September 19, 2011, 9:21 pm
By Todd Gitlin
The New York Daily News reports that squeegee men are back on the streets of New York. (H/t: Josh Petri of TPM.) Granted, the Daily News found only five of them. Granted, the squeegee men have cropped up every once in a while (here’s a NYT sighting from last year) even in a city that was supposed to have been definitely cleansed squeegeed by Rudy Giuliani during his heroic metropolitan period. But I am wondering why there are so few squeegee men, and so orderly, and at that, so mannerly as to speak respectfully to reporters.
Last year, driving through the valley town of Gilroy, California, I was struck by the profusion of men shuffling down the streets pushing supermarket carts bearing their possessions. They moved slowly. Nothing much showed in their faces. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reports two sightings of aggressive panhandlers. Nothing new about that: Around 1994,…
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September 12, 2011, 10:37 am
By Todd Gitlin
The Ground Zero ceremony yesterday was, the NYT informs us, “an occasion deemed too solemn for speeches.”
This judgment, shared by the organizers of the memorial, was less about solemnity than about speeches. Yes, the occasion was solemn. Almost three thousand human beings (the numbers vary) were massacred 10 years ago (and, largely unmentioned, many others have perished since from aftereffects). The sinister violence of the deaths, their astounding suddenness and gruesomeness and simultaneity, stamped them as horrific. The absences of all those individuals is more raw than if they had each died separately, and their relative youth no doubt makes every single death harder for survivors to assimilate.
It’s not hard in the slightest to understand, then, why the survivors would want to recite the names of the lost, to touch the official engravings and make rubbings. What needs to be…
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September 3, 2011, 4:22 pm
By Todd Gitlin
Suppose we lived in a world in which reporters asked politicians to explain the grounds on which they believe what they purport to believe; in which they did so regularly at press conferences and in presidential debates—
• why, for example, they are “skeptical” about the presence of climate change that virtually all scientists think is in significant measure the product of human activity;
• whether they are equally skeptical of scientific arguments about, say, genetic modification, the design of wing shapes or drone technology;
• in other words, on what basis they pick and choose their scientific arguments;
• or why (if they are Republican) they believe that jobs are produced when taxes are lowered, in the light of the fact—reported by a notorious Communist newspaper called The Wall Street Journal—that fewer jobs were created under George W. Bush’s…
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September 2, 2011, 6:23 pm
By Todd Gitlin
Without question, WikiLeaks has done good. You don’t have to accept the strongest claims made for its indispensability for overturning the Tunisian dictatorship, or approve of the label “Collateral Murder” Julian Assange affixed on the appalling video that surfaced last year revealing lethal American attacks on civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters photographer, to appreciate much of what WikiLeaks has done in the name of transparency. WikiLeaks unearthed evidence of war crimes and corruption. What it performed constituted, in the words of a statement signed in December by 19 Columbia journalism school faculty, including myself, “journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment,” deserving protection from government prosecution under the Espionage Act or any similar laws.
The initial releases of diplomatic cables by the Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and…
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August 31, 2011, 11:06 am
By Todd Gitlin
I’m just catching up on the dead-tree Chronicle, so just came upon this front-page piece by Jeffrey R. Young from the Aug. 12 issue. It seems that grade inflation, and the misguided demand to make education prove its value by numbers, has led some universities to cut out their brains to spite their faces. Or, to put it more neutrally, they’re not only hiring low-cost contract labor to grade papers, they’re also using computers to grade answers to essay questions. “Robot grading is the hottest trend in testing circles,” says the editor of the journal Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice.
The two universities mentioned by name as robograders are the University of Central Florida and the University of Missouri, Columbia. But this trend can’t even be laid at the door exclusively of the American mania for numerical measurement, since the editor of said journal is Canadian.
I…
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August 24, 2011, 7:36 pm
By Todd Gitlin
When did America go wrong? The crackpot right has been backdating the origins of the country’s original sins from the 60s.
