On the Jason Arday Saga

Jason Arday, 1985-2026

Curmie is a little late to the feeding frenzy around the case of Jason Arday.  Arday is, or rather was, a Cambridge University professor of sociology of education (whatever that means), and a lightning rod for allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation in one direction and racism in the other.  He resigned from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion on August 5 after the university re-opened the plagiarism investigation, and he was found dead in his apartment on the 14th.  As of this writing, no cause of death has been released, but of course there is the unspoken likelihood of suicide.

Back in 2023, when Cambridge made Arday the youngest black professor to be hired in that venerable institution’s over 800-year history, a couple of things became clear.  First, the university was really interested in bragging about their new hire as an effort “to do everything it can to address this [“the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education and especially at leading universities”] by creating academic spaces where everyone feels they belong.”

Second, even usually responsible news outlets bought Arday’s tales of perseverance and extraordinary accomplishments without the slightest hint of skepticism.  The Guardian, for example, breathlessly exclaimed that “he did not learn to speak until he was 11” and that he was “unable to read or write until the age of 18.”  (Both of these assertions have subsequently been at least challenged if not outright disproven.)  Shortly before Arday’s resignation, The Guardian was calling him a “superstar academic.”

But, as they say in the infomercials, That’s Not All! 

Tyler Austin Harper, a former academic currently writing for The Atlantic, describes a pattern of “systemic, ritualized, dishonesty.”  In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Harper says, 

He lied about a number of elements of his background, his medical history.  He plagiarized a number of his various academic works.  On the athletic achievements front, he claims to have run 600 miles in six days, which would put him 50 miles shy of the world record, which would make him a really world-class endurance athlete.  He claims to have been mute until age eleven and then had a miraculous turn-around, an illiterate until age 18….  So, any one of these things may have perhaps been believable, but the sheer accumulation of implausibilities made it pretty apparent that he was a serial fabulist.

“Fabulist” has got to be the classiest term for “liar” that Curmie has heard in a long time.  There are, by the way, a host of other claims that rather strain credulity, enumerated in the Times of London, and the New York Times, as well as The Guardian.  Asked by that newspaper about some of his more outrageous assertions, Arday responded, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.  Why would I lie?” 

The answer to that question is rather obvious; Occam’s Razor would seem to apply.  He wanted the adulation and the benefits of someone who had actually done those great things.  If, Gentle Reader, you think that sounds rather like an obese octogenarian currently living in this country’s most expensive public housing, you are not alone.

Harper notes that the initial accusations regarding the alleged plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral dissertation were set in motion someone whom Harper says “is fairly described as a racist.”  That would be Nathan Cofnas, whose comment that in a true meritocracy, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” would seem to provide sufficient evidence for that assertion. 

Cofnas, who was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024, has now been suspended from his research position at Ghent University, who must, of course, have known of his views when they hired him.  But Arday’s death somehow changes things in the minds of cowardly university administrators.  (Curmie offers the usual apologies for redundancy).

Importantly, however, whatever motivated Cofnas’s allegations, he seems to have had a case.  Just as Mark Fuhrman may have been a bad cop but that didn’t make OJ innocent (as opposed to “not guilty”), the allegations against Arday cannot be ignored just because he’s black and the accuser is a racist.  Viewed with skepticism, yes; automatically rejected, no. 

It is true that Arday’s PhD school, Liverpool John Moores University, cleared him of plagiarism charges, but if the New York Times is correct that “Dr. Arday’s published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people,” then anything that university says should be disregarded in its entirety.  The thesis is available here; you’re welcome to check it out for yourself, Gentle Reader.  Curmie has neither the disciplinary expertise to evaluate the originality or validity of Arday’s arguments nor the time to search out those grammatical errors.

What Curmie can tell you is that when he submitted his dissertation, the committee did their jobs.  In a study of late 20th-century Irish adaptations of Greek tragedies, Curmie had made a passing reference to a play by a Nigerian playwright, and seemed to imply that it was written by someone other than the actual dramatist.  A committee member pointed out the error. 

Curmie had also quoted one of the classical Greek tragedians.  He provided the English translation for the entire passage he wanted to cite, but inadvertently left out a few words of the original Greek.  The classicist on the committee caught that one.  Needless to say, the corrections were made before the document was printed and bound.  That dissertation represented not just Curmie, but the department and the university.  It was going to be accurate.  Apparently, the standards at Liverpool John Moores are a little more… erm… lax.

Fact is, no one looks good here.  Not Arday, not Liverpool John Moores, and certainly not Cambridge, who chose Arday over more senior scholars, including other “global majority” finalists with apparently better credentials, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  Arday was, in the words of the New York Times article linked above, “underqualified, by the school’s own standards.”  Ah, but hiring any old black scholar wouldn’t make headlines the way The Youngest Ever would.  The search committee included someone whose research into autism and related conditions should have set off alarms about just how unlikely Arday’s claims about his medical history truly were.

Plus, of course, the university immediately rushed to his defense even after they themselves re-opened the investigation into his alleged transgressions.  It’s understandable that a university of Cambridge’s stature wouldn’t want to admit they’d been taken in, but that sure looks like what happened.  Jason Arday may indeed have been a brilliant man, an outstanding lecturer, and a researcher capable of cutting-edge work.  He may have had colleagues, students, and friends who liked and admired him.  But, beyond the proverbial reasonable doubt, he was also a fraud, a liar, and a plagiarist.

