Primary Coverage Without the Facts

One thing that does really tire me concerning the coverage of the primaries is that, being so intent to provide color in the manner of a sportscast, to the point sometimes of shouting (but at least not shouting "Booyah" so far), the standards of the factual content have declined.

I've noted before that explaining how the voters feel is akin to reporting on the voters to an audience of candidates rather than vice versa. It is also an ill because it aggravates "third-party effect", plants the notion of voters' election role as passive and predetermined, and promotes preoccupation with the least important concerns. It is human nature to absorb the silliness of the pundits, just as it is human nature to laugh more readily at unfunny farce when a laugh track is provided. I of course am wrapped up in the race myself, being not immune. I fancy myself a lay pundit, with something unique and important to say to anyone who will listen, which puts me in the same cart with two thirds of the voters, who when scratched will do their best imitations of insiders, spouting back the virdicts of the punditocracy. The election coverage we get, which does not tell us how candidates would govern, but communicates the feelings and concerns of pundits and asks us to internalize them, is a continuous track not of chuckles and guffaws, but acquiescence and indigation according to the values of the pundit class.

But as I began, the issue today is on declining factual standards. Before I make my point about them, let me just set one thing up: A lot of things in this world are complicated. One must take care to speak with a certain precision about them, otherwise, one veers easily into untruth. Some things are not just complicated but sensitive. A small misstep might inadvertently send a message that insults or denigrates. And some things are policed so that it is not unheard of that people might speak in code, relating a message below the surface of their literal meaning. There are also those in the audience who find a convoluted or complex position irksome because it seems "overlawyered" and weasely. Something so carefully parsed suggests less than full commitment.

In this kind of public discourse environment, it would be back-asswards public policy to put the entire onus on the speaker to construct every statement perfectly, or to obligate them to elaborate each remark to idiot-proof it against imagined meanings, unlikely but conceivable misinterpretations, or misuse by clever editing. This especially goes for the campaign trail, where candidates are prone to rattling 20-hour days where every word is recorded and the record culled for the most outstandimg highlights.

What can the media do? It can provide context and background, so that voters will not be taken advantage of for their ignorance. I've often thought that John Kerry, although a bad pick, would have done much better if anyone in this country understood how the Senate worked, and that voting no on one version of a bill, then voting yes on a better version was not a flip flop. (Plus that some votes are strategic or symbolic, all are compromises, and voting twenty times on one bill that contains thirty inconsequential and uncontroversial small tax increases is not voting for six hundred tax increases.) Back to what the media can do: it can resist the urge to run soundbites, whose time I have not checked recently, but the last time I saw the research, their average length had gotten down to about eight seconds. It's not easy to get much context or nuance into eight seconds. The media can resist relaying any campaign message that seeks to punish core discourse values like nuance, caution, precision, reliance on evidence, transparency and tact. It can refuse to convey messages that are fact checked and determined to be simply and uncontriversially untrue. It can generally include context. And there's one final thing they can do, which they are not doing, and it's a pretty basic Journalism 101 skill. Can you guess it?
Consider the following examples, not all, from the Clinton-Obama dustup manufactured by the media. :

(1) Bill Clinton calling Obama's candidacy a fairy-tale.
(2) Obama changing positions on the war.
(3) Obama saying conservatives had all the good ideas.
(4) Hillary lying about Obama by saying he praised Reagan.
(5) Hillary suggesting Martin Luther King was not an effective civil rights leader.
(6) Hillary fanning the flames by making snipes at Obama on Meet the Press.
(7) Bill distorting the the facts by saying no one thought Hillary could win New Hampshire.

