Why not a loyal opposition?

Jay Rosen has some interesting thoughts about an exchange between Alan Feuer's alter-ego "T.R." (this reporter) and Bob Franken of CNN. Feuer's book is a remembered tale, not hard journalism. As such, Franken says the story is not wholly accurate, but mostly. He clarifies. The details can be found on Rosen's J-School blog, Press Think. Rosen discusses the skepticism of journalists and the Franken quote (in clarification) that "When I’m reporting, I am a citizen of the world."

I will make several observations from the perspective of my salon: skepticism doesn't mean sustained disbelief in the face of contrary evidence, and the press needs to learn the theory of the loyal opposition.

Journalists seem to frequently mistake skepticism for incredulity. Putting aside philosophical skepticism (which argues that we cannot know anything reliably) journalists seem to argue for a professional skepticism. The most common of these is scienticfic scepticism, which holds that ideas should be regarded as false until subjected to the scientific method, generally by reproducable results. Of course any discipline with a method of seperating truth from falsehood can argue a professional skepticism. Historians have a method for interpreting documents to seperate the true from the false (we might say the reliable from the unreliable, but we agreed to put philosophical skepticism aside). Such a method must be a critical method capable of satisfying skepticism by revealing what is. (Let's also put aside academic skepticism, and acknowledge any work will be open to criticism because the consultation of this or that source will better nuance any work.) Much of journalism seems to proceed without any critical method at all. Some of it consists of reportage, some of punditry, and some retelling of the spin of some interested party. Reportage is fine for the local fire at the lumber mill. Started at 2:50 AM, firemen at the scene at 3:14, three alarm, such and such vehicles present, time spent fighting the fire, any specicial techniques or devices, and so on. Punditry is naught but opinion, sometimes learned, sometimes not. Its never news, its always commentary. Acting as the outlet for someone's spin is just substituting someone else's opinion for your own (or finding someone else to voice your opinion for you.)

One of the criticisms of balanced reporting is that it often relies on nothing more sophisticated than the principles of reportage, tell both sides. Typically this tells us next to nothing. Is either side credible? Can either statement be falsified? If both statements appear true, how can they be reconciled? Suppose one wants to cover the Debra Burlingame criticism of the International Freedom Center at the WTC site. Like most contraversies, its a conflict of values and world-views. We might begin by testing to verify that both sides have a verifiable set of facts, or when discussing each other, have the same set of facts. Once we have that established, we are left with two different sets of values and world-views. One side, the Freedom Center consultants, argue that 9-11 was caused by injustice, and that the cause of injustice is earlier injustice, because as descreibed in Uncle Tom's Cabin, injustice harms both the perpetrator and the victim of injustice. One of the great arguments of the abolitionists was that slavery turns good people into cruel masters by the corruption of power over other people. Critics argue that responsibility need not be so diffuse as this. A specific event has specific as well as general causes. I am assuming that this second argument is the more common and needs less explanation. It sees a proper memorial as focusing just on the WTC events and its immediate causes, and these other, broader causes belong elsewhere or nowhere. Rather than just giving both sides a money quote and calling yourself done, or worse yet, depicting one side as sensible and rational and the other side as crazed lunatics, is terribly unsatisfying, because it explains little or nothing.

As a historian, I assume everyone is rational, until they prove otherwise. So when I see some action that strikes me as odd, my first instinct is to understand what set of ideas the person has organized to result in such a view of things. As such arguments always (or nearly so) come down to a set of assumptions and a method of organizing those assumptions. Thus I have a method that forces me to judge everyone to be sensible people until the prove otherwise (such as "my neighbor's dog told me to kill blondes and their boyfriends.") I don't have to agree with them, only understand that with a certain set of assumptions, their conclusions are reasonable. For example, I contend that farming is difficult on mountainsides because of erosion. If someone believes that the mountain has a spirit, and the spirit kills the crops, its a reasonable explanation of the effects based on an assumed cause (animism). If such a person asks the river spirit for permission to cross the river, they have a world-view that leads to a rational approach to such problems as where to farm and how to avoid drowning. Again, I have my own solutions to these problems which are based on an alternate set of assumptions. This is the difference between "I'm right and you're a reasonable person who is in error," and "What are you, an idiot?"

