Tag Archives: writing

Bad editing at both Politico and the Brookings Institute: Susan B. Glasser and “Covering Politics in a ‘post-truth’ America”

Susan B. Glasser’s article “Covering Politics in a ‘post-truth’ America'” is an interesting read, though not in the way it was intended. At least, not for me. As usual, the interest comes in the form of fnords, and how it demonstrates bad editing.

What’s the fnord? The whole thesis of the article! The idea that the press is better than it has ever been while also being more hated and more ignored than it has ever been is FUCKING INSANE. “The press is so good, today! It’s too bad that we have poisoned the well and no one respects us or pays attention to us.”

(And, as ever, I will take this time to point the finger at the Brookings Institute guys who let this obviously flawed thesis past the draft stage. The fundamental contradiction in the article is obvious, and I’m hardly an elite editor. If my primary job were to make sure that content was intelligible, I’d be ashamed to have let something this obvious slide by. The thesis makes no sense, and Glasser should have known it, and her editors at the Brookings Institute, too.)

Glasser also ignores some very real items. The biggest is the money.

The press loved Trump because he sold newspapers. So they followed him with a dogged, slavish devotion, hanging on his every word. The amount of free press that Trump got from the traditional media was in the billions of dollars. If they had treated Trump fairly, if they had focused as much on his flaws instead of just his fucking Twitter account, if they hadn’t been so sycophantic in following him, Clinton would have won. And they did this for money. It does not follow the basic principles of journalistic ethics – they prostituted themselves for money, and the whole country will suffer.

And, not for nothing, for the press, there is a hell of a silver lining. Trump is now President, and he’ll keep on selling papers. For them, there was no downside. Middle-class white people – and the press has yet to face the racism in its biz – are going to do fine under Trump. We’ll probably see big tax cuts, even! PLUS, they’ll sell a lot of papers! It made it very easy for the press to ignore how much they profit from Trump, and how that profit makes it hard for them to be objective about what happened in 2016.  Glasser ignoring the role that money played in the media portrayal of Trump is unconscionable.

So when Glasser says that “the big media crisis of the Reagan era was all about the ease with which the journalists could be spun or otherwise co-opted into the Hollywood-produced story line coming out of Reagan’s media-savvy White House,” I think she’s ignoring that media manipulation is a problem we have today. Her article with the Brookings Institute is part of the modern willingness of the press to succumb to manipulation!

After all, part of the very story of the election was the way Trump was manipulating the media. They knew it was happening. It wasn’t a secret. But they let it happen; they let the Trump stories that should have remained in the pages of TMZ and other gossip rags spread through the “real” news and treated his every tweet as important. Sure, there were good stories about Trump’s corruption and incompetence – but they were buried in a non-stop barrage where the news media hung on his every word and movement.

Otherwise, it reads like a paean to the Good Old Days. I understand that Glasser believes that the democratization of media of the Internet age is a good thing. But the fact remains: as the media has been democratized, it has become easier to dismiss. This is not good. So while the technology of the news has improved dramatically, its effects have diminished. If computers ran faster than ever but broke down all the time, we would not say that “computers had improved.” We would yearn for the days when computers worked properly.

The inability of the news media to adapt to modern technology – even as that technology has made parts of their job much easier – means that the media has not improved!

That at this stage of the game they’re only becoming aware of the crisis is, itself, exceptionally telling. The public’s dissatisfaction with the news is old news. The Daily Show – the show is nearly old enough to vote – has been a running commentary on American dissatisfaction with the media. So while Glasser writes her personal history in the news business in the rise of Internet news, she doesn’t talk about how media’s failure with the Internet created the dissatisfaction with the news. It becomes a story of a day late and a dollar short – that the traditional press didn’t understand the significance of the 24-hour cable news, or the Drudge Report, or Facebook, or Twitter.  She doesn’t describe better news, but worse.

Perhaps most tellingly, the article has a chart where age cohort ranks people’s primary news sources. Unsurprisingly, young people mostly get their news from the Internet. Equally unsurprisingly, the older you are, the more likely that you get your news from cable news shows, local news, and newspapers.

But remember Glasser’s thesis – that the Internet, specifically social media, has created insular worldviews that allow people to ignore objective facts.

Her chart, however, seems to indicate, well, the contrary. Young people voted for Clinton, they like gay and trans rights, they are pro-choice and believe in evolution and anthropocentric climate change. Trump’s anti-fact, news-hating cohorts tend to be older Americans, often with limited or no direct Internet access!