All of these have been reported in a manner completely at odds with basic journalistic standards, and most if not all of these has been reported in a manner exemplifying the basic staple of journalistic integrity I referred to above, which is: quote accurately. I mean, jeesh! In (1), Bill Clinton was not ambiguous at all. The context was completely clear that he called Obama's account of his consistent opposition to the war a fairy tale. Paraphrasing him partially quoting him as indicated above has not been limited to Obama surrogates outside of the media. In (2), I don't know of Obama being misquoted, but I wouldn't bet against it. Obama was consistent in saying that he was opposed to the war, but could not say how he would have voted on the war were he in the Senate in 2003. That's fair, because in the Senate, no one introduces a bill that says simply, "War?" and asks for your vote. The particular legislation was for authorization of force, and it deserved to be voted down, but lots of Senators stood up and said their vote for the bill was not intended as a vote for war. This goes back to the idea that the media doesn't explain much of the civic basics regarding the responsibilities and processes in government. In (3) we have a Bill Clinton misquote of Obama, which many in the media echoed either in or out of quotes. Obama actually said the Republican Party was for a time the "party of ideas," which was true, in fact. The Republicans had a bold agenda to push America backwards, while the Democrats were mostly about stopping this, which is not in itself much of an idea. In (4) we have Maureen Dowd from today's Times, misreflecting what Hillary said and implicitly misreflecting Obama too by somehow viewing the substance of what she put into Hillary's mpouth as wrong when it was right. Obama did praise Reagan. If Hillary had said simply this, it would not be inaccurate. It is possible to praise someone you disagree with. In (5) we have what is now a famously ridiculous misreading, which was originally attributed to James Clyburn but disavowed by him. I don't remember actually ever seeing Clyburn quoted as saying anything really substantive. I do recall the Times attributing a vague statement to him, which in the context they provided seemed ridiculous, and made me instantly think, "I wonder what the actual context was for this remark." Since then, I've seen the Clyburn elliptical comment referred to repeatedly without ever being quoted for I think the obvious reason that there wasn't ever much there to quote. In (6) we have a reference from someone in the media talking about how Hillary just wouldn't let the issue go. In fact, she was asked directly about the matter, and answered in a way that was fairly deflective, but I guess the fact that he answer was somewhat responsive and not completely evasive meant that she was trying to keep the story alive. Finally, (7) is Dowd again, accusing Bill of misreflecting what the pundits had said. Of course, Bill was accurate. The polls showed Obama way ahead on the eve of the vote, so "everyone" (among the class Bill was referring to) had already pronounced Hillary the loser. Dowd said this was "rewriting history," which in this case was a job Bill was happy to leave to Dowd.

So, in a nutshell: the media get off on handicapping the horserace, and it's infectious and it's bad not only for its own sake, but because the commentators are so preoccupied with how things seem or are read that they don't even do the reality-check of just reporting accurately what someone said, meaning they have effectively regressed to a prejournalistic state, and have lost the one thing that ever made them useful to begin with. They've stopped reporting and stopped anchoring their commenting to the actual news, and are commenting on their own feelings, which is far worse than nothing at all.

Green and Gold, Local News, Sex and Violence

I actually wrote this on Sunday, and realized today, Thursday, that I never published, probably expecting to do more...

Today is game day. I really can't help wishing the Packers will lose. Sorry, locals. I know some of you have invested thousands of dollars for a few tickets to the game. And it means a lot to you, and it pumps up the economy and all that. But for me, it's just one unending annoyance. If you want to measure the level of distraction, see our local news. With the national news devoted almost entirely to the who's-gonna-win predictions and strategies of the primary contests, it would be nice if the local news could administer at least the small amount of news they usually give, but Packers coverage has crowded out all but a few minutes of every broadcast. They've even be telling me what today's weather would be many times over all week, at the expense of knowing the weather day immediately ahead of those broadcasts.

One of the few stories to peep through on Friday was that of yet another sex offender, although this one has so far been convicted only in the media and is as a legal matter still technically innocent. Among the charges per Channel 4 was "pornography," which, so far as I am aware, is still protected by the Constitution and not a crime. This points I think to two things: first, the reporter was not awake, and the editor did not care, because they had 40 seconds or so to report the story and then get on to their real interest: a local family telling us their superstitious rituals to help Green Bay win, and which shirts are lucky and which shoes are not. Second, right under the surface, there is an understanding that these laws are not just about (or at least the coverage is not about) protecting potential victims, but is really focused on the sex thing. Get some sex into the newscast, while posing as anti-sex.

This struck me particularly because last week's Law and Order SVU just a day or two before this was about a little kid who became a serial rapist and his defense was the internet did it to him with its pervasive porn. What was strange was that no one in the show (so far as I saw, although I missed the beginning) made what I thought would be an obvious point: the really violent rape porn that the boy described is anything but ubiquitous. I think I have a reasonable familiarity with online pornography, but I have never personally encountered what this child described. I haven't had any personal or professional reason to look for it, but I would hazard that the general quantity of porn must be thousands or tens of thousands of times greater, maybe millions of times greater than that of viscerally violent porn. For a show that's usually pretty smart about knowing the difference between sex and rape, this was a bizarre omission.

