cheese it, the cops!

addiction and yapyap

this piece, from the atlantic, on 'privileged, white' twenty-something addicts, is typical of a certain style of middle-brow, pseudo-profound analysis, a genre pioneered by people like malcolm gladwell and, um, jonah lehrer. liz kulze produces a seemingly definitive account that is just a mess. now i am going to attack almost any 'external' account of addiction; i think if you are explaining addiction as something bizarre and external that needs to be explained sociologically or medically, you've already missed everything, or you have little credibility; the only real explanations include the first-person experience of addiction, which does not come from collaging quotes to make your pre-conceived points. but just one problem with kulze's account: it accounts for addiction in this sort of person, first, on the grounds that these kids are coddled and spoiled so much that they never form a self, and second, because their parents are always driving them to succeed, that they grew up in excessively-structured contexts, both in their families and in educational institutions. surely these things are in tension with one another. but either way, over and over, she moves straight from incredibly vague cultural observations that apply perfectly well to non-addicts and addicts alike (but really apply to no one in particular) to an explanation of particular people's addiction.

first off, i doubt that addiction is a greater problem in this population than in many others. but it is an explanatory problem: how can people like me end up like that? i'm going to tell you exactly how: the same way people not like you end up like that. the essence of addiction is in the relation betweeen the person and the substance: demographic explanations are going to be wrong, especially if you start by assuming that certain people should be immune. addiction among privileged, white twenty-somethings is exactly no more puzzling than among trailer-dwelling rednecks or inner-city black people, and that you think the one needs explaining and the other does not only displays all your prejudices right there on the page. you might start out instead, if you have to go sociological or whatever, with addiction patterns among the parents of these people. and then that you offer pseudo-profound pseudo-explanations that do absolutely nothing just shows that you've been reading way too much new yorker. on both counts, you need to get out of your own little demographic spider hole.

oops we kicked your ass

i have been doing research and working on the wikipedia entry for my great-grandfather, herman bernstein (he's my mother's mother's father). what an unbelievable life! i thought i wrote fast. for one thing, the dude was super-jew. for example, henry ford, with whom he locked horns for a decade, called him 'the messenger boy of international jewry.' he was rolling across russia during the revolution, interviewing john reed and leon trotsky.

even a superficial skim of the list of his correspondence (housed at the yivo center for jewish research at the center for jewish history) reveals letters to and from Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Sholem Aleichem,Andrew Carnegie, Leo Tolstoy, William Howard Taft, George Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, John D. Rockefeller, Louis Marshall, Israel Zangwill, Henri Bergson, Arthur Brisbane, Mordecai Kaplan, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franz Oppenheimer, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Constantin Stanislavski, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Balfour,Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Arthur Goldberg, Adolph Ochs, Romain Rolland, Julius Rosenwald, Benjamin Cardozo, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and Franklin Roosevelt.

as herman might have put it: jesus a vehicular christ.

herman bernstein as a sensitive young poet

 and as a mature ass-kicker

 

when my mother (joyce abell, b. 1925) was 5, she was sent by her parents, alone, on a ship to albania, where herman was the ambassador. she still remembers the spectacle, the dresses etc., at the court of the magnificently attired zog, king of albania. 

here are a few of the other writers in my lineage, on both or all sides, whether they arrived with the puritans in 1637 or came to ellis island from the russo-german border in 1893. some were protestants, some were catholics, some were jews (100% on my mom's side). most were atheists, though, whatever their heritage. some were communists and some were republicans and some (well...) were anarchists. novelist and short story writer grace sartwell mason (my great great grandfather's sister; one of her books is women are queer); herman's brother hillel bernstein, novelist and new yorker contributor; novelist etc murray gitlin (my grandfather and herman's son-in-law); my grandfather franklin sartwell, columnist for and editor for the washington times-herald and the washington post; my father franklin sartwell, jr., reporter and editor at the washington star, national geographic, science news, and defenders magazine; herman's son david, writer and editor for, and owner of, the binghampton sun. there are others!

