Im-Politic: How The New York Times Op-Ed Page Really Blew It on Tom Cotton

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fact-checking, free speech, freedom of speech, globalization, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, MSM, op-ed page, opinion journalism, Paul M. Krugman, protests, Tom Cotton, Trade

Although pretty much everyone who’s thought about it agrees that The New York Times op-ed page has thoroughly bungled its handling of an article it recently published by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, disagreement is rife over what the blunder was.

Because I’ve written several times for The Times‘ Op-Ed page and others, I’ve got two thoughts that I believe can usefully add to the mix. But first, it’s important to note that even The Times as a company can’t seem to agree on what went wrong.

At various times, various staffers in various of its departments (including ownership) have claimed that Cotton’s main argument (that President Trump should call in the U.S. military to restore order in cities where it’s broken down and/or where state and local authorities can’t or won’t respond inadequately)

>should never have run because it fell outside the bounds of responsible opinion;

>that it might constitute responsible opinion but that its publication at a time of major national tumult – and especially race-tinged tumult – was inappropriate, and even heightened dangers to Times and other reporters covering the George Floyd protests, and to African-American reporters in particular;

>that however controversial, the argument wasn’t out of bounds, but that the article wasn’t satisfactorily fact-checked;

>that it was indeed fact-checked as per usual; and

>that Cotton’s and other allegedly out of bounds views should be presented in the paper, but in hard news articles (where adequate context, scrutiny, and counter-arguments could be provided), rather than on the op-ed page (where regardless of whether it was fact-checked or not, publication per se created an aura of approval or legitimacy or prestige that was unwarranted. Here’s a good summary from The Times’ main national competitor, the Washington Post.

Moreover, if you’re not already confused enough, how about these two positions stated by the newspaper’s ownership – the first by publisher A.G. Sulzberger (presented in the above linked Post piece):

>“I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit” and

and the second by his spokesperson:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

At least these statements weren’t made on the same day.

And to top it all off, the article hasn’t been retracted or yanked from The Times‘ website.

Now for my two observations. The first involves the fact-checking issue.

As mentioned above, I’ve written frequently for The Times and other op-ed pages. And I can tell you from personal experience that fact-checking for outside contributors is spotty at best. I’ve been asked to provide cites for the specific data that my articles typically contain. But I have no reason to believe that anyone on the paper has looked through these numbers in detail – or at all.

That’s especially revealing because the trade and globalization subjects on which I’ve most often written are so obviously alien territories to the paper’s opinion staffers. But I’ve never knowingly presented a number or fact that I know is either inaccurate or misleading – or in which I haven’t had complete confidence.

More disturbing, one undoubted reason that my articles have been even superficially fact-checked is that they run counter both to the newspaper’s official stance generally favoring pre-Trump U.S. trade.policies, and to the unofficial but clear approval of such policies by The Times‘ straight news economics correspondents.

It’s unimaginable to me that anything like such requirements – including contextualizing – have been imposed on articles that conform with these official and unofficial Times‘ views. And I’m certain this is the case because flagrant errors have been so easy to spot.

One example: It’s become seemingly mandatory that articles favoring pre-Trump policies contend that 95 percent of the world’s population lives outside U.S. borders, and that therefore any deviation from so-called pro-free trade policies that ignores or slights the need to reach these potential consumers would be a catastrophic mistake. Never, ever pointed out: The vast majority of this 95 percent earns far too little to be significant customers for American-made products, or to become significant customers in the policy-relevant future. (I debunked the claim here.)

And as I’ve repeatedly shown on RealityChek – notably in the case of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul M. Krugman – serious fact-checking seems at least as rare when it comes to The Times‘ regular columnists.

So let’s please drop fact-checking as an excuse for challenging the legitimacy of running Cotton’s piece.

My second observation involves the broader debate set off by this fiasco (which resulted in the chief of the opinion pages resigning and the head of the op-ed page getting moved into another job). As with The Times internal deliberations, it’s been all over the place, too, but one central and explicit charge has been that even The Times‘ official waffling on the Cotton piece’s suitability amounts to troubling retreats from the ideals of journalistic objectivity and of free expression (which of course needs to comply with well established Constitutional limits, like prohibitions on speech and other forms of expression that are defamatory, or that posed dangers to children, or that ,’by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”).

