When it comes to crafting winning political narratives, progressives have a natural advantage over conservatives. That’s because progressives have a free hand to project rosy visions of the future while conservatives must constantly defend against progressives’ distorted depictions of the past.
Two fundamental techniques undergird progressives’ success at narrative spinning. The first is skillful framing of the debate through investing heavily in public opinion making machinery. This disarms critics while giving lawmakers cover to vote for bills they’ve neither read nor understood. Thus framed, policies are judged only by their stated intentions, never their actual results. This allows politicians to promote new pieces of legislation named for their lofty objectives, even if the thousands of pages of vague and contradictory content deliver just the opposite.
The second is dodging all responsibility for failure. This is accomplished by blaming insufficient resources, the prior administration, the greedy 1 percent, sabotage by Republicans, or even the people’s obdurate failure to appreciate the progressive benefits conferred upon them. When the going gets tough, reality can be dismissed with a slogan. Forward!
Bill Frezza, “2013: The Year The Progressive Narrative Collided With Reality”, Forbes, 2013-12-30
January 2, 2014
QotD: Why progressive policy ideas get more media attention
December 23, 2013
Ambrose Bierce, remembered
In The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson recounts the life and (theories about the) death of Ambrose Bierce:
“We have produced but one genuine wit,” H. L. Mencken wrote, in a survey of American letters: “Ambrose Bierce. And save to a small circle he is unknown today.” Mencken was writing decades after Bierce had gone off to Mexico, by which time his life was best remembered for the way he had left it. And the circle of those who read him is even smaller now, needless to say. When the Library of America finally got around to issuing a canonical selection of his writing, in 2011, the single volume (Philip Roth got nine!) was relatively slender; it was the 219th in the library’s series of great American writers.
His fame was not general, even at its most robust. Those who admired him, mostly his fellow writers, admired him extravagantly. He was a “writer’s writer,” in the deadly phrase. The tributes from William Gladstone, Arnold Bennett, Bret Harte, and many other popular and learned literary men shared a common thread: Why, they all asked, wasn’t Bierce better known? Bierce himself ached for fame as awfully as any writer, but was, in time, amused by the strange status he had achieved: He was famous for not being famous. He wrote to a friend toward the end of his life:
How many times, and during a period of how many years must one’s unexplainable obscurity be pointed out to constitute fame? Not knowing, I am almost disposed to consider myself the most famous of authors. I have pretty nearly ceased to be “discovered,” but my notoriety as an obscurian may be said to be worldwide and everlasting.
The problem with “writers’ writers” — as many readers have discovered — is that they are seldom “readers’ writers.” It depends on the readers as much as the writers, of course, and today’s readers might find they have caught up to Bierce’s jaded view of war, politics, romantic love, religion, family life, and nearly everything else. When he is remembered these days it is usually for the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which, until recently, was one of a handful of short stories — along with “The Lottery,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” “To Build a Fire,” and a few others — that no student could escape an American high school without having pretended to read.
His witticisms, which were of a very high order, reappear sometimes, too. His best aphorisms in The Devil’s Dictionary are easily a match for La Rochefoucauld, maybe even Voltaire. His most reprinted book review consists of a single sentence: “The covers of this book are too far apart.” When a young mother pestered him for advice on bringing up children, he finally replied: “Study Herod, madam. Study Herod.” Democracy he defined as “four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” At the death of a local politician, Bierce volunteered the epitaph: “Here lies Frank Pixley, as usual.” Disdainful of philosophical pretension, he rewrote Descartes’s axiom as “Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum”: “I think I think, therefore I think I am.”
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.
December 10, 2013
Origins of the “infographic” plague
As Tim Harford says, “So it’s HIS fault”:
So it's HIS fault. MT @brainpicker: Otto Neurath, godfather of the pictograms that populate modern infographicsy: http://t.co/L0L2UbySvs
— Tim Harford (@TimHarford) December 10, 2013
In the 1930s, Austrian sociologist, philosopher and curator Otto Neurath and his wife Marie pioneered ISOTYPE — the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education, a new visual language for capturing quantitative information in pictograms, sparking the golden age of infographics in print.
The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts is the first English-language volume to capture the story of Isotype, an essential foundation for our modern visual language dominated by pictograms in everything from bathroom signage to computer interfaces to GOOD’s acclaimed Transparencies.
The real cherry on top is a previously unpublished essay by Marie Neurath, who was very much on par with Otto as Isotype’s co-inventor, written a year before her death in 1986 and telling the story of how she carried on the Isotype legacy after Otto’s death in 1946.
