The Volokh Conspiracy

Economist Robin Hanson has a blog post discussing a recent study showing that most people tend to limit conversations about politics to those who agree with their views. This is not just a matter of people tending to have friends and acquaintances who have similar views. Even when there are people in our social circle who have divergent political views, the study shows that we are far more likely to talk about politics with those we agree with. Much previous research reaches similar conclusions. Moreover, we see the same pattern in people’s choices about the media they follow on political issues. Conservatives are likely to watch conservative TV channels, and read conservative newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Liberals have the opposite pattern. If you are a regular VC reader, you are far more likely to to be a libertarian or a conservative than not. If you regularly read a liberal political or legal blog, chances are that you’re a liberal yourself.

When people do encounter opposing arguments, they tend to evaluate them in a highly biased way, in effect holding them to a much higher standard than they apply to arguments that support their own views. Moreover, as Diana Mutz shows, most of these tendencies are especially pronounced among people who are most interested in politics and have the most strongly held political views.

Perhaps the avoidance of political talks with people we disagree with is in part driven by a desire to avoid social awkwardness. But that can’t explain the avoidance of opposing media. Moreover, conversations about politics with those we disagree with are awkward at least in part because people tend to be intolerant of opposing views.

All of this is highly irrational if the goal of reading and talking about politics is to seek out the truth. As John Stuart Mill famously put it, a truth-seeker should make a special effort to seek out opposing viewpoints, and try to evaluate them in an unbiased way:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them… [H]e must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

The evidence is less puzzling if truth-seeking is not the main goal of most political conversations or most people’s efforts to read about politics. Rather, many people enjoy having their preexisting views reinforced and like the experience of associating with their fellow “political fans” who support the same side as they do. Because the chance that your vote in an election will be decisive is infinitesmally small, there is little payoff for seeking out political truths just so you can be a better-informed voter. And most nonexperts have few other incentives to seek out the truth either. Being exposed to opposing arguments is often emotionally unpleasant, and giving them a fair hearing can be even more painful – especially if you are strongly committed to your own opinions. And the payoff for all that pain is usually very small, so why bother? Unfortunately, while such ignorance and close-mindedness is individually rational, it can cause terrible collective outcomes.

That’s not to suggest that people deliberately embrace political views they know to be false. But it’s easy to be cognitively lazy about seeking out opposing arguments and controlling your biases against them when you do run across them. Obviously, most people are not completely indifferent to opposing evidence on political issues. Sometimes the evidence against you is so obvious and overwhelming that it’s hard to ignore even if you want to do so. When Germany lost World War II, many Germans who had supported Hitler were forced to admit that he had led them to disaster. On most political issues, however, the evidence is much less stark and therefore it’s much easier to insulate yourself from possible challenges to your beliefs. Such insulation is not always impossible to overcome. Otherwise, no one would ever change any of their strongly held political views, except in the aftermath of WWII-like disasters. But it is often extremely difficult.

Last week, I posted a short piece on an article by Neil Lewis in the Columbia Journalism Review, discussing whether the New York Times reporting is hostile to Israel. As I noted, Lewis gets the basic story right–the Times’ isn’t anti-Israel, as such, but its reporting on Israel tends toward the adversarial, for two reasons. First, for several decades the Times’s Israel correspondents have typically had views on appropriate Israeli policy well to the “Left” of the governments in power in Israel. And, second, reporters find it naturally appealing to take the “David” (Palestinian) side in a David vs. Goliath (Israel) story. I should have added a third factor, noted by Lewis: the growth of leftist domestic NGOs in Israel strongly opposed to government policy (and often to Zionism), which–though Lewis doesn’t mention this–are typically staffed by English-speakers, often Americans, and that, because they are so far out of the mainstream of Israeli opinion, tend to focus on feeding stories to a more sympathetic international media.

The problem with the article is that Lewis seems to think that this is more or less the end of the matter. If the Times isn’t affirmatively anti-Israel, it doesn’t matter whether the Times’s reporters are nevertheless implicitly opposing Israeli government policy and/or supporting Palestinian claims by virtue of the stories they choose to pursue, how they frame those stories, what photographs they choose to run with the stories, and so forth–none of which he analyzes in any detail. Other critics, some much more vociferous than I, have noticed the same thing.

Indeed, even though Lewis acknowledges the points noted in the first paragraph, and he cites critics of the Times (including critics who think the Times is too favorably inclined to Israel), he manages to avoid acknowledging any instance where he agrees that pro-Israel critics of the Times’s coverage have had a valid objection. Instead, the piece comes off as suggesting that the only folks who could reasonably object to the Times’s coverage are right-wing Orthodox Jews who support the settlements. [FWIW, I'm neither Orthodox nor support the settlement enterprise, yet I've found the Times's coverage wanting on many occasions.] And he spends an awful lot of time on other matters that are peripheral to the issue he was supposed to be writing about, including the Times’s failure to adequately report the Holocaust as it was happening, and gossipy matters perhaps of interest to media insiders, such as confusion within the Times’s hierarchy over whether former Israel correspondent David Shipler is Jewish (he’s not, but who cares?)

Meanwhile, it turns out that I gave a poor, indeed, incorrect example of something that I said Lewis didn’t mention, but should have: that the far leftist Chris Hedges, who we now know as a vociferous critic of Israel, was the Times’s Middle East Bureau Chief from 1998-2001, when the Times’s coverage of Israel by Deborah Sontag was subject to particular criticism. It turns out that I was relying on misinformation from several websites that identified him as bureau chief at that time. In fact, Hedges was Middle East Bureau chief earlier in the decade (a fact that, oddly enough, Lewis didn’t know, as he acknowledged to me). So mea culpa on that.

It was Lewis himself who alerted me to my error via a response he asked be posted here. Here it is, with a bit of additional commentary from me following it.

here is my comment as i would like it published/posted:

i am the author of the cjr piece abt the times and israel.i try not to respond to the range of comments it has produced — people are entitled to ….etc. if someone thinks i failed to analyze specific articles enough, i think they did not read my article thoroughly, but that’s their view and i have no need to try and rebut.

but i found the comment [by prof. bernstein] so exquisitely typical of the ignorance of many i have read, i thought i would respond.

the facts: chris hedges, heartily disliked by fervent supporters of israel, was not debbie sontag’s superior or supervisor. ever. he was, for a time, the correspondent based in cairo (and i am not sure their times much overlapped if at all).

but mr bernstein says he was “middle east bureau chief” and thus he extrapolates he was sontag’s supervisor. this is a “salient” fact to explain her coverage, he writes that i omitted.

this has all the elements of the conspiracy-spinning mind that snatches at odd facts (and untrue notions) and puts them together in a way to confirm some previous notion.

as i suggested above, it has been heartily dismaying to read so many nonsensical comments — from people who come at the issue from both sides– as it demonstrates the obstacles such obduracy presents to honest, or even minimally intelligent discussion

From this comment, one can perhaps see the origins of the problems with Lewis’s piece. First, Lewis implies that Hedges is apparently not reasonably considered hostile to Israel by anyone except “fervent supporters of Israel.” Recall that Hedges has expressed a strong preference for Hezbollah and Hamas in their conflict with Israel. I should think that any person who values liberal democracy over Islamic theocracy and terrorism would find Hedges’s views objectionable; Lewis apparently disagrees. Moreover, it’s hardly just supporters of Israel, much less just “fervent” ones, who have objected to his radical foreign policy views. But Lewis’s attitude is consistent with the notion implied in his article that only the fringe is likely to see anything worth criticizing in the Times’s Israel coverage.

Second, while I can understand why Lewis was annoyed by my misstatement of fact, it’s a long way from such a misstatement to being “ignoran[t]” and having a “conspiracy spinning mind” incapable of “intelligent discussion.” (Mr. Lewis, did the Times never have to issue a correction for any of your articles? If so, does that make you ignorant etc.?) This, however, is apparently what Lewis thinks the Times’s more vocal critics, an attitude that occasionally reveals itself in his article. Indeed, Lewis is so caught up in what he sees as the unreasonableness of his critics that he failed to note that I started my post by agreeing that the basic thrust of his piece was correct, i.e., that its general take on the Times’s coverage reflects what every “fair-minded observer already knows.” But hey, I’m just a simple-minded ignoramus.

