James Fallows

Being hypotheses, these are subject to testing and disproof. The experiment goes on.

You know the syndrome. And, hey, if you've forgotten, check these two recent examples. Today several hypotheses about its origins. First, from a reader in Colorado, the idea that the false-equivalence reflex -- "extremists on both sides are blocking progress on the budget" -- comes from a kind of mirror-image mentality:

I've had a similar reaction to politicians and pundits (virtually always on the right, it seems these days) who assume that just because they are for something, the people on the other side must be against it, or vice versa.

So, if they think there should be "less government," then the rest of us all think the answer to every problem is "more government." Or because they purport to be single-mindedly focused on less spending, the rest of us are for out-of-control spending. It puts a straw man front and center and then bashes it, which the press doesn't call out enough either.

A reader in Connecticut says we are seeing a grown-up, political-world version of schoolyard bullying:

I am particularly amused by the current meme that somehow the blame lays at Obama's, and by extension, the Democrats' feet.  So they have to give in because everyone understands that the Republicans are so set in their views that they won't change, so it's up to Obama to compromise?

I think that this ties in with the new attention that Emily Bazelon has given to the problem of bullying with her book [and related Atlantic article] Sticks and Stones.  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that bullying exists, even in adults.  Furthermore, bullying by supposed adults often works at the highest levels of politics and business.  In sum, if a group of kids acted like the Republicans in Congress, refusing ever to even even acknowledge that there are legitimate points of view that contradicted their own, and refusing to do anything unless they got their way completely, wouldn't the teacher think that they were attempting to bully the rest of the class?

Another reader, Shreeharsh Kelkar of MIT, offers a social-science explanation:

I share your frustration with the false equivalence that's practiced by the big newspapers.

But I wonder if I might offer a perspective on bipartisan think based on my discipline: the history and sociology of science.

You say in one of your posts that the thinking behind it seems to be that reality is somewhere between the positions of the two parties. And there's something to that. But I think one of the ways of explaining it is using a concept called "boundary work." 

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis. 

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work -- between "politics" and "policy." Our politicians will always say: what I'm doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that. 

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can't say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one's own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it's what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don't, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr's history of the media) is that it's a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements -- and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) -- and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

Interestingly enough, we're now back in more partisan times, thanks to the Web. And it's interesting to me that you, Matt and others who call the editorials on their false equivalence operate in a completely different new media ecosystem; you have readers of a certain kind and stripe (but lots of them thanks to the reach of the Web), you don't really need to be bipartisan. But I think the example of Ezra Klein proves my point: ever since he's moved to the Washington Post, he's a lot less rough(er) on Republicans than he used to be. He won't fall into the false equivalence trap for sure but he's certainly adapted to a different audience. (I think it's great that he's reaching more people).

So - I don't think the WaPo is ever going to abandon its false equivalence model; not unless it becomes a completely new kind of WaPo (which it might very well become!).

I don't mean to suggest of course that all editors are dumb actors acting out a premediated sociological script; just that the roots of false equivalence go pretty deep into our current system.

I suspect this analysis is not particularly new to you (with some jargon added!).

Indeed this is an analysis I've thought about before -- thanks to Starr's book, and Jay Rosen's, and many others', and Breaking the News back in the 1990s. But I had not known about the "boundary work" label, which is usefully clarifying. It's a long road ahead.

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the Boston Phoenix. I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.

Wen Stephenson, an Atlantic veteran who was closely involved in our first online versions (called "Atlantic Unbound") nearly 20 years ago, says that the Phoenix has played an increasingly important role in climate coverage, and thus its absence will be felt there as well as in other fields. I turn it over to him:

A Death in the Family
By Wen Stephenson

We got the news, of course, on Twitter: "Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck."

That tweet came yesterday afternoon from the Boston Phoenix, the storied but struggling alt-weekly, for which the current print issue will be its last. There will be an online-only issue next week, containing an important piece by my friend and fellow climate activist-journalist Bill McKibben. And then the rest is silence.

But a lot of us can't stay silent, and won't. There are a great many people in Boston right now, and around the country, who care deeply about everything the Phoenix has always represented, right down to the end -- smart, fearless, fiercely independent journalism -- and want to say a few things about what this means for our impoverished media landscape.  Many thanks to Jim for lending me this space to offer a few words of my own.

I was proud to be associated with the Phoenix, even if briefly. My cover story last fall, called "A Convenient Excuse" (right), took serious issue with the way our mainstream media has covered -- or failed to cover -- the climate crisis. One of the places I criticized was The Atlantic (though I spent seven years as an editor at the magazine, from 1994 to 2001, and still have friends there). [JF note: see my discussion of that piece.]

