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Defenders of National Security Agency (NSA) wholesale spying on Americans have asserted that it was and is legal, thanks to the Patriot Act.

But it turns out that all too often the NSA has broken the law—2,776 times over a one-year period, according to an internal audit leaked by the former NSA contractor and American hero Edward Snowden.  That’s an average of more than 7.6 times per day that the NSA violated privacy rules protecting the communications of those residing in the United States. The New York Times reports that most of the violations resulted from operator and system errors like “inadequate or insufficient research” when selecting wiretap targets.   For example, almost 70% of the violations occurred when a foreigner whose cellphone was wiretapped without a warrant came to the United States, where a warrant was required.

There is no way to prettify this pig: On its face, 2,776 instances of breaking the law in one year seems to prove that there has been a complete breakdown in agency discipline and that abuse of the Patriot Act is rampant.

The fact that it looks as if most of the violations involved taking a shortcut doesn’t absolve the NSA or the Obama administration. Here are some examples of other shortcuts: not asking for a warrant to wiretap an American citizen; doing complete sweeps of the metadata of millions of Americans; military trials to avoid civilian due process; and, of course, the shortest of all short cuts—torture. We’re not talking about a slippery slope here. What’s at issue is a mindset that is willing to break the rules and in the process trample on the rights of millions and to turn our society into a friendly police state.

It’s lose-lose for the NSA. Saying that the number of errors was miniscule compared to the number of wiretaps they are performing would indicate that the NSA is in fact spying on a disturbingly enormous number of people. So either the NSA makes a ton of mistakes or it’s doing massive spying.  That’s about as lose-lose as you can get!

Barack Obama assumed the office of the President of the United States on extremely high moral ground, which mainly reflected American and world disgust with the bumbling butchery of Bush II that birthed two useless but destructive and expensive wars, a torture gulag around the world and shocking new levels of spying on American citizens.  Barry even won a Nobel Peace Prize essentially for not being George Bush.

After the continued use of drones and continued revelations of spying abuses, Obama has lost all that high ground. You can’t stake a claim to a higher morality merely because you never ordered torture (especially if you have essentially suborned torture by not prosecuting the creators of the illegal torture machine). That’s akin to saying that you’re a better person because you only sell crystal meth to those over the age of 18. Of course, if we apply this analogy to Obama’s NSA, it may mean that you still “forget” to ask for ID most of the time!

Unfortunately the answer is not to vote for Republicans in the 2014 mid-term elections, since the Republican Party as a whole buys into the authoritarian state much more than the Democrats do.  Before we can stem the slow drift towards a police state, we have to turn the Democratic Party back towards a reasoned approach to fighting terrorists, one that depends on legal police and intelligence techniques known to work. It would also help if we had a foreign policy that did not overtly exploit and offend the people who represent the terrorists’ constituency.

The powers that be in Egypt seem to have the same view of democracy as those in the United States have: it’s fine as long as we get our way.

In the United States, they pass laws that make it harder for people to vote in hopes of offloading minorities, the poor and students from voter rolls to give future elections to right-wing conservatives.  In Egypt they are taking a more violent approach, first with a coup d’état that no one wants to call a coup d’état, and then violently uprooting thousands of protesters, leading to the deaths of 525 and counting.  The only coup d’état we’ve had in the United States was in 2000, when the Supreme Court used dubious law to declare George Bush (the Younger) the winner even though he lost the popular vote by millions and probably also lost the electoral college before voter manipulation.

Of course in the bad old days of southern overt resistance to civil rights, those who wished to limit voting to Caucasians often resorted to violence.  We’ve come a long way, baby!

All facetiousness aside, the United States is looking pretty foolish today for not having immediately cut all aid to Egypt when the military overturned the democratically elected government of the Muslim brotherhood.  There was certainly a lot of incompetence displayed by the Brotherhood in running the country, but if incompetence was a justifiable excuse for overthrowing a legally elected government, then we would have endured a number of coups in the United States over the years, including to overthrow Bush II.

Our attitude towards democracy overseas has always been ambivalent, because despite the flowery language about democracy our leaders have spouted from Wilson to Obama, the main concern of American foreign policy has always been to protect the interests of large American companies doing business abroad, secure a cheap source of raw materials, specifically oil, and open markets for American goods, including huge supplies of weapons. Democracy is fine—as long as the democratically-elected government supports those goals.