te'o and media

i can be pretty hard on reporters who get stories wrong. like i was ragging on all the misinformation they were purveying on newtown. but i'm going to forgive them on the te'o story. it's just not the sort of thing you'd think someone would make up. it spoke well for us that we wouldn't require verification on something like that, just believe the raw emotion he was...expressing. well, i suppose even things like that have to dissolve in our current context, including social media. but that's sad, see? do i resent the fact that i was laboring under a misapprehension? well yeah a bit. how much of a burden was it to continue to labor under that misapprehension for a few extra weeks? indetectible in the face of the actual burdens that confront me on any given day. this crap ain't exactly watergate. believing a college kid about his tragedy is not like believing what some politician or military spokesman or corporate flak is saying, which are real and constant problems in american journalism. so i just don't feel that there is a big media problem here, except maybe that te'o was tailoring the story to fit into espn's formulae. the formulae should be reflected on not least because the narrative forms they deploy are getting awfully old, and have the sort of falsifying imperatives that alway arise when you try to read actual life as though it were a novel.

or: how could notre dame not release this information as soon as they had it? well, this is the kind of story that there just is no urgency in reporting to anyone. now, maybe it's disturbing that they waited til after the championship game, but really we don't know how the deliberation went at all. it's sad, stupid, and fucked up no matter how it happened, but nothing turns on getting it out immediately at all: it has no, like, policy implications. no one has to make up their mind about anything on its basis, at least until the draft. 

supposedly fox news has 'banned' discussion of gun contol. well, they're talking about it right now.

mistakes you don't have to make

it really is amazing how wrong everybody got the story, in virtually every respect. they misidentified the shooter as his brother. for like 24 hours everyone was asserting with complete assurance that his mother was a kindergarten teacher at sandy hook. then they said he went there as a student. all that is wrong. they said he left the assault rifle in his car and fired all the shots with handguns; now all the shots came from the bushmaster, and so on. now, in any particular case, maybe it's the police who are giving the wrong info or maybe it's the media developing it independently. and of course, reporters are human and will make mistakes. but i say that they can and should do better than that. i'm impatient too, but you really do need to take deep breath and think about sourcing, confirmation, etc.

the familiar problem gathers: everyone wants to know what's going on, wants to participate in some wise in the mourning. so all media gather and engage in saturation coverage. the town becomes a kind of truman show or something. after the fortieth time they put on a psychiatrist to tell you how to talk to your kids or pay tribute to the victims, you begin to lose the emotional thread and participate in a media spectacle. the more attention they bring and the more they insist on telling the story, the further it starts to recede into a kind of fiction, with a kind of pre-determined narrative shape: the heroes, the community pulling together, etc. not that any of that is exactly false, but one begins to experience it as though it were a fictional narrative: they want to construct it that way for us and it attenuates the immediacy in a way that both helps everyone turn a corner, and puts the thing away somewhere where we have it contained. the narrative form requires some sort of resolution, and that requires at a minimum a process of systematic simplification. again you lose the excess, where the reality of an event like that enters into our experience: the moment where you can't face up that is the real response.

after awhile you start to worry that you want to watch people in pain as a kind of entertainment. you're getting it right where you get your sports and romcoms. you start to doubt the sincerity of the anchors' and politicians' formulaic emoting. you start to doubt your own.

counters

i'd say folks have a pretty low standard of 'counter-intuitive.' then again i would caution those contemplating a career in the counter-intuitive that if you take a few more giant steps after gladwell, you will often be greeted with incomprehension, or at least extremely modest book sales.

ethnic pussies

here's a relatively typical case in which the exquisitely delicate ethnic sensitivities of the press preclude them from actually reporting the story: espn fired a staffer for an 'offensive' headline: we report the story at length, but can't actually say what the headline said. that's frigging ridiculous. we'd do our basic jobs, only we're pussies. the headline itself was only up for a half hour, and for example reading this account would make it impossible to reach an informed opinion on whether the firing was reasonable. you don't want to offend your readers, who are not at all offended for example when you report the actual facts of a murder in excruciating detail. well, lord knows this - whatever it was - was worse than murder.

disconnect me

one of my fave phrases in campaign coverage/debates etc is 'negative attacks.' that said, there is a distinct difference, a disconnect, between negative attacks and positive attacks.  