In that NPR interview, Harper also argues that recent efforts to achieve a more inclusive professoriate “in some cases has led to a lowering of standards, but also has led to the sense that black and brown folks are on campuses to be black and brown first and foremost, and scholars and educators second.”  He then describes “what is often being described as cancel culture is actually a culture of cowardice…. No one has the stomach to say something that’s going to get them yelled at.” He’s referring here to hiring Arday, to the George Santos affair, and to his own experience as the “token black professor” at Bates College.

Curmie has occasionally mentioned that his views are not uniformly “liberal.”  He tends towards a Confucian belief that every case is different, and towards what is often regarded as a traditional conservative view that people are individuals first and representatives of a group second.  From this perspective, the situation Harper describes is doubly problematic in that it tends to isolate black scholars, making them akin to mascots, uncomfortable in their roles in the academy, and that a single incident like Arday’s apparent unfitness is taken as representative of other members of his demographic, thereby questioning the credentials of hundreds (at least) other black academics who got their positions simply by excelling.

This latter phenomenon, suggesting that most if not all black (or brown, or female, or LGBTQ+, or…) scholars got ahead simply by DEI or some variation on the theme, has been propagated not merely by racist idiots like Cofnas (or, in a different area, by buffoons like Pete Hegseth), but by far too many everyday conservatives.  (Curmie antiphrastically does not mention that most of the whiners had no objections when those who got unearned benefits were straight white males.) 

Let’s be real for a moment.  If Curmie were to identify the three academics he has known whose example he hoped to follow, people whose scholarship, integrity, and interest in helping those lower on the proverbial totem pole were all exemplary, there would be a black man on the list.  If he were to identify three academics he least wanted to emulate, there’d be a black man on that list, too.  And, of course, there are others at about every point along the continuum.  Something similar could be said for any other demographic.  None of this ought to surprise anyone.  Individuals are individuals.

Arday’s misrepresentation of himself in terms of medical history and athleticism tells us something about him as a person, not as an academic per se.  But other than serious abuse of students, there is no greater offense committed by a professor qua professor than serial plagiarism.  There is no excuse.  None.

Shaun Harper (not to be confused with Tyler Austin Harper) writes in Inside Higher Ed, “Even if he plagiarized his work, how can we best extend support to him as the investigation carries on and his reputation is being ruined across continents?”  Sorry, that’s utter nonsense.  It’s pretty clear that Arday did indeed plagiarize, and it’s more than a little smug to say that “Death should not be the price of academic celebrity” as if not everyone believed that.  Give me a damned break.

The whataboutism argument that white academics have gotten away with plagiarism in the past is simultaneously (often) true and irrelevant.  There’s at least one well-known white scholar in Curmie’s field whose career did indeed blow up after a plagiarism charge, but Curmie also knows about some pretty unethical behavior that went largely unpunished.  That said, what should happen is that there are serious consequences for all plagiarists regardless of race.

And don’t get Curmie started on arguments like “there are things he himself may have felt under pressure to exaggerate. But you have to remember always that he was trying to say, ‘Look what we can achieve. Look what black people can achieve and do.’”  Sorry, to talk legitimately about what you can accomplish requires you to actually accomplish something, not just say you did.  Such excuses do more to de-legitimize Arday than to defend him.

There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to suggest that Cambridge has a lot to answer for.  They were certainly lazy, craven, and predictably hypocritical.  But the more profound problem for Jason Arday was… Jason Arday.  It may be a bit much to call him a “turbo-fraudulent serial fabulist whose crime spree has discredited one of the world’s oldest academic institutions, as Tyler Austin Harper  does, but, frankly, not by much.

The coda to all this is that there’s apparently software that says that the chances Arday’s resignation letter was AI generated are 100%.  You may recall, Gentle Reader, that last year Curmie asked ChatGPT to write an essay about Elon Musk in Curmie’s own style.  It did so rather frighteningly well.  Some time later, Curmie fed that composition to one of those programs that purports to determine whether an actual person wrote something.  He was assured that it was 100% certain that it was written by a human.  Oops.  Maybe we ought not to be too trusting of computers’ conclusions?

Another program says that it’s only 3.5% likely that Arday’s resignation was computer-generated.  That’s a pretty wide range!  If the allegation is correct, it provides a sadly ironic conclusion to the whole affair.  If not, it serves as a reminder that whatever his faults, Dr. Arday was also an injured party.

Actually, he’s both perp and victim, however that letter was created.

The Tuna That Wasn't... But Probably Was

There’s a big brouhaha afoot about whether Subway’s tuna sandwiches actually contain… you know… tuna.

A lawsuit in California got all this started, and then the New York Times got into the act, and then, well, there are claims and counter-claims, virtually all of which are predictable: the plaintiffs say X, and the company spokesperson says not-X.

Curmie is not a fan of either Subway or tuna sandwiches, at least those not made from a small can of Starkist or Chicken of the Sea.  If he’s ever eaten a Subway tuna sandwich, it was probably 20+ years ago.  So it’s not like there’s a lot riding on the outcome of this kerfuffle from a personal perspective.  I could cheerfully live out the rest of my days without Subway or tuna sandwiches, let alone both at once.

Anyway, let’s take this from the beginning.  In the January Washington Post article that started any national interest in this case, reporter Tim Carman writes that:

The star ingredient, according to the lawsuit, is “made from anything but tuna.” Based on independent lab tests of “multiple samples” taken from Subway locations in California, the “tuna” is “a mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna, yet have been blended together by defendants to imitate the appearance of tuna,” according to the complaint. Shalini Dogra, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, declined to say exactly what ingredients the lab tests revealed….  “We found that the ingredients were not tuna and not fish,” the attorney said in an email to The Washington Post.

