Cue the Weiner Jokes

Yesterday’s revelation that New York Congressman Anthony Weiner really did tweet a link to a photograph of his occupied and bulging underwear to a 21-year-old woman he’d never met answers many but not all of the relevant questions. 

Politically, Weiner was, is, one of the few reliably progressive voices in Washington, alongside Barney Frank and former Representative Alan Grayson. I’ve never seen him back down from a fight; indeed he had that quirk of personality that made him all the more dangerous when cornered: if he was attacked, he knew he was on to something. His obvious intelligence and political skills, coupled with the good fortune of representing a district and indeed a state that shared his views made him a politician with a bright future. He was mentioned as a possible mayoral candidate in New York, or perhaps as a successor to his political mentor, Senator Chuck Schumer. 

Not now. Weiner hasn’t resigned, and, given where he’s from, he might just get re-elected (he won by 22 points in 2010). Still, I think we can take as given that the Republicans will actually nominate someone to run against him (unlike in 2006 and 2008). Moreover, I suspect that his future outside his district is probably not very bright. Speaking of not bright, just how stupid is it to send a crotch-shot to a stranger young enough to be your daughter, then lie about, then equivocate, then admit it? The answer to this question, of course, is pretty freaking moronic, or, perhaps more accurately, arrogant in the extreme. 

Like another talented New York Democrat, Eliott Spitzer, Weiner began to believe that rules apply only to other people: whether it’s racking up four figures’ worth of parking tickets (a particularly ironic offense, given his hectoring of foreign governments who don’t pay their New York City parking offenses) or tweeting his… erm… member of Congress to a co-ed. It is the latter incident for which, in this culture, he is likely to become known. Of course, in real terms this transgression is minor compared to those in the same arena of many who subsequently went on to extended (pardon the pun) political careers: Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, David Vitter. (On the other hand, it is apparently at least as substantive as the shirtless Craig’s List photo of Representative Chris Lee, which led to his resignation and, ultimately, to his seat flipping to the Democrats in last month’s special election despite Lee’s landslide victory only seven months earlier.) 

As far as I can see, there was no crime committed, and no one was directly hurt in the way a wife would be in the case of an actual affair. Weiner’s initial act—the tweet—was puerile, stupid, and incomprehensible. The ensuing actions—the part that has everyone and his great-aunt Tillie intoning Watergate clichés about “it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up”—consists of precisely this: he lied. He got caught having done something absurd, arrogant, and potentially politically suicidal, and he lied to the press. 

Of course, you can take it as a matter of faith that a dozen different members of Congress, three senators, two governors, and at least one representative of the federal executive will lie to the press in the time it takes you, Gentle Reader, to finish with this blog post. But this is lying the press cares about. They don’t care if they get lied to about trivial stuff like warrantless wiretaps, the projected cost of extending the Afghan War, or whether Medicare is actually going broke. 

No, because, you see, investigating those claims would require actual work, and the people proven to be liars could and would cling to their fabrications, leaving no opportunity for triumphalism. But Congressman Weiner admitted it, thereby allowing the righteous indignation to flow unabated. Representative Weiner complained that this whole business was a “distraction.” Of course, it was. But it was a distraction entirely of his own making. True, the baying hounds of the alleged journalistic world may have been a little (OK, a lot) louder than the situation warranted. 

But the man’s been in politics for years—he didn’t know that? Well, actually, he did, but he realized it too late. Hence, presumably, the “I’ve been hacked” tweets and the non-denial denial (“I can’t say with certitude”) that led to the most concise encapsulation of the whole affair, by Bill Maher, for whom the opportunity to talk dirty overrode his natural reluctance to criticize those on the left: “If somebody asks if you tweeted your penis, and your answer is anything but ‘no,’ you tweeted your penis.” 

So, what’s to make of all this? There are still unanswered questions, including many of those posed by Stef at Daily Kos: how did conservative blogger patriotusa76 seem to know about the tweet two weeks before it happened? why was the “evidence” evidently doctored? what was Andrew Breitbart’s role in all this? Indeed, the greatest crime committed by Rep. Weiner may have been to give a modicum credibility to Breitbart, whose previous record was spotless: not a single one of his hatchet jobs provided anything but an intentionally vicious and wholly mendacious version of what actually happened—not ACORN, not Shirley Sherrod, not the two University of Missouri professors, not NPR (although there were needles of truth in the haystack of digital manipulation in that case). 

