Thursday, January 31, 2019

The Six Forms of Media Bias?

David Leonardt of NYT has an interesting piece - The Six Forms of Media Bias -  in response to Margaret Sullivan's WaPo perspective article: "The media feel safest in the middle lane. Just ask Jeff Flake, John Kasich and Howard Schultz."

These articles properly address major problems of objective media political reporting, but miss the big picture. Leonardt organizes his piece around six elements, but in two of those - Centrist Bias and Liberal Bias, he notes the problem of bothsidesism, which is the correct point of focus.

Bothsidesism derives from an inability of political journalists to understand the difference between:

1. Fair and accurate reporting
2. Fair and balanced reporting

Balanced reporting can be inaccurate, and often is, especially if one "side" recognizes this media vulnerability and instinctively or, with calculation, act to exploit that weakness.

So, political reporters, so afraid of being wrong, now and then, practice bothsidesism, and wind up wrong more often than not.

The commitment to forced balance leads to these errors:

-If a full and objective analysis of facts would logically lead to dire conclusions regarding one "side" in our politics, especially if it is the other "side", these so-called "liberal" journalists soften their conclusions in order to maintain the appearance they are unbiased, but the result is bias against factual reporting in full context. Fox News does not have "Conservative bias" as Leonhardt writes. Fox News is a propaganda machine with enormous influence on viewers who like what they see and hear on the station. But Leonhardt can not say that. He says they "skew hard right" says nothing about their disregard of reality. They lie. Trump lies.

Fair and balance leads to
Forced balance, leads to
False balance,
False equivalencies

We need a new journalistic set of standards for political reporting with a commitment to objectivity and accuracy,  not so-called "fair and balanced" reporting. Fair and balanced implies the reporter is just a conveyor of facts without context. This has resulted in reporters who try to step back at all times to the "View from Nowhere" as Jay Rosen calls it, practice he said/she said journalism by default. They can not do otherwise under this regime. He said/she said political journalism favors the more aggressive politician, especially those who lie over those who tell the truth. Lying sends the political reporters into fact checking, which means they waste their time. Or they go running to the political opponent to ask - "he says this bad thing about you. What do you say about that?

"Bias for the new" is a big problem that is related to an inability to properly handle incremental changes to the status quo on important items. For example, the unbelievably significant interactions between Trump, his campaign, and Russia in 2015 and 2016 became public slowly over an extended period of time and the means of revelations was often manipulated by team Trump to soften the immediate blow to their credibility.  So, for example, Jeff Sessions sworn testimony to the Senate in his confirmation hearings that he was not aware of any contact with Russia was an absurd statement.

The solution to outdated standards of reporting for journalists is to step away from he said/she said reporting. Political journalists need to be like scientists - not referees, not judges. Instead of fair and balanced, be complete and accurate in context. Instead of horse race emphasis, turn to likely outcomes. We live in a world that is completely opposite to the world America would have inhabited if Clinton had won and Brexit had lost. But we did see much, if anything on that story in the he said/she said, false balance reporting of 2016.

Donald Trump is not an aberration. He represents the apotheosis of Republican political strategy of the last half century. Republicans are good at winning. Democrats are good at analyzing complex problems and designing complex solutions. Republicans succeed by dumbing down the debate to the lowest common denominator. Journalists have a duty to report this as fact, as the context for political debate, not as opinion.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

The God that Failed

The American model for objective political journalism takes the he said/she said, both sides approach to every issue. Jay Rosen calls this the View from Nowhere. And nowhere is it more apparent than in the persistent adherence to this soft, hands-off approach followed by The New York Times.

This forced balance reporting falls easily into the horse race model for elections also decried by Rosen. After the horse race field is winnowed down by the primaries to two opposing main party candidates, one Democrat and one Republican, this archaic model can be strictly applied by political reporters.

And so NYT news analysis drifts easily into the headline: For a President Consumed With Winning, a Stinging Defeat. In it, Peter Baker writes:

"Democrats were not exactly gracious in victory, barely containing their delight. “Hopefully, it means a lesson has been learned: Shutting down government over a policy difference is self-defeating,” tut-tutted Mr. Schumer. “It accomplishes nothing but pain and suffering for the country and the American people.”

