Author: hankkalet

 

This kind of story makes me nuts. It is cast as unbiased reporting, but really is closer to opinion than a straight explanation of what is happening. As Jay Rosen, the press critic pointed out, it is so maddening that it deserves a response:

This story may finally get me to try press-criticism-as-annotation, a method I have been meaning to attempt. http://t.co/3lPD3EKmXu

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) June 7, 2015

I thought annotation was worthwhile, too (see above), and it led me to the brief analysis that follows.

The key point I want to make is this: The unattributed statements in the first few paragraphs are meant to cast conventional wisdom as fact, which then recasts recent history in an alternative universe, painting the Clinton years as qualitatively different in terms of partisanship than what we have experienced during the Obama years. Of course, the story doesn’t overtly make that claim, but the implication is pretty clear from the way it chooses to describe Bill Clinton’s

Let’s look at the first four paragaphs (see the photo above of my red-penned mark-up). It starts with a conditional claim, that Clinton “appears to be dispensing with” with Bill Clinton’s approach — a phrase designed to distance the story from its main thesis, that Hillary Clinton has decided that she can’t win “white working-class voters and great stretches of what is now red-state America” and that, in doing so, she will be foregoing an opportunity to use her campaign to unite voters and politicians. This assumes, of course, that Bill Clinton was a unifying figure in American politics — a rather absurd claim given that the Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 or so years while he was in office, and that the ’90s were marked by the same kind of partisan gamesmanship we have been witnessing during the Obama era.

The writers, however, double-down, claiming that her apparent decision to “retrace Barack Obama’s far narrower path to the presidency” may be “a less difficult task than trying to win over independents in more hostile territory.” according to Democrats, “even though a broader strategy could help lift the party with her” (unattributed comment — i.e., the writers’ opinion).

This early in the campaign, however, forgoing a determined outreach effort to all 50 states, or even most of them, could mean missing out on the kind of spirited conversation that can be a unifying feature of a presidential election. And it could leave Mrs. Clinton, if she wins, with the same difficulties Mr. Obama has faced in governing with a Republican-controlled Congress.

Bill Clinton, of course, did not have the “same difficulties” with the Republican Congress, or so the writers’ rather confused memory would have us believe. Clinton did manage to get some things through Congress — mostly the kind of dismantling of the safety net usually associated with Republicans — but the reality is that his eight years in office offered a permanent state of investigation of his administration, a government shut down and an impeachment.

Clinton’s broadbased election strategy, the story says, resulted in Democrats winning back the white working class. Again, this is at odds with reality. Exit polling showed that Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, won the white male and Protestant votes by significant margins — something that Republicans have continued to do in the intervening years.

In addition, it is important to remember that Clinton won both of his elections without crossing the 50 percent popular vote threshold, and it could be argued that his electoral college landslides occurred because Ross Perot siphoned off just enough conservative votes to keep several states out of the Republican column. (He won Kentucky and Nevada by about 1 percentage point each and Arizona and Tennessee by less than 3 percent each.)

This is pure speculation, of course — who knows what may have happened had Perot not run. This is why I turn to so-called “weasel words” like “could be argued.” I’m not saying he would have lost those states, but saying Bill Clinton was a unifying political force bears no relation to the decade of partisan warfare that I remember.

The story is, as Rosen pointed out on Twitter last night, a case bias without self awareness:

I wouldn’t mind these things if the reporters showed just a bit of awareness that THEY prefer centrism and “middle.” http://t.co/3lPD3EKmXu

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) June 7, 2015

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that there is some reasonable middle and that anything that deviates from it, any politician who claims a political philosophy or boldly stands up for a constituency, contributes to paralysis.

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I posted this to my Facebook account and thought it worth sharing. Feel free to comment on the Facebook thread, or here:

I will update this with Twitter responses as (if) they come in.

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A four-year old video from Louisiana has been making the rounds on Facebook again — and it is difficult to know why. I saw it on the page of someone who usually posts generically patriotic material, so I have to assume he was offering this as an example of how “real Americans” deal with internal critics, but I can’t be sure. What I can say is that the video — which shows students at Louisiana State University reacting in anger to a protest by a handful of protesters planning to burn an American flag — shows that we continue to revile dissent in this country and that the rights of conscience outlined in the First Amendment to the Constitution mean little to far too many people.

