John McQuaid

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made clear his distaste of the news cycle and its trivial obsessions. Skeptics said this would hurt his chances: that to win, a candidate must dominate the news day-by-day, minute-by-minute, with attacks that keep the opposition off-balance. Yet the Obama campaign managed to win by emphasizing a longer-term strategy over the hair-trigger approach.

But on Jan. 20, for all intents and purposes President Obama became the news cycle. His ambitions for toning down Washington’s nasty partisan warfare – and with that, creating better prospects for his agenda – depend on his ability to nudge the news cycle away from the cable network- and Drudge-driven obsession with transient panics and cultural outrages. (An obsession that the Bush administration, with its focus on divisive electoral politics, actively cultivated.) On that front, he’s been only partially successful so far. But far more so than most of us would have thought going in.

The media love nothing more than scandal, failure and disaster. But so far Obama has declined to provide them. The White House’s frenzy of activity during the first 100 days – much of it politically and substantively successful, with the opposition in disarray – more or less requires that news about him focus on relaying facts. It’s hard to stick with “who’s up, who’s down” when there’s only one player on the field.

And as Dan Kennedy notes, Obama has been a boon to the media business. It’s more fun and better for ratings to cover a glamorous new president than an unpopular old one. The camera loves Obama, his family, even his dog. His professorial cool is a stark contrast to the at-sea press conference performances of his predecessor. We’re also facing various alarming crises, so for various reasons – information, reassurance – people want to hear what Obama has to say: his prime time press conferences draw an impressive number of viewers. Robert Gibbs’s White House press office, meanwhile, has been strategically smart. It has sat Obama down with conservative and liberal columnists and bloggers, and had the president give non-traditional media (including the Huffington Post) a turn at press conferences. Not surprisingly, these are explicit choices to bypass the insular White House press corps in the shaping of public opinion.

Obama has lagged on the transparency front — the creation of a friendly interface that will allow journalists, bloggers – and everyone else – full access to information and data from the White House and rest of the government.. But the technical obstacles are formidable, so this will take time.

Where is all this going? We probably won’t know until Obama makes his first big stumble and has to fend off the wolves. But a Lewinksy or Rovian gambit seems unlikely from this White House, so that’s progress in itself.

The staff of the New York Times has done some great reporting on the Bush administration’s torture policies. But there is something absurd about the paper’s internal debate over how to describe what the U.S. did to Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners. Public editor Clark Hoyt recounts the discussions that led to the chosen word of the moment, “brutal”:

The word had appeared a few times before in this context, most recently on April 10, when the Central Intelligence Agency said it was closing the network of secret overseas prisons where interrogations took place. Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods” since the Sept. 11 attacks. Shane said he felt that with more information coming to light, including a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the words harsh and even harshest no longer sufficed. He proposed brutal, and Jehl agreed.

A week later, Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, came to her own conclusion that the facts supported a stronger word than harsh after she read just-released memos from the Bush-era Justice Department spelling out the interrogation methods in detail and declaring them legal. The memos were repudiated by President Obama.

“Harsh sounded like the way I talked to my kids when they were teenagers and told them I was going to take the car keys away,” said Abramson, who consulted with several legal experts and talked it over with Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief. Abramson and Baquet agreed that “brutal” was a better word.

These discussions presume there is a public debate over whether waterboarding is harsh or brutal or torture. But there isn’t a genuine debate at all: it’s obvious that it’s all of those things. The reason the wording is in dispute is classic Orwell: Dick Cheney and others claim that torture is useful in defending American interests and lives, but U.S. and international law ban torture. So the U.S. must torture but call it something else. So we don’t torture. By failing to call torture by its true name, the Times and other media outlets lend legitimacy to a rhetorical scam.

This is an interesting journalism question. A group of public officials – whose record of honesty and credibility on national security matters is already in considerable doubt – insists that torture is not torture but something else. Even if they’re sincere in their assertions that “enhanced interrogation” is key to defeating terrorism, self interest is also key motivation for this stance: they don’t want to be prosecuted for war crimes and don’t want their legacy tarnished. Yet the media establishment feels it must avoid weighing the context and motivations behind these improbable linguistic acrobatics, and so cannot make a rather straightforward judgment.

I can see the reasoning, and Hoyt spells it out: if you start calling torture torture, a lot of people will get mad at you and accuse you of liberal bias. You’re also strongly implying someone has committed a crime, which will stir up even more outrage and perhaps have legal implications. Still, I think these problems have to be weighed against a paper’s basic obligation to tell its readers the truth, and not filter information with euphemisms coined to obscure the truth. By dancing endlessly around the question of whether “brutal” = “torture,” media outlets are only damaging their own credibility.

Why is the notion of Karl Rove tweeting in defense of Bush administration torture policies so disturbing?

Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterize diligence as overcautious.#TCOT #SGP #HHRS

Yes, I suppose U might be impatient with the amount of legal and bureaucratic activity the Bush White House set in motion to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” if U belonged to the Khmer Rouge or the Syrian secret police (though if U were a Nazi, this fastidiousness would seem nothing exceptional).

