The Boy Who Could Change the World (27 page)

Hurting Seniors: The Attack on Social Security

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting6

June 11, 2006

Age 19

Recent events provide a compelling case study of how this process works. Conservatives have wanted to get rid of Social Security for years. The most successful anti-poverty program in history, it clearly shows how the government can be used to help people—anathema to conservative ideology. Now, with a secure lock on government, is their time to strike. As a White House deputy wrote in a memo that was later leaked, “For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win—and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country.”

There's extremely strong public support for Social Security—conservatives could certainly never just come out and say they wanted to end it—so their plan is to deceive the public: First, persuade people that Social Security is facing some sort of crisis and won't be around for the next generation. Second, convince them to begin replacing Social Security with a privatized version. Privatization, the logic goes, will naturally keep increasing until all of Social Security is eliminated. The only problem is that Social Security isn't facing a crisis and any form of privatization, which would require both paying out to existing retirees and saving away money for the private accounts of the current generation, would worsen whatever financial problems Social Security does have.

But think tanks have been preparing for this moment for years, floating privatization plans and doing their best to persuade the media that Social Security was in imminent danger. So when the Bush
administration started up their anti–Social Security campaign, the media knew exactly what to say.

CBS, for example, presented a segment featuring man-on-the-street Tad DeHaven. “I don't expect to get anything from Social Security, OK?” said young DeHaven. “It's not going to be there—that's my assumption.” DeHaven had good reason to say these things: for years, he's been one of the leading Republican activists in the fight to get rid of Social Security. CBS never mentioned the connection.

A later CBS report boosted fears that Social Security was going bankrupt by displaying a graphic on the screen that read “2042: Insolvent = 0 benefits??” [
sic
] (“In 2042, Social Security will become insolvent, and today's young workers risk losing their benefits,” a voiceover explained.) But this just isn't true: even the pessimistic Social Security Administration concedes that by 2042 Social Security will be able to pay nearly 80% of scheduled benefits, which is still far more than what it pays out today.

Other networks were no better. NBC's report features quotes from Bush saying the system would go “flat bust” and an interview with a Heritage Foundation scholar—identified only as a “Social Security expert”—but allowed no critics to contradict their claims. Meanwhile, an ABC report claimed, “One thing everyone agrees on, the Social Security system as it exists now won't be able to afford those payments for long after the Wilsons retire.” In fact, it's quite the opposite: even the most pessimistic predictions say that Social Security will be fine until the Wilsons are statistically dead. Again, no critics got a voice.

Fighting Back: Responses to the Mainstream Media

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting7

June 15, 2006

Age 19

Unlike the conservative media, it does not appear the national media is intentionally partisan. But it exists in a very specific structural context. A recent study found that two-thirds of journalists thought bottom-line pressure was “seriously hurting the quality of news coverage” while around half reported their newsrooms had been cut. 75% of print and 85% of broadcast journalists agreed that “too little attention is paid to complex issues.” When you're short on staff and stories are shallow, reporters become even more dependent on outside sources—and the right-wing think tanks are more than willing to help out, while further pulling coverage to the right.

But one obvious solution—creating a matching set of left-wing think tanks—while perhaps helpful in balancing the debate, will not solve the problem. Media norms of balance mean that even qualified experts will always be presented as “just one side of the story,” balanced directly against inaccurate conservatives—recall how the handful of corporate-funded global warming deniers are still balanced against the overwhelming scientific consensus.

Ideally, viewers would be able to hear both perspectives and decide which they thought was accurate. But since, as the journalists conceded, so little time is spent explaining complex issues, in practice very little information is presented that can help the viewer decide who's correct. So they're left to decide based on their existing ideological preferences, further splitting the country into two alternate realities.

Figuring out what is true—especially when it's so obvious, as in
the examples above—is precisely what the mainstream media should be doing. Partisan pundits would be replaced with thoughtful scholars. Non-peer-reviewed books would be ignored, not endlessly promoted. Scientific facts would be given precedence over political arguments. Political commentary would be replaced by factual education.

Don't hold your breath. Six major companies own nearly 90% of all media outlets.
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And they—and their advertisers—don't mind how things are going. Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (Paramount, CBS, Blockbuster, MTV, Comedy Central, etc.), told a group of CEOs that “I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom.” And, “from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.” Better news reporting wouldn't just be more expensive, it would threaten these business interests.

To get the straight story, it's necessary to turn to independent and community sources which don't have such conflicts of interest. One possibility is the daily news show
Democracy Now!
, hosted by Amy Goodman, which is funded only by viewers and foundations. Broadcast on 150 radio stations, 150 television stations, and the Internet, the show presents stories from activists, journalists, authors, and public interest organizations from around the world.