To which my response is: Grow up. After all, The Times is a private company, and is under no obligation to publish all or even most ideological or philosophical comers on its opinion pages or anywhere else. It’s not a “public square.” Get a permit (if needed), and preach from a soap box on a street corner if you want one of those. 

True,the paper – which literally invented the op-ed page – avowedly conceived of the feature, in 1970, as an effort to:

“afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”

Times editors added:

“In furtherance of our belief that the diverse voices of our society must be given the greatest possible opportunity to be heard, we are at the same time approximately doubling the weekday space devoted to letters from our readers.”

I personally believe that this commitment to maximum (legal) diversity has been admirable. But that’s far from claiming that the paper has any legal or moral obligation to seek such variety. So my only quarrel with The Times on these free speech issues is an insistence on transparency – and honesty. If Times management wants officially to turn the op-ed page into a megaphone for whatever set of viewpoints it likes, or against whatever group of opinions it dislikes, just do it, and announce the decision to your readers.

At the same time, if the paper wants to keep sitting on the fence, or groping in the dark, or simply doesn’t even yet know what it’s groping towards, that should be announced, too. Such a confession of broad fallibility has its ethical virtues, too. In fact, for the nation’s too-often high handed Mainstream Media, and its pretensions of omniscience and unimpeachable civic and intellectual integrity, nothing could be more refreshing – not to mention newsworthy.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! One Clueless Peacock

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Andy Lack, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Gallup, Glad I Didn't Say That!, journalism, Mainstream Media, media, MSNBC, NBC News, news media, polls, Trump, Wuhan virus

“Journalism is under attack from coronavirus and the White House. But we’re winning.”

– Andy Lack, Chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, April 27, 2020

Share of Americans approving President Trump’s coronavirus response: 60 percent

Share of Americans’ approving the news media’s coronavirus response: 44 percent

– Gallup poll, March 25, 2020

(Sources: “Journalism is under attack from coronavirus and the White House. But we’re winning,” by Andy Lack, “Self Explanatory,” Think, NBC News, April 27, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/journalism-under-attack-coronavirus-white-house-we-re-winning-ncna1192306 and “Coronavirus Response: Hospitals Rated Best, News Media Worst,” by Justin McCarthy, “Politics,” Gallup.com, March 25, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/300680/coronavirus-response-hospitals-rated-best-news-media-worst.aspx)

Making News: New American Conservative Article Shows that the NY Times is Flunking Journalism 101

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CCP Virus, commentary, coronavirus, COVID 19, globalism, journalism, Mainstream Media, Making News, MSM, nationalism, reporting, The American Conservative, The New York Times, Wuhan virus

I’m pleased to announce that my latest article for an outside publication is now on-line.  The piece, titled, “Front Page NYT: ‘Nationalism Is Jeopardizing’ COVID Fight,” appears in The American Conservative. 

Click here and you’ll find a detailed look at a recent front-page news article in our nation’s supposed newspaper of record that reveals a scary truth:  Either The New York Times‘ staff has forgotten the difference between fact and opinion, or it no longer cares.  Not coincidentally, by the way, the slant is all pro-globalism. 

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Following Up: The New York Times’ Fake History of the U.S. is Spreading

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1619 Project, African Americans, education, Following Up, history, journalism, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, racism, Sean Wilentz, slavery, The Atlantic, The New York Times

Since Americans’ mistrust of the news media keeps getting stronger, it’s a safe bet that they’d be pretty upset to find out that one major news organization is playing a bigger and bigger role in shaping their childen’s education. And they could well become livid if they learned that this media influence in the schools is growing even as scholars in the relevant field are concluding that much of the material being propagated is bunk.

Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening with The New York Times‘ 1619 Project. As I reported in a post last year, the project, named after the year the first black African slaves were brought to North America, seeks to [its words] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The Times‘ reason for undertaking this effort? Its conclusion that “our story” as a nation hasn’t been told “truthfully.”

As I explained last year, the big problem with the 1619 Project isn’t that reconsideration of any aspect of U.S. history (or any history) should be beyond the pale, but that a news organization like The Times has no qualifications to undertake this task. Even more troubling: The Times lately has endorsed the view that it should act like a news organization with a substantive agenda, or several of them. And one of them is writing “about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years” because “America [has] become so divided by Donald Trump.”