The Phoenix has run three more of my pieces on climate and the climate movement in these past four months (you can find them, for now at least, here); the last one was just this week, an online piece about a stunning student-led protest against the Keystone XL pipeline at the TransCanada office in Westborough, MA, in which 25 (mostly young) climate activists were arrested for peaceful civil disobedience (a remarkable local story, with national resonance, that the Boston Globe, incredibly, has failed to cover).

There's a reason I'm mentioning these pieces, and it's not to promote my own work (ok, maybe just a little; I'm a freelance writer who just lost my main outlet!).  In all sincerity, it's to pay heartfelt tribute to my editor, the guy who commissioned and expertly edited these pieces -- the last editor-in-chief of the Boston Phoenix -- Carly Carioli.

To put it simply and bluntly: Carly championed not only the climate issue but, equally important, the young and increasingly powerful grassroots climate movement, at a time when virtually no one else (outside of environmental blogs and magazines) could be bothered to give them a serious thought. Those pieces of mine -- to my utter amazement -- went somewhat viral, garnered national attention to the Phoenix, and put the climate movement on the map for a lot of readers. I know an awful lot of people right now who feel a piercing sense of loss, and powerlessness, and quite frankly, real anger, knowing that the only widely-circulated publication in Boston paying serious attention to climate change has gone away.

In today's paper, the Globe's editorial page had an eloquent euology for the Phoenix, where editorial page editor Peter Canellos, like a long list of other accomplished journalists, spent some formative years of his career.  Acknowledging the Phoenix's "proud journalistic tradition," the editorial notes that the alt-weekly's audience "was anyone who believed that powerful institutions and other engines of society deserved a kind of scrutiny that went beyond mere reporting, and who wanted to see the fundamental ills of the social order exposed." And it concludes:

Now, with Thursday's announcement of the Phoenix's demise, much will be written about the paper's impact on local politics, music and film criticism, and the various journalistic careers it launched. It's a substantial legacy, by any measure. But better to focus on the careers that might not be launched, the questions that might not be asked, and the stories that might not get told.

Yes, it's a little ironic to read that on the Globe's editorial page, in whose offices (as I described in the Phoenix) I protested the paper's lack of climate coverage.  We can only hope that the Globe -- or somebody -- will fill the void now left on Brookline Ave. in Boston.

Last week I mentioned the striking difference in the way three major newspapers "framed" the latest employment data. The Washington Post's headline was "Jobs report builds hope," the WSJ's was "Tepid Job Growth Fuels Worry," and the NYT's was "Job Creation Is Still Steady Despite Worry" -- this while all were talking about exactly the same government report.

Here's a new example, from the front pages of the same three major dailies yesterday. The visuals are fuzzier, but the editorial differences are at least as significant. Let me lay out what you're seeing below.

The news concerns the findings that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the continental United States. The Washington Post and the New York Tmes both played this as big front-page news. The WaPo's headline, at left in the picture below, was "Nation set record for heat last year." The NYT's was "Not Even Close: 2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S." Both papers devoted most of the above-the-fold space on their front pages to the stories and accompanying photos, maps, and graphics -- which I've boxed in red.

I am still in only shaky post-hurricane connection to the Internet, so here is one update before catching up on a variety of other topics soon:

By all means read Wen Stephenson's impassioned essay* in the Phoenix today on what he views as the tyranny of complacency and business-as-usual in the media's approach to climate change.

It is one thing for politicians to decide that they simply can't touch certain issues. Politicians need to keep raising money. They're vulnerable to concerted opposition campaigns. They are acutely aware of the tiny distance they can afford to get "ahead" of the sometimes-uninformed center of public opinion on any issue.**

Thus we've come to recognize the inch-wide boundaries of political argument when it comes to anything involving guns (as I argued at length here). Stephenson says that, even if politicians have come to a similar calculation about the impossibility of discussing climate policies and therefore climate change itself, the media should not accept their definition of what "can" and "cannot" be discussed.

That is: It's the politicians' fault that neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama mentioned climate change during their debates. It's the press's fault that they weren't asked.

For cultural, commercial, intellectual, and political reasons, it is tricky for members of the press, especially those in organizations that still quaintly think of themselves as "mainstream," to decide that they, rather than elected leaders, should announce what "matters" to the public. But they do it all the time. The push-and-pull of the press "leading" versus merely "reflecting" public opinion has gone on for a very long time, on a very wide range of issues.*** In this article Stephenson admits all the difficulties but still argues, fiercely, that it's time for the established media to do more.

