least can we just ignore him while he is here?
I have written pieces on several occasions decrying his inane ramblings on affairs domestic and international. The latest incendiary barrage leveled against the president, defending Dick’s War in Iraq. This ill-conceived and grossly mismanaged plan is universally acknowledged to be the deadliest miscalculation in modern history except by those who created it. The natural inclination in response to its continued defense is a sharp rebuke filled with profane invectives. But we will not go there; it only humors those who are immensely frustrated with the enormity of their failure.
Going to war is without a doubt the most serious decision that a leader must confront. It requires every ounce of intellect, reasoning, factual examination, political dexterity, diplomatic consideration, compassion, and strength of conviction that a mere mortal possesses. The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was strong on conviction and marketing and short on all other counts. It was a bad decision that has seriously put this nation in a position of weakness and suspicion internationally, has shortchanged the American people by redirecting considerable financial resources away from investment in them and to wartime profiteers, has created a class of military veterans who struggle with deep wounds that have not been and may never be adequately treated, has energized a worldwide jihadist movement, and has left the millennial generation with no conception of a world without war.
Imagine a surgeon who removes the wrong limb, then picture the patient continuing to consult the doctor for additional surgical advice. Absurd you say, who in their right mind would do such a thing? The answer is the news media. That’s right, our information outlets. I don’t care what qualifications or credentials the doctor possesses or claims to possess — would you take your child back to this quack? Of course you wouldn’t, yet here we are being buffeted by the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Kristol and other architects and apologists of a policy so fraught with miscalculation that in another setting it would qualify for criminal prosecution.
Dick Cheney has not the least amount of credibility on the Iraq situation, either this one or the one 11 years ago. He has audaciously illustrated time and again that he has no capacity for self-reflection, introspection, analysis or questioning on issues that involve life and death on a large-scale. These qualities are important to human growth; Dick’s growth was stunted at a very early age.
He has every right to speak his mind, which is the hallmark of a free democratic society. But he also has a responsibility as both a leader and a former leader in such a society to evolve, to contribute to the betterment of society by examining his actions and thoughts, and correcting his mistakes. Refusal to admit mistakes and challenge one’s own assumptions is the most selfish, irresponsible, and immature behavior that any leader, whether of a nation or a family, can exhibit and is reflective of insufficient capacity to lead.
No human is infallible; everyone makes mistakes, true leaders own up to them. Dick Cheney’s childishness does not deserve the print either he or his co-conspirators regularly receive. The only way to shut him down is to pay him no attention. That would be far more devastating to him than hurling verbal jousts that are richly deserved and instinctual to the well-adjusted and reasonable among us.
So I offer this plea that in the name of all that is good, can we please refrain from giving Dick and his droogies a platform? The world would be a better place.
By: Lance Simmens, The Huffington Post Blog, June 19, 2014
“Where Is The Accountability On Iraq?”: At Best A Fool’s Errand, At Worst A Criminal Act
Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)? How many times does the Beltway hawk caucus get to be wrong before we recognize that maybe, just maybe, its members don’t know what they’re talking about?
Certainly Politico could have found someone with more credibility than Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration and one of the architects of the Iraq war, to comment on how the White House might react to the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Iraq today. Certainly New York Times columnist David Brooks knows what folly it is to equate President Obama’s 2011 troop removal with Bush’s 2003 invasion, as he did during a discussion with me last Friday on NPR?
Just a reminder of what that 2003 invasion led to: Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes authoritatively priced Bush’s war at more than $3 trillion. About 320,000 U.S. veterans suffer from brain injury as a result of their service. Between 500,000 and 655,000 Iraqis died, as well as more than 4,000 U.S. military members.
Yet as Brooks’s words reveal, the prevailing mindset in today’s media is to treat the 2003 invasion as if its prosecution were an act of God — like Hurricane Katrina, an inevitability that could not have been avoided. Seen this way, policymakers can ignore the idiocy of the decision to invade in the first place and can instead direct all of their critical attention to how to deal with the aftermath. It’s almost as though the mainstream media have demoted themselves from a corps of physicians, eager and able to diagnose, prognosticate and prescribe, to one of EMTs, charged instead with triaging, cleaning and cauterizing a catastrophe without investigating its underlying cause.
Since so many liberal hawks reached the same conclusion as did Bush et al., this notion of the 2003 invasion’s inevitability can falsely seem to have some credence (which is, perhaps why, as Frank Rich points out in New York magazine, so many erstwhile hawks, especially so-called liberal ones, feel no need to acknowledge their erroneous judgments of a decade ago).
