The other day my local news referred to vegetables as "veggies" and bees as little "stingers." Assuming most viewers are adults, it would be good to not have the language cutesified.
Also, some very good things have been said by Glenn Greenwald and by Rachel Maddow concerning the whole Obama "bitter" flap. Not only is the coverage loaded with misinformation, as I noted, but of course the whole issue is stupid. Of course, the whole thing shows a disingenuous bit of circular reasoning: the media covers this stupid trivia about little things a candidate says or does that are not really very important otherwise, on the excuse that they may have the power to influnce the election. And of course they do have that power, because the media covers them obsessively, to the exclusion of actual news.
These two topics raise broader ones. I love media criticism, and I think the topic is vitally important. The fact that the Obama story here is so trivial raises a question of news values. One project which would be important would be to identify actual news values and interrogate them. For example, it has been commonly said for 40 years that negativity is a news value, and people have asked, why is bad news more important than good news? Or, if it is sometimes, when? Perhaps we should eliminate or at least refine this news value so that we do not overemphasize negative coverage. Of course, the local news have a habit of trying to be upbeat, which is just as disgusting. They still follow the formula that if it bleeds it leads, then produce "positive" segments for balance that are awful and do nothing to balance out the obsession with crime news.
A few days ago, for some reason I've forgotten, I had to look up standard western news values. I think those values have some serious shortcomings. I like Wikipedia's entry, on which I have based the following synopsis. They utilized three sources: Johan Galtung & Mari Holmboe Ruge's classic, "The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers, " from the Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2, pp. 64-91 (1965). This gave them 10 values. They added four more from Allan Bell's book, The Language of News Media. (Oxford, 1991), and a final two from Philip Schlesinger, Putting "Reality" Together (London, 1987), making a total of 16. I recite them below with my own explanations based on Wikipedia's, and put in my own order to reflect what I see as supercategories among them. I have put an asterisk on each of Bell's contributions and two on each of Schlesinger's.
Narrative structure:
Frequency (events at a convenient time versus other events or slow trends).
Unexpectedness (unusual versus everyday occurrence).
Unambiguity (simple background and obvious implications versus complexity).
Drama:
Personalization (individual actions versus no human interest).
Conflict (dramatic opposition versus none).
Negativity (bad news versus good).
Subjects important or culturally proximate:
Meaningfulness (culturally proximate subjects versus foreign).
Reference to elite nations (global powers versus other nations).
Reference to elite persons (celebrities and decisionmakers over everymen).
Relating to synergy or countersynergy:
Consonance (fit media's expectations versus unreadiness to report).
Continuity (inertia from being already in the news versus new subjects).
Co-optation* (related to major story versus not).
Competition* (endorsed by other news outlets versus not).
Composition (balances overall news output versus not).
Relating to the ease of production:
Prefabrication* (supplied verus requiring work "from the ground up").
Predictability* (pre-scheduled versus not).
Time constraints** (able to be covered quickly versus not).
Logistics** (nearby, accessibile and secure location versus not).
If one thinks about it, though, this list is plainly inadequate. Here are some I would add:
Exclusivity: (proprietary versus reported by others).
Currency: (recent, breaking, or imminent verses temporally distant).
Aesthetics: (compelling audio or video available versus words-only).
Uncontroversialiaty: (free of legal, security, or social restraints versus problematic).
Structure: (having a standardized narrative, like a legal proceeding or election, versus developing randomly).
Reproducability: (able to be repeated as a new story with small changes versus not).
Categorized: (belonging to a staple type like sports, weather, or crime versus miscellany).
Source-value: (known and considered important by frequent sources versus information scattered among those not frequent sources).
Another, broader project that I have had in mind for a long long time would be to gather up the various criticisms of media coverage and sort them out and evaluate them. Some, I think, would fall away as cases of a very intuitive but ultimately unsatisfying and unprincipled approach: if it does not reflect my values, it is biased. Without a set of neutral procedural and substantive criteria that identify how to present the news objectively, the tendency is to navigate between critics, covering things however intuitively feels fair. It's a start but it only goes so far, and explains why there is so much failure in objectivity in the present media output.
Wikipedia has a nice little entry on objectivity, but it highlights this shortcoming. It fails to mention Westerstahl's definition of objectivity, which I've always liked. More on this later.