Subway wasn’t about to let those claims go unrefuted.  Part of spokeswoman Maggie Truax’s statement:

These baseless accusations threaten to damage our franchisees, small business owners who work tirelessly to uphold the high standards that Subway sets for all of its products, including its tuna. Given the facts, the lawsuit constitutes a reckless and improper attack on Subway’s brand and goodwill, and on the livelihood of its California franchisees. Indeed, there is no basis in law or fact for the plaintiffs’ claims, which are frivolous and are being pursued without adequate investigation.

Unfortunately, this lawsuit is part of a trend in which the named plaintiffs’ attorneys have been targeting the food industry in an effort to make a name for themselves in that space. Subway will vigorously defend itself against these and any other baseless efforts to mischaracterize and tarnish the high-quality products that Subway and its franchisees provide to their customers, in California and around the world, and intends to fight these claims through all available avenues if they are not immediately dismissed.

Well, OK, then.

Several months later, the New York Times got into the act.  They sent reporter Julia Carmel to do a little investigation.  She bought “more than sixty inches worth of Subway tuna sandwiches.  [She] removed and froze the tuna meat, then shipped it across the country to a commercial food testing lab.”  The spokesman for the lab in question “agreed to test the tuna but asked that the lab not be named…, as he did not want to jeopardize any opportunities to work directly with America’s largest sandwich chain.”

The results: 

No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA…. Therefore, we cannot identify the species…. There’s two conclusions.  One, it’s so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification. Or we got some and there’s just nothing there that’s tuna.

That seems rather damning… but is it?  First off, Carmel notes that the plaintiffs were backing off at least some of their claim: no longer was the complaint that the stuff of those sandwiches wasn’t fish at all, but rather that it wasn’t “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna,” as advertised on the company’s sourcing website. 

This is interesting in that this revelation cuts both ways.  One the one hand, it suggests that the initial claim, and the attending publicity, was fraudulent.  On the other hand, it also could be taken to mean that although they couldn’t prove the initial claim, they can prove this one.

The lab’s explanation also needs to be teased out.  Carmel writes, “Once tuna has been cooked, its DNA becomes denatured — meaning that the fish’s characteristic properties have likely been destroyed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify.”  And tuna is indeed cooked, twice (!) before making it to a Subway franchise. 

Moreover, when Inside Edition tried the same experiment (other than gathering their samples from New York instead of LA), the results were uniformly positive for tuna.  A couple of things stand out here.  First, the lab in question was identified, unlike the one the Times used.  Inside Edition used Applied Food Technologies in Florida.  LeeAnn Applewhite, AFT’s CEO, confirmed that the tuna sandwiches her firm tested were, in fact, tuna.

And now Curmie is even more confused.  Let’s see: the company that says what the country’s largest sandwich chain would want them to say is willing to be identified; the one that supports (sort of) the lawsuit isn’t.  Curmie hastens to add that it would take considerably more evidence to assert that either of these labs are doing anything untoward, but the coincidence does make a skeptic raise an eyebrow at the very least.

Moreover, does the fact that AFT can confirm the presence of tuna in the tuna mean that the absence in the tests conducted by whatever labs the plaintiffs in the lawsuit really does show that there was no tuna in the “tuna” they tested?  Or did they use different tests?  Or did Subway have an “oh, shit, they’re on to us; we’d better start putting tuna in the tuna” moment?  Curmie did well in high school biology, but that was a half century ago, and somehow I suspect the answers to these questions might require some actual expertise, not just the ability to score well on the Regents exam.  (Curmie wonders if those things even exist any more in New York State.)

Of course, two other ideas need to be factored in.  First, even if what got served as tuna wasn’t actually tuna, the chances are good that Subway is the victim rather than the perpetrator: that the deception comes from the cannery, not the distributor.  Carmel is quoted in a follow-up piece entitled “Inside Our Subway Tuna Sandwich Test” that “Everyone I talked to said that if it’s anyone’s fault, it isn’t Subway’s.”  Carmel’s story also quotes Peter Horn, the director of the Ending Illegal Fishing Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, that “it would be difficult to place blame on Subway.”  Tuna is cheap enough to begin with, so the savings wouldn’t be worth the risk to reputation, even in the most amoral of scenaria.   

Finally, there’s the suggestion that perhaps yes, it’s tuna, but not of the best quality.  Well, duh.  I don’t know how to break this to you, Gentle Reader, but Subway does not qualify as fine dining.  Curmie and Beloved Spouse went out to dinner a couple of nights ago (the first time we’d done so post-COVID, as it happens).  We went to a place that calls itself an “ale-house and bistro.”  Curmie had a cheeseburger.  It was considerably better than what one could buy at one of the fast-food joints that line our city’s major north-south thoroughfare.  It also cost twice as much as one of those places would charge.  Curmie attracts a pretty intelligent readership, so he’s betting you already considered the distinct possibility that these two concepts might be linked, perhaps even causally.

Of course, if there is a misrepresentation, even if Subway isn’t directly responsible, it’s reasonable to wonder just how rigorous they are at overseeing the integrity of their products.  Conversely, the plaintiffs may have simply have hired a couple of shyster lawyers looking for a juicy settlement, truth be damned.  Or both.  Certainly it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for either side.

Curmie’s best guess: it’s tuna.  Will he be eating a Subway tuna sub any time in the near future?  No.  But he wouldn’t have been doing so, anyway.

Intentions Matter (except when they don't).