See what he did there? Government shutdown battles are a tug of war between the two sides. Trump "wanted" a wall and did not get it, so he lost. Nancy Pelosi held the Democrats in the House together, so she "won". She "defeated" Trump. But what did Pelosi win exactly? Getting the government running again, though weakened, falls short of the status quo before Trump/McConnell employed this tactic. That's no victory.

Suppose the goal of Trump is to disable the federal government so badly that the FBI and Justice Department are hamstrung in their investigations of him and his team. Suppose Mitch McConnell wants to disable the federal government so badly that most of the agencies fail in their mission and, when Democrats return to power, need to spend all of their energies just trying to revive the functioning of the government. And, in addition to wanting to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency, the Education Department, Housing and Urban Development, the Consumer Finance Protection Agency, isn't it obvious that a weakened IRS benefits Trump and the billionaires who financially support Republicans?

No, Pelosi has not won, if winning means gaining an advantage that you did not have previously. Pelosi and the Democrats have lost. Trump had no chance of holding the functioning of the U.S. government hostage and obtaining a legislative advantage. But he was able to hold the U.S. hostage with the aid of Mitch McConnell who held the Republican coalition in the Senate together for 34 days - long enough to inflict real damage on government and make skilled people think twice about going to work fot the feds and, for those who are good at their jobs, think twice about staying in those thankless roles when private industry beckons.

Peter Baker's "Democrats were not exactly gracious..." nonsense demonstrates his full commitment to the horse race, both sides, black and white winner/loser view of politics." At the NYT, the "barely containing their delight" take on the Dems is not the observation of an objective reporter. The NYT loves to refer to "gleeful" politicians. And for some reason, probably their commitment to "both sides" symmetry, Baker and many fellow reporters do not acknowledge the assymetry between Democrats and Republican on government shutdowns. Republicans are happy to engineer shutdowns, as noted above, to weaken the federal government to make a later cleanup by Democrats that much harder, but also to support and expand the cynicism of voters about the federal government. Baker's comment about Schumer's quote shows he has no understanding of the game theory dynamic of government shutdowns.  The NYT and Peter Baker do not and can not face the facts because it would force them to confront their perpetual devotion to the God of both sides symmetry - the God that failed.

Friday, January 25, 2019

He said/She said Journalism Rules

At the Schumer/Pelosi news conference announcing the agreement with Trump to end the federal government shutdown, Pelosi was asked:

"The president has wanted this wall funding for a long time, but it wasn't until Democrats won the House that he really went to the mat for it. How much of all of this do you think is about the new power dynamic that is his desire to show you who really is in charge?"

Pelosi did not take the bait.

The question can be reparsed as "Why is he doing this to you?" Isn't that better asked of the person doing the doing rather than the done to party? Better to ask someone who is not going to yell at you and shout you down as "fake news".

This particular reporter is demonstrating a problem with journalistic standards in the U.S. Mainstream political journalism is comprised of reporting actions and events and asking each side what they think about the other side. Direct observation with reasonable interpretation is forbidden under standard political reporting and relegated to the opinion section. Just as journalists willingly follow every tweet by the president, in part, because it fits their model the "he said" parry, someone like Nancy Pelosi, who is performing her job, needs to be drawn into the he said/she said model of both sides journalism in order for the model to appear to function, to advance to the next parry. The reporter in this scenario had made the same observation that many others have made (see "Not a Wall, Not a Wall"). But if you think this, there is no reason to ask Pelosi if she agrees with you. It's just not her job.

The only real reason for this shutdown was for Trump to asset his dominance and deny that the Democratic majority in the House has any power.

The reporter reached this reasonable conclusion, but is not empowered to make a declarative statement - hence the disguise in the form of a question to try to get a response from Pelosi that nudges team Trump to respond in an endless he said/she said "debate" of both sides journalism.

Hey - this isn't Jeopardy people.
source:npr.org

Monday, January 14, 2019

Eighteen is Enough

In the U.S. we now live with a world of Team Trump-Putin or you may more accurately call it Team Putin-Trump. Either way, the reality is that there are two sides:
1) Team Putin-Trump
2) All others
This reality is quite clear to any rational observer, but much of our traditional media views this reality as so incredibly shocking and extreme, that we must be very very very sure this is our reality in order to acknowledge it and face it. (That was three very's. The actual number of very's is equal to the number of Trump documented lies before they stop counting lies and start to stop listening to Trump lies.)