Finally, what does Lewis’s piece say about the attitude of the MSM toward its critics on the right? Lewis seems to acknowledge that the Times’s coverage of Israel has a point of view (i.e., a “bias”), but seems perplexed that anyone cares or objects when that bias manifests itself in the Times’s reporting.

I’ve blogged before about the New York Times’ coverage of Israel, so I thought I’d point out a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by former Times reporter Neil Lewis on that precise topic.

Unfortunately, it’s trite, largely repeating what any fair-minded observer already knows: first, that the Times is not hostile to Israel, per se, but its reporters’ and editors’ views of “proper” Israeli policy have for decades leaned far to the “left” of actual Israeli policy, which in turn makes much of its coverage implicitly adversarial (and which also explains why folks that are truly hostile to Israel think that the Times is a Zionist rag); and, second, that in a David vs. Goliath story, reporters tend to strongly favor David. As the narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict has shifted from little Israel defending itself against tens of millions of Arabs to stateless Palestinians demanding rights from Israel the advanced military power, reporters, including reporters at the Times, have a natural inclination to skew their stories to favor the Palestinian Davids, with much of the context of the conflict–including those tens of millions of neighboring Arabs still largely unremittingly hostile to Israel–often lost in the shuffle.

Meanwhile the piece misses some opportunities to point out various occasions where the Times’s has deviated from anything resembling fairness to Israel. For example, while Lewis notes that Deborah Sontag, the Times’s Israel correspondent from August 1998-2001, was considered even by her bosses at the Times unduly unfriendly to Israel, he then adds that the Times considered replacing her with Jeffrey Goldberg, a clearly pro-Israel (albeit, as one would expect, left-leaning) writer.

But he somehow neglects to note a much more salient point than the Times’s flirtation with Goldberg: that the head of the Times’s Middle East Bureau during Sontag’s time (and assumedly therefore Sontag’s direct supervisor) was a leftist ideologue named Chris Hedges. As I noted in 2006, we’ve since learned that Hedges thinks that Israel is far worse than either Hamas or Hezbollah. One wonders, in fact, how much of the bias many saw in Sontag’s writing was attributable in one way or another to Hedges. But my main wonder is how someone could write a lengthy essay on this particular topic, and discuss specifically the period when Hodges was in charge of the Times’s overall Middle East coverage, and never even acknowledge Hedges’ existence.

Correction: Hedges was the Times’s Middle East Bureau Chief, but earlier in the decade.
I’m not going to be available to moderate comments tomorrow, so comments will be open, but not indefinitely. But I stand by my general point, which is that even though Lewis acknowledges in the abstract that the Times’ coverage of Israel is often adversarial, he fails to point out ANY instances where agrees that the Times’s coverage was actually unfair.

Note: This is the second of two book “reviews” I’ve been hoping to do since about August, but my fall got so busy with actual paying work that they were both pushed off until the delightfully slow week between Christmas and New Years.  “First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers” was the first, but Jonathan kinda beat me to that.  This is the second.

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We’re all lawyers here, right?

If you’ve ever regretted your career choice, I have the antidote:  Paul B. Spelman’s “Even Worse Than We Had Hoped: A Journey Through The Weird Wild World Of Local TV News,” the memoir of a former local TV news reporter who is now a lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission (and until 2010 was an associate at my firm).

After leaving the truly small time as a radio reporter in Telluride, Colorado—where Christie Brinkley made a donation to his station in gratitude for Spelman’s lack of killer instinct in investigating the story of her ski accident, Spelman’s first assignment as an on-air TV reporter was in the perfectly named Whiteville, North Carolina, where he found a sign outside one of the 86 (no joke) local churches reading “Let Jesus Fix Your Achy Breaky Heart.” Spelman is “something of a curiosity” to the townsfolk as a “half-Jewish New Yorker whose only religious experiences came from attending classmates’ bar mitzvahs.” (I am confident that many Whiteville residents are, like you, puzzling over whether that should have been “B’nai Mitzvah.”) There, Spelman gains experience operating a one-man news “bureau,” or “one-man band” in industry argot, simultaneously serving as his own cameraman as he videotapes himself reporting from the scene day after day. Spelman explains how local reporters work to turn mundane events into seemingly hard-hitting stories—the book’s title comes from a statement a local anchor supposedly made to the reporter covering a story about how an accident had been worse (and thus more newsworthy) than expected.

One sample grab comes describes how Spelman, by then working in East Tennessee, was dispatched to get footage of the farm of a former judge who had been arrested for growing marijuana there. By this point, Spelman had achieved the seniority necessary to warrant having an actual cameraman, Dan, accompany him to cover his stories. Because of delays in finding the farm, the judge had posted bond by the time they got to the scene, and Spelman’s admirable efforts to explain his rights to collect footage from a public roadway came to naught when the judge pulled a rifle case from his truck. Recognizing that the judge had the better of the argument,

We drove off, but unfortunately, we drove in the wrong direction, heading farther down a windy back road that didn’t seem to lead anywhere. So with a sinking feeling, we realized we’d have to turn around and head back to the farm. We decided that if we were going to get shot, we should try to get it on video, so I drove and Dan got in the back seat with the camera. I generously allowed that if the guy started shooting Dan was permitted to duck. “But keep rolling,” I said, “if we survive it’ll be good footage.”

When a highlight of your career is deciding how to caption your response to a sur-reply brief, that is infotainment. Spelman’s book is filled with this kind of gentle, self-deprecating humor, the observations of a person who in many ways is a visitor in his own country. Spelman spares no details, even (or especially) when it is embarrassing; his account of one evening when he spent so long in a courthouse bathroom that he arrived late to cover an aviation mishap ends with the memorable phrase, “luckily for me, it’s unwieldy to remove plane wreckage.” (His account of how he got the story anyway, maybe better than his speedier competition did, is illuminating.)

Admittedly, I grew up in Peoria, Illinois. My standards for a good time may not be the same as for some of you swells who grew up where “entertainment” consisted of something more sophisticated than listening to AM radio in the back of a Plymouth Belvedere as you drove out to a strip mine to shoot beer cans with BB guns. But as I read this book, I kept thinking, “There is a movie in this.”

When I was in my second year at law school, I went to go see the movie Black Robe, about a Jesuit priest trying to make converts in 17th Century Canada. There is a scene where the priest has been captured by hostile Iroquois and he stands waiting, hand held fast to a post, as the Iroquois chief impatiently sorts through clam shells to find one suitably dull to maximize the pain when he uses it to sever his guest’s finger. I left that movie thinking that, even though I had chosen to be a lawyer, life could be worse. Reading Paul Spelman’s book, I had the same feeling. But I laughed a lot more.

That wasn’t her intent, of course–Greenhouse was famously rebuked by her editors at the New York Times for marching in an abortion rights rally in 1989 in D.C.–but consider her recent blog post:

Earlier this month, the American Bar Association traveled north to Toronto for its annual meeting. Doing some homework for a panel I was to moderate, I came upon Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, added in 1982 to the country’s mid-19th century constitution. Section 1, the “limitation clause,” makes the Charter’s many guarantees subject “to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” A Canadian judge assured me that this requirement of “proportionality,” as various European constitutions with a similar principle refer to it, is invoked constantly and forms the basis for Canadian constitutional interpretation.

Proportionality strikes me as worth considering in preference to the arid absolutism that seems to have taken hold of the United States Supreme Court.

Greenhouse is alluding primarily to the Court’s recent First Amendment cases, but surely Roe v. Wade is the most absolutist case the Supreme Court has ever issued, on a variety of levels–it invalidated the abortion laws of all fifty states; created a regime that permitted virtually no regulation of abortion for the next eighteen years, giving the U.S. the most liberal abortion laws in the world; was significantly out of line with public opinion; gratuitously went well beyond what the Court needed to say to rule in favor of Jane Roe; and invented a right to abortion that’s awfully hard to justify based on either the Constitution’s text or American tradition.

So if the principle of “proportionality” should apply to freedom of speech, an explicit and enumerated right, surely the same principle should apply to allow “reasonable” limits on the unenumerated right to abortion. And surely the USSC should interpret reasonableness in the abortion context with the same leniency that the enlightened Canadian Supreme Court has applied to freedom of speech. Right Ms. Greenhouse? Ms. Greenhouse?