Of course, the criticisms do not all center on bias. The problems of clutter, narrowcasting, entertainment values, horserace journalism, and stuff like the babytalk I mentioned above all pretty much grate on me. The local alternative weekly actually had a very nice cover story about a year ago, drawing together dozens of particular criticisms, to which I could have added a dozen more. I thought I had done a blog entry on it at the time, but I see that I never did, and have only my rough notes. This is something I want to come back to. It's a rich subject, important, and something I like to think about.
More later.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Precision, please. Balance, please.
I hate the fact that when I listen to news and talk programs I always have to second guess them as I would a scatterbrained friend who comes to me with a "Did you hear?" story. Im writing at the end of the News Hour and beginning of Charlie Rose and I've just heard a series of statements that are false in various minor aspects, regarding the statement Obama made that people in hard economic times unsurprisingly tend toward bitterness and cling to their religion and so on. Regarding what he said, what it meant, reharding what others said about it. What was particularly frustrating concerning this affair, is that both shows spent good lengths of time debating the parsing of the statement, and then wrap it all up with a paraphrase that adopts a particular, innacurate reading of what was said.
There was a nice piece in the local paper yesterday on the local cold case unit, looking at two cases from 1990. It was all very well done. But it was one of those pieces that assumes at the outset that balance does not matter. It referred to one of the cold cases as having been solved, because someone has confessed to it. That always annoys me because to me, the case is not solved when the prosecutor decides it is, or when the police decide it is, but when someone has been found guilty. The other cold case the article examined still exists as a cold case only because it was not considered solved eighteen years ago when a suspect confessed after a long grueling interrogation. Beyond the individual defendants' perspectives not being included, there was a more general question which the article did not consider: is there a downside to solving these old cases and prosecuting them? Does that mean reopening old wounds? How do you go about defending against a nearly 20-year-old charge? I'm not taking a position, but I think the article did.
There was a nice piece in the local paper yesterday on the local cold case unit, looking at two cases from 1990. It was all very well done. But it was one of those pieces that assumes at the outset that balance does not matter. It referred to one of the cold cases as having been solved, because someone has confessed to it. That always annoys me because to me, the case is not solved when the prosecutor decides it is, or when the police decide it is, but when someone has been found guilty. The other cold case the article examined still exists as a cold case only because it was not considered solved eighteen years ago when a suspect confessed after a long grueling interrogation. Beyond the individual defendants' perspectives not being included, there was a more general question which the article did not consider: is there a downside to solving these old cases and prosecuting them? Does that mean reopening old wounds? How do you go about defending against a nearly 20-year-old charge? I'm not taking a position, but I think the article did.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Earth Hour
I don't know if I should even spend my time noting this, but it seems like the commentary from the Journal-Sentinel's community columnists just gets stupider and stupider. They seem to include a small minority of reasonables set against a crowd of...
Well, best to avoid sputtering insults at them, which would only prove the phenomenon is contageous. I've been sitting on this for a week, since I read Al Smith go off on Earth Hour. The guy is apparently some ridiculous old crank who gets whipped into a frenzy by some news outlet that he takes far too seriously. Or maybe it's performance art -- imitating a slobberjawed hysteric as a kind of hoax. Or maybe he's really a good guy but had been involuntraily drugged on hallucinogens when it come time to write last week's article. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now, but I tend to suspect he belongs in a place where the friendly nurse will remind him to eat his jell-o and take his meds.
Judge for yourself. Here is the article in question. I've shown it to a few folks who have said what I think is obvious: if this came in as a letter, it would be attributed to a crackpot and thrown in the dustbin with the old sandwich wrappers or at best the "maybe if we're really desperate" pile. It certainly wouldn't get spotlight treatment. But here he is, a columnist. And advertising his freelance writing availability in his ID tag.
I shall now give my analysis of his argument.
Earth Hour, in the real world, is a sort of a stunt event promoted by various cities and countries around the world, where near the end of March, people are encouraged to douse the lights for one hour. The idea is to draw a little attention to global warming and also just to get people to try just a tiny taste of conservation, on the notion that some might see that it isn't so bad and try it more. It's designed to be minimally demanding, an admittedly negligible start in terms of actual conservation, but significant to the extent that it commands some attention and breaks some resistence to further steps. It's basically costless. The only negative is that some people might decide that participation in this trivial act of conservation is sufficient to purge their guilt over their Hummer and do even less than they otherwise might.
Smith, on the other hand, calls it first a "charade" of "staged" "propaganda" for the "gullible."
Huh? How can any of this apply? What's the message that we shouldn't fall for? Is it a charade because even when you turn your lights off, they aren't really off?