Unfortunately, the "both sides" model of traditional political reporting dictates that there are two equal and opposite sides, that those two sides are the "Democrats" and the "Republicans". So any "Republican" who abandons Team Putin-Trump is "really" a Democrat and maybe always was a "Democrat". And if Trump is a problem, then "Democrats" need to fix it. Traditional journalism, embodied in the intransigent New York Times, helped create this dichotomy by imposing their artificial binary worldview on their stories and then treat the result as a fait accompli totally unrelated to their behavior. So the NYT often refers to "these polarized times" or our "deeply polarized country."

Max Boot is one of those political conservatives who has gone over to the "other side". His article in WaPo is quite effective at identifying red flags in Trump's behavior. Instead of counting thousands of lies in some vain attempt to convince true belivers in Trump who will not budge no matter the lie count, Boot says, when it comes to red flags, eighteen is enough : "Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset."

My one quibble with Boot is his weak closing remarks: "This is hardly a “beyond a reasonable doubt” case that Trump is a Russian agent — certainly not in the way that Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames were. " Actually, that's not true. There are many more than 18 reasons to believe precisely beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump is guilty, guilty, guilty. The only reason that reasonable people express any doubt is that the reality is so horrible - that the U.S.is and was so vulnerable to ignominious defeat at the hands of a weak and corrupt foreign power and only needed the aid of a willing weak and corrupt American agent.

Friday, January 11, 2019

Martial Law

In America, the president has enormous power. Trump will use those powers not only for personal financial gain at home and abroad, but to stifle opposition to his regime. The chief opposition to Trump is law enforcement because Trump, his family and their associates have committed serious felonies before the election of 2016, during the transition, and following his inauguration.

The mainstream press has focused on the Mueller investigation as the single potential solution to the problem of Trump. Under this interpretation, no matter what else goes wrong in the U.S., so long as the Mueller investigation continues and his investigation's magical report may be issued - the U.S. is not in an existential crisis.

But it is. The Wall Street Journal report on continuing Russian cyberattacks reminds us that the U.S. is made extremely vulnerable because we have a president who can not be trusted to act in America's interests, but can be trusted by Putin to act in Putin's interests. Our mainstream press has no journalistic standard that allows them to consider the president as anything other than the chief player on one side of a binary functioning democratic system with two equal and opposite sides, both of which act in the interests of the U.S. , but who have different political philosophies that are equally valid in all circumstances. Under that lens, a president who acts solely in his personal financial interests, and who is happy to commit crimes can not exist in nature. It just can not be.

Trump's incrementalism is plain for all to see. He began his term in office by appointing a mix of family members, campaign loyalists, people with Russian ties, and a smattering of generals and traditional Republican party operatives. The generals were there for a combination of optics and as a test of loyalty - could the generals be counted on to maintain loyalty throughout the military when push comes to shove? Meanwhile, the Republican party operatives were mostly there for window dressing - no way would Sean Spicer and Reince Preibus last long. But they, too, were window dressing - see, this is only a little different from a normal Republican administration. Meanwhile, there was no question that the long arm of the law would head towards team Trump. That meant the greatest threats - the Justice Department and FBI needed to be wrestled to the ground. In short order, Trump was able to eliminate or sideline some of the FBI's most effective leaders in Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Bruce Ohr. (And no coincidence that this plays into Russia's goal of eliminating the U.S. ability to withstand their cyberattacks.)

As now Trump has succeeded in consolidating power within his administration. Only lackeys and sycophants remain. Predictably, a leader who can only remain in power by authoritarian means in a democracy will need to impose marshall law at some point to avoid removal by the normal operationo of the legislature and the courts. But the imposition of marshall law requires a reason, or at least an excuse...like the claim that there is an emergency, such as a flood of enemies massed at the southern border trying to enter illegally to cause harm.

Today it is a false claim of a national emergency. But tomorrow the national emergency will be any attempt by the legislature - or the people -to remove the president by legal means. If a false emergency can be declared, nothing would stop this president from signing a declaration that suspends the 2020 elections. One way or another, Trump's incremental approach to consolidating power will lead to a state of martial law in the U.S., whether or not that is the term he uses.