When outlets from ABC to the
New York Times
began claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,
Democracy Now!
was one of the few sources to take a contrary view. It presented the testimony of Iraq's top weapons official, who defected to the U.S. and explained that all the weapons had been destroyed. (Other stations, ironically, parroted the Bush administration in promoting the information he presented about the weapons Iraq had, without mentioning they had been destroyed.)
^†
†

And when U.S. soldiers kidnapped Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the
democratically elected president of Haiti, and flew him to the Central African Republic, where they locked him in a hotel room, he managed to quietly phone out while armed guards stood outside his door.
Democracy Now!
was alone in airing his incredible story. When Aristide was finally freed, he insisted on returning to his country, and again Amy Goodman was the only U.S. television journalist who dared to accompany him back.
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Still,
Democracy Now
!'s audience is rather small compared to that of the mainstream media. But stories from overseas hint at what could happen if enough people began paying attention to such sources. In South Korea, the country with the highest rate of broadband adoption, politics has been turned upside down by OhmyNews, a five-year-old website. Founded by Oh Yeon Ho, OhmyNews has a feature unlike any other paper: more than 85% of its stories are contributed by readers.

Almost anyone can write for OhmyNews: the site posts 70% of all stories that are submitted, over 15,000 citizen-reporters have published stories. OhmyNews copyedits their work but tries to leave their differing styles intact. The citizen-reporters write about things they know about and that interest them; together they end up covering most of the traditional spectrum. Yet their new voices end up providing coverage on things which typically get ignored by the mainstream media.
^†
†

This is most evident in their political coverage. Before Ohmy News, conservatives controlled 80% of Korea's newspaper circulation. Then OhmyNews gave a voice to progressives, inspiring massive nationwide protests against the government. The protests, in turn, led to the election of reformist Roh Moo Hyun, now known as “the first Internet president.” The furious conservative National Assembly responded by voting to impeach Roh on technical grounds. OhmyNews readers again organized and overthrew the Assembly in the next election, reinstating Roh. There's no reason why what happened in South Korea can't happen here. Overcoming the tide
of misinformation is hard work, but working together committed citizens can make amazing progress, even when up against the most powerful interests. Our society has an extraordinary level of freedom and openness. Whether we use that freedom to seek out the truth or remain content with conventional platitudes is up to us.

What Journalists Don't: Lessons from the
Times

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001677

April 10, 2005

Age 18

Speech to the
Bay Area Law School Technology Conference
blogs panel, as prepared
.

So I was asked to speak about bloggers and journalists—it seems like people are always finding an excuse to talk about this. In fact, the National Press Club had a panel on it just yesterday. Most of the discussion focuses on what bloggers do—is it trustworthy? Is it right?—but I'd like to take a different tack. I'd like to discuss what journalists
don't
.

Last summer, during the election campaign, I decided to take on a little project. Every day for a month I would read all the political articles in the
New York Times
and take notes on them on a blog. A number of things stood out and I thought I would discuss them. Keep in mind that this is the
New York Times
, widely recognized to be the most serious of newspapers. So everything that applies to them applies to an even greater extent to all the lesser newspapers, the evening news, the talking-head shows, and so on.

The first was the extreme conservative bias. One day, they ran a front-page story that claimed Kerry was, quote, like a caged hamster. Another, claiming, quote, life is like high school, decided to interview various Kerry classmates. So they got two quotes. On the right was the guy who thought Kerry “seem[ed] ruthless” and on the left was the one who insisted “hatred is too strong a word” for what his classmates felt. These are just fun examples—I found hundreds of
these things in just a month. And many were on more serious issues as well.

The constant theme was that
Times
reporters would repeat Republican talking points and images and so on. Kerry was elitist, Kerry was a flip-flopper, the Kerry campaign was failing. One reporter even had his own cottage industry in stories of that last type. Adam Nagourney ran 22 consecutive stories claiming Democrats were worried about themselves.

But we shouldn't forget the more important things as well. The
Times
was, of course, one of the major outlets for false claims that Iraq had WMDs. My understanding is that it's a sort of cardinal rule in journalism that if you're going to make a claim, especially a big, important front-page claim, you get two sources. Well, the
Times
didn't do that on WMDs—they just printed whatever the administration said. And when the administration used their bogus reporting to go to war, the
Times
did its best to ignore the fact that the war was a blatant violation of international law.

In all these areas, the blogs bested the
Times
. Some tracked the spreading meme that Kerry was elitist, others pointed out that Bush wasn't much of a down-home cowboy himself, still others carefully debunked each new right-wing myth. Blogs pointed to people like weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who correctly pointed out there were no WMDs, or the Iraqi defector who explained they had all been destroyed. Blogs 1,
Times
0.