The Egyptian military is dependent on U.S. aid, as is the Egyptian economy, which was invoked as a reason for the coup. Would the generals have produced a replay of Tiananmen Square if we had withheld all aid until new elections had occurred?

More to the point, why aren’t we halting aid now? The pleas of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry for an end to violence on both sides sound hollow in the wake of the slaughter of the protesters. Of course, democracy plays little if no part in the equation for U.S. foreign policy makers. It’s a beautiful word we like to throw around, but since we became actively involved in world affairs sometime at the end of the 19th century, we’ve been more concerned with creating stable governments. Military governments are certainly more stable than democracies.

It’s time to freeze all aid to Egypt and organize our allies to put pressure on the Egyptian government for immediate elections.

Everywhere we turn nowadays we see mass culture infantilizing adults.

Here are some other examples of infantilization of American adults, by which I mean adults in late 20th century and early 21st century America behaving like children and enjoying the entertainments of their childhood:

• Disney’s EPCOT Center, a theme park for adults, opened in 1982 and since then the growth in popularity of all theme parks among adults has skyrocketed.  It is absolutely amazing how many adults now go to theme parks for vacation.
• Around the mid-70s, there began a wave of children’s movies for adults, starting with the “Star Wars” and the Indiana Jones series.  Other children’s movies for adults are the movie versions of situation comedies for children such as “The Brady Bunch.” (But I’m not talking about “The Simpsons,” which like “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Huckleberry Finn,” is an adult entertainment that children can also enjoy.)
• The hundreds of computer games for adults.
• Glorified fast-food chains serving alcohol with video and other games for adults, such as Dave & Busters.

Instead of graduating to something more sophisticated, adults seem to be keeping their childhood and childish entertainments and hobbies, such as video games, comic books and amusement parks. Mass media is spewing out ever more juvenile entertainment targeted for adults such as the recent wave of superhero movies. Adults are showing a much greater interest in juvenilia such as the Harry Potter and the Hunger Games novels. Campus recruiters compare their campuses to Harry Potter’s imaginary school. Advertisers are also appealing to the child within all of us, as we can see from a recent Oreo Cookie commercial with Sesame Street graphics that appeared in the New York Times, a publication read almost exclusively by adults.

I would submit that from the hellish Little League parent to the helicopter parent, the greater intrusion of parents into the lives of their children nowadays is a related phenomenon—in a sense instead of adult pursuits, many parents relive their childhoods through their children.

One of the most subtle forms of infantilization of Americans is the “buy now, pay later” mentality that makes people use high-interest credit cards or take loans on their houses to buy something now instead of saving up the money and not having to pay interest later.  Let’s amend the phrase and call it what it really is: “buy now and pay more later” because of what are sometimes exorbitant interest charges.

Infants and children can’t wait.  One of the signs of adulthood is being able to delay gratification.  Buy now, pay more later is about instant gratification.  It’s about behaving just like a child.

I kept thinking about the infantilization of American adults while recently reading a popular book of natural history (AKA evolution) recently, titled Last Ape Standing by journalist Chip Walter. Walter uses the most recent scientific discoveries to trace the rise and fall of the 26 other versions of the human species who inhabited the Earth from about 7 million to about 100,000-10,000 years ago. Why did our species make it and the other 26, including the Neanderthals, did not?

Walter attributes the success of human beings to the fact that our birth canal is so small that we do not come out fully formed, so that we keep growing after birth long after any other species. This concept of slowing down development is called neoteny and it leads to the retention of juvenile characteristics. That’s why, for example, compared to apes and the 26 other human species, we have flatter, broader faces, a larger brain, hairless bodies and face, thin skull bones, legs longer than arms and larger eyes. These are juvenile or prenatal traits in our near relatives, but we retain them into adulthood.

In fact, humans are so undeveloped at birth that they are dependent on their parents far longer than any other species, a force that many believe naturally leads to the formation of societies of humans.

According to Walter, the big payoff of neoteny and the big key to the development of humans is, of course, the bigger brain. Humans are able to keep learning new things—new languages, games, bodies of knowledge—until pretty much the day they die. I’ve read elsewhere that we now recognize that the brain of male human beings keeps growing into his twenties.

On a superficial basis, one could claim that the concept of neoteny demonstrates that adult infantilization is a good thing for our species. After all, it’s retaining our youthfulness that gave us an advantage over our 26 closest competitors.