UPDATE: Of course, I’m aware that Casey limited Roe to some degree, and that Carhart v. Gonzalez allowed further regulation of abortion, importantly by not allowing the “health of the mother” exception to trump otherwise acceptable regulations on partial birth abortions (in practice, this exception would swallow the rule). This is why I wrote “for the next eighteen years,” i.e., between Roe and Casey. But in 1989, Greenhouse was marching in favor of Roe, and of course even in Casey the Court’s liberal wing continued to defend Roe. If someone can provide me with some evidence that Greenhouse nevertheless in fact thinks Roe went too far and is comfortable with significant limits on abortion rights [this "news analysis" from 2007, this Q & A from 2008, and this very recent defense of Roe against liberal "backlash" critics, are evidence to the contrary], I’ll be happy to recant. Otherwise, the point–not that the Court is currently “absolutist” on abortion [or, as a couple of commenters who obviously didn't read the Canadian link, bizzarely conclude, that I actually support both speech restrictions and abortion restrictions], but that Greenhouse consternation over “absolutism” is really just a reflection of her own political beliefs–stands.

Liberal Pittsburgh political blogger “Davyoe” complains that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review misleadingly portrayed me as a “politically neutral” expert when they interviewed me about the recent individual mandate decision a few days ago. The type of issue he raises is commonly brought up these days:

While his description above seems politically neutral (he’s just described as “an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law”) parts of Somin’s bio was conveniently omitted by the Scaife-employed [reporter] Craig Smith.

Somin is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Scaife-funded Cato Institute – and from that page we also learn that Somin blogs at the conservative/libertarian Volokh Conspiracy.

However brilliant Professor Somin may be, politically neutral he isn’t. Smith should have pointed out Somin’s connections to the political right.

Also omitted, of course, are the millions of dollars Smith’s boss Richard Mellon Scaife has shuffled of to Cato, where Somin’s a scholar.

The implication is that the media must disclose any connections, however indirect, that an expert has with politically motivated funders of any kind. Being an adjunct scholar at Cato is an unpaid position that doesn’t give Cato any control over my research (or me over theirs) – much less giving any such control to individual Cato donors. If that is going to be the standard for what reporters must mention, it should be applied consistently across the board.

For example, most major universities get funding from liberal foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, and often also from individual liberal donors such as George Soros. Many of the liberal legal scholars who are quoted in the media in support of the individual mandate are affiliated with the American Constitution Society, which also gets some of its funding from Soros (full disclosure: I’ve spoken at several ACS events myself). Some of them also blog at liberal legal blogs, such as Balkinization.

Even more significantly, virtually every university (including mine) gets large amounts of money from the federal government, which is the defendant in the individual mandate cases and has a huge stake in the outcome. By Davyoe’s standards, that would have to be mentioned any time an academic expert is quoted in support of the individual mandate or any other expansion of federal power. I suppose it would also have to be mentioned that many academics are employed by state universities controlled by one of the twenty-eight states that have filed suits against the mandate, including George Mason University, which is owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The state and federal governments have a lot more leverage over me (and other academics) than Richard Mellon Scaife does. Even most private universities are heavily dependent on federal funds – much more than on any private donor.

There are, however, some good reasons for not mentioning these things every time an expert is quoted. First, virtually any article that quoted any academic expert on anything would then be cluttered with a long list of donors and affiliations. The net result is that reporters will usually shy away from quoting experts because doing so would require too much space. Second, in most cases the experts in question are not advocating their positions because of those affiliations, but rather the reverse. I’m not a libertarian because I’m affiliated with Cato and say what they pay me to say. Rather, I’m affiliated with Cato because I’m a libertarian and had been one for many years before I ever did any projects for them. If I was a liberal constitutional law scholar, I could easily avail myself of the much greater research funding available on the left. Similar reasoning applies to liberal legal scholars affiliated with ACS and other left of center organizations.

The situation may be different when an expert is directly employed by an organization with a stake in the outcome of a legal or policy dispute and is hired for the purpose of advocating that organization’s viewpoint (e.g. – a spokesman for the Department of Justice who comments on the individual mandate case, or one who speaks for the plaintiffs). In that case, there is stronger reason for supposing that what he says is dictated by his affiliation with his employer. Presumably, he or she would be fired for expressing a contrary opinion.

In fairness, the Tribune-Review didn’t mention a connection I have to the individual mandate cases that is much more important than those Davyoe focused on: I have written amicus briefs in several of the mandate cases on behalf of the Washington Legal Foundation and others. It’s arguable that this should have been noted. At the same time, many liberal legal scholars have written amicus briefs on the other side, yet this is rarely if ever mentioned when they are quoted on the mandate cases in the media. Perhaps the point I made above with respect to my Cato affiliation also applies here. The amicus briefs were pro bono projects that I accepted because I already believed that the mandate is unconstitutional. I didn’t come to that conclusion because I was asked to write those briefs. The reverse was true. Presumably, the same applies to the many liberal legal scholars who wrote amicus briefs on the other side. Still, it’s reasonable to argue that when the media quotes legal scholars about a case, it’s relevant to disclose any amicus briefs they may have written or signed in it.

On the other hand, it’s much more tenuous to claim that the media should disclose any indirect affiliations with any donors whose political views place them on one side of the dispute in question. By that standard, there are no experts who qualify as “politically neutral.” Virtually every expert employed by a research institute, think tank, or university has indirect connections to government or private donors with a political agenda.

Obviously, there is another sense in which most experts are not neutral. With rare exceptions, they tend to have strongly held views on the subjects they study, views that are often influenced by their general ideological outlook. These factors can sometimes blind the expert to the merits of opposing arguments. That’s a real problem. But it’s very different from the assumption that experts’ views are dictated by various indirect affiliations to donors.

UPDATE: Davyoe responds to this post here. Interestingly, he admits that his view really does requires the media to mention all experts’ connections to politically motivated, funders, however indirect. For the reasons I describe in the post, I think this is both unrealistic and unnecessary. Any story that quoted an expert would then be weighed down with long lists of all the donors (including government agencies) who have ever given money to any organization he has ever been affiliated with. The practical result would be to either make the stories unreadable or (more likely) to deter reporters from quoting experts in the first place.

Davyoe also tries to catch me in a supposed contradiction for disclosing that I have spoken at ACS events myself. But I didn’t disclose that because I thought it was essential to identifying my supposed biases. I did so in order to make clear that I’m not trying to suggest that liberal scholars’ affiliation with ACS somehow puts them beyond the pale or renders them unworthy of citation as experts. If a reporter quotes one of these scholars without mentioning their ACS ties, I don’t think the reporter will have done anything wrong.

Although on-line reading continues to grow, many people still enjoy old-fashioned printed periodicals. In the spirit of gratuitous advice, here are some suggestions for print subscriptions.

First of all, if you’re conscientious about registering for the frequent flyer program every time you step on an airplane, you may accumulate a few thousand points on various airlines which you fly only occasionally. You’ll never get to the level of a free ticket, but the points expire if you don’t use them. So use them for magazine subscriptions. I’ve been enjoying the daily Wall Street Journal that way for several years, and have used low-level points for dozens of other year-long or half-year subscriptions over the past decades.

Second, there’s a lot to be said for trying many different periodicals with one-time subscriptions. You may find a magazine that becomes indispensable for you (as The New Republic was for me, for about 15 years), but just reading something for a year or a half-year can broaden your knowledge, and then you can move on to something else.

Some category recommendations:

Newsweeklies: Back in the olden days of the 1970s, these were truly great. Then, the daily New York Times wasn’t available outside of the New York area, and the Wall Street Journal was sparse on non-business news. Time and Newsweek, and to a lesser extent U.S. News & World Report, provided in-depth, thoroughly-reported stories of the major issue of the week, the deep inside of presidential campaigns, and so on. These days, it’s hard to make a case for reading the remnants of those once-important magazines.

The Economist is still probably the most influential periodical in the world. If you read its U.S. coverage, you’ll quickly discover that the analysis is not nearly so sharp and insightful as the omniscient tone would imply, and that the coverage has numerous blind spots and biases. Knowing how flawed the U.S. coverage is makes me question The Economist‘s accuracy on topics for which I don’t know enough to judge the coverage. So in a sense, the less you know about something, the more useful The Economist is. For example, the latest issue had an article explaining that Poland is going full speed ahead with natural gas development via fracking. Because I previously had never thought about Polish natural gas, I learned a lot by reading the article. Overall, The Economist is still a strong source for weekly world news, as long as you don’t take its editorial judgements too seriously.