Now confirmation has just emerged making clear that this bias has significantly infected the 1619 Project, and it comes not only from the ranks of America’s academic historians, but from historians with decidedly progressive views. Their case was summarized (at length) by Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, who concluded in a piece in The Atlantic (itself a pretty progressive publication) that although the role of slavery and racism in American history “remains too little understood by the general public,” The Times in many cases sought to fill the gap “through falsehoods, distortions, and significant omissions.”

What’s arguably worse, as Wilentz’ account makes clear, The Times not only blithely brushed off all of the historians’ critique. It doubled down on its propagandizing.

And here’s what’s clearly worse: The paper’s efforts to introduce this shoddy excuse for scholarship into school curricula have been succeeding. According to this report, 1619 Project materials are now being used or will soon in school systems in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Buffalo, New York. A New York City school is teaching with the Project as well, And The Times is working with an important ally – the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has produced a variety of “curricular resources,” including “a reading guide for the issue, activities to engage students, and more.

It’s bad enough that American journalism keeps spewing out Fake News. It now needs to be spreading Fake History? And the nation’s schools need to be swallowing it?

Im-Politic: The Mueller Letter Coverage Shows the Need for a Journalism Hall of Shame

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Attorney General, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, obstruction of justice, Pulitzer Prize, Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel, The New York Times, Trump, Trump-Russia, Washington Post, William P. Barr

Here are two suggestions for the folks at Columbia University’s journalism school who each year award the Pulitzer Prizes for that so-called profession: First, in addition to citing reporters and editors whose work supposedly embodies journalistic excellence, they should identify news people whose performance is a complete disgrace. Second, they could easily kick off this practice next year by shaming the Washington Post and New York Times articles this morning revealing that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has complained to Attorney General William P. Barr about Barr’s descriptions of his report on Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election and President Trump’s reactions to the Mueller probe.

Both pieces – and the reporters and editors responsible – completely mis-characterized the Mueller concerns that they eventually went on to portray accurately. And they committed the unforgivable journalistic (and broader ethical) sin of accentuating the negative when the case for focusing on the positive was at least equally strong.

Specifically, the thrust of the two pieces was that Mueller in a letter to Barr expressed objections to Barr’s March 24 letter to Congressional judiciary committee leaders summarizing the “principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation,” and informing them of the status of Barr’s “initial review” of the report.

But any reader who finished the articles would discover that, contrary to the headlines and the opening paragraphs, Mueller was most irked not by any of Barr’s actions or writings, but by the press coverage. According to the Post reporters (who claim to have seen the Mueller letter), the Special Counsel did write to the Attorney General (his Justice Department superior) that the March 24 Barr communique to Congress

“did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

(The letter has since been released.)

But farther into the story, readers are told that the following day, when the two spoke by phone, “Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials.”

Moreover – and this is crucial – “When Barr pressed Mueller on whether he thought Barr’s memo to Congress was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not but felt that the media coverage of it was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.”

So the question needs to be asked: Why wasn’t the emphasis in the Post story Mueller’s statement that Barr had accurately summarized his report, and that he thought the press coverage was awful? And by extension, why wasn’t the headline something on the order of “Mueller praises Barr summary as accurate; slams media interpretations”?

The Times story followed the same pattern and therefore embodied the same fatal flaws. In particular, it wasn’t until the seventh paragraph that readers learn that

“‘The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,’ a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, said in response to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.”

As a result, it, too, could have been – and indeed should have been – structured along lines favorable to Barr, not critical of him. Indeed, here the argument for such an approach is even stronger than for the Post piece, since the evidence of Barr’s accuracy comes from a named official spokesperson, not from anonymous sources.

Last week, a major national poll found that American voters’ distrust of “political news” had hit an all-time high of 54 percent. The Post and Times coverage of Mueller’s words all but guarantees that new records on this score will soon be set – and is sending a message to the Pulitzer folks that something like a Hall of Shame is needed to start getting journalism off its current irresponsible track.

