Bottoming Out or Approaching the Edge?

Apparently we're entering crunch time in the Dump Biden saga.  Biden, unfortunately, has caught COVID-19, taking him off the campaign trail for several days.  That has created another lever for those who are trying to get rid of Biden to use against him.  Apparently there are rumors "major donors" are now threatening to take their money away if he stays in, and as a result he is about to fold.  Of course, I am getting these rumors 3rd- or 4th- or 5th- or 27th-hand, so I have no way to verify them or what Biden's actual thinking is at the moment.  I'm just reacting to the flow of (potential) bullshit in my information streams.

Let me clear: I have thought Dump Biden has been a hit on Biden since day one.  There is not an organic groundswell among the Democratic primary voters based on the 6/28 debate to change who they selected in 50+ primaries.  This is a top-down, rich male-driven attack that does not have the country's best interest in mind,* blasted through a media that is owned by many of the same people but that also has its own parallel interests.  It's a one-way bet for both groups - either they cripple Biden and Trump wins, or they get a shitty replacement and Trump wins, or they get the exact replacement they (and not the Democratic base) want and that person wins, and is beholden to them.  Even Harris, if she survives this putsch and is the replacement candidate, may feel obligated to them (though I would like to think not), or at least very intimidated by what they just accomplished.  No matter the outcome, rich males will get tax cuts and the media will get a controversial, click-bait-ready president.  Everybody else will lose.

I very strongly prefer that Biden stays in.  I believe he can beat Trump - or at least could have beaten Trump before the hit on him was ordered.  Things have gotten murkier since the media blitz against Biden began, and the attempted assassination of Trump did not help.  Biden may be irreparably damaged among low-info swing voters who don't know much but do respond to the general tone of media coverage.  Of course, if the media decided to stop putting its thumb on one side of the scale and try the other one for a change, those swing voters would pick up different vibes.  That won't happen, especially now.  But it's also not clear to me that a replacement will suddenly surge in the polls, even with good vibes from the temporarily placated media.  For better or worse, even if the replacement is Johnny Unbeatable, some segment of the Democratic coalition will be bitter about what has transpired, rendering ole' Johnny eminently beatable.

No matter how it occurs, or why, any replacement for Biden other than Harris is absolutely unacceptable.  I will not accept "major donors" controlling the party in that way.  Yes, it may play into their hands if I don't vote for president.  And yes, I am a straight white male, albeit a poor one.  But I believe in democracy, and even if the Democratic Party's selection process is flawed, it is still little-d democratic, and should be respected.  If the Democratic Party won't stand for democracy within its own processes, what will it stand for at all?

So, we may be reaching an inflection point.  Or not.  I certainly don't know.  Whatever happens, it's going to be jarring for someone.

* I have ideas about the composition of this group which are circumstantially strong but otherwise unsubstantiated, so I won't publish them.

War Is a Media Racket

The non-stop huffing and puffing we've seen in the past several weeks over the withdrawal of American troops and the return of the Taliban has laid bare a deep problem in larger media institutions.  Smedley D. Butler used the phrase "War is a Racket" in a series of speeches given in the early 1930s, which he turned into a book published in 1935.  In it, he explained how the U.S. military was used to support corporate interest in various countries it was deployed to in the 1910s and 1920s.  These days the U.S. military does not so much prop up overseas corporate operations directly as aim a giant fire hose of defense dollars to defense contractors large and small.  These companies and their owners in turn use some of the money as campaign contributions to the most hawkish or pro-outsourcing politicians, who then seek to extend wars or have the military turn over as many functions as possible to private industry.  The money also flows to various "think tanks" who generate position papers, op-eds, and conveniently available talking heads for any news show that makes a last-minute request.

The media, too, has an interest in conflict and war.  At the institutional level, war is good for ratings, subscriptions, "engagements", and - ideally - revenue.  That's not surprising.  The uncertainty and potential threat from war makes people pay attention because there is a long history of war causing massive amounts of death, well above the everyday level of death that people have always experienced.  So it is completely rational for media organizations to cover war in detail, and bring in lots of guests who are pro-war, or at least deeply, deeply concerned with developments.  Little time is given to anti-war voices, who are viewed and portrayed as naive and idealistic.  We saw this in 2002-2003, and we're seeing it again, though the pro-war voices present now are mostly there to re-enforce the idea that Afghanistan was a "loss" and thus Biden is a loser who should be replaced with a more war-friendly president, or at least replaced.

What is more complicated is individual motivation among members of the media.  I think a lot of them have a pro-war bias because covering a conflict could be better for their career than covering anything domestic.  Those who are assigned to the war get to stand in exotic locations and talk intensely about dramatic developments for reports that are aired at the top of the hour, or have their reports published on the front page.  Those covering ongoing domestic issues tend not to be the center of their reports, which are relegated to the second half of the show, or farther into the newspaper, next to the ads for the discount liquor stores.  It is also probably more rewarding personally to cover war.  The locations are distant and different.  The conflict-zone reporters have opportunities to "embed" with the military and be flown around in helicopters while officers explain complex programs.  Domestic reporters on assignment get a rental car in which they have to drive themselves around to assemble their story.  And so on.

Ultimately, an overwhelming majority of journalists and media institutions cannot be trusted on matters of war.  They may create and run tragic stories from the front lines, or about the victims, or even the aftermath, if the leadership thinks viewers still remember the war. But in the lead-up to any war of choice, they will be biased in favor of war.  That will come though in the choice of stories, interviewees, and overall tone.   American citizens will have to learn to fight this bias by choosing different media outlets for their information.  Otherwise, the country will eventually repeat the mistakes of the Iraq War and the overly-long occupation of Afghanistan.

