One Photo

and one interpretation (h/t C&L). Others?

Selling Candidates Like Soap

Rebranding, restaging, and the GOP.

Case in Point

"THE METAPHYSICS OF POST HEADLINES." Ryan Advent via Ezra Klein, in the vein of "Shape of Earth: Views Differ"?

$100,000 for Oomph

Shafer at Slate:

Instead of decoding the Obama propaganda, the broadcast press mostly wallowed in it: Flipping the dial, I didn't hear much in the way of disparagement from the talking heads. Indeed, the fact that the networks paid $100,000 to install a Skycam to hover over the cheering hordes at Invesco Field proves how easily they can be co-opted by a campaign that spends the money to produce a terrific "show." The Skycam added no journalistic value to last night's coverage, only buckets of oomph for the Obama-Biden ticket. If you can't avert your eyes from such spectacles and the network anchors refuse to frame them skeptically, be prepared to discount the emotional effect they may exert on you.

"The next president will disappoint you"

Boston University's Andrew Bacevich in the LAT.

I'd align myself with his central claim, as would, I think it is fair to say, most political scientists -- do not underestimate the institutional constrains upon Presidential action. The core rigidities of Madison's Constitutional framework have only hardened, thanks especially to the decline of party power and (counterintuitively?) the increased partisanship fostered by Congressional redisctricting, the rise of interest-group influence, the state of campaign financing, and the current near-absence of broad-based social movements.

But (and it's a big but, if you'll excuse the expression), should Obama bring massive numbers of new voters into the system (McCain's voters, all else equal, are already in the system), along with significantly larger same-Party majorities into Congress, some of that political and institutional inertia might (empahsize: might) be disrupted. This is, after all, one of the lessons of FDR's early Presidency and, to a lesser extent, LBJ's post-1964 political environment.

So, barring seizmic shifts, temper expectation.

More Background

This, I fervently hope, will be familiar:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In other classes, some of you have heard me make a distinction between rights (obligations of government) and liberties (restrictions upon government), and I've observed that the Bill of Rights is largely, in fact, an articulation of liberties, not of rights. So -- if we align ourselves with Stewart and Tocqueville (see below), does the Constitution permit any formal obligation upon media (see The Fairness Doctrine), or must we allow the market to be the ultimate arbiter? Or are there other options?

[posted bumbed up for your reading and thinking pleasure for Wednesday's class]

Stewart, Tocequeville. . . . .

and Foser:

Watching television coverage of the convention, with the relentless focus on what the Democrats should do, whether they did it well enough, what they didn't do but should have, and how people would react to it, it often seemed that many journalists don't really have much interest in journalism; they'd rather play armchair campaign manager.

The media's obsessive focus on what the Democrats should be doing and how they should be doing it is, of course, a spectacular waste of time. But it's worse than that: It squanders the attention of the American people, during one of the weeks when they pay the most attention to the presidential campaign. Tuesday night, 26 million viewers watched Hillary Clinton's speech, nearly as many as the 27 million U.S. viewers NBC's Olympics coverage averaged per night. More than 38 million people watched Barack Obama's speech Thursday night -- more than watched the Olympics opening ceremony, the final American Idol, and the Academy Awards this year. It's possible that most of those viewers were tuning in to hear Chris Matthews' assessment of who is and is not a "regular person" (answer: middle-aged white men). But it seems more likely that they were watching for more substantive reasons -- if they wanted to watch journalists playacting at being campaign strategists, the cable news channels would probably have significantly higher ratings during non-convention weeks.

So there was a huge audience -- an Olympic-sized audience -- tuning in to watch a political convention; a perfect opportunity for the media to help voters educate themselves about the parties and candidates -- what they've done, whether it worked, what they say they'll do, and how it will likely affect the country.

Instead, readers and viewers were treated to an endless parade of journalists substituting cocktail-party chatter for useful coverage. . . .

Read it all. It's useful.

Jon Stewart channels Alexis de Tocqueville?

First, our favorite French visitor:

WHEN men are no longer united among themselves by firm and lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the co-operation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help you require that his private interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the others. This can be habitually and conveniently effected only by means of a newspaper; nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment. A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought, but that comes of its own accord and talks to you briefly every day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs.

Newspapers therefore become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal and individualism more to be feared. To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested schemes; but if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity. The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure.

The effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same purpose to a great number of persons, but to furnish means for executing in common the designs which they may have singly conceived. The principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude of men after them. In democratic countries, on the contrary, it frequently happens that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it because as they are very insignificant and lost amid the crowd, they cannot see and do not know where to find one another. A newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling that had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.

Compare/Contrast:

Jon Stewart on Crossfire | Viral | SPIKE.com

We'll discuss this at some length on Wednesday. . . . . That is, what should media do in a democratic polity? Do they have a civic obligation?

[post bumped up]

Experience

That's been what the talking heads have been on about today -- does nominee Sarah Palin have the experience to be Vice President and, by extension, President? Does Barack Obama?