Im-Politic: Home Delivery for Chinese Propaganda

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"Democracy Dies in Darkness", BBC, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, fake news, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, propaganda, RT America, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

For all the attention that’s been focused lately on the mainstream media’s objectivity and credibility, there’s no doubt that some major newspapers have for years been foisting unmistakably fake news on their readers, and I just got a reminder when I went out to my front porch this morning to pick up my Washington Post. It comes in the form of the ChinaWatch supplement (see here, e.g.) that arrives stuck inside the print edition periodically.

My main problem with ChinaWatch – which also has deals with other leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal – isn’t that it’s issued by the Chinese government, and therefore is nothing more than Beijing propaganda. Any country valuing free expression should welcome all comers to its media markets and national debates.

Instead, my main problem with ChinaWatch is that there’s no way for anyone lacking considerable knowledge about China and its state-run media to know that ChinaWatch is a Chinese government product.

Near the top of the front page, readers can see that the ChinaWatch supplement is “prepared by China Daily, People’s Republic of China” and “did not involve the news or editorial departments of the Washington Post.” At the very bottom comes the statement, “ChinaWatch materials are distributed by China Daily Distribution Corp., on behalf of China Daily, Beijing, China. Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.”

But why should that raise any red flags (no pun intended) with non-specialists? After all, the Post and most other news organizations routinely report that the Chinese economy is full of “private companies.” (See, e.g., here.) Why not simply assume that China Daily Distribution Corp. is simply one of them? It certainly sounds like a typical American-style business. And although the Justice Department reference might look a little odd, how many readers of American newspapers recognize it as a sign that the “company” is required under U.S. law to register as a foreign agent (though not necessarily as a foreign government)?

On page two you’ll find the masthead, with contact information for ChinaWatch‘s offices in China and various foreign locations. But no hint of any Chinese government affiliation appears here, either.

But there’s an easy fix for this problem: Require ChinaWatch to mention prominently on the front page (at least) that it’s a Chinese government publication. And because ChinaWatch is hardly the only foreign government product to appear in American news media outlets, the same should go for the United Kingdom’s BBC, Russia’s RT America, and others. As those two are among the foreign government media organizations that mainly broadcast, their identification could come in the form of text that continually appears in the “crawls” that so many televised news programs run at the bottom of the screen, or, in the case of radio, as periodic announcements (say, every five minutes).

And finally, in the interests of full disclosure, although ChinaWatch specifies that its content has nothing to do with the news and editorial departments of papers like the Washington Post, its appearance has lots to do with the business departments of those newspapers, and their bottom lines. For ChinaWatch is paid advertising. So the Post and the Journal and any others should make clear on a regular basis that they depend in part on the Chinese government for revenue.

After all, as the Post declares ominously in its new, Trump-era advertising slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness.” That’s also the place where reader ignorance and conflicts of interest flourish.

Im-Politic: Why Journalists Should Tweet Even More – & More Recklessly

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Covington Catholic, Farhad Manjoo, Frank Bruni, Im-Politic, Jill Abramson, journalism, Lincoln Memorial, MAGA teens, Mainstream Media, March for Life, media bias, Nathan Phillips, National Mall, Native-Americans, racism, social media, The New York Times, Twitter

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has a pretty self-serving explanation for why so many Mainstream Media journalists so prematurely joined the Outrage Mob that was so eager to condemn a group of Kentucky Catholic high school students for an alleged display of smirking racism on the National Mall on Friday: Twitter made them do it.

Sorry, but I ain’t buying it, and neither should you. And as I’ll see, Manjoo’s concluding recommendation – that these reporters and editors (and possibly pundits?) should abandon Twitter – is also completely wrong.

In case you’ve been ignoring the news for a while, these high school students, who were in Washington, D.C. for the “March for Life” last Friday were widely accused of treating a Native-American also in the capital for a (separate) protest with shockingly disgraceful disrespect and displays of outright bigotry. But this initial conclusion – which was based on a short video clip taken at the Lincoln Memorial scene of the confrontation – was quickly debunked by much longer videos that both absolved the students of all the serious allegations, and raised big questions about the role and background of Native-American protester Nathan Phillips and other groups on the scene.