Heady with triumph in 1995, Newt Gingrich, the pseudo-intellectual’s Eric Cantor of the ’90s, offered the standard post-Reagan cram course version of American history from 1607 to—wait for it—1965:
There is a core pattern to American history. Here’s how we did it until the Great Society messed everything up: don’t work, don’t eat; your salvation is spiritual; the government by definition can’t save you; governments are into maintenance and all good reforms are into transformation….From 1965 to 1994, we did strange and weird things as a country. Now we’re done with that and we have to recover.
Dick Armey, erstwhile House Majority Leader, now éminence grise of the Tea Party, declared then: ”To me all the problems began in the 60s.” He meant the likes…
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August 10, 2011, 7:33 pm
By Todd Gitlin
I posted the other day on the mysteries of the Standard & Poor’s US government credit demotion, and marveled that it was taken seriously in the light of S&P’s well-known and grotesque part first in inflating the housing bubble and then in accelerating the crash. The subsequent discussion in this space, as is its wont, was soon enough hijacked by one-note ranters who always have an all-purpose speech ready to the effect that all that matters are deficits—a subject that did not transfix the right when Reagan and George W. Bush were heaping up deficits; but I digress. It’s worth getting back to the subject of credit ratings, not only because they play a part in the actual world but because they point to a huge failing both in public understanding and in the journalism that’s hypothetically interested in elevating that understanding.
Commenter suomynona is (as it were) on the money,…
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August 8, 2011, 10:49 pm
By Todd Gitlin
Watching video of the London riots, skimming the newspaper commentary and bloggery, I get shivers. Not only because of the awful destruction, not only because the difficulty of establishing facts, not only because everyone is stunned by the sheer scale of the violence, not only because some cops are racist, not only because so many people like thuggery and looting and burning and throwing things at cops—that’s “like” as in “thrill to,” “feel like taking part in,” not as in Facebook “like”—not only because nihilism is as much fun as cruelty and as cruel as it is fun, but because of the vast cloud of incomprehension that surrounds the events—an incomprehension that seems to match Americans’ incomprehension in 1965 (Watts), 1967 (Newark, Detroit)…1992 (L. A.).
At least it’s my impression that now, as then, much of the commentary consists of nothing more than rage, fear, and…
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August 6, 2011, 7:34 pm
By Todd Gitlin
The blogger Aaron Bady, who goes by the name Zunguzungu, has an interesting post up about Standard & Poor’s, the credit-rating company that just knocked down its rating of U.S. government’s creditworthiness after years of drastic errors about the value of mortgage-backed securities—errors with devastating consequences for the banks that took them seriously, and therefore for the global economy. He notes that The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki cast a skeptical eye upon the agencies almost two years ago:
The rating agencies’ role in inflating the bubble is well known. Less obvious is their role in accelerating the crash. Agencies have typically resisted changing their ratings on a frequent basis, so changes, when they occur, tend to be belated, widespread, and big. In the space of just a few months between late 2007 and mid-2008 (after the housing bubble burst), the agencies…
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August 5, 2011, 5:55 pm
By Todd Gitlin
Americans who talk to pollsters are a sadly confused bunch. Here’s Finding #1, from today’s New York Times:
The Republicans compromised too little, a majority of those polled [by NYT/CBS] said. All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations.