Here is the video:

The thing that bothers me here is not the counter-protest — that is completely appropriate. You meet speech you dislike with more speech; you meet protests you disagree with with more protest. What bothers me is the efforts at intimidation, the way the crowd moves in on the silent protester, the need for police to protect him, the up-in-your-face verbal assault by the uniform-clad member of the military and the tossing of what I assume are water balloons (can’t be sure) at the protester.

The police escorted the protester away and ended the protest, to protect his safety, so it never descended into outright violence. But projectiles were being thrown. Counter-protesters were getting ansty and aggressive. One has to wonder what would have happened had the police not intervened.

And this raises an interesting question: How different is this than what we saw happen in Baltimore or Ferguson, where anger did spill over into violence? Would we have seen the same kind of gleeful dismissal of the protesters we witnessed after Baltimore and Ferguson, especially from conservatives who used the violence as an occasion to call into question “ghetto culture” and the like? Would they, in particular, have used this flag protest to liken the counter-protesters to Nazi Brown-shirts, or attack Southern patriots as a somehow lesser race of people?

My guess is no. My guess is that the folks at Fox News and throughout conservative media would have hailed the counter-protests and patriotic Americans and would have blamed the handful of lefties who planned the initial protest for any violence that might have occurred. My guess is that, rather than the “no-excuse-for-violence-there-is-a-right-way-to-protest” line they have been pushing over the last month, we would have heard some variation of Goldwater’s “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” — conveniently ignoring the second half of his quote in which he says “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” (The line echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s defense of protest and “extremism” in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”)

As I said, there are differences between what we see on this video and what occurred in Baltimore and Ferguson that go beyond the descent into actual violence. On the one side, we have a crowd representing a majority point of view, a largely (if not completely) white crowd using intimidation to enforce political conformity, seeking to silence dissent, and essentially sacralizing the flag. On the other, we have a people who live in some of the worst poverty conditions in the United States, in a city that has been gutted by political and economic systems that have no use for the city’s residents, a people who have been beat down and denied not just their rights but any sense of their humanity for hundreds of years and who still deal daily with the kinds of sleights and assaults that white Americans do not have to endure. One side’s patriotism and sense of entitlement are being challenged, the other side’s very existence.

Even if we do not tie this video to what has happened more recently in Baltimore and Ferguson, we should be offended by what takes place in this video — and not by the flag-burner.

Flag burning is a provocative act, a symbolic act designed to underscore our national failings. By burning the flag — our national symbol — the flag-burner raises questions about American provenance, about American exceptionalism, about our role in the world and our inaction at home. It is a symbolic assault. It is extreme, to be sure, but it is extreme in the way Goldwater and King use the phrase — an action designed to wrench us from complacency so that we can see our own failings. (Whether it works, in a pragmatic way, is another discussion.)

As such, the burning of a symbol like the flag is protected speech and protected protest. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree, but we live in a country in which this is allowed — as is art work like “Piss Christ,” as are cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed (whether presented in satirical publications like Charlie Hebdo or by avowed Islamaphobes and racists like Pamela Geller).

What is offensive and scary to me, in the end, is not the counter-protest itself, but the form it takes, the intimidation and the sense that it is OK to berate (and possibly beat) people into silence, and that this sort of violence in the cause of the status quo seems OK to too many.

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One of the things that has struck me about the debate over police brutality and the uprising in Baltimore is its reductive nature — both sides demonizing everyone on the other side, failing to acknowledge the difficulties that both sides live with every day. I can’t pretend to know what it is like to live in a place like Ferguson or West Baltimore, where money and jobs are scarce, where the police appear as overseers and occupiers; I also can’t pretend to know what it is like to do a job in which there is a chance that any interaction can turn violent in a second.

But while there is a lot of gray in this debate, it is not one in which blame can be spread equally. The power structure — of which police are a part — is responsible for the creating conditions in which American citizens feel like an oppressed and occupied population. History argues that this is the case, the history of slavery, Jim Crow in the South and a de facto Jim Crow in the North that played out in housing policy (as outlined in Ta Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”), union membership and hiring, the deindustrialization of our cities, white flight, school funding fights, etc.; the war on drugs and the general use of war rhetoric in the public policy arena, especially as it relates to black youth; and the victim blaming we see regularly on cable television that pretends that the occasional success story (i.e., Barack Obama or Cory Booker) proves it isn’t public policy but personal character that determines all outcomes.