By her own data, there is an inverse correlation between getting news on social media and being gulled by anti-news conspiracy theories and counterfactual stories. If anything, it suggests that the real culprit behind hating the traditional news is cable news channels! But it is hardly a story that Fox News has attacked the basis for objectivity in America. However, that’s where Glasser’s data goes.

(And, again, how did this pass editorial muster? I know that analyzing data is hard. I do. But Glasser is the editor of Politico, and I presume there are editors for the Brookings Institute, too. These people are supposed to be the best in the world at editing news stories. I am constantly struck while reading this at how badly it is reasoned and analyzed. Clearly, they don’t even understand the data that they’re looking at, or else they would not have so brazenly printed it!)

Scattered throughout are ads for Politico (“These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials,” and similar nonsense.)

It ends by continuing to ignore the brute fact that the Internet generation is pretty fact-loving – that they aren’t the problem. The people buying the “fake news” and “post-truth” garbage get their news from cable TV and newspapers.  Glasser offers no solutions, not even for the wrong problem her article identifies. She says that traditional news media “took their audience for granted.” She talks about the dearth of investigative reporting and ignores Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowdon and the whistleblower websites that have utterly transformed investigative journalism. She also doesn’t mention the many failures of the news media – not just with Trump, but with, say, the Iraqi war when journalists “embedded” themselves with military units and praised Colin Powell for his “slam dunk” presentation to the UN that was entirely fictitious. Even though UN weapon’s inspectors were highly vocal about Powell’s failure and critical of the American march to war in Iraq – how did THAT happen, hmm? Glasser creates a fairytale where the sole problem with the news media has been a little arrogance, not that they have failed at every turn to both effectively communicate their ideas (which is necessary for their job) combined with factual errors of the highest caliber.

And while bragging about how much Politico is worth, Glasser fails to mention the extent to which editorial greed motivated the news media’s puppy-dog-like prancing after Trump, and how this plays into modern news reporting on all platforms. When Glasser started the job, newspapers were sustained almost by patronage. No one expected to get rich owning a newspaper. Nowadays, that’s the whole point. CNN ushered in an age where news was profitable on a scale large enough to interest big-money investors. And they want their money’s worth. And they were willing to pursue Trump – and be one of the forces that handed him the Presidency – to get it. So by failing to touch on the role of money in news, Glasser doesn’t have to look at the incredible journalistic ethical failures of modern news corporations including Politico and her own compromised status.

I also find it utterly disingenuous by Glasser to admit that the press sabotaged the election with their non-stop coverage of Trump (and, as a corollary, their equally bad coverage of Clinton) but then have a “shucks, who, us?” look on her face.  You can’t grab a bunch of money in defiance of journalistic ethics and then claim that it was just a little mistake.  If she was honest, she would have known that chasing money rather than legitimate, fact-based stories is part of the problem – and part of the reason why the news isn’t trusted.  How many times can the media chase money and fail at their jobs before surrendering their claim to truth?  I would argue we are well past that point.  That skepticism of the news is a rational decision in the face of their money-grubbing and lies.

Which does not make it good for people to fall for conspiracy theories and fake news.  It is, however, a dilemma.  If you can’t rely on the news for accurate facts – and as the Trump election shows, again, we can’t – where does a person go?

Falsity of “strength of will” in Painfully Rich by John Pearson

jp_getty1944In Painfully Rich: J. Paul Getty and His Heirs by John Pearson, the author talks about “willpower.” As I research Atlas Stumbles and very wealthy people, I’ll hear that word again and again: willpower.

But in Painfully Rich, you don’t have to go very far to get to the essential absurdity of the term. When describing Paul Getty, has “formidable resources – originality, strength of will and an obsessive mastery of detail.”

The same writer on the same page says that Paul Getty was driven by competition with his dead father to create a huge fortune. Paul Getty had indomitable willpower, but is driven by a clichéd daddy complex? At the same time, Paul Getty is also a master of his emotions, but obsessed by this same childish revenge fantasy against his dead father!

Which is it? Does Getty have “strength of will” or did he spend his life seeking his dead daddy’s love through the pathetic surrogate of material acquisition? It seems to me that a person with real strength of will – if one believes such things exist – would conclude a person of great willpower wouldn’t particularly care that they didn’t live up to the parochial expectations of their parent’s fundamentalist morality. They could get by or through it to live their life on their own terms, unhaunted by the ghosts of the dead. In short: they would exercise self-control.

It is an inherent paradox to say that someone was both master of their fate but also driven by the ghost of their dead father. It is a contradiction to say that someone has mastered their emotions, while also obsessed with chasing a dead man’s approval. John Pearson fails to note these essential contradictions – often on the same page.