This is an angry, polemical piece, which says both good and bad things about many specific people in the media -- including us here at The Atlantic, where Stephenson once worked (he was deeply involved in the creation of The Atlantic's original web site) and still has many friends. At a time when both parties are saying that this is an "exceptionally important" election, yet neither will even discuss an issue that (I contend) will loom larger in historical accounts of this era than 99 percent of what is discussed in speeches, news analyses, and debates, this article is worth reading and thinking about. And after a "historic" hurricane, following a historic drought and heat wave, following historic rains .... Stephenson said in a note to friends that it was the "hardest thing I've ever written." It is not comfortable to read, and I have various things to say about the Atlantic's long-term performance on this issue; but I am glad he wrote it.

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* The Phoenix unfortunately portions the piece out in eight separately clickable chunks, with no "single-page" option. You could support their online ad model by clicking through all eight. Or you could try the "article print" ruse.

** Still-relevant historical example: LBJ's decision to go ahead and support civil rights legislation in the Martin Luther King era, despite the likelihood that it would switch the previously Democratic "Solid South" to a solid Republican stronghold.

*** It's more than I can get into now, but in widely varying ways the press has "led," "reflected," and "lagged" on issues ranging from slavery, to worker mistreatment and workplace safety, to immigration, to environmental protection, to race relations, to today's "debt crisis." The history of press "leadership," good and ill, on the sequence of U.S. wars from the one against Mexico in the 1840s, through the Civil War and the war with Spain, through the two 20th-century world wars to Korea and Vietnam, and on to the CENTCOM wars of the moment and the open-ended "war on terror," is its own important both heartening-and-discouraging theme. 

When we moved back to Washington DC three years ago, after three years of out the country, naturally we noticed the old TV shows, radio broadcasts, stores, etc we'd been used to that had disappeared -- and the new ones that had started up while we were gone.

One of the new arrivals I was glad to have happened upon was The State We're In, which was improbably* enough produced by Radio Netherlands but was carried by WAMU, the local NPR station, on Saturday afternoons. I'd usually listen when I was running or driving around etc, but I began seeking it out because the mini-dramas and interviews were part of the tradition of modern radio done right, and as a lead-in to the unmissable** Weekend All Things Considered on NPR.

Just now I was out for a run and, while listening, heard the announcement that today's TSWI episode would be the very last. The Dutch government had cut the budget for Radio Netherlands Worldwide by 70 percent, and the show was getting the axe.

I am sorry to hear this, and am noting the occasion (a) to recognize the staff on the excellent production they've done for these past few years, and (b) to point you to some of the archives you might want to explore. Today's show is a good place to start; it's made of staff and listener favorites. For more you can prowl around in the archives. Here are the people responsible for the show:



Congratulations and thanks to them; for everyone else, you won't regret checking into some past episodes.
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* "Improbably" because the on-air voices sounded so North American. Yes, the Dutch are great linguists, but most speak English with a Euro-style rather than a North American accent. Today I learn from the show's website that the host Jonathan Groubert, in the glasses above, has lived in Holland for many years but grew up in Brooklyn.

** Inside joke: I love this show, and also regularly appear on it.

Yesterday I mentioned the latest, and in my view genuinely funny, Downfall / Hitler-rant parody, in which the Fuhrer bemoans the recent setbacks for the Romney campaign. I can't embed it, but you can see it here.

I also mentioned that the video included a "DC press in-joke," about a Washington Post writer who has become the Baghdad Bob of the 2012 election cycle via a willingness to spin any news, of any sort, as the best possible development for the Romney campaign. For clarity I should point out that her name is Jennifer Rubin, and the video refers to her below:



Imagine my amazement when the person who created the video, Daniel Vergara, wrote in to say that what I considered a side allusion was for him the entire point of the project. With his permission, here is his account: 

 I wanted to take exception to one little thing in this brief post about the Downfall parody video, the suggestion that Jennifer Rubin is an inside DC press joke.

I am the one who made the Downfall parody video, and I'm a Floridian single dad who has nothing to do with the media, who hasn't been to DC since the Clinton Administration, and who made that video almost as an afterthought after putting my little boy to bed and finding myself with some free time.

Jennifer Rubin is well-known outside the DC inner circle, and her jenrubinisms are legendary in more places than you'd think. The entire purpose of the video was to mock Rubin (as is the parody account I've created of her) and nearly everything else was added as filler for the long, loooong (but you don't really understand how very long until you have to make one) rest of the video. I have a fascination with Rubin based on the fact that I think we are living through historic times, that future generations will speak of her in amazement, and that she might even lend her name to an era or a practice, not unlike, for example, this.

