Category: Social & Political Issues

Perhaps my favorite weekly feature in the news media is “Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet,” which I read on page two of the Saturday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Earthweek is a compendium of five or six small stories about weather or geology related events that occurred in the prior week, for example, monsoons, tornadoes, plagues, discoveries of new species or earthquakes. Each story has a little circular icon by it, which is also placed on a map of the world which comes with the feature. 

This past weekend, Earthweek’s lead story was about the latest analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  (NOAA) that found that so far, 2010 is the hottest year in the record books, which started in the late 1800’s.  And believe it or not, the extent of snow cover in North America was the smallest since those records have been kept in 1967.

I’d like to go beyond the obvious question of why this NOAA release of data was so little publicized in the mainstream media.  I think it’s clear by now that high on the agenda of virtually all the news media is keeping the controversy about the validity of global warming alive, despite the overwhelming evidence and acceptance by the scientific community that global warming is occurring. 

Instead, I want to use this analysis of the first four months of the year to talk about the power of anecdotal evidence.  When I first read about the NOAA data, I immediately thought of all those right-wing lie-mongers like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh scoffing at global warming in the dead of winter with 30 inches of snow on the ground.  They expected that their audience would place more credence in what they are feeling at the moment than on the mountain of studies about warmest years on record and retreating snow lines that has accumulated over the past two decades.

That’s the emotional power of the anecdote.  Each cold day is an anecdote of weather, just as Willie Horton and Reagan’s imagined welfare queens were anecdotes of grave threats to civil society;  just as the weak and powerless people that presidents since Reagan have taken to parading before the nation during State of the Union speeches are anecdotes of inspiration.

Anecdotal evidence is always based on a story, whether it’s the time you saw a dark-faced youth rob someone on the subway to the slow growing throb of cold pain in your hands when you’re into the second hour of shoveling out your car.

Anecdotal evidence works best when the anecdote symbolizes the message of the speaker, and it seems to be most powerful when it runs counter to facts but with the flow of belief.  For that reason, anecdotal thinking thrives wherever there is a clash between faith and science, with the side of faith more prone to making the anecdotal argument.

I believe that the best argument is one that is based on the facts but uses anecdotes to serve as examples of those facts.  In this way, you appeal to both the head with facts and the heart with stories that bring the facts to life.  But beware anybody who tells you the story, but doesn’t give you the facts. 

By the way, in the vast scheme of things, four months is also anecdotal, in that the warmest four months in recorded history could occur as an aberration during an extended cold spell.  But in fact, as NOAA and other statistics have proven, the earth has been rapidly warming over the past two centuries to the point that it is changing environments and weather patterns.

The news media unleashed a tsunami of stories about comments Rand Paul’s made on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with almost 2,700 stories coming up on Google news within 48 hours.  Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse wrote the base story for the front page of the May 21 edition of the New York Times.

Pundits from across the spectrum of opinion weighed in. Some rightfully excoriated R-Paul for making absurd statements such as his belief that private businesses have the right to refuse to serve African-Americans; for example David Gans on The Huffington Post.  Others offered principled explanations, such as the attempt of the Wall Street Journal to put R-Paul’s offensive remarks in the context of a libertarian movement that the Journal’s writer Jonathan Weisman claims began as a reaction to FDR’s New Deal.

Before speculating on the broader significance of what looks on the surface to be a sudden outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease, I want to analyze a part of the first Times article in which R-Paul demonstrates that he is completely stone deaf not only to minorities, but to his own Tea Party supporters:

Mr. Paul also found himself on the defensive on Thursday when he sought to justify his decision to hold his election night celebration at a country club in Bowling Green, arguing that was not in any way at variance with the grass-roots movement he has come to epitomize.

I think at one time, people used to think of golf and golf clubs and golf courses as being exclusive,” Mr. Paul said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” adding, “Tiger Woods has helped to broaden that, in the sense that he’s brought golf to a lot of the cities and to city youth.”

First, R-Paul ignores the question completely because his answer focuses on minorities and the question concerned his movement, which has been well-documented to consist of fairly well-off whites living in far suburbs and rural areas.  What R-Paul is trying to do is bring minorities into his lily white tent, which consists of a lot of people who feel right at home in country clubs.  But R-Paul shows his finger is on nobody’s pulse when he hails Tiger Woods, who is currently still in semi-disgrace, as proof that minorities go to country clubs, which then for mysterious reasons justifies having his election night celebration in a country club.  Minority admissions to historically segregated country clubs may or may not be up, but the greatest golfer in the world certainly doesn’t prove it, since he gets a free pass as a celebrity.  And isn’t it a bit insulting to both African-Americans and his own constituency of middle aged, money white suburbanites to hold up as an example someone who has never really done anything for civil rights and has now scandalized himself with his bad behavior (which I still think was nobody’s business but his family’s and his).

