The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens makes a good point about the way in which the mainstream media pounced on a morality play in the initial reporting on the rape case against former IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn:
. . . the media (broadly speaking) has too often been guilty of looking only for the evidence that fits a pre-existing story line. It doesn’t help that in journalism you can usually find the story you’re looking for, whether it’s record-breaking heat in some corner of the world, or malicious Israeli settlers making life miserable for their Palestinian neighbors, or evidence of financial chicanery in Manhattan, or of economic prowess in Shanghai.
But anecdotes are not data–which happens to be the world’s most easily neglected truism. Also true is that sloppy moral categories like the powerful and the powerless, or the selfish and the altruistic, are often misleading and susceptible to manipulation. And the journalists who most deserve to earn their keep are those who understand that the line of any story is likely to be crooked.
Of course, insightful bloggers such as Larry Ribstein have been pointing out this dynamic in regard to the mainstream media’s coverage of business-related matters for years.
And Stephens’ own employer still has not owned up to the fact that it embraced in the case of Jeff Skilling precisely the same type of morality plays that Stephens decries in the DSK affair. The fact that Skilling remains imprisoned under an effective life sentence makes the WSJ’s touting of myths in his case even more egregious.
Life is complicated. Government is powerful. When the MSM embraces the latter’s suggestion that the former is simple, beware.
Another in our continuing series of creative commercials, an oldy but goody from Austrialia.
Just in time for the 4th of July weekend, Mark Bittman of the NY Times provides a lucid and comprehensive overview on how to grill a variety of popular foods.
Enjoy!
The latest security theater outrage from the Transportation Security Administration almost defies belief – forcing a dying, elderly woman in a wheelchair to remove her soiled diaper before she could board a flight to go die peacefully near her relatives.
And what is even more outrageous is the TSA’s official response to public outcry over the incident:
"We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure."
In other words, the TSA followed its self-prescribed “process,” so what it did must have been right regardless of the consequences to a dying 95 year-old.
Such reasoning is preposterous, of course. But, as Cato’s Jim Harper explains, the TSA and other governmental agencies routinely get away with such nonsense because of the bureaucratic prime directive – i.e., maximize discretionary budget:
The TSA pursues the bureaucratic prime directive–maximize budget–by assuming, fostering, and acting on the maximum possible threat. So a decade after 9/11, TSA and Department of Homeland Security officials give strangely time-warped commentary whenever they speechify or testify, recalling the horrors of 2001 as if it’s 2003.
The prime directive also helps explain why TSA has expanded its programs following each of the attempts on aviation since 9/11, even though each of them has failed. For a security agency, security threats are good for business. TSA will never seek balance, but will always promote threat as it offers the only solution: more TSA.
Because of countervailing threats to its budget–sufficient outrage on the part of the public–TSA will withdraw from certain policies from time to time. But there is no capacity among the public to sustain “outrage” until the agency is actually managing risk in a balanced and cost-effective way. . . .
TSA should change its policy, yes, but its fundamental policies will not change. Episodes like this will continue indefinitely against a background of invasive, overwrought airline security that suppresses both the freedom to travel and the economic well-being of the country.
As with overcriminalization and drug prohibition policies, the TSA’s policies are an ominous reflection of a federal government with bipartisan support that is increasingly remote and unresponsive to U.S. citizens.
Have the incumbent leaders of both political parties become too insulated to address these policies effectively and modify them?