Now I know. Thanks to Vergara for the video, even if I originally missed its point.

In response to this item yesterday, about mainstream media outlets figuring out how to cope with "post-truth politics," a writer who is a regular contributor to the New York Times and other publications (and is not a NYT staff member) writes with this elaboration: 

I enjoyed your piece on the Times' new public editor, and agreed with most of it, but I think there's an underlying fallacy to it, slight but significant, which your readers should understand:

There's no such thing as 'the Times', really.  It is, of course, an enormous organization operating on very tight deadlines; there are hundreds of reporters and editors, each of whom acts at least somewhat autonomously, and often in a mad scramble to get the news out on time.  The paper -- like any news organization -- has its standards, of course, but they're flexible and not always easy to enforce, and in many cases it's up to individual actors, faced with specific circumstances, to decide how to phrase things.  A certain amount of oversight takes place, but a certain amount of freedom is granted, as well.

I mention this because I think readers, and people in general, often think of the Times --or the Washington Post, or CBS, or CNN -- as a monolithic entity, a single organism with a consistent approach to news-gathering.  I suspect the Times likes to think of itself that way, too.  But in my experience, this simply isn't true: reporters are given leeway; editors change things, or they don't; something gets rewritten by the desk at the last minute, because space is short or a new piece of information came in; phrases are added or dropped.  I wouldn't describe it as arbitrary, but I think it's more contingent, messy, and catch-as-catch-can than most readers realize.

I like reading the Public Editor columns, but I think they're a bit misleading.  They imply that there's a 'Times policy', and often there is, -- but often there isn't, or it's imperfectly enforced.  We would all be better off, I think, if readers understood that the paper, like all papers, is a large and contentious organization, made up of strong-willed and opinionated people in a half-mad dash to produce a fair account of what's going on.  It's message, methods, style and results are nowhere near as controlled as, say, a corporation, or a political campaign.  The paper's editors try, and I'm glad they try; but they seldom succeed, and I'm glad they seldom succeed.

Of course I agree on the main point. Even an organization like The Atlantic, so much smaller and less sprawling than the NYT, usually sets its tone through an accumulation of individual responses rather than through any tightly coordinated plan. (And I think we all view this as a good thing.) I also realize that the Times's "public editors," another term for ombudsmen, have no line authority at the paper beyond the guaranteed ability to express their views within the Times's space. My point in noting Margaret Sullivan's column was as another illustration of evolving discussion within the paper about moving beyond the "false equivalence" trap.

On another angle of the Sullivan column that I didn't address, it is worth reading this critique from Kevin Drum.

Thanks to many readers who have sent pointers to today's column by the NYT's new public editor, Margaret Sullivan, shown in a Times photo at right. Here's the good news: she is off to a strong start with her entry on the "false equivalence" debate.

Her predecessor, Arthur Brisbane, asked in a column earlier this year whether the press should be expected to serve as a "fact vigilante." Sullivan answers Yes.

[F]alse balance is the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side....

It ought to go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what to believe, to help them make their way through complicated and contentious subjects.

The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them, the better off the readership -- and the democracy -- will be.

I'll take this as another positive sign in the long "false equivalence" wars. For a few previous installments, see here, here, here, and here.

Two caveats and elaborations:
1) As Andrew Cohen points out on the Atlantic's site today, some of the Times staffers whom Sullivan quotes sound as if they are not yet fully on board. For instance:

[One Times editor says] "There's a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides... It's not our job to litigate it in the paper. We need to state what each side says." That's absolutely right as far as it goes. But like the original piece itself it's not nearly enough. Since [the editor] used the word "litigate" I'll start there, with some of the recent litigation that has surrounded the new laws....

The Times' piece did not mention, for example, the fact that Pennsylvania conceded during its voter ID trial that there was no in-person voter fraud in the state and that none was expected in the 2012 election....

From a political perspective, there may be a level of "equivalence" in the number of people who either support or oppose these laws... But from a legal perspective, at least so far, it has been a rout in favor of those who believe the new laws would unlawfully disenfranchise registered voters. In other words, there is no "equivalence" in the way judges so far have evaluated these laws. 

Cohen's piece is very much worth reading alongside Sullivan's, because it lays out so carefully the damage that falsely equivalent coverage can do.

2) Reader SC points out this passage from Sullivan's piece today, with emphasis added:

On other subjects, The Times has made clear progress in avoiding false balance.

The issue has come up frequently with science-related stories, particularly those involving climate change. The Times has moved toward regularly writing, in its own voice, that mounting evidence indicates humans are indeed causing climate change, but it does not dismiss the skeptics altogether.