Manjoo is absolutely right in lamenting how many journalists – including news reporters and editors, who are supposed to shunt aside their personal opinions on the job, go the extra mile to describe events as accurately as possible, and weigh information carefully – rushed to judgment about the students’ guilt. But he’s absolutely wrong to blame a social media platform – and in the process, spread the laughable idea that journalists who have been accomplished enough to secure employment at the nation’s most prominent news organizations are as incapable of resisting the temptations created by a new technology as a child is incapable of resisting gorging on candy.

According to the author:

“Instead of curious, intellectually honest chroniclers of human affairs, Twitter regularly turns many in the news — myself included — into knee-jerk outrage-bots reflexively set off by this or that hash-tagged cause, misspelled presidential missive or targeted-influence campaign.”

He adds:

“Twitter isn’t just ruining the media’s image. It’s also skewing our journalism. Everything about Twitter’s interface encourages a mind-set antithetical to journalistic inquiry: It prizes image over substance and cheap dunks over reasoned debate, all the while severely abridging the temporal scope of the press.”

Yet these arguments completely ignore what has to be the real explanation for this behavior: The journalists in question were all fully formed adults by the time they began tweeting recklessly, and have never prioritized telling their stories intellectually honestly. The only possible alternative? These folks weren’t fully formed adults by the time they began such tweeting, and/or by extension when they were hired. That sure doesn’t reflect well on the individuals and news organizations that gave them their weighty responsibilities.

Moreover, two prominent New York Times-related journalists themselves seem to disagree with Manjoo that the news business’ irresponsible tweeters should be let off the hook. Here’s Times columnist Frank Bruni, assessing how (and why) opinion journalists have dealt with the Mall confrontation story, and many other events recently:

“With everything from Twitter followers to television bookings, we’re rewarded for fierce conviction, for utter certainty, for emphatically taking sides and staying unconditionally faithful to what we’ve pushed for and against in the past. We each have our brand, and the narrower and more unyielding it is, the more currency it has and the more loyal our consumers. Instead of bucking the political tribalism in America, we ride it.

“We react to news by trying to fit it into the argument that we routinely make, the grievance that we usually raise, the fury or angst or sorrow that we typically peddle. We have our narrative, and we’re on the lookout for comments and developments that back it up. The response to the initial footage of the Covington boys — and, in particular, to the one who wore a red MAGA cap as he stood before and stared at the drumming veteran — adhered to this dynamic.

“Was that a smirk on the teenager’s face? A sneer? His expression was just indefinite enough to become a symbol of entitlement for the pundits who favor that locution, of the white patriarchy for another group, of the wages of Trumpism, of the fraudulence of Catholicism.”

But Bruni also wrote (correctly) that “the rest of the media didn’t behave all that differently” on and off Twitter. (A superb description of The Times own overall record in this incident – and the incident itself – can be found in this article in The Atlantic.)

His views also have been supported by no less than Jill Abramson, the recent (and fired) Times news chief. In a forthcoming book (as reported by Fox News‘ Howard Kurtz, and not denied by Abramson or anyone else at The Times), Abramson

“describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. ‘The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,’ she writes.”

And as is clear to anyone following them, most of the most aggressive and biased tweeters from the news profession are well short of middle age.

All of which is why I so strongly disagree with Manjoo’s belief that journalists, and especially straight news reporters, should tweet much less – and try to steer clear of controversy. Nothing would make it easier for them to keep hidden the biases that surely have been shaping their reporting and editing. In fact, I hope they tweet even more – and more candidly.

After all, the great early 20^th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis rightly observed that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Twitter is proving to be a great source of the kind of light that unmistakably needs to be shined on journalism these days.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Economics and Business Reporting Needs More Context, Too

Tags

aluminum, automotive, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, GM, journalism, metals tariffs, profits, steel, tariffs, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s my fervent hope that journalists and their audiences learned a valuable lesson about context from this past weekend’s firestorm about the confrontation on the National Mall between a group of mainly white Catholic high school kids on the one hand, and some Native American and African American protesters. One test of whether the need to avoid rushing to judgment based on limited information really has sunk in will be stories about the impact of President Trump’s metals tariffs on the U.S. auto industry.