Curmie thinks a lot about the notion of intention. Part of that, of course, comes from being a theatre director. One of my most common notes to actors is to clarify intentions: to make clear what a character wants to accomplish, whether s/he succeeds in achieving it or not. 

But there have been three specific moments in the last week that have brought the concept to the forefront. The first was the annual discussion in Advanced Play Analysis class of the intellectual underpinnings of the absurdist movement in dramatic literature, specifically existentialism’s emphasis on prioritizing existence (the individual ego) over essence (the labels applied by others). 

I talked about how this concept is very similar to traditional conservative ideology (not to be confused with what passes for conservatism in contemporary politics). I also discussed how the manifestations (although not the rationale) of existentialist thought comport with those of Ancient Greece: Oedipus may have been attempting to avoid a horrible prophecy, but his actions bring about his downfall in a manner that is simultaneously inevitable and deeply ironic. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (The Flies) serves as an excellent means of linking the two philosophies, as he treats the matricidal Orestes as an existential hero. 

Finally, I contrasted the emphasis on individual responsibility with little regard for context or demographics and more traditional Judeo-Christian thought. Whether founded on a concept of pollution, as in the case of Shinto and (largely) Ancient Greece or upon a Nietzschean or Sartrean conception of the role of the authentic self within the universe, this emphasis on actions rather than intentions runs counter to the dominant Western belief system of the past two millennia. I should note here that concern for context is not an exclusively Western idea. Confucius, for example, distinguishes between murder (which cannot be condoned), self-defense (in which killing is excusable), and protecting one’s lord (in which failing to kill, if necessary, is punishable). 

Still, in terms of the way laws and ethical systems are constructed in the US and in countries like it, it’s the Judeo-Christian ethic that prevails. Thus, whereas Sartre’s Orestes strides unflinchingly into the swarm of flies, symbolic of both the chthonic Furies of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the niggling doubts about the legitimacy of his regicide and matricide, even a lapsed Christian like W.B. Yeats can close The Countess Cathleen, the title character of which has sold her soul to the “demon merchants” in order to redeem the souls of her subjects, with the Countess’s ascension into Heaven and the Angel’s observation that “the Light of Lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.” 

Donald G. McNeil, Jr.

What all this means is that in our society, existential thought notwithstanding, intentions and context matter. Usually. Which brings us to the second relevant event: the controversy surrounding the compelled resignation of now-former New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. McNeil was forced out for using a racial slur while leading a Times-sponsored student trip to Peru in 2019. As is often the case, the details of the incident are unclear. 

According to a late-January article in the Daily Beast, “McNeil repeatedly made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip including, according to two complaints, using the ‘n-word.’” But according to McNeil himself, he had used the term only in the context of quoting a student who had asked “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used” the slur. The “repeatedly” and “sexist” parts of the allegations seem to have disappeared from the discussion, with the furor concentrating on the utterance of a single word. 

After an apparently lengthy internal investigation, the Times reprimanded McNeil for “extremely poor judgment” (really?) but determined that his intentions were neither “hateful or malicious,” citing in particular “repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language.” (Curmie can’t help thinking about the “Jehovah” scene from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”)  Within a few months, McNeil was the paper’s lead journalist on COVID-19, even being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. But then the situation went public, and some 150 Times staffers signed a letter demanding further review. The bosses promptly ousted McNeil, declaring “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” despite having used the inexcusable term as recently as February 2 of this year in a feature story on classicist Dan-el Parilla Peralta. Its use in that story, by the way, is completely appropriate. 

Busted for the inanity of the comment, Executive Editor Dean Baquet subsequently walked back the business about intent. Mediaite quotes him indirectly, citing “comments obtained” about “a staff meeting”: “In our zeal to make a powerful statement about our workplace culture, we ham-handedly said something you rightfully saw as an oversimplification of one of the most difficult issues of our lives…. It was a deadline mistake and I regret it.” If you, Gentle Reader, believe the “deadline mistake” part (there are deadlines for staff e-mails?), then Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas you might be interested in purchasing. 

The story took on even more “legs” when the Times higher-ups spiked a column by Bret Stephens in which he criticized the paper’s handling of the situation, especially the whole “regardless of intent” part. Whether the piece was axed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger (as Stephens claims) or by opinions editor Kathleen Kingsbury after consultation with Sulzberger (as she claims) really doesn’t matter. But the column found its way around the offices, and was apparently sent by someone (not Stephens) to the Times’s crosstown rival, the New York Post. The Post, of course, is as conservative as the Times is liberal (both to rather an extreme, alas), and their decision-makers were happy to publish the piece in full. 

Curmie urges you to read what Stephens has to say in its entirety, but for the purposes of brevity, Curmie will quote only two short passages. He opens with this: “Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.” A little later, he makes his thesis clear:

This is an argument about three words: “Regardless of intent.” Should intent be the only thing that counts in judgment? Obviously not. Can people do painful, harmful, stupid or objectionable things regardless of intent? Obviously. Do any of us want to live in a world, or work in a field, where intent is categorically ruled out as a mitigating factor? I hope not.

Curmie can’t improve on any of that, noting only that there’s a lot less mitigating context to Baquet’s inanity (which, being written, intrinsically allows time to reconsider before hitting “send”) than to McNeil’s utterance of a clarifying question. Somehow Curmie doubts that Baquet will be booted for violating a core principle of journalism. 