If journalists are going to be able to cover people in such a way that they recognize themselves rather than the MSM characature of who they are supposed to be, they need a reliable method of discovering what is and what is not. When I was in grad school, we had a required six hours of historiography. In one of the two semesters was an MA student in the J-school who was impressed at how much we spent thinking about our method, various sub-methods, and analyzing and criticizing them. Questions of how we selected good interpretations and good method from those that were poor or mis-applied were important to us as professionals in training. Other contacts I have had with people in J-schools or as practicing journalists confirm this sense that journalists lack a method and don't give it much thought. They offer some good reasons why such a thing is missing, and its hard to argue with the speed of the news cycle in short-circuting any in depth analysis. My own suspition is that if a method were in place it would not slow down the news nearly as fast as it would take veteran journalists to stop and begin applying a method now. Learning would slow things down. Apllication of an already learned method would have a much smaller effect.

Loyal Opposition will have to wait.

Just How Liberal is the EU?

Gerald Braunberger tries to make the case that the EU is not all regulation, but includes a liberal (free markets, less government) componant as well. I'm dubious. Its true that there is a free market principle at work in regards to eliminating barriers to trade between polities, but liberalism seems to end there, and give way to socialism afterwards.

News Outlets Gets Job Numbers Backwards

KTLA's website is typical in reporting in a larger font that only seventy-eight thousand jobs were added in May, and in a smaller font that the unemployment rate is down to 5.1%. As the unemployment rate slips, it simply must get harder and harder to keep the job creation numbers up. This seems to go unmentioned no matter where I see or hear this news reported. Part of the problem is that no one knows where structural unemployment lay, and so we can't tell whether job creation slips because were are approaching structural unemployment, or because of poor economic performance. Putting the news in the organization "job creation low" and "unemployment rate very low" ends up being at the very least a dubious misreading. Try this headline: "Unemployment lowest since September 2001, job creation slows."

Can the rich, famous save Social Security?

So asks USA Today. What fame has to do with it, I cannon guess, except to say that USA Today headline writers assume fame and wealth are coincident. The plan discussed by Dennis Cauchon, who has 982 hits coupled with "social security" at Google, suggesting he's their man on the subject.

The plan discussed proposes that the payroll tax cap be removed and that benefits be capped. Such a tax raises $100 billion dollars a year (according to USA Today, CATO offers a figure of $541 billion over five years which throws in productivity growth and inflation which reflect a higher burden in the later years) but would probably only extend the life of the program's solvency by less than seven years. This is because, an economics professor I had often said, there are more of us on Main Street than there are on Wall Street. The demographic problem is huge, a shift from 3 workers per retiree to 2 workers. Taxing the very wealthy won't fix the problem, just dent it.

My own program to reform social security includes removing the payroll cap, but is also part of a full privatization plan which means that only the employer side of the tax is collected, and is used to pay the transition costs. [My plan is to privatize personal accounts fully, invest the trust fund surplus in the stock market (rather than T-bills where it is now), and removing the cap on the payroll tax.]

The problem with the proposal in USA Today, which the piece clearly acknowledges, is that collecting this $100 billion without paying any benefit in return risks turning the program into a welfare benefit, along with the stigma which the pension/insurance model was supposed to avoid. The article quotes the socialist Economic Policy Institute's Micheal Ettinger in opposition to this plan. It may at first, strike one to question why the socialist would oppose such an obvious income redistribution program, but as EPI writing makes clear, they are aware that anti-poverty programs that get stigmatized, get cut. In America, income redistribution must provide handsome benefits to the middle class. The same is true in Europe, which is also saddled with generous middle-class benefits. Everyone pays, everyone gets, that is the mantra of the modern socialist.

Indeed, its hard to see where support from such a proposal could come from. Advocates for the proposal mentioned claim they cannot find a base of support.