But quite the contrary—neoteny explains why infantilization is a dangerous trend that threatens our survival. Neoteny offers the possibility of continued learning and continued expansion, constant adaptation to changing conditions. Infantilization means keeping the predilections of childhood. Staying the same is the very opposite of growth. It shows a rigidity of thought process that can be quite dangerous when faced with new and very complex dangers such as global warming and resource shortages.

Infantilization thus takes away the edge that neoteny has given to human beings, because it sets our thought processes in stone at a young age. The infantilized adult is the adult stuck in his or her own past, the adult who has ceased to learn, and having ceased to learn, has less flexibility of mind and thought. Easier to manipulate, to be sure, easier to convince of the need to buy something. But much less adaptable to change.

Two new American heroes have emerged in the fight for civil liberties and they’re both companies that do the same thing. The managements of Lavabit and Silent Circle, two secure email services, have decided to close their respective firms rather than hand over the emails of their users to the
National Security Agency (NSA).

The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, made a particularly poignant statement:

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on — the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.”

Bravo to all involved with both companies, who have put their livelihoods on the line to avoid participating in an evil activity—mass spying on the entirety of a nation.

Meanwhile, President Obama has been wimping out. He says that he wants to form a commission to consider scaling back the Patriot Act, yet he continues to have the NSA collect and analyze the personal telephone data of hundreds of millions of Americans.

He expresses concern for the use of drones, but keeps using them.  Why can’t he just say, No!

Just because the executive branch of government has the right to do something, doesn’t mean it has to do it. The Patriot Act does not order the NSA to spy on all Americans; it merely gives it the legal right to do so.

All the President has to do is tell the NSA to stop spying and tell the military to stop using drones. But he won’t do it.

Instead he closes more than a dozen diplomatic posts and intensifies the droning of Yemen based on the so-called intelligence the NSA culled from its vast information sifting machine.
But what was supposed to be a justification for all this spying turned out to be a petard upon which Al Qaeda hoisted the President, claiming that its campaign of terror was succeeding in its mission to terrorize the United States—we were certainly shivering in terror by closing those embassy offices!

Obama seems to be losing his moral compass when it comes to security the same way that all our Presidents since Truman seem to have done, except Ronald Reagan and Bush II. Under the sway of neo-Con and Nativist thinking, Reagan and especially Bush II fully embraced the idea of curtailing civil liberties and spying on citizens as part of their central political agenda from the very beginning.  It’s sad to see Barack Obama continue our drift to a police state.

 

A sudden flash of light, followed by a gigantic ever-expanding mushroom cloud. Within minutes the explosion destroys virtually everything and everyone within a mile radius, including innocent children. A black rain of soot and oil descends on the region. Those who survive have severe burns and other injuries. A silent atmospheric poison leads to tens of thousands of deaths in the months and years ahead. In all, 140,000 people die.

That’s a fairly sanitized version of what happened at Hiroshima, Japan, where the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb 68 years ago. Three days later, we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, another mid-sized Japanese city, killing 80,000 and injuring thousands more. These two instances mark the only atomic bombs that any nation has ever deployed.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that December 7, 1941 was a day that would live in infamy because that was the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, killing 2,402 Americans and injuring another 1,282. About 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks.  We routinely memorialize these days, yet we keep relatively quiet about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are surely the two most savage and barbarous single actions in the history of mankind. (By contrast, the destruction of 5.7 million European Jews known as the Holocaust consisted of a series of thousands of actions).

Before writing this article, I did a quick check on Google News about the events of the day. Here’s what I found:

Hiroshima: 90,000 stories

Shark Week on the Discovery Channel: 203,000

Apple, the computer and smart phone company: 348,000

Jennifer Aniston, a popular celebrity: 1,930,000

Chris Brown, a popular entertainer: 17,600,000

In other words, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was effectively ignored by the news media today. Sure, the Wall Street Journal mentioned it as a one-sentence “factoid” at the bottom of its “Morning Moneybeat” and The New York Times buried a short description of Hiroshima Day events in the New York area in its August 1 roundup of upcoming events in the “Arts” section.  Washington Post’s website had a photo gallery of remembrances taking place throughout the world. Compare this paltry coverage with what we get every year about Pearl Harbor Day and 9/11.

