Taking Lazy Press to Task (Again!)

I've been intrigued with a serious dustup at the Washington Post over the course of the last week. In short, the ombudswoman for the paper was quite lackadaisical/careless (at least) in the way she described the implications of the Abramoff case, doing the usual "everybody does it" non-reporting. As if anyone actually choosing to actively validate the incoming news hasn't run into a sewer-full of the same sort of dodgy equivocation on Abramoff (much almost certainly part of the predictable campaign of attach by the rove-scum). At best she seems to have been sloppy, lazy, and way too thin-skinned for the job she has. At worst, well aside from wondering if she has dated Jeff Gannon, I'm leaving that to your fertile imagination. She has taken considerable well-deserved flak for this and, interestingly, her blog has been temporarily put on hold.

Josh Marshall has a nice upbeat curtain line for anyone thinking we should still be looking to a two-party (or more) system with maybe even a hint of a fourth estate:

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This stuff isn't always pretty. But, really, thank God those folks are on her tail because shoddy reporting isn't pretty either.

So much of the imbalance and shallowness of press coverage today stems from a simple fact: reporters know they'll catch hell from the right if they say or write anything that can even remotely be construed as representing 'liberal bias'. (Often even that's not required.) Indeed, when you actually watch -- from the inside -- how mainstream newsrooms work, it is really not too much to say that they operate on two guiding principles: reporting the facts and avoiding impressions of 'liberal bias'.

On the left or center-left, until very recently, there's simply never been an organized chorus of people ready to take the Howells of the press biz to task and mau-mau them when they get a key fact wrong. Without that, the world of political news was like an NBA game where one side played the refs hard and had roaring seats of fans while the other never made a peep. With that sort of structural imbalance, shoddy scorekeeping and cowed, and eventually compliant, refs are inevitable.

This is evening the balance, creating a better press.

Word-Quibbling

It's a meadow full of enticements these days, possible post subjects all around. First you must overcome the Ferdinand syndrome, then, once on feet (or foot, twirling!), select one or more fleurs-of-interest.

Tonight it is a more benign subject than usual. somewhere in the universe orbited by innocence, naivete, and, alas, marketing (i.e., greed). My original inspiration here turned up late last week. I shared that original, from the NYT, with one chum and thought nothing more of it. Monday morning at work I had an encounter in the coffee room that suddenly rang a bell. I've been twisted ever since whether to sit on this and collect more examples, more or less certain to come. I'm going with what I've got.

On Friday the 13th (sort of an anti-April Fool's Day if you ask me) the NY Times had an article entitled "Come October, Baby Will Make 300 Million or So." Alas, I now find that for some reason what used to be a reliable resource of record (ok, giving credit, for a number of years a generous resource, with pretty much all of their material available on-line for free) has chosen to include that article in their "pay-only" category. But you can find it with a wily word choice and decent search engine (I just did).

Here's the line that got my attention:

If the experts are right, some time this month, perhaps somewhere in the suburban South or West, a couple, most likely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic, will conceive a baby who, when born in October, will become the 300 millionth American.

Wow! 300 million! Next October! I want to say amazing but really on further thought think appalling. The article itself fortunately tiptoes around anything like a celebratory mood. Unfortunately it also fails to state the obvious - we have too many people on the earth and in this country, why is it that there is so much organized opposition to proper birth planning and birth control? And thank you, Planned Parenthood for all you do!

But having made my pitch, here is my original point. "Perhaps in the suburban South or West"?? Sorry to go logical on you - reality's charms are rarely appreciated in this age, but when was it determined that births in October would be encouraged to occur in the suburban South or West? It sounds like something King Herod would have decreed: get thy pregnant women to the suburban South or West! No later than Halloween!!

Presumably somewhere way back in the chain of communications there is some actual thinking that suggests that those mentioned areas are the most "fertile" in the country. Even so, it annoys me to be fed this sort of anti-thinking crap by what was formerly reputed to be a resource that involved actual educated, intelligent staff. The original article limns some fascinatingly whacky historical details when prior equally arbitrary population milestones were met.

I'd bet we could do a lot better by putting it in other terms. Something like: there is a 60% chance the 300-millionth American will appear in the sub-South or West. That is to say, throughout October (the projected month of the numero-celebrity) my expectation is that there will also be births in North Dakota, say, and the occasional immigrant who appears in Maine.

