Yeah, But The Silo

Jennifer Rubin writes a good bit of what I've been thinking.

And (for me) at or near the top of the list of shit that's been going really wrong is the very strong probability that there's something wrong with the polling.

The questions on most polls are such that when I think about it, I can't give Biden a really high grade - even though I think he's doing pretty well in general - because (eg) AG Garland isn't stomping the fuck out of Steve Bannon and I'm kinda pissed about that. 

Even if the questions aren't so fucking stupid that they automatically allow for a much lower score on any given candidate or issue, the political marketing guys have sliced and diced the demographics to the point where smaller and smaller chunks of the electorate are so well-insulated and isolated from each other that they're likely never to see or hear anything but what they're being fed according to the algorithms.

As usual, "civilization" is finding it hard to keep up with its technology.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Imagine if the Virginia governor’s election had been held a week later

President Biden and the Democratic Party had a much-needed great news day on Friday, upsetting the favored political media narrative. Definitive predictions of doom went up in smoke, reminding us how the pack mentality that drives coverage often leads to a cringeworthy disconnect between headlines and reality.

Pundits on the right and left had spent a week insisting that the Democratic Party was in a death spiral, and that the popular Biden agenda was the source of the party’s woes. Then the ground shifted.

First, the October jobs numbers released on Friday put to rest the notion that Biden has not been addressing issues most important to voters. With a boost of 531,000 jobs and an upward revision of 235,000 jobs for August and September, Biden could claim his aggressive agenda was working.

“This did not happen by accident or just because,” Biden said. “We laid the foundation for this recovery with my American Rescue Plan that Congress passed at the beginning of my term. It put money in working families’ pockets.” He also pointed out:

We got more than 220 million shots in arms in my first 100 days. And we didn’t stop there.

In recent months, we’ve started implementing vaccination requirements, which have helped bring the number of unvaccinated adults down in this country from around 100 million several months ago to 60 million now.

You know, that’s good for our health, but it’s also good for our economy.

Now vaccine — vaccinated workers are going back to work. Vaccinated shoppers are going back to stores.

And with the launch of the vaccine for kids ages 5 through 11 this week, we can make sure more vaccinated children can stay in school.

The constant refrain from Republicans and much of the political media that Biden has been focused on the wrong things simply does not hold up to scrutiny. One can question whether presidents get too much credit for economic numbers, but if you’re going to hold Biden responsible for the outcome, he has every reason to boast about the 5.6 million jobs created since the start of his term, an unemployment rate down to 4.6 percent, an average gain of 600,000 jobs per month and a rise in hourly wages of nearly 5 percent this year.

Moreover, in the agonizing struggle to pass two giant pieces of legislation, Biden could finally declare victory. The House on Friday voted to adopt the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan. The final Build Back Better vote will take place by the week of Nov. 15.

Consider the narrative incessantly pushed by virtually every media outlet until Friday: Biden has not delivered on the economy. His agenda is too far left, threatening to expand the debt and fuel inflation. He has lost the confidence of the public on covid. Biden cannot corral the left (and/or the centrists).

None of that was borne out by subsequent events (or polling on his agenda). By week’s end, the economy looked on much firmer footing — and, unlike his predecessor, the president had achieved a historic infrastructure investment.

Inflation and deficit fears also subsided. The Joint Committee on Taxation declared the Build Back Better agenda would raise about $1.47 trillion over 10 years and in all likelihood would not add to the deficit. A pack of Nobel Prize-winning economists confirmed that the agenda would reduce long-term inflationary pressure. As one told The Post, “This is sound and uncontroversial economics — increasing supply and capacity reduces the bottlenecks that fuel inflationary surges.” Separately, Moody’s Analytics reported that Biden’s legislation “will strengthen long-term economic growth, the benefits of which would mostly accrue to lower- and middle-income Americans,” and it dismissed inflation concerns as “overdone.”