I think these two events underscore a weakness in our public approach to sex crimes, which is, treating the sexual element as their defining characteristic, and obscuring the significance of violence and real harm (and indeed all details of the offense). I represented a teen whose crime of having sex with his underage future wife carried a far worse sentence than he could have gotten for just beating her (which was also alleged, but why try to prove it when you can just show the teens were hooking up before they were wed?). I have another case where it's clear that the only protection the law provided was not to potential victims, but to the public's irrational fears and the "yuck factor" concerning some things they'd rather not think of. (The law deals with what kinds of busineseses a registered sex offender can own or operate.) In these cases, it looks like sex panic has trumped prevention of actual harm. (Although oddly, as a consequence of the same motivations and lack of legislative precision, it can also happen that a crime will be considered a sex offense by definition even when it has no sexual aspect.)

UPDATE: Packers lost. Our locals appeared to be good sports about it. The news has returned to its normal state, which is poor, but better than it was when it was all Packers all the time.

Lessons from the Filipino Monkey

Glenn Greenwald’s treatment of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz is missing some of the revelations to come later, but has the right central point: the incident mainly shows the unreliability and incredibility of the Pentagon. With what we now know, it should be fairly evident the irony of Defense Secretary Robert Gates rhetorically asking who one would better believe: Iran or the Pentagon. The answer from the start has been clear and it has not been the Pentagon.

The Administration has been so eager to point fingers at Iran that George Bush has declared himself outside the intelligence consensus (and after reading all those books!) and pressed the nonexistent case for fearing a nuclear attack from Iran. It has a long history of staging Gulf of Tonkin type events (including provocation of the Korean War, and piggybacking on civilian efforts, the Maine incident). And more recently, it has resurrected the Five O’Clock Follies with the fraudulent stories about the Jessica Lynch story and toppling of Hussein’s statue at Fardis Square, not to mention the propaganda about turning points in the occupation, and the Petraeus show.

Iran, on the other hand, has little obvious reason to lie or to stage an episode, albeit this may reflect the US perspective. From Iran, it may seem that it does get some benefit from focusing international and domestic attention on US bellicosity, but this is just speculation, because we really don’t get much of any news here that shines a light on the view from Tehran.

The story was largely concocted. It initially did not appear worth reporting, but a day later it had become dramatic with the report, from which the Pentagon has since distanced itself, that the captain of one of the US warships was on the verge of ordering fire on the Iranian boats when they backed off, and that the boats had dropped mysterious white boxes into the water. A video released by the US was altered by merging footage that did not seem particularly disturbing (no white boxes, no aborted order to fire) with a black screen over which a voice could be heard telling the US (or the Iranians?) “you will explode.” The audio had no trace of a Farsi accent, and did not have the same ambient noise as the actual transmissions from the Iranian boats. It has since been reported by Navy Times and other sources that navigators of the Gulf are familiar with heckling messages of similar character in this region, threatening US warships, and these have been routinely been assumed to be civilian transmissions unassociated with Iran.

Martha Raddatz, appearing to be a credulous idiot (sorry) on Washington Week in Review, said the US captains were really scared. This begs a whole series of questions, mainly, scared of what? The implication is that the tiny Iranian speedboats could have crippled a gazillion-dollar US warship. If so, I have a plan to reduce the navy budget by about 90% replacing our fleet with outboard racers. My first thought was that the Iranians would obviously scratch the hull paint on the pride of Annapolis if they tried anything. My guess in fact is that a speedboat could produce minor but disproportionate damage sufficient to put the captains in concern that they would be forced by standing orders to engage the boats, and thus put themselves in the middle of an international incident. Another question I would hope for somebody to ask is, “what do you mean by behaving provocatively?” What does a small boat do to provoke a big boat? The failure to state anything particular that constituted the provocation was a red flag. George Bush commented that he found the actions (of behaving provocatively) very provocative. He also did not say why.