In fact like his comments on the Civil Rights Act, holding his party at a country club was a subtle but easy-to-understand message to his core constituency.  It’s an ugly racist message at heart, no matter how much he pretties it up with libertarian abstractions.  And it’s obvious it’s been part of R-Paul’s bag of campaign tricks all along. Frank Rich dates 2002 as the earliest point one can start tracking R-Paul’s anti-Civil Rights Act rap.

So why didn’t the news media say anything about R-Paul’s obnoxious views regarding civil rights before the election?  The media should have been salivating over R-Paul’s incendiary comments, as they represent the very type of detail from which reporters can build a campaign narrative about a “horse race” and not the issues.

There is a long history of the news media building up candidates in the primaries only to tear them down during the election, or of building up candidates during the election only to tear them down once they have won.  The classic example is the Watergate burglary, which was downplayed until Nixon had trounced McGovern.  But think of the case of Michael Dukakis, who could do no wrong in the news media until he was nominated, giving the Democrats perhaps their weakest candidate ever in a presidential election in which there was no incumbent.  Kerry, too, was a much weaker, and more centrist, candidate than other 2004 choices among Democrats.  As I remember it, the media didn’t start dumping on him for his gaffes, his policy turnarounds and his privileged background until the fall campaign.  (Of course, Kerry’s smarmy and immature salute at the convention did make him a very easy target.)

I can’t tell you why the news media protects one candidate and goes after another, or protects a candidate until after the election, except to say that at the end of the day, newspapers represent the people who own them.

Every week at least one article in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times is completely devoid of content.  These articles usually use a chatty tone to babble irrelevancies about one aspect of a news story that is supposed to reflect a trend or epitomize an idea.

Yesterday, it was Roberta Smith’s article titled “The Coy Art of the Mystery Bidder,” which was a series of cleverly stated observations on the social significance when a buyer of an expensive work of art remains anonymous, such as the person who anonymously purchased a Picasso this past week for more than a $100 million.

Smith, who is described as an art critic for the Times, has nothing of import to say, but prattles some not-so-sharp but coyly phrased observations about the super-rich; conjectures on which ethnic caricature might have done the buying; imagines a fantasy in which the $100 million is given to the New York Public Library; and concludes with the assertion that when blowing millions on a work of art, it’s much more admirable if you tell people who you are.  Threading together these disparate thoughts is a gossipy tone and the idea that we all inherently have a high interest level in seeing rich folk spend money. 

The article is nothing but contentless filler, a pleasant way to read for a few minutes without having to actually think about what you’re reading.  We see this kind of writing all over the news media and the fact that the Times has been cluttering “The Week in Review” section is not very amazing, just a little pathetic for a publication vying to be our national prestige newspaper.

What I find most fascinating, however, is how even in these contentless fluff pieces that the writer is able to employ propaganda techniques to instill a set of values, some unstated but present in the assumptions or the subtext.

Let’s start with the first few sentences of Smith’s piece: “If you follow art auctions even peripherally, you know that each one leaves a trail of question marks. Who bought the van Gogh? Who bought the Johns?”

It seems like a harmless if slightly gossipy opening, a kind of a trivialization of both the business of art auctions and the evolving history of which artists society esteems most.  But why Jasper Johns?  His name is not mentioned elsewhere is the article as an artist whose works are frequently at auction or breaking sales records.  So why Johns?  Why not Rauschenberg?  Or Rivers or Motherwell?  Or one of the all-time biggies like Monet and Giacometti whose works are shown elsewhere in the story as examples of those bought anonymously for record or near record amounts.

Van Gogh makes sense because he’s the one artist whom everyone will have heard of.  (50 years ago it might have been Renoir, or perhaps Michelangelo.)  So if the other artist that the writer selects as an example is not another Babe Ruth like Rembrandt or Picasso, her selection is her statement that this artist is very important.  Smith selected Johns, for I don’t know what reason.  But it clearly is a great piece of propaganda because without telling us that she thinks Johns is important, she conveys it in the subtext of the grammar.  He gains stature on the subliminal level merely by being the fill for the blank of “other great artist” in the sentence, “Who bought the ____?”

Now let’s look at this little tidbit:  “Strictly enforcing one’s privacy — at a time when so much goes public as fast as it happens — may be the ultimate public display of power, and thus the most erotic.”

Huh?

While admiring the irony of a private act becoming a public act, let’s quickly move to the real meaning of the sentence: that power is the most erotic attribute one can have.

Her way of expression takes it for granted that everyone agrees that power is more erotic than say good looks, athletic prowess, knowledge of teen dance styles, intelligence, resemblance to nuclear family members or artistic talent. 