If the Virginia governor’s race had taken place after Friday, the good news might or might not have made a difference in the outcome. But the jobs numbers and legislative wins surely would have provided Democrats with a sense of momentum and blunted the gloomy coverage that no doubt depressed Democratic voter turnout.

One can argue that Democrats should have passed their bills weeks ago, allowing Virginia Democrats to bask in the glow of legislative success. However, one might also take away a different lesson, namely that the hyperbolic media coverage does a disservice to the public, increasing anxiety, playing down real progress and exaggerating the degree of political peril the administration faces. The media’s consistently premature declarations of failure (as with the Afghanistan airlift) never seem to prompt self-examination.

Greatly improved jobs figures and declining coronavirus numbers coupled with passage of the American Rescue Plan, historic infrastructure legislation and Build Back Better should soon allow Biden to claim one of the most successful first years of any modern president.

The “Biden failure” narrative, in retrospect, appears alarmist and downright wrong. If only the political media would exercise a modicum of self-restraint and allow events to play out, it might not continually wind up defending foolish predictions. Then again, measured headlines and restrained cable TV analysis do not necessarily draw big audiences.

Call It What It Is

The poodliest of Press Poodles get it right once in a while, and I try to lift 'em up when they do.

Here's MSNBC indulging their fantasy of being a bulldog. 

MSNBC:

Trump's GSA tells Biden the transition can begin

But let's not sugarcoat this failed coup

Establishing a line here is a critical function of journalism. Which is why it's important for the media to call what Trump's campaign tried to set in motion an attempted coup.

Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, former ambassador to Germany and current Trumpist agitator, offered some sage advice to reporters Thursday: "The journalism industry will improve when there is Truth in labeling its reporting."

I think that's true. Which is why, Ric, I also think it's important for the media to call what President Donald Trump's campaign has tried to set in motion these past few weeks an attempted coup. Trump tried to instigate an "autogolpe" (also known as a self-coup). This particular label is terrifying and hard to fathom, but it is also the more accurate way to describe what has happened. As of this writing, the Trump campaign's putative putsch failed, with almost comical ineptness. But it also marked a predictably dangerous turn for an autocratic president who can't admit to losing, fair and square.

Here's how Reuters described the situation on Thursday: "A senior Trump campaign official told Reuters the plan was to cast enough doubt on the results in crucial states to persuade Republican legislators to step in and appoint their own slates of electors."

This reporting is backed up by a series of events in states like Michigan, where Trump tried to cajole and pressure state officials into investigating and hopefully overturning the results. Monday, after Michigan did finally certify its result, the administrator of the General Services Administration informed President-elect Joe Biden's campaign in a defensive letter that the agency would order federal agencies to cooperate with a presidential transition.

Reporting is an involved process that aggregates dozens of voices and sorts through motives and intent. Giving the president the benefit of the doubt here would be more biased than just reporting the facts as we know them.

Even so, I know that "coup" is a big word that carries a lot of historical baggage. It shouldn't be used without deliberation. Can there be a coup that doesn't involve a news blackout or tanks in the streets or people cowering in their homes? Perhaps movie coups aren't the best archetypes. Instead, let's evaluate some of the clearer objections.

Provocatively, Indi Samarajiva argues that even when a coup is doomed to fail — and especially when everyone knows that the coup will fail in advance — it can still do damage. Samarajiva lived through what she calls a "student coup" in Sri Lanka, and she writes that America is strong enough to withstand Trump, this time.

But Samarajiva also notes that our democracy encourages bad-faith actors to maximize their power. She is right. We need to establish precedents and laws stronger and deeper than the polite norms we ask presidents to abide by today. We must also re-evaluate our language and narrative; the word here is "coup," and the narrative here is "a coup that did not succeed." Because if the election were closer — if, say, the election came down to only one state — we might have a totally different situation on our hands. And that's scary.