So, by a small margin, those polled prefer the Democratic approach to the debt-ceiling talks to the Republican. They run 50-50 on Obama’s approach. As for the Tea Party, (Finding #2), it
is now viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the public and favorably by just 20 percent, according to the poll. In mid-April 29 percent of those polled viewed the movement unfavorably, while 26 percent viewed it favorably. And 43 percent of Americans now think the Tea Party has too much influence on the Republican Party, up from …
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July 31, 2011, 1:13 pm
By Todd Gitlin
Arthur Laffer is back. There he was holding forth on Fox News the other day, replaying his Golden Oldie about how lowering tax rates increases growth, which increases government revenue. According to David J. Lynch in Business Week, even many top Republican economists find Laffer’s notion absurd:
In practice, the 1981 Reagan tax cuts left revenues about 30 percent below where they would have been if rates hadn’t changed, says Lawrence B. Lindsey, director of the National Economic Council in the Bush Administration. The Bush tax cuts cost $1.5 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimated last year. “The notion that a broad decrease in tax rates raises revenue was never taken seriously by professional economists,” says Alan D. Viard, who worked for the Treasury Dept. on tax issues in the George W. Bush Administration and is now at the…
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July 25, 2011, 1:40 am
By Todd Gitlin
DRIVING THROUGH COLORADO
1
Driving through the mountain states during the last couple of days, my wife and I were gripped for many hours by the BBC reports on the massacre in Norway. The initial reports, you will recall, described the gigantic bomb blast in downtown Oslo. It wasn’t till a couple of hours later that the reports starting coming in from the island where the gunman was shooting down teenagers at a labor party camp. During the interim, the first official voice on the BBC—I didn’t catch the name, but it might have been Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg—said something that impressed me especially, elementary and necessary words to the effect that terrorist acts are terrible “wherever they take place.” Then the BBC correspondent referred a couple of times, after brief hesitations, to “Islamic terrorism.” Ample ruminations followed on what might be motivating “I…
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July 18, 2011, 1:31 pm
By Todd Gitlin
A number of readers have found it unseemly of me in recent days to carry on so about Murdoch’s criminal enterprises, for after all, aren’t they confined to the old Motherland, where some high officials have not yet resigned; and isn’t it true that not all those under suspicion of crimes have yet been convicted and sentenced; and anyway, is the complainant not an honest-to-God left-winger?
I sympathize, seriously, with the task of conservatives trying to defend Murdoch and his enterprises as exemplars of the Live Free or Die, Don’t Tread on Me mentality. After all, he is one of the big-booted treaders of our time. He has corrupted the British press—from the downscale Sun and News of the World to the upscale Times and Sunday Times—on more than an industrial scale: it’s cartel scale. Over here, he has degraded the Wall Street Journal, once known for serious investigations. And…
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July 16, 2011, 8:39 pm
By Todd Gitlin
In his resignation statement on Friday, Wall Street Journal publisher, Dow Jones CEO, and 52-year (no typo) Rupert Murdoch employee Les Hinton, who before moving to New York was executive chairman of News International (which published the late News of the World), said:
When I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated; that important lessons had been learned; and that journalistic integrity was restored. My testimonies before the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee were given honestly. When I appeared before the Committee in March 2007, I expressed the belief that Clive Goodman [convicted of hacking into royal voicemail] had acted alone, but made clear our investigation was continuing. In September 2009, I told the Committee there had never been any evidence delivered to me that suggested the conduct…
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July 14, 2011, 3:24 pm
By Todd Gitlin
British politicians are suddenly sprouting spines and even American legislators (Sens. Jay Rockefeller, Frank Lautenbach, Robert Menendez, Barbara Boxer, and lone Republican Rep. Peter King) are calling for SEC and Justice Department investigations into possible criminal acts performed on native soil. As I write, the AP reports that the FBI is investigating whether News Corp. might have hacked into the phone accounts of 9/11 victims. In the light of Murdoch’s extraordinarily successful attempts to do for salacious depravity what John D. Rockefeller did for oil, it’s an especially nice touch that the latter’s great grandson, West Virginia Senator Rockefeller, was first up among American politicians to seize the investigative day. Meanwhile, Steven Brill has pointed out that “News Corp. has a lot of FCC licenses. There’s still a clause in the federal communications law that requires that …
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July 8, 2011, 12:38 pm
By Todd Gitlin
Indefatigably pursuing the burning question of why repeatedly law-breaking corporations—in particular, the financial corporations whose self-dealing frauds and criminal negligence brought the global economy crashing down—have not been indicted on criminal charges, the invaluable Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story have an amazing story on Page 1 of this morning’s New York Times. The headline barely introduces the tale: “As Wall St. Polices Itself, Prosecutors Use Softer Approach.” The online head is: ”Behind the Gentler Approach to Banks by U. S.”