So far, the coverage has stressed that the levies, which to some extent, for some period of time, raise the cost of the steel and aluminum for auto-makers, have been major headwinds for the sector. And that’s certainly been the message sent by the industry itself. But there’s also no doubt that other key data, representing that crucial context, have gone missing, and these omissions have significantly distorted the picture being presented.

The key statistic that’s been emphasized is the $1 billion in increased 2018 costs claimed by both General Motors (GM) and Ford due to higher metals prices. Which of course sounds like a lot of money. (Fiat Chrysler, the third of the “Detroit 3” auto-makers, has said that because of its use of fixed contracts, its metals prices were largely unaffected last year, but could cost it an extra $300-$350 million this year.)

But the $1 billion figure doesn’t exist in isolation. It needs to be compared with the total costs these companies pay to run their operations. And when that rudimentary calculation is performed, the $1 billion looks pretty unimpressive.

After all, GM’s total costs and expenses in the third quarter of 2018 (the latest data available) topped $34 billion. Its total costs for the year’s first two quarters exceeded $32 billion. (See here and here.) So if the fourth quarter winds up in that ballpark, GM’s 2018 costs will be nearly $130 billion. Which doesn’t make the $1 billion in extra metals costs look very big at all. Ford’s costs, incidentally, were running even higher than GM’s for the first nine months of 2018.  (See the quarterly earnings reports listed here.) 

The extra metals costs look much more important compared with the profits of these companies. Through the third quarter of last year, GM’s operating profits were $7.50 billion. Its guidance for the fourth quarter and for this year is even better. Nonetheless, a company with nearly $130 billion in total annual costs would seem to have plenty of opportunities to generate savings to offset higher steel prices.

Ford’s operating profits so far in 2018 have been lower than GM’s (just under $5.2 billion).  But its costs have been higher, so it’s hard to finger the metals tariffs as its strongest 2018 headwind.

If President Trump imposes tariffs on vehicles and auto parts from much of the rest of the world, the Detroit 3 could definitely have a tougher slog this year. But that point is irrelevant to the impact of the metals tariffs last year.

Will the business and economics press present a fuller picture going forward? General Motors is expected to announce fourth quarter and full-year 2018 earnings on February 6. Ford’s is coming up tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Im-Politic: Enough with the Neocons Already

Tags

American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, chattering class, Eric Levitz, Im-Politic, journalism, libertarians, media, neoconservatives, New York magazine, think tanks, Trump

Boy, am I glad I read Eric Levitz’ recent piece in New York magazine all the way through! Not that the author sprung any pleasant surprises on me. Based on the headline, I was expecting just another example of arrogant, intolerant liberalism, and Levitz’ certainly didn’t disappoint in this respect. His main argument: that major liberally oriented opinion publications and op-ed pages should no longer seek left-right ideological and political balance nowadays because the only American conservatism in the age of Donald Trump that has any influence is yahoo-ism in various forms. Instead, these liberal referees of the national political debate generally should keep their forums open almost exclusively to voices from more responsible and rational the left of center.

But within this laughably tendentious claim is a point that’s entirely valid, and that in fact has been bugging me for many years. It concerns the – long-time – practice of either liberal or even nominally neutral opinion forums (i.e., most of the national media) for publishing viewpoints, from whatever perspective, that obviously have no notable constituencies outside the bounds of the interlocking and increasingly hidebound ranks of America’s chattering class elites.

And in my mind, the viewpoint that sticks out more than any other in this respect is neoconservatism. This branch of conservatism began as an interesting hybrid of (a) the kind of Big Government-oriented liberalism that since the New Deal era has dominated the views of Democrats on domestic issues, and (b) the kind of aggressive anti-communism and, more recently, broader global activism that many Democrats have rejected since the Vietnam War began going bad. In addition, much neoconservatism was animated by what its pioneers considered the Democrats’ abandonment of the goal of racial integration in favor of various programs of racial preferences and forms of racial pandering.

As documented in this insightful article by Michael J. Lind of the New America Foundation, the neoconservatives steadily became more conventionally conservative on domestic issues – including a strong enthusiasm for standard free trade policies and mass immigration. But something that still hasn’t changed has been their stunning talent for attracting media attention – a record that genuinely qualifies as stunning because there’s never been a shred of evidence that neoconservatives have any significant following among the general public.