If you read French, Courrier International is definitely worth a trial subscription. This Paris-based weekly takes stories from newspapers all over the world, and translates them into French. You’ll get acquainted with many fine newspapers. I ultimately gave up on Courrier because their story and source selection leaned so heavily to the official left. If the choice is between a particular nation’s version of The Guardian vs. The Telegraph, Courrier almost always goes with the former. Their special issues were particularly tendentious and one-sided. But since tastes vary, I’d recommend that people who read French give it a try.

Le Figaro, one of the leading French daily newspapers, publishes a weekly edition for a U.S. audience. It’s well-written, and has good coverage of all the Francophone world, including African analysis that is hard to find in U.S. papers. As with The Economist and Courrier International, there’s also plenty of European news that you won’t find in the U.S. dailies. Le Figaro is right-wing by French standards, which places its approximately in the same zone as the New York Times. Le Monde, which is left-wing by French standards, also has a weekly; I’ve read occasional issues, but never subscribed, and, ideology aside, Le Figaro has bigger print and better layout.

Business and Finance: If you’re a law student, or in the same general age group, the time to start learning about business and investing is now. Don’t wait until you’ve saved $50,000 in a 401(k)  and have to figure out where to put it. The sooner you start reading and thinking about investing and business, the more you’ll see fads and bubbles come and go, and the less likely you’ll be to invest foolishly 25 years from now, or to allow yourself to be led around by a self-dealing financial advisor. Besides, whatever kind of lawyer you become (or whatever other career), you’ll almost certainly be more useful to clients and yourself if you have some background knowledge of business–whether you’re serving as a volunteer on the Board of a small non-profit, or urging your friend not to spend his life savings on program trading.

Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week remain the big three of the business magazines. Give each of them a try, and pick your favorite. I life Forbes, for excellent writing, and its pro-capitalist orientation. Barron’s is worth a trial subscription. It’s purely about investing, not about business in general. For a person just starting to think about the stock markets and other financial investments, Barron’s is a good choice. You may not want the avalance of daily information that comes in the Wall Street Journal or Investor’s Business Daily. Rather, in the learning stage, you may be better off with the weekly perspective. Especially useful are the big articles which provide the viewpoints of numerous experts on a major topic (e.g., how will the economy perform in the next 12 months?). As you’ll find, experts, even well-qualified and sincere ones, are often wrong about economic predictions. One of the reasons to start reading the business/finance press early in life is to develop a healthy skepticism about following any single expert’s advice.

Money is OK if you know absolutely nothing about money, and have to start at the very beginning.

New York City:  If you’ve ever lived there, it’s fun to stay in touch. Of course the New York Times takes care of this for plenty of readers who used to live in The City, but there are other options. New York magazine is lively and interesting, and captures the NY feel in a way that the Times doesn’t. It also sometimes has strong reporting on national politics. Also worth trying is the weekly New York Observer newspaper, which has great coverage of state and city politics. As with New York, the political slant is firmly to the left, but the factual reporting can sometimes be very good. The New Yorker remains, for eight decades running, the best cartoon magazine in the world. It has, unfortunately, also become a favorite vehicle for character assassination–sort of a highbrow version of ProgressNow. I’d trust its non-fiction articles only on topics which don’t involve U.S. politics.

Legal newspapers: Especially if you can get a law student discount subscription, the National Law Journal (general national news), Legal Times (D.C. focus), and American Lawyer (corporate lawyers) are all worth trying. The same goes for any local/regional law paper in your area, such as New York Law Journal. Because of the Internet, none of these are probably as influential as they were 20 years ago, but they’re still a good way to diversify your diet of legal news.

Daily newspaper: Coverage of legal issues in the mainstream daily press is typically horrible, with stories tending to concentrate only on who won or lost, while leaving the reader in the dark about the precise legal issue in dispute. But for general coverage of the state where you live, there is still nothing that comes remotely close to the daily newspaper. So if you live in the Denver area, you ought to be a daily reader the Denver Post; in Dallas,  the Dallas Morning News, and so on. Yes, those papers can be biased and selective, but they’re still far superior to any other single source for state and local coverage.

On top of that, I’d recommend a high-quality national newspaper. In other words, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. The Times has a much larger “news hole,” except for business news. But the Journal‘s new stories are much less likely to be DNC opinion essays misplaced in the news section. While both papers are well-written, the Journal is better-written. And the Journal‘s Friday/Saturday culture and leisure coverage has gotten quite good. For the Times, I’d recommend a partial weekly subscription (e.g., Monday to Friday), rather than the Sunday paper. You’ll get a better variety of stories in the weekday editions, and the weekly special section on Science and Technology is sometimes excellent.  The Sunday Times does have the Book Review, which is now more important than ever, given the harsh cutbacks in book reviews at almost every other newspaper. But you can always subscribe to the Book Review separately, if it’s important to you.

For a change of pace, London’s Financial Times can sometimes be obtained with airline points. Like the Wall Street Journal, it’s a business newspaper which covers lots of regular news, and some culture. And of course plenty of U.K. news. The editorial viewpoint might, roughly speaking, be considered somewhat similar to The Economist: supportive of free markets and globalization in general, but not at all afraid of big government activism.

Gun Week: Despite the title, published tri-monthly by the Second Amendment Foundation. Pre-Internet, the indispensible source of news on the firearms industry and the gun control issue. Even today, the best single source for people who follow the topic closely.

Bonus on-line reading: One of the big differences between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times is reporting on the United Nations. The Journal has done excellent investigative reporting on the U.N. The Times has also done some good work, as in coverage of the “peacekeeping” fiasco in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Times coverage of U.N. HQ often consists of running p.r. interference on behalf of the U.N. For daily coverage of the U.N., by far the best source in the world is the indefatigable Matthew Lee, of the on-line Inner City Press. Lee’s personal viewpoint is definitely from the Left, but he is relentless at digging into the corruption, lies, and human rights abuses perpetrated by an organization which too often escapes serious journalistic scrutiny, all the more so because of budget cuts in international coverage in most of the rest of the media. To his credit, the United Nations Development Programme temporarily convinced Google News to disappear Inner City Press.

p.s.: In response to some of the comments: Legal Times and National Law Journal merged last year; all the more reason for law students to give NLJ a chance, I guess. The above periodicals are only a small fraction of the periodicals to which I subscribe, and those to which I’ve subscribed in the past. Not included are categories including public affairs (e.g., Mother Jones, Natonal Review, Reason), Congress (National Journal etc.), hobby/lifestyle (Sky & Telescope), sports (Field & Stream), or scholarly journals. I’ll write about some of those when mood strikes.

I regret that I must report that USA Today refuses to correct the misrepresentation of my views about the individual mandate litigation that I pointed out in this post. I pointed out the mistake in e-mails to Joan Biskupic, the author of the article in question, and the editors of USA Today. Both refused to issue any correction. They did invite me to state my view in a letter to the editor. However, after I sent in the letter, they refused to print it on the grounds that “[i]t is the paper’s policy not to disguise corrections as letters to the editor.” They were only willing to print a heavily redacted version that didn’t clearly indicate the nature of the error that Ms. Biskupic made in her characterization of my supposed “prediction” about what the Court will do. I refused to let them publish the letter under such absurd restrictions. The whole point of the letter was to point and out and correct her mistake.

Here is the original unexpurgated letter:

To Whom it May Concern:

In her April 14 article on the the Obama health care plan individual mandate litigation, Joan Biskupic incorrectly wrote that I had predicted that “the Constitution’s ‘original meaning,’ along with recent cases, would lead a majority of the [Supreme] court to reject the law.”

In reality, I never said any such thing. In the past, I have several times publicly written that the Court is more likely to uphold the law than strike it down, though the anti-mandate side also has a significant chance of prevailing. Ms. Biskupic also erred in stating that I predicted that Justice Anthony Kennedy would necessarily vote to strike down the mandate. I did not say that either.

Finally, Ms. Biskupic omitted crucial context in quoting my statement that “There is no logical way to uphold this mandate.” What I actually said was that “[t]here is no logical way to uphold this individual mandate except by a chain of reasoning that would allow Congress to impose any mandate of pretty much any kind.” The full context shows that I was making a statement about what the Court should do, not what it actually will do.

