John McQuaid

June 25, 2010

Bring me the head of David Weigel

Posted by johnmcquaid under media | Tags: Ben Smith, conservatism, David Weigel, Huffington Post, journalism, Journolist, mainstream media, media, politico, Politics, Washington Post |
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At first, I couldn’t quite understand why David Weigel, the Washington Post politics blogger who just resigned, would merit his own feeding frenzy. He’s not Helen Thomas: he hasn’t been around for 60-plus years, nor does he have a front-row seat in the White House briefing room, nor has he uttered on-camera statements that many people consider offensive or outside the bounds of political discourse.

Instead, one of his offenses was … dancing, maybe a little strangely, at a wedding. This was truly a feeding frenzy worthy of a Seinfeld episode.

Seriously, Weigel is a talented journalist who added a fresh perspective to the Washington Post. He should not have been booted out for what he did. Why was he? The Weigel Incident does illustrate some of the biggest fault lines and flaws of Washington journalism. Here are a few: (more…)

June 21, 2010

Where 'Treme' went astray

Posted by johnmcquaid under media | Tags: Clarke Peters, David Simon, HBO, Hurricane Katrina, john Goodman, New Orleans, Steve Zahn, Treme |
[2] Comments

Wendell Pierce as Antoine Batiste

If any TV show deserves not just ratings but love, it’s Treme. The HBO show (which concluded its first season Sunday night; a second has been greenlit) has interesting characters, an epic overarching storyline, a fascinating setting and great music. And the themes it treats – the frayed yet unbroken civic bonds of New Orleans society, and America, in the face of disaster – are very important. Not just because south Louisiana now confronts another catastrophe, but because of our crumbling infrastructure, dirty energy economy, institutional rot, and climate change, there are going to be a lot more of them.

And yet, to me anyway, Treme has not lived up to expectations. (I will pause here to ask my New Orleans friends for forgiveness.) It’s had some great moments, but just as often it’s been erratic and self-indulgent. Compared to the awesome mastery of The Wire, Treme still feels like a minor work in the David Simon oeuvre, yet to find its focus. (more…)

June 17, 2010

Thanks, Joe Barton

Posted by johnmcquaid under politics | Tags: Barack Obama, BP, conservative movement, GOP, Jim Bunning, Joe Barton, Oil spill, Rand Paul, Republican Party, Sharron Angle |
[7] Comments

WASHINGTON - SEPTEMBER 26: Rep. Joe Barton (R...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

One feature of modern conservatism has been its ability to embrace, in the service of pragmatism and politics, things many of its followers find inimical. And I want to thank Joe Barton for confirming that that thin thread linking conservatives to basic political reality still exists.

“Wha-?” you say. Bear with me.

The conservatism of the past 40 years or so has basically been a critique of the modern liberal welfare state. Sometimes a pertinent critique, but usually just a critique – never an actual alternative. For the most part conservatives say they’re just fine with the achievements wrought by liberals, over their movement’s opposition: big things like Social Security, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and smaller things like regulations requiring seatbelts and airbags. That’s because the public overwhelmingly likes and approves of this stuff.

Lately, though, with the emergence of the tea party movement, conservatives are having a hard time covering up the fact that a lot of them aren’t really okay with the stuff they’re supposed to be okay with. And because they don’t really have a viable alternative to the basic outlines of the liberal welfare state, the atmosphere has been getting crazier and the potential policy results dangerous. (more…)

June 16, 2010

Where the 'New York Times' went wrong on the Afghanistan minerals story

Posted by johnmcquaid under media, politics | Tags: Afghanistan, David Petraeus, Dean Baquet, Defense Department, James Risen, journalism, lithium, Marc Ambinder, media, minerals, New York Times, Pentagon |
[2] Comments

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...

Image via CrunchBase

Every so often, the establishment press unintentionally reveals how it works. It’s as if you suddenly put Big Media through an fMRI that showed not only its internal structures and their connections to the government, business et al, but how this system actually works, dynamically – and also pinpoint where something has gone wrong.

I’m referring to James Risen’s New York Times story on Afghanistan’s apparently vast mineral resources. I wanted to wait a little while before writing on it, because such a story has a kind of lifecycle, and I wanted to see how this one played out.

At first it appeared to be a geopolitical game-changer, perhaps heralding the arrival of a the next big 21st conflict, like the “Great Game” in 19th century Central Asia between the Russian and British Empires. And maybe it is.

Then, instantly, the story came under fire for overhyping known facts and what looked like too-convenient timing. The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan – set to end next year – is faltering, Hamid Karzai is acting odder than usual, Congress is growing restive. Suddenly, the NYT runs a story quoting David Petraeus saying: Afghanistan has enormous strategic importance. (more…)

June 11, 2010

BP explodes the myth of corporate responsibility

Posted by johnmcquaid under environment, politics | Tags: Barack Obama, BP, Business, Corporation, free markets, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Mexico oil spill, media, Oil spill, Politics, Tony Hayward, United States |
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Entry in the Greenpeace BP parody logo contest

This is a constant drumbeat, but think about it: Isn’t it remarkable how transcendently awful BP’s approach to the Gulf disaster has been? At each and every turn, with the stakes impossibly high, BP has always chosen to do the wrong thing. There’s the substance – having no emergency worst-case contingency plans for a blowout, disingenuously refusing to estimate the amount of oil flowing. There’s the politics and image stuff, including CEO Tony Hayward’s lies and self-pity and the platoons of lawyers and PR people trying to keep cleanup workers silent and choke off media attention. It’s been an awesome display of every kind of 21st century corporate dick-itude.