And this power that Smith finds so erotic, what is it and how does it manifest itself? One word: money.  Smith slyly proffers “powerful” as an appropriate synonym for “moneyed,” especially when it comes to erotic matters, and because she puts it into the subtext as a series of assumptions (and because we read it so often in other subtext), we get the message without stopping to consider if it’s true or not.  The message of course is that all things including the measurement of power and sexual appeal reduce to the common denominator of money. 

The handling of the topic is also a matter of ideology, in this case, the trivialization of public discourse, the turning of all news into gossip and all gossip into news.  Her topic is the anonymous buyer, which is the current events hook.  Instead of doing a chatty gossipy contentless piece of fluff, Smith could have analyzed if there is some difference in the makeup of the anonymous (whose names eventually do comes out in most cases) and the non-anonymous buyer.  She could have reported their true reasons for wanting to remain anonymous (instead of her almost-racist hypothetical about an imaginary Russian oligarch).  She could have traced what happens to art bought anonymously and if that differs significantly from art bought by a publicly-revealed person or company.  Of course taking any of these approaches would have required Smith to do a little research.  Heaving chatty tidbits of myth, assertion and ideology probably takes less time.

Yesterday, National Public Radio ran a fairly longlong feature on country-and-western performer Merle Haggard, who has recovered from lung cancer and recently released a new set of recorded material.

The story took the standard format of cutting back and forth between a conversation with Haggard and samples of the new material.  Here are the topics of the conversational segments between the music (and I may have them slightly out of order).  Consider this list an SAT test question—which one does not belong?:

• His bout with lung cancer
• His music
• His view that the new health care law is bad
• His life
• His new album

What is Haggard’s opinion on healthcare legislation that has already passed doing in a feature about his life and music?  While it is true that Haggard, an Obama supporter in the last election, wishes the president well in the same segment, it is so out of place as to beg the question, why did the reporter and editor choose to include this material from what was probably an interview with Haggard that lasted more than an hour before editing?

In the NPR story, Haggard says, “I’m not sure we can ask people to pay for it,” which sounds like what some rich folk say when they don’t want to help fellow citizens in need.  It also reflects Haggard’s ignorance of what is in the actual law.

I don’t condemn Haggard for making his views known, no matter how uninformed they are.  He’s entitled to his opinion, like all of us.

But I’m wondering what NPR’s hidden agenda is?  I’ve heard these pop culture stories on NPR for years and they almost always stick to the bio and the music.  When they do broach issues of politics it’s because that’s the focus of the entire story.  In this case, however, the reference seems gratuitous and out of place.  Note that by injecting this anti-healthcare comment in a story on an entertainer, NPR relieves itself of its journalistic responsibility to tell both sides.

This injection of more ignorance on a pressing issue into what was otherwise a soft entertainment feature seems to be part of what I see as an effort by all the mainstream news media to help the Republicans in the mid-term elections.  I’m not saying that the media is working together, only that they are slavishly following the lead of the ultra-right media, as usual.

The news media sets the agenda for public conversation by determining what stories it will cover outside of hard news such as wars, mass murders and celebrity breakups.  This week we have a perfect example of the great disservice that the news media does in the way it currently determines what issues to make the focus of discussion in the marketplace of ideas.

The other day I told you about the survey that found that about half of television weather personalities don’t believe in global warming.  The news media used the study, which was really an analysis of a barrier to communicating about global warming to the public, as a platform for keeping the question of if there is or is not global warming on the table.  Of course the funny but disheartening problem with this line of reasoning is that half of all TV weather personalities are not meteorologists and meteorologists for the most part never study climatology, the science involved in predicting global warming.

As of yesterday, the second day after the release of this study, there were 96 stories that you could pull up on Google news.  When I checked while writing this blog entry, it was the third day and the number was up to 108.

Compare those numbers to a study of 800 registered voters commissioned by Transportation for America and Smart Growth America, two groups in favor of more mass transit.  The study, released yesterday, found that 51% of those surveyed would pay more in taxes for more and better public transit.

Wow! In the privatized car culture of this (still) Age of Reagan, that finding is stunning: Slightly more than half of all Americans will pay higher taxes for mass transit.

More study results: Transportation for America poll

• 59 percent said public transportation was a better way to reduce congestion than building or expanding roads.
• 57 percent said they would like to spend less time in their cars.
• 82 percent said America would benefit from expanded transit.

This poll shows that the U.S. is hungry for mass transit, which has ramification on key decisions we have to make concerning how we address global warming, the predicted shortage of oil and public investments and tax credits to stimulate job growth.  By the way, some 73% of the survey takers say they currently have no access to mass transit.