But, as Mark Fuhrman demonstrated at the OJ Simpson trial, it is indeed possible to frame the guilty… which doesn’t make it any less of a frame. More importantly, the questions that have been answered are certainly enough to legitimately raise the question of whether Weiner should resign. And the answer is… probably. There is no evidence of an actual affair, Weiner never ran as a crusader against the very behavior he indulged in (Cf. Gingrich, Spitzer, Larry Craig, et al.) and there appears to be no actual criminality (Cf. Clinton, Kennedy, Mark Foley, David Vitter, John Ensign… and on and on). 

On the other hand, the Congressman’s actions have been by turns reckless, immature, and dishonest. As I wrote on the CC Facebook page, “No one over the age of 12 who thinks this is cute or funny or (God forbid) alluring behavior deserves other than contempt.” His ability to represent his constituents has been severely compromised, whether they think so or not. Progressives are better off without him as a spokesperson in the short term, and probably longer. It would be better for his party, for the causes he purports to believe in, and for the country if Weiner stepped aside. He is now the distraction he has railed against. The fact that he might be able to ride the storm out doesn’t mean he should. 

I’m not holding my breath.

Academic Freedom: What It Is and Isn't

One of the essential tenets of philosophical Taoism is the notion of the yin and the yang: that idea that opposites define each other. There can be no light without a concept of dark, no male without female, no strength without weakness, and so on. Indeed, a room, for example, is defined both by its boundaries rather than itself, and by the relative size of the nothingness it contains. I have, of course, been reminded of this concept this spring in teaching a course in Asian theatre, but recent events have called it to the forefront of my mind.

Specifically, I’ve been contemplating the concept of academic freedom in these terms: that is, for it to exist, it must also not exist. In other words, there must be activities which it covers and, importantly, activities it does not—I can discuss ideas and even express opinions without fear of losing my job over it (or at least I can do so since having been tenured), but that doesn’t mean I can do whatever the hell I want in my classroom. For one thing, as the Renaissance humanists as well as the Taoist sages made clear, there is no freedom without restraint: it is ontologically impossible for me to have freedom to punch you in the nose and simultaneously for you to be free from being thus punched. Moreover, in the specific context of academic freedom, since my freedom would be mere chaos without some boundaries, the imposition of those boundaries does not inherently abridge my rights, even if I disagree with the regulations in question.

Stanley Fish has an interesting opinion piece in today’s New York Times in which he looks at three recent cases in which the term “academic freedom” has been tossed around. As it happens, I’ve written about two of them, and come to pretty much the same conclusions as Fish (I should note that I seldom agree with Dr. Fish, at least to this extent): the brouhaha at the City University of New York about whether Tony Kushner would receive an honorary degree, and the Koch-funded gift to Florida State with a few too many strings attached.

On the former, here’s me:

I’ve been following the excellent coverage of George Hunka on this story, [who] makes the excellent point that “It is not a case of censorship or suppression…. Nor is it an attempt to render Kushner, his work and opinions invisible”…. the CUNY trustees generated their own personal tempest by being remarkably bone-headed.

And here’s Fish:

It was just the board screwing up with the predictable public-relations disaster as the result. No one’s freedom was curtailed, no one’s speech was censored, no harm, except to the board’s reputation and by extension to CUNY’s, was done.

On the Florida State case, me:

… the real blame attaches to David W. Rasmussen, the dean of the College of Social Sciences, who sees nothing wrong with selling out his program’s integrity: “it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it.” No, sir, what is irresponsible is chasing after dollars, even a lot of them, at the expense of the university’s control over its own curriculum.

And Fish:

Rasmussen says he is “sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom.” The implication is that “their view” is a minority view or an over-fastidious view, but the view that university hiring and firing procedures shouldn’t dance to the tune of an external constituency is absolutely mainstream and is the core of what academic freedom stands for.