Full disclosure: Curmie has directed two plays (that he can think of) which include the word “nigger.” One of them, “Master Harold”… and the boys, is one of the most profoundly anti-apartheid scripts ever written, and the use of the term by white character—one we in the audience have come to like, in part because of his close relationship with the two black men in the play—shocks us, precisely as it was intended to do. Curmie has also said the word in class, choosing to quote texts accurately instead of dancing around specific words. And yes, there were complaints from the Woke Folk. So be it. Curmie will never use the term in his own voice, but will do so in citing a source if (and only if) the situation demands it. 

So: intentions matter. But, of course, they are sometimes insufficient justification for actions. Which brings us to event number three. Like many Republicans with political aspirations, Nikki Haley has been walking a tightrope of late. Having no core values (like many if not most politicians in both parties), she has found the purely pragmatic need to negotiate her distance from the sociopath who appointed her to the UN Ambassadorship, all the while trying not to alienate the Trumpian base. Suddenly, after it became clear that all Trump’s huffing and puffing wasn’t going to change the election results, she has come to the conclusion that perhaps, just perhaps, Donald Trump might not be the answer to all our prayers. 

After a couple of years as a Trump toady although she clearly despised the man and everything he represents, she’s now come to the shocking realization that “We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.” In other words, she’s just as crass, self-serving, and ethically compromised as a host of other pols on either side of the aisle. Imagine Curmie’s surprise. 

But what really fascinates me about this otherwise mundane case of amoral political ambition is not so much Haley’s unwillingness to tell the truth to Trump, but rather that she presents as a defense for him the assertion that “to his core, he believes he was wronged. This is not him making it up.” There is, to be blunt, no conceivable way that all of those election officials, secretaries of state from both parties, and judges at all levels—including Trump-appointed members of SCOTUS—could all be part of a gigantic conspiracy to end the Trumpian regime. There may have been a minor glitch here or there, but there is literally no evidence (not to be confused with claims of ultimately illusory evidence) that Joe Biden wasn’t ethically and legally entitled to literally every electoral vote he received, or that Donald Trump was within hailing distance of a popular vote victory. Ah, but, you see, he really thought he’d won. 

There are three possibilities here. 1). Trump knew better all along, but is sufficiently narcissistic and traitorous that he just didn’t care. 2). Trump surrounded himself with a gaggle of sycophants who actively (or in Haley’s own case) passively withheld the truth from the President of the United States. Shouldn’t there be penalties for that? And, of course, Trump would have to be stupid enough to believe in the “alternate facts” spun by his yes-men (and -women). 3). Trump is so distanced from reality that he really does believe, of his own accord and without the fawning support of his minions, that he won the election. Ambassador Haley would have us believe this version. I’m willing to do so, but only if she’ll call it by its proper name: the insanity defense. 

So we’re back at intentions, again. Donald Trump isn’t really lying, you see. “He believes it” might be a good enough rationale in Haley’s mind for Trump’s outrageous and seditious behavior, but such a claim requires… wait for it… context. And the only context that gets the former President off the hook for seriously damaging the integrity and, nearly as importantly, the perceived integrity of the electoral system is the assertion that he’s batshit crazy. He can think he’s a butterfly for all Curmie cares: there is, after all, as much truth to that belief as there is to the claim that he won the election. But if Trump honestly believes that he was acting to protect democracy, he needs to be kept away from sharp implements and housed in a nice room with padded walls. 

It is perfectly possible to great harm with the best of intentions. It is also possible to do great harm by ignoring the context of an action. Curmie finds himself grateful to Confucius, whose disdain for generalities is vindicated yet again.

Selective Outrage or Biased (Non-)Reporting? Hint: Both.

Eric Swalwell and “Christine” Fang in 2012

Somewhat by chance, Curmie happened upon an article bemoaning the lack of New York Times coverage of a potential scandal involving Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and an alleged Chinese spy named Fang Fang (a.k.a. Christine Fang). 

This essay is going to take the form of “on the one hand, but on the other hand.” Let’s start with what could be construed as the right wing position. Yes, it’s troubling that Curmie is only now learning about this story, which was broken by Axios nearly a fortnight ago. This speaks to Curmie’s apparent insularity, which he vows to address, to the fact that the story broke during finals week, and to the decision on the part of the Times and other left-leaning news agencies not to cover the story. 

This last part is indeed problematic. Even if the story is the legendary tempest in a teapot, it does seem to be worthy of at least a modicum of coverage: an alleged (and likely more than merely “alleged”) Chinese operative who gained enough access to a Congresscritter that she could apparently get an intern hired, who worked as a bundler for that politician, who clearly was a close affiliate, and who may indeed have had a romantic/sexual relationship with him. 

There is no accusation of this last from a credible source (Tucker Carlson hardly counts), and Swalwell declines to comment. That said, if Curmie may adapt Bill Maher’s apt observation on the Anthony Weiner case from nine years ago (damn, was it that long ago?) to the present circumstances: if somebody asks you if you schtupped a Chinese spy and your answer is anything but “no,” you schtupped a Chinese spy. And it’s a stretch to say that either confirming or denying the allegation could be construed as spreading “classified” information. 

Moreover, the implications of case go beyond Rep. Swalwell’s being a member of Congress. He’s a member of the House Intelligence Committee, in which position he has access to sensitive information. Following a closed-door briefing by the FBI after the Axios story broke, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy proclaimed that “The one answer that I got out of that briefing was there is no way Eric Swalwell should continue to serve on the Intel committee,” adding that “I just think there are definitely 200 other Democrats that I know could fill that place.” And it’s certainly plausible that the FBI would reveal information to Reps. McCarthy and Pelosi that they wouldn’t discuss even off the record with reporters: they want to avoid letting the Chinese know what information they have and don’t have, lest China refine their espionage activities to more successfully avoid detection. 