November 27, 2013
Some awkward questions about the Brixton “slaves”
Brendan O’Neill goes through the “half-truths and wild claims” of the recent modern slavery story in Britain:
It was presented to us as another Fritzl-like horror, involving three ‘enslaved women’, at least one of whom had ‘spent her whole life in captivity’ and had ‘never seen the outside world’. Or it was Britain’s own version of the recent Cleveland, Ohio case, in which Ariel Castro kidnapped three women from the streets and shackled them to immoveable objects in his house where he abused them for 10 years. In fact, it was worse than Cleveland, suggested the Mirror, because where those American women only suffered for a decade, these British-based women went through a ‘30-year nightmare of captivity, servitude and unimaginable brutality’. It was, in a nutshell, the worst-ever case of hidden human enslavement, the papers told us. ‘No known victims have spent so long in captivity being brainwashed, beaten, manipulated and terrorised’, one said.
We now know that these claims about the so-called ‘Brixton slaves’ are, to use the only term that will suffice, bullshit. Everything that has subsequently come to light, everything that has unfolded in the six days since these ‘slaves’ were ‘rescued’ from some kind of one-time Maoist commune, has called into question the initial claims made by the police, the highly dramatised narrative imposed on these events by the media, and the hyperbolic descriptions of the case by politicians desperate to appear as modern-day William Wilberforces combatting the evils of ‘slavery’. Indeed, the key question that must now be asked is not ‘How did three women end up in a grim commune?’ (let’s leave that to the police), but rather: ‘Why did the entire British media and the political class, along with campaigners and the Twitterati, so willingly and gullibly buy a horror story that was not true?’
[…]
So almost everything we were told about the Brixton case has turned out either to be untrue or to have been wildly exaggerated or dramatised. These were not slaves. They were not held captive. They were not denied contact with the outside world. Rather, what we seem to be dealing with is, quite simply, a very, very eccentric household, in which various people came together, did and believed very strange things, developed an obsession with Mao and conspiracy theories about the British ‘fascist state’, and then ended up regretting it all — well, three of women seem to have regretted it. And so they left. Voluntarily. Without a struggle. It sounds like it was all very unpleasant; it seems clear emotional manipulation was involved and possibly physical force too (but let’s allow the courts to decide that). But slavery? Fritzl-style abuse? Hell, horror, unimaginable brutality? There is nothing remotely resembling evidence to show that anything like that occurred.
So why did the media, politicians, feminists and campaigners lap up this half-cooked, shrill, mostly baseless fantasy about slaves stuck in suburban jails in London? Because it spoke to their already existing prejudices; because it seemed to confirm the darker thoughts that lurk in their heads, about wicked men, vulnerable women, and the unspeakable things that happen in ‘ordinary houses on ordinary streets’; because it allowed them to feel, temporarily, like history-making moral crusaders against evil, and to hell with anything so pesky as a fact. Aneeta Prem, head of the Freedom Charity that assisted the women and drove much of the dramatic talk about ‘domestic servitude’ and ‘rescue’, yesterday said there was too much media frenzy around the case and ‘the more information there is that comes into the public domain, the more it will hamper [the women’s] recovery’. So there’s a problem with having too much information about this case? Why? Might it be because the information so dramatically contradicts the fantasy put about by Prem and others about a group of slaves having been held captive in London for three decades?
November 23, 2013
Houston – sex trafficking capital of the world (says Dallas newspaper)
According to a Dallas newspaper, Houston is the focal point of a vast sex trafficking operation:
Check out this obvious crap — unbelievable to any thinking person — in the November 22 Dallas Morning News.
The Texas Senator and Representative that the paper apparently very credulously and obediently took notes from contend that there are 300,000 sex trafficking cases prosecuted every year — “in Houston alone.”
Here’s the quote from the Dallas Morning News editorial:
Editorial: Cracking down on sex traffickers
Two Texas Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe of the Houston area, are co-sponsoring a bill that would impose stiff penalties on these adult victimizers of up to life in prison. The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which has bipartisan support in both houses, would supplement an existing law that focuses primarily on punishing sex-trafficking organizations abroad.
Poe and Cornyn estimate that one-quarter of U.S. sex-trafficking victims have Texas roots. Poe says our state’s proximity to Mexico and high immigrant population give the state a particularly high profile. In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year.
Do they work butt-drunk at this paper?
300,000? Do you realize how many people that is?
