Journalism As Social Business?

What a month--nothing but travel and work, work, work. Now I am in Laguna Beach, California, working with a team of four authors on their business book. (Never worked with four authors on a single project before--quite a job to reconcile all their different viewpoints and styles. I've more or less decided that the solution is to let them fight everything out among themselves and then pick up the pieces.)

Anyway, this is a moment of lull while the group of us eat leftover Chinese food and read my draft of chapter 2, so I thought I would catch up on a little of my long-overdue blogging. Here's an item I've been meaning to write about for the longest time. After discussing how much trouble newspapers have been having making a profit in recent years, Ezra Klein writes:

. . . the news, like other things in life, should not be seen as a straight commodity. It is not there to turn a profit. It is there to keep our democracy healthy and our public informed. If that means it can't be appropriately subsidized through advertising, and needs public subsidies in a blind trust, or some sort of philanthropic revenue scheme, then so be it. Other countries do this, and do it well. But either the way, the bottom line should be that if it turns out that responsible news reporting isn't profitable, then we should sacrifice the profitability, not the responsible news reporting.

I think this is about right. In fact, I've saved this passage to quote because it ties in with a pet idea of mine, which is that executives in the newspaper business ought to be looking at Muhammad Yunus's social business as a financial model.

The idea behind social business, as you may know, is that a company could be run so as to be self-supporting, generating enough income to cover costs and support expansion (if any), but not throwing off profits. Being set up in this fashion reduces the financial pressure on social business managers and allows them to focus on their primary mission, which is to provide some product or service that benefits society. (In the case of newspapers, that service would, of course, be providing honest information about local, national, and world events that helps readers be better and more powerful citizens.)

If implemented properly, this business model also frees managers from the different pressures they'd be under if they were running a traditional NGO or charity--especially the pressure of raising funds through donations, foundations grants, and the like.

In our book Creating a World Without Poverty, Yunus assumes that the primary purpose of social business would be help the poor--the purpose, of course, for which his Grameen Bank (itself a kind of social business) was founded. But it seems clear to me that honest journalism also offers a social benefit that deserves and needs to get out from under the burden of profit-making. I'd love to see someone with the power to implement this idea starting to think about it.

Knee-Capping Scott McClellan

Watching the flood of coverage of Scott McClellan's book has been fascinating. It's amazing to see how many thousands of columnists, reporters, pundits, politicos, bloggers, and commenters have been willing to opine authoritatively about the contents of the book, Scott's motivations, how he wrote the book, etc. etc. without having read the book itself. (It is still not on sale, and just a few advance copies have been circulating among members of the media and some insiders.)

One day I may write something extensive about this experience and the truths it illustrates about how opinions get shaped and spread in today's idea marketplace. For now, I just want to offer brief responses to some of the most common fallacious criticisms Scott has been receiving from diverse sources in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

1. Criticism #1: "This is not the Scott McClellan we know and love. Why didn't he express his doubts to us, his friends in the White House?"

This is the party line being parroted by everyone in and around the administration, from Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino to Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove. It might make sense if you believe that the Bush administration is made up of people who are genuinely interested in sincere self-criticism and self-examination. What do you suppose would have actually happened if Scott had ventured to talk about his misgivings about the Iraq war and the way it was being sold. I can just hear Rove's reaction now: "Gee, Scott, I never thought of that before! Forthrightness and honesty, eh? What a great idea! Let's go for it!" And Dick Cheney: "I guess you're right, Scott--this war really isn't necessary. Call off the invasion!"

2. Criticism #2: "Why didn't McClellan go public with his accusations earlier, when it might have made a difference?"

Here the idea is that, if Scott had resigned in protest (in 2003, say), and disclosed his incipient doubts about the administration, it would have shifted public opinion against the Bush team and changed history for the better. Sounds nice--except that testimony from disgruntled former insiders like Richard Clarke, John Dilulio, Paul O'Neill, and the retired generals who criticized the Iraq policy didn't have any such effect. Why on earth would McClellan's testimony have tipped the balance?

3. Criticism #3: "Isn't McClellan just taking the easy route to riches by trashing an unpopular president?"

I already debunked the notion that Scott could expect to get rich from his book. (I'm happy to see Jonathan Alter on MSNBC this evening emphasizing the point that Public Affairs, in particular, is well known for its modest advance payments.) But now I see blogger Ezra Klein (whose work I generally like a lot) implying that Scott is somehow being cowardly in criticizing Bush now, when most of the public has already turned against him:

George W. Bush is now the most unpopular president since the advent of modern polling. His disapproval rating passed 70 percent last week, higher than any leader before him. It has been 40 months since a majority of the country supported his presidency. And now, now Scott McClellan tells of us of his dedication to the truth, and his disgust with the propaganda used to sell the war. . . This doesn't come close to clearing his name.