This is not to argue that Trump's incrementalism is a carefully calculated and orchestrated approach - that he thinks to himself - "I see where this is going and will have to declare martial law someday, but what do I need to do today to get there?" Or, "I see where this is going and I will have to suspend elections in 2020. What do I need to do today to get there?" Rather, it is a matter of Trump doing whatever works for him today, personally, and without regard to any future consequences whatsoever,  based on the assumption that his next step will be regarded as only incremental and not as part of a developing scenario - by Republicans in Congress and the mainstream press alike.  And those two players - Republicans in Congress and the mainstream press are both setting up America for a complete breakdown of our basic governmental systems and processes, just as Trump is doing. Trump is actually the only player among those three who is behaving strategically, in the sense that he knows that his short term thinking approach has always worked to his personal advantage in the long run, no matter what else happens. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress and the mainstream press have willingly locked themselves into a system that is designed to protect Trump in all circumstances. That is, unless the magical "Mueller report" transforms America and saves us all.


Thursday, January 10, 2019

Not a Wall, Not a Wall

The fight over the wall has nothing to do with the wall. It's all about power. If Trump had really wanted the wall, he would have used his considerable leverage to get his wall when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. Trump is asserting his absolute power - if he wants to, he can declare a national emergency, even as a whim, sending a message to Pelosi and the Democratic House - "don't get too excited about your new majority...you have no power."

For decades now, ever since Newt Gingrich and House Republicans tried to force their Contract on America through Congress, a series of federal govenment shutdowns have illustrated the stark asymmetry between the two main political parties. Republicans are willing to impose shutdowns because they are basically opposed to the federal government with the sole exception of the military and federal law enforcement. In game theory terms, Republicans only care about the effects of a shutdown on the next election, which tend to be quite limited. For Trump, who is unpopular and conducts himself as the president of his base rather than the nation, the shutdown affords a perfect opportunity to assert his absolute dominance over national politics. And Mitch McConnell is more than willing to assist. The added benefit for Trump in this case is that strangling the federal government eventually hurts the special counsel investigations into his presidential campaign, the transition, and the conduct of the president and members of his administration.

Speaking of strangling the important work of the federal government:

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Follow the Money Laundering

The Trump - Russia story had three separate phases:
1) Cultivation of Trump as an asset. Started in the 1980's(?). Gained head of steam circa 2008 after legitimate bankers stopped lending to the serial bankuptcist. Casinos and real estate offer two great opportunities for money laundering. Of course, that does not prove anything. Maybe they were all just friends.
2) Cultivation of Trump as a candidate for president and agent of influence in the Republican party.
3) Cultivation of President Trump as an agent of influence - revolutionizing American foreign policy, destruction of NATO, elimination of sanctions against Russians, create political upheaval in the U.S. by dismantling the American system insofar as possible, and provide U.S. intelligence to Moscow.

How does Natalia Veselnitskaya fit into this?

Veselnitskaya become known in the U.S. as an attendee at the famous June 2016 Trump tower meeting about which Don Jr. claimed he expected "dirt on Hillary Clinton", but Veselnitskaya "only"wanted to talk about "Russian adoptions".

Yesterday's news on Veselnitskaya : Russian lawyer at Trump Tower meeting charged in separate case:

"A Russian lawyer whose role in a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower has come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was charged Tuesday with obstructing justice in a separate money-laundering investigation."

But how separate are the two cases? Isn't it an odd coincidence that a Russian lawyer, who was in NYC June 16, 2016 for a scheduled court appearance in the Prevezon Holdings Case that relates to money laundering happened to appear at a Trump Tower meeting regarding "dirt on Hillary Clinton"?

Team Trump lies all the time about everything. So do Putin, his oligarchs, and their representatives. But they tell us where to seek the truth with their denials and deflections. If Don Jr. (aka Individual-1 Jr. ) invokes "adoptions" as a deflection, what does that tell us? Well, Veselnitskaya represents the interests of the Katsyvs in the Prevezon money laundering case. Publicly, Veselnitskaya has registered a non-profit to work Russian adoptions in the U.S. that would presumably resume if and when sanctions are lifted. But sanctions against Russia are targeted at the oligarchs. The oligarchs who desperately want to move their wealth out of Russia to places like the U.S. and the U.K. No, this wasn't a meeting about adoptions and not just about dirt on Clinton. Topic 1 was money laundering through real estate - removing sanctions to ease restrictions on money laundering -and possibly other types of  transactions. That meant that Jared Kushner's attendance was important - hence the necessity to deny that Kushner was even there or spent much time at the meeting.