August 6 should be declared a permanent day of mourning in the United States, a day when as a society we ask for forgiveness for our sin of mass destruction. Every year, our president should attend a Hiroshima memorial and make a major speech about peace and disarmament.  The news media should give wide coverage to Hiroshima remembrances. Our summer camps should engage our children in some commemoration of this tragic day when America lost its ethical bearings. Religious figures should focus their sermons on the horrors of Hiroshima on the Sundays before August 6.

Moreover, I believe that we should posthumously impeach and convict the president who made the decision to drop the bomb—Harry S. Truman, who should go down in history as a villain as heinous in his own way as Hitler and Mao. Certainly over time Hitler and Mao caused more death and suffering than Truman, but no tyrant, king, dictator or elected leader has been responsible for more deaths in one day than Truman—and he did it twice! Don’t believe the nonsense that Truman saved more lives than were killed by the atomic attacks. Japan was already on its knees and ready to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was absolutely no reason to drop these terrifying weapons of mass destruction, except to frighten the Soviet Union. Evil does not reside in the mind, but in our actions. Truman was one of the most evil men in history, responsible for the two most evil single actions in the history of mankind.

Despite the fact that the media has practically ignored Hiroshima Day, I hope that my dear readers all take a little time today to feel shame at being citizens of the only nation ever to use the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

The New York Times article on electrical utilities lobbying against government support of solar powered electricity didn’t surprise me. It did disappoint me, though.

You would think that given what electrical utility executives know about shortages of fossil fuels and global warming, instead of trying to scuttle solar they would develop products and services for the solar market. It doesn’t have to just be a central power plant using solar energy to generate electricity and then sending it to homes and businesses along the grid. The utilities could also lease solar panels to houses and provide all maintenance, servicing, repair and insurance. There all kinds of ways the utilities can continue to line the pockets of the executives and shareholders in a solar and wind world.

Didn’t any of these guys go to business school? One of the first things that business students everywhere have to read is the classic Harvard Business Review article on the railroad industry. The thesis of the article is that the railroads declined because they forgot that they were really in the transportation business and they didn’t adapt to the changing conditions.

Did Microsoft or Apple roll up their tents when tablets and portable devices became big?  No, they adapted. What did that typewriter and mainframe computer company IBM do when personal computers came on the market?

Electrical industry spokespersons complain that government assistance to people who convert to solar helps to shrink the market for their way of delivering electricity to homes, and that they will eventually have to raise prices. So what? The country has been paying too little for energy for too long, which is why we waste so much. (Of course it’s an illusion to think we have relatively low energy costs, because so much of what we pay for our oversized military is to protect the oil supply chain.) The rising price of fossil fuel generated electricity helps to make solar and wind more attractive. Isn’t that the point of the government support of solar?

Keep in mind that for many years into the future there will still be a market for electricity generated by fossil fuels.

For decades, government gave generous subsidies and tax breaks to electrical utilities, and they still do in the form of the annual rate approval systems and tax exempt bonds to back construction of new capacity.

It once made sense to provide government support for fossil fuels. But those days are long gone.  Now we as a society have a pressing need for government investment into developing and commercializing sources of electricity that depend on renewable resources. Biofuels seem less possible since the ethanol fiasco in which more energy has been consumed to convert corn to fuel than resulted from the conversion while food prices skyrocketed. Our best options are solar and wind.

If utilities don’t invest in these alternatives, they will end up like makers of buggy whips. But that’s their problem, not the government’s or yours. Our problem is to secure a source of electricity in a world of resource shortages and extreme warming caused by carbon emission.

 

 

Do Americans want a “Big Brother” figure involved in their intimate relationships?

That’s what eharmony.com, one of the largest dating sites in the world, seems to be saying in a commercial that has been airing for many months now.

The imagery is a bit smarmy, because it suggests a wholesome threesome involving a man and a woman and a sage-looking elderly gentleman, who happens to be eharmony.com founder, Neil Clark Warren.

Here are the three vignettes that visually dominate this 30-second ad:

1. A man gives a woman an engagement ring and the woman shows it to Warren who says, “We took the platinum setting.”
2. A man and woman are getting cozy on a couch, about ready to watch TV when Warren sits down between and the woman offers him a large bowl of popcorn and starts munching.
3. At the beach, a woman gives a man a drink with a little hat or umbrella in it and turns to her other side and gives a drink to Warren.

In all three, Warren has intruded on a romantic moment, making it a kind of ménage a trois.