Al's wife: Will you turn out the light when you come up, honey?
Al: Propaganda and lies! You won't trick me!
Well, apparently, despite being obviously intended to deceive us, this effort is in fact the exact opposite. It is, Al informs us, extremely revelatory. "It all becomes clear now" because nothing more perfectly reveals "the true intent" of Earth Hour: it is "merely the prelude" to an even more diabolical scheme. The manufacturers of Earth Hour want to "turn off the lamps forever" and achieve their "longed-for dark age." Really! This is their "vision," their "only approved endpoint": the "dismantling" of capitalism, consumerism, and civilization altogether. (How this all becomes clear from asking people to conserve electricity is not exactly spelled out in detail. I assume this is because Al considers it too self-evident to bother to explain. Somewhere in his fevered brain, it came to him that this was true, and all he need do is point it out to the rest of us, and we would see too. Yes! It's so obvious now! Thanks, Al!)
Al appropriately labels these enemies of civilization. They are not just "extreme" "radical" "zealots" who push "insanity", "absurdity", "buffoonery" and "tragicomic...farce." They are "Goths". Worse, their campaign is "anti-human" based on "self-loathing" and "self-flaggelation."
To be fair, Al does not completely eschew evidence. He makes, as far as I can tell, two observations of fact supporting his epithets against environmentalists. First, they obstinately reject the obvious solutions to all our problems, such as simply finding more gasoline and burning it. I guess Al remembers thirty years ago when the issue was more about shortages than it was about climate change. He should check into this milennium. Fighting pollution with more pollution is at best unproven as a panacea. Other solutions they reject: burning more coal, burning more corn, and building nuclear plants. They also supposedly hate hydroelectric power, because rivers should run free. I must confess I had not heard this. He does not explain why they supposedly reject harnessing hydroelectric power from the oceans.
His other item of evidence is that he quotes a single climate and public policy specialist as saying that Earth Hour, while nice, will not stop global warming on its own. No private inititive ever will. The government must step in. I suspect he meant applying a range of policy tools, a carbon cap-and trade system, or a tax, clean power subsidies, tax breaks or other incentives, government limiting its own wastefulness, and assisting with public awareness, research and effort coordination.
Al, however, is certain that what this means is that the black helicopters are coming to get him the next time he forgets to turn his porch light off. He has figured out that "government is to have the power" to cut off your energy. Oh, the Constitution! he raves. People sadly are too "afraid" to defy the Nazi "Uber Greens" or the Communist greens of the "People's Republic of San Francisco" and their worldwide "fellow travelers."
So, I'm right, am I not? This guy is a nut and the Journal's standards are dropping like a stone.
Well, best to avoid sputtering insults at them, which would only prove the phenomenon is contageous. I've been sitting on this for a week, since I read Al Smith go off on Earth Hour. The guy is apparently some ridiculous old crank who gets whipped into a frenzy by some news outlet that he takes far too seriously. Or maybe it's performance art -- imitating a slobberjawed hysteric as a kind of hoax. Or maybe he's really a good guy but had been involuntraily drugged on hallucinogens when it come time to write last week's article. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now, but I tend to suspect he belongs in a place where the friendly nurse will remind him to eat his jell-o and take his meds.
Judge for yourself. Here is the article in question. I've shown it to a few folks who have said what I think is obvious: if this came in as a letter, it would be attributed to a crackpot and thrown in the dustbin with the old sandwich wrappers or at best the "maybe if we're really desperate" pile. It certainly wouldn't get spotlight treatment. But here he is, a columnist. And advertising his freelance writing availability in his ID tag.
I shall now give my analysis of his argument.
Earth Hour, in the real world, is a sort of a stunt event promoted by various cities and countries around the world, where near the end of March, people are encouraged to douse the lights for one hour. The idea is to draw a little attention to global warming and also just to get people to try just a tiny taste of conservation, on the notion that some might see that it isn't so bad and try it more. It's designed to be minimally demanding, an admittedly negligible start in terms of actual conservation, but significant to the extent that it commands some attention and breaks some resistence to further steps. It's basically costless. The only negative is that some people might decide that participation in this trivial act of conservation is sufficient to purge their guilt over their Hummer and do even less than they otherwise might.
Smith, on the other hand, calls it first a "charade" of "staged" "propaganda" for the "gullible."
Huh? How can any of this apply? What's the message that we shouldn't fall for? Is it a charade because even when you turn your lights off, they aren't really off?
Al's wife: Will you turn out the light when you come up, honey?
