In another retrenchment, after closing its domestic bureaus in 2009, the Washington Post is eliminating even more offices – almost all of the bureaus it has to cover local news. While conservatives may have little love for the work of the Post, it is yet another disturbing sign for one of the nation’s most prominent papers.
The Post will maintain just two offices for local affairs, in Richmond and Annapolis. Local editor Vernon Loeb has promised “never” to close those offices, but time will tell.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart writes about the president’s choice of September 7 for the big ObamaJobs speech:
That was one bad-ass move by President Obama. For weeks, MSNBC has been showing commercials for the first post-Labor Day presidential debate with all of the declared Republican candidates. Sept. 7 at 8 p.m. This afternoon, the White House announced the date and time when Obama would release his long-awaited jobs plan. Sept. 7 at 8 p.m.
But, wait. There’s more. Obama will do it before a joint session of Congress. While the folks onstage at the Reagan Library try to look presidential in the eyes of viewers and voters, Obama’s address in the House chamber communicates clearly, “I AM the president of the United States.” Whether intentional or not — and I agree with The Fix, coincidences don’t happen in presidential politics — it’s a go-big maneuver.
Capehart doubles-down:
Update, 5:20 p.m.: Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sent a letter to President Obama requesting that he move his jobs speech to Thursday, Sept. 8, at a time of his choosing. His stated concerns about time-consuming security sweeps are not entirely unreasonable, if they are to be believed. But it should not stop Obama from speaking to the nation. As much as I like the idea of the president sending a bipartisan signal by acceding to the wishes of the House speaker, this isn’t the time for compromise.
As we know now, the “bad-ass” move blew up in the president’s face. The speech will now be on Thursday, when it will compete with the start of the NFL season.
“Frustrated” is the subject of an email I just received from the president about his ObamaJobs speech, now set for Thursday. Here’s the line that jumped out at me:
No matter how things go in the weeks and months ahead, this will be an important challenge for our organization.
Nothing like a little us vs. them as you’re pitching your bipartisan plan to Congress in what amounts to an abuse of the Joint Session of Congress for campaign purposes. Here’s the email in its entirety:
Greg –
Today I asked for a joint session of Congress where I will lay out a clear plan to get Americans back to work. Next week, I will deliver the details of the plan and call on lawmakers to pass it.
Whether they will do the job they were elected to do is ultimately up to them.
But both you and I can pressure them to do the right thing. We can send the message that the American people are playing by the rules and meeting their responsibilities — and it’s time for our leaders in Congress to meet theirs.
And we must hold them accountable if they don’t.
So I’m asking you to stand with me in calling on Congress to step up and take action on jobs:
No matter how things go in the weeks and months ahead, this will be an important challenge for our organization.
It’s been a long time since Congress was focused on what the American people need them to be focused on.
I know that you’re frustrated by that. I am, too.
That’s why I’m putting forward a set of bipartisan proposals to help grow the economy and create jobs — that means strengthening our small businesses, giving needed breaks to middle-class families, while taking responsible steps to bring down our deficit.
I’m asking lawmakers to look past short-term politics and take action on that plan. But we’ve got to do this together.
I will deliver this message to Congress next week, but I’m asking you to stand alongside me today:
Whoa. Tamron Hall was the moderator of the panel when Andre Carson (D., Ind.) accused Republicans in Congress and the Tea Party of wanting to lynch black people, yet she never reported it.
On National Review Online yesterday, Jonah Goldberg argues that liberals’ weakness for “expert” opinion gives them a fetish for predictions. This is just as true of left-leaning media outlets. Today, Kevin Drum of Mother Jonesproclaims that, based on historian Allan Lichtman’s model of “thirteen keys to the presidency,”Obama is a “shoo-in.” The model rests on the theory that a candidate with more than half of the thirteen keys will always win (as has been true since 1984). Obama currently holds nine.
Lichtman’s coding is debatable, as Drum admits: the victory counts Obama as possessing keys for “major policy changes” (the stimulus and health care reform – both stupendously unpopular), “no social unrest” (one could argue the Tea Party represents major social unrest), “major foreign policy success” (based on the fleeting and relatively meaningless killing of Bin Laden), and “no charismatic opponent” (which remains to be seen).
But do these flaws cause Drum to reject Lichtman’s model? No, he states: “Still, Lichtman is the expert … [s]o there you go.”
It’s only a matter of time before Tina Brown follows the HuffPo model and includes soft-core porn. Until then, it’s “College Rankings 2011: Horniest.”
Here’s the list that Newsweak came up with. Lest you think there was no thought put into the rankings, here’s their methodology:
Looking to get an A in partying? Whether or not a one night stand leads to a serious relationship, Newsweek ranks the 25 schools where students have the best odds of hooking up.
Methodology: To find the best 25 schools for hookups we used four data points: each college’s score for girls, guys, and campus strictness from College Prowler (a higher campus-strictness score indicates a less-strict campus culture), and the male-female ratio with data from the National Center for Education Statistics, with better scores given to gender egalitarian schools that ensure both genders have a fair shot at a hookup. Each data point was weighted equally, and extra credit was given for schools that landed on Playboy’s best-party-school list for 2011.
