Brendan Nyhan

Via Andrew Sullivan: Slate’s Jack Shafer documents how angry journalists have stopped rolling over and started to question the official spin on Katrina:

In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead.

Charles Babington purports to know that John Roberts’ demeanor is “deliberately bland” in a Washington Post news story yesterday:

Given Roberts’s deliberately bland demeanor, some of the more entertaining or dramatic moments [in his confirmation hearings] could come from the mercurial chairman [Arlen Specter], who combines an incisive legal mind with an almost puckish pleasure in annoying and surprising the political left and right.

Surely blandness is in Roberts’ strategic interest, but that doesn’t mean that he is “deliberately” bland — we can’t know that to be true unless Roberts confesses as much. Maybe he’s just boring!

I have little to add on this heartbreaking subject except another Red Cross donation link.

I have to admit, though, that I was galled to see President Bush saying (falsely) that no one anticipated the breach of the levees — just like the White House line on 9/11! Yes, it’s truly the Responsibility Era.

Ana Marie Cox is officially on fire this week – go read Wonkette ASAP. Here’s my favorite item so far:

Fox News and others are reporting that the President just got “his own bird’s eye view” of Katrina’s damage as Air Force One flew over the devestated region. Shortly after, Bush gave prepared remarks to the press pool:

We are making progress in New Orleans. The flood is in its last throes. Clearly, the hurricane has a hateful ideology and does not like our freedom or our dryness. We cannot surrender to it. In New Orleans, they are working on a draft evacuation; it is an evacuation process, and we must expect that if we are to bring American-style democracy to the Mississippi Delta.

The president added that “to pull out now would only give aid to the elements.”

She’s also devastating about the racial coding of the Katrina aftermath, in which Mississippi governor Haley Barbour apparently referred to looters (many of whom happen to be black) as “sub-human” and news photos of black and white looters described them as “looting” and “finding” merchandise, respectively.

My debate with Jack Shafer made me realize something: the next casualty of blogs may be general-interest intermediary publications like Slate. Just a few years ago, the need for a meta- approach to the news seemed compelling. But with so many expert blogs now available for free, I don’t need a general interest intermediary anymore. Via RSS, I can easily read political analysis from Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum, economic analysis from Brad DeLong and Marginal Revolution, etc. And given that you have to consume information before determining its value (a key economic feature of the media, as Jay Hamilton points out in his excellent book on the subject), I can have more confidence that posts from trusted bloggers are worth reading than I can with articles on Slate, which are written by a large array of staff and freelancers. (There are obviously bloggers and columnists whose work I knowe well on Slate to whom this doesn’t apply, but on a day-to-day basis, most articles are not by those authors.)

The upshot may be that the aggregation/meta-commentary model is not that compelling, at least for heavy media consumers like myself, who (a) get a major national newspaper that does original reporting and (b) read multiple bloggers via RSS, so they don’t need a general-interest intermediary. In the near term, of course, Slate is fine; MSNBC.com dumps it huge numbers of visitors each day. But in the long run, RSS may undermine general interest online publications faster than people realize.

Number of articles touting the “Bush Boom” on nationalreview.com: 44.

Change in median income 2001-2004: -$673.

Change in the number of Americans in poverty: +4.1 million

Change in the number of Americans without health insurance: +4.6 million

(All statistics are from Census data via the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

Last Friday, I linked to some criticism of Slate by Eric Alterman and wrote this:

[T]he problem with Slate is that it’s virtually content-free. There’s almost never new reporting, so the articles have to present really smart takes on the news to be worth reading. But as Alterman points out, there’s only one Michael Kinsley, so instead you get a lot of faux-clever “everything you know is wrong” pieces, which almost never succeed.

In comments, Jack Shafer, Slate’s editor-at-large, took exception to the post:

Nyhan writes, “In general, the problem with Slate is that it’s virtually content-free. There’s almost never new reporting…” (Emphasis added.)

You don’t supposed Nyhan could add a few more qualifiers to couch his criticism of Slate, do you?

What does Nyhan consider “new reporting”? The latest quotation from an oft-quoted talking head? A first person account of an event? Do telephone interviews count as “new reporting”? Document searches or database dumps? Is it “new reporting” to spend the day in the Library of Congress reading books? Is a piece to be considered “reported” only if it shouts out that it’s “based on 27 interviews with top authorities in the field”? Is a work of journalism “unreported” if the writer spends time collecting quotations and facts but doesn’t use them because they don’t advance the story?