Our Lousy Media

Consider this series of screenshots (via Shawn in comments):

There was an interesting report released this week.

But if you watched Fox, you wouldn't know.

To be fair and balanced, NPR isn't doing any better.

Nothing new here, either.

Elsewhere, there's a fair amount of chatter.

Why is this important, you wonder?

Because the end of the controversy isn't being reported like the beginning.

The false accusations against the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit were widely reported, even in less biased news organizations, despite the evidence being thin.

But the final proof that they were false, and that the observational record that underlies the theory of anthropogenic climate change is solid, is absent from the airwaves so far.

Controversy sells.

Denouement doesn't .

But by not reporting both equally, our media creates false impressions.

And it's one of the reasons our media sucks.

Fleet Street Cheatsheet

Most Americans probably don't realize that the newspaper ecosystem in the United Kingdom is quite a bit different than in the US.  Except for the specialist-oriented Wall Street Journal and the McPaper, US newspapers are tied to a city or metropolitan region.  In much smaller England, the national newspapers (which are all based in London) dominate.  These are divided into three separate groups according to their perceived level of journalistic standards: quality, mid-market, and tabloid.  Something else for Americans to note is an odd tradition (to this American) of having a mostly separate staff for the Sunday edition of the papers, most of which also have different names.  In Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, most of the English national papers run regional versions, and there are also a few regionally significant papers.  Here's a rundown of the national titles ordered by circulation as of March 2011 (or Sunday circulation where appropriate).

Daily Title	Sunday Title	Format	Market segment	2010 election endorsement	Circulation daily / Sun.	Owner	Notes
The Sun	n/a	tabloid	tabloid	Conservative	2,817,857 / n/a	News Corp.	Murdoch; soon to launch a Sunday edition
n/a	News of the World	tabloid	tabloid	Conservative	n/a / 2,664,363	News Corp.	Murdoch; defunct as of July 9
Daily Mail	The Mail on Sunday	tabloid	mid-market	Conservative	2,039,731 / 1,888,040	Daily Mail and General Trust, PLC
Daily Mirror	Sunday Mirror	tabloid	tabloid	Labour	1,155,896 / 1,063,096	Trinity Mirror
Daily Star	Daily Star Sunday	tabloid	tabloid	Conservative	699,216 / 293,489	Northern & Shell
The Daily Telegraph	The Sunday Telegraph	broadsheet	quality	Conservative	626,416 / 481,941	Barclay brothers
Daily Express	Sunday Express	tabloid	mid-market	Conservative	620,616 / 533,192	Northern & Shell
n/a	The People	tabloid	tabloid	none	n/a / 477,185	Trinity Mirror
The Times	The Sunday Times	tabloid / broadsheet	quality	Conservative	446,109 / 1,031,727	News Corp.	Murdoch
Financial Times	n/a	broadsheet	quality	Conservative	381,658 / n/a	Pearson, PLC	Financial focus
The Guardian	The Observer	mid-size	quality	Liberal Democrats	261,934 / 296,023	Scott Trust	Not-for-profit
The Independent	Independent on Sunday	tabloid	quality	anti-Tory	181,934 / 153,183	Alexander Lebedev
“i”	n/a	tabloid	mid-market	anti-Tory	171,415 / n/a	Alexander Lebedev	downsized version of the Indy
Morning Star	n/a	tabloid	mid-market	none (tactical for Labour)	15,000 (?) / n/a	People's Press Printing Society	Voice of the Communist Party of Britain

Note 2011.07.15: A lot of people consider the now-defunct News of the World as the Sunday edition of The Sun. I've kept NotW separate because it is being wound up (or down), and the staff let go instead of being moved to The Sun.

Update 2011.07.15: Added the Morning Star, which is national but very small.

Hacktacular

The ongoing phone-hacking scandal in the UK is just mind-blowing.  Kudos to the Guardian and its staff, whose dogged investigative work has brought all of this to light.

Misoverinterpretation

In the middle of this vague but slightly encouraging report about ending the filibuster at the beginning of the next Congress, I found this quote from Amy Klobuchar:

The people of this country want more bipartisanship. They want the government to run better. They want us to help the private sector create jobs. That was the message out of the election, and we'd better heed it.

Putting words in the mouth of "the people" is a standard rhetorical trick that bugs me because the words so rarely reflect anything like what "the people" are be saying.  For this election, the polls I've seen indicate the people were sending only the third of the three messages in Klobuchar's list.

But I want to comment on the first of the three, the message of "bipartisanship."  It's something the DC-based chattering classes talk about a lot more than the population at large.  In the context of the SCLM, it basically means Democrats should shut up and accede to whatever Republicans demand.  When "the people" say it, I think they mean something entirely different.  In that case, bipartisanship means, "I want the noise to stop and technocrats to implement policies I like."  People don't want to have to wade through the claims and counterclaims to figure out what is really going on.  It's work.  Hard work, in fact, because so many in the media are either stenographers or charlatans.  And the work is not done once the truth is discovered.  Politicians need to be called, advocacy groups joined, donations made, letters written, etc., etc.  All that takes time - time people either don't have or would rather spend watching re-runs of Hogan's Heros.  Essentially, indicating a desire for bipartisanship is the adult equivalent of a kid sticking his fingers in his ears and saying "La la la la la" really loud.