The second thing I noticed during my study was that reporters rarely pointed out Bush was lying, corrected his lies, or even conceded that an objective reality containing a truth existed. You don't have to trust me on this one; I spoke to
Washington Post
campaign reporter Jim VandeHei about it when he visited Stanford. Some things are undoubtedly true, he said—he got very animated—but editors won't let reporters print the facts. He wanted to do a piece where he compared Bush and Kerry's stump speeches to see how many lies they contained, but editors just wouldn't let him.

So instead you get the results so perfectly parodied by Paul Krugman, who commented that if the administration announced the Earth was flat, the lead story in the
Times
the next day would be “Shape of Earth: Views Differ.” In fact, we don't really need to leave
that sort of thing to the imagination anymore. The other month ABC ran a show which balanced people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens against respected doctors who explained that their experiences resulted from a condition called sleep paralysis. Who was right? ABC refused to say.

Even when facts are reported, they don't seem to stick. Just last month, a Harris poll found that 47% of adults think Saddam helped plan 9/11 and 36% think Iraq had WMDs. But if the media sends the message that it's unnecessary to check your beliefs against the facts, should we really be so surprised that so many Americans don't?

Blogs suffer from no such compulsions. They're happy to tell you the facts and show you the evidence. They're happy to tell you that some things are just wrong and often furious against those who dare to lie. The incredible blog Media Matters, for example, diligently tracks right-wing lies spread through the media, citing all the sources that prove them false.

But the most important thing, and the thing that nobody really seems to talk about, was how completely empty the
Times
's coverage was. It was entirely focused on who the candidates were giving stump speeches to or what ads they were buying this week.

The only time an actual policy proposal was mentioned was deep inside a discussion of how a candidate played with a certain group. You know, “Kerry has had problems with the Teamsters, even though they support his health care plan” or something. That was basically it. And this is supposed to be the high point of journalism! If the
Times
won't talk about policy then no one will.

And if nobody talks about policy then nobody votes on the basis of it. A September 2004 Gallup poll found that only 10% of registered voters said that they voted based on the candidates', quote, agenda/ideas/platforms/goals—6% for Bush, 13% for Kerry.

And it's at this point that you really have to ask yourself: “Is this really a democracy?” It's the most contested election of our time, coverage is lavished on the topic, the nation is closely divided, and yet the media completely ignores the issues. There's no policy debate. And if the media doesn't report the policy proposals and the media doesn't report the facts, then we're right back to my first point: vague emotional claims about Kerry being a rich elitist flip-flopper,
or, from the other side, Kerry was a brave soldier who blew stuff up in the Vietnam War.

This wasn't your grand democratic election: The people didn't get together and look at the facts and have a debate about issues. They didn't look at facts and they didn't discuss issues at all! They sat in their houses, watched a bunch of fuzzy TV commercials, and took in news coverage that recited the same vague themes. And then they voted based on which fuzzy image they liked the best. There's a word for stuff like that. It's not pretty, but I think it's appropriate. It's called propaganda. This was an election on the basis of propaganda.

And so I believe blogs are important insofar as they help us move away from this sorry spectacle and towards a real democracy. Blogs, of course, can help spread propaganda—and no doubt, most do—but they can also help stem it. Political blogs can help pull people into politics, tell them things they wouldn't otherwise hear, and lead them to organize their own projects—like building support for Howard Dean or trying to save Social Security.

One of the most important things I think blogs do, though, is teach people. The media, as I've noted, is supremely unintelligent. But I don't think the people of this country are. And one of the most striking things about blogs to me is how they almost never talk down to their readership. Indeed most seem to think higher of their readership than they do themselves.

Atrios doesn't hesitate before explaining some piece of economics that the
Washington Post
finds too complex. Tim Lambert will teach you the statistical theory you need to understand why some right-wing claim is wrong. And Brad DeLong has taught me more about what it's like to be an economics guy in the government than I got from Paul O'Neill's book.

The media isn't going to come save us from this nightmare. But maybe blogs can. Or at least they can help. The more people learn, the smarter they become. The smarter they become, the more they understand the way the world really works. The more they understand, the more they can do to fix things. And that is the truly important goal. Thank you.

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*

So, what I did was I took the above speech, bolded the key words and numbers, and printed it out. Then I gave it mostly from memory, occasionally looking down to get the next bolded word or a particularly well-worded phrase. It worked really well, I think.

The speech touched quite a nerve, as I hoped. My two conservative co-panelists (Zack Rosen failed to show) immediately demanded a chance to respond and then cut off my rebuttals. One of them (Mike) started insisting there was no such thing as objective truth, at which point I cut in and said, “Well, I can see why Republicans would want to deny that truth exists since it often cuts against them!” which was hailed as the best line of the night.

After the talk I got a lot of compliments and a guest blogger for Daily Kos said he'd talk to Markos about getting me an occasional spot on Daily Kos, which is something like the liberal blogger equivalent of a regular gig on the
Tonight Show
. So I think it went well. (:)