But seriously, this is … icky. And on about three different levels. Rove is not a lawyer or an intelligence expert; he is no position to judge the merits of legal memos or other steps taken to justify “enhanced interrogation.” And in general, nothing he says about what went on in the Bush White House can be taken as anything but spin. He’s also a particularly amoral political operative; throughout his career he’s has prided himself not just on winning but on using underhanded tactics to destroy the reputations of his opponents. That such a man is blithely spinning on one of the gravest moral issues before us is ridiculous and chilling, an example of the Bush administration’s elevation of politics above even the nation’s bedrock ideals. That Rove is doing this on Twitter (with hashtags!) just adds a layer of absurdity to the whole thing, while giving a bad name even to the “had too much butter on my pancakes” Twitterer class. Via Alex Massie.

President Obama deserves credit for releasing the Bush torture memos. But his position on torture prosecutions is so muddled it gives nuance a bad name (and just when it was making a comeback). There are so many bad actors it’s hard to figure out how to handle them all, but Obama’s position is, or appears to be: CIA interrogators won’t be prosecuted. The lawyers who wrote the now-infamous memos may be. The top officials who were ultimately responsible – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, others – probably not. And – maybe – there should be some kind of 9/11-style commission to examine this. But Obama is not actually calling for that, just suggesting it.

This makes sense only through the prism of politics – and a complex politics it is, involving constituencies in the intelligence and defense bureaucracies, Congress and the nation as a whole. Obama is trying to please, or to not offend, as many of these constituencies as possible, while at the same time laying down a clear marker against torture.

Obama should be setting the tone for how the country handles the torture issue. Instead, the debate has slipped away from him entirely and taken on a life of its own. Democrats are agitating for investigations and prosecutions. Republicans are arguing that torture works (pivoting from, without completely abandoning, the now-untenable “we do not torture” refrain). And Obama is both parsing up a storm and trying to stay above it all.

I empathize – Obama is trying to accomplish a lot, and the torture debate can only suck attention from much bigger issues, while opening up political and social divisions the president is trying to put behind him. It may even make more sense, in terms of building a lasting anti-torture consensus, to have less accountability rather than more. But this process requires clarity, not endless caveats. How, for example, does Obama’s don’t-prosecute-the-interrogators-policy apply to the period before the legally enabling memos were written? A process has begun here; more disclosures will follow the ones we’ve already seen. It will be messy and politically contentious – exactly the kind of thing we know Obama doesn’t like one bit. But that is how democracy works, and Obama would be advised, to the degree he can, to simply get out of the way.

Today George Will takes on the scourge of denim, which apparently has some connection to the TARP and the number of Batman movies in the ongoing ruination of America – I won’t summarize it further. The fact that Will considers the popularity of comfortable clothes to be a greater threat to society than climate change is certifiably crazy.

The problem here, though, is not just Will’s idle musings but the form and institution of the newspaper column. It’s long been clear that writing one year after year makes people stupid. It’s not merely the repetition and monotony of the 600-word form, which would challenge the most talented writer’s creativity and freshness. (Will did manage some fine, astringent columns on the Bush administration’s own problems with empiricism.) It’s that the column writer develops his/her own set of cliches and tropes that end up being repeated over and over, taking up more and more space as the column ages. This is one reason columns rarely feature genuinely thoughtful arguments. Another reason is linked to the newspaper itself. Columnists are trying to appeal to a mass audience that doesn’t really exist anymore. And if you’re a conservative columnist, you are not only burdened with your own personal cliches but the husk of a whole movement in decline and transition.

So the tendency, as when Will twists science to deny climate change in one breath and attacks jeans in the next, is to resort to provocation, the simplest way to get attention. Nothing wrong with being provocative, but provocative nonsense is still nonsense.

Today President Obama gave a speech outlining long-term plans for economic recovery, titled “A New Foundation“:

We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.

I knew I had heard “New Foundation” somewhere before, and sure enough, a Google search shows that Jimmy Carter used the same slogan in his 1979 State of the Union address:

Tonight I want to examine in a broad sense the state of our American Union–how we are building a new foundation for a peaceful and a prosperous world…The challenge to us is to build a new and firmer foundation for the future–for a sound economy, for a more effective government, for more political trust, and for a stable peace–so that the America our children inherit will be even stronger and even better than it is today.

Of course, 30 years have passed and Carter is an elder statesman. But is the 1979-vintage Carter administration – an era of stagflation at home and humiliation at the hands of Iran abroad – really something Obama wants any association with? Or, to put it bluntly, don’t his speechwriters routinely do a Google search on their slogan-of-the-week? (Alternatively, perhaps they were trying to evoke Asimov’s “Foundation” books, in which wise seers build new institutions to succeed the eroding galactic empire, preventing the total collapse of civilization.)

Jay Rosen has a piece on the once-standard, but now increasingly in disfavor “he-said, she-said” approach to journalism: when some politician or interest group gets up and lies, and the journalist’s response is not to point this out but to blandly quote someone from the “other side” of the argument and stop there. The problem with this is that it implicitly assumes what everyone now knows to be wrong: that public figures make statements that can be taken at face value, and the truth can be ascertained by juxtaposing contradictory statements.