He then goes on to list his specific disagreements with Alterman (which weren’t really my concern.)

So let me get right to the point. I don’t particularly care about “reporting” per se. There are lots of ways for writers to add value to stories, which include the kinds of research that Shafer describes. But as I said, the problem with most Slate stories is that they don’t add much value with either reporting or original factual research. When you’re parasitic on the news in this way, your take has to be really novel to be worth reading. (This applies, of course, to all bloggers, including myself.) There are notable exceptions at Slate, of course — Daniel Gross, Fred Kaplan, Will Saletan, and Shafer are all talented journalists who you should read regularly. You’ll be a better person for it. In my experience, however, they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Shafer also chooses rather strange grounds to defend Slate, which has explicitly sought to deemphasize reporting and fact-gathering. In 1999, Columbia Journalism Review quoted Slate’s founder and then-editor, Michael Kinsley saying “I don’t think the world needs more scoops,” which CJR described as “defending his decision to curtail original reporting.” And I’ve seen no sign that Jacob Weisberg, the new editor, has gone in a different direction since he took over. Does Shafer really think that more than a small percentage of Slate stories involve the kind of research he’s talking about?

What I see on Slate a lot more often are first-person narratives, summaries of other media, and — of course — everything-you-know-is-wrong Kinsley-style journalism, as exemplified (at its worst) by defenses of vote fraud and the Pacers-Pistons riot. At the time Slate was founded, this meta- approach to the news was somewhat novel (and thus more compelling), but bloggers are doing it better now — and that’s why I so rarely read a site that was once a favorite of mine.

Today, Eric Alterman writes:

Will Bush become the most unpopular president in the history of Gallup Polling? Here. (And will the mainstream media continue to refer to him as “well-liked” by the country?)”

I agree — Bush’s approval ratings make the phrase “well-liked” totally inappropriate. So I took Alterman at his word and tried to find examples of the media using the phrase to describe the President. But I couldn’t find one example in the last six months (academic Nexis: bush w/10 “well-liked” and president w/10 “well-liked” in the major newspapers, magazines and journals, and news transcripts categories).

This is the same thing that happened when Alterman claimed in June that the political media was repeatedly calling Bush a “popular president” — no one that I could find had done so since Bush’s second inauguration except for Chris Matthews (a notable exception, to be sure, but still an exception).

The media does tend to overestimate Bush’s popularity, but that doesn’t mean you can just put phrases in quotes and claim people in the media are repeating them.

My friend Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science is out today — pick up a copy! I’ll have a full review by next week (haven’t quite finished reading it yet), but in the meantime, see his blog for links to excerpts and reviews.

Also, Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment website that my friend Ben Fritz co-edits, was profiled Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. Make sure to check out the site and the article.

Via Marginal Revolution, here a partial transcript (and video link) to John Stewart’s destruction of Christopher Hitchens during a debate about the Iraq war on the Daily Show last week. Stewart only challenges his guests infrequently (apparently for fear of being too preachy), but when he does, it’s borderline revolutionary. Before Hitchens, the best example is the way Stewart savaged Henry Bonilla during the campaign about the phony talking point that John Kerry was the Senate’s #1 liberal. Let’s hope we see more of this…

Stewart: The people who say we shouldn’t fight in Iraq
aren’t saying it’s our fault. That is the conflation that is the
most disturbing to me.

Hitch: Don’t you hear people saying that we made them nasty. . .

Stewart: I hear people saying a lot of stupid
[bleep]. . . But there is reasonable dissent in this country
about the way this war has been conducted, that has nothing to do with
people believing that we should cut and run from the terrorists, or that we
should show weakness in the face of terrorism, or that we believe that
we have in some way brought this upon ourselves. They believe that this war is being conducted without transparency, without credibility, and without competence…

Hitch: I’m sorry, sunshine. I just watched you ridicule the president for saying he wouldn’t give a timetable…

Stewart: No, you misunderstood why. . . .What I ridiculed the president [about] was [that] he refuses to answer questions from
adults as though we were adults and falls back upon platitudes and
phrases and talking points; that does a disservice to the goals that he
himself shares with the very people he himself needs to convince.