The companies get to investigate themselves. Nice work for criminal defendants. Here’s how Morgenson and Story put it:
Government lawyers now go to companies earlier in an inquiry, and often tell companies to figure out whether improper activities occurred. Then those companies hire law firms to investigate and report back to the…
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July 6, 2011, 11:31 pm
By Todd Gitlin
NBC News led tonight with a S-C-A-R-Y story by Pete Williams, boomingly introduced by an alarmed Brian Williams, warning that “al-Qaeda operatives have talked” about finding doctors who might “surgically implant explosives or explosive components in passengers to carry out suicide attacks.” Yemeni terrorists “are figuring out how to bring down an aircraft.” Brian Williams intoned in a state of alarm that the TSA was talking not about body cavities but about explosives “surgically placed within the body of a living human being.”
No government leaker, no terrorism expert, purports to have found any evidence of an impending plot.
Now, I’ve no doubt that al-Qaeda operatives talk about lots of things. I’ve no doubt that they would love to bring down planes on their way into the U.S. I’ve no doubt either that the TSA wants to alert passengers that they may expect more intensive…
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July 4, 2011, 1:26 am
By Todd Gitlin
WILLIAMS, ARIZONA
My wife and I are driving across the country to Southern California. Many are the splendors of this land, which is your land, my land, and a lot of other people’s land. Some own too damn much of it and some don’t own enough to get by. But that’s not my story today. It’s the eve of July 4, 235 years to the day after some wild and crazy Englishmen (they were all men, then) decided to subscribe their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to some propositions they were not yet prepared to deliver on, but they ushered something brilliantly new into the world, where it remains, an idea still unfolding, still warped, still transgressed, still most imperfectly delivered—still tantalizing.
In this little town near the Grand Canyon, there’s a nightly festivity performed by a local amateurs’ (lovers’) group, billed as a shoot-out. At 7 p.m., a town crier type strolls around in…
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June 27, 2011, 9:27 pm
By Todd Gitlin
I’m proud to say that Kate Coleman is a friend of mine. She is also a fearless, indefatigable Berkeley-based journalist who resisted fashions for more than 30 years while writing penetrating and courageous reports on the Black Panther Party, both when it was lionized (well, pantherized) and when it was demonized. Now she’s done it again, for The New Republic, on Elmer (“Geronimo”) Pratt, who died earlier this month in Tanzania, where he went after serving 27 years in prison for the Santa Monica murder of a woman named Caroline Olsen, the first eight of those years in solitary. He was, she writes, “denied parole 16 times before his sentence was vacated and he was freed.” Some of this was reported in obits, but the worst of it was missing.
Here’s her nut graf about how it happened that Pratt was denied the alibi he had earned because of the vileness of the sometimes still lionized …
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June 22, 2011, 10:47 pm
By Todd Gitlin
My co-blogger Laurie Essig writes:
…whatever strange bedfellows come together to end this war, it will not be in the way that Vietnam ended: as a result of pressure from the Left end of a very different political spectrum, from the students, from the media, from the “leading voices,” and from many of the soldiers themselves. When the war in Afghanistan does finally end, it may very well be the result of economic collapse (as it was for the Soviets) more than political vision or mass movement. In other words, wouldn’t it be nice if Afghanistan were another quagmire like Vietnam instead of the black hole that it is.
The overwhelmingly effective forces that ended the war were the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. Absent their military prowess—which meant also their political prowess—all the righteous demonstrations, the lobbies, the political swings, all of them would…
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