Sincerely yours,

Ilya Somin
Associate Professor of Law
Editor, Supreme Court Economic Review
George Mason University School of Law

The only one of my statements at the ACS debate (video available here) that Ms. Biskupic cited in in support of her interpretation of my words is the following:

While it is certainly true that Thomas is willing to go farther in rolling back federal power than the other conservatives on the Supreme Court, I don’t think you have to go as far as Thomas to want to do so. Moreover, people like Scalia and also Kennedy, in recent cases, such as in the Comstock case, and Alito have gone out of their way to signal their commitment to the idea of limiting federal power. … As to Roberts, it’s hard to predict his position on this. I do not think it would be predicted by the preemption cases.

Nothing in the above passage predicts that Kennedy will vote to strike down the mandate. And even if I somehow predicted that Kennedy would do so, I certainly did not predict that the Court as a whole would.

Ms. Biskupic also tried to defend her misrepresentation of my views by noting that she quoted me as saying that Chief Justice Roberts’ vote is difficult to predict. That, however, does not offset her error in stating that I predicted that the Court as a whole would “reject the law.” The reasonable reader of her article is left with the impression that I predicted that the Court would strike down the law, regardless of the fact that Roberts’ individual vote may be hard to predict.

As I said in my previous post on this subject, I don’t blame Joan Biskupic too much for the original mistake. We all make such errors occasionally, especially under the pressure of deadlines. It is much more reprehensible for her and her superiors to refuse to correct an error after it has been pointed out to them in great detail.

Over the last few years, I have often been quoted in the media about both the individual mandate and other issues. To my knowledge, this is the first time that anything I said has been seriously misrepresented. In my experience, most reporters and editors try hard to get the facts right and to correct any errors they might inadvertently commit. Unfortunately, this case is an exception.

One of the dangers of commenting on hot-button legal issues is that reporters will sometimes misquote you. That happened to me in today’s front-page USA Today story on the individual mandate litigation by prominent legal reporter Joan Biskupic, which cited me as follows:

George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin argued at a recent forum sponsored by the American Constitution Society that the Constitution’s “original meaning,” along with recent cases, would lead a majority of the court to reject the law.

“There is no logical way to uphold this mandate,” Somin said, predicting that Justices Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy and Alito would be inclined to strike down the law. Somin said the vote of Chief Justice Roberts is more difficult to predict based on his record.

In reality, I never predicted that a majority of the Court would “reject the law.” I actually said that the case could go either way, and that Kennedy and Roberts were likely swing voters. I also noted that some things Kennedy has said in recent opinions suggest that he wants to enforce limits on the scope of federal power. But I did not say that means that it’s clear he will vote to strike down. He could, I think, go either way.

I have on several occasions publicly said that the case could go either way, that the plaintiffs face an “uphill struggle” and that a victory by the pro-mandate side is more likely than the opposite. I think the Court should invalidate the mandate, but the justices do not always get these issues right, and sometimes go against logic.

At the same time, I believe that the anti-mandate side has a real chance to win and that the case is far from a slam dunk for the federal government. To put it in sports terms, I think the federal government is the favorite to win the case, but only a narrow favorite. Everything I said at the ACS forum was completely consistent with these long-held views.

I am certain that Ms. Biskupic’s error was inadvertent. Perhaps she misremembered what I said at the ACS event (which was held back in February), or took it down incorrectly. She apparently did not have an opportunity to check the accuracy of her summary with me before publishing it. I have sent her an e-mail urging her to correct the error. But I also wanted to correct it here, in case USA Today does not get around to it in a timely fashion.

UPDATE: Having listened to the tape of the debate, I also noticed that that Biskupic omitted some relevant context from my statement that “There is no logical way to uphold this mandate.” What I actually said was that “[t]here is no logical way to uphold this individual mandate except by a chain of reasoning that would allow Congress to impose any mandate of pretty much any kind.” I should in addition note that, contrary to my memory, I didn’t say that Justice Kennedy was a swing voter, but also did not predict that he would vote to strike down the mandate.

Ryan J. Foley, AP, begins a “news” article as follows: “To end a high-stakes stalemate over union rights that has captured the nation’s attention, a handful of Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin might have to stand up to their new governor.”

There is no indication in the article that such defections are in any way likely. Indeed, later in the article, Foley writes, “So far, there’s little evidence of a move to compromise.”

As near as I can tell, the stalemate could also be ended with the defection of some Democrats to the governor’s side, though Foley doesn’t choose to mention that option.

Just a bizarre bit of editorializing disguised as news, with the rest of the article just as one-sided.

UPDATE: The story cited above has now been replaced at its link with a new story by a different author with a more appropriate lead: “No resolution appeared imminent Monday to the stalemate over union rights in Wisconsin, leaving Senate Republicans resigned to forge ahead with less-controversial business such as tax breaks for dairy farmers and commending the Green Bay Packers on winning the Super Bowl.”

As regular readers know, I’m often critical of the New York Times’ reporting on various matters. But this morning, the ninth most popular article on the New York Times website, about the hard-leftist “Jewish Voice for Peace,” is not even a Times piece, but reprinted from a local San Francisco online startup called the Bay Citizen.

Journalistically, it’s a disaster. A few examples:

(1) Out of context quotes. After recounting a few incidents where left-wing Jews were treated badly, the piece goes on: “What’s happening is outlandish; the era of civil discourse has disappeared,” said Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce of Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco’s largest synagogue. Was Pearce referring to these incidents and/or the general hostile attitude of the Jewish community to JVP, to the mutual hostility of JVP and the organized Jewish community, or to JVP’s own confrontational tactics? The piece makes it seem like the first, but there’s no way to know from this out of context quote, and I’m guessing the quote is misleading. [UPDATE: Here's a report of Rabbi Pearce participating in a delegation to Israel, a purpose of which was "to express the urgent need for all members of our communtiy to learn and use constructive tools for sharing concerns about Israel without descending into hurtful, hateful, and destructive vitriol." Looks like Rabbi Pearce is concerned about the lack "civil discourse" emanating from groups like JVP, exactly the opposite of the impression you'd get from the article.]

(2) Credulity “Jewish Voice for Peace’s mailing list has risen to 100,000 from 35,000 since the start of the Gaza conflict, according to the organization; the number of chapters has grown to 27 from 7. From 2008 to 2009, the group’s operating budget, fueled by donations, grew 44 percent.” Who cares how big the mailing list is? JVP clearly has only hundreds of activists, not enough to fill a regional AIPAC meeting. Some of them, according to JVP itself, are non-Jews (“Jews and allies“), who like the idea of hiding their anti-Israel views behind a “Jewish” cloak. And many of them are “as a Jew”s–Jews, especially prominent among anti-Zionists, who have no affiliation with the rest of the Jewish community, other than to be able to say that “As a Jew, I.”* And a 44 percent increase from what? Without a baseline, who knows if this is significant. (UPDATE: And for that matter, it’s 2011. Wouldn’t it be useful to know if the 44 percent increase caused, apparently, by Operation Cast lead, continued in 2010?)

(3) Leaving out relevant information The article features one Rae Abileah, described as a JVP activist. It’s more than a little relevant, though, that Ms. Abileah is a national organizer for the radical left “Code Pink.” As numerous sources have pointed out, JVP isn’t a “Jewish” organization, but a leftist organization composed mostly of people of Jewish descent, who use the fact that they are Jewish strategically to support the leftist cause of being anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. But you wouldn’t learn of Ms. Abileah’s Code Pink activism from the Bay Citizen piece. Here are questions an enterprising reporter might have asked to JVP: “Can you identify any Bay Area JVP members who aren’t involved in far-left-wing activism more generally?” “Can you identify any Bay Area JVP activists who are involved in non-Israel-related Jewish causes?”

(4) Accepting your subject’s narrative The narrative of the piece, what it starts and ends with, is that unlike mainstream Jewish organizations, who are concerned about who and what will replace Hosni Mubarak, the JVP is uncritically supporting the Egyptian protesters. But wait a minute, the mainstream Jewish organizations’ concerns rest on the fact that Mubarak has preserved peace between Israel and Egypt, while a future Egyptian government may not. The article raises this point only obliquely, stating that Jewish organizations are concerned that the “demonstration in Cairo may ultimately threaten Israel.” But it’s all really about the peace treaty, and put in those terms, a good reporter might ask, “isn’t the Jewish Voice for Peace” at all concerned about “Peace?” And then a JVP spokesperson’s statement would make sense: “Ms. Surasky said she hoped a new political order in Egypt would help speed the end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which her group opposes.” Peace, in other words, is secondary (at best) to “ending the occupation.” A more probing reporter would have discovered that many JVP members also support the dismantlement of Israel (see here for an acknowledgment that JVP welcomes “anti-Zionists”), which is, shall we say, unlikely to come about by peaceful means.