[…]
Of course, Houston’s population is only 2.161 million. So, throw in my fantasy guestimate of at least 200,000 uncaught and unpunished people guilty of sex trafficking on top of the 300,000 supposedly documented. This suggests that a vast segment of Houston’s population — at least 15 percent and maybe 25 percent — is engaged in the business of sex trafficking.
Math is hard.
The power of the press in World War One
The current issue of History Today includes an interesting article by Adrian Bingham on the British newspapers (especially the Daily Mail and the Times) during WW1:
When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 the widespread feelings of fear, uncertainty and patriotic determination were matched at the offices of the Daily Mail by a sense of vindication. The newspaper had been warning about the German threat for years, perhaps most notoriously when it serialised in 1909 a series of inflammatory articles by the journalist Robert Blatchford, which, when reprinted as a penny pamphlet, sold some 1.6 million copies. The Mail had, moreover, consistently demanded that the Royal Navy be reinforced. It was soon styling itself ‘the paper that foretold the war’. For its critics, the Mail’s irresponsible stoking of anti-German sentiment, driven above all by the paper’s owner, Lord Northcliffe, actually helped to create the conditions that enabled conflict to break out. ‘Next to the Kaiser’, wrote the esteemed editor and journalist A.G. Gardiner, ‘Lord Northcliffe has done more than any other living man to bring about the war.’
[…]
It was not long, however, before Northcliffe became frustrated with the strict censorship imposed on the British press when reporting events in Europe. ‘What the newspapers feel very strongly’, wrote Northcliffe to Lord Murray of Elibank, ‘is that, against their will, they are made to be part and parcel of a foolish conspiracy to hide bad news. English people do not mind bad news.’ Such censorship was particularly worrying when it risked hiding failures in the prosecution and management of the war. Drawing both on the experiences of his visits to the front and on private sources of information from his many correspondents, Northcliffe became increasingly convinced that several men in leading positions were not up to the job, including the prime minister, Asquith, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener.
The episode that crystallised this concern, over which Northcliffe put both his and the Mail’s reputation on the line, was the Shell Crisis of May 1915. Northcliffe had received letters from the front claiming that British military operations were being undermined by the lack of the right kind of shell and, after the Allies failed to capitalise on an initial breakthrough at Neuve Chapelle due to a lack of munitions, these criticisms began to be publicly aired. On May 15th, 1915 The Times (also owned by Northcliffe at the time) published a telegram from its respected military correspondent, Lieutenant-Colonel Repington, highlighting the problem and Northcliffe decided to go on the offensive. After some critical editorials, on May 21st the Mail published an incendiary piece written by Northcliffe himself and headlined ‘The Tragedy of the Shells: Lord Kitchener’s Grave Error’. Northcliffe pinned the blame for the shells scandal directly on Kitchener:
Lord Kitchener has starved the army in France of high-explosive shells. The admitted fact is that Lord Kitchener ordered the wrong kind of shell … He persisted in sending shrapnel – a useless weapon in trench warfare … The kind of shell our poor soldiers have had has caused the death of thousands of them.
This direct public attack on such an esteemed figure at a time of national crisis was shocking and generated fury among many of Northcliffe’s critics. Members of the London Stock Exchange burned copies of both The Times and the Mail and anxious advertisers cancelled contracts. Thousands of readers stopped buying the papers. Northcliffe, though, was undaunted: at this point he was concerned not with circulation but with what he perceived as his national duty. ‘I mean to tell the people the truth and I don’t care what it costs’, he told his chauffeur. It was clear even to Northcliffe’s opponents, moreover, that there were indeed problems with Britain’s munitions supply. Northcliffe was soon vindicated. Although Kitchener survived in the short term, the Liberal government fell at the end of May 1915, to be replaced by a coalition administration: Asquith remained as prime minister, but Lloyd George was appointed as minister of munitions to address the supply problems.
November 3, 2013
“More bombshells” in the police document on Mayor Rob Ford, says the Toronto Star
I’ll be honest: I haven’t been following the twists and turns of the crusade by the Toronto media to oust Mayor Rob Ford. That’s not to say there isn’t actually news on the situation:
More bombshells are contained in a weighty police document used to obtain a search warrant for Mayor Rob Ford’s friend and occasional driver, according to a Star analysis of court information already released.
“Project Traveller and the Rob Ford connection” is the bold heading atop one section of still-sealed information. The pages are blacked out pending an ongoing court challenge.
Project Traveller was the recent guns and gangs investigation that saw massive arrests in north Etobicoke. Police Chief Bill Blair has said information learned in that probe led to the creation of the Ford investigation, dubbed Project Brazen 2. (Brazen 1 was an unrelated Scarborough investigation.)