Okay, but this ignores the reality of Scott's social, professional, and political milieu. For someone like Scott McClellan--a lifelong Republican, a Texas loyalist and friend of Bush, a man whose career and livelihood were derived from Bush and who spent seven years of his life at the very center of the Bush circle, surrounded by people who admired Bush and regarded dissent or disagreement as suspect, if not downright evil--for someone like this to write a book like What Happened is absolutely not an act of cowardice.

Ezra may not think the book "clears Scott's name." That's fine. Scott might even agree. (He devotes a fair amount of time in the book to describing his own mistakes and his complicity in the misdeeds of the administration.) But Scott doesn't deserve to be excoriated for writing the book. (Ezra: "Just the tinny bleatings of a man who abetted a lying, disastrous presidency because it seemed like a good gig, but doesn't want his name maligned by the historians.")

Judging by some of the anger against Scott being vented by critics on the left, you'd think his book was intended to somehow justify or excuse the sins of the Bush team. Of course it doesn't--as the defensive reaction of the Bushies themselves makes clear.

There's plenty of room for fair criticism of Scott and his book. But let's not get distracted by arguments that are illogical, irrelevant, or unrealistic.

Libertarians And Their One-Note Melody

Ezra Klein:

I find it impressive that Megan was able to use the financial meltdown to compare liberals who're calling for tighter regulation of a financial market run amok to conservatives who call for warrantless wiretapping. In these tough economic times, it's comforting to know that normalcy can still be achieved.

Actually, the Megan McArdle post Ezra links to is a lovely, chemically pure example of what makes libertarianism so clear, logical, and utterly misguided:

So the left wants me to admit that the current meltdown means that we need oodles more financial regulation, and maybe the death penalty for being a rich idiot. The right wants me to admit that if we don't allow warrantless wiretapping, it will be harder to catch terrorists. . . .

These two things are essentially flip sides of the same coin for me. Government powers come only at enormous cost: to liberty, to community, to the economy, and of course, the financial burden of paying for them. In some cases they are necessary. But pointing to a problem and noting that it exists is not an automatic warrant for me to smash it with the hammer of the state.

Well, I suppose that regulation of financial markets is "the flip side of the same coin" as warrantless wiretapping if both are viewed solely as exercises of government power. But by that token, everything that government does is essentially the same. Public schools are pretty much the same thing as nuclear weapons. The FDA is about the same as farm price supports. Putting drug dealers in prison is interchangeable with Social Security disability benefits.

Megan and many other libertarians are so focused on the "enormous cost" of government that they never move on to ask the obvious questions most people ask whenever they are asked to pay for something: What are we buying? Do we want it? Is it worth the price we are being asked to pay? Is there some better alternative? Rather than get into any of these messy, real-world questions, Megan just says, "Ooh, that sounds expensive," and decides not to use "the hammer of the state," no matter what the purpose, the cost, or the context.

This is about as logical as considering all proposed purchases the same--tickets to a Broadway show, prescription medicine, a vacation in the Caribbean, repairs to the family car. (You might imagine some pathological miser feeling equally resistant to all these forms of spending.) If you were to evaluate everything solely on the basis of whether or not it costs money, you'd end up lumping together things that are totally different--just like libertarians, who evaluate everything solely on the basis of whether or not it involves government power.

Of course, Megan would never admit that she reflexively, mindlessly opposes government action no matter what the circumstances. Instead, she pretends that she is simply doing battle against unnamed, hypothetical opponents who "automatically" want to use the government to solve every conceivable problem. This is a pure straw man. Socialists in the contemporary U.S. are a vanishingly small minority with no voice in the public debate. The only people with knee-jerk attitudes toward government are the libertarians and their Republican allies, whose knees jerk to the right rather than the left.

The Hillary-Haters And The Racial Insult That Wasn't

The Hillary-haters have found their latest outrage to froth about. This one is the supposedly vicious attacks being launched by the Clinton campaign against Barack Obama. If the latest claims of the Hillary-haters are to be believed, what makes these attacks so unconscionable is the near-racist motivation behind them: The Clinton camp doesn't just regard Obama as a dangerous rival for the White House, but as an "uppity" Black man who is being "presumptuous" for daring to challenge Hillary's right to waltz to the nomination.

Wow--if true, this is nasty stuff. (Calling Black men "uppity" sounds more like Bull Connor or the unreconstructed George Wallace than Hillary Clinton.) No wonder concern trolls like Slate's Mickey Kaus and the Obama-infatuated Andrew Sullivan have been eagerly blogging about this latest evidence of Hillary's arrogance.

But then you click through the links and devote thirty seconds of scrutiny to the actual source of these accusations, and you discover it is this post by David Corn:

When talking to Clintonites in recent days, I've noticed that they've come to despise Obama. I suppose that may be natural in the final weeks of a competitive campaign when much is at stake. But these people don't need any prompting in private conversations to decry Obama as a dishonest poser. They're not spinning for strategic purposes. They truly believe it. And other Democrats in Washington report encountering the same when speaking with Clinton campaign people. "They really, really hate Obama," one Democratic operative unaffiliated with any campaign, tells me. "They can't stand him. They talk about him as if he's worse than Bush." What do they hate about him? After all, there aren't a lot of deep policy differences between the two, and he hasn't gone for the jugular during the campaign. "It's his presumptuousness," this operative says. "That he thinks he can deny her the nomination. Who is he to try to do that?" You mean, he's, uh, uppity? "Yes."

So the idea that Hillary's people "hate" Obama for being "presumptuous" comes not from one of her spokespeople or even one of her supporters but from a journalist's conversation with an anonymous "Democratic operative" who has no link to Hillary or her campaign. In other words, David Corn was swapping opinions with somone in a coffee shop somewhere, and the two of them decided they had a shared impression of the Clintonites--which thus becomes "news" to be breathlessly reported.

And notice where the word "uppity" comes into the picture: It wasn't uttered by anyone associated with Hillary. It wasn't even suggested by Corn's "source," the anonymous Democrat. It arose in the conversation through prompting by Corn himself: "You mean, he's, uh, uppity? 'Yes.'"

In other words, there's nothing there.

But given the sloppy way in which people like Kaus and Sullivan have passed this meme along--and the eager way in which people tend to latch onto, over-simplify, and magnify ideas that fit their pre-conceived narratives--it's easy to picture how people who hate Hillary will remember, and repeat, this story: "Did you hear the latest? Hillary has been going around calling Obama 'uppity'! What a bitch!"

This latest example of how the haters have been demonizing Hillary illustrates why I agree with Ezra Klein's take on the theme of the "polarizing candidate." Klein points out that, in fact, candidates deemed "polarizing" are simply those who have long been politically prominent and therefore subject to partisan attacks for a long time. He shows, for example, how John Kerry magically became "polarizing" after the Swift Boaters and the Republican spin machine did its work on him.

If Hillary is currently considered "polarizing," that is simply because the Republicans have been attacking her, using some ammunition based on fact and some that is utterly dishonest, since the early 1990s.

The obvious corollary: If either Obama or Edwards gets the Democratic nomination instead of Hillary, he will experience the same miraculous transformation from unifying figure to "polarizing" one. Just as, somehow, the Republicans managed to transform moderate, religious Southern Democrats like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore into weak, corrupt, ultra-liberal threats to the republic.

If you believe that nominating yet another conciliatory, centrist, "non-polarizing" Democrat will inspire the Republicans to mount a clean, civil, honest, respectful election campaign, I have some beautiful beachfront property in southwest Bangladesh to sell you. Instead, let's stop wasting our time trying to identify the "least polarizing" Democratic candidate and instead nominate the one who will fight hardest and most effectively for our values and policies.

The Men Go A Little Nuts Over Hillary

Not being a woman, I can't speak from personal experience about the nature of "the secondary conversation" that women might have apart from the men, in which they share the realities of their lives in ways that might not fly in mixed company. Nonetheless, I intuitively sense that this post by Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED is describing accurately what happened to Hillary Clinton this past week.

I also feel strongly, with Ezra Klein, that accusing Clinton of "playing the gender card" based on her comments at Wellesley is just ludicrous. What, is she not even allowed to mention the fact that she is a women--even when visiting with fellow-alumnae from an all-woman college?

And how is saying, "In so many ways, this all-women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics," in any way to claim victimization? I think Obama's claim that Hillary said, in effect, "Don't pick on me" in the aftermath of last week's debate is a real distortion. He lost some stature in my eyes with that unfair attack.

If you ask me (you didn't, but play along), the article that best explains the dynamic in the Democratic race this week is one that didn't even mention Hillary Clinton. It is this New York Times story by Lisa Belkin--in the Style section!--describing the psychological obstacles that professional women face when they seek advancement:

"It's enough to make you dizzy," said Ilene H. Lang, the president of Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace. "Women are dizzy, men are dizzy, and we still don't have a simple straightforward answer as to why there just aren't enough women in positions of leadership."

Catalyst's research is often an exploration of why, 30 years after women entered the work force in large numbers, the default mental image of a leader is still male. Most recent is the report titled "Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don't," which surveyed 1,231 senior executives from the United States and Europe. It found that women who act in ways that are consistent with gender stereotypes--defined as focusing "on work relationships" and expressing "concern for other people's perspectives"--are considered less competent. But if they act in ways that are seen as more "male"--like "act assertively, focus on work task, display ambition"--they are seen as "too tough" and "unfeminine."

Women can't win.

Abe Foxman of the ADL likes to point out how the stereotypes of Jews harbored by anti-Semites are mutually contradictory: Jews are "too clannish" and "too attached to their own kind," but they also are "too pushy" and "too eager to force their way into circles where they aren't welcome"; they are "too liberal" and "closet Communists," but they are also "arch-capitalists" who "secretly rule the business world."

I see Hillary as being up against the same kind of self-contradictory attacks. She's an ultra-liberal bogeywoman hated by the Right, but also a Bush-appeasing hawk hated by the Left; a naive ideologue pushing an extreme agenda, but also a flip-flopping weathervane who will say anything to get elected; a vicious pursuer of vendettas driven by the desire for revenge on her enemies, but also a robotic "Stepford Wife" candidate programmed to behave only in politically correct fashion.

And now, apparently, the mainstream media consider it out-of-bounds for her to make an appeal to one of her most important natural constituencies--women (who constitute more than half of the Democratic Party and the national electorate). They call it "playing the gender card," as though this is somehow sleazy. Since when? Have the morning talk shows ever attacked any of the Republican candidates for "playing the religion card" in their appeals to "Christians"? Speaking as both a Christian and a man, I find those appeals far more divisive and offensive than Hillary's comments about being a woman in a male-dominated profession.

Maybe Tim Russert and Chris Matthews can get together a write a list of approved campaign strategies for Hillary, along with a description of the clothes she is allowed to wear, the places she is allowed to visit, the people she is allowed to meet, and the facial expressions she is allowed to wear. Such a list would be interesting to see and it might make it easier for future female candidates to win the approval of the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of our political system.

The Pure, Beautiful, Ever-Receding Dream of True Conservatism

It's quite a sign of both intellectual bankruptcy and political desperation to see "thoughtful conservatives" increasingly trying to distinguish some abstract, ideal, Platonic vision of "conservatism" from the actual policies advocated and pursued by practically every real-life conservative over the past thirty years--which cumulatively have led the United States into a disastrous cul-de-sac, economically, socially, and on the world stage.

As Ezra Klein smartly notes, the precise analogy is to old-time Marxists who spent decades plaintively declaring that "true" Marxism had never been tried, seeking in vain to disavow responsibility for the visible results of actual Marxism virtually everywhere it existed (and as supported in most cases by those same Marxists).

A vivid illustration of how the same phenomenon now dominates conservative "thinking" is found in today's George Will column about the line-item veto. The concept is in the news again because Mitt Romney has taken to pushing as a way of distinguishing himself from Rudy Giuliani (who legally battled a short-lived version of the veto when Clinton tried to use it to cancel funds for New York).

Will quite correctly points out that the line-item veto was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on grounds that make perfect sense. He also points out, again correctly, that creating such a veto through constitutional amendment would have the effect of "substantially augmenting what should not be further augmented--presidential power."

But then, having established a principled difference between himself and a huge chunk of the conservative establishment, Will proceeds to announce that this does not suggest a possible flaw in conservative ideology--which by definition is impossible. How so? Because the line-item veto isn't a conservative idea at all:

The line-item veto expresses liberalism's faith in top-down government and the watery Caesarism that has produced today's inflated presidency. Liberalism assumes that executive branch experts, free from parochial constituencies, know, as Congress does not, what is good for the nation "as a whole." This is contrary to the public philosophy of James Madison's "extensive" republic with its many regions and myriad interests.

Get that? An idea that first gained widespread fame as part of Newt Gingrich's Contract With America; that was passed in both House and Senate thanks to overwhelming support by self-proclaimed conservative Republicans, despite substantial opposition by Democrats; that was then challenged in court by five Democratic members of Congress (supported by a single Republican, Mark Hatfield); and that since then has been advocated almost entirely by conservative Republicans like Romney (and in fact is being used by Romney to help shore up his conservative bona fides)--this idea is, for George Will, an expression of "liberalism."

It's fine for people to play around with words and ideas, creating their own fairyland versions of concepts as an exercise in pure esthetic/philosophical gamesmanship. Conceptual artists and avant-garde theoreticians do stuff like that all the time, which is why they influence a total audience of approximately 217 people.

If Will ever went on ABC's This Week and admitted that the ideal conservatism he adulates has little connection with the policies and personalities that dominate the Republican Party, he would thereby be declaring his own intellectual irrelevance--which is why he will never say any such thing, instead leaving the relationship between his ideals and the muck of actual politics as vague as possible.

And the mainstream media's tolerance for that vagueness creates a situation in which fantasists like Will are invited week after week to appear on national television and granted significant political clout to help shore up support for actual conservatives and undermine actual liberals--despite the fact that these real-world beings share very little with Will's fairyland visions except the terms used to name them.