I can see why Democrats accuse conservatives of being the anti-science party. We’d never think of doing something like this.
As the New York Timesreports, a recent paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science student at Yale, casts new light on the role of social and mass media in revolutions like those of the Arab Spring. The chattering classes, from the State Department to Silicon Valley, have assumed that social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter (despite their very low rates of adoption in the Arab world) played an integral role in the movements which have now toppled three governments. The Obama State Department has enthusiastically embraced this theory, placing it at the center of its policies in unstable places like the Middle East.
The paper, however, hypothesizes that less social media access catalyzes more effective cooperation and face-to-face interactions, from which revolutions draw strength. The paper argues that, on a macro level, media distribution is correlated quite strongly with low rates of dissent (even after controlling for per capita income and type of regime).
This and other dynamics suggest that a significant disruption in the distribution of media may spark significant levels of dissent, possibly enough to topple a regime. Using this spring’s Egyptian uprising as a natural experiment, Hassanpour argues that a sudden shutdown of digital communication contributed to the overwhelming protests that forced Mubarak to step down.
The paper, of course, does not suggest that social media cannot contribute positively to the organization of rebellions; Hassanpour’s conclusions are nuanced (and well worth reading). But it does add to the growing skepticism of techno-progressive commandments: for instance, that cyber-freedom is a crucial tool in modern diplomacy. Arguably the most impressive accomplishment of the Arab Spring has been the victory of a disorganized and heterogeneous group of rebels in Libya, which succeeded thanks to Western military expertise and impressive tribal cohesion. A mere 5.5 percent of Libya’s population has access to the internet, and the regime shut off internet access completely in early March (notably, just before protest escalations and the beginning of Western military intervention.) The tactical victory that freed Libya hardly seems to have been won by digital democracy.
During the uprisings in Iran in the summer of 2009, U.S. State Department official Jared Cohen (now a Google executive) asked Twitter’s management to delay network maintenance in order to allow protestors to continue communicating through the service. It is unlikely this had any effect, positive or negative, given that just .02% of Iran’s population had Twitter accounts at the time. However, Hassanpour’s work suggests that such intervention by the techno-elite may be no more likely to help revolutionary movements than to harm them. The components of successful revolutions remain effective dissent and determined crowds, neither of which is obviously connected to the rise of digital and social media.
Hassanpour’s paper, along with other lines of dissent (e.g., Evgeny Morozov), provides an important reminder that modern media may not be nearly as essential or beneficial on the ground in the world’s most chaotic places as the Obama administration and the technological élite may like to think.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell has chose an interesting hashtag for her latest tweet about the former vice president:
If you don’t know about twitter hashtags, what you do is put “#” in front of a word to make a hyperlink that searches twttier for that word, in this case, “dick.” As you can imagine, clicking on #dick is NSFW.
Nate Silver has a good post over at his NYT FiveThirtyEight blog about how coverage of Irene stacks up against past hurricanes. Irene comes in 10th:
Do hurricanes receive too much media coverage? Are they more or less newsworthy than airplane crashes? The avian flu? The iPhone 5? Shark attacks? The Dominique Strauss-Kahn case? The Libyan civil war? The royal wedding? Global warming? Anthony Weiner? The Dallas Cowboys?
I don’t know. What’s easier to evaluate is how much coverage Hurricane Irene received in comparison with other hurricanes. By that standard, the coverage was quite proportionate to the amount of death and destruction that the storm caused.
The Web site NewsLibrary.com is a searchable database of millions of news accounts — mostly newspaper and magazine articles, but also some sources like television transcripts. While it lacks representation of things like blogs and social media, it contains a highly comprehensive sample of what we might think of as the traditional media.
It’s easy enough to conduct a series of searches on NewsLibrary.com in order to determine how much press coverage past Atlantic hurricanes have received. The only tricky part is that the further you go back in time, the fewer sources the database has available, so we’ll have to adjust for this.
We’ll accomplish this by creating a statistic which I’ll call the News Unit (or NU). This is defined by taking the total number of stories that mentioned the storm by name (for instance, “Hurricane Hugo” or “Tropical Storm Hugo”; either one is considered acceptable) and dividing by the average number of stories per day that were available in the NewsLibrary.com database during that period. I then multiply the result by 10 just to make things a little bit more legible — so essentially, a News Unit consists of one-tenth of all the stories published on a given day.
For instance, there were 13,326 stories published that used the term “Hurricane Gustav” or “Tropical Storm Gustav” during the period when that storm was active, from Aug. 25 through Sept. 4, 2008. And on average, there were 56,200 stories published per day during that period in the NewsLibrary.com database. Dividing 13,326 by 56,200, and then multiplying by 10, gives a result of 2.37. So Gustav produced 2.37 News Units worth of coverage while the storm was active.
Irene’s score by this measure is 2.25 News Units, which on the high side but not extraordinary.
Specifically, it ranks 10th from among the 92 named tropical cyclones that made landfall in the United States since 1980.
Phi Beta Cons Re: Cal State Prof
I just wanted to point out that my two favorite cable dramas, Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, appear to . . .Go
The Campaign Spot We the Sheeple?
The good folks at The Daily, the new iPad-only publication from Rupert Murdoch, asked me to write an item and . . .Go