The Origin of John Galt

statue-1515390_1920-1200x900Here’s another Atlas Shrugged fanfic from yours truly!  One of the fascinating things about these characters – now that I’ve got a little distance from the novel – is that Rand leaves them as nearly blank slates.  Even when some of the characters do having living family, like Hank Rearden, their family seems to have no real relationship with the character, evidenced by Hank’s mother’s name, in the novel, is literally “Hank’s mother.”  She has no proper name.  And while both Francisco and Dagny are obsessed with long dead ancestors, we learn almost nothing about their immediate family and nothing at all about their fathers.  Ayn Rand has daddy issues that burn so brightly that people are Jupiter are blinded by them.

Why I’m Writing a Parody of Atlas Shrugged

I’m reading about Ayn Rand because I intend to write a parody of Atlas Shrugged, which takes the form of a novel that occurs immediately after the end of Rand’s novel (albeit changed enough to remove the threat of copyright infringement, and strengthen a fair use defense in case something weird happens). The purpose of the parody is to create a rejoinder to the political, philosophical, and economic principles that Ayn Rand lays out in the novel.

It is simply uncontroversial that Ayn Rand’s followers, particularly those at the Ayn Rand Institute, use the novel Atlas Shrugged to spread Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. In The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism A to Z, Atlas Shrugged is quote dozens if not hundreds of times to illustrate the philosophy of Objectivism. The Ayn Rand Institute has given hundreds of thousands of copies of Atlas Shrugged to schools with the express purpose of introducing new generations of readers to Objectivism. John Galt’s long speech in Atlas Shrugged is considered to be the first complete expression of Objectivist principles. It is also my personal experience that followers of Ayn Rand quote Atlas Shrugged the same way Christians quote the Bible – at nearly every turn for nearly any occasion.

Continue reading Why I’m Writing a Parody of Atlas Shrugged

John Galt: Cult Leader

statue-1515390_1920-1200x900John Galt looks a lot like a cult leader.

After having read the first couple of chapters of part three of Atlas Shrugged, something started to look mighty familiar from my research for Simon Peter: John Galt has nearly every characteristic of a doomsday millenarian cult leader.

First, John Galt approaches people – or has them approached – when they’re psychologically vulnerable. He targets people who are in the midst of exceptional crises, in this case, generally the failure of their business or some other great professional failure.

Continue reading John Galt: Cult Leader

Reinterpreting Atlas Shrugged: Galt’s Gang

statue-1515390_1920-1200x900Apropos my previous, serious post about reinterpreting Atlas Shrugged, there’s something kicking around my head: how the actions of Galt’s guys are similar to the work stoppage. After all, if I say that people are doing work stoppages to prevent the US from benefiting the USSR, it is also clear that Galt and his guys are also contrary to the USSR.

No.  They’re not the same thing.

In many times of political crisis and chaos, bandits and warlords arise. The bandits are the enemy of both the invaders and the people – they aren’t motivated by a desire to see their country free of foreign influence, but their own personal profit.

Galt’s goons fit that description. America is going to hell in a hand basket, and what they’re worried about is how individual businessmen can’t make enormous piles of money. They take advantage of the weakened state, and further weaken it, to create the conditions where they can take profit from America’s misery.

That Galt’s goons have an ideology hastily pasted onto their terrorism is normal. Many bandits say that they’re looking out for people, or fighting an unjust system. The Shining Path rebels mouth Marx while shipping drugs, for instance. The Contras in Nicaragua said they wanted to “free” the people from socialist tyranny. The Taliban talks about creating a Caliphate. So what? Ideology doesn’t magically transform bandits into freedom fighters.

Galt and his associates are just bandits, terrorists, and criminals.

Serious alternate interpretation to Atlas Shrugged: an American work slowdown

altas3For Atlas Stumbled, one of the things I’m going to provide is a larger context for Atlas Shrugged. While reading Atlas Shrugged, I noticed along the way that Rand will invent things she doesn’t need to invent. So she will create fictional philosophers when, you know, there are real ones to choose from. She does things like this because it is exceptionally hard to argue about these fictional sources. What does the fictional philosopher really say? Only the snippets we get from the characters in a novel, they are our only source of interpretation! If you use a real philosopher, well, now people can actually look into what they said and see the nuances or see how Rand misrepresents their work.  Thus, Rand is careful to avoid specific references to Kant and Nietzsche because people might legitimately argue her interpretation and what this means to the story overall.