But if so many were wrong about Iraq in 2003, why are they still being invited (and trotting themselves out) on Sunday morning talk shows and op-ed pages as authorities on U.S.-Iraq policy? Where is the accountability for the politicians’ and pundits’ warmongering of 11 years ago? James Fallows — who was “right” on Iraq in a 2002 Atlantic cover story — tweeted Friday, “Working hypothesis: no one who stumped for original Iraq invasion gets to give ‘advice’ about disaster now. Or should get listened to.” Amen.
In the current cacophony of Washington, we must remember that there is no equivalence to be drawn between Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq and Obama’s 2011 decision to withdraw U.S. troops. Bush’s invasion, after all, was not just a mistake. At best a fool’s errand, at worst a criminal act, this great blunder helped set the stage for Iraq’s chaos today. The increased sectarian violence stems not from the 2011 withdrawal; rather, it is the fruit of the 2003 invasion, subsequent occupation and much-vaunted “surge” of 2007–08.
McCain and Graham insist that airstrikes are the only way forward in today’s Iraq. But what we need now are not armchair warriors calling for military strikes or sending weapons. (As an aside, I will say that, should members of the neoconservative movement feel so motivated, we would wholeheartedly respect their decision to enlist in the Iraqi army.) Obama, himself “right” on Iraq during the war’s run-up, is also right today to resist calls for direct U.S. military action — including airstrikes — in Iraq. The U.S. misadventure in Iraq ended in 2011; we do not need another. Experience and history have (clearly) taught us that there is no military solution in Iraq. Only a political reconciliation can quell the unrest, and this requires more than bellicose calls for violence from 5,000 miles away. To find a solution, we must commit to regional and international diplomacy.
We learned in 2003 that when we move in with guns blazing, we tend to spark a lot more fires than we extinguish. In 2014, we cannot afford to learn this same lesson. Regardless of how many are too blind (or proud or foolish) to realize it, we need to write a new scenario for 2014, so that 11 years from now, we can look back and ponder how, this time, we did things right.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 17, 2014
“Not Off To A Good Start”: Heritage Tries Its Hand At News, But Forgets The Facts
The Daily Signal, The Heritage Foundation’s online “news” website, debuted Tuesday, offering up vagaries and unverifiable assertions aplenty, but too few empirical facts and little in the way of attribution. Its first video was a publicist’s dream, a puff piece that no serious news organization would air.
What appears in The Daily Signal matters because it is assured a large audience eager for reinforcement of deeply embedded views, but no real evidence that would challenge or even bring into question the factual basis of those views.
Reader comments on the Signal’s first investigative piece – the only solid piece of fact-based journalism it published Tuesday – showed just how eager Signal readers are to read confirmation of their biases into pieces and to ignore inconvenient facts, especially subtly presented truths that run contrary to the Heritage Foundation’s well-established perspectives.
Heritage opened its doors in 1973 and has since worked to ensure business dominance of American politics and government. It likes to describe itself as the true champion of the poor in America. A realistic appraisal of its policies shows that it favors protecting existing wealth against the creative destruction by which the existing economic structure is constantly under siege from new wealth seekers.
Heritage also turns a blind eye to the many stealth forms of welfare for the already rich that I detailed in my books Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch, and The Fine Print.
America needs fact-based, insightful and aggressive journalism — both opinion and fact — from every point on the spectrum. But sadly, much of what we get from what mainstream news organizations mislabel “conservative” is radical rhetoric that far too often has little basis in fact or even reality.
Progressives and liberals in particular should encourage, and read, quality journalism from the right because it will help weed out flabby, half-baked ideas by everyone not in accord with the Koch brothers and Fox News chief Roger Ailes. Without rigorous journalism from the far right, the whole country suffers a paucity of informing debate.
The framers used empiricism and reason to make their case for our Constitution and were critical of naked assertion, vague accusations and failure to test hypothesis with verifiable facts.
The breathtaking distortions and even lies by some of our best-known opinion journalists who self-identify as conservatives drew my scrutiny in National Memo columns this year, which you can read here, here, here and here.
The Signal surely cannot quarrel with my call for fact-based news and opinion, as its website says, “We are committed to news coverage that is accurate, fair and trustworthy. As we surveyed the media landscape, it became clear to us that the need for honest, thorough, responsible reporting has never been more critical. That’s a challenge in today’s fast-moving world. And it’s a challenge we’re willing to accept.”
The website then proclaims:
We are dedicated to developing a news outlet that cuts straight to the heart of key political and policy arguments – not spin reported as news. The Daily Signal is supported by the resources and intellectual firepower of The Heritage Foundation – a dedicated team of experienced journalists to cover the news and more than 100 policy experts who can quickly help put issues in perspective. We believe this combination of news, commentary and policy analysis will establish The Daily Signal as a trusted source on America’s most important issues.
We believe that high-quality, credible news reporting on political and policy issues is of paramount importance to an informed and free society. This is a reflection of that Jeffersonian notion that the greatest defense of liberty is an informed citizenry.