Of course there are many Americans who support the low-tax, small-government positions now taken by neoconservatives these days. There are many fewer who support their brand of foreign policy activism, but at least this position hasn’t completely disappeared from the electorate. Yet have you encountered many friends, neighbors, and relatives who believe in slashing federal spending and shrinking the national tax base on the one hand; sending American troops to the furthest, least important corners of the world to nation-build, spread democracy, fight extremism etc on the other; and opening the national doors wide open to imports from places like China and immigrants the world over? In fact, have you ever met anyone fitting this description?

Just as important (and not unrelated), can you identify many national politicians or office-seekers who embody this set of views? After Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona (the former of course afflicted with aggressive brain cancer and the latter deciding to leave office before suffering certain defeat in his state’s Republican primary), and their South Carolina GOP colleague Lindsey Graham?

Until recently, you could have added Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio to this short list, but in recent months, he’s definitely been reading the handwriting on the wall. Just look at his new stances on confronting China both militarily and economically, and complaining about important aspects of the latest tax cuts passed by Congress.

All the same, however, the neoconservative presence in the national media remains impressive. Writers from neoconservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary appear constantly on the nation’s talk shows, and they’re frequently joined by neoconservative colleagues from less doctrinaire publications and from think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. Maybe most revealing, when the proudly mainstream liberal New York Times chose the latest columnist to add to its roster of regulars, it picked card-carrying neoconservative Bret Stephens – a Wall Street Journal alum.

Now it’s true that President Trump, who generally is loathed by neoconservatives, has chosen two of their leading lights as major foreign policy aides – John R. Bolton to serve as his White House national security adviser, and former Kansas Republican Congressman Mike Pompeo to serve as his Secretary of States (after a year of running the CIA). And some important Trump foreign policies look awfully neocon-y, most prominently his approach to countering the influence of ISIS-like terrorists and the Iranian government in the Middle East (combined so far with a loudly stated aversion to massive American boots on the ground). But Trump as a neoconservative-in-the-making? Talk about a wildly premature judgment at best.

So why is the mainstream media still so enamored with neoconservatives? Four main reasons. First, many are still strongly anti-Trump, so featuring them on the air, on-line, and in print enables Trump-hating news organizations to pretend that most opposition to the President remains bipartisan. Second, the United States was governed by a largely neoconservative administration as recently as 2008. And since former this-es and that-s are so skilled at finding post-government careers in Washington, neoconservatives make up an abundant supply of voices with governing experience on which journalists can rely for right-of-center analyses. Third, neoconservatives are still so easy to find in Washington (and secondarily in New York City) largely because although this faction has almost no grassroots, it’s generously funded. So think tank perches and related jobs (including a wide variety of non-tenure university appointments) in the two cities tend to be readily available for individual neoconservatives, and their publications tend to be at least adequately funded.

Fourth, precisely because neoconservatives have been so numerous in the nation’s two main media centers for so long, they’ve become thoroughly familiar to the media. In addition to their widespread and easy availability to newsmen and women as sources of information and analysis, neoconservatives can socialize routinely with their journalistic counterparts. Not only is there no shortage of conferences and receptions at which these segments of the chattering class can socialize (many of which are sponsored by neoconservative or neoconservative-leaning organizations). But neoconservatives (along with other think tankers and the like) and journalists tend to live in the same small group of affluent neighborhoods and send their children to the same first-rate public schools and exclusive private academies.

And as is common with people who hang out a lot together, neoconservatives (and other think tankers) and journalists often become very chummy. The more so if they’re college buddies, or went to the same school, and took the same kinds of courses from the same kinds of professors. The latter of course increases the odds of media types finding themselves in broad agreement with the neoconservatives, and thus regarding these figures as doubly appealing.

New York‘s Levitz argues that conservatives generally shouldn’t be shut out of the news media entirely – and decidedly deserve to appear if they have something new and/or especially interesting to say. I believe the same about neoconservatives. But no doubt largely because these thinkers have had such easy access to the mainstream media, and enjoyed all the associated glistening economic and status prizes, they’ve had little incentive to change their fundamental tune, and surmount this hurdle. So given their predictability and lack of influence, maybe news organizations could at least dial down the overexposure?