Despite my criticisms of the Times, it clearly contains a lot of good reporting, and has a brand name to defend. Why does it want to dilute that brand by importing dreck from other sources?

[*UPDATE: This is important context in a piece about the relationship between JVP and mainstream Jewish groups: if much of JVP's membership is composed of "non-Jews" and "as a Jews", who are all welcome to be "anti-Zionists," it's hardly surprising that they aren't welcomed with open arms by Jewish groups. "Hi Jewish community, we're JVP. Some of us aren't Jewish, and of the rest of us, many of us haven't been affiliated in any way with the Jewish community in our adult lives. We want to boycott Israel, and welcome those who seek Israel's destruction. Can we join the local Jewish Community association?" Fat chance.]

FURTHER UPDATE: Here’s a shocker: Article co-author Aaron Glantz is a veteran of leftist radio network Pacifica. And could the other co-author, Daniel Ming, be the same Daniel Ming as the Vasser student who was the author of a now-private anti-Israel blog? Given that there is a “Daniel Ming” on LinkedIn who studied at BirZeit University in the West Bank, who is now an intern at the Bay Citizen, I’d say it’s very likely. [UPDATE: Yes, it's the same Daniel Ming.]

These are the folks on whom the Times is willing to stake its reputation? Admittedly, even ideologues can be good, objective journalists. But judging from this article, Glantz and Ming fail the test.

Washington Times:

White House officials said that sort of “surpassingly curious reading” called into question Judge Vinson‘s entire ruling.

“There’s something thoroughly odd and unconventional about the analysis,” said a White House official who briefed reporters late Monday afternoon, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Hmm. I think it’s a bit curious that the White House would send an “anonymous” official to criticize the ruling of an Article III judge, and surpassingly curious that a gaggle of reporters would agree to respect the aide’s anonymity in exchange for the “anonymous” quotes.
Shouldn’t the reporters either tell the official to go on the record, or refuse to take part in a “briefing” that amounts to simply a colorful attack on an unfavorable opinion?

In response to Ken’s post below, the idea that the BBC is somehow “objective” compared to American t.v. and radio is laughable. (I’ve blogged about the Beeb here, here, and here.

My favorite example is a BBC radio report I heard a couple of years ago. The reporter was in China, reporting on the Chinese health system. With perhaps slight (but only slight) exaggeration, the report went something like this.

Reporter, narrating: China used to have a universal, efficient, publicly provided health system, with medical care provided by the government for free, and each village or farm having full-time medical staff under government salary. Now, however, China has moved to a “free market” system, with devastating consequences. Medical care has become far more expensive, beyond the means of many working class Chinese.

Reporter speaking to Chinese citizen: How do you feel about the medical care you receive today, compared to the days when the Chinese government provided the care?

Chinese Citizen [assumedly the most anti-"free market" citizen the reporter could find]: It’s much better now, we have access to educated doctors and Western medicine.

Reporter: But didn’t medical care used to be free?

Chinese Citizen: It was free, but it was terrible. The “doctor” assigned to our village had only a sixth grade education, and was more likely to kill you than to heal you.

Reporter: But didn’t everyone have equal access to this doctor?

Chinese Citizen: Sure. We were all poor, and we were all free to die in this quack’s care.

Reporter: But isn’t it true that sometimes people can’t afford the medicines they need today?

Chinese Citizen: Yes, sometimes it is very hard to pay, but at least if you can borrow the money, you can save a sick child. In the past, the child had no hope.

Reporter, narrating: So we see that China has moved from an equitable, fair system in which there was universal health care to a free market system in which the rich get good medical care and the poor are left to their own devices.

My jaw was open the entire time. Outside the BBC and the Shining Path, who pines for the days of Chinese Maoism? I remember thinking to myself, wow, the BBC makes NPR sound like Fox News.

Of course, British commentators may be more polite and civil in their tone than are American commentators, but–Question Time excepted–aren’t the British generally more polite?

UPDATE: Thanks to an anonymous reader, here’s a 2006 story from the BBC website with a similar theme. It begins:

A village doctor for the past 55 years, he was just 15 when he started practising as a third-generation herbalist.

In the 1970s he received simple training under Chairman Mao’s programme to send “barefoot doctors” to serve China’s rural masses.

Dr Liu still wears a faded Mao suit and a picture of the Great Helmsman dominates his bare clinic. He remembers those days with nostalgia.

“In Chairman Mao’s time, you could see a doctor whether you had money or not. We could carry out disease prevention, like injections, whether our patients had money or not. Nowadays only those with money can get injections,” he says.

Today the old system providing near-universal access to basic healthcare has been dismantled, as the government tries to spread the cost of providing healthcare to more than one billion people.

The site also has a picture of Dr. Liu, with the caption, “Dr Liu Quan says everyone got equal health care under Mao.”

Nothing like fifteen year old herbalists to provide quality health care!

Because, as Jack Shafer explains on Slate, the killer was seeking publicity. And such publicity encourages copycats, as I detailed in Rocky Mountain News columns in December and April 2007. Regarding copycats, Clayton Cramer’s award-winning “Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage in the Mass Media,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 9:1 [Winter, 1993-94] 26-42 is well worth reading.

There was some value in reporting the killer’s name initially, in part so that people who knew him could come forward and provide information. At this point, however, repeating the name adds nothing useful. In general, a publicity-seeking murderer’s name should be mentioned only if clearly necessary (for example, in an encyclopedia entury, or in a newspaper report about judicial proceedings), and never otherwise. Let his name sink like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. Let us remember instead the names of the vicitms and the heroes.

Chief Conspirator Eugene commented on the legal aspects of the four-year old child and tortious negligence a couple of days ago, and linked to a story in the New York Times discussing the court’s holding.  I was intrigued by something else linked to this story, but not about the law.  Rather, when I opened the Times this morning – the paper edition (which, for reasons having to do with my Beloved New Yorker Wife, and despite my public announcements several times that we are giving up home delivery, continues to appear on our door at $65 a month …) – I saw in the front page an article on this case.  Not the one that Eugene linked to, but a first person essay by Susan Dominus, under a “Big City” tag.  Here is a little bit from the middle:

This month, a judge ruled that the case against the 4-year-old girl involved could proceed (the family of the boy named in the suit did not file a motion for dismissal). Reading the judge’s ruling — which cites cases dating to 1928, and suggests that a 4-year-old could be held to the standard of some mythical “reasonable child” of that age — I kept flashing back to images from my college-era art history class: medieval baby Jesus, looking more like miniature adult Jesus, a representation of children as small adults so outdated as to seem almost incomprehensible through the lens of modernity.

Even as we expect our children to be ever more precocious — bilingual before kindergarten; too old at 4 for picture books, thank you; capable of showing us around our iPhones — somehow we never expect them to be ever more adult; certainly not so adult as to be potentially liable for negligence. One of my own 4-year-old twin sons not only believes Batman lives and breathes, but assumes he will someday grow up to be Batman. I have little fantasy that he is “reasonably” anything in particular when it comes to his judgment.

Obviously the Times or any other newspaper can sort out its strategy for the paper and front page however it thinks will be most successful, but I was struck that the Times has moved in the direction of an explicit magazine-type column, including first person commentary, on the front page.  It is true that the Times has been essentially turning the front page into a magazine for years now, in the sense of running stories that are not really about news of the day or even the week in a format that one might see in a weekly magazine.  But this was the first time I had seen the Times move to adopt a front page, first person, magazine style cultural criticism-opinion essay.  Indeed, first person to the point of discussing one’s own four year children in the essay.

This is not a complaint; it is an observation about changes in how a leading newspaper sees the journalistic function of the front page.  Perhaps the Times is seeking to differentiate itself from the WSJ, which despite many quirky front page stories, still maintains the stories as largely “news” stories.  Perhaps it can work with the smaller and more homogenous readership that the Times seems to be targeting; I don’t know.