Al: Propaganda and lies! You won't trick me!
Well, apparently, despite being obviously intended to deceive us, this effort is in fact the exact opposite. It is, Al informs us, extremely revelatory. "It all becomes clear now" because nothing more perfectly reveals "the true intent" of Earth Hour: it is "merely the prelude" to an even more diabolical scheme. The manufacturers of Earth Hour want to "turn off the lamps forever" and achieve their "longed-for dark age." Really! This is their "vision," their "only approved endpoint": the "dismantling" of capitalism, consumerism, and civilization altogether. (How this all becomes clear from asking people to conserve electricity is not exactly spelled out in detail. I assume this is because Al considers it too self-evident to bother to explain. Somewhere in his fevered brain, it came to him that this was true, and all he need do is point it out to the rest of us, and we would see too. Yes! It's so obvious now! Thanks, Al!)
Al appropriately labels these enemies of civilization. They are not just "extreme" "radical" "zealots" who push "insanity", "absurdity", "buffoonery" and "tragicomic...farce." They are "Goths". Worse, their campaign is "anti-human" based on "self-loathing" and "self-flaggelation."
To be fair, Al does not completely eschew evidence. He makes, as far as I can tell, two observations of fact supporting his epithets against environmentalists. First, they obstinately reject the obvious solutions to all our problems, such as simply finding more gasoline and burning it. I guess Al remembers thirty years ago when the issue was more about shortages than it was about climate change. He should check into this milennium. Fighting pollution with more pollution is at best unproven as a panacea. Other solutions they reject: burning more coal, burning more corn, and building nuclear plants. They also supposedly hate hydroelectric power, because rivers should run free. I must confess I had not heard this. He does not explain why they supposedly reject harnessing hydroelectric power from the oceans.
His other item of evidence is that he quotes a single climate and public policy specialist as saying that Earth Hour, while nice, will not stop global warming on its own. No private inititive ever will. The government must step in. I suspect he meant applying a range of policy tools, a carbon cap-and trade system, or a tax, clean power subsidies, tax breaks or other incentives, government limiting its own wastefulness, and assisting with public awareness, research and effort coordination.
Al, however, is certain that what this means is that the black helicopters are coming to get him the next time he forgets to turn his porch light off. He has figured out that "government is to have the power" to cut off your energy. Oh, the Constitution! he raves. People sadly are too "afraid" to defy the Nazi "Uber Greens" or the Communist greens of the "People's Republic of San Francisco" and their worldwide "fellow travelers."
So, I'm right, am I not? This guy is a nut and the Journal's standards are dropping like a stone.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Elections as IQ Tests
I believe it somehow made it into this blog that I have referred to the election of George Bush as a failed national IQ test. There is currently a wave of debate that has consumed the local papers and local bloggers regarding whether the election of Mike Gableman to the state supreme court over Louis Butler represents such a failed test.
Butler's advocates (including blacks, liberals, most of the state's judges, and me) saw him in this race as clearly superior: he has more experience, is more scholarly, has more integrity, lends the court some diversity of perspective (the only justice from Milwaukee, as well as the only African American), and was generally far better qualified (as ratings from the bar confirm). His sense of justice may be labeled as more liberal or pro-criminal defendant (but more pro-civil plaintiff) than Gableman's, but it probably corresponds better than Gableman's to the actual values that most people can agree with: injured people should have decent access to the courts, even people accused of terrible crimes should receive a fair trial.
It is also easy to account for the votes against him on the basis of misinformation. Even when the local paper here was pointing out the lies in Gableman's ads, it assumed the framing of the Gableman campaign that the election was about which candidate would better use his position to fight crime. Since this is not the function of the court, there was an implicit contradiction in the Gableman campaign: I will not be an "activist" judge: rather, I will subvert the position to reach outcomes that I am running on today. Gableman's supporters and Gableman himself implicitly and explicitly argued that Butler's experience, dedication, and success as a public defender were negatives, a position that has profoundly negative implications for justice.
Joel McNally said on InterCHANGE, a local public television panel show, that the voters knew nothing abot Gableman, which is not entirely true. But it is hard to see what positive information got out about him other than: he was a prosecutor and judge, which is probably enough to show most voters that he is at least minimally qualified (notwithstanding that the bar buried him in "not qualified" votes), and he promises to be "conservative" (a term that probably confuses more than it explains) and anti-crime (which given the role of the court, also probably does more to confuse).