Continue reading Serious alternate interpretation to Atlas Shrugged: an American work slowdown

Thoughts on opposing Rand’s work with reality and the need to take her seriously

It’s very easy to just make fun of Ayn Rand’s work. This is a problem that liberals and leftists have had since they started being critical of her work. Her books and ideas are so ridiculous, so devoid of artistic merit, so lacking in consistency, so void of rigor that we have a hard time grasping that her books and ideas need anything more than a little ribbing. Certainly, we say, when we expose how bad they are, how laughable they are, people will understand that we’re telling the truth and abandon Rand.

That doesn’t happen. What happens, instead, is that her books spread despite our humor. Her acolytes run the Federal Reserve, they spread through the Tea Party, they form the foundation of the libertarianism  in both the Libertarian and Republican parties. Despite all our humor, Ayn Rand’s ideas and works flourish. In a survey, 29% of Americans say they’ve read Atlas Shrugged. In contrast, only about 20% of Americans have read the Bible from start to finish. When one counts Rand’s other books, it’s fair to say that Ayn Rand is more popular than the Bible in the US, and considerably more influential.

Her ideas are also more relevant. The Bible says nothing about the ethics of mercantile activity, industry, much less specific economic systems like capitalism. Rand does. At great length. Her books are still highly relevant (though the specifics are increasingly weird; American’s just don’t feel the significance of railroad like we used to, for instance).

And her ideas are held not only by Americans who have read her, but those who have learned of them second-hand.  Who argue that all regulation must be stopped but can’t identify the source, or who say that the only proper function of government is protecting the right to own property (a right that is not mentioned in the Constitution).
So while I think there is a place for humor in the debate of Ayn Rand, we must also be prepared to counter her ideas with other, better ideas. And if you really want to show the flaws in her thinking, counter her ideas with facts.  Facts – or, more precisely, the gulf between reality and the idealism of Rand’s followers – are like kryptonite to Ayn Rand.

So in Atlas Shrugged, the action in the story is totally divorced from reality. In my book, Atlas Stumbled, I’m going to base many of the characters are actual businesspeople from the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The one in particular is Howard Hughes. Hughes is really the closest you’re going to get to an actual Randian hero. He was this rugged individualist, communist-hating billionaire who would take wild chances with his money – and usually came out alright. He was also thin, tall, and good looking. If you’re going to look for an actual Randian hero made flesh, Hughes is the guy.

He was also a drug addict and nutjub recluse who thought that Mormons had “germ free blood” and was getting transfusions, and saved his piss and shit in jars.  But until the very end, despite his madness, he made savvy business decisions.

That kind of specificity is poison, I think, to Rand’s works. It isn’t that I’m looking for business people with exceptional flaws – but that every business leader out there is an actual human being in defiance of Rand’s idealism. Whether it is Henry Ford’s literal Nazism or Steve Jobs rejecting science to fight his cancer with herbal remedies, even brilliant businessmen are nevertheless human.  If anything, their wealth insulates them from the consequences of their actions to such an extent that their flaws are allowed to grow out of control – sometimes called “affluenza”, or the idea that wealth is very much like a mental illness that creates lack of empathy and grandiose thinking.  And all of this without even talking about how businessmen holding laissez-faire ideals are often intensely corrupt – guys like Kenneth DeLay and Bernie Madhoff, or those who orchestrated the farce at Lehman Bros. or AIG.  (I know their counter is that there has never been a perfectly capitalist system.  But that is, itself, a flaw.  A system that requires perfection to work will never work.)

Rand’s heroic business leaders lack the human flaws, and certainly the humanity, of their non-literary kin. So Rearden is like Howard Hughes in his ambition and success, but unlike him insofar that he has none of the troubles that Hughes grappled with all his life.  To the extent that Rearden has problems, he can just discard them to live his perfect Objectivist life in a way that no human being actually can.

I believe by creating links between the real world, our world, and the highly stylized fantasy of Rand – populated only by virtuous heroes and contemptible anti-heroes, without any basis in realism or possessing any nuance – that it is possible to do real damage to Atlas Shrugged, which is the primary vector of transmission of Rand’s ideas for young people.

And the most important thing is to make it a good book. To make it a book people WANT to read, because I’m fighting an uphill battle, here.

Atlas Shrugged Review, Chapter 3

atlas2Evil Commie Business Cabal Chorus: Mexico need railroads that go from nothing to nowhere! Because reasons!

Dagny Taggart: I’m so proud that my ancestor didn’t take gubmint money! He never profited through force or fraud . . . except that time he killed a congressman, and that other time he threw a dude down some stairs! He only ever earned his money, though! He didn’t force anything!

Kit Bradley: C’mon! You’re not even making sense inside the same damn paragraph, Ayn!

Continue reading Atlas Shrugged Review, Chapter 3