It does not appeal to me – and this is not about politics, but the question of whether I read the front page of a newspaper, as it were, mostly for sense or most for sensibility.  The Times has for a long time been seeking to market itself as the bearer of a sensibility, exquisitely tailored (I myself find it tiresomely middle-brow, naturally, and most middle-brow in its upper-middle-brow condescensions).  But of course the Times has no doubt discussed the options thoroughly for how to increase its readerly appeal at the least cost; this might be it, for all I know.  Still, it did seem a noteworthy move in newspaper strategy.  I would be curious if there is anything published, in the journalist-insider press, for example, on how the Times came to this editorial decision.

Is it just me, or is there something rather inapt in the UPI headline “Big 5 stealing liberal justices’ lunch money”? The article is simply discussing the recent, often 5-4, conservative Supreme Court rulings.

It seems to me there are some substantive weaknesses in the article. It doesn’t mention the recent high-profile constitutional cases in which four of the conservatives lost to the liberals plus Justice Kennedy, or the fact that even two liberals (Justices Stevens and Ginsburg) joined the conservatives in one of the three 1995-2000 cases holding that Congress exceeded its enumerated powers (City of Boerne v. Flores, which held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act exceeded federal power as applied to the states). It also speaks of “the steady trimming of commerce clause power” under the conservatives’ decisions in two of the 1995-2000 cases (noting also the “only break” in that, the medical marijuana decision), which strikes me as rather exaggerating what is mostly a symbolic and minor movement, though of course others may well disagree with me on that. But the headline is what most struck me.

Thanks to How Appealing for the pointer.

A few days back, Instapundit linked to this scathing and reasonably entertaining attack on Glenn Greenwald by Benjamin Kerstein. At the time, I thought about linking to it, with a post along the lines of: “here’s a link to an entertaining attack on Glenn Greenwald. It’s well-written, unfair, a bit hysterical, with some grains of truth. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of criticism that Greenwald merits, given his own writings.” I then reconsidered; even Greenwald deserves a fair shake.

But then I saw Greenwald’s response [scroll down]:

many of the most extremist neocons this morning (TNR’s Jamie Kirchick, Martin Kramer, The Weekly Standard’s John Noonan, Red State’s Josh Trevino, the “Republican Jewish Coalition”) are falling all over themselves in praise of this 2,800-word attack on me in The New Ledger for my views on Israel. Written by Benjamin Kerstein — a standard-issue, Israel-devoted neocon smear artist whose self-selected slogan is “Bostonian by birth, Israeli by choice” and who has written similar screeds about other heretics such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky (a whole blog devoted to that), and even Peter Beinart — it’s filled to the brim with trite neocon attacks that once worked to deter free debate but are now pitiable in their impotence…

I view the increasingly unhinged attacks by the worst neocon elements to be a vindication of what I’m doing. I see them as pernicious and destructive, and genuinely welcome their contempt.

So you see, Greenwald doesn’t take the opportunity to point out any actual errors or unfair statements in Kerstein’s piece, or even to simply express his contempt for Kerstein. Instead, he uses Kerstein’s piece as an opportunity to launch his own “unhinged” attack on “neocon elements,” which he seems to define as anyone who isn’t rabidly hostile to Israel like himself, and to attack Kerstein for being an “Israeli by choice,” as if there is something inherently evil about choosing to live in Israel.

In Kerstein’s piece, in other words, Greenwald reaps precisely what he sows.

UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh has more on Greenwald’s reaction, including a fun analogy.

Sixty-nine law school deans have signed a letter endorsing Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court. According to the Washington Post, “The letter was signed by the deans of most Washington area law schools, with the exception of those at George Washington and George Mason universities.” The letter was signed by the deans at AU, Georgetown, and Howard. It was not signed by the deans at GW, GMU, Catholic or UDC. (University of Maryand’s law school is in Baltimore, not College Park.)

Not that there’s any particular significance to whether Washington area deans sign or don’t sign this letter. But is it too much to ask reporters to get basic, easily-verifiable facts right?

Since Glenn Greenwald is showing up on MSNBC and elsewhere, as an “expert” on Israel and Gaza, this is as good a time as any to recall his record with regard to the last major Hamas-Israel blowup, the Gaza incursion in 2008-09.

Greenwald consistently accused Israel of a “disproportionate” (and therefore illegal under international law) military response to the missile attacks from Gaza, but he refused to specify what he would consider a proportionate military response. He finally justified that refusal by claiming that since the military response was not going to work, only diplomatic means were lawful:

I’ve answered this repeatedly. Do you know of anyone who actually believes that at the end of this Israeli attack, there will be no more Hamas, or no more rockets? The only military solution to the rocket attacks is total annihilation of the residents of Gaza and a complete flattening of their cities. If Israel were to do that, what possible objections would those here be able to make who are arguing that “proportionality” has no role to play in restricting the means used to fight justifiable wars? Terrorism ends when the causes of it are addressed, typically via diplomatic means. That’s what history proves. [Editor's note: But cf. Israel's successful counter-terrorism operations in the West Bank in the 2000s, among other examples.]

Putting aside the obvious strawmen (no one was arguing that there would “be no more Hamas,” or not a single rocket), what history has shown is that 3,000 rockets, missiles, and mortars landed in Israel in 2008 before the Gaza incursion, and that includes a lengthy cease-fire period. Since the end of the Gaza incursion, only about 200 projectiles have fallen in Israel from Gaza, and, I believe, none have caused physical injuries. Other commentators (but not Greenwald) have acknowledged that they were wrong about the efficacy of Israel’s military action.

But let’s repeat the initial point: Greenwald thinks that ANY military action that Israel may take against Hamas is illegitimate, and that Israel’s only proper response to whatever violence Hamas unleashes is diplomacy. If Hamas decides to adhere to its stated policy that its goal is the destruction of Israel and the exile of its inhabitants, and acts accordingly, Israel’s only resort is apparently to surrender.

And while we’re on the subject of Greenwald, here’s an interview with Greenwald in which he (a) claims that Israel’s boarding of a blockade-running ship violates international law because the ship was in international waters. Ruth Wedgwood, an actual expert in international law, then comes on to rebut him. I’m not an international law expert, and it’s not my cup of tea, but if you’re going to cite international law, you might as well get it right, and my understanding is that Greenwald is simply wrong here. Greenwald, also accuses Israel of piracy [UPDATE: More specifically, he writes, perserving I suppose plausible deniability: "What's so odd about that is that the U.S. has been spending a fair amount of time recently condemning exactly such acts as 'piracy' and demanding 'that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes'," though he doesn't actually link to anything suggesting that the U.S. has said that a state enforcing a blockade on the high seas is "piracy"], even though piracy is by definition undertaken by non-state actors; and (b) accuses everyone who disagrees with him about Israel’s blockade of simply regurgitating propaganda, which is amusing coming from someone who unhesitatingly repeated the following false propaganda from the “Free Gaza” activists: “Those on the ships emphatically state that the IDF came on board shooting.” (He later added a “but see” (without acknowledging that it wasn’t there initially), linking to video that rebuts the claim he regurgitated.) And this from someone who constantly accuses journalists he doesn’t like of being “mindless stenographers.”

UPDATE: Greenwald updates: “for an excellent discussion of the illegality of the Israeli raid, see this analysis from former British Ambassador and maritime law expert Craig Murray, and this one from International Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller (the Post has a decent article on this topic today as well).”

The first piece simply asserts that the raid was illegal. Heller, meanwhile, argues that the blockade itself is illegal, but seems to acknowledge that if the blockade is legal, the raid is legal. The Post piece presents different perspectives, but the “illegality” argument seems come down to the bizarre position that a state can board ships heading to another recognized state to enforce a blockade, but it can’t board ships heading to a terrorist entity that acts as a state to enforce a blockade.

The percentage of blacks marrying whites has risen by 3 times since 1980. Asians are just as likely to marry whites as they were in 1980 (40%), even though there is a much larger Asian population to choose from, and Hispanics are significantly more likely to marry whites than in 1980 (38% compared to 30%), even though there is a much larger Hispanic population to choose from. The sheer number of interracial marriages has risen 20% since 2000.

This is good news, right? Not the way the Washington Post Associate Press spins it, complete with a commentary by Cornell Prof. Daniel Lichter that is completely at odds with the data, but supports left-wing shibboleths about 9/11 and the recent Arizona illegal immigrant law:

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000.