But earlier this year, the Times has seemed to be much more definitive on the climate-change point. As I mentioned back in February, a NYT piece about the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute said this, with emphasis added:

Heartland's latest idea, the [internal] documents say, is a plan to create a curriculum for public schools intended to cast doubt on mainstream climate science and budgeted at $200,000 this year. The curriculum would claim, for instance, that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy."

It is in fact not a scientific controversy. The vast majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by humans are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk. Whether and how to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases has become a major political controversy in the United States, however.

Optimist that I am, I will assume that Sullivan's comment today was an incidental "to be sure" touch, rather than a deliberate sign of a step back from the Times's previous clarity on this issue. Good for Sullivan for making this case; good for the Times in choosing her for this role.

I realize that's a big claim. But for your "post-truth" chronicles, check this out, a "data-based" graphic from a Fox & Friends program today.

Relevant background point #1: Rep. Paul Ryan's fame has depended on his reputation as the man who knew the obscure details of federal budget policy, and who was brave and honest enough to tell the public the unvarnished truth about those details.

Corollary #1: Therefore questions of selectively presented truth, or incomplete honesty, count against his reputation more than they would someone who is seen as a run-of-the-mill partisan. Similarly: suspicions of extra-marital dalliance would do more damage to someone whose image involved being strait-laced than to someone already known as a rogue. (Think: Mitt Romney on the one hand, Bill Clinton on the other.)

Relevant background #2: In his speech at the GOP convention, Paul Ryan really laid on the "selectively presented truths," more than other major speakers from either party. Especially notable:

• Slamming the Obama administration for Medicare cuts, without mentioning that his budget plan included the same cuts (an omission Bill Clinton smilingly filleted him for in his DNC speech);
• Slamming Obama for not doing more to support the Simpson-Bowles commission, without mentioning that Ryan was on the commission and voted against its recommendations;
  
• Slamming the administration for the downgrade in the U.S. government's credit rating, without mentioning that a big part of the reason* for that downgrade (as reported by Standard & Poor's when issuing the downgrade) was the threat by Ryan and other GOP House members to block a usually routine measure to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and therefore risk a default on U.S. sovereign debt.

Again, we expect politicians to shade and shape their version of reality. But getting a reputation for doing this, as Ryan is doing during the campaign, is a particular problem for someone who has been set up as a uniquely honorable truth-teller.

Which brings us to Ryan and Norah O'Donnell today on Face the Nation. She presented him with another of the partial-truths from his convention speech, which he has repeated afterward. This is his slam of Obama for cutting defense spending, without mentioning that he has voted for these same cuts. I mention this less for what it shows about Ryan than for what it shows about O'Donnell. Take a look for yourself.



Relevant background #3. It is hard for political journalists to know enough about the substance of obscure budget votes to go up against a famed "numbers wonk" from the Budget Committee; harder still for journalists to be sure enough of their knowledge, in the real-time pressure of live TV, to say "no, that's not right" to a national figure; and perhaps hardest of all for a mainstream network correspondent to take on the responsibility of saying, "This does not seem true," rather than just finding some credentialed "critic" to quote to that effect. I've mentioned before some signs of the mainstream media groping to figure out its role in the "post-truth" era. This is an encouraging sign.

On the merits of what O'Donnell was asking Ryan about, see ThinkProgress. This is an issue I have followed. Ryan's thinly shaved rationalization here is consistent with the three I mention from his convention speech, in that each involves the deliberate omission of a major, elephant-in-the-room complicating truth. And, before you ask, when Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or other Democrats go as far as Ryan has -- not in presenting their opinions, or political "visions," but offering gross distortions-through-omission of their own records -- they deserve exactly the same treatment.
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* I edited this to include "a big part," since the debt-ceiling uncertainty was a factor but not the only factor S&P mentioned.

See UPDATE for Canadian readers, below.

Yes, I know that it's lame just to make an item out a Daily Show clip. But this should not be missed. Seriously.


And maybe it becomes less lame, and certainly more "balanced," if I include this one too. It's another look at the "disappointment" question I mentioned here.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Hope and Change 2 - Barack Obama: It Could Have Been Worse
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

"Real" items will resume after a decent interval.

UPDATE.Was off the grid just after posting this item. Another thunderstorm brought another 11-hour power failure in our part of D.C. Since the last two storms led to outages of five and four days' duration, respectively, we're feeling lucky! But on re-connecting I find a number of messages from Canadian readers asking what the Daily Show segments are, since apparently the embedding is blacked-out north of the border. Hadn't realized that. In any case, here is the link to the first clip, which is the important one.

I assume it was by serendipity rather than design that both the New York Times and the Washington Post had bracing articles today on the way the way the Post is being forced to, or is deciding to, "right size" its news staff to cope with unending business pressures.

High up in the Times story is an eye-opening quote from Robert Kaiser, a mainstay of the Post since the early 1960s and co-author with Len Downie, the Post's long-time editor, of a book on the future of the news business. As journalistically sophisticated a figure as Kaiser must have known exactly how it would sound for him to say the following, on the record, to a reporter from the traditional-rival news organization:

"The survival of the institution is not guaranteed," Mr. Kaiser said in an interview... Over the course of his five-decade career with The Post, he has been a summer intern, a metro reporter, a foreign correspondent and the No. 2 to Len Downie, Mr. Brauchli's [the current editor's] predecessor.

"When I was managing editor of The Washington Post, everything we did was better than anyone in the business," he said. "We had the best weather, the best comics, the best news report, the fullest news report. Today, there's a competitor who does every element of what we do, and many of them do it better. We've lost our edge in some very profound and fundamental ways."

Meanwhile, in this morning's Post, the paper's current Ombudsman, Patrick Pexton [disclosure: formerly of National Journal, part of the Atlantic's corporate family], has what is overall an even tougher item. It discusses the latest round of buy-outs for reporters, editors, and designers at the paper and ends this way:

But in looking at this buyout, I worry that The Post is moving away from local news and toward a publication that covers only national politics and government and the Redskins, one that relies too much on columnists....

Ultimately, readers, online and print, will be the judges of the downsized Post. The staff here is not happy. They ask, Where is the bottom? They hate the less-is-more bromides from senior editors, so I'll not quote those. I'll quote Brauchli's most telling statement from The Post's town-hall meeting on the buyouts: "This is painful."

I've never worked at the Post. But anyone in the news business knows that the phrases I've emphasized are extremely stinging judgments. Pexton, like Kaiser, is a veteran of this business who must have chosen his words knowing exactly how they would sound.

The Post's travails are not good news for anyone, including "competitors" like the Times and the WSJ. These two articles are worth absorbing as measures of the challenges the paper now faces. This will sound glib, but like Pexton and Kaiser I am also choosing my words carefully and am sincere: I hope that five years from now some big NYT feature on the Post can refer to them as marking an early-2012 nadir from which the Post as a first-tier news-gathering organization managed to rebound.

Of course Mark Halperin should not be fired for saying on MSNBC that President Obama had been "kind of a dick" when sounding angry at Republicans during his press conference yesterday. I say that notwithstanding the certainty that if some other "mainstream" journalist had said the same about George W. Bush on MSNBC or CNN, the outrage would never have been allowed to ebb on Fox and the Limbaugh show. (Angry Obama picture yesterday, via CBS)

The real problem is the dickishness of our mainstream political analysis, especially from the "savviest" practitioners. Back during my days as media critic, I argued in Breaking the News and a related Atlantic cover story that the laziest and ultimately most destructive form of political coverage came when journalists seemed to imagine that they were theater critics or figure-skating judges. The what of public affairs didn't interest them. All they cared about was the how.

In this case, the "what" of Obama's press conference -- the unbelievable recklessness of mainly House Republicans in inviting the largest self-inflicted economic wound in American history -- deserves every bit of frustration Obama showed, and lots more. In the long run we'll have some sense of whether Obama's typical surreal unflappability, whatever its origins (I have my theories, but for another time), was the wisest long-term response to today's Republican party -- and whether this unusual flash of emotion worked in directing public attention to a looming and entirely unnecessary blow to America's wellbeing.

But the real news of the press conference, of course, was the economic, financial, political, and Constitutional showdown Obama was discussing. Not to understand that, and to act as if this was a free-skate program where a contestant should be judged on poise, costume, and sticking the landings, is just dickish.

UPDATE: Harder-edged version of similar analysis from Greg Sargent of the WaPo.

ALSO: After the jump, a strong point from Andrew Sullivan on the "economic terrorism" of the Republican stance.

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I've gotten a lot of mail about the recent exchanges between Jon Stewart and Chris Wallace, which I'll get to in the next few days. For the moment, it might be worth posting a link to an Atlantic cover story from 15 years ago, which ran as "Why Americans Hate the Media," with the illustration at right. That article was adapted from my 1996 book, Breaking the News.

It has short-term relevance, in that the opening anecdote recalls a kind of TV program hard to imagine in today's environment (the "Ethics in America" series) and and also explains some background on Stewart-v-Wallace.