To my way of thinking, this poll is important enough to appear on the front page of the New York Times, just as the study on TV weather personalities did.  But clearly I’m out of sync with the mainstream in my belief that arguing over public transit is more important than arguing over a proven scientific theory.  The New York Times did not cover the story at all.

In fact hardly anybody did. Today, the second day of the study, Google News showed only 17 stories about the public transit survey.  That’s about 18% of the number of stories about what TV weather personalities think of the theory of global warming. 

The mainstream news media has been delighted to give voice to non-experts on scientific matters, so ready to publicize the illogical rants of the sliver of the population in the original “Tea Party” movement.  Yet as a group they have completely ignored what appears to be a sea change in the will of the people regarding public transportation.  Of course, there is an array of special interests aligned against mass transit, including those who benefit from the sales of automobiles, those who don’t want to raise taxes ever and those who are suspicious of anything having to do with city life.  Evidently these opponents are so strong that they manage to keep issues of public transit out of the media for the most part, except for the occasional “gloom-and-doom” stories when public transit systems have to cut back service because they have been starved for funding since the Reagan administration.

To truly understand the absurdity of this situation, let’s take a hypothetical trip back to the 1940’s and ask ourselves: Would we rather have seen public debate on whether or not Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was really true OR on if the U.S. should be developing an atomic bomb?  I think the answer is obvious: whether to build an atom bomb or not involves complicated issues of military, economic, political, political philosophy and ethics, just like building more public transit does.  Whether or not Einstein was right or wrong can only be decided by analyzing scientific data, not by gathering opinions, just like the theory of global warming. 

Let’s put the comparison in the coverage these two studies have received into a broader context of hard news.  There are currently more than 9,000 stories about the Moscow Metro bombings and their aftermath on Google News.

First the sad news: A study released yesterday by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that only about half of approximately 570 television weathercasters surveyed believe that global warming is occurring and fewer than a third believe that climate change is caused by human activities.

Now the news media coverage, primarily following a story on the front page of today’s New York Times, used the study as a podium for expressing the view that there is still controversy over if there is global warming and what might cause it.  The bulk of the article tries to substantiate a broader opposition of meteorologists and climatologists on global warming beyond what is in the survey of TV weather personalities.  By pitting the meteorologists against the climatologists, the media coverage serves to keep the debate on global warming alive.  Of course among climatologists and other environmental scientists there is no controversy on this issue, as virtually all now do subscribe to the theory of global warming.

The media coverage makes a number of logical mistakes and the study itself has a small flaw.  As the Times article points out, only half of all TV weatherfolk have degrees in meteorology.  When I was a television news writer and reporter in the 1980’s, the TV weather people were for the most part entertainers, and that still seems to be the case to a great degree.  These TV stars are entitled to their opinion, but have absolutely no standing as experts on scientific issues. 

Now the purpose of the study was to see how TV weather personalities were contributing to science education, especially when it comes to global warming.  In fact the mission of the George Mason group is admirable: “to conduct unbiased public engagement research – and to help government agencies, non-profit organizations, and companies apply the results of this research – so that collectively, we can stabilize our planet’s life sustaining climate.”  The group knows that global warming is occurring and wants to create a body of research that can help us communicate more effectively to the public about this grave threat.  Obviously TV news weather personalities could contribute to that effort so understanding their attitudes is very important. 

But the professors make one small flaw, a very surprising one to someone with some familiarity with consumer research.  When we do consumer research, we try to divide our target market into significant segments, for example, sex, income level, size of company, education level.  We try to differentiate the segment by the factor that will give us the most information about the group, for example, when we did a survey for a maker of industrial seals, we segmented the survey respondents by size of company and customer versus noncustomer.  The George Mason study does absolutely no segmentation.  For a study with the goal of uncovering information to help improve science education, you would think that the professors would ask the survey respondents if they had degrees in meteorology or another scientific field, and then present one version of the findings with those with degrees separated from those without. 

Because of this small flaw by a well-intentioned group of researchers, the news media has an opening to conflate meteorologists with TV weather people and turn what should be a story on the sorry state of education of TV weather personalities into an argument that global warming might not be taking place.

There is also the issue of what a meteorologist’s expertise really is.  As the National Severe Storms Laboratory states, “While meteorologists study and forecast weather patterns in the short term, climatologists study seasonal variations in weather over months, years, or even centuries.”  And according to Joseph Romm on The Energy Collective website, meteorologists don’t even have to take a course in climate change, because it’s not part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service certification requirements.

So to have meteorologists chime in on the global warming debate is as helpful as having civil engineers, sociologists or theologians say their piece:  It’s not their area of expertise, and those who have developed the expertise virtually all say the same thing: our planet is warming and our species is at least in part to blame.