The latest trend belies notions of the U.S. as a post-racial, assimilated society. Demographers cite a steady flow of recent immigration that has given Hispanics and Asians more ethnically similar partners to choose from while creating some social distance from whites due to cultural and language differences.

White wariness toward a rapidly growing U.S. minority population also may be contributing to racial divisions, experts said.

“Racial boundaries are not going to disappear anytime soon,” said Daniel Lichter, a professor of sociology and public policy at Cornell University. He noted the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as current tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law.

“With a white backlash toward immigrant groups, some immigrants are more likely to turn inward to each other for support,” Lichter said.

In fairness to Prof. Lichter, reporters have been known to quote sources out of context, but there’s no excuse for how the Post A.P. reporter, Hope Yen, reported this story. It’s possible that there is actually some hidden bad news in the data, but if so, it’s not apparent from the story.

[NOTE: READ UPDATES BELOW]

Today’s Washington Post features a story by Michael Birnbaum on the controversial new Texas social studies standards.  As characterized by the Post, the standards sound quite bad.  Ann Althouse was concerned by the story, so she looked at the Texas materials (for which the Post had declined to provide a link) and was appalled.  “Virtually everything cited in the article to make the curriculum seem controversial is misstated!” She summarizes:

If you’re going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you’d better quote it.  Or at least link to the text. And if you choose to paraphrase and not even link, and I have to look up the text myself, and your paraphrase is not accurate, it is my job to embarrass you by pointing that out.

Based on what Althouse reports, Birnbaum and the Post should certainly be embarrased.

UPDATE: Just so there is no confusion, neither this post nor that by Ann Althouse is a defense of the Texas standards. However bad they are, news outlets should report on them accurately.  What Althouse shows is that the Post utterly failed in this regard.  Criticizing the Texas standards should not require misrepresenting them.

SECOND UPDATE: It appears Ms. Althouse may have blogged too soon — and I may have been too quick to repeat her accusations against the Post.  Althouse relied upon the text of the standards as proposed a few months ago, not the final language.  The Texas State Board of Education revised the standards this past week before approving them.  Based on live-blogging by the liberal Texas Freedom Network (see here and here), and the direct quotes (and, in some cases, video they provide), the Post‘s characterizations of the final language is much more accurate that Althouse suggested.  I think it’s fair to suggest the Post story should have quoted the relevant language (as this prior story did), but unless there is something inaccurate about TFN’s account, Althouse and I both owe the Post and Birnbaum an apology.

There’s a bizarre controversy brewing over the fact that New York Times Middle East reporter Ethan Bronner’s son has decided to volunteer for the Israeli military.  Anti-Israel activists are arguing that this means that Bronner will be tempted to bias his reporting in favor of Israel and the IDF, rendering his reporting non-objective, or at least suspect.  The Times’s public editor agrees with Bronner’s critics, but the Times editor-in-chief is defending Bronner.

I say that this is bizarre because I think friends of Israel would love to see media outlets adopt the standard proposed by Bronner’s critics, so long as it applies to both sides.  If the fact that Bronner’s son is serving in the Israeli military means that Bronner can’t be permitted to report on Israel and the territories, then Western media outlets should henceforth be banned from hiring Palestinian stringers who are responsible for doing much of the “on-the-ground” reporting in the West Bank and Gaza.   After all, if an American whose son joins the Israeli military as a non-citizen is too tied to one side to report the news, surely actual Palestinian citizens–many of whom no doubt have close friends and relatives affiliated with Hamas or the Palestinian Authority–are even more suspect.  It’s no secret that much of the hostile reporting against Israel in the Western media originates from work done by these stringers, both “journalists” and photographers.

For that matter, I assume we can expect Bronner’s critics (and Western media outlets) to no longer rely on reports from Human Rights Watch and other anti-Israel NGOs.  If Bronner’s objectivity is in question because he might be biased in favor of Israel, what of “factual” NGO reports commissioned by individuals who are blatantly hostile to Israel?  What about, for example, the likes of HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson, who lobbied in the U.N. against Israel and for the Palestinians during the Second Intifada, just before she joined HRW?

I could go on, but the point is that if the Western media is going to start seriously ferreting out biases and potential biases in how it reports on Israel, I don’t think Bronner’s critics would like the result.

UPDATE: Of course, Bronner’s critics likely expected the Times to keep Bronner on his Middle East beat, but hope that by stirring this controversy, Bronner will feel the need to bend over backwards to report the Palestinian side of the conflict, to show that he is “objective”.  They may be right.

So suggests John Avalon, in a Daily Beast column “The Secret History of the Birthers.” He traces birtherism to a Texas woman named Linda Starr, who was a Hillary Clinton delegate to the 2008 Texas state Democratic Convention. Avalon writes that Starr “was also cited as a key source for CBS’ discredited election year investigation into George W. Bush’s National Guard records that led to Dan Rather’s replacement after 24 years as the evening news anchor.” Avalon links to the Thornburgh/Boccardi report, which was conducted at the request of CBS News to examine CBS’s conduct in producing the infamous 60 Minutes story about Bush supposedly evading National Guard service and then having the records scrubbed. As the report details, Starr made the claim about Bush in an article on her website, three days before the 2000 presidential election. She also played a key role in serving as an intermediary for CBS to obtain the document which purported to be National Guard memo regarding the removal of NG records about Bush. The Thornburgh/Boccardi report does not claim that Ms. Starr knew that the document  was a clumsy fabrication.

At the very least, however, the fiasco of the Bush National Guard story shows that Ms. Starr did not provide her Internet readers, or CBS, with a story which could withstand factual scrutiny. Accordingly, if Avalon’s reporting is correct, he has provided yet another reason for people to disbelieve the (already-implausible) assertion that President Obama was not born in the United States. In contrast to the way the mainstream media initially handled the 2004 Bush National Guard story, the mainstream media did a better job in 2008 by not embracing a story about a presidential candidate which could not be supported by solid, verifiable facts.

I have been trying to follow the story of the dustup among Amazon, Apple, and Macmillan on pricing on e-book readers, but have been distracted by other things.  What interests me are the business models being pursued by the various parties here – and whose makes sense, whose doesn’t, and who is likely to survive and win out.  Plus – someone tell me what the legal status is of “books” that I purchase today on Kindle – am I simply purchasing a revocable license of some kind to read it?  What’s the legal condition.  I love my Kindle, and anticipated that some kind of pricing battles would eventually break out – but I sorta hoped that competition would favor me as a consumer.  At this point, is it?  Someone explain to me what’s going on.

Here’s Charles Martin on the business model; there are good stories in the Times, WSJ and FT.

Update:  Delighted to have Virginia Postrel, of whom I am a big fan, join the comments and point us to her article at the Atlantic business channel.  Very interesting article on pricing.

Update 2:  There are a number of exceptionally interesting comments here in the thread.

New York Magazine is reporting (good piece by Gabriel Sherman) that the NYT has decided to move to a paid-online site model – a drastic shift away from its current free website.  The article explains the debate between the two sides within the Times – those urging that it has to somehow get to a paid online subscriber base, and those arguing that if it can hang in there, it will emerge with the largest global news site audience, which will enable it to charge a premium advertising price that cannot be charged now:

The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. In favor of a paid model were Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson. Nisenholtz and former deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who was until recently in charge of nytimes.com, advocated for a free site.

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Timeswould be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”

But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times’ online reach.

At the end of December, I stepped down as the chair of a nonprofit media assistance organization aimed at developing world media companies and their businesses, so I pay a lot of attention to media economics.  Bloggers, especially on political blogs, tend to assume that the problems of a NYT trace back to politics, but that is far from the case.  The economic problems are baked into the newspaper model, to start with, and the NYT has special economic problems all of its own.  But also bear in mind that the Times is actually in (somewhat) better shape than an awful lot of newspaper companies in the United States – i.e., it is not in bankruptcy.  Also, the Times website is magnificent – the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real newspaper “feel” online.  I love the WSJ site, too – but it doesn’t feel like a newspaper the way the Times site does.

I have thought a lot about the Times’s business dilemmas, and really don’t know what I think would work even in principle.  I’ve linked here to a Pajamas Media piece talking about dropping our ($600 a year in DC) home subscription – but since then I find my New Yorker wife re-upped, only after, I am happy to say, the Times offered a price below home delivery of the Washington Post.