More to the point of course is the misinformation about Butler. As suggested above, he could be called more liberal than average. He treats Constitutional protections for the accused seriously. Ads regarding him worked hard to create the false impression that he was happy to see criminals run free and reoffend. Voters may never realize what a great justice they had in Butler, because he will leave his seat and who knows what they will hear of him in the future.
But the buyers' remorse over Gableman may be starting before Gableman is even seated. As the press continues to play out on this, and as ethics investigations proceed, and then when the court starts issuing opinions with his deciding vote, there will be almost certain regrets. It should be amazing, except that it is completely commonplace: the day after an election, the local papers report what the outcome will mean for the public. This was front page in the Sunday paper here. I can think of few things the press regularly does that are more absurd. Either the press has done their jobs and reported what the likely results of this victory would be before the election, or they have not. If they did so, then this is old news. If they did not, then they only indict themselves by reporting the information after its utility has fallen from 100 to nothing overnight.
This is one of those elections where one feels that if the truth had gotten out, the result would change. In that sense, it is a test failed. Failed by the system, and yes, failed by voters, but only because the test was made harder for them and they were led to think they did not need to study.
There is now a push led by liberal Butler supporters to reform the system. One (liberal proposal) is to eliminate judicial elections altogether. (Others include public financing and the Illinois retain-or-dismiss election system.) Any of the above would probably be an improvement. All deserve consideration. But ultimately, it is hard to see where any of this will make any difference if the public remains completely bewildered regarding what the court actually does and what qualities really make a good judge. To some extent, the fault is out in the democracy itself. As the saying goes, you always get the rulers you deserve, or else we would have gotten the metric system.
The conservative conventional wisdom is now that the liberals are animated by "sour grapes" to make any changes, and that the whole thing is profoundly undemocratic and dismissive of voters.
Of course, it is not that anybody wants to impose upon the public something that the people don't want; it is rather a paternalistic desire to protect voters from making the dumb decisions they make and regret. Time and experience show that there are some decisions people make that they frequently (or nearly always) regret. Like flirting casually with dangerous things (unsafe sex, unsafe drugs, unsafe explosives). Like falling for con artists, absusive husbands' promises to stop hitting, and conservative political ads. We make some of these deals voidable, grant rights of rescission, require some terms to be in bold print, and outlaw others. Some actions can only be taken with a license. But not voting for Gableman. The system really looks broken when 95% of judges support the incumbent justice, and an upstart under and ethical cloud is able to steal the seat by massively advertising distortions or lies.
I cannot buy all the righteous piety regarding how we should respect the voters. The same conservative conventional wisdom, before Gableman won, was very pronounced in the opposite direction on another race. There was a contest here in Milwaukee where the voters were constantly being second-guessed and there was rampant speculation over whether they would make the obvious right choice or be fooled. But that was the race for the Sixth Aldermanic District, the voters were nearly all black, and the second-guessers were white folks from outside who assumed they would get it "wrong" by re-electing the imprisoned Michael I. McGee to another term.
McGee lost, and I happen to think the voters in that district made a good decision, but I would not have faulted them for keeping McGee, either. Those who would have, though, dominated the discussion prior to the election, and they were the same conservative segment of the punditsburo that now find second-guessing of the Gableman vote distasteful. Was the supreme court race afford fewer unfair advantages to Gableman, whose victory we cannot question, than the Aldermanic race did to McGee, whose victory we could have? McGee was in jail, impeded from serving his district, under a cloud he could not answer without injuring his defense, and his whole budget was spent for legal defense rather than ads. He had no unfair advantage, and in fact was saddled with disadvantages. But his opponent's victory is not suspect, and his somehow would be. The only explanations for this doublestandard are political convenience, and, of course, race.
Butler's advocates (including blacks, liberals, most of the state's judges, and me) saw him in this race as clearly superior: he has more experience, is more scholarly, has more integrity, lends the court some diversity of perspective (the only justice from Milwaukee, as well as the only African American), and was generally far better qualified (as ratings from the bar confirm). His sense of justice may be labeled as more liberal or pro-criminal defendant (but more pro-civil plaintiff) than Gableman's, but it probably corresponds better than Gableman's to the actual values that most people can agree with: injured people should have decent access to the courts, even people accused of terrible crimes should receive a fair trial.