In a lot of ways, the protests — and riots — in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere were almost inevitable. Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were spark and the long-term conditions were the fuel, though it is hard to know why these specific cases were the ones to ignite what has happened and not others that were equally alarming. (I won’t call them tragic, because I try to reserve the use of the word to the Aristotilian use — via Joyce — in which tragedy is the result of hubris, the tragic outcome a result of an individual’s excessive pride and something caused by his or her own actions.) Violence can follow when subjugated people — or people who view themselves as subjugated — feel as though their concerns are being ignored.

Coates, in an essay shortly after last month’s riot, was critical of those calling for calm and criticizing the youth in Baltimore from afar. The riot, he said, was “an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain,” but also a response to something deeper.

Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city’s publicly appointed guardians of order. And yet the mayor of that city and the commissioner of that city’s police still have no idea what happened. I suspect this is not because the mayor and police commissioner are bad people, but because the state of Maryland prioritizes the protection of police officers charged with abuse over the citizens who fall under its purview.

The citizens who live in West Baltimore, where the rioting began, intuitively understand this.

The calls for non-violence, he adds, came from people “charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray’s death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death and so they appeal for calm.” That, he said, is disingenuous.

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called rioting an immoral act, but also made clear that “riot is the language of the unheard” — a line he used a number of times, including a little remarked upon speech (“The Other America”) and this CBS interview. King was critical of violence on moral and tactical grounds, but he understood its genesis. The Black Power movement of the time was a response to the failures of white America to address not only segregation but economic inequality and the race-based, though seemingly race-neutral policies used to enforce the status quo.

The police are a part of this legacy, though their part is complicated and not completely or even mostly of their own creation. They have been put in an untenable position, having these racist and military tropes drilled into their heads repeatedly. They have been told they are fighting a war, so it should be no surprise when they act like soldiers and treat the “bad guys” not just as people who may have broken a law but as the enemy and, as we do to all enemies in war, as less than human.

Radley Balko put it this way in an interview a few years ago:

I think rhetoric is very important. For one, declaring war on drugs, crime, etc. conditions the public to be ready to give up some essential rights in order to win the war, as often happens during war. But it also of course has an effect on police, who have come to see themselves as soldiers on a battlefield instead of peace officers.

The war rhetoric has also been accompanied by efforts to dehumanize drug offenders. One Nixon official called them “vermin.” William Bennett once floated the idea of public beheading of drug dealers. Daryl Gates once equated drug use with treason. When you tell the public that drug offenders are less than human, the public is more tolerant of treating them that way.

Part of this is the history of American police forces — which were created to protect property and wealth and keep the rabble (blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Italians, workers) in check.

Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working-class neighborhoods.

Today’s police are very different than those early forces — far more professional and, in many places, better connected to the communities in which they serve. But their main focus remains the same — keeping order — and that infuses everything they do. They’ve also become their own standing interest group, with leaders fighting to protect members and to maintain long-won prerogatives, and the ability to influence local and state politics. (In this way, the police unions are no different than the teachers or other public employee unions, though they rarely end up the butt of criticism in the same way that teachers do.)
 If it sounds like I am being critical of all police, then you’re misreading my intent. There are good cops out there — most cops, in fact, are well-intentioned, are professional, are only interested in protecting the community. But they operate in a system designed to stifle their best impulses. Systemic reform is needed — not just within individual police departments or even within the larger police culture, but at a societal level, a cultural level, a broad economic level. Democratizing police culture is a start, but it won’t go very far until we acknowledge that we need to fix the rot at the core of the American economy and address hundreds of years of willful neglect of (and, in too many cases, outright hostility toward) Black Americans.

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I found this paragraph interesting in today’s New York Times’ story on the drone program.

Consider the level of detail explaining why the Times was identifying officials, despite a government request not to do so. The paper saw it as allowable

because they have leadership roles in one of the government’s most significant paramilitary programs and their roles are known to foreign governments and many others.

It’s a gutsy move from a news organization that often abides by these kinds of requests, and the level of detail offered explaining the paper’s reasoning underscores this. It demonstrates that the needs of the readers come first while signaling that the decision was a deliberate and thought-out one.

So kudos to the paper, though I should point out that this also sets its mixed record on unnamed sources. This level of explanation should accompany every use of an unnamed source — as should the implied level of discussion. That the Times — and far too many other papers — fails in this regard remains a major problem with the modern reporting process.