And that was only the geographical aspect of the quote. "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic," huh?

You're still breathless though I can tell for closure on the coffee room. Maybe this is a connection only I would make (wow! I might be unique! or at least strange). I drink my java strong and black. But there's all this other crappola lying around, you understand, for the folks that drink it but don't really like the taste. Including a no-calorie "sweetener" that brags that it is "made from sugar so it tastes like sugar." Double stop.

While I have a few chemistry classes in my distant past, I don't think you need to know much chemistry to see where I am going with this. Being "made from sugar" says little about the taste. Sugar, like any other semi-complex organic compound, can be converted into any manner of other chemicals. Being "made from sugar" doesn't preclude the possibility that the dust enclosed in this little envelope is a listed intoxicant - or even a poison. Why not "made from crude oil so it tastes likes sugar"?

Your homework is to find the connection there.

UnExTheP-tical - What Don't You Get???

OK, everyone who has studied the Unitary Executive Theory of the Presidency, raise your hand. Anyone? Anyone?

If you are not raising your hand, you're not alone. As regular readers of Tomdispatch are aware, only recently has the world received notice that President Bush's "I can do anything I want" approach to governance has a name: the Unitary Executive Theory of the Presidency. Not having heard of this concept, and thinking perhaps that I had missed something in Constitutional Law, I decided to survey a random sampling of attorneys about it. The group included civil practitioners, prosecutors, a federal judge, a former federal prosecutor who has a PhD as well as a J.D., defense attorneys, and a U.S. magistrate. The precise question was, "When did you first hear about the Unitary Executive Theory of the Presidency?" Most said, "The past few weeks," but my favorite was, "A few seconds ago, when you asked about it." All agreed that the term does not appear in the U.S. Constitution and that, the last time they checked, we still had three branches of government.

That is former Federal Prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega speaking. It's great to have her unique perspective on what gives every appearance on the small of being yet more law-breaking by that fake Texan the Supreme Court illegally installed in the White House and corrupt voting equipment and procedures (barely - and again illegally) managed to re-non-elect.

But we're finally collectively starting to see more of the "large." The program the Cheney/Rove/Bush cabal have in mind of jettisoning our almost unique democratic representative form of government, with checks and balances, reducing the risk of dictatorships or other authoritarian forms. These folks know (if you recall, the honky-tonk uncowboy has admitted it would be easier if he was a dictator) their corrupt democracy-razing program cannot be implemented with a balanced form of government (never mind that they already own all three branches). de la Vega continues (please link to and read full column):

Discussion of this "theory" has been prompted, of course, by President Bush's recent confession to a crime: repeatedly authorizing the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept domestic electronic communications for foreign intelligence purposes without a court order in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA contains no exception for the President, but Bush claims his action is legal because: (1) Congress endorsed it in its September 18, 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force in response to Al Qaeda's September 11th attacks, and (2) he has inherent power as Chief Executive to act as he deems necessary in wartime. Many scholars, including Georgetown University's David Cole and former New York State Congressional Representative Elizabeth Holtzman have thoroughly debunked these arguments.

You don't have to be a constitutional scholar to know that Bush's legal justifications are weak. You merely have to consider the administration's duplicitous conduct. The Bush team has deliberately concealed this program, not only from the public and Congress, but, most damning of all, from the very agency that is responsible for executing the laws of this country: the Department of Justice (DOJ). It has been widely reported that even Bush appointees, such as former Assistant Attorney General James B. Comey, and possibly former Attorney General John Ashcroft, objected to the NSA's wide-ranging warrantless spying. After 20 years as a federal prosecutor, I am absolutely certain that the vast majority of career attorneys at DOJ and criminal prosecutors from U.S. Attorneys' Offices around the country, as well as federal law enforcement agents, would have refused to participate knowingly in this program. Bush and his coterie knew that their legal arguments were weak and intellectually dishonest, if not ludicrous, so rather than making their case honestly, even to their own people, they avoided dissent by acting in secret and affirmatively misleading the entire country. Using a tragically familiar modus operandi, Bush has carried out his unlawful spying scheme by acting not as a unitary executive (whatever that is), but as a solitary executive -- as if the President Knows Best.

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