So, let’s take a look first at the Signal’s featured first-day video, an interview with Sharyl Attkisson, a former reporter and anchor for CBS, CNN and PBS. The headline is hyped, describing an interview with the Signal’s own correspondent as “exclusive.”
The headline also promises a report on “Journalism’s Very Dangerous Trend” but presents zero verifiable evidence of anything dangerous or even of any trend.
After Attkisson quit CBS, she told Bill O’Reilly in April that her Benghazi, Obamacare and “Fast and Furious” gun stories did not make the air because senior producers lost interest. O’Reilly, an entertainer possessed of masterfully honed commercial instincts, skillfully conflated that into an implication of foul motives at CBS without a shred of empirical evidence that anyone could verify. Classic O’Reilly.
At The Daily Signal, producer Kelsey Harkness tossed Attkisson softballs, even puffballs. As edited, the video shows zero effort to get beyond rhetoric to empirical evidence — names, dates, specific stories, etc. Naked assertion without verifiable specifics is not reporting, it is propaganda, an irony evidently lost on the Signal’s editors.
Harkness promises two more installments, so perhaps we will see some actual reporting by her in the days ahead. Hopefully she will improve with experience, but if not, she can look forward to a superb career as a flack, as reporters call publicists.
The Daily Signal let Attkisson mix and conflate issues in a way no serious and experienced journalist would let pass. Her vague assertions about CBS newsroom managers, as edited, flowed seamlessly into a different issue — non-journalists who use social media to confuse the public.
Attkisson gave no specifics, nor did Harkness ask for any. Attkisson did express a belief that stories want to “tell themselves” in “natural” ways, whatever that means.
News does not exist in nature. It does not just happen. News is made by reporters who gather facts, check and crosscheck them, seek out a range of perspectives and present what they learn in the time available as narrative, attributing facts to sources. Reported columns, like this one, combine those facts with expert knowledge gained through years of study and practice.
Differences between reporters in the field and editors at their desks are, and always will be, sources of disagreement and even angry words.
Different news organizations also have different takes on what is significant and where the heart of the story lies, as shown by academic studies. Long ago, a front-page series in the Los Angeles Times by the late David Shaw, the pioneering news-as-a-beat reporter, documented how little the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers have in common. That’s competition for you.
Attkisson has done serious work, winning Emmys and once being named a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. But as presented by The Daily Signal, she comes across as a disgruntled former employee who does not offer even one telling detail to back up her vague implications of news distortions.
News distortions do sometimes occur. In 1973 I exposed how for years the owner of what was said to be the most profitable TV station in America and five other broadcast outlets issued orders to manipulate the news to advance his commercial interests, which eventually resulted in the forced sale of those stations.
Attkisson’s own words describe what is nothing more than routine disagreements about significance, yet The Daily Signal gullibly presented her story without a single tough question.
Attkisson also indicates she may have been late on some of the stories, coming up not with solid facts, but merely tantalizing leads she wanted to pursue. In TV news, where immediacy is paramount, potential new angles on last week’s news to be offered sometime next month is not a formula for success. But The Daily Signal failed to explore this perfectly legitimate and routine basis for telling Attkisson to move on to more pressing stories.
This puff video comes with the Signal’s first investigative piece, a report by Attkisson about deceiving parents of premature babies into participating in a federally funded medical experiment. It is a troubling tale that I recommend.
But unless you are a careful reader, you could miss that these experiments all took place during the George W. Bush administration.
That brings us back to Heritage’s new outlet feeding an audience what it wants rather than what it needs to know. Deciding what matters among an overwhelming array of choices is the judgment for which journalists get paid.
One of the first to comment on Attkisson’s investigative piece wrote: “Don’t forget that this is the Obama administration. The same people that burn aborted babies to generate electricity.”
Many of the other comments on the piece, and the video, are also mindless screeds against Obama, Democrats and anyone with whose views the posters viscerally disagree. Plenty of liberal and centrist websites post equally mindless comments, a practice that would diminish if people had to sign their real names.
America needs well-informed, thoughtful and fact-respecting conservative journalists. Without serious and fact-based, issue-oriented journalism, we get civic debates that confuse rather than enlighten, we get poorly conceived ideas that sometimes become law. The quality of our civic debate matters so long as we intend to choose our own fate.
Going forward, I hope that new website‘s managers demonstrate that they are in fact in the business of news, a difficult task given that The Daily Signal is an arm of an advocacy organization with a well-established reputation for ignoring important issues, not the least among them how its supporters sup with big spoons at the public trough. They are not off to a good start, but that can change if The Daily Signal is really about what its website asserts.