It is also easy to account for the votes against him on the basis of misinformation. Even when the local paper here was pointing out the lies in Gableman's ads, it assumed the framing of the Gableman campaign that the election was about which candidate would better use his position to fight crime. Since this is not the function of the court, there was an implicit contradiction in the Gableman campaign: I will not be an "activist" judge: rather, I will subvert the position to reach outcomes that I am running on today. Gableman's supporters and Gableman himself implicitly and explicitly argued that Butler's experience, dedication, and success as a public defender were negatives, a position that has profoundly negative implications for justice.
Joel McNally said on InterCHANGE, a local public television panel show, that the voters knew nothing abot Gableman, which is not entirely true. But it is hard to see what positive information got out about him other than: he was a prosecutor and judge, which is probably enough to show most voters that he is at least minimally qualified (notwithstanding that the bar buried him in "not qualified" votes), and he promises to be "conservative" (a term that probably confuses more than it explains) and anti-crime (which given the role of the court, also probably does more to confuse).
More to the point of course is the misinformation about Butler. As suggested above, he could be called more liberal than average. He treats Constitutional protections for the accused seriously. Ads regarding him worked hard to create the false impression that he was happy to see criminals run free and reoffend. Voters may never realize what a great justice they had in Butler, because he will leave his seat and who knows what they will hear of him in the future.
But the buyers' remorse over Gableman may be starting before Gableman is even seated. As the press continues to play out on this, and as ethics investigations proceed, and then when the court starts issuing opinions with his deciding vote, there will be almost certain regrets. It should be amazing, except that it is completely commonplace: the day after an election, the local papers report what the outcome will mean for the public. This was front page in the Sunday paper here. I can think of few things the press regularly does that are more absurd. Either the press has done their jobs and reported what the likely results of this victory would be before the election, or they have not. If they did so, then this is old news. If they did not, then they only indict themselves by reporting the information after its utility has fallen from 100 to nothing overnight.
This is one of those elections where one feels that if the truth had gotten out, the result would change. In that sense, it is a test failed. Failed by the system, and yes, failed by voters, but only because the test was made harder for them and they were led to think they did not need to study.
There is now a push led by liberal Butler supporters to reform the system. One (liberal proposal) is to eliminate judicial elections altogether. (Others include public financing and the Illinois retain-or-dismiss election system.) Any of the above would probably be an improvement. All deserve consideration. But ultimately, it is hard to see where any of this will make any difference if the public remains completely bewildered regarding what the court actually does and what qualities really make a good judge. To some extent, the fault is out in the democracy itself. As the saying goes, you always get the rulers you deserve, or else we would have gotten the metric system.
The conservative conventional wisdom is now that the liberals are animated by "sour grapes" to make any changes, and that the whole thing is profoundly undemocratic and dismissive of voters.
Of course, it is not that anybody wants to impose upon the public something that the people don't want; it is rather a paternalistic desire to protect voters from making the dumb decisions they make and regret. Time and experience show that there are some decisions people make that they frequently (or nearly always) regret. Like flirting casually with dangerous things (unsafe sex, unsafe drugs, unsafe explosives). Like falling for con artists, absusive husbands' promises to stop hitting, and conservative political ads. We make some of these deals voidable, grant rights of rescission, require some terms to be in bold print, and outlaw others. Some actions can only be taken with a license. But not voting for Gableman. The system really looks broken when 95% of judges support the incumbent justice, and an upstart under and ethical cloud is able to steal the seat by massively advertising distortions or lies.
I cannot buy all the righteous piety regarding how we should respect the voters. The same conservative conventional wisdom, before Gableman won, was very pronounced in the opposite direction on another race. There was a contest here in Milwaukee where the voters were constantly being second-guessed and there was rampant speculation over whether they would make the obvious right choice or be fooled. But that was the race for the Sixth Aldermanic District, the voters were nearly all black, and the second-guessers were white folks from outside who assumed they would get it "wrong" by re-electing the imprisoned Michael I. McGee to another term.
McGee lost, and I happen to think the voters in that district made a good decision, but I would not have faulted them for keeping McGee, either. Those who would have, though, dominated the discussion prior to the election, and they were the same conservative segment of the punditsburo that now find second-guessing of the Gableman vote distasteful. Was the supreme court race afford fewer unfair advantages to Gableman, whose victory we cannot question, than the Aldermanic race did to McGee, whose victory we could have? McGee was in jail, impeded from serving his district, under a cloud he could not answer without injuring his defense, and his whole budget was spent for legal defense rather than ads. He had no unfair advantage, and in fact was saddled with disadvantages. But his opponent's victory is not suspect, and his somehow would be. The only explanations for this doublestandard are political convenience, and, of course, race.
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