Nearly 500 pages of a document presented before a judge to obtain a warrant to search Alexander “Sandro” Lisi’s home were released Thursday. Half is censored pending a court challenge by the Star and other media lawyers.
In examining the document, the Star has learned that some remarkable information remains sealed.
Whether any of the censored pages relate to the mysterious second video the Star first learned about in early August, and Blair confirmed last week, is not known.
The Star has been told by two sources this second video also features the mayor. Blair has said the second video is “relevant to this investigation.”
In his dramatic Thursday news conference Blair answered a question about whether Ford was in the first video. The chief first said the mayor was in “those” videos, then caught himself and only spoke about the first video.
Update: It’s worth noting that Ford’s popularity actually increased after the latest news came out.
October 26, 2013
October 25, 2013
QotD: The dangers of reading internet comments
I joke — hilariously — but there is a serious issue here. At least, I assume there is. Frankly, I can’t remember, because I made the mistake of scrolling down to the reader comments about the visa story. Reading online comments is like letting someone punch your brain in the face with a fistful of stupid. If you doubt this, consider that I’ve been hit with the “fist of stupid” so many times, I now think brains have faces. Kudos, Internet.
Scott Feschuk, “Mexico is ‘really mad’ at us, and it is so a big whoop: Diplomacy should be more like ‘Mean Girls’”, Maclean’s, 2013-09-20
October 7, 2013
Harsanyi – Better openly partisan than “impartial” media
David Harsanyi thinks the political scene would be better if more media outlets were up-front about their partisan stance rather than pretending to be objective and impartial:
As much as it pains me, let me take a few moments to defend MSNBC. Last week’s much-talked about testy exchange between anchor Thomas Roberts and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus has been predictably negative. Media bias is a perpetual grievance of the Right — for obvious reasons. But maybe the only way to improve on the situation is to champion more openly ideologically driven political journalism? By any measure, it’s a lot less destructive than what we had for decades: a media feigning impartiality.
[…]
It can be uncomfortable watching a head-on collision of hackery, but the truth is the entire exchange is weirdly honest, entertaining and informative. It’s not often a TV anchor admits to viewers that he’s reading “directly from what the president just gave us.” Roberts is standing in for the president. Perfect. It’s not as if Reince Priebus was on MSNBC to offer his dispassionate impression of the situation, either. He should be challenged. And though the table-setting question is preposterously biased, it’s exactly the kind of question Priebus should be able to deflect. And he gets to do it in front of an audience that generally detests Republicans. I saw many people on Twitter wondering why Priebus does it to himself. They should be wondering why he doesn’t do it more often.
We all know where MSNBC or FOX News stand. It’s establishment media masquerading as impartial that has the real impact. This bias is rooted in insularity, showing a lack curiosity about the other side’s worldview — the ignorance about religion, guns or free-market economic ideas are the most glaring example — and, even worse, a lack of skepticism towards its own conceptions about how things work.
To the untrained eye, the Obamacare rollout may seem like an unmitigated disaster. But editors at Reuters (“Web traffic, glitches slow Obamacare exchanges launch”) or the Associate Press (“Rollout of ‘historic’ Obamacare in California hits some snags”) will try to dissuade people of this notion. Bias doesn’t only manifest in what you write but what you don’t, in what goes above the fold and what sort of delicate nouns and adjectives you sprinkle in your headlines.
October 2, 2013
Now we have the real reason for the decline in newspaper revenue
If you guessed “the internet” — particularly the internet sites that ate the classified ad business alive — you’re apparently wrong. The real culprit is … an amazingly old-fashioned racist and sexist stereotype:
For years, we’ve talked about the ridiculousness with which many old school journalists want to blame the internet (or, more specifically Google or Craigslist) for the troubles some in the industry have had lately. It is a ridiculous claim. Basically, newspapers have survived for years on a massive inefficiency in information. What newspapers did marginally well was bring together a local community of interest, take their attention, and then sell that attention. What many folks in the news business still can’t come to terms with is the fact that there are tons of other communities of attention out there now, so they can’t slide by on inefficiencies like they did in the past.
Either way, it’s always nice to see some in the industry recognize that blaming the internet is a mistake. However, Chris Powell, the managing editor for the Journal Inquirer in Connecticut’s choice of a different culprit doesn’t seem much more on target. Powell, who it appears, actually does have a journalism job (I can’t fathom how or why) published an opinion piece (found via Mark Hamilton and Mathew Ingram) that puts the blame squarely on… single mothers. Okay, not just any single mothers:
Indeed, newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households — two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they’re living in, and couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population.