I think the article as a whole is surprising, in a 15-year perspective, for what it suggests about the things that are the same in today's media environment, the things that have gotten irretrievably worse, and the things (there are a few) that have gotten better. On the "getting better" front, I have this recent cover-story update. All this offered in "for the record" spirit. If I had the heart, I'd re-do Breaking the News, but I've got enough other things to juggle.
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UPDATE: If someone were starting on a mid-2011 update, an item from today's news could be a case study. Al Gore's new essay in Rolling Stone, about impending climate disasters, is mainly about the failure of the media to direct adequate attention to the issue, and to call out paid propagandists and discredited phony scientists. That's where the essay starts, and what it covers in its first 5,000 words. The second part, less than half as long, and much more hedged in its judgment, is about the Obama Administration's faltering approach on climate change. But of course the immediate press presentation on the essay has been all "OMG Gore attacks Obama!" For instance at Slate,* TPM, NY Mag, Huffington Post, the AP, and the Atlantic's own Wire site.

(Example of the hedged judgment: "In spite of these obstacles [financial crisis], President Obama included significant climate-friendly initiatives in the economic stimulus package he presented to Congress during his first month in office. [Long paragraph of other signs of Obama efforts on the topic.]... But in spite of these and other achievements, President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change.")

Yes, the news value here is Gore-v-Obama; yes, that's part of the story. But the theme I tried to lay out in that essay is that the media's all-consuming interest in the "how" and "who's ahead" of politics, and "oh God this is boring" disdain for the "what" and "why" of public issues, has all sorts of ugly consequences. It makes the public think that politics is not for them unless they love the insider game; it makes the "what" and "why" of public issues indeed boring and unapproachable; and as a consequence of the latter, it makes the public stupider than it needs to be about the what and why.

The reaction to Gore's essay illustrates the pattern: from his point of view, it's one more (earnest) attempt to say "Hey, listen up about this problem!" As conveyed by the press, it's one more skirmish on the "liberals don't like Obama" front, and one more illustration of the eyes-glazing-over trivia and details about melting icebergs and scientific disputes.

Remember Jon Stewart's argument, that the real bias of the mainstream media is not "liberal" but in favor of conflict and sensationalism. Hmmmm.

* Slate uses a classic form, explaining its political emphasis by saying that this is what the press is emphasizing: "Still, it is Gore's take on Obama's energy and climate agenda that is drawing the most media attention, largely because the essay represents the first time that Gore has directly criticized Obama's White House on the topic."

** Update-update: Ezra Klein argues that in today's audience-metrics-uber-alles media environment, the fact that TPM highlights the political angle of the story is a sign that inside politics are popular with the public, rather than the reverse. My answer is: Yes, of course -- if we're talking about a site optimized for coverage of politics, like TPM. The larger point I'm trying to make is that most Americans don't care as much about political maneuvering as TPM readers do, or as both Ezra Klein and I do. But they are finally affected by disastrous changes in climate. If public affairs comes to seem one more niche activity, for political zealots, we're worse off -- as I know that TPM staffers, Klein, and I agree.

As I never tire of saying, China Daily is my favorite newspaper in the world.

But it's conceivable that not every visitor to the Washington Post's web site would know the reason for my fondness and loyalty. China Daily is the state-controlled English-language voice of the Chinese government to the outside world. Sometimes this makes it a useful source of intel about the line the government wants to push. For instance, its recent revelation that "most nations" opposed the choice of Liu Xiaobo as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Very often the hyper-earnestness of its approach makes it a delight. For example, here and here, or my favorite of all headlines, "Happiness abounds as country cheers."

Recently the Washington Post has started carrying China Daily's US edition as a physically separate advertising supplement to the printed paper, as described here. Fine: it's clearly labeled, and we've all gotta stay in business. But now the Post is doing the same thing on its website. Look at this part of the "Washington Post"'s site as it appears just now, and tell me how obvious it is that you're seeing a paid presentation of official Chinese government propaganda perspective:
 

The Knight Foundation awards up to $5 million a year for innovative projects in reviving journalism, especially through use of new-media technology. There are two weeks to go before this year's deadline for grant applications. The competition is open to anyone in the world. Check out the details below:

>>Deadline is Dec 1 for Knight News Challenge media innovation contest ================================================
If you have an innovative media technology idea, you might be able to get funding from the Knight News Challenge contest.

Run by the Knight Foundation, the grant competition awards up to $5 million annually for innovative projects that use digital technology to transform the way communities send, receive and make use of news and information.

More info can be found here: http://newschallenge.org. The site includes application information, as well as details about past winners.

This year's application deadline is December 1. The News Challenge is looking for applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.