Meanwhile, the voice over makes a completely grandiose and mendacious claim: “Chances are behind every great relationship is eharmony.com.”  Let’s take a moment for the meaning of this statement to sink in: “Chances are” means probably or almost definitely. The explicit statement here is that eHarmony.com is responsible for all great relationships (at least between men and women). Even if we believe the eharmony.com website when it says that a recent Harris Interactive survey found that an eHarmony match led to almost 4% of all U.S. marriages in 2012, that’s a long way from “every great relationship.” It’s also worth pointing out that not every great marriage involves a great relationship. The claim in the TV ad goes far beyond exaggeration. It’s an outright lie.

More disturbing than this false claim, which most will easily see as self-serving puffery, is the hidden message that eHarmony makes by injecting its founder—a white male dressed in a traditional formal suit—into the happy relationships it shows in the ad.  It’s an authoritarian symbol. It’s one thing to use eHarmony and its questionnaire as a tool to sort potential mates.  As a sort mechanism, it’s probably works as well as bar-hopping, joining singles clubs, asking friends for fix-ups, taking cruises, using personal ads or going to adult activities such as Scrabble clubs and singles nights at the symphony.  But the ad is not just saying, use us as a tool. It’s saying: interject us—as represented by our founder—into your life and your relationship. Let our “29 dimensions of compatibility” be your guide, your guru, your teacher, an integral part of the relationship with your significant other.

As many OpEdge readers probably know already, Warren is a Christian theologian who first marketed the eHarmony dating site on Christian websites and in other Christian media, touting eHarmony as “based on the Christian principles of Focus on the Family author Dr. Neil Clark Warren.”  EHarmony claims to be secular and now advertizes everywhere, but think about it: Isn’t one of the main principles of many right-wing Christian denominations and Catholicism that god is part of the marriage, almost a third person in the relationship. Whether taken on a literal or figurative level, “god in the marriage” represents both the person of god and the principles of action that supposedly lead us to god. One traditional image of god is as a wise old man. Moreover, a genial grandfatherly man has served as an image for pastors, rectors, priests and other figures of religious authority for centuries.

The hidden message of the ad then is that eHarmony will bring god (or the religious and ethical values god represents) into the relationship.  The assumption, of course, is that the god in question is Christian.

It’s all done so fast—three story lines, a voice over and all that feel-good gospel pop music in the background. Like all TV commercials, it goes by so quickly that we are unaware or only vaguely aware of the subliminal messages. But make no mistake about it—the ad is meant to appeal to those who want someone to tell them what to do, whom to love, how to get it right. Warren and his 29 dimensions of compatibility are a stand-in for an authoritarian, right-wing church.

At the end of the day, what any politician does in his or her private life should not matter in considering his or her qualifications. None of us are without sin, and one would want one trait of any leader to be continued intellectual and spiritual growth from youth through old age. When the news media ignores past peccadilloes, it does the country a great service.

The only time the past matters is when the candidate or elected official was a hypocrite, broke an important law or showed a character trait that makes him or her unqualified to serve. Hypocrisy covers such diverse figures as Senator Larry Craig, a vocal homophobe caught soliciting men in a men’s room, and Elliot Spitzer, who prosecuted others for hiring prostitutes and then indulged in a high-priced hooker. Breaking the law covers Watergate, and should have covered the Iran-Contra arms deal and creating a torture gulag across the globe.

But in the case of Anthony Weiner, the issue is his character.

Hearing and seeing his apologies to his wife and the world on every media outlet over a 12-hour period made me think of my deceased father. He had so many ways of telling my brother and me to learn from our experiences.  He had his three mythic men—the wise one learned from the mistakes of others, the average one learned from his own mistakes and the dummy never learned.

Then there was his old saw, “Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice, my fault”

Even his favorite joke about the old and young bulls standing on a hillside overlooking a pasture full of cows was about experience, for when the old bull suggested they walk down the hill, it always sounded as if he had tried running in the past.

Weiner did not learn from his mistake.  After being publicly chastised and publicly chastising himself for behaving like a high school freshman while humiliating his wife, he did it again.

I’m not saying Weiner is stupid. I’m sure he’s a very bright guy. But the fact that he committed the same social folly (which, by the way, was likely not criminal and really a private matter) after saying it was wrong suggests a compulsive personality under the sway of his emotions. If he had not resigned, if he had said, “It’s my business and I did nothing illegal,” then doing it again would not be as problematic. It would merely be the sign of a juvenile mind and perhaps a partially open marriage—permission to do 21st -century flirting. But he said it was wrong and he took his own job away—and then he engaged in the same behavior again. That’s an obsession and that’s an obsessive personality. That’s someone who can become out of control.

Weiner expects us to take his word for it that he’s over that kind of behavior, that he’s grown up or been therapized. But the events in question are only a few years ago.  It’s too soon to tell if he’s over his compulsive online sexual flirting or if he’s merely taking a break.  Or maybe he has replaced his sexting with other actions that he or many people find reprehensible. Worst of all—and also perhaps most likely—the obsessive part of his latest scandal may carry over into other parts of his life and negatively affect his judgment and actions as Mayor of New York City.

Weiner should leave the race for Mayor of New York.  He has demonstrated that he has a character flaw that leaves him unfit for leading and managing our nation’s largest city.

At first glance it looks as if Americans have an abundance of news sources at their fingertips—at least the majority of us with easy access to the Internet. But as other public relations professionals may have noticed, sources of real news have shrunk substantially.  Most of the news we see is repackaged from other sources, sometimes as a news story and sometimes with the spin of opinion attached.

A few years back, the Pew Research Center conducted an in-depth analysis of news reporting in one city, Baltimore, which found that daily newspapers are responsible for 50% of all original news reporting. Most of the local media would pick up stories from the local newspaper or from wire services. Today there are fewer wire services, but most significantly, there are many fewer daily newspapers and those still around have fewer reporters in search of original news.

As consumers of news, we easily and naturally overlook how concentrated the sources of news generation have become in recent years. As a public relations professional, though, I frequently see the results of news concentration. The other day it led to many news stories that were completely inaccurate and had the potential of harming the reputation of a very effective and responsible social service organization. The funny part, though, is that at the heart of the misinformation was a reporter misinterpreting a sentence written in the passive construction. It therefore took an act of bad writing to set off a chain of misjudgments and standard practices that led to erroneous information on several TV stations and in several newspapers.

Here’s how it happened: A child nearly drowned during swimming at a summer day camp operated by a social service agency. The child was fine and didn’t have to go to the hospital, but as is normal protocol, the social service agency reported the incident to the appropriate regulatory body. After an inspection, the regulator decided to revoke the license of the summer camp because not all the camp staff was following every safety protocol. The social service agency then decided on its own to close down the swimming programs of the other 20 some-odd summer camps it operates for a few days to do a thorough inspection of each, retrain all the staff and make sure that all the staff knew and were following all the safety protocols. Of course, a parent or two called the daily newspaper, which published an accurate report.

Unfortunately, that accurate report contained the sentence, “Each camp site must be inspected and approved before it can reopen for aquatics.” Note the passive construction, which does not require the writer to tell us who is doing the inspecting and approving. In point of fact, it was the social service organization, acting on its own behalf and through no request of any regulatory agency or pressure by any other organization, which decided to close the programs and inspect. No one had been hurt, but the organization was bending over backwards to protect the children in its charge.

Unfortunately, the rewrite professional at the Associated Press (AP) did not do any research or fact-checking when he or she abridged the story into one paragraph. That one paragraph claimed that the regulatory body had closed all the camps and had to approve them before they could reopen again. To avoid the passive, the re-writer had to attribute the actions to someone, and so he or she made an assumption that it was the regulator. Wrong information, and liable to give the public a false impression of the social service agency.

Several TV stations and many regional newspapers reprinted or read the Associated Press story during the few hours that it was posted.  The social service organization—a client of my company—called me at 10:00 at night and I had to call several local TV stations and the AP to get the story corrected. It was no problem, at all: everyone was very professional. They made the change once I had properly identified myself.  The TV stations dropped the story, because it was no longer newsworthy for TV. A regulatory body asking an organization to close down more than 20 camps is definitely newsworthy. But an organization volunteering to double-check or police itself may or may not be newsworthy; a newspaper may have room for the story, but local TV news likely won’t.

It took two and maybe three mistakes by two (or three) very reliable and professional organizations for incorrect news to get out:

1. The social service organization and its PR counselor (my company!) may or may not have made a mistake by deciding not to distribute a news release that would have specified that it was the organization and not some regulatory body that acted. If and when to release information is the most difficult question for public relations practitioners. On the one hand, subsequent events revealed that it wasn’t much of a news story. On the other hand, if the organization had distributed a news release, it is less likely that a media outlet would have misreported the story. Never an easy call
2. The writer of the original story made a mistake in style against which I often rage in print and with my staff: a passive construction that created a misleading sentence.
3. The AP made an assumption from the passively-constructed sentence that was just inaccurate. The mistake was not taking the time to check the facts.