September 14, 2013
September 4, 2013
“Despite a rash of deadly train crashes…”
Coyote Blog indulges in a good old-time fisking of an article built on the claim that there has been a “trend” of increasingly deadly railway accidents:
The best way to explain the phenomenon is with an example, and the Arizona Republic presented me with a great one today, in the form of an article by Joan Lowy of the Associated Press. This in an article that reads more like an editorial than a news story. It is about the Federal requirement for railroads to put safety electronics called Positive Train Control (PTC) on trains by a certain date. The author has a pretty clear narrative that this is an absolutely critical piece of equipment for the public good, and that railroads are using scheming and lobbying to unfairly delay and dilute this critical mandate (seriously, I am not exaggerating the tone, you can read it for yourself.)
My point, however, is not to challenge the basic premise of the article, but to address this statement in her opening paragraph (emphasis added).
Despite a rash of deadly train crashes, the railroad industry’s allies in Congress are trying to push back the deadline for installing technology to prevent the most catastrophic types of collisions until at least 2020, half a century after accident investigators first called for such safety measures.
The reporter is claiming a “rash of deadly train crashes” — in other words, she is saying, or at least implying, that there is an upward trend in deadly train crashes. So let’s ask ourselves if this claimed trend actually exists. She says it so baldly, right there in the first seven words, that surely it must be true, right?
[…]
So let’s go to the data. It is actually very easy to find, and I would be surprised if Ms. Lowy did not actually have this data in her hands. It is at the Federal Railway Administration Office of Safety Analysis. 2013 data is only current through June and seems to be set up on an October -September fiscal year. So I ran the data only for October-June of every year to make sure the results were comparable to 2013. Each year in the data below is actually 9 months of data.
By the way, when one is looking at railroad fatalities, one needs to understand that railroads do kill a lot of people every year, but the vast, vast majority of these — 99% or more — are killed at grade crossings. People still do not understand that a freight train takes miles to stop. (see postscript below, but as an aside, I would be willing to make a bet: Since deaths at grade crossings outnumber deaths from collisions by about 100:1, I would be willing to bet any amount of money that I could take the capital the author wants railroads to invest in PTC and save far more lives by investing it in grade crossing protection. People like Ms. Lowy who advocate for these regulations never, ever seem to consider prioritization and tradeoffs.)
Anyway, looking at the data, here is the data for people killed each year in US railroad accidents (as usual click to enlarge any of the charts):
So, rather than a “rash”, we have just the opposite — the lowest number of deaths in a decade. One. I will admit that technically she said rash of “fatal accidents” and this is data on fatalities, but I’m going to make a reasonable assumption that one death means one fatal accident — which certainly cannot be higher than the number of fatal accidents in previous years and is likely lower.
Most of you will agree that this makes the author’s opening statement a joke. Believe it or not — and this happens a surprising number of times — this journalist is claiming a trend that not only does not exist, but is of the opposite sign.
August 27, 2013
Hey, Kids! It’s time for back-to-school bad journalism bingo!
The slow news days of August have reached the traditional back-to-school phase of page filling:
I love back-to-school time: the joy, the energy, the sense of limitless possibilities. It’s almost enough to make you forget about the tsunami of dreadful journalism that accompanies it.
There are basically three reasons for bad back-to-school journalism. First, higher education is complicated; it doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic narratives required for 800-word articles. Second, there’s a serious lack of decent data about higher education in Canada, what with the Millennium Scholarship Foundation gone, HRSDC no longer funding any decent Statscan surveys, and provinces and universities holding on tightly to their own data on the grounds that someone might use it to compare them against other provinces/institutions (and that would never do!). In this data vacuum, interested parties with their own agendas find it easy to peddle all sorts of demented, half-true factoids to journalists; hence, the frequent appearance of stories based on “data” which simply aren’t true.
The third problem is the lack of outcome measures. Everyone wants “good” education, but no one knows what that is. So journalists tend to fall back on input measures: small classes, students per professors, etc., which inevitably lead to a weird mythologizing of university life in the 1970s. Nothing wrong with the 1970s of course, but it somehow never quite clicks with op-ed writers that a major reason life was so great for students back then was that access was restricted to a fairly small elite, and that the comparative “failures” of today’s universities are largely the result of expanded access.
Here’s the Bingo card for you to play along at home:
