Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

The News Media and Karen Santorum

I have written previously that, while it was unfortunate for the Republican Party (and the country) that Mitch Daniels and other people like him are not running for president, I understand their decision and why they made it.  In Governor Daniels’ case, it just would not be worth what the gutter press we have today would have put his family through.

And so, in case anybody thinks I was exaggerating, I want to thank Nancy Hass at Newsweek/The Daily Beast for proving my point.  Ms. Hass has just written a 1200-word-plus article about Karen Santorum’s life before she met and married Rick.  The article, of course, has no point other than to try to embarrass former Senator and Mrs. Santorum.

Apparently, Mrs. Santorum, back in her 20s, lived with a doctor who was 40 years older than her and who performed abortions.  Okay, but so what?  Who cares?  How is that relevant to anything?

Of course, that’s the point.  There is no point.  The only purpose of the article to try to dig up “dirt” (or what some people might consider dirt) on people who are connected with candidates that Ms. Hass/The Daily Beast/Newsweek don’t like and then publish it in the hopes that these irrelevancies may somehow hurt the candidates in question. If the articles have no redeeming social purpose other than to appeal to the prurient interest of certain groups of people, that’s okay – as long as the proper political candidate is hurt (or might be hurt).

So, thank you, Ms. Hass (and The Daily Beast/Newsweek) for proving my point – and for helping make our political process the disgusting mess that it has become today.

A Washington Post Columnist Visits a Foreign Country

This is from a short article by Richard Cohen, an Op-Ed columnist for The Washington Post, on Wednesday, about a “foreign country” he recently visited, apparently via his television set*:

“Among the losers Tuesday night in Iowa was the late Leslie Poles Hartley. He was the British novelist who began his best work, “The Go-Between,” by saying, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Now we know, so does the Republican Party.

Watching the returns come in last night, … I chanced upon an all-important endorsement Rick Perry Santorum was getting. It came from Jim Bob Duggar, who, as far as a prodigious amount of research can tell me, is famous for fathering 19 children. He and his wife, Michelle … are the stars of a TV reality show called “19 and Counting.” …

Earlier, I had watched a clip of Karen Santorum, Rick’s wife, crying as her husband defended or explained or described how they had handled the 1996 death of their prematurely born son, Gabriel. Karen Santorum wrote a book about the tragedy, Letter to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum.” They brought the dead child home from the hospital to show their other children, slept with him that night and returned him to the hospital where … I don’t know.

I relate this story without any judgment whatsoever [sic], since I find myself incapable anymore of judging the folkways of the people who live in the foreign country we call the GOP. It is simply a strange place, and the man who took his dead child home** and who was endorsed by the father of 19 nearly won the Iowa caucus ...

After campaigning in Iowa for what amounts to eight years, Romney cannot be said to have done well. … But his opposition is weird, underfunded and inconceivable as president. …

Still, in making predictions, it is useful to keep the sagacious Leslie Poles Hartley in mind. What he said about the past is just as true for the contemporary Republican Party. It is a foreign country, and most of us are mere tourists there.”

There is not much to say about Mr. Cohen’s article.  The article really says it all – all by itself.

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* I have tried to keep the spirit of Mr. Cohen’s piece, but if you want to read the whole article, and I do recommend it, you can find it here.

** I wonder what Mr. Cohen thinks about the fact President Lincoln had the body of his dear son Willie exhumed twice so that he and Mary could look at him again. (See here.)

"The Daily Show" and President Barack Obama

I was watching part of "The Daily Show" a couple of days ago. Jon Stewart was doing his usual thing with respect to some of George W. Bush’s recent statements, especially President Bush’s interview with Charlie Gibson.

As I was watching, I began to wonder what is going to happen to The Daily Show (and its spin-off, the Colbert Report) when President Bush leaves office and Barack Obama becomes President. George Bush has been the perfect foil for Jon Stewart, with his inarticulateness and, for a majority of Mr. Stewart’s audience, his positions.

I wondered whether Mr. Stewart will make fun of President Obama the same way he has of President Bush. Will the Daily Show ridicule and laugh at President Obama the way it has President Bush? Certainly, President-elect Obama is a better speaker than President Bush, so the opportunity in that area will be less. But what about his positions? Will Mr. Stewart be giving President Obama’s positions the same treatment he has been giving those of President Bush?

Actually, the question is not really what Jon Stewart will be doing. My guess is that he will try to treat President Obama the same way he has President Bush. The real question is how will The Daily Show’s viewers take to such criticism of President Obama? Are they going to tune in to watch Jon Stewart make fun of their President, someone they actually like, someone whose positions they agree with?

I’m not sure, but I hope Jon Stewart has saved some of the money he has been making over the last few years because I think he may have four lean years coming up.

Political "Fact Checking"

A big thing in the media this election cycle is taking a claim or charge by a candidate and then "checking" to see whether it is true or false, whether the candidate is telling the truth or lying. It is an interesting exercise, but how well it is working is open to question.

Obviously, the exercise requires total objectivity and honesty in the self-proclaimed judge. But even that is not enough. In fact, it reminds me of a story that happened at the company I worked for before my current employer. I went into a fellow employee’s office and asked her to read a certain provision in a contract. I then asked her if the meaning was clear. I said that I thought it was clear, but I wanted to get a second opinion. She said yes, it was clear. I started to leave, but then I stopped. I turned around and asked her what it meant. She told me. And her interpretation of this provision, which both of us thought was perfectly clear, was 180 degrees opposite of mine.

Which beings me back to political fact checking. Let me give you two recent examples of fact checking, here and here. Both of these are by CNN, and they involve charges made by John McCain against Barack Obama. One of them looks at Senator McCain’s charge that Senator Obama has "never taken on the leaders of his party." The other relates to what Senator Obama said about our troops in Afghanistan.

In both cases, CNN decided that Senator McCain’s charge was false. But after reading the very same information on which CNN based its judgment, I came to the opposite conclusion, especially with respect to the first charge, that Senator Obama has not taken on the leaders of his own party in the Senate. On this one, CNN quoted an analysis by Congressional Quarterly that said Senator Obama had voted with his party on 29 out of 30 votes that CQ decided were "key" votes. CNN then mentioned one time in 2005 (his first year in the Senate) that Senator Obama had voted with seventeen other Democrats against the majority of the Democrats. On the basis of this, CNN concluded that Senator McCain’s charge was "[f]alse. While McCain is correct that Obama has supported the Democratic leadership almost all of the time, to say he’s never differed with them is not true." Huh?! Sounds to me that Senator McCain pretty much hit the nail on the head with this charge.

On the second charge, CNN agreed that Senator Obama said what Senator McCain’s commercial claimed, but they seemed to decide Senator McCain’s charge was false anyway because they could find no evidence Senator Obama ever repeated the remark and because the remark left a different impression than what Senator Obama had said twelve days earlier. In other words, CNN said Senator McCain’s charge was false because, even though Senator Obama did say it, CNN didn’t think Senator Obama really meant it in the way Senator McCain was claiming he said it.

But the best example of "fact-check follies" comes from James Taranto at WSJ.com’s Best of the Web Today. Mr. Taranto notes that both ABC and CNN fact-checked one of John McCain’s claims (that he had opposed President Reagan’s sending Marines to Lebanon). ABC found it to be false. CNN said it was true.

That pretty well sums up political fact checking by the media. I guess the weather forecasts are still the most accurate thing in much of the media today.

John Edwards and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

As I read about the rumors concerning John Edwards’ alleged affair, and the child he may have fathered (fairly recently), I am reminded of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Let me explain.

Many people, especially Democrats, viewed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as an evil, right-wing group that slandered John Kerry with a lot of falsehoods about his time in Vietnam. They have even tried to turn the SBVT’s name into a term of dirty tricks politics: "swiftboating".*

What I found most interesting about the SBVT, however, was how they were able to overcome the resistance of the mainstream media to report on their charges/statements and get their points out. When the MSM would not report on their press conferences or look into their claims, they wrote a book, they produced TV commercials, and they pushed their issues through talk radio and the Internet. Eventually, John Kerry felt obligated to respond, and then the MSM finally had to report on the issue.

It seems like something similar may be happening here. The MSM is ignoring this issue. You can find it on the blogs and, apparently, in the National Enquirer, but that’s it. Why the silence? If it is to be nice to Elizabeth Edwards, I can understand it. Other than that, I cannot come up with a reason. Last February The New York Times published an article with innuendo about John McCain and a female lobbyist that had less substance than what seems to be the case here. It cannot be that Edwards is a private citizen. He was running for President six months ago. It was a big deal earlier this summer when he endorsed Senator Obama. There has even been talk about him having a role in an Obama administration.

So why the silence? I think it’s because the MSM doesn’t consider this to be a story that they want to report on; just like the SBVT’s charges in 2004. This story may not come out like the SBVT story eventually did. Certainly, this story doesn’t have the kind of people who believed so deeply in that issue. But it does raise an interesting question about the role of the MSM and their ability to decide what is allowed to be an issue and what isn’t. And about the need for talk radio and the Internet and groups like the Swift Board Veterans for Truth to inform voters about things the mainstream media doesn’t think we need to know about.

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* The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised two big issues about John Kerry and Vietnam. The first related to Kerry’s service in Vietnam and whether it was what he claimed it to be. The second related to what he said about our servicemen in Vietnam when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. I can’t speak for the truth or untruth of the former. I didn’t look at it because I didn’t care; it didn’t matter to me. The second point, however, mattered to me a lot. I had thought about it even before the SBVT raised the issue, and I was glad somebody was mentioning because I thought it was important.

How Do We Know What Is Really Happening In Iraq?

I don’t know about other people, but sometimes I find it really difficult to really know what is going on in Iraq. A good example of this is the recent fighting in Basra and other places, including Baghdad, between Iraqi government forces and various Shiite militias. I try to read news and opinion articles from different publications and websites and from different points of view. The reports in this case have had totally different conclusions. Some said it was a disaster for the Iraqi government, others said the government did pretty well, and still others said it was a stalemate. I do not know if any of the articles were right, but given the different conclusions, at least some of them had to be wrong.

So what do you do in these cases? How do you know what and who to believe? In situations such as this, I try to look at the articles in several ways:

    Where is the writer and where is he getting his information from? Is he near the fighting or hundreds of miles away, just reporting what he is told by others (whether government spokespeople or somebody else)? Sometimes a reporter can’t get the big picture if he is too close, but if the reporter is holed up in the Green Zone in Baghdad and the fighting is in Basra, I question the report a little more.

    When it comes to fighting, does the reporter have any special expertise or experience on military matters? I don’t mean service in the military; I just mean some real knowledge about things military. Many regular reporters do not have the knowledge to be able to understand and report what battles really mean, as opposed to what they might appear to be on the surface at first glance.

    What is the editorial position of the publication in which the article appears? News articles do not always follow the editorial policy, but the more extreme the editorial positions, the more careful you should be about the news reports in that publication – at least until you have more experience with that reporter yourself,

    How much of the article seems to be based on quoting people? When I see a reporter trying to explain things by quoting this person or that, I sometimes wonder how those people got picked. How do we know that the people quoted are representative? Sometimes I wonder whether reporters aren’t just passing on their own opinions by the quotations they pick to give us. In other cases, the people willing to talk to a reporter may not be representative of the people as a whole.

    Finally, at least when it comes to battles and things like that, I always figure the quicker and earlier the report or the article is, the less likely it is to be accurate. Military operations take a while. You cannot properly evaluate them at the beginning or in the middle – or sometimes even right after they are over. A little time for evaluation and review increases the chances the report is accurate.

Media Reports on Climate Change Skepticism – Sort Of

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune had an article* on page 8 entitled "Summit warms the hearts of climate change skeptics". The only trouble with the article was that it told us very little about the substantive positions of the global warming skeptics. It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that we were told what scientists at the conference were saying – which was after the pro-global warming side was discussed in the third and seventh paragraphs of the article, as well as in a little box next to the top of the article entitled "The case for global warming."

The article did ultimately tell us a little more about what happened at the conference – in the last three paragraphs of the article – and after more time was spent letting the global warming side say why they were right and the skeptics were off base.

If you are interested in a little bit of real substance about what happened at the conference, see this article in the London Sunday Telegraph or go to the Heartland Institute website.

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* I apologize for not linking to the article itself, but I could not find it on the Tribune website.  It was in the print edition, though.

A Good Story Gone Sad

There was a sad story in today’s paper. It wasn’t about a suicide bomber killing little children or families losing their houses because of mortgage problems. It was just a story about a young man who wanted to serve his country, but couldn’t.

Britain’s Prince Harry, third in line to the crown of England, had not been allowed to go with his regiment, the Household Cavalry, when they went to Iraq last year. Not surprisingly, he felt bad. He wanted to be with the men he had trained with and served with. But because of his position, because of all of the publicity his serving would result in, it was not to be.

But then a deal was struck. The media in Britain agreed that they would keep his service a secret, that the Prince could serve in Afghanistan without the glare of publicity, and that the media would get its coverage when he returned.

And for ten weeks it worked. There was a hint in a couple of places, but nobody followed up. And Prince Harry got to serve.

But then Thursday night the Drudge Report posted the story on its website for the world to see, and so the Harry’s service had to end. There was no reason for the report. No great good was done by it. It was something that could be done, so it was.

When so many people are not willing to serve others, it is sad when one who wants to is not allowed to do so. For no good reason.

What Was The New York Times Trying to Say?

Wednesday’s post on Iraq led with a Lincoln quotation from August of 1864. Yesterday’s article in The New York Times about … about … about something that happened, or maybe it didn’t happen but somebody thought it might be happening, almost ten years ago involving John McCain, brings to mind another Lincoln quote, this one from Lincoln’s debate with Stephen Douglas in Quincy in 1858.

In talking about Douglas’s attempts to square his theory of popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln said: "Is not that running his popular sovereignty down awfully? Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?"

"The homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death". That is just about the amount of substance that the Times gave us yesterday.

When Good News Isn't News

As bad news from Iraq has decreased, so have news reports from Iraq. Apparently, success, as seen in the absence of car bombs and lower numbers of casualties, and the hard, difficult work of maintaining security so people can live normal lives again, just isn’t as interesting or newsworthy as bombs and deaths and apparent failure.

In that spirit, I wanted to give a brief history of the United States’ involvement in World War II:

• December 1941 – Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
• January - June 1942 – Massive losses to German U-Boats in the North Atlantic.
• April 1942 – Bataan surrenders.
• May 1942 – Corregidor surrenders.
• February 1943 – Americans suffer huge losses at Kasserine Pass in North Africa.
• August 1943 – George Patton removed from command after slapping a soldier.
• January 1944 – Allies bottled up on beachhead at Anzio in Italy.
• June 1944 – U.S. fails to reach first-day targets in Normandy invasion; disarray among parachutists and gliders result in loss of countless troops.
• June/early July 1944 – US forces fail to break out of Normandy.
• December 1944 – Massive German counteroffensive in Ardennes pushes US forces back.
• February 1945 – 6,800 troops die and 20,000 are wounded trying to take Iwo Jima.
• April - June 1945 – 5000 American sailors die in Japan’s kamikaze campaign at Okinawa.