The final part of the story is the Pentagon’s claim that the US vessels were engaged in transit passage into the Persian Gulf, operating in international waters five miles outside Iranian territorial waters. This is, it turns out, nonsensical in a whole variety of ways. There are no international waters in the Gulf. Outside of Iran’s territorial waters lie Oman’s territorial waters. Ships typically enter the Gulf on the Iranian side. No agreement recognizes transit passage into the Gulf on the Oman side, and the agreement that allows the rest of the world access to the Gulf through Oman’s waters has never been ratified by the US. I find this striking because it would seem to be something easy to check, and yet most outlets got it wrong.

The Free McGee Movement

I went to an event last week, part of my effort to getting back to being more politically active. I used to go to political events daily, but my attendance has been falling off for some time. The event was a fundraiser for the defense of the imprisoned 6th district Milwaukee alderman, Michael McGee, Jr. (whose real name may or may not be Michael Imani Jackson).


Background.

McGee is interesting. I've met him a couple of times and from our limited interaction he seemed progressive and hardworking. Some of my friends who have dealt with him are not sympathetic. They see him, and I have no reason to doubt this, either, as being more successful in terms of his own notoriety than for his constituents, and ideologically sullied by a homophobic and sexist mindset that is all too well established in the community, which tends to get blamed on rap music but really is propagated just as strongly by traditionalists in the black church. On the common council and in the community, I sense a deep ambivalence toward him as an imperfect model who embarasses them and causes them trouble, but also represents some positive things, deserves respect, and has been unjustly treated. Some of the people I've talked to paint him as loving to project a kind of capo image, natty in a suit, king of the city, dropping asides regarding who might deserve a comuppance. His worldview appeared to be informed by that of the black power movement (his father, after all, revived a version of the Panthers little more than a decade ago) but was perhaps a bit indiscriminate. He seemed to sense conspiracies everywhere when I talked to him, which given the politics of City Hall and the dirty tricks against him is certainly understandable, whether or not it is factually justified.

McGee has been regularly attacked legally and rhetorically on private matters, and the local media has not been kind to him. It is sometimes hard to tell whether the news you see about him represents a struggle to be fair to him despite a lack of sympathy and the persuasiveness of his detractors, or whether the media have only barely gone through the motions of formal objectivity, actively seeking to embarass him. In either case, there has certainly been a very negative portrait that has shown through, and at many places, the coverage has been willingly or unwillingly slanted. Until recently, the news has focused on matters such as accusations regarding a woman whose child he fathered, questions about the name on his driver's license, and his use of intemperate name-calling against a fellow official, the types of news that he would get if he were Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, not anything related to policy or central to issues of aldermanic service. This alone is a black mark on the media, which waits to be fed these kinds of celebrity news rather than digging into policy issues and reporting on where council members stand.

The current plight of McGee relates to state and federal investigations into his official conduct which have landed him in jail. His state trial is scheduled for March. The first charge announced to the public was an alleged consipracy to commit murder, which is not anywhere among the current charges. A phone tap revealed McGee issuing directives to an associate to apparently intimidate an enemy. This was originally portrayed as the hiring of an assassin and is currently viewed by the prosecution as paying for a beatdown, resulting in two counts of felony conspiracy to commit battery. This is an I Felony, the least serious level, just enough to remove McGee from office and take away his pension. The authorities arrested McGee claiming that they needed to act quickly to stop the assault. The two codefendants on this matter have apparently decided to take deals and testify against McGee. Otherwise, I suspect the case would be difficult, since McGee could simply argue (and probably still will) that the expression he used did not imply violence, but some milder form of rough persuasion.

The state charges now number 12 and include several unclassified misdemeanors for criminal contempt for attempting to pressure witnesses from jail. The remaining charges are all for one or another variation of electioneering, bribery, or lying to election officials, mostly in the course of surviving a recall election initiated by conservative enemies outside the city. I was an election observer and deputy registrar, and observed unlawful election practices by his opponents, despite which McGee easily won the recall. The federal charges are related to corrupt use of aldermanic licensing powers, from what I gather. (More in a little bit about information gaps...) All told the state charges are about half felonies, all of the smallest caliber.


The Movement's Issues.