journalism's last moment

daily beast: exclusive! newt's ex-wife's lawyer on his narcissism. now i would say few of us would really be satisfied to be portrayed in the media by our ex-spouses. (mine - one of mine - just sold a book including an account of our break-up; i intend to ignore it unless pressed, then launch the nukes, or at least the blog posts.) but your ex-spouse's lawyer?  christ, tina, that's your idea of journalism?: a first-person account of somebody's marriage by a person who is actually being paid to eviscerate the person she's writing about? your ex-spouse might be bitter, might have what you take to be a distorted view of events, etc., but at least she's going to be more or less sincere. this is more like hiring lady gaga's producer to review her next album.

mmmm, foxy

this gleefully publicized notion that people who watch fox news know less than people held in an isolation chamber is just ridiculous. honestly i don't care what your poll shows. tell you what, tonight watch special report with bret baier and fox report with shepard smith, then tell me they didn't cover the day's news. you'll get more or less the same info as you would on wolf blitzer or abc nightly news, with plenty of overlap with tomorrow's new york times and news hour. there might be a few symptoms of rightwingedness; maybe they'll find a little anti-christmas story from florida or something. but they will cover the news.

salute

sometimes we take for granted all that the members of the miltary do for us, all the sacrifices they make for our freedom. that's really unaccountable, because the media bludgeons us with it absolutely incessantly.

on spin

cain is the paradigmatic casualty of the "news cycle": an absolute non-stop bludgeoning on cable news. i'd be very surprised if he survives as a candidate even for the next few days; one just whiffs further devastation.

free lisa

[disclaimer: lisa simeone is a friend of mine.]

now i am not really interested in the question of whether, strictly speaking, she violated npr's poicies. if the policy really is that no one associated with npr, or producing or helping to produce any sort of content for them, can explicitly advocate political positions, such a policy is ridiculous. first off, npr actually has people on-air expressing their actual opinions, people whose job it is to express opinions (often, though, these actual opinions are pure pablum, a la juan williams or cokie roberts). but say the post had a no-advocacy by employees policy and then started applying it to charles krauthammer or e.j. dionne, or for that matter to their music critics. 

now, i can understand a news organization trying to limit the public expressions of opinions by its reporters. i have to say, i disagree with even this, because it is devoted to creating an impression of impartiality, rather than to achieving actual impartiality. it simply makes it a little less easy to assess the impartiality of any given piece. it's like banning the 'appearance of impropriety,' while letting the actual corruption proceed unchecked. it makes whatever bias is actually represented even less honest.

but to prohibit the off-air expression of political conviction on the part of the host of 'world of opera' or 'soundprint' is just ridiculous. you might as well prohibit placido domingo from endorsing herman cain or whatever. there is no possible justification of it whatsoever. if, like zurowick, you want to put the whole thing on whether simeone actually violated the "ethics" policy that is actually in place at npr, you're considering this thing far too narrowly. but if so, then the policy needs to be changed, not the world of opera. oddly i was listening to cornel west and tavis smiley hosting a show on an npr station just last night. believe it or not, they have publicly expressed their political positions.

npr is obviously so incredibly sensitive to accusations of bias that they react far too strongly to any hint, which ends up messing them up much worse. the treatment of juan williams was idiotic, and then the crazy overcompensation against the decision and the andrew breitbart thing was wackily overwrought; fire everybody etc. well, never accept state funding if you don't want to answer to jesse helms, as i used to tell karen finley. but also try to respond to these pressures calmly and thoughtfully, and try to continue doing your job in the right way. so i'd say they fired juan williams because they actually are basically a unanimously leftish organization that hates fox. then they had to thrash wildly the other way because the firing showed that. and ditching simeone is part of this thrashing. i don't know. get over it. hire ron paul to host your world of hip hop show or whatever. you're not going to have a whole huge staff and whole archipelago of contractors none of whom have any political opinions; let a thousand flowers bloom and then really really try to cover politically contentious subject-matters fairly. that is the best you can do.