In a rational, thoughtful world, this would call for a fairly basic inquiry, one that has been, in my observation of the tee vee today, utterly absent: what kind of experience, and of what duration, is actually required (or at least desirable) to be President?

Everyone's talking about experience, but no one seems to be telling anyone what they mean by it. So, not to sound like a grumpy old man, but let's define our terms, shall we?

The Constitution, of course, sets minimal standards -- at least 35 years old, a natural born citizen, a resident for at least 14 years, without any religious test for the office. That's it.

What else do you want to see in a President? Maybe, as the Obama campaign has been arguing (at least until today), it's not experience that matters, but judgment.

Perhaps, we could instead approach it this way: historians tend to identify Lincoln, Washington, FDR, TJ, and TR as the "best" Presidents. If we concede for these purposes that they were indeed among the "best," can we identify what it is that made them great? Was it their experience? Was it something else?

Or, perhaps Daniel and Steven might weigh in with what Political Scientist Stephen Skowronek has had to say about Presidential power that is relevant to this subject (I know, I know, our Presidency course was a year ago, but I like to pretend that the knowledge you gained there will reside with you always. . . .).

Finally, of course, we must make a distinction between what makes a compelling candidate (both to voters AND to the media) and what makes an effective leader or administrator.

UPDATE: Richard Reeves says no one is prepared to be President.

UPDATE II: Millman says some of the best experienced/qualified for POTUS picks have been awful VPs (Cheney), while some of the less experienced have been terrific (Truman). And some of the best qualified have been good (Gore), and some of the less qualified bad (no real example). He thinks Palin a terrific choice, btw -- as long as she promises not to assume the Presidency if the need arises.

Is all of this debate simply fodder for the argument that we should simply abolish the office, one that FDR VP John Nance Garner famously said was "not worth a bucket of warm spit"?

38 Million+

tuned into Obama's acceptance speech, reports say. What can we make of that? Is that a large or small number? Does it tell us anything about what effects it may have upon voters? Which matters more, given the current media environment -- the event itself, or the narrative the media (in all their various forms) make of it?

What Matters?

from the very useful Project for Excellence in Journalism:

I'm Told That it's Not This Palin

"Welcome Silence"?

From one of many article from the NYT:

Mr. Obama brought the crowd to its feet many times to cheer and applaud, but perhaps just as importantly for audiences back home, for almost 50 minutes he silenced the ceaseless chatter of television anchors and commentators who had insistently put their own stamp and faces on one of the most exciting political conventions in modern times.

People do want to watch: the audience for cable news coverage this week was about double what it was in 2004. Yet despite the huge public fascination, the three major networks limited their coverage to an hour a night, a prime-time patchwork of highlight reels, catchup snippets of live speeches, and commentary.

Anchors at conventions used to serve as omniscient narrators; at this convention, they mostly served as human V-chips blocking live speeches with their own palaver and predictions.

The broadcast networks long ago ceded gavel-to-gavel coverage to cable and, more recently, to the Internet and news Web sites. Concerned citizens have more ways than ever to follow political events, but it requires ingenuity and patience to cobble together a coherent narrative.

And even the 24-hour cable news channels proved unreliable at times, giving too much screen time to their gassiest anchors.

Of the three cable news networks, CNN was the least intrusive: Wolf Blitzer and his colleagues were willing to let speakers speak for themselves. When Martin Luther King III spoke on Thursday, so did Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who chose to entertain his viewers with a Doonesbury cartoon about Mr. Obama and the Clintons that also featured Mr. Olbermann and his co-host, Chris Matthews. (Fox News mostly focused on Mr. McCain’s possible choice for a running mate, but raced back to the convention when Sheryl Crow took the stage.)

It’s a bad reading of the audience. For most of the convention, CNN — staid, stable and anchored by fewer egomaniacs — won higher ratings than the other cable news channels, as well as ABC and CBS. And Wednesday, CNN was neck and neck with NBC, and for a while even ahead, suggesting that when a political event is this interesting, television commentators are less so.

Obama's Speech

Text here.

UPDATE: For our purposes, I'm less interested in your thoughts about the speech itself. But I would like to see posts about your observations about (and, dare I hope, analysis of?) the media coverage of it. Thoughts? [edited for style]

UPDATE II: From a poster at Ezra Klein's: "The comment "let's not make a big election about small things" was not just a rejoinder to McCain, but also to the press. Skillful, subtle. I doubt the press heard it that way."

News from the Future!

Someone at the AP is a wee bit eager:

Aug 28 07:45 PM US/Eastern
By DAVID ESPO and ROBERT FURLOW
Associated Press Writers

DENVER (AP) - Barack Obama promised an end to the "broken politics in Washington and the failed presidency of George W. Bush" Thursday night as he embarked on the final lap of his audacious bid to become the nation's first black president.

He vowed to end the war in Iraq—and to break America's dependence on Mideast oil within a decade.

Obama sought to dismiss his campaign rival, Sen. John McCain, by linking him to Bush. . . .

Obama's speech is scheduled for 10:15, btw.

Didion on 1988

Andrew Sullivan hoists from the NYRB archives, and reminds us of Joan Didion's sharp essay on the 1988 convention. A few choice bits:

American reporters "like" covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one's peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is one reason why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported. . . . .