The event I attended had about 100 or so people. (The estimate of 200, given from the podium, was clearly inflated.) A petition for McGee has 148 signatures, but I'd estimate that about 2o of these were repititious or at least partially anonymous. Not many lawyers seem to be in his corner. His own lawyer on the state charges has twice asked to withdraw. The billing for the event drew me by suggesting that there would be some kind of legal briefing, and defense brainstorming, but what I encountered was essentially a sermon or revival meeting, which addressed the injustice to McGee only in generalities, except for a brief address by his federal defender. The main point to be made was that we could raise money if we all worked together, and that a conspiracy of evil had robbed McGee of his civil and human rights by denying him a trial, denying him bail, and had forced his constituents to endure taxation without representation. The goals of the movement seemed to be several: to actually free McGee by proving him innocent, to redress perceived injustices regarding his mistreatment in prison and denial of rights, and to assure his reelection.

Since this meeting was mainly preaching to the converted, there was not much substance to the cries of injustice. The Free McGee website is a bit better, but still not very robust. It does not link to any documents, like the criminal complaints in the case, and too many basic facts are missing for it to convince even a sympathetic skeptic.His defenders compare McGee's treatment to that of white aldermen and state officials accused of corruption (but not witness tampering or conspiracy to batter) and to that of violent criminals, who at least received bail and trial. As an attorney, I did not find the arguments very compelling, but I nevertheless believe there is some truth to them.

The denial of bail was based on a sound principle, at least superficially, and I actually worked for a while with the AUSA who argued for bail to be denied. McGee could make an argument, perhaps a strong one, that he was screwed over in the bail proceedings and that they were unfair throughout, but this is a detail-intensive argument I cannot personnally make with the information I have. I seem to recall state bail was originally requested and set at a very high amount, but that may have been because of the whiff of murder and an overestimation of McGee's wherewithal. It was subsequently reduced, which is proper; his community ties make him unlikely to flee. The federal bail proceedings all took place after the completion of a sisyphusian ritual of arguing, assembling and posting the state bail, which was all rendered moot by a federal hold. In the federal cases, bail was first granted by the magistrate, but this was reversed by the district judge. The ultimate result of denying bail impedes McGee's representation of his district. McGee's supporters don't really appear to address the state's argument that his release on bail would have facilitated his intimidation of witnesses and the frustration of justice, and that this was a factor not existing in the cases of white officials. Nor do they take into account that the context of the bail originally being set high would have been influenced by the allegations of a murder for hire. State Senator Chuck Chvala might have done some bad things, but no one ever accused him of planning the assassination of his political enemies.

As for his being denied a trial, this is simply not so. He has a trial scheduled. Trial delays usually help the defendant, and in this case, deferring the trial would assure that his pension will vest and that he will have time to prepare a defense.

Nor are his constituents completely without representation, although obviously the quality of that representation is affected gravely by McGee's inability to attend meetings, hearings, and votes. If McGee is guilty, then one might argue that this is what you get when you decide to elect a felon. If McGee wanted to assure his consituents had a representative able to fulfill these functions, he could turn over his seat. On the other hand, releasing McGee for votes and meetings (under appropriate restrictions to prevent any risk that he would undermine the legal process against him) would have been far preferable from the perspective of the legitimacy of local government. If Milwaukee were a province of ancient Rome, the people could cash a get-off-the-cross free card, as those of Palestine did Biblically for Barabbas. There's something to be said for such a policy. As inappropriate as it might be to literally allow the release of a criminal based on local popularity, it would be good to see the law recognize some viable mechanism where a community's support of an accused could be better heard. In this case, the federal authorites and the state and even local prosecutions are not seen as fully legitimate in the eyes of the local community, because Milwaukee is so racially segrgated and all of these guys that I've seen have been very much white. They are part of an establishment that seemed to selectively go after McGee, bug his conversations, push for a recall against him, pressure him with bad press and civil actions, and then characterize his responses to these very pressures as criminal.

I don't know anything specific about alleged mistreatment of McGee, but there is the matter, which I would agree is an outrage, is that while McGee's peer officials appeared in court wearing suits, McGee appeared in a prison jumpsuit and shackles. The image of McGee in shackles was used as recycled stock footage in subsequent newscasts which is an indignity to him and his constituents which evokes images of slavery. Whether this happened because of specific dislike for McGee as an alderman, or because of overt or more subtle racism is something that can only be guessed at, but there it is.