[anyway, no one on the right or left actually has any opinions; all they have are social affiliations. an opinion on x is a relation of a person to x. what a democrat or a republican, liberal or conservative, has instead is a relation to a demographic segment, expressed in pseudo-propositions that the people in that segment parrot in unison. what matters is producing the right syntactical unit to express your belonging; it's not about what it seems to be about, or the items that would under decent circumstances be referred to by the nouns used. (alright myabe that's a little arch and hyperbolic.)]

woof!

i remember when the editors of major newspapers were crusty old bastards, played by jason robards, who were intent on exposing the corruption of the political machine. now, like every middle-aged woman in the country, they write unauthorized yet exhaustively detailed biographies of their golden retrievers. surprisingly, it turns out that there's a lot to be said for patriarchy.

safer?

ten years after 9.11, i ask a simple question, for i am a simple man and capable only of asking questions that absolutely every person in the media is asking, like a chorus of mindless jackdaws: are we safe? did the bush administration's introduction of a gigantic security apparatus make it impossible that i might contract prostate cancer, break my neck in the bathtub, get tangled with jacknifing tractor-trailer? did it prevent me from growing old should i survive that long? did it make me immortal? i really got scared after 9.11, and still i have not been carefully packed away in cotton batting or pickled in brine. i want janet napolitano to keep me safe, to rock me like an infant and sing me comforting songs in major keys, for i am an american. where are our leaders? all i really want is for someone to tell me what to believe and what to do, and i want to believe whatever it is safe to believe.

media heroine

for the last few days, sara sidner's (and her crew's) reporting from libya for cnn has been astonishing. she rolled into tripoli from zawiya with the rebels and straight to green square when the rebels reached it. today she was actually reporting from inside the gaddafi compound as the rebels took it, right inside the firefight, chaos, and celebration. now she's back in green square. really, amazing, not least for extreme composure under fire.

out: autocracy

i guess after all the sarcasm, i'd be remiss not to acknowledge that assad finally lost his legitimacy. for some people, that's a very hard job. meanwhile the turnaround in libya would i suppose be encouraging to those of us who called for intervention. i like the notion of gaddafi in the bunker in the last stand, still basking in the adoration of his people to the last breath.

the new pace

man if you like extremely furiously-paced news coverage, check out the frenzy on cnbc right now as the dow plummets. they're yelling and going from person to person and place to place: ten talking heads in a frame of graphs and numbers scrolling by at various speeds. stuff is beeping and people are yelling in the background etc.

come to youth camp

very predictably, glenn beck is getting smacked at five minute intervals on msnbc for throwing out 'hitler youth' with regard to the political camp that was the site of the shootings in norway. well it's not the best way in, especially given that the nazi was breivik. still as i blogged that day, the camp has a creepy quality of youth indoctrination. so people have squawked that beck is directly/indirectly connected to right-wing youth programs in the usa. if so, maybe beck should pipe down. but on the other hand, beck isn't running camps for the republican party. and ask yourself: are you comforted by the fact that glenn beck does it too? does that make it less creepy? are you sending your kids to beck camp this summer?

this appeared to be something more than that, of course: it looks like a kind of installation, a youth training facility, actually owned by the rulling party of a democratic country. maybe that is routine? even if so i say it's creepy. not as creepy, of course, as going in shooting.

ed murrow, private dick

one sort of obvious thing i find strange and repugnant in the phone-hacking scandal is that newspapers are hiring private detectives, which seems to be a routine practice over there. don't you have, um, reporters? i suppose you have to think the private eyes are doing work that journalists can't, won't, are not permitted to do.

refreshing

i kind of appreciate murdoch's straightforwardness before that parliamentary committee today: no i'm not responsible. it's someone else. the usual procedure is to take full responsibility and then to assert that you didn't know anything about what was going on and it's someone else.

lestrade knee-deep

this murdoch scandal has become astonishing. so the head of scotland yard resigns.

The official, Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as the Met or Scotland Yard, said that he had decided to step down because “the ongoing speculation and accusations relating to the Met’s links with News International at a senior level” had made it difficult for him to do his job.

But he said that he had done nothing wrong and that he would not “lose sleep over my personal integrity.” He also said that because he had not been involved in the original phone-hacking investigation, he had had no idea that Neil Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor who had become a public-relations consultant for the police after leaving the paper, was himself suspected of phone hacking.

i'll tell you this: that's horseshit. if all that were true, then why in the world would you resign? as far as i have seen, he hasn't actually been nailed by the guardian, etc. he will be.