The contest is open to anyone in the world.

A simple description of the project is all you need to apply. Submit a brief pitch to http://newschallenge.org. If the reviewers like it, you'll be asked to submit a full proposal later.

If you have questions you can a) reference the FAQ: http://www.newschallenge.org/frequently-asked-questions, or; b) check the archived chat transcript here: http://www.newschallenge.org/1026-live (another live chat will be held before the end of the contest period, time/date TBD)

You can follow Knight Foundation at http://twitter.com/knightfdn. The News Challenge Twitter hashtag is #knc   <<

This is kind of sad: word late last week of the end of U.S. News & World Report as a print publication, after a 77-year run. (Technically, it will no longer be something you can subscribe to, though some standalone issues will still be published and go on sale.) The in-house memo announcing the change, which has a resolutely upbeat "taking this opportunity to spend more time with the family" tone, is on the Romenesko site here. Eg:

>>Colleagues, We're finally ready to complete our transition to a predominantly digital publishing model with selected, single-topic print issues. This will allow us to make the most of the proven products, useful journalism, and great audience growth we've been sustaining... As you know, we've been a leading innovator in adapting to the changing environment -- and we don't intend to give up that lead.<<

During a nearly two-year stint as editor of US News in the late 1990s, I learned a lot about the rigors of the "business space" for weekly newsmagazines. These were especially apparent from the perspective of US News, as the number-three contender (behind Time and Newsweek) in a field that, in the long run, can probably support one entrant at most. It was clear even then that without the rankings business that US News had pioneered--"America's Best Colleges" and so on--the publication would have had a hard time going on; rankings appear to be its main emphasis in its web-based future.

For some other time, more discussion on how colleges might blunt the distorting effects of US News rankings; why, exactly, the weekly newsmag business has proven so tough; what will become of the magazine's famous back-page owner's editorials, which are a genre of their own; etc. For now, I'm sorry to note the end of any publication. I'd seen US News around the household when I was a kid, relied on it for competitive-debate prep when I was in high school, and truly cared about it later on. Journalisto sum; journalisti nihil a me alienum puto.*
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* This is a homemade translation, so don't bother telling me how it's wrong, especially as regards "journalisto"! The image above, of an old US News cover before its merger with World Report, from here.

This has been widely noted elsewhere, for instance here on the Atlantic's site and here by Fortune, but for closing-the-loop purposes I should mention Google's announcement today that it is giving $5 million to support innovations in journalism, including $2 million to the Knight Foundation.

This is in keeping with the Google argument I reported last summer, that it had both a public-relations stake and a self-interested business stake in helping support the survival and evolution of professional journalism. The PR stake is avoiding being seen as the "vulture picking off the dead carcass of the news industry," as Eric Schmidt, the CEO, put it; the business stake is supporting the continued flow of information from around the world, which Google can then index. The larger view Google offered was that journalism's survival would depend on no one innovation -- or one company or one business model -- but on a constantly evolving set of experiments with an ever-expanding array of new approaches. (They think the same is true of their own company's survival.) This grant is consistent with everything they told me at the time. Congrats; we should view it as a good start.

I have known and very occasionally worked with Juan Williams, and I don't want to say much about him. I think Andrew Sullivan is very astute in pointing out the difference between the complex way Williams wrote about racial stereotypes and racial differences early in his career (including in The Atlantic) and the blunt way he now talks about them on Fox News.

I have known and frequently worked with a variety of people at National Public Radio, and I do want to say something about them. The worst aspect of the Williams-NPR imbroglio is that it has allowed Fox and its political allies to position NPR as something it is not, and in the process to jeopardize a part of American journalism we can't afford to lose.

To get these out of the way: First, I think that the NPR leadership made a mistake in appearing to fire Williams in a snit, rather than not renewing his contract, at the next opportunity, because of longstanding differences in journalistic values*. NPR's Vivian Schiller was also wrong to crack that Williams should keep his views of Muslims to "his psychiatrist." Second, I am not a disinterested observer. From the mid 1980s through the mid 1990s, I did regular commentaries for NPR's Morning Edition. (I stopped when I signed on as editor of US News & World Report, a job that I thought made a commentator role inappropriate.) More recently I've made regular appearances on Weekend All Things Considered.

But I care about NPR not because of my minor role as a contributor but because of their major role in the American journalistic landscape. To hear the Fox/DeMint attack machine over the past week, NPR is simply a liberal counterpart to Fox -- a politically minded and opinion-driven organization that is only secondarily interested in gathering news. I believe that the mischaracterization is deliberate, and I know it is destructive and wrong.

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