If you’re cynical, then this is merely garden-variety corporate misbehavior, if on a grand scale. But we’re at an interesting pass here. Consider: for years BP has buffed its image with the green sunflower logo and the “Beyond Petroleum” campaign, portraying itself as a forward-looking, responsible corporate citizen. This nominally covered its left flank, but more importantly gave it a forward-looking, friendly image. Perfect mainstream mass-market positioning.

Meanwhile, the cult of the free market, which too often means letting big business do what it wants, retained a powerful hold on U.S. politics. (more…)

June 7, 2010

The real Helen Thomas scandal

Posted by johnmcquaid under media, politics | Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, Helen Thomas, Israel, Liz Cheney, Middle East, New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart, White House |
[3] Comments

Helen Thomas meeting students from Maxwell Sch...

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Last week, Israeli commandos boarded a relief ship attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip and, during a clash with pro-Palestinian activists, shot nine people to death. It was an old-fashioned, bona fide “international incident,” a fiasco that raised alarming questions about the current trajectory of Israel’s security, the wisdom of its government, as well as the fate of Obama’s Middle East policies and U.S. security in general.

But this week, somehow, the Washington media’s “Israel narrative” has abandoned those questions and focused instead on the ugly words and sudden retirement of cranky 89-year-old White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

I’m not going to defend Thomas – what she said was deeply offensive. But in the overall scheme of things, it was a trivial incident, and DC’s sudden obsession with it – to the exclusion of a lot of other, more important things – is especially ironic given the parlous state of the Israeli situation.

The Washington media universe may not have set a new speed record here for spinning itself, Tasmanian devil-style, from grave and difficult to trivial and ironic. (more…)

June 1, 2010

Conservatives on the oil spill: Government doesn't work, and that's OK by us

Posted by johnmcquaid under politics | Tags: David Brooks, Deepwater Horizon, Federal government of the United States, Federal Register, George Will, government, Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, Oil spill, Washington, Yuval Levin |
[3] Comments

There is a perverse new meme brewing on the right, a riff on the apparent impotence of the Obama administration to stop the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. It goes like this: some things are just too big and complex for the government to deal with. In fact, 21st century life itself has grown too complex and interconnected for government to deal with. So let’s scale back our expectations and our reliance on government to fix stuff. Just go with the flow, as it were.

At NRO, Yuval Levin dismissed the anger over the response to Hurricane Katrina as unjustified because “accidents happen.” David Brooks argued that technological systems had grown too complex to manage in a column last week. In a later NPR discussion with E.J. Dionne, he rejected the idea that more effective regulation might have made a difference in heading off the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

As for the regulation, if you go down the list of decisions that were made that led to this disaster, the interpreting of the tests, whether to recycle the cement, how to recycle the mud, how to set the cement, none of these things is clear to me would be solved by different regulations. There are certain decisions that have to be made on the spot on a case by case basis and they were made, in this case, by people under extreme duress and in extreme ignorance. I’m not sure a regulator 3,000 miles away could really have done a better job.

It’s interesting how Brooks can take a good point (the problems of growing techno-complexity) and, in a sentence, turn it into a dumb, knee-jerk point. (more…)

May 28, 2010

The National Review and Mother Jones both get Hurricane Katrina wrong

Posted by johnmcquaid under media, politics | Tags: emergency management, Hurricane Katrina, Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, National Review, New Orleans, New York Times, NRO.com, Obama's Katrina, United States, United States Army Corps of Engineers, Yuval Levin |
[4] Comments

Steel sheet pile pulled from the 17th Street Canal floodwall breach, New Orleans

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put a renewed media and political focus on the significant government failures of Hurricane Katrina, including the collapsed, flawed floodwalls and levees that put most of New Orleans underwater. There’s also an HBO drama now featuring John Goodman’s impassioned, expletive-laden speeches on that man-made disaster. The New York Times Public Editor recently devoted part of a column to discussing the subject.

But a selective amnesia still dominates for some reason. Take a look at this blogosphere exchange between NRO’s Yuval Levin and MoJo’s Kevin Drum:

Levin says, essentially, Katrina was an act of God for which no government could have been prepared, and, under the circumstances, things weren’t so bad: (more…)

May 28, 2010

David Brooks, the oil spill and the complexity excuse

Posted by johnmcquaid under technology, Uncategorized | Tags: Complex systems, David Brooks, Deepwater Horizon, Fannie Mae, Gulf of Mexico, Lehman Brothers, Natural disaster, New Orleans, risk, risk assessment, Technology |
[10] Comments

A controlled burn of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, May 19

David Brooks has a good column today on the Deepwater Horizon disaster that sums up a significant problem my last post touched on: modern life is made possible by various complicated technological-bureaucratic systems. And these things can go south rather quickly and surprisingly. Part of the problem is that they’re complex, and not managed well. That’s par for the course. But the tricky thing is our collective expectations: we (and often the people running them) expect them to just work, and our expectations are way wrong:

Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As [Malcolm] Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”

So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.

This is about right. But not exactly. (more…)

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