Elsewhere, Trump sympathizer Jay Whig argues that it's unfair to call this a coup because Trump may not even understand what he's doing — he may genuinely believe he won the election. But whether Trump is or isn't knowingly committing sedition doesn't matter. Motive matters far less than intention and consequence. The election was fair; to even try to subvert it while fomenting a demonstrably false conspiracy is a consequence that demands an explanation.

Others, like political scientist Erica de Bruin, argued early on that Trump hadn't actually violated any laws. I concede that this continues to be more or less true. It's true that Trump's lawyers have seemed unwilling to lie in court in the same way that they have in the media. But it is a felony to tamper with the results of a certified election. (Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, certainly seemed to feel he was being pressured by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to tamper with the certification.) It is also a felony to offer state legislators or presidential electors a thing of value to influence an official decision. Several election law experts wrote Monday that the conduct of Trump's attorneys is grounds for disbarment. Taken in aggregate, this is a political crime — the type that should trigger an impeachment — and an offense against the system itself.

The journalism professor within me, who came of age during a time when accusations of media bias carried more weight, thinks the press should be careful with the word "coup" because it could seem overly partisan. Won't the press lose credibility with Republicans if it gangs up on Trump's post-election machinations? But my wizened self disagrees with my former self.

The press already finds it hard to communicate with people who have personalized politics, who, in the words of Republican never-Trumper Tim Miller, "have been trained to believe that the left is evil incarnate." The conspiracy "sounds so preposterous to everyone else that Republican elected officials can avoid engaging on the merits while they accuse The Media of being mean to them for asking about it and mock liberals for panicking over this subversion of our democracy."

Biden understands that the press's new moral grammar — the president lies; the president cheats on his taxes; the president stokes racial animosity — is a healthy development for journalism in its role as an institutional guardrail against authoritarianism.

He also understands that the media's good instincts can amplify Trump's bad ones. With Trump, a hunch can turn into a tweet, which can turn into a strategy, which can turn into a fait accompli in the space of several minutes. To win, which for Trump means to be the center of attention, is to have an enemy that is suggesting something horrible about you.

Biden wants to draw Trump away from the center of attention. He wants Americans who voted for Trump to focus on his message, mien and mindful transition. The more amped up the rhetoric, the harder Biden's job will become. It will also complicate his informal efforts to reach out to Republican lawmakers.

And yet, the press must not apply a coat of sugar in service of a politician's agenda. Establishing a line here is a critical function of the media. This is how we build those guardrails we like to talk about; we point out what is, and what is not, acceptable in a democracy. In American elections, there is an implicit trust that people in power will cede their positions when they lose, but a lot of that trust is based on actors' proceeding in good faith and being responsive to political cues. Calling out bad-faith politicians who do bad things using executive power is an essential journalistic mission.

This Week Last Night

John Oliver - cuz an awful lot of the real investigative journalism, and in-depth reporting is happening on cable comedy shows.

The Silo Effect

Columbia Journalism Review:

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

It's the narrow-mindedness, stupid.

While you're trying to see country and party and candidates from a perspective that includes as many aspects as possible, Alt-Right Conservatives (eg) are being fed a steady diet of binary purity, narrowing the perspective down to some pretty ridiculous bumper sticker sloganeering that sometimes contradicts itself.

"My guys are always and only good which means your guys can't be anything but always and only bad."

But there's a kind of Orwellian contradiction to it too. If I start with that binary, but then apply the negative component to "the system of a corrupt duopoly" (eg), then the benefit of the smear accrues to whoever I can make you believe is standing against whatever's being smeared. So while the overall approval for Congress is low and constantly beat down by relentless generalized attacks on "idiots in da gubmint", I can condition you at the same time to see "our guys" as fighting the noble fight to hold back the onslaught of the ruinous agenda of tax-n-spend libruls and blah blah blah.

Remember that while the approval numbers for Congress as a whole are dismal, 90-95% of these people get re-elected. A big bunch of the reason for  that on the GOP side is gerrymandering and voter suppression, but let's put all that together with a message of "they all suck, but my guy's one of the good ones - he's lookin' out for me".  Now we have that the cult thing - isolation and indoctrination, which is where that thing about The Breitbart Sphere comes in.

And not to get all Both-Sides-ey on ya, but it's become a lot more visible on the left as well. The big myth being peddled the hardest is that Hillary didn't win because "she's not Democrat enough". "She's a creature of Neo-Liberalism." "She abandoned traditional Democratic Party values". None of that is flat-out untrue, but it illustrates for me that the Purity Warriors are revving up, and I'm not going along with that because I see it as having full potential to be translated to little more than fulfillment of the Both-Sides prophesy.

Analogy Alert

We're almost completely off the pavement on the righthand shoulder, and we have to steer  to the left to keep from hitting the bridge abutment up ahead. But if we yank the wheel and over-correct, we run just as big a risk of veering all the way over into the left lane and being smushed head-on by a cement truck.

The point being that The Logical Extreme is where good ideas go to die. Keeping it down the middle isn't sexy and it's not terribly satisfying and it can feel just like losing, but it's what we have to do in order to sustain this little experiment in self-government.

In the end it all depends on factual information, and the ability to test the information so we can make accurate assessments of its veracity.

Let's review:

In the presence of confirming evidence

and

the absence of conflicting evidence,

the statement is more likely to be true

I the presence of conflicting evidence

or

the absence of confirming evidence,

the statement is more likely to be false

A New Era Dawns

BBC News

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months.

It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.

Its selection follows June's Brexit vote and the US presidential election.

Oxford Dictionaries' Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become "one of the defining words of our time".

Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right" from a shortlist selected to reflect the social, cultural, political, economic and technological trends and events of the year.

Spotting the false thingie

Remember all the stuff we learned in US History way back in high school? Stuff like Yellow Journalism?

Some of y'all are too young to have had that chance because we stopped teaching the good "liberal" stuff quite a while ago, and of course, some of us are too old, and I guess we forgot too much and now here we are again.

Nov 1888

Gotta Wonder

In Trump's defense, he probably has never read the First Amendment.

Or the rest of the Constitution.#ImWithTur pic.twitter.com/vPw6AQQNtH

— Eric Wolfson (@EricWolfson) November 2, 2016

Seth

Seth Myers, Samantha Bee and John Oliver are the 4th estate now

"You don't get to peddle racist rhetoric for 5 years and decide when it's over" —Seth Myers on Trump's birtherism: pic.twitter.com/hQ2IpGX8nD

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 20, 2016

Today's Quote

"Calling a liar a liar isn't an opinion if you can prove it. That's what we call a fact. The idea that news network executives traded their balls for ratings, that's just my opinion." --Samantha Bee

Part 1

Part 2

And Now, Samantha

Today's Moronicity

Lil Brian (bless his heart) tries to make a point about how the sheriff's limited resources are being stretched too thin by helping all those dirty immigrant invaders who're busily destroying USAmerica Inc by trying not to get fucked over - or something.

So here's a question:  How do we fix the problem of underfunded border security when "conservatives" refuse to support funding for better border security?

It's just too fucking typical of the over-delegating under-thinking kind of hands-off "Modern Management Mindset" that always always always ends up saying, "We need you to improve all this mess, but make sure you don't change anything - and just let us know what you need, as long as it's nothing".

These jag-offs wanna slag Obama with some bullshit about "leadership"?

PS) I'm betting there's a fair probability that somebody's good buddy/brother-in-law is putting together a really great private-sector (or even better, a public/private) solution that promises amazing results at the low low price of about 2 1/2 times what it'll cost us if we just figure out a coupla ways to treat people like people instead of using them as political theater props in order to turn their hardship into corporate profit.

No soul and no honor.

Smart

Many many times, Rachel Maddow is just really annoying.  Just as many times, she shows herself to be among the smartest political analysts anywhere; and why it's a good idea for me to listen to people who frequently annoy me.

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