But let’s be clear, the harm to the organization came in not one story, but in many stories misreporting the facts. And the reason so many got it wrong is that so little original reporting is being done. Any of the TV stations or newspapers that ran the AP could have made a phone call to double-check the information (one TV station actually did call and got the story right). Yet it was not a mistake that these re-users of the AP story were making—it was business as usual.

One more proof that to a great degree, the news has become like casual dining restaurants: whichever restaurant you go to, you’ll have your choice of essentially the same menu. The name and brand are different, and maybe one has a spicy sauce and another offers something sweet, but the contents are the same.

The same is true of hard news today. We see it everywhere, but most of the people reporting or commenting on it got the information from somewhere else. Thus whatever the brand, you’re essentially getting the same news. Try reading daily newspapers from two different cities. You’d be surprised at how many have the same stories and even the same columnists. Or consider how all the media in one region cover the same story. Yes, sometimes the liberal newspaper will spin the story one way, while the right-wing radio station will spin it another, but the facts and quotes will mostly be the same. One media outlet does the story and everyone else just accepts its version and goes from there.

 

That thousands of people would wait in line five hours or more for a 10-minute artificial experience of rain falling befuddles me. But that’s what they’re doing.

For days, the New York news media has been reporting that people are waiting five or more hours to walk through the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) “Rain Room.”

Rain Room is a dark alley way in which a heavy rain is coming down except where sensors detect people. People thus get the sensation of walking between rain drops. Whether or not it’s an aesthetic experience is open to discussion, as is the parallel question of whether Rain Room is a work of art. I haven’t been there and I won’t go, but my sense is that the installation would fit more easily in an amusement park or Universal Studios.  I had a similar feeling about the Punk fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I did see, but that was because of the exhibit itself. In the case of  MOMA, it is not the curator who has decided to present artifacts of culture in an amusement park environment, but the artists who have decided to conjure an amusement park experience and present it as art.

That “Rain Room” makes an interesting juxtaposition with a summer exhibit at another New York cultural mainstay—the James Turrell show at the Guggenheim, which is also generating enormous lines of paying customers. Turrell is a light artist, which means he makes boxes and other shapes in which all the color is provided by light.  The show includes a retrospective of light boxes meant to look like Joseph Alber’s paintings, but the center is a new piece called ”Aten Reign” that turns the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda into an enormous volume filled with light that gradually changes color.

Like “Rain Room,” the Turrell pieces depend more on technology than the individual hand craft of the artist. Mental skills such as manipulating light, small engines, gears and arrays of photovoltaic sensors replace the hand skills of applying paint, cutting shapes or molding clay. The raw materials tend to be pre-fabricated parts.

Of greater relevance is the similarity in the aesthetic experience between “Rain Room” and the Turrells: Both are primarily physical experiences, such as you get from a light show or an amusement park ride. The Turrell may make a much greater claim to being art because of the allusions to Albers and other artists, unless you consider his light versions to be similar to stuffed toy versions of the Mona Lisa or neckties with “Starry Night” printed on them.

The issue of what is or isn’t art has plagued critics and scholars since recorded history began. Dresses, scepters, bowls, jewelry boxes and advertisements have all laid claim to art, as have blank canvases, lumps of material and even jars of the so-called artist’s stool. At the end of the day, the question, “What is art?,’ can have as many legitimate answers as the number of people who ask it.

The more interesting question is not whether Turrell or “Rain Room” is art, but why at the same point of time, two of the most important museums in the United States have decided to have exhibits of art based on the amusement park values of physical titillation and the manipulation of engineering concepts at the same time as a third major museum in the same city is presenting an exhibit which is itself an amusement park experience.

When James Ensor and Emil Nolde used amusement park imagery in their paintings and Fellini and Bergman did so in their movies, they were reanimating the tradition of their respective art forms, but the aesthetic pleasure of the painting or movie remained.  This current crop of exhibits takes not the imagery, but the techniques of the amusement park to produce the aesthetic experience of the amusement park. Entertaining, but probably not art.

But the very fact that one can find the amusement park experience at a museum probably is contributing to the popularity of all three shows. People may not want to stand in line to see a Titian or a Picasso, but they are used to long lines at Disney World.