Finally, quoting the Axios article here:

Private but unclassified information about government officials—such as their habits, preferences, schedules, social networks, and even rumors about them—is a form of political intelligence. Collecting such information is a key part of what foreign intelligence agencies do…. 

Close relationships between a U.S. elected official and a covert Chinese intelligence operative can provide the Chinese government with opportunities to sway the opinion of key decision-makers….

China’s spy services want to influence [Chinese diaspora] communities to become more predisposed to the regime, as well as surveil and stamp out potential organized opposition to the Communist Party….

Access to local political offices can give Beijing’s intelligence operatives opportunities to collect information on communities of Chinese descent in the United States.

Meanwhile, other than a brief denial of wrongdoing—to a friendly interviewer—Swalwell has declined to comment… except for righteous dudgeon that the story had been leaked. Of course, he blames the Trump administration. Sigh. 

Oh, and the UK’s Daily Mail (a less than unimpeachable source, but still…) reports that Fang has a “lingering presence in [Swalwell’s] family’s Facebook friendship circuit,” whatever that may mean. 

So much for that point of view. On to what we’ll call the left wing perspective. Let’s start by quoting the Axios article that started this whole business. Remember, this is the result of over a year of investigative journalism:

U.S. officials do not believe Fang received or passed on classified information….

[A] Bay Area political operative and a current U.S. intelligence official… who witnessed Fang fundraising on Swalwell's behalf, found no evidence of illegal contributions…. 

Amid a widening counterintelligence probe, federal investigators…alerted Swalwell to their concerns—giving him what is known as a defensive briefing. Swalwell immediately cut off all ties to Fang, according to a current U.S. intelligence official, and he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

[In 2015] U.S. intelligence officials also provided multiple briefings to White House officials and members of Congress on the case, a current senior official said.

So, let’s review the bidding: there is no evidence that Fang got any information of significance from Swalwell or anyone else; that Swalwell knew about Fang’s connections to the Chinese government prior to receiving the defensive briefing, after which he immediately cut ties with her; that, despite the snark a few paragraphs earlier in this blogpost, there was anything illicit about the relationship between Swalwell and Fang. True, if there were an affair, that wouldn’t be something to brag about on Swalwell’s résumé, but he was single at the time, so the prospects for extortion are pretty feeble. And Fang is not accused of doing anything illegal in her work with Swalwell’s political campaigns. 

It’s also worthy of mention that among the Congresscritters briefed about the situation by federal investigators five years ago was… drumroll, please… Kevin McCarthy. But now, like Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” McCarthy is shocked, shocked! that Swalwell would be allowed to serve on the Intel Committee. Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow at the idea that McCarthy seems to have allowed this untrustworthy character to serve on that Committee for five years without complaint, but now, when Swalwell has become a particular thorn in the side of the Trump administration and has thereby achieved a degree of notoriety as one of the few significant Democrats under the age of 50, Swalwell is somehow unfit. 

We can readily imagine the tears McCarthy and his cohorts would shed if unsubstantiated rumors and scurrilous innuendo were to derail the political career of a rising star in the opposition party. Curiously, there are no calls for Swalwell to be arrested for treason or anything of the sort, only to remove him from an important committee. Curmie is trying to wrap his head around this part. The best I can do is to suggest that any kind of legal action would require proof, whereas wounding an adversary can be accomplished with scuttlebutt and innuendo, and demanding Swalwell be removed from Intel is sufficient to rally the base, which is the whole point of this exercise. 

Don’t get me wrong: consorting with a foreign spy is not an activity to be encouraged in anyone, let alone in a sitting Congresscritter. Still, assuming Fang was a spy, she appears to have been very good at her job. That she fooled Swalwell, and there is literally nothing to suggest anything worse than that on Swalwell’s part, means only that he didn’t detect her deception better than, apparently, a lot of other politicians, lobbyists, and the like. 

In short, show Curmie evidence—real evidence—that Rep. Swalwell did anything morally, ethically, or legally wrong. Perhaps that evidence exists, and perhaps the FBI presented it to McCarthy and Pelosi at their meeting. Perhaps David Koresh really was a prophet. Perhaps the moon is made of green cheese. 

But back to the initial question: should the Times be covering this story? Absolutely, because one of two things must be true: either there’s substantial and credible evidence that a member of the House Intel Committee has been compromised, or the House Minority leader is willing to impugn the integrity of a fellow Congresscritter without that evidence, whether to score some cheap political points or to engage in a little wagging of the dog to distract attention from Dear Leader Trump’s latest escapades or the GOP’s love affair with QAnon wackadoodles. Either way, there’s an influential Member of Congress who shouldn’t be allowed to serve.

"I'm Erick, and I'm a Pseudo-Christian Moron." "Hi, Erick."

There’s a wonderfully instructive post by the reliably stupid Erick Erickson over on RedState.com.

Erickson was certainly not alone in buying into the easy narrative coming out of Norway that the terroristic attacks there were perpetrated by Islamic radicals. The New York Times, the BBC, and other allegedly reputable outlets all signed on without bothering to do any… you know… fact-checking or real reporting. (There’s a good chronicle of how what is now pretty clearly a false report spread here.) The sloth of the mainstream media is, of course, a running theme on this blog: a couple of the more recent examples are here, here, and—perhaps most relevantly—here.