 

kabul

this attack on the intercontinental hotel in kabul sounds pretty heavyweight. it reminds me of mumbai, actually, and they're describing a series of large explosions, snipers on the roof firing rocket-propelled grenades at the vice president's house, rumors of approaching truck bombs, etc. this could be rather a disaster in terms of its timing for the obama administration, which has more or less declared victory. it would be important to know who is actually staying at the hotel.

right now, cnn is on blagojevich. msnbc is on bachmann and palin in iowa. headline news is on caylee anthony. ok, well, they're scrambling. but please, there is actual news.

great moments in politics

a truly great moment in american political history - replayed everywhere of course - was when wolf blitzer asked weiner, 'is that a picture of you?' and his response was, 'we've retained a firm to investigate that.' weiner has a notably high iq, and that was a complete and grammatical english sentence. but it made palin's random nonsense look brilliant. this intelligence thing is...complicated. the asshole thing is pretty simple, though. it would surprise me if he's still in congress or still living with huma 48 hours from now.

we make truth

cnn right now - having the finalish account of what happened in osama's compound - presents as usual this account as fact; they stop at a certain point with the 'sources say,' and they deploy the new animatied reenactment based on the official account. now they ought to be thinking about this because the story has changed radically a number of times as they have gone along. and this does fuel your conspiracy theories or at any rate distrust for msm (which, yes, is my basic source of info). i heard a number of reporters express outrage on some npr show (white house and congressional correspondents, for god's sake) at the very idea that they represent the point of view of the political authorities. yet those authorities' point of view is constantly presented as fact in all these outlets. and then every time they have to backtrack, they evidently don't think again about this posture; they just go right on identifying what a pentagon spokesman says, e.g., as the truth.

apparently osama produced some sort of 'martyrdom tape' to be released in the event of his death. i just heard anderson cooper on cnn saying that such a tape would never be shown on any show he was associated with; 'he's a mass murderer and doesn't deserve to be heard.' that is crazy wrong! it's hard to imagine a more newsworthy item, precisely because osama was a mass murderer.

maybe i just don't understand the meaning of leadership. obama's visit to tuscaloosa today (then off to the scuttled shuttle launch!) was a bigger story than the aftermath of the disaster. ok he was there, but the practical steps he took he took from dc last night. it's a constant stream of mayors, governors, senators expressing their shock and resolve in the very same scripted words. excuse me, but that is not the story. cover any serious practical measures they take, or new actual information that they announce,but it's far more relevant to hear someone who just lost their town than to hear richard shelby with 'we will emerge stronger' or deeply regretting the loss of life or whatever it may be. i can deeply regret the loss of life for myself. i don't need an authority to validate my belief that there has been a disaster or to tell me what to feel, and neither does cnn. and i don't need another dozen rehearsals of the same words from last time, the time before, etc etc. our model is that something is only real when the president says so or something. no wonder we end up expecting these people to fix everything - gas prices say. reality is for us only exactly what they say it is: an astounding power for people pretty much just like everyone else.

i was happy to see that the death toll of the royal wedding has reached over 300. the aesthetic toll, however, is world-annihilating. sometimes the juxtapositions at the top of the front page are just odd.

for some reason, every media outlet favors the formulation 'forces loyal to moammar gaddafi,' as also to assad or mubarak. i think they should stop reading minds. it seems particularly odd with regard to libya, where a goodly portion of gaddafi's force evidently consists of mercenaries. and 'loyalty' is actually the name for a virtue: i notice that carmelo anthony - who had an amazing game against the celtics last night - has it tattooed on his arm. but his approach is stop snitchin, which i sort of doubt is at the heart of the practice of assad 'loyalists.'

anyway, just go for 'the forces of moammar gaddafi.' it's neutral, shorter, and picks out the same people.

on the npr hourly newscast just now, they described the attack on the un compound in mazar-e-sharif, apparently in response to a koran burning by a florida minister. then they dutifully reported the condemnations of the attack by ban-ki moon and obama, and in fact there have been whole news stories on the condemnations. the attack is news. but the condemnations are not. they are incredibly formulaic series of words ('we unequivocally condemn this cowardly act' etc). you know without being told what these people said; you have literally heard it a hundred times. they have to say it. but you don't have to report it. in a four-minute newscast, you could actually use those seconds to say something with some content about the actual event. it's not the case that what the authorities say is ipso facto news or that you need to have the comment of authorities to report a story to which it is irrelevant. if they respond in any substantive or surprising way, then by all means. otherwise, not at all.