By; David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, June 4, 2014
“We’re All Journalists Now”: No, Glenn Greenwald Cannot Be The One Who Decides What Stays Secret
This Sunday, The New York Times Book Review will finally print Michael Kinsley’s review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide, two and a half weeks after the review was published online and provoked a polarizing debate involving Greenwald, the Times‘ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, Kinsley again, and countless commentators who promptly took sides in the dispute about government secrecy and freedom of the press.
Some readers, including Sullivan, objected to Kinsley’s smart-alecky tone and psychological sketches of Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, which these critics saw as bordering on ad hominem attacks. But there were also more substantive criticisms levied by Sullivan and many others, most of them boiling down to the claim that it was simply outrageous of Kinsley to deny journalists an absolute right to print classified material passed on to them by leakers.
Here is the most controversial passage from the review:
It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald. [The New York Times]
Some objected to this passage because they thought it contradicted another line of the review in which Kinsley called the Snowden leaks a “legitimate scoop.” But for most critics, the issue was far more fundamental: How dare anyone suggest, and in the pages of America’s newspaper of record no less, that the government, and not an intrepid journalist like Glenn Greenwald, should get to decide, while wielding threats of prosecution and imprisonment, what information is secret and what is not?
Clearly, the critics implied, Kinsley was expressing a deep-seated sympathy for authoritarianism that no self-respecting American citizen, let alone a journalist professionally and existentially devoted to the press freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, could possibly endorse.
There’s just one problem with this objection: Kinsley was almost certainly correct.
In the ensuing debate about the review, The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf made the strongest and most concise case against Kinsley’s position. When we look at the competing track records of the government and journalists in deciding what should be kept secret and what should be made public, Friedersdorf argued, it is clear that journalists have done a far better job. For that reason, journalists, and not the government, should get to decide.
Friedersdorf also made a point of stipulating that this does not imply blanket permission for leakers to divulge to journalists any information they wish. In Friedersdorf’s words, “The least-bad system is one where leakers can be charged and punished for giving classified secrets to journalists (which isn’t to say that they always should be), but where journalism based on classified information is not criminalized.”
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable compromise — at least until you think it through.
Permitting journalists to publish anything and everything that gets leaked to them, under no possible threat of prosecution, would make it nearly impossible to prosecute a leaker, since the harmlessness of the leak would automatically be demonstrated the moment a journalist makes the decision to publish the classified information. After all, in Friedersdorf’s least-bad system, it’s journalists who decide what can and can’t be made public, based in part on their assessment of the likely public harm. This means that as soon as classified information gets published by a journalist, the leaker would instantly be exonerated.
To which many will no doubt respond: So what? That’s exactly how it should work!
Except for one additional consideration, which Kinsley raised in his original review. In the age of blogs, portable audio and video recording, instant messaging, and social media platforms, “it is impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts.”
We’re all journalists now.
In such a world, Friedersdorf’s rules produce a situation in which any leaker who leaks any information to anyone willing to publicize it is automatically absolved of any crime.
In such a world — a world completely lacking in disincentives to leak classified information — government secrecy would be rendered impossible.
“But no,” I imagine Friedersdorf objecting. “I mean real journalists, working for established, recognized media companies. Only they should be given the power to decide what to publish.”
To which the proper reply is to repeat Kinsley’s line that making such a call — deciding who is and who is not a “real” journalist — is impossible. Sure, we can agree that a journalist employed by The New York Times or The Atlantic is an authentic journalist entitled to make the hard calls on secrecy. But what about a reporter working for BuzzFeed? Or a reporter working for BuzzFeed six years ago, when it had little politics coverage and was known primarily for its cat-photo click-throughs?
And what about self-employed blogger Andrew Sullivan? Is he a journalist? If someone leaked classified information to him, should he have blanket authorization to decide whether to publish it?
What about someone who runs a blog with a tenth of Sullivan’s traffic and journalistic experience? A hundredth? A thousandth?
We seem to have a problem. Either anyone or everyone gets to make the call, rendering state secrets impossible, or we need some independent authority to decide who is and who is not empowered to make the call. Government licensing of journalists? That’s where Friedersdorf’s “least-bad system” leads us, I’m afraid.
Which means that Friedersdorf leads us right back to Kinsley: “Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.”
Pace Friedersdorf, the least-bad system is the one we have right now: Government (elected officials, appointees, and judges) deciding what gets and stays classified. In that system, both leaking and publishing classified information are treated as crimes, albeit crimes for which leakers and journalists are rarely punished, with the benefit of the doubt usually swinging in their favor.
This system isn’t perfect. Free speech absolutists don’t like it, and understandably so, because it makes government secrecy the legal principle and press freedom an exception dependent on the prudential judgment of prosecutors and judges.
But in a world where secrets are necessary, this may be the best that a democracy can do.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, June 6, 2014
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