But Erickson is a special case: he’s stupid enough to try to be clever: he tweeted “Terrorist bombing in Oslo. I bet you it was not Lutherans who did it.” Well, Erick, ol’ boy, I bet you lost that bet.

Still, most of us have confidently, even smugly, made a prediction that didn’t turn out to be accurate. The difference between you and me on the one hand, Gentle Reader, and wastes of potentially useful protoplasm like Erick Erickson on the other is precisely this: when we screw up, we admit it, apologize, and move on. He, on the other hand, while admitting he has a fair amount of egg on his face, wants to blame everyone else for his lapse. In this, of course, he is not unlike a lot of self-styled pundits, mostly but by no means exclusively on the right, who simply cannot admit that they got one wrong.

You see, it’s not that his prejudice blinded him to the possibility that an act of terrorism might be perpetrated by the quintessential Aryan (after all, Europe has never had any trouble with that lot, right?). It’s those wild-eyed leftie pinkos in the media who are always making excuses for Muslims. After all,

In the Arkansas army shootings and the Ft. Hood shooting and a host of others, the media and the left have sought to downplay any possible connection to Islam the attackers or would be attackers have had. And when those of us on the right have pointed it out, we’ve been accused of racism and those on the left have demanded to know why it even mattered.

Really, because all I heard for days was about how Nidal Hassan was Islamic, and the New York Times article, for example, (I just picked one at random from the list of allegedly left-leaning media sources) on the Arkansas shootings includes this: “In a lengthy interview with the police, Mr. Muhammad said he was angry about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chief Thomas said. Previously known as Carlos Bledsoe, Mr. Muhammad told investigators that he had converted to Islam as a teenager, Chief Thomas said.” By the way, that was in paragraph 6 (see below). Sounds to me like there’s no cover-up there.

Ah, but Erick the Oblivious isn’t done yet: “Contrast that with the coverage of the Oslo shooter and already the New York Times is making sure in its first few paragraphs everyone knows the guy described himself on Facebook as a ‘conservative Christian.’” Might that be because he’s a conservative Christian? Oh, and confessed culprit Anders Behring Brevik isn’t identified as “right-wing” in the first Times article to identify him until paragraph 11 or as a Christian until paragraph 16 (see above). He was in fact described as a “right-wing fundamentalist Christian” in a follow-up report, only after what the Times describes as “a detailed manifesto calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination” came to light. (OK, that one was in paragraph 5: you got me, there.)

In fact, if a perspicacious reader were to be troubled by the Times’s reporting, the distress would more likely be founded on sentences like the following, taken from a since-removed article: “Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday's assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida's signature brutality and multiple attacks.” You catch that? The clear implication is two-fold: 1). it isn’t terrorism unless it’s Islamic terrorism, and 2). it’s still al-Qaida’s fault. This is the allegedly pro-Islamic, anti-Christian coverage that has Erickson’s skivvies in a twist.

In fact, Glenn Greenwald has a point when he argues:

Thus: if it turns out that the perpetrators weren’t Muslim (but rather “someone with more political motivations”—whatever that means: it presumably rests on the inane notion that Islamic radicals are motivated by religion, not political grievances), then it means that Terrorism, by definition, would be “ruled out” (one might think that the more politically-motivated an act of violence is, the more deserving it is of the Terrorism label, but this just proves that the defining feature of the word Terrorism is Muslim violence). The final version of the NYT article inserted the word “Islamic” before “terrorism” (“even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause”), but—as demonstrated above—still preserved the necessary inference that only Muslims can be Terrorists. Meanwhile, in the world of reality, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU, a grand total of one—1 out of 294—was perpetrated by “Islamists.”

Of course, minor details like facts never get in the way of Erickson’s narrative. Ultimately, however, this part of Erickson’s baseless screed isn’t really the troublesome part. Idiot conservative commentators’ lying about the facts is hardly news. Then we get this: “The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam.” Once again, of course, the accusation is unmitigated bullshit (see Greenwald’s numbers, for example, which come not from some random guy with a Twitter account, but from the European Union’s Terrorism Situation and Trend Report for 2010). Ultimately, Erickson’s argument boils down to an allegation that wacko Christians aren’t really Christian, but wacko Muslims are really Muslims. Just because Erickson says so. The really outrage is yet to come, however:

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

In fact, Mr. Erickson, you bigoted asshat, Christ tells us to love one another. That’s why “secular left[ists]” like me can embrace homosexuals and Muslims: because they are God’s creatures, made in His image. Because we, not pseudo-Christian pietists like yourself, who read only the parts of the Bible that conform to your manifold prejudices, actually try to emulate the compassion embodied in Jesus. We might not do it for that reason, but that’s what a belief in social programs, in Welfare and Social Security, in health care for all is—that’s what we believe in. And I’m here to tell you, you mendacious Mammon-worshipper, that Jesus is a lot more likely to be on our side than on yours.

I will grant you one thing, though: you are “most definitely not of this world.” We don’t mind your visiting our planet, and we hope you enjoy your stay. Just don’t try to pretend you live here.

Nibbling around the Edges

There’s an intriguing graphic on the New York Times website. It shows, in scale, President Obama’s budget proposal. The bigger the rectangle, the bigger the budget. The chart also gives an indication, by means of color, of whether Mr. Obama is asking for more or less money than last year's budget for each area: green means an increase, red a decrease.

