The People in the Know and the People in the Dark
Greg Mitchell asks us:
After the war started, and then for years, and years, afterward, the editorial pages and most pundits backed the war and continually argued against a real change in direction... So what does everyone think about the reasons for this reticence going back years ago-- especially given that public opinion backed some kind of withdrawal early on?
I have an answer for him. It involves two kinds of people.
First I want to join Spencer Ackerman in commending to you the Bateman explanation for why General David Patraeus gets such good press. In a word, he's unafraid of the media. Spencer writes, "Petraeus is willing to entertain points of view that don't correspond to his own." Which means, "You can talk to Petraeus like a human being. For a lot of reporters used to getting canned answers, evasions or outright silence, that's irresistible."
Sounds right to me.
Extreme spin and stonewalling are de-humanizing for the reporter on the note-taking end. They say, "I'm not going to recognize you as a thinking person." Patraeus humanizes reporters. Why wouldn't they reward him with good coverage? I don't know from experience (Spencer does) but I'm willing to bet that more than one reporter along the way felt his or her sanity improved by interviewing Patraeus. That's what I took from his sketch. "Everyone with half a brain knows the war is going first not-good, then disastrously, then nightmarishly," Spencer writes. But "everyone up the chain of command that they have to interview says that black is really white." The guy who doesn't do that is going to get good press, maybe better than his deeds deserve.
The same pattern held with the press and John McCain. Because reporters felt they could talk to him like a human being, he humanized them and their work. McCain grasped that gotcha goes away when a reporter has asked everything he can think of asking McCain....and they're still talking. (This used to happen on the Straight Talk Express; it's different now and will become more so.) The agreement or harmony between them is not ideological. It is about spin and gotcha relaxation rules. And I'm not saying McCain doesn't spin, shade, cheat or obfuscate. I'm saying reporters were in situations with him where spin and gotcha were suspended, and that has a psychological effect.
Now to Greg's questions about newspaper editorials: why so wrong for so long even after the public had turned against the war? I would begin with the division that counts the most for editorial writers, which is between people in the know and people in the dark. The people in the know... well, they know much. To put it in a single image, they've read the cables. The people in the dark don't know ; they just read the papers! Editorial writing is the art of explaining what the people in the know think to the people in the dark, but with a little twist of argument or finely connected bit of fact that shows that the editorial writer, too, is a person in the know. Maybe he talked to the guy who read the cables.
Under no circumstances does a writer in this style identify with the people out there who are in the dark, protesting something they are not a part of, and don't know much about. The people in the dark need to be led to a judicious stand. That's why a newspaper editorial is sometimes called a leader. The echo is still there in some newspaper names: The Lexington Herald-Leader, the News-Leader of Springfield, Mo.
So while it's true that public opinion turned against the war and in favor of withdrawal, elite opinion did not. To be a "leader" is not to be ahead of public opinion, but to be more sophisticated than it. This is why Atrios, Matt Yglesias and other acerbic bloggers on the left are constantly making fun of what "very serious" people in Washington and the press say; it is an apt term for how they present themselves. This is also why coverage of street protests is typically so bad and so condescending. Look: the people in the dark are trying to make news. Send a photographer and a reporting intern.
The Iraq war is a case where the people in the dark were right, and the people in the know were not only wrong but in many cases trying to fool the world with cooked books and a cherry picked case. Added to the ordinary difficulty of saying, "we were wrong for so long," there's the disturbing possibility that the people in the know are the wrong people to identify with. That's too much. When Eli Pariser or Amy Goodman come to town, the editorial board of the Daily Bugle doesn't ask them to lunch.
Comments (17)
I'm inclined to agree that Petreus is getting better Press because he is more open to the reporters and less concerned with presenting just his spin.
But that is a strategy that can only be implemented at the top of the chain of command. anyone further down the food chain who tried that would quickly find himself squelched, much as that Marine Captain who was an apparent honest spokesperson, treated the reporters as humans instead of enemies, and who as I understand it, now works for the English version of Al Jeezera rather than the Marine Corps.
March 20, 2008 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
The elites. The people-in-the-know, those who "read the cables, versus the people in the dark.
Then the editorial writers who revel in being in the know, close to those who read the cables, and translating what the elites say to those in the dark.
It's really not about information passing. It's a social system, and the editorial writers are social climbers.
Wrong information can be changed, but a social system is first a stable system. It sharply resists changes of any kind, especially in attitude.
Bloggers are trying to disrupt a dysfunctional social system, aren't they? It's no surprise, then that the elites and elite-wannabees are acting so dismissive of the "Dirty Fucking Hippies" (with their crude, non-elite language) on the Internet. The elites are the attitudinal descendants of those who absorbed the similarly socially disruptive Hippies over three decades ago, and see it happening again.
When they start feeling even more threatened, I am sure they will bring out the big guns and start calling bloggers "Jacobins" or even, if they have any historical knowledge, "sans-culottes." Sans cullotes is what members of the elite, wearing thousand dollar Armani suits, are likely to call their opponents. The distinction is not money, it's attitude, but money is used as a symbol.
I'll admit that the attitude of the elites was never as clear to me before. Or of the Revolutionaries, either. I wonder if that's why the American elite switched from the knee-britches of the English aristocracy to trousers when Jefferson became President some time after the American and French Revolutions? Or maybe why Americans switched to denim following the 60's?
This is probably old news to a lot of people, but I'm only just now seeing it in the behavior of the editorial writers. How much to Tim Russert and Chris Russell pay for their suits and shoes?
March 20, 2008 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I, and I'm sure a zillion others, can almost immediately tell when someone is trying to sell us aluminum siding; whether its a politician, a military spokesman, or a neighbor.
I find one of the tools most used by the aluminum siding, snake oil salesmen is 'dissembling.'
The Iraq war reporting by many in the media, the Bush gang and the Bush military appointees is a tsunami of dissembling.
Finally, people like Judy Miller, Bob Woodward and Tim Russert, to name a few, represent a media market that long ago concluded having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it.
March 20, 2008 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
For a searing critique of his counter-insurgency theories read "Counter-insurgency as Military Malpractice" by Edward Luttwak, who is a military strategy theorist and used to be a hawk, but has changed his stripes. It was published in Harper's Magazine a few months back but should be online.
March 20, 2008 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bloggers are trying to disrupt a dysfunctional social system, aren't they? It's no surprise, then that the elites and elite-wannabees are acting so dismissive of the "Dirty Fucking Hippies" (with their crude, non-elite language) on the Internet.
Yes. That is a factor. The dirty fucking hippies, as Atrios often calls them, are the people in the dark (and the street.) These are very similar notions.
It's not that editorial writers don't agree with them; rather, they don't wish to associate themselves and their ideas with the DFH. They like a nice distance between the information classes, the insiders and the outsiders, because that preserves the distinctions that founded their style, which as you note is also a social system and therefore quite stable.
The bloggers are more disruptive of this system than any I can think of in journalism.
March 20, 2008 1:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's a very good article, but I'd say it understates the issues somewhat and doesn't get to root causes or solutions.
It's a fundamental human problem: people tend to strive greatly to attain success, and then become complacent once achieving it, and eventually anti-competitive to prevent from losing it.
In the media it takes the form of establishment orthodoxy and intellectual rot due to everything from commercialism, to celebrity and brand journalism, to establishment gate keeping and "access." Many brand name pundits, having achieved the most crass sort of commercial success, will not ever, and simply can not, do good journalism which would be detrimental to their career and nature in every sense.
A concrete example of that was the run up to the Iraq war and the complete failure of many establishment journalists to challenge the status quo assumptions about WMD. Josh Marshall, a relative outsider, was still connected enough to the establishment to be snared by the orthodox view on WMD held by many of his colleagues.
More independant journalists, and even citizens like myslef, who were simply digging for facts and taking nothing for granted, i.e. those who were motivated entirely by necessity of the issues, were able to dig out the IAEA reports and other sources which were clearly contradicting the WMD claims. Outsider status was a huge advantage in avoiding the group think.
There were also reporters like Sy Hersh who always go against the grain, step on a lot of toes, and have only their reputation for continued success. As such, their work tends to be exceptionally controversial, meaningful, meticulously substantiated and vetted. But Sy Hersh or such can't run a news organization and you can't recruit a staff of such people.
The only solution is a partial one: information consumers must keep the media on their toes with critical reading, resist brand loyalty, and never overlook stagnation. That has to apply equally to blogs as it does the MSM, otherwise we'll just create another online MSM, including blogs, with all the same problems.
As much as I like TPM, as it expands to become more of a news organization, brand name, and business, employing an increasing staff, where editors spend more time on mangement than reporting, where the network of sources expands while individual accountability for sourcing of memes decreases; it also moves further away from the model of independent, intrepid, individualist journalist. It runs into most the same fundamental problems as MSM, regardless of format.
March 20, 2008 2:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
And when the measure of success is wealth, and a person is born into an inherited wealth rather than having to strive to achieve it, most such people become very conservative. Their focus is on not losing their inherited wealth, using the wealth itself to make it greater (because, having not striven to create the wealth, the only skills they have are manipulating wealth that already exists), and defending their inherited social status. The Coors family is one example, the Walton's of Wal-Mart another, and Eric Prince out of his fortune is another.
You can see why such people would consider an inheritance tax the greatest threat they have.
The problem of TPM going establishment does exist. Maybe the outside bloggers they publish will help. The thing about newspaper and TV journalism is that the great sums of money that were required to establish a system to distribute the news caused a loss of focus on collecting the news. Corporate strategists call that cost to set up a distribution system a barrier to entry to the industry.
At the moment, the Internet and World Wide Web does not present such a barrier to the entry of new competitors. TPM is going to have to stay in permanent "scrambling" mode just to survive.
However, the ability to regularly draw traffic is such a barrier to entry. That's the one new entrants have to overcome. Someone like myself who has most of his links bookmarked is hard for a new entrant to attract. Politico got around that by using already established reporters to start up their website. They each brought traffic with them based on their reputation.
Josh and TPM have made a reputation with the award for the US Attorney reporting. A new investigative journalistic web site might deliberately set out to gain such an award. New awards and a subsidy for that kind of reporting could encourage more investigative reporting.
Just some thoughts on your excellent post, kozmic. But I have expected such posts from you since I was posting as Rick B. (Apparently the new system does not recognize a name with a space in it. I hate to lose a recognized brand.)
March 20, 2008 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
btw, I remember Rick B. Nice to virtually meet again.
March 20, 2008 9:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
We are encouraged not to remember that in fact any number of smart, certified grown-ups in the international-relations field -- at Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Ohio State and UCLA, among others -- told us precisely the trouble that Bush and Co. were taking us into well before the invasion of Iraq. I note especially an ad in the New York Times of September 26, 2002, in which 33 scholars warned, for example: "Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state." The signers paid for the ad themselves because the Times declined to run their views as an Op-Ed.
One would love to think that these are the few brave voices that the Times and others would be seeking out anew -- instead of recycling the crocodile tears of the many happy warriors still trying to justify their catastrophic misjudgments.
In a series of Open Source podcasts under the heading "They Got It Right," I have interviewed a number of these foresighted folk. The honor roll includes Robert J. Art of Brandeis, Michael Desch of the University of Texas, Barry Posen and Steve Van Evera of MIT, Peter Liberman of Queens College and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. See also my conversation with Kanan Makiya, who got it stunningly wrong.
It remains one of the confounding features of policy-making and punditry that for the most part only those who were wrong from the start on Iraq -- and are still wrong about fundamentals -- are held up as qualified to comment expertly.
March 20, 2008 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Late to the party, I had to think this over. But my first reaction is still my final reaction.
Somewhere in my distant past, I learned the phrase "priesthood of knowledge."
It applied at the time to my suspicion that I was not being told things by the powers that be in my life — my teachers, my bosses, my senior colleagues — because they had a vested interest in inhibiting competition and thus hoarding everything from secret recipes to communing with God.
The priesthood is ancient and prevails across all layers of society.
What's happening in the 'sphere is that the rats have gotten into the grain stores, and are finding that a lot of it has rotted.
Then, they're telling.
Too many metaphors, but still.
I also agree, after 30 years in the business, that the priesthood is nothing unusual nor new in journalism.
March 20, 2008 3:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great post and comments. Isn’t it also that the information elite (writers, editors, producers and publishers alike) learn and make judgments through a combination of fact gathering and intuition or gut feelings. They pledge to be objective and, so, are blind to their own biases.
At the reporter level, when it comes to assigning credibility to a source, they unconsciously make allowances. George Bush is just a good guy and gives people nicknames, so he wouldn’t intentionally mislead us. McCain is a FP expert; he was a POW in Vietnam, for chrissakes, so if he confuses his terrorist enemies a bit it’s just because he’s old. Donald Rumsfeld berates the press, so he must be a straight shooter.
At the management level, the real gatekeepers, it seems more a matter of defending the establishment. The more corporate the media becomes, the more conservative it gets. Maybe it's just a by-product of a society devolving into pure consumerism. Or maybe they’re just good liars workin' for the Man, I don’t know.
March 20, 2008 7:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had this same discussion about the internet with a fellow geek and software developer over 15 years ago. I think that's largely a fallacy and the small differences between the internet and other media are vastly over stated and largely fail to counteract human nature.
There's a certain degree of entropy that occurs naturally. There's countless clinches. Power corrupts. It's older than Oedipus. A fundamental law of evolution. No change of format changes basic human nature.
BLOGS and the internet are faster, in that you can switch favorite blogs faster than you can switch favorite magazines and newspapers on limited rack space. However, the most limited shelf space is a person's mind. That's where following and the associated social steering, brand loyalty, and familiarity have tremendous importance.
BLOGGERS have all the same incentives as the MSM to move towards complacency and then anti-competitive practices, including an orthodoxy which disparages competing alternatives. They increasingly want financial security as they age. They want to spend more time with the family. They want a business they can own but can generate revenue somewhat independently of their participation. The more successful they become, the further they're removed from their audience. The time spent managing a business is also time away from directly innovating and generating the product of their business.
It's a classic pattern. An individual starts with no infrastructure and all the bright ideas, and winds up a company with all the infrastructure and no ideas. They begin as insurgents competing on merits, and end as a highly uncompetitive establishment.
For example, already we see bloggers aligning into sides, coalitions of blogs which give each other a lot of links (i.e. business) which also serves to facilitate ad revenue. They spend a lot of time snarking the opposing team, and paying homage to one's own sacred cows. Bloggers will think twice before goring the ox of a fellow teammate and losing their good regard.
That's surely the beginning of blog establishments and orthodoxy. It'll be a meta-establishment and meta-orthodoxy, but none the less has much of the same problems.
March 20, 2008 9:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wonder about the combination of Petraeus' and McCain's standing with the press. It seems to me that Petraeus has the power to get McCain off the hook on Iraq. If Petraeus "concludes" that political reconciliation will not work in Iraq, he opens the door for McCain to adopt a position on ending the occupation similar to Clinton's and Obama's. Without the occupation as an issue, the dynamics of the general election change dramatically.
March 21, 2008 8:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
kosmic,
The rigidities you describe in human behavior all exist. My only point was whether they are barriers to the entry of new competitors. Newspapers and TV networks have gotten large enough so that they literally suck up all the available revenue sources. A new entrant without the advantage of size can't compete with TV or newspapers and make a profit for a long time.
On the internet it has gotten harder to break in as the competition has gotten tougher and there has become a steeper learning curve simply to reach the journeyman level as a competent reporter. Not that the competition was ever easy. Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both came from a journalism background. I'm not sure what Digby's background was, but it shows in-depth education and a lot of experience writing as well as pure talent. So does Duncan Black (as well as, in his case, the appearance of an obsessive focus of his time and energy on his site.)
But competitors even today are not literally blocked from publishing as they are in TV and Newspapers. For all the difficulties of breaking in with a new on-line presence, such startups are not prevented by the structure of the industry to the extent that they are in the older media.
At least, not yet. Predictions are inherently risky, especially about the future.
March 21, 2008 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
There were some old hands not fooled by the enthusiasm. Seymour Hersh comes to mind. I also remember Dan Schorr reporting that everyone expected a war with Iraq if W won the election. People wnet out of their way to ognore the acts.
More importantly, the State Dept. knew how much work would be needed following an invasion, but was held out of the process completely. I think the obssessed idiots in the White House, and at Defense, talked themselves into a belief state, but everyone else wanted to believe it; it was way more fun than reporting on the failures in Afghanistan.
The good news is that as a people, a country, we are not as stupid as we appear. The bad news is the folks in charge are. Their insider talk is useful for parsing what the insiders think. It is not to be confused with facts, or knowledge of a situation.
BTW, paths to posts are sometimes broken---I