. . . . .The narrative is made up of many such understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line. It was understood, for example, that the first night of the Republican National Convention in New Orleans should be for Ronald Reagan "the last hurrah." "REAGAN ELECTRIFIES GOP" was the headline the next morning on page one of New York Newsday; in fact the Reagan appearance, which was rhetorically pitched not to a live audience but to the more intimate demands of the camera, was, inside the Superdome, barely registered. It was understood, similarly, that Michael Dukakis's acceptance speech on the last night of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta should be the occasion on which his "passion," or "leadership," emerged. "Could the no-nonsense nominee reach within himself to discover the language of leadership?" Time had asked. "Could he go beyond the pedestrian promises of 'good jobs at good wages' to give voice to a new Democratic vision?"

The correct answer, since the forward flow of the narrative here demanded the appearance of a genuine contender (a contender who could be seventeen points "up," so that George Bush could be seventeen points "down," a position from which he could rise to"claim" his own convention), was yes: "The best speech of his life," David Broder reported. Sandy Grady found it "superb," evoking "Kennedyesque echoes" and showing "unexpected craft and fire." Newsweek had witnessed Governor Dukakis "electrifying the convention with his intensely personal acceptance speech." In fact the convention that evening had been electrified, not by the speech, which was the same series of nonsequential clauses Governor Dukakis had employed during the primary campaign ("My friends…it's what the Democratic party is all about"), but because the floor had been darkened, swept with laser beams, and flooded with "Coming to America," played at concert volume with the bass turned up.

It is understood that this invented narrative will turn on certain familiar elements. There is the continuing story line of the "horse race," the reliable daily drama of one candidate falling behind as another pulls ahead. There is the surprise of the new poll, the glamour of the one-on-one colloquy on the midnight plane, a plot point (the nation sleeps while the candidate and his confidant hammer out its fate) pioneered by Theodore H. White. . . . .

. . . . . All stories, of course, depend for their popular interest upon the invention of personality, or "character," but in the political narrative, designed as it is to maintain the illusion of "consensus" by obscuring rather than addressing actual issues, this invention served a further purpose. . . . .

Matt Taibbi at NYU

Some of you have already posted about Matt Taibbi's political reporting for Rolling Stone. He'll be at NYU on October 8. From my amateur's ability to read the calendar, this looks to be Erev Yom Kippur, so I'm going to assume not possible for any of you to attend. If that's not true, let me know, and I'll see how many seats I can wrangle (free but limited space).

An Election Event

from a decidedly left perspective, to be sure, but with some sharp and provocative journalists. Ad below, details here. If any of you would like to attend (I'm speaking only to my students, now), I can likely get the Honors Program to pay for tix. If interested, email me, or we can discuss next class. If you come across a NYC-based event with some right-leaning journalists, we can try to do that, too. . . .

What's the Line

between distortion or bias, on the one hand, and legitimate competing interpretations, on the other? Could we now compare this FOX vs. MSNBC clip with PBS, for instance? Is any one of these responses (I hesitate to call them analyses) better than the other? or *truer* than the other? And does any of them serve a public function?

UPDATE: Not quite a parallel clip, but. . . . .

Objectivity

Jim Lehrer and CJR's Liz Cox Barrett:

[Liz Cox Barrett]: How do you approach reporting what a public official has said something that is blatantly untrue?

[Jim Lehrer]: I don't deal in terms like "blatantly untrue." That's for other people to decide when something's "blatantly untrue." There's always a germ of truth in just about everything ... My part of journalism is to present what various people say about it the best we can find out [by] reporting and let others -- meaning commentators, readers, viewers, bloggers or whatever ... I'm not in the judgment part of journalism. I'm in the reporting part of journalism. I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four. Sometimes they're going to come up with five. Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist.

LCB: That goes beyond presenting a claim and several counter-claims that appear to call into question the original claim?

JL: That's part of it. Absolutely that's part of it. I mean, if somebody says -- doesn't matter if it's the president or who -- if somebody says, "It rained on Thursday," and you know for a fact it didn't rain on Thursday, if the person was of a nature that you felt you should quote him, "It rained on Thursday." Second paragraph, third paragraph -- or in television terms second or third sentence -- you would say, "However, according to the weather bureau it didn't [rain Thursday]." But you don't call the person a liar. The person who would call that person a liar would be the person who'd read that story and say, "My god, Billy Bob lied." But I'm not doing that. I'm providing the information so that the person can make their decision. People might say, "Well the weather bureau has lied. Or I was out that day and it was raining ..."

[...]

LCB: Is there any place for writing, "Billy Bob said it rained Thursday. The weather bureau said it didn't. I was out that day and I say it didn't."

JL: I would never do that. That's not my function to do that.

Stupid Distraction

The rest here.

Biden Bucks

from OpenSecrets.

On Houses and Elitism

Jamison Foser:

. . . . Naturally, the news media rushed to cover the fight. Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post explained the importance:

In politics, there is nothing worse than appearing out of touch.

From time immemorial, a candidate who is effectively portrayed as forgetting about the "little" people, of having "gone Washington," of living higher on the hog than voters, loses.

Class remains a powerful motivator for many voters in the country. Politicians are forever trying to cast their candidacies as closely rooted in the communities from which they sprung -- a purposeful attempt to ensure that voters know that the candidate "understands the problems of people like you." Put simply: The worst thing you can call a politician is an elitist.

But in more than 1,000 words about the importance of candidates' convincing voters they are not "out of touch" and understand the problems of typical Americans, Cillizza made no mention of the candidates' policy positions. Didn't even hint that such things might indicate, in a more concrete way than the shoes they wear or the salad greens they favor, whether the candidates truly understand the problems of the people they would serve -- and whether they would do anything to ease those problems. Cillizza's focus was entirely on the perception and the politics of the dispute -- without so much as an acknowledgment that the candidates' policies might more meaningfully indicate whether one (or both) of them is "out of touch."

And Cillizza's approach carried the day. NBC's Nightly News, the CBS Evening News, ABC's World News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post -- among others -- ignored the candidates' policy positions in their reports on the flap. Instead, they focused on the campaign attacks -- and on attempting to assess which would be more effective. But assessments like these have absolutely no merit, no value. They serve no purpose; they do not educate viewers and readers about anything that matters. As Congressional Quarterly senior editor Chris Lehmann explained this week:

Market share dictates the witless coverage, which is largely for the media's own amusement. You see that all the time on the Sunday political chat shows, which are always about the polls and who is performing better in strategic terms. The only constituency that cares about that is the media. I have family around the country and we always talk politics, and no one ever asks me, "How did Obama perform on his European tour?" It's an asinine question.

Rather than attempting to guess how voters will score the exchange so they can tell the voters how they'll react (an exercise that is pointless at best), reporters should be giving them additional information that will help them meaningfully assess the candidates.

Sigh

While Ed Rendell speaks, the Chyron on MSNBC: BREAKING NEWS: Pennsylvania has 21 electoral votes.

The Campaign, Civility

and the Prisoner's Dilemma?

Media and Free Speech

in Jordan, via a Cardozo student. . . . .

New iTunes Category?

Songs about exposed CIA agents?

More on Narratives

re: my comments below, here's a McCain response to the how-many-houses kerfuffle. Again, merits aside, this strikes me as less likely to resonate with media or with voters because it does not tap into any ongoing narrative of Obama. That doesn't mean that it can't work, but that it's that much more difficult for it to gain traction.

Bundlers for 'Bama

from the Center for Public Integrity:

Amateur Hour

This is one thing new technology means -- fast ads from people no one in the campaign has ever heard of, this one, reportedly from some anonymous college senior:

Partisan News?

re: Madow's new gig (she is, btw, one of the very few Political Science PhDs on the teevee. . . .). See the comment string, especially.

UPDATE: Greenwald weighs in.

Five Forbidden Questions

Debate analysis from James Fallows, who you'll be reading for our first class. . . . . .

Esteemed Anchor Kent Brockman on Journalism

A Good Reminder

that much of the campaign cannot be easily seen. Local-market TV is one aspect, but as, or perhaps more, important, are local radio and direct mail, which often play "under the radar," and are where it's easiest for a campaign to get away with its ugliest tactics.

*** Obama’s stealth ad campaign: Over the past week, we've gotten our hands on a number of negative TV ads Obama's been running against McCain in key states like Ohio and Michigan. This is in addition to the tough spot, uncovered by Politico [*** UPDATE *** Actually the spot was uncovered by the Washington Times' Christina Bellantoni, who reported on it yesterday and was linked to by Politico] , that Obama's airing in Indiana. Clearly, the Obama campaign isn't interested in telling the media about every single McCain attack ad they’re running. Perhaps this is because Obama's brand can't afford to be tarnished too much if he's seen as constantly running negative TV ads. So the campaign simply puts them on the air in key markets, doesn't tell the press about them, and layers those ads with positive ones being run nationally during the Olympics. Also, by not releasing to the media, it forces the McCain camp to wait a day or two before they see the ad. McCain's camp is much more comfortable unveiling their negative ads, perhaps because they want the free press that comes with them. But make no mistake, Obama’s running plenty of negative TV ads, particularly in the industrial Midwestern states. In fact, one of Obama's biggest candidate strengths -- which doesn't get the attention it deserves -- is that he plays political hardball as well as his opponents; he just sometimes does it under the radar.

"The Parasite Has Consumed the Host"

Shafer and Ferguson:

Why do the parties throw their meaningless conventions? As Andrew Ferguson wrote in the Weekly Standard four years ago, the no-news extravaganza of a convention is excellent news for them. But what excuse do thousands of reporters have for attending? According to Ferguson, in the weeks leading up to the conventions, the press traditionally complains about the "empty ritual" of the "infomercial" that the parties have "choreographed." But that's just for show. They fight their colleagues for the honor to attend because a political convention is a gas to cover. It's like a vacation, only no spouses! There's free food, plenty of booze, nice hotels, lots of pals in the press and politics dishing gossip, and the assignment is easy to report. Ferguson concludes that political conventions exist only to make the second convention—the "journalists' convention"—possible. "The parasite has consumed the host," he wrote.

If the political press corps were honest, they'd start every convention story with the finding that nothing important happened that day and that your attention is not needed. . . .

The New Mobile Press Engagement Unit

"Paranoid dysfunction breeds the impulse to hoard"

Joshua Green's behind-the-scenes look (with links to rich, primary-source goodness) at the Clinton campaign. For two responses to the question of whether Clinton could have won if Edwards', ahem, indiscretion, had been revealed sooner, see Kos here and here.

Russia vs. Georgia

This will help make sense of it -- Glenn Greenwald interviews GW Prof. Charles King. About 30 mins.

Slate on the Columbia Journalism Review

and journalism, Kuhn, and dissent.

Upside Down Bad Apple Cake

I've just started Thomas Frank's new book, and as luck would have it, most of the Introduction is online. Like Taibbi, who we've been discussing, he has a lovely way of turning a phrase and hammering consistently upon a provocative thesis. We can argue as to what effect, however (see Larry Bartels in QJPS). Here's a taste of the new argument, and the lovely, bouncy sentences:

Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a "culture of corruption," a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology--an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. "The White House belongs to you," its dust jacket told us. "So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, DC. For you are a citizen of the United States." For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.

The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can't bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.

We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff. . . . Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the "bad apple" thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its onetime superstar.

. . . . . .

But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don't get the message.

It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story's worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities--priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Read the rest here.

Bonus video:

Quote of the Day

"Technological progress is squirrelly."

An Obama Olympics Ad

The Causal Arrow

There's much that is interesting in this poll and article by Rasmussen, but it's the headline that most drew my attention. Why assume that which cable news network you watch might affect your vote, rather than how you vote might affect which cable news network you watch (if you're among the minority that watch cable news at all, that is. . . . .). Notice that they imply causation, without demonstrating it, and assume it goes only in one direction.

James Wolcott Does Not Think That

the McCain-Paris ad is well conceived. Count the ways.

A Nice Splash of Cold Water

for some of the Obama enthusiasts with heroic expectations, courtesy of the always entertaining (and potty-mouthed) Matt Taibbi. The focus here: campaign contrbutions.

Organizing on Campus

Election edition. Two resources:

Campus Compact
Your Vote, Your Voice

The Oprah Effect: 1 million votes?

Abstract:

Candidates in major political contests are commonly endorsed by other politicians, interest groups and celebrities. Prior to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a celebrity with a proven track record of influencing her fans’ commercial decisions. In this paper, we use geographic differences in subscriptions to O! – The Oprah Magazine and the sale of books Winfrey recommended as part of Oprah's Book Club to assess whether her endorsement affected the Primary outcomes. We find her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by Obama. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and Obama's success in previous elections, nor with underlying local political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately 1,000,000 additional votes for Obama.

Full paper here

(h/t The Monkey Cage)

Cell Phone Effects

on opinion pollling. Note the key demos

No Grammy Likely

Jack Davis for Congress: "Brand New Man"

Polls 101

A good reminder of what to watch out for when looking at election-season polling.

Polarization?

More here.

Polarization?

Sheer Breadth of Fluff

From, of course, The Onion

Negative Ads, Democratic Primary Edition

Article here, from CQ

Religion and Support for McCain/Obama

from Gallup

Matt Drudge Rules

their world

Movements without Barricades?

Online Activists vs. Obama

Where Does the Money Go?

Click here for more interactive goodness

"Self-Segregation or Deliberation?"

"Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics," by H. Farrell, E. Lawrence, and J. Sides. ABSTRACT:

There is active debate among political scientists and political theorists over the
relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Internet based blogs provide an important testing ground for these scholars’ theories, especially as political activity on the Internet becomes increasingly important. In this article, we use the first major dataset describing blog readership to examine the relationship between deliberation, polarization and political participation among blog readers. We find that, as existing theories might predict, blog readers tend to read blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Cross-cutting readership of blogs on both the left and right of the spectrum is relatively rare. Furthermore, we find strong evidence of polarization among blogreaders, who tend to be more polarized than both non-blog-readers and consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US Senators. Blog readers are also substantially more likely to participate in politics than non-blog readers. However, in contrast to previous research on offline social networks, we do not find that cross-cutting exposure to blogs of different ideological dispositions lowers participation. Instead, we find that cross-cutting blog readers are about as likely as left wing blog readers to participate in politics, and that both are significantly more likely than right wing blog readers to participate. We suggest that this may reflect social movement building efforts by left wing bloggers.

Read the full paper HERE

Running for Clinton's Third Term?

Mock Outrage

from CJR's Campaign Desk

No Excuse to Not Not Vote

Source Amnesia

and emotional selection. Let the campaign begin. . . .

Money Still = Speech

From the Times:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a law meant to level the financial playing field when rich candidates pay for their own political campaigns.

The 5-to-4 decision, legal experts said, was significant for rejecting the rationale behind the law, known as the “millionaire’s amendment,” and for confirming the court’s continuing skepticism about the constitutionality of campaign finance regulations.

“Supporters of reasonable campaign finance regulation are now zero for three in the Roberts court,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “This is a signal of what is to come. What could easily fall following this case are the longstanding limits on corporate and union spending in federal elections.”

The law at issue in Thursday’s decision imposed special rules in races with candidates who finance their own campaigns. Those candidates are required to disclose more information, and their opponents are allowed to raise more money.

. . . .

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the asymmetry imposed by the law was unacceptable. “We have never upheld the constitutionality of a law that imposes different contribution limits for candidates who are competing against each other,” Justice Alito wrote.

The law allows opponents of candidates for the House who spend more than $350,000 of their own money to receive triple the usual amounts — $6,900 rather than $2,300 — from individual contributors when a complex statutory formula is met. The law also waives limits on expenditures from political parties.

The law was a response to Supreme Court rulings that forbid limits on the amount that candidates can spend on their own behalf. But Justice Alito wrote that the legislative response was unconstitutional because it “imposes an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises” free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Rich candidates, Justice Alito said, must “choose between the First Amendment right to engage in unfettered political speech and subjection to discriminatory fund-raising limitations.”

Obama and Public Campaign Finance

A debate, from Democracy Now

Two Views of Iraq

The New York Times vs. Juan Cole

UPDATE: The GAO weighs in (via WaPo)

Video Madlibs, Campaign Edition

Right-Wing Cartoon Watch

April-June edition. . . .

How Does the News Shape the Way We See the World?

The Election Online

From Pew:


(Executive Summary and Ful Report HERE)

Much Better

"Remembering Russert," from FAIR

. . . In reality, Meet the Press was the venue for some of the White House's most audacious lies about the Iraq War--most of which went unchallenged by Russert. On the morning that the New York Times published a front-page article falsely touting the now-famous "aluminum tubes" as components of an alleged Iraqi nuclear weapons program, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press (9/8/02), where Russert pursued open-ended questions that seemed to invite spin from the vice president on Iraqi nuclear weapons.

Recalling such softball questioning, it's easy to believe the advice that Cheney press aide Cathie Martin says she gave when the Bush administration had to respond to charges that it manipulated pre-Iraq War intelligence: "I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used," she said (Salon, 1/26/07). "It's our best format."

In Bill Moyers' documentary "Buying the War" (PBS, 4/25/07), Russert expressed the wish that dissenting sources would have contacted him: "My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them." Of course, any journalist could have found such sources--and certainly few critics of the war would have passed up an opportunity to air their views on such a prominent media platform. . . .

Hmm

. . . or die

"Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. . . . “Media consultant” is barely adequate to describe Mr. Schwartz’s portfolio. In a career of more than half a century, he was an art director; advertising executive; urban folklorist (in one project, capturing the cacophony of New York streets on phonograph records); radio host; Broadway sound designer; college professor; media theorist; author; and maker of commercials for products, candidates and causes. What was more, Mr. Schwartz, who had suffered from agoraphobia since the age of 13, accomplished most of these things entirely within his Manhattan home. Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign."

New from Pew

The Internet and the 2008 Election

Something missing?

Take a look at this NYT article, "Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic." Oddly, no mention of the words "net neutrality," or the substance of that long-standing (in internet years) debate, which has resulted in some reasonably substantive Congressional hearings and efforts at regulation that would protect access and limit the ability of service providers to discriminate on the basis of content. For the neutrality advocate's perspective, see here. For a more, ahem, neutral overview, see the wiki. It's decent. And while I'm complaining about the Times (well, Brad De Long has cornered the market on complaining about the Washington Post), take a look at this article on a protest directed at LES gentrification: does it seem a wee bit snide to you? ". . . the opening of the East Village summer social season"? Or is the tone actually somewhat affectionate, and I'm reading it wrong?

Against Hagiography

From The Washington Monthly, last December:

. . . . .Actually, the balls [Tim] Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance. John McCain entered the zone last May, when he went on the show and repeatedly asserted that the Bush tax cuts had increased the federal government's revenue. Hearing this, a tough but conscientious journalist might have pointed out that this is demonstrably false. Russert, however, reached for a trusty hardball and sent it sailing. McCain, he pointed out, was now supporting extending the very same Bush tax cuts that he had once opposed.

. . . . the unbearable inanity of Russert transcends partisanship. It's an equal-opportunity bias against anyone with anything substantive to say.

. . . . . .To say that such exercises offer no information would be unfair. But the information is purely meta. Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert not to assess the candidate's views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling.

. . . . . Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience. He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News. The politicians, in turn, go on the show determined not to make news. And why do they bother? Because, as Geraghty has noted, it's a rite of passage, and any politician too chicken to play Russert's inane games would never garner the respect of the political class.

John Cole observes that the wall-to-wall teevee encomnium is a product of the fact that DC reporters/newsreaders "have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story" (although, to be fair, this is hardly the only incidence of hour-after-hour coverage of a small story). The related problem, of course, as Ygelsias writes earier in the Washington Monthly article, is this:

Russert's brand of journalism, rather than being ghettoized as a pointless or perverse form of entertainment—like shoulder self-dislocation or cat surfing—has immense influence.

The Blogopticon?

Katie, What'd You Cover Instead?

Another Candidate

for The Turning Point. Needlenose offers this entry:

Sometimes it's Useful

just to have a little perspective. Note where our Sun is marked on this artist's rendering of what some astrophysicists think our galaxy may look like from afar. . . . .

How Dem Primary Voters Voted

Very, very cool animated data. . . . .

The Turning Pont

Perhaps this fall I can get some students (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) to help devise and execute a study to test this hunch (it's not really even a hypothesis, yet): this was the turning point in the primary campaign; not the cause, necessarily, but the marker of some moment at which significant change happened.



It inevitably brings this to mind:

News IQ

Take the Quiz, from Pew.

Media Culpa

An Architect on the Media, on On the Media

Lesions in Wernicke’s Area?

From Scientific American:

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

The frontal and temporal lobes, which govern speech—no dedicated writing center is hardwired in the brain—may also figure in. For example, lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

The rest here. . . .

Nieman Watchdog

and Dan Froomkin, on McClennan:

Here’s what McClellan wrote, in excerpts from his new book:

In the fall of 2002, Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We'd done much the same on other issues--tax cuts and education--to great success. But war with Iraq was different. Beyond the irreversible human costs and substantial financial price, the decision to go to war and the way we went about selling it would ultimately lead to increased polarization and intensified partisan warfare...

And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth--about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict--would get largely left behind…

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere--on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.

In this case, the “liberal media” didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.

That’s actually only one part of McClellan’s media critique. There’s more in these excerpts:

The permanent campaign … ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who's winning, who's losing, and why…

The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation. Finally, it becomes much more difficult for the general public to decipher the more important truths amid all the conflict, controversy and negativity. For some partisans, that is fine because they believe they can maneuver better in such a highly politicized environment to accomplish their objectives. But the destructive potential of such excessively partisan warfare would later crystallize my thinking.

This second part of McClellan’s critique is at least somewhat controversial. The first part, by now, certainly shouldn’t be. A flurry of self-examinations by the media have all reached pretty much the same conclusion McClellan did.

Yet because many of the cable-TV pundits talking about McClellan’s book were themselves members of the White House press corps during the time in question, some of them have been responding with unseemly defensiveness.

The Rest is Here

"Under Enormous Pressure"

The AJR Weighs In

On the decline in war coverage. . . . .

Documentary or Satire?

h/t Ezra Klein
NB: Crude language warning. . . . . .

Unified Field Theory, Media Edition

From the new mag, Miller-McCune:

Why has the U.S. political press found a possibly imprecise use of the word "bitter" fascinating for weeks on end? Why does a search of significant English-language news sources turn up 985 articles in the last year that include the words "Britney" and "underwear"? And why, oh why, do news organizations all follow the same stories almost all the time, moving in such complete lockstep that they might as well be Groucho Marx in the Duck Soup mirror scene?

Because I've been a journalist for decades, I've been asked why the news media seem so repetitive and, yes, dumb at least several hundr ed times now, usually at cocktail parties. (Three drinks, I've learned, turn anyone into a journalistic expert.) When I was young, the questions would rile me, and I'd spout First Amendment bromides. The longer I worked in journalism, though, the more I sensed that a systemic disorder had infected the news business. It was a malady that led newspapers and television news organizations to copy one another often, while pretending never to. And to quote from the most self-serving of business and government press releases as though they were Moses' tablets. And to rely on official sources, even when the sources were obviously wrong or lying. And to commit many resources to coverage of transitory and trivial events and very few to investigative or other enterprise reporting that would result in stories of lasting import.

So, when faced with questions about the failings of my chosen trade, I began to evade. No, I'd say, most reporters aren't secretly trying to sneak their own views into the news pages. And no, although it happens sometimes, the owners of large news organizations don't generally reach down into the newsroom nowadays to bludgeon enemies and help friends. And no, I'd say, the mayor (or the governor, or the president) can't usually threaten news executives with anything that would make them kill a story. It's not that simple, I'd say; the problem's more complicated than that. But I never could come up with an overarching explanation, the Unified Field Theory of General Media Banality.

British journalist Nick Davies offers just that with his book Flat Earth News, a much-discussed best-seller since its U.K. publication earlier this year. Emend that: It's been much talked about in England but gone largely unnoticed in the U.S., in no small part because it has yet to pick up a U.S. publisher. It should, and quickly. The book is sophisticated and not just engagingly written, but hilarious in all the right places.

There's more. . . . .

They're not There Either

More on photographs. This from Moyra. Go see and read the rest. Go on, now.

The recording of the homeless scene and of homeless people is regarded as “victim” photography by contemporary photography theorists. For the documentary photographer such a criticism, if taken as gospel, prevents the bearing of witness to social conditions, and assists in the elimination of particular pieces of visual social history. A vacuum is thus created into which a new interpretation is possible, based on whatever brand of political ideology is being proposed.

How then is the antipathy to the descriptive photograph to be overcome, in relation to the depiction of street-homelessness? With the Identity Kit series shown here, I have attempted to portray the gross poverty of the dispossessed by inviting some of the homeless men on London's streets to display their belongings - those carried in their pockets, or in a bag. The individuals' participation in the arrangement of their possessions, and their willingness to lay them open for external scrutiny, is a statement from the heart of their perilous and impecunious position. (As one young man, Darren, stated: These are all my worldly goods.)

Within contemporary theory these photographs are an acceptable portrayal of poverty, with no direct visible indicator to the disadvantaged human subject. The photographs' contents become the vehicle through which the viewer can attempt to understand the bleakness of a human existence deprived of material objects and possessions.

“Yeah, you can see them, but they’re not there.”

A biography of a photograph, via filmmaker Errol Morris.

ERROL MORRIS: I’ve just finished this movie on the Abu Ghraib photographs. And I believe that many of the photographs have been misunderstood – for many reasons and in many different ways. The picture of Sabrina Harman smiling with her thumb up above the body of an Iraqi prisoner — we know his name, Manadel al-Jamadi. People saw this picture and were horrified. They took her smile as a smile of enjoyment, a smile of pleasure.

PAUL EKMAN: So what’s the explanation of why she has the smile and the thumbs up?

ERROL MORRIS: Her explanation is that she did it all the time. People took her picture and she would have the same goofy smile and the same thumbs-up, again and again and again and again and again.

PAUL EKMAN: Well, there are a lot of them.

ERROL MORRIS: I often think about Sabrina being a woman, a gay woman in the military, trying to show that she is in command, a master of her emotions – not cowed by her experiences but in control. Of course, when people see that photograph, they do not see Sabrina. They see the smile.

PAUL EKMAN: Well, here’s what I think happens when the typical viewer looks at this picture. One, you’re horrified by the sight of this dead person. Most of us haven’t seen a dead person. Certainly not in that state. If you’ve seen a dead person, you’ve seen them in an open casket where they’re made to look like they’re alive. Do you know how “horror” is defined?

ERROL MORRIS: Tell me.

PAUL EKMAN: “Horror,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the combination of disgust and terror. So I think “horror” is the right word. It’s a horrible sight, and it instills horror. And then you see, right next to that, someone having a good time. Most people will not realize that’s a “say cheese” smile. They’ll think, because of the broadness of the smile and the thumbs-up gesture, they’re having a good time. That’s what makes this a damning picture to the typical viewer.

I’ll add one more thing. When we see someone smile, it is almost irresistible that we smile back at them. Advertisers know that. That’s why they link products to smiling faces. And when we smile back, we begin to actually experience some enjoyment. So this photograph makes us complicit in enjoying the horrible. And that’s revolting to us.

So why it is such an upsetting photograph is not just because we see someone smiling in the context of the horrible, but that when we look at her, we begin to have to resist smiling ourselves. So it’s a terrible, terrible picture for that reason alone.

. . . . . . .

[Morris:] There are many photographs of al-Jamadi’s body, but it is the photograph of Harman with his body that stands out among them, the photograph of a pretty American girl who is alive and a battered Iraqi man who is dead. The photograph misdirects us. We become angry at Harman, rather than angry at the killer.

We see al-Jamadi’s body, but we don’t see the act that turned him from a human being into a corpse. We don’t understand what the photograph means, nor what it is about.

Instead of asking: Who is that man? Who killed him? The question becomes, Why is this woman smiling? It becomes the important thing — if not the only thing. The viewer assumes that Harman is in some way responsible — or if not responsible, in some way connected to the murder — and is gloating over the body. How dare she? Isn’t she in the same photograph as the body? Looming over the corpse? And even if she is not guilty, she stands in (in the viewer’s imagination) for those who are.

And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile.

When we look at photographs used to illustrate the news, or even video, how do we know that what we are seeing is what's really there? How can we gauge what is being revealed, and what is being concealed?

YouTube Says No

to Senator's censorship request.

There's Only a War in Iraq

on the Radio. From the terrific Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Rich Campaign Goodness

From the Council on Foreign Relations, overviews of Obama's and McCain's foreign policy advisors. h/t Ezra

News Flash!

The Daily Show satirical comedy program, not news broadcast. . . . . .

What are You Doing Online?

From Business Week:

Internet Journalism

Sports Blogs Edition

A Swimmingly Good Question

And one I only have the inklings of an answer to.  Add to big list of "how to we study this"? From Atrios:

In the Swampland comments, Karen's saying that how can you suggest that the mainstream media ignored this story [Pentagon propagandists] when it was front page of the Washington Post.

It is a mystery, though, isn't it. Some stories land front page of the Washington Post and then just sort of disappear, never to be heard from again. Some light up the Drudge siren, get talked about nonstop on cable news, breathless Politico reports, follow up stories, editorials, coverage in weekly news magazines.

And no one in the press quite understands how this happens. Some stories magically take flight, and some don't. It's all very strange.