It’s been obvious for some time that this is unworkable because the public “conversation” is too splintered, its participants too practiced and manipulative. Nobody agrees on what the terms of the conversation are. Public figures aren’t merely shilling for themselves, but for multiple, layered economic and cultural interests. They are embedded in intricate communications networks. For instance, a member of Congress once had to pay attention chiefly to what was happening in his/her district, what the local Chamber of Commerce and unions thought, what kind of complaints were coming into the district office. Today, though, all issues are to some degree “nationalized.” If the member is a Republican, his public utterances will also be shaped by Fox News’s and Rush Limbaugh’s interpretation of the day’s events; by interest groups such as the Club for Growth or the Family Research Council. All of these sources are force multipliers, highly useful in political messaging. But of course they’re BS multipliers too.

As a result there are competing narratives for everything. There is also an ironic narrative that comments on the competing narratives. There are insane narratives that are popular because of their insanity. And nobody ever admits error because there is little incentive to do so – your followers, who have invested in your narrative, may desert you.

So, journalists should be ready to call BS when they see it. That capacity, after all, is an important engine of journalistic credibility. And, put simply, it goes with the territory today. It’s necessary to understand a complex and often dishonest conversation. Sometimes, it requires making value judgments that journalists aren’t comfortable (or even good at) making. But the alternative is getting left out of the conversation entirely, as Jay notes:

At a certain point in this dynamic, he said, she said journalism loses its utility and becomes one of the things dragging the news business down. But as the industry sheds people and newsrooms thin out, there could be greater reliance on a more and more bankrupt and trust-rotting practice. That’s a downward spiral.

Socialism is apparently a lot more popular, or at least less unpopular, than most of us thought:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

This poll probably reflects transient feelings about the economy and the global disaster that American capitalism got us into. Steve Benen suggests that the use of “socialist” as an anti-Obama attack might be rebounding in an unexpected way: to the extent Obama and his economic policies are popular, “socialism” may be getting its biggest boost since Castro. The results also indicate that many Americans don’t know what socialism is (nor, in all likelihood, capitalism). Which is part of the risk of using demagogic rhetoric that references events from mid-20th century history, increasingly removed from most people’s experience or basic civics knowledge.

On another level, obviously Americans are reconsidering the cult of markets and deregulation that has occupied the center of U.S. politics since Reagan. For instance, this recent Charles Krauthammer column tries to gin up outrage calling attention to Obama’s “real agenda”: “Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.”

The column has its distortions, but on the whole – unlike the “socialism” charge – it’s pretty accurate. But it’s no more effective as an attack because to most ears, the idea of the government working for “fairness” sounds pretty good right now.

Via Dave Roberts, reporters at the Washington Post are pushing back against George Will’s series of mendacious columns about climate change. In an article noting continuing declines in Arctic sea ice, they note:

The new evidence — including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s — contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

As Dave notes, this is a clear rebuke not just from some reporters to Will, but from the Post’s newsroom to its editorial page. (Funny that we have to resort to Kremlinology – interpreting sentences buried in news stories for broader institutional significance – to see what’s going on, but that’s how newspapers work.) This pushback is overdue. Will took data on arctic sea ice out of context, making it seem like it meant something it did not. By doing publishing it on the Post’s op-ed page (and, via syndication, on op-ed pages across America), his editors undermined the paper’s credibility on issues of fact. That’s something no newsroom can afford to just let pass.

Still, it’s sad that it came to this point. The Post editorial page prizes a certain coldly contrarian approach toward the Washington conventional wisdom, and 10 or 15 years ago, this made it a good read. But its contrarianism, ironically, derives from a mix of both-sides-do-it Broderism and, on foreign affairs (with the exception of torture, which it has consistently and admirably opposed), neoconservatism. Events have overtaken this political sensibility, and today, what was once provocative has become curmudgeonly and predictable (cf. the hiring of Bill Kristol). And in the case of Will and climate change, objectively wrong.

One problem with the Republican attacks on Obama is that, as rhetoric, they make little logical sense. Their principal frame of reference is the mid-20th century: a time of prosperity when the U.S. had a well-defined external enemy, and thus very different from the present. In the 1950s, a good part of the world was under socialist dictatorships and it wasn’t at all clear that markets and democracy would win out. To find the reductio ad absurdum of this trend, look no further than Minnesota, where some are worried about the threat posed by an expanded AmeriCorps public service program:

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann says she fears the Obama administration will create “re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.”

This is ridiculous on its face, but it’s interesting to note the context. The term “re-education” dates to 1950s-era China, when intellectuals were shipped to the countryside en masse to rid them of their bourgeois thinking, and was also employed in Vietnam. It has reappeared every now and then, semi-ironically, to attack political correctness and sometimes the abject apologies made by political figures after they inadvertantly blurt out inconvenient truths. But Bachmann has abandoned the irony and returned to a literal interpretation. The problem is, today the real re-education camps seem quite remote, as does the literal threat of socialism – i.e., forced collectivization as practiced by the Chinese and Soviets more than a half-century ago. If the Republicans want to identify something pernicious about Obama, they’re going to have to find examples that people can actually understand and identify.