Honey, Can You Take Out the Trash?

There are thousands of writers and intellectuals who would kill to have just one of their opinion pieces appear in The New York Times. And they would confess to another crime they did not commit to have that piece appear in the Sunday "Week in Review" section. Count me in as one of those people.

Which is why it is so incredibly dispiriting to read a piece like this one, by Sandra Tsing Loh, in last week's Sunday Times. The purpose of the column, from what I can tell, is to brag that she makes more than the man in her life; to allow her to concoct an idealized and self-indulgent picture of a romanticized 1950s scene domestic bliss; and in ways that are not clear to tie it all into the difficulties of modern life. This is a column we've all read ten thousand times before. Surely the Times received a hundred potential contributions this week that the editors did not even deign to recognize with a response that were more substantial and more coherent than this flatulent garbage.

Robert Novak, RIP

Robert Novak passed away today. Novak was one of the first conservative pundits whose work I came to know back when I was in high school and shows where people shouted at each other first began to enter the public consciousness. But before he was a talking head he was a columnist. A sometimes dour columnist, but one who knew where he stood and was not afraid to tell you, damn the blowback. He and George Will have always driven me crazy with a certain unguent smugness, but give me them any day over the Glen Becks, Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs, and Bill O'Reillys who have taken over the mantle as the public voices of conservatism.

Quick Hits

Because dcat readers cannot live solely on a diet of Keele Diaries, here are a few links with brief commentary:

Eugene Robinson takes on the very real and deeply disturbing possibility that The New York Times Co. might shutter The Boston Globe. He uses words such as "pimp" and "cannibalism" to describe the Times' behavior. It is hard to disagree with him.

At Salon Glenn Greenwald goes after Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic for what Greenwald (to my mind rightfully) calls Rosen's "smear" of potential Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Rosen basically relies on little more than anonymous sources to attack Sotomayor's intellectual abilities. long-time readers know my view on journalistic use of anonymous sources, especially when those sources are used simply to grind an ax or pursue an agenda. It is one thing to protect a source who would otherwise be in legitimate danger and whose evidence is essential to the telling of a story. It is quite another to rely on anonymous sources to provide the only evidence you have to accuse someone of being dumb, sloppy, or both.

Finally, Jonathan Chait at The New Republic asks what happened to conservatives cherishing the rule of law? It was vital when it came to pursuing Bill Clinton for lying about his infidelities. Apparently it is less important when it comes to the rather more significant matter of engaging in torture. I am not sure where I stand on pursuing convictions. It seems to run the risk of guaranteeing future tit-for-tat. At the same time, should being in a presidential administration automatically grant one carte blanche for what are, not to put too fine a point on it, human rights violations?

Grammar FYI

Apparently lots of journalists are misusing the word "prepossess" and its myriad derivations. I have no idea if this matters to any of you, or to me either.

On Journalism Schools

Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that journalism school is kind of bullshit? Michael Lewis had just such a concern in 1993 and so visited Columbia's highly regarded School of Journalism to see if his suspicions were true. The result was this classic crackback in The New Republic. And frankly stuff like this (also at Columbia) doesn't help either.

The friend I am staying with here in Asheville is like a brother to me (and he periodically checks in on this blog) and he went to Albama's graduate school in journalism to get an MA. He enjoyed it, and surely found it useful in terms of giving him something to grasp on to after an undergraduate career in which he did not intend to pursue journalism and in an aconomic climate not especially conducive to helping a new graduate transition into professional journalism in small-town New Hampshire. He worked in the field for a few years and hated more about it than he liked - all while living in poverty even with full-time writing gigs - and is now a nurse (which required two more years of schooling). My own views of journalism school were shaped at my PhD program, an admittedly small sample, where the Contemporary History Institute included members of our nationally- ranked journalism program. The bulk of my journalism colleagues (CHI is an interdisciplinary program) were so enamored by the reputation of their school and the occasional big name passing through to teach for a year or a semester that they forgot to consider whether or not one-sentence paragraphs represent an especially wise approach to writing or why knowing stuff made their colleagues in history (or occasionally poli-sci, though at Ohio the political science grad students, and more than a few of the professors, tended to be fools and lackwits) so much more prepared to engage in substance than they were.

As far as I am concerned we could close all of the business, journalism, and education schools tomorrow, (keep early childhood education, which we could team with psychology or something) and the world would be none the worse for it. If these programs were limited to graduate school we could ignore them. But they pervade undergraduate education to the point where the journalists and teachers in training do not realize that you need to be teaching or writing something of substance that you know something about. Meanwhile undergraduate business majors all think they are going to be the next Donald Trump when the reality is that they are on a fast track to a middle-management trainee program somewhere that will teach them all they actually need to know about how to run that local Walgreens. Meanwhile the elite firms in accounting, consulting, investment banking, and what have you are recruiting senior English, history, and econ majors at Williams and Dartmouth knowing that smart people can be trained to pick up rudimentary business skills but that dumb people with business degrees cannot necessarily be trained to have analytical and critical thinking skills.

Misusing Quotation "Marks"

If you have ever graded student papers, or simply had to wade through a lot of bad writing, you've seen it: The profligate quotation mark. The single-most common comment I probably make on student papers is to circle unnecessary quotation marks and ask: "why"? This might become required reading for my students. (It will go along with this reminder, which I pointed out a few weeks ago, that the inapt quotation mark can also be used hamhandedly for ideological purposes.)

Not Playing Any More

Play, the fantastic sports magazine that came out quarterly in the Sunday New York Times is closing up shop after an all-too-brief run at the top. Play fell victim to the frankly lousy economic situation facing newspapers and magazines right now. It will be missed.

Creating Narratives

From today's Fiver, The Guardian's daily tea-time email football newsletter, comes this stinging indictment of sports journalism:

Ah yes, here we go, another conspiracy of the inadequate. Sports hacks are a lot like those boilers who huffily insist that all models are airheads. Here's how it works: we put it about that all footballers are so stupid it's as if B-movie alien zombies have gobbled their brains, then we oink and wheeze like diseased swine the very second their utterances stray from the clichés we want them to spew. And hey presto, footballers mostly stick to the script, enabling us to churn out putrid guff and then smugly sit back and congratulate ourselves for being so much better than the folks we write about - they may be fitter, richer, better looking, more talented, more widely travelled and altogether nicer than us but, hey, they're so dumb. Ha ha ha, the no-good fools!

Not only does this self-criticism ring true, it also says something about one of the ongoing laments I have about journalism, sporting and otherwise: The unrelenting hold journalists take on the narratives they essentially establish.

We see it in sportswriting, but this tendency is every bit as entrenched, perhaps moreso, among the hard news folks and the political commentariat. Obama wins a dozen primaries and caucuses in a row, then Hillary wins Pennsylvania, still leaving her hopelessly behind, but the talking heads have asserted that a good showing in the Keystone State gets her back in the game, and so there you have it. Those same folks insist that Jeremiah Wright is a major story, so they make his rantings a story and voila, it is a story. This same approach is how in some circles Tuesday's primaries are presented as a split decision even though Obama overwhelmingly won one state, narrowly lost another, and emerged with a greater delegate lead. Or how shallow interpretations of "the working class" and "elitism" becaome so warped and misused. Journalists create these memes and then have an interest in perpetuating them.