As to the dirt on Hillary Clinton, the original stories omitted the attendance of Rinat Akhmetshin.
As reported,
"Mr. Akhmetshin, a Washington resident, has told reporters that he just happened to be lunching with Ms. Veselnitskaya in Manhattan that day when she spontaneously invited him to the meeting with the president’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Manafort. He did not explain why she wanted him there."

That's a clear case of deflection - tells us Akhmetshin's participation was critical. My guess is that Akhmetshin (the Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet intelligence officer per Wikipedia) was there with the news of "dirt on Hillary Clinton". Why would Jr. claim it was Veselnitskaya? To distract attention from the money laundering that would resume when sanctions were lifted on the oligarchs.And that money laundering would include handsome payoffs  - not just for money laundering services, but for the president who, by the way,  has been extremely reluctant to impose sanctions on the oligarchs and anxious to remove those sanctions as quickly as possible. The Treasury Dept. announced just before Christmas, the lifting of sanctions on Oleg Deripaska's Rusal and EN+Group while allegedly keeping sanctions in place on Deripaska, Paul Manafort's boss for many years.






Monday, January 7, 2019

The Safe Place

In America, political journalists in the business of objective news reporting pull themselves to the safe place of "both sides" reporting as a purported best practice in their field. When you play the "both sides" game you innoculate yourself from criticism of bias.

Reporting "both sides" is not always wrong or inaccurate, but forcing all political reporting into a "both sides" box is one of the great journalistic failures of 2016. And it continues.

On MSNBC this morning, Craig Melvin announced in his lead-in:
source:msnbc
"A disrupter in Congress...
How Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez draws the right's outrage and forces members on the left to look over their shoulders all at the same time.

Take a look at the subject and the predicate. Ocasio-Cortes just is a maverick - is that now that John McCain is no longer with us? Is that why - just to fulfill the press's need for a maverick?

And what action did she take to draw the right's outrage? Is it really outrage at some action? More likely she represents a threat or an opportunity. A threat if she is well liked, or an opportunity if she lets certain conservatives check all the boxes of their antagonism - a) female, b) outspoken, c) latina, and d) young. After her election, a Washington Examiner reporter tweeted a picture of her taken from behind, challenging her personal story by claiming her being too well dressed to be poor. That also gave him the excuse he needed to take a photo of her butt. More recently, an old video of her joyfully dancing with friends at Boston University was tweeted in an apparent effort to discredit her for being what? Young, attractive, energetic, and happy? That most recent episode demonstrates that something peculiar is going on here with the urgent attempts to take her down. Ordinarily a freshman member of Congress has very little power - one vote among 435. So the rapid fire attacks on AOC demonstrate that Republicans feel a need to make the story about her. It's a tell - something about the Republicans. Not AOC. That is the real news. The Republicans want AOC to be their spokesperson for the Democrats. And for that story, let's keep "the left" out of it. Don't bring in "the left" to force the appearance of balance. Just tell the real story.

"How conservative operatives jumped on the election of AOC to attract attention and foment anger and resentment of this new member of Congress as a way to distract from serious policy discussion"

Not perfect. But would be much better. Much closer to the truth.

Melvin made it worse after he came back from the "break."
"Love her or hate her Congress youngest member AOC has become a lightning rod for Republicans 
She has also become a darling of the left."

There he goes again. Both sides. You can't say anything about one side without invoking an equal and opposite statement about the other "side" That may seem harmless enough, but that approach has made it almost impossible to state the obvious as plain fact or even as the most likely set of facts in any situation where "both sides" leads to fallacy.

The presumption that both sides are always the same is a fallacy that flies in the face of the reality we have faced over the past two years. A man is president of the U.S. who did certain things and did not do certain things.

He never ran for or served in any government office or as a general in the military.
He never functioned in business in any way similar to ANY business leaders in the U.S. He just is not Rex Tillerson, let alone Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, or anyone else.

He ran beauty pageants.
He ran casinos.
He traded in real estate, such as condos and office buildings. Much of his real estate was sold to Russian oligarchs and criminals.

And so on. Ignoring that stark asymmetry  with a both sides approach guarantees that reporting will distort the truth about Trump. Which is why we are where we are today. And failure of major news organizations to recognize that problem with their reporting guarantees that 2020 will be a replay of 2018.