A post about nothing

OK, about something: just go and take a look. My favorites is Einstein trying to explain relativity to President Harding.

Journalists in war zones

The disturbing news about the assault of CBS reporter Lara Logan raises the question of how far journalists should go to cover a story. The presence of people like her gave audiences a viewpoint unattainable without their presence; but is it worth the risks? Kim Barker's editorial in today's New Yorl Times argues that despite the dangers hearing female voices is especially important from dangerous places.

Meanwhile, it seems that Al-Jazeera, despite the kudos it's been receiving for how it covered the Egyptian revolution, refuses to discuss the assault on Logan. I guess cultural taboos are still infiltrating their coverage.

Palin and the "mainstream media"

Conservatives have been complaining for a long time that the so-called "mainstream media", i.e. everything non-Internet, is biased against them. Now it turns out that a potential Republican presidential candidate you may have heard of is thinking of running an entire campaign centered around the assumption that avoiding traditional media outlets is the key to victory.

According to Ben Smith, yesterday she said: ""How else does the public know me though, than through the press?" she asked, complaining that the press "reports things that have really misrepresented my record."

"I look at those poll numbers and I say if I’m going to do this then obviously I have to get out there," she said. "I can’t rely on a liberal leaning press to do that for you. That’s why social media is going to be so important.""

If at first you don't succeed, try to avoid the scrutiny altogether.

Iraq and the media as watchdog (UPDATED)

This story in today's New York Times highlights the problem of the media acting as a watchdog. Back in 2002 and 2003, when the debate over whether or not to invade Iraq was heating up, one of the single strongest pieces of evidence against Saddam Hussein was the testimony of an Iraqi defector going by the code name of "Curveball." Curveball told the CIA and other intelligence agencies that Hussein was continuing to stockpile weapons of mass destruction, specifically mobile bioweapons labs.

Today, Curveball, aka Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, admitted that he made up the entire story in order to convince western governments to overthrow Hussein. Along with other Iraqi exiles, al-Janabi's fake testimony led to an invasion under false pretenses (no significant amounts of WMD's were ever discovered).

But here's the big question: did the media fail the public in the run-up to the war? Few media outlets at the time questioned whether the WMD story was true, and few questioned the wisdom of an invasion. Reporters seemingly went along with a herd mentality, accepting whatever information the Bush administration leaked to them without seriously investigating those claims. The media is supposedly a "watchdog" - looking out for the public's interests. Here, they failed miserably in that job.

UPDATE: Donald Rumsfeld admits that without the WMD claim the U.S. "probably" wouldn't have gone to war.

"Going public" revised

In his well-known book Going Public, political scientist Samuel Kernell argues that modern presidents have the ability to move legislation by appealing to the people directly rather than negotiating with members of Congress. This strategy of "going public" has its limitations, as he acknowledges, but it can also be a powerful strategy for forcing Congress to move along with the tides of public opinion.

A story today on ABCNews points out that President Obama is using social media tools, such as Youtube, Flickr, and Facebook to sidestep traditional media outlets and speak directly to the public. This seems to be a new sort of "going public" that not only ignores Congress but ignores the media, too. How effective this strategy will be remains to be seen.

Agenda-setting and the Obama budget

We'll soon be discussing the agenda-setting functions of the media - how the stories the media cover and the ways in which they choose to report on them can set the agenda for politicians and the public at large. An interesting way to start thinking about this is to look at two different stories out today on President Obama's new budget proposal.

The New York Times story starts by highlighting the shift in Obama's priorities, from stimulating the economy through spending projects to the new emphasis on budget cutting and deficit reduction. Jackie Calmes writes, "The budget reflects Mr. Obama’s cut-and-invest agenda: It creates winners and big losers as he proposes to slash spending in some domestic programs to both reduce deficits and make room for increases in education, infrastructure, clean energy, innovation and research to promote long-term economic growth and global competitiveness." So based on this story, we would assume that the issues at stake are where to cut and how much.

But look at how the Washington Post reports on the same event: "President Obama drew fire Sunday from congressional Republicans and independent budget experts for his reluctance to advance a plan that would tackle the nation's biggest budget problems in the spending blueprint he will submit to Congress on Monday." Lori Montgomery has already pressed you into a corner by arguing that Obama hasn't faced up to the big issues at stake. Her version begins by biasing you against his plan - before you have read one single fact about it.

The power of the media here is demonstrated by their ability to set the terms of debate. In this case, the Times and the Post are providing their readers two completely different versions of this event, and each set of readers will therefore start their day with different beliefs about what the president is trying to do.

Tweet your way to a better president!

OK, so this story doesn't go quite that far... but it feels like that's the direction we're heading in. Pretty soon presidents will have to make sure all of their important objectives can be explained in 140 characters or less.

This dumbing-down of our political discourse is one of the primary themes of the recent book by Elvin Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency. Lim demonstrates that presidents have consistently been downgrading the intellectual level of their rhetoric since the time of Woodrow Wilson. The implications of this for our civic discourse are disturbing.