What’s particularly interesting, however, isn’t the graph that first appears on the site. Rather, it’s what happens when you click on the tab that reads “hide mandatory spending.” What happens then is that “spending that is controlled by existing laws and not subject to the annual budget process” is eliminated from consideration. So, for example, the increase in Social Security spending is overwhelmingly mandated: there’s an increase of about $14.5 billion, of which about a half a billion or so, slated to be used for administrative expenses (off-budget!) is discretionary. In other words, about 97% of the increase is prescribed by law. Of the $17 billion increase in Medicare, less than $1 billion is subject to the budget process. And the $63 billion in new interest load just has to be paid.

But even within the realm of what could conceivably be cut, there aren’t a lot of significant declines. There are a handful of programs that are projected to lose 10% or more of their funding: but all of these line items put together generate a total savings of barely over $30 billion, less than half of the increase in interest payments, or roughly equal to the discretionary increases in various areas of military spending (there are also some cuts in specific areas of the military budget, but, significantly, not in personnel, procurement, or O&M).

The most striking thing about the chart that eliminates mandatory spending isn’t that it’s significantly more green than red (although it is), i.e., it represents more areas of increase than of decrease; what’s striking is how much white (mandatory expenditure) space there is. The total budget: $3.69 trillion, up from $3.6 trillion a year ago. That $90 billion increase matches almost exactly with the mandatory increases in interest and social security… and doesn’t count significant mandated hikes in Medicare (the federal contribution to states) and student financial assistance, for example.

The debt and deficit are both huge, and growing. Two numbers a lot of people talk about: the deficit reaching 10% of GDP and the debt reaching 100% of GDP. One number I don’t see a lot: we’re looking at a deficit equal to about 40% of the budget! That means that for every $5 we spend, we collect $3 in taxes. I’m not an economist, but that sure looks to me like an unsustainable pattern. We are looking, after all, at a deficit in the range of $1.5 trillion in this fiscal year.

This means the spiffy new $60 billion budget cut just passed in the House, even if it were to become law (which it won’t, although parts of it might), wouldn’t make a dent in the deficit. That’s not to say that attempts to rein in spending are inherently misguided: predictably, I’m unimpressed with the specific targets of House Republicans’ budget-cutting axe, but a little fiscal restraint wouldn’t be a bad idea. More to the point, the Tea Party proposal, which would have cut an additional $22 billion from the budget, was deemed “irresponsible” by the GOP power base. It would have cut “everything indiscriminately in a heavy-handed way,” quoth Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky. And we can’t have that: Republicans came into power declaring their opposition to federal spending, and they all said that “everything [was] on the table” (Speaker Boehner said so in precisely those words), but of course they didn’t mean their pet projects.

One thinks, for example, of Boehner’s opposition to cutting $450 million for a new engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane. (Here are links to good commentary by Dana Milbank and by Jack Marshall.) The Pentagon declares itself happy with the engine it has, making the cut seem a no-brainer. Half a billion dollars might not be a lot of money compared to the size of the deficit, but it ain’t chicken-feed, either. Yet John “We’re Broke” Boehner opposed the cut. Purely coincidentally, of course, the new engine would be made in Boehner’s little corner of the world. You see, “so be it” commentary about the loss of federal workers’ jobs notwithstanding, the good Speaker really does care about the American worker. Or at least the Southwestern Ohio worker, which is pretty much the same, right? It hardly qualifies as a revelation that Boehner is a hypocritical douchebag, but that knowledge doesn’t get us any closer to a sustainable budget.

What will do so, of course, is a recognition of reality. Protestations from both sides of the aisle notwithstanding, our old friends Waste, Fraud and Abuse are alive and well in most if not all federal agencies. My wife, who is a financial aid director at a community college, for example, sees more than her share of lazy and dishonest people whose “job” it is to attend classes long enough to collect a financial aid check, and then to simply flunk out and start over somewhere else. But Pell Grants and other forms of federal financial assistance per se aren’t the problem; indeed, they’re a central ingredient to a long-term solution. A well-educated workforce is crucial to any hope of a vibrant economy in years to come, and that means we as a nation need to provide a means for our best and brightest young people, not merely our most affluent ones, to attend not merely colleges, but good ones. Closing loopholes without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, however, takes actual work, actual commitment, and actual thought: neither party seems terribly interested in any of the above.

What this all boils down to, and pay attention because this doesn’t happen very often, is that Rand Paul was right in declaring that the federal government “can cut all of the non-military discretionary spending and not balance the budget.” You read that right. We could cut 100% of non-military discretionary spending and still not balance the budget. And that means next year’s debt payment will be bigger than this year’s, making it even harder to make any progress then. And so on ad infinitum.

I have a friend who is a costume designer. For a long time she had a saying posted outside her office: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick two.” The resurgent GOP has to make a similar choice, although I’m not sure they can really have more than one. Their options: maintain military spending, maintain current tax rates, and maintain the slightest hint of integrity in their rhetoric about caring about the deficit. It’s pretty clear, unfortunately, that such real resolve is lacking in the Republican leadership. Getting away with smoke and mirrors in the Reagan and Bush years, when the deficit (and spending) shot up but the rhetoric was always about fiscal responsibility, taught the current GOP all the wrong lessons.

Similarly, the Democrats, having slurped the Kool-Aid that makes them distrust the intelligence of the citizenry, seem far more interested in getting re-elected (by pretending to be Republicans), than in solving problems. There are solutions out there: raising taxes, probably significantly, especially on those can most afford it but ultimately on all of us; drawing down the war in Afghanistan and re-defining the mission of the American military throughout the world; recognizing that federal spending is often, even usually, a good thing, but current deficit levels cannot long be endured.

We’re well on our way to Oz. Here’s hoping we find a heart, a brain, and courage.

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…