The McGee website does identify some acheivements of the alderman in office, but the descriptions are very slight and give no links.


What is to be done?

Back to the movement, the real question is, what should be done about all this? The obvious persons with the power to help McGee are the judges and juries in his trials, who are supposed to be insulated from influence and follow the law. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to raise money for legal fees and expenses like investigators that might legitimately help move a jury. This all supposes that McGee is innocent or at least has a viable defense that can be supported by these means. Beyond that, the Governor could issue a preemptive pardon, generally a bad practice, and politically unimaginable. The DA and US Attorney have a great deal of power and these really are appropriate parties to address if the goal is freedom for McGee. The problem is that the Milwaukee DA does not need McGee supporters to remain in office, and his federal counterpart is appointed. Winning support for McGee among Milwaukee residents might have some effect on getting the DA to moderate his attack, but not if the evidence is compelling, and the public has not really been exposed to the full scope of this evidence. Pressuring the media for fairness is something that might produce better coverage which is a good in itself and will have a secindary effect of making it easier to win others to the cause. To the extent the goal is McGee's reelection, then the focus should be on the voters, with an awareness of how legal developments will play in the campaign.

There are two big problems I see in all of this, however. The first is contingency. Many of the goals espoused by the McGee movement assume he is innocent. Maybe he is. But if he is not, then all of this will fall apart when the evidence against him proves to be overwhelming.

The other problem is possible misdirection. it sometimes seems like two thirds of all the political activity on behalf of minority and disenfranchised groups is wasted on purely symbolic campaigns. The effort to free McGee is not entirely symbolic, because the community is at risk of more than symbolic losses if it loses either the candidate it elected, or a vote in he common council which that candidate failed to influence because of his incarceration. I also understand there is a principle of standing behind one of your own who comes under attack for sharing your beliefs. In part this is the Niemoeller principle, which was further invigorated by the divide and conquer strategy of the red scare: all must stand together or all will be vulnerable.

However, there is a large portion of the energy in this campaign that appears directed to the offense or indignity in principle that their individual champion should be injured. To that extent, the community is responding to a symbolic injury, much as it would to the airing of a racial slur on talk radio. Campaigns around these kinds of issues, like third party presidential runs, can operate for or against more important concrete issues.

A recent example is the campaign by local Latinos to get Mark Belling fired from a local radio station for an offensive comment about “wetback” voters. Two groups pressed the issue. One called off the attacks when the radio station inaugurated new programming directed at Latinos and contributed money to the local community for beneficial projects. The other group pressed for the firing of Belling and as far as I know, won nothing but a sneering phony apology. The first group arguably sold out for too little, or for benefits that went too much to themselves and not enough to the broader community, but they did well in considering that the remedy they sought was flexible.

One can treat a symbolic issue as either complementary with broader issues, or as a competitive substitute. For example, if the media treatment of McGee is regarded as part of a broader phenomenon, then the media can respond by improving coverage of the inner city and the views of African American community leaders, and drawing attention to the effects of inadequate city services, inadequate state staffing of community corrections and child welfare offices, failure to deal with the housing crisis, predatory lending institutions like rent-to-own and payday loan stores, police brutality, employment discrimination, and on and on. Alternatively, the media could be pressured to devote less resources to all these items, by diverting the fixed share of attention it gives to inner city concerns to more balanced attention to the sixth district alderman.

Likewise, the McGee movement can draw connections to other issues, and use support for the imprisoned alderman as a way to press those issues using the celebrity of the situation, channeling outrage at one case into broader solutions affecting the whole community, or the whole criminal justice system. Or it can compete with other movements, diverting energy, attention, and resources from community benefits to the benefit of one man.

A crucial issue here is McGee’s keeping his seat. If McGee is a leader, his position should be that he (1) will serve as long as that is the will of his constituents, and not abandon them, but (2) counsels his supporters that they should let him resign rather than see the community suffer because of his circumstances, by his being unable to cast crucial votes for their welfare, or otherwise unable to provide them the leadership they need. The question is the same as above: can McGee use his imprisonment to rally support for broader causes, or will those causes end up taking a back seat to McGee?

It bears reiterating that McGee’s cause may well be quite just, and that it is not purely symbolic. But his movement should be strategically aware that the causes McGee represents could be either served or disserved by how this is played.