Incidentally, for the same reasons, I’d favor treating libertarians the same way. Their funding is impressive, indeed lavish. (Doubt me? Check out the Cato Institute‘s Washington, D.C. headquarters sometime, along with its wide-ranging agenda of conference and similar events). But where are their grassroots? In particular, which noteworthy portions of the electorate share their enthusiasm for unilaterally opening America’s markets no matter how protectionist trade rivals remain, erasing U.S. borders and requiring American workers to compete against an immense new influx of very low-wage foreign counterparts even for high-skill jobs, trusting the private sector (including Wall Street) to regulate itself, and eliminating the major entitlement programs? Even individually, these stances command precious little popular support. Taken together, they comprise a modest minority. That’s surely why Americans have elected exactly zero libertarians as President, and why even Republicans have resoundingly rejected them in presidential primaries even well before the Trump phenomenon appeared. Moreover, read libertarian writings on any of the above issues from decades ago, and you won’t see much difference in terms of their analytic framework with libertarian writings today.

Of course, simply ostracizing neoconservatives, or neoconservatives plus libertarians, from major opinion forums, or at least sharply limiting their presence, would leave the national political debate nearly as narrow, and phony, as following a Levitz-type approach. So what the media referees need to do is work much harder to find contributors who represent not only reasonably coherent emerging schools of thought (like populism’s conservative and liberal variants) but who are trying to turn American politics less rigidly formulaic and exploring various combinations of positions that have never, or not recently, been combined before, along with those who are seeking wholly new answers to pressing national questions.  Moreover, it should go without saying, important new factual findings should always be welcome, no matter how they cut politically.

The op-ed editors and talk show hosts will face a formidable challenge in achieving this goal. After all, success would require exercising judgment, rather than flipping through their familiar (electronic rolodexes). But success is urgently needed – for it would mean a national opinion universe that looks much less like the tiny, inbred communities in which they’re embedded, and much more like America.

Following Up: Vital Background on “Idea Laundering” — and Washington Corruption

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Bloomberg.com, conflicts of interest, corruption, hedge funds, idea laundering, Im-Politic, James K. Glassman, journalism, lobbying, Mainstream Media, Nick Confessore, special interests, The Washington Monthly, think tanks

Since I’m a great believer in giving credit where it’s due, I feel honor-bound to report that I just learned that a development I thought I first identified (along with a catchy name) wasn’t spotted first by me after all. At the same time, it’s also a pleasure to make this confession, because it creates a golden opportunity to recommend two excellent pieces of journalism that shine much needed additional light on this development – which has tremendously deepened corruption in American policymaking.

The development? “Idea laundering” – which I’ve defined as the now widespread practice of special interests (like corporations) using think tanks to issue materials that push the particular agendas of these funders while garbing them in quasi-academic raiment to create the impressions of objectivity and intellectual respectability. In other words, it’s become practically standard operating procedure in the policy world for outfits with scholarly-sounding names like “The Brookings Institution” to put out reports and articles that flack for the companies and other donors (now including foreign governments) that pay the rent without disclosing the hand that’s feeding them. Just as bad, journalists almost never reveal these conflicts of interest – or even ask about them.

I thought that I was the first to spotlight and name this deception, in 2006 testimony before Congress on Chinese influence-peddling operations in America. But yesterday, while reading a terrific piece on Bloomberg.com on how hedge funds have been using an especially insidious variant of the practice, I learned that it was first described in a 2003 Washington Monthly article by Nick Confessore, who is now a reporter for The New York Times. Interestingly, the individual at the center of both articles is James K. Glassman, a long-time fixture in the Washington, D.C. chattering class scene who Confessore credited with pioneering this deceitful new version of lobbying.

I do believe that I’ve been writing and warning about idea laundering more than anyone else. But I’m glad to acknowledge publicly that I was beaten to the punch when it comes to parenthood. It’s also great to see that more and more journalists are looking underneath the hood of the writings and Congressional and media appearances that so profoundly shape America’s approach to virtually all foreign and domestic issues.

Unfortunately, as made clear by this recent post, we’re a long way from the point at which reporters name the donors routinely, and when editors demand this vital information just as often. Until they do, the idea launderers and their paymasters will keep winning far too many victories at the expense of Main Street Americans.