There are two more cases, one of which I hadn’t heard about, but which Fish references. Quoting here:

In early March, Professor John Michael Bailey of Northwestern University invited a couple to perform a live sex-act in front of the students in his course on Human Sexuality. (Attendance at the presentation was optional.) The man brought the (naked) woman to orgasm with the help of a device with a name this newspaper will not print.

Bailey defended himself by saying that such “events” provide “useful examples and extensions of concepts students learn about in traditional academic ways.” This statement amounts to acknowledging that the live-sex demonstration was outside the boundaries of academic practice (Bailey might respond that he was stretching the envelope) and it’s an easy step to conclude that it is not protected by academic freedom, by an instructor’s freedom to bring into a class whatever materials he thinks appropriate so long as they serve a legitimate pedagogical end. Bailey claims the live-sex demo did serve such an end because it was an extension of one of his course’s main themes, the diversity of sexual experience.

OK, give me a fucking break. (Or, same words, different order: Give me a break! Fucking?) You cannot convince me that this little escapade had anything whatsoever to do with a legitimate course function. It was voyeurism in the cause of professorial popularity/edginess/whatever, and nothing else. Therefore, as Professor Fish points out, it’s not covered by academic freedom, because “academic freedom is for academic activities and not for everything that happens to go on in a university building.”

No, re-assigning this prof to other courses is not a suppression of free speech, a violation of academic freedom, or anything like that. It is, in fact, a gift. He should simply have been fired. And whereas it is silly not to offer the course in the upcoming year based on the fact that it was once taught by a charlatan, putting the class on hold for a year neither disrespects the subject matter nor violates any tenets of appropriate academic conduct. Those who say otherwise, in Fish’s words, “are behaving as so many in the Kushner controversy did; they are crying academic freedom whenever a university does something they don’t like, and by doing so, they cheapen the concept.”

Finally, we come to a case Fish doesn’t mention. This is the episode at two University of Missouri campuses at which Judy Ancel (Kansas City) and Don Giljum (St. Louis) team-teach via electronic interaction a course in labor studies. The ever-despicable Andrew Breitbart (guess what?) deceptively edited some tapes he had no right to have access to in the first place, and smeared the two faculty members as advocates of violence. (There’s a good demonstration of the specifics here.) But, as I said in linking to the just-mentioned video clip on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page,

This isn't about Andrew Breitbart being a pathological liar. We knew that. It's about a university system believing in a thoroughly discredited, ultra-partisan, utterly immoral dirtbag like Breitbart over their own faculty until it was proved AGAIN that Breitbart would have to evolve to be pond scum, and that they were innocent of his accusations.

Given the fact that it appears Mr. Giljum was pressured into offering his resignation ("conditionally," whatever that means), it certainly appears that the Mizzou hierarchy panicked first and asked questions later.

More importantly, there are a host of legitimate scenaria whereby a professor might advocate (or pretend to advocate) violence, just as there are a host of legitimate scenaria whereby a law school professor might construct a hypothetical story about killing his dean. There might be a comparison to the perceived need for violence among some members of the civil rights movement, or the Irish Republican Army, or even the colonial militias of the American Revolution. Or maybe the prof just wants someone in that class to argue that violence isn’t the answer: a little engagement in an issue can go a long way.

But even if a professor really was arguing that violence is “just another tactic,” as it was for someone quoted by Professor Ancel (hence the “matter-of-factness” complained about by right-wing bloggers), I’d argue that such an assertion is precisely what academic freedom is designed to protect: provided, of course, that the course instructors do not require their students to agree with their conclusions. I offer my opinions all the time in class; most of the time, I reiterate that opinions are different than facts. Sometimes I don’t. But, significantly, I know where the weak points of my own point of view are: I often tell students that agreeing with me for all the right reasons is probably good for a B+. If you want an A, you’d better disagree with me for the right reasons.

But what I do in my classroom isn’t completely relevant, although I suspect that I’m not the only faculty member in the country who wonders whether today is the day that some student will show up in my class with a grudge, a recording device, and access to editing equipment. What matters here is that MU officials did backflips to accommodate Andrew freaking Breitbart, whose ethical transgressions on case after case after case are so egregious that Glenn Beck’s website feels compelled to point out his deceptive editing. An administration with the courage of a particularly nervous rabbit would tell him and his minions to take a long walk on a short pier. But, of course, they’re as craven as high school principals.

So: even if Ancel and Giljum did what they were accused of doing, their administration should have backed them up. But, given the source, it would be a reasonable surmise that Breitbart was lying (roughly as reasonable a surmise as that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow). The university, however, investigated them anyway, and dangled at least Mr. Giljum out to dry in the process. Now that’s a violation of academic freedom.

Today’s scoreboard, then:

Number of universities looking stupid: 4

Number of violations of academic freedom: 2

(EDIT: An interesting and provocative piece by Jack Marshall on the Northwestern case in particular, posted within an hour of this one, can be seen here.)

It's Easier to Admit to Something If It's True

It may seem strange, with so many significant world events to be commented on, and after such a long absence from writing here, that I would return with what is, to be sure, a trivial concern. I have thoughts about what’s happening in Egypt right now, thoughts about the new Republican House whose members assured us their sole focus would be jobs and then as one of their first actions proceeded to try to re-define rape, thoughts about the horrific events in Tucson a few weeks ago. But one of two things has held me back. Either what I had to say wasn’t really blog-length (I could say it in a couple of sentences or it would take a longer essay than I had time to write or, likely, than you would choose to read), or someone else had already said pretty much what I wanted to say, and I could simply link to that piece from my Facebook page (those of you who “like” that page may have noticed an increase in such traffic over the last few weeks).

So here goes with a blog-sized issue, in the hopes that it will help me break my blogger’s block.

One blog/website I check not infrequently is called Ethics Alarms. I read (or at least skim) virtually all of these posts, agree with many if not most, and link to a few, both in my Curmudgeon Central persona and, less frequently, as myself. The blog is written by a guy named Jack Marshall, a Virginia-based ethicist and lawyer (and stage director!), who appears to mean it when he says his blog “attempt[s] to be bold without being reckless,” and that it is “dedicated to starting discussions, not ending them, despite the tone of certitude that often invades its commentary.” This attitude jibes well with the stated goals of my own blog: “You won't agree with me all the time... or at least I hope not. If all you can bring to the table is unsubstantiated opinion, please don't feel compelled to prove it, but I'd love to hear from you if you can offer an intelligent perspective that differs from my own.”

Anyway… Mr. Marshall recently posted an essay praising Marvin Kalb for “confronting the most prestigious and perhaps the most egregious of left-biased media, the New York Times, with the truth it routinely denies.” While I certainly agree with Marshall’s general point, that news is news and opinion is opinion, and the latter should not insinuate itself into the former (at least without an acknowledgment that it is doing so), there is much about the piece that is puzzling.

We begin with the opening salvo, an assertion that the “so-called mainstream media have an obvious leftward political bias,” for which “the evidence is overwhelming.” That is an arguable case, but I’d suggest that such bias, should it exist, is hardly “obvious.” It is true that a considerable majority of reporters self-identify (or are registered) as Democrats. This could, of course, be taken as evidence of a cabal: that only like-minded true believers can work in the MSM. Of course, it could just as easily be argued that journalists are well-educated and curious folks who are likely to be the best-informed demographic in the country about current events, and that smart and well-informed people tend to lean to the left. More to the point, while no one can completely eliminate his/her own perceptions or lived experience, it certainly is possible to minimize those subjective impulses (cue the Sonia Sotomayor references). As I’ve said repeatedly, I can direct a Brecht play without being a Communist or a Racine play without being a monarchist.

Moreover, with the increasing corporatization of the media, news coverage in general is trending to the right. I freely grant that my experience may be idiosyncratic, but in all the hoopla generated by the Tea Party’s protests against Obama-care in particular, I literally never heard anyone in the Corporate Media point out that the health-care bill will, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, reduce the deficit by a couple of hundred billion dollars… a fair amount of money in my neighborhood. But I heard a lot of Republican hand-wringers, suddenly, miraculously even, worried about the deficit. Everything the inane Sarah Palin utters is breathlessly recounted on the evening news, more often than not without rebuttal of even her most egregious factual errors. Need I continue?

The particular target of concern here, the New York Times, principally through the sloth (or mendacity) of Judith Miller, who unquestioningly parroted Bush administration talking points as if they were undisputed fact, became one of the primary cheerleaders for the Iraq war, and, like the Bush administration itself, never took responsibility for its role in a trillion-dollar debacle which failed to uncover any of those WMD it would be a “slam dunk” to find. The Times subsequently sat for months on a story about warrantless wiretaps (a clear violation of the 4th amendment) until after President Bush was safely re-elected. These are not the actions of a radical left-wing institution. This is not to say that the Times doesn’t make some decisions that could legitimately be described as left-leaning. But they’re an equal-opportunity incompetent. They’re lazy, they’re more interested in having access to power than in speaking truth to it, and they’re oftentimes more interested in the “sexy” story than in the truth. But they’re not “the most egregious of left-biased media.” And, despite their manifold flaws, they’re still better at journalism than virtually anyone else in the arena.

Marshall’s claim that MSM “supposedly objective reporters are openly adversarial to conservatives while covering news events” is supported by a link to a nearly two-year-old piece he wrote himself (I presume) describing a single incident in which a CNN reporter I’ve never heard of (Susan Roesgen, anyone?) said a couple of stupid things on the air. In the absence of a video or even a transcript of Roesgen’s alleged transgressions, I can’t assess the events except through Marshall’s descriptions. (N.B., I am not suggesting that Mr. Marshall is misrepresenting facts, or that he couldn’t have supplied other examples.)

Certainly decrying a rally as “anti-CNN” is dumb, but declaring the event unfit for “family viewing” might well have been a reaction against the language employed (as in, shall we say, citations from the Anglo-Saxon) rather than content. And while it might seem petulant to observe that the Tea Party movement was largely a product of the proselytizing of Fox News, the fact remains that that’s an objectively true statement. Moreover, were I in the position of interviewing such protesters, I suspect that I’d want to know why they were describing the President of the United States as a “fascist,” if they really thought they were benefiting their cause by doing so, and indeed if they had other than a visceral rationale for their allegations. I would “cut off” such a protester if he wasn’t making any sense—not because I didn’t want to have his ideas on air, but because I might hope to find someone better able to articulate a rational reason for the demonstration. And, of course, I might have been granted only a very small window of air time. If this is the best available example of MSM reporters’ contempt for conservatives, in other words, I’m pretty much unimpressed.

And then, Marshall’s essay gets really strange: “Fox News, which was launched to counter balance this tendency [towards a left-leaning media], has at least been relatively open about its conservative slant: ‘fair and balanced’ was always intended to convey Fox’s efforts to balance the scales, not to suggest the Fox News by itself was balanced.” In what universe? True, Fox News was, in its origins, intended to do exactly what is described here: to balance a perceived slant in media coverage. I actually used to watch some Fox programming in the network’s early days, and I continued to watch Fox News Watch throughout its first incarnation, when Eric Burns moderated (very well, I might add) and the likes of Neal Gabler were given the opportunity to engage in actual discussion with the Cal Thomases and Jim Pinkertons or the world. But even as the corporate media has drifted rightward in recent years, Fox has steadfastly moved even further to the right into, frankly, loonyville.

Fox, in other words, lurches far more to the right than MSNBC, the New York Times, or NPR veer to the left. Those latter organizations may, from time to time, interpret the news through their own political lens, but they don’t simply fabricate stories about death panels or Sharia law. In England, two of the three most widely-respected newspapers are the Guardian and the Telegraph. Everyone knows the former leans left and the latter leans right. But both try as best they can to get the facts straight, and I’ve linked to both of them in blog pieces over the last few months. It is possible, in other words, to be a legitimate news organization and still have a political point of view. But Fox News doesn’t live on that planet.

That network’s complete disregard for anything approaching coverage that is either fair or balanced is quite obvious to any reasonably informed person who watches for five minutes or glances at their website. The recent headline that “Obama Botches Bible Verse at Prayer Breakfast” because the President quoted accurately from the New International Version instead of apparently the only Fox-approved translation, the King James Version, is merely one among dozens of examples of Fox’s desire to cast Mr. Obama in a bad light, facts be damned.

The only real question is whether Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party or the other way around. I know that, you know that, Mr. Marshall knows that. But I see no evidence that the Fox viewership knows that. Turn on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, and chances are you won’t go an entire episode without hearing a phrase like “for those of us on the left.” But show me any evidence at all that Fox’s equivalent talking heads are ever that forthright about their political positioning. Bill O’Reilly’s catch-phrase isn’t “And now, from our side”; it’s about his “No-Spin Zone,” which, of course, is all about spin, just, well, his spin. I see literally no one at Fox, either on air or in management, who is “relatively open about its conservative slant.” A self-image as being unlike the allegedly leftie other guys, sure. But overtly conservative? Nope. Maybe those confirmations (admissions?) are there and I missed them… I’d really like to be proved wrong about this.

Next on Mr. Marshall’s menu is an indictment of the MSM because of its “repeated tardiness in covering legitimate ‘conservative news stories’ like the New Black Panthers controversy, and the ACORN ‘sting.’” Seriously? The “New Black Panthers” is a tiny, completely impotent, and not terribly smart gaggle of fringies (good article from Newsweek here), and investigation of them was deemed, well, not worth the bother by Attorney General Holder. No one other than the hacks at the Washington Times who manufactured the “controversy” could believe the NBPP poses any kind of threat to free and fair elections anywhere. No one, that is, except Fox News. Well, actually, they don’t believe it, either, but they’re willing to pretend that they do because of their need for ideological red meat.

The ACORN “sting” consisted of significantly edited footage, quite intentionally misrepresenting what actually happened. (My blog piece on the topic from last April is here.) This, of course, didn’t stop Fox News from beating the drum to destroy ACORN, just as they were to do subsequently when another tape deceptively edited by the despicable Andrew Breitbart purported to show Shirley Sherrod (remember her?) admitting to racial bias, whereas the unedited footage showed precisely the opposite. Fox, of course, both their commentators and their alleged reporters, screamed for President Obama to fire Sherrod. When the administration cravenly did so without bothering to find out the facts first, Fox went apoplectic again because Mr. Obama did precisely what they themselves had demanded that he do.

In other words, while there may be “legitimate ‘conservative news stories’” the MSM hasn’t covered, the two examples cited by Mr. Marshall don’t qualify, and the current-events reference to “the similar Planned Parenthood videotapes,” another Breitbart-edited hatchet job, doesn’t look like it’s going to be much of a story, either, largely because (who’da thunk it?) the unedited tape tells a very different story than the edited version. I know, I know, next I’ll tell you that ice is slippery. This non-coverage isn’t because the media is leftist; it’s because they’re sometimes competent, and they’re becoming increasingly less interested in being pawns in a sleazy propagandist’s latest ploy. (Sidebar: honestly, who would trust Andrew Breitbart if he said that ice cream tastes good?)

Finally, we come to the conclusion of Mr. Marshall’s essay, in which he cites Mr. Kalb’s observation that “there’s more analysis dipping into commentary and the editorial side of reporting than a straight hard news story.” To be honest, I’m not sure what that means. Reporting isn’t a Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” phenomenon. Ever. Every reporter, every editor (and I’ve been both, though not professionally) makes myriad choices about what facts are relevant and what aren’t. When two “facts” seem to be in disagreement, which gets rhetorically privileged? “X, but Y” or “Y, but X”?

Moreover, as I tell my students all the time, the nature of analysis is simultaneously objective and subjective: that is, there is as much difference between analysis and opinion as there is between analysis and purely objective reporting (as if the latter were indeed possible). This is a distinction I expect the dimmest of my Theatre Appreciation students to understand: I have no interest in your opinion, in whether or even why you liked or didn’t like something. Tell me what you saw, and, if you want an A, tell me what it might have meant. My classroom employs all three approaches: there are objective facts, there is analysis (“this seems to have happened because of that”), there is (occasionally, always clearly identified) opinion. It strikes me that reporting is remarkably similar in this regard: reporters and professors alike should be careful to distinguish between personal opinion (even professional opinion) and objectivity, but it’s frankly unreasonable to suggest that every statement be parsed and modified into meaninglessness. This positioning of analysis between the objective and the subjective doesn’t seem too difficult a concept to expect a professional journalist (Mr. Kalb, or a NYT reporter) to be able to comprehend.

I don’t want a reporter to tell me what to think about an issue, but I do expect a reporter to know more about an issue than I do, and to provide me with the relevant information. What qualifies as “relevant” in this formulation is ultimately at his or her discretion: I’m not an economist or a Middle East expert or a lawyer, or (usually) possessed of whatever particular professional insight might be most useful to understanding a specific issue. I am not, or at least I try not to be, a disjunctive thinker: there are shades of meaning in every useful commentary. I will agree with this politician most of the time but not always, and so on. But if I’m not going to simply agree with what my political party (religious leader, favorite commentator…) tells me, I need answers to certain very real questions: What does this mean? What is its context? How does it change the status quo?

As Times editor Bill Keller says in a part of the interview not quoted in Marshall’s blog entry:

I don’t mind analysis in the news pages; in fact, I encourage it every day. The discipline of objectivity or impartiality is something that is drilled into American reporters from their first day on the job….

It’s an aspiration, and reporters and editors bring their own beliefs to their jobs, and… just as judges are expected to set their personal prejudices aside in judging a case, reporters and editors are expected to lay their personal prejudices aside in assessing the facts of a news story….

They [readers] don’t get my opinion. If we’re going to write a piece on a particular political figure, then supplying some context to his remarks or his activities is a service to readers, I think.

Forgive me if I don’t go running after my torches and pitchforks at the audacity of those comments.

If the Times is actually editorializing under the guise of news reporting, that’s a bad thing. I really can’t comment on that assertion because, while I read the occasional Times article on line, it’s been quite a few years since it was my principal source of news, and while I haven’t seen any real evidence to support the claim, it night be true. If the charge is true, the Times wouldn’t be the only news source to do so, and I feel confident that they’re not as bad as some (Cough. Cough. Fox. Cough.). But while Mr. Kalb (and hence Mr. Marshall) may have a point, I find it interesting that the bleeding of opinion into news is never overtly linked to liberal bias: the closest Kalb comes is suggesting that “many conservatives” regard the Times as “left-wing.” And Keller’s responses are about as untroubling as it is possible to be.

Mr. Kalb’s questioning, then, seems rather more tepid than intrepid. He may have “visibly upset” Mr. Keller, as Mr. Marshall claims, but nothing like that is apparent in the audio tape. I’m afraid I’m not ready to lionize Kalb or to demonize Keller. Rather, I’m reminded of the television ad for The Nation, which claims that journal exhibits “that well-known liberal bias you won’t find anywhere else.” Think about what’s implicit in that claim…

How to prostitute yourself by pretending to be a prostitute

Today's Paul Simon lyric du jour is from "The Boxer":

All lies and jest,

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear,

And disregards the rest.

California Attorney General, erstwhile Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown announced last Thursday that his office would not prosecute anyone at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for any activities allegedly caught on tape by an undercover operation by a pair of conservative activists. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles claimed to have dressed themselves up in some fetishistic nightmare version of pimp and prostitute, and supposedly caught ACORN employees helping them import under-age girls from Latin America for a prostitution ring. The whole ploy seemed a bridge too far at the time—underage girls and prostitution, maybe; smuggling illegals across the border, maybe; both at once? Hmmm…

Now, what O’Keefe and Giles did was illegal under California privacy law, but the Sean Hannitys and Glenn Becks of the world—and much of the rest of the country—were willing to overlook that little technicality because these were such upright “journalists.” And indeed the duo will not be prosecuted: but only because they were granted immunity in exchange for access to the unedited versions of their tapes… which, oh so coincidentally, show that O’Keefe and Giles really were engaged in prostitution, but of a different sort than they pretended. Because they sure as hell prostituted anything that bore any resemblance to the truth. A month after the Brooklyn DA found “no criminality” by ACORN workers when O’Keefe and Giles tried the same stunt in New York, Brown’s investigation showed "that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor."

An examination of the unedited California tapes—from San Diego, San Bernardino and Los Angeles—reveals that, for example, that what O’Keefe and Giles represented on their edited version as an ACORN worker guiding them towards means of bilking money from the government really shows that staffer only offering encouragement in obtaining affordable housing. And Rachel Maddow suggests that a different employee, Juan Carlos Vera, who seems to be helping the couple import underage prostitutes is in fact setting them up. Maddow quotes from the Attorney General’s report: “Immediately after the couple left, Vera telephoned his cousin, Detective Alejandro Hernandez, at the National City Police Department… [and said] that a self-admitted prostitute had been to the office and was discussing human smuggling…. Detective Hernandez contacted Detective Mark Haas at the San Diego Police Department. Detective Haas works with cases involving human smuggling.” So, argues Maddow, “that ACORN employee… did the responsible thing. He elicited as much information as he could get out of this supposed pimp and prostitute in his office, and he immediately reported it to the police. For that he ended up getting fired…” after Fox News aired what Maddow quite reasonably describes as “fantastical interpretations of his actions.”

What to make of all this? First, as both Attorney General Brown and commentator Maddow concede, the fact that some ACORN employees were clearly unjustly accused doesn’t change the fact that others were guilty as charged: those tapes from Baltimore, for example, edited or not, seem pretty damning, and ACORN didn’t exactly help its pretensions to legitimacy by suing the pair—not for misrepresentation (which certainly could have been charged in, say, San Diego), but with the purely legalistic argument the tapes were acquired illegally, in violation of Maryland’s privacy laws: “yeah, we’re a gaggle of felons, but you cheated when you tried to prove it, so we should get off.”

But it is also very clear that O’Keefe, Giles, and their employer/shill Andrew Breitbart—not to mention the propagandists at Fox News—didn’t really care whether they had actually uncovered an organization willing to engage in criminal conspiracy. The couple lied consistently, and provably, about what they were wearing, how they represented themselves, and who said what: Giles has admitted to at least the first of these charges, all the while claiming the demonstrable falsehood that they “never claimed that he went in with a pimp costume.” Too bad O’Keefe shows up here, introduced by a fawning Fox pseudo-journalist as “dressed exactly in the same outfit that he wore in these ACORN offices.” This is a standard ploy among the prevarication set: admit to what you can’t possibly deny any more, but continue to deny everything else. Lather, rinse, repeat. (Hey, it worked for Bill Clinton!) And these zealots’ utter disregard for the reputations of completely innocent victims they had so savagely defamed is nauseating at best.

Be it noted that there is no clear evidence that Fox News was an active co-conspirator in the O'Keefe/Giles prevarication. More likely, at least at first, they were presented with something so tantalizing to their prejudices that they simply didn't bother to act like journalists and check out the story before airing it. It's pretty clear the New York Times behaved with precisely that laziness on this pseudo-story. An incompetent press is little better than an actively dishonest one: their only contribution is to make the liars work a little harder. They'll still get away with their chicanery for at least a while, they'll still have a profound effect on public opinion with their lies, the (perhaps inevitable) revelation of their fraud will still attract less attention than the initial drumbeat of falsehoods did... but the bad guys will have to do their own editing.

Still, apart from the apparent demise of journalistic integrity across the board, there’s something else very disturbing here. Remember Juan Carlos Vera, the guy who got fired for appearing on that tape from San Diego, even though he immediately called the cops on O’Keefe and Giles? Why, exactly, did he get fired? Here is one version of the story as it happened last September. Remember that Mr. Vera’s English is not the best, so there may be some confusion, but he was dismissed despite the fact that ACORN had apparently confirmed the phone call to the National City police. Presumably, assuming the Attorney General’s report to be accurate, it would have been an easy matter to confirm the time and purpose of Mr. Vera’s call to Detective Hernandez, or the latter’s call to Detective Haas.

An organization that purported to fight for the poor (I use the past tense because ACORN is now apparently defunct) , then, failed to protect one of its own employees even when there was clear exculpatory evidence, even when releasing that evidence would get the yapping hounds away from their doorstep for a while. That makes ACORN either sufficiently corrupt that it was willing to sacrifice an innocent man to prevent (or at least delay) further investigation, or sufficiently craven that it wasn’t willing to go toe-to-toe with lightweight liars like O’Keefe and Giles. I’m guessing it was the latter… I confess it’s getting a little old watching anyone even vaguely liberal run scurrying for cover the first time some idiot like Sean Hannity shakes a teabag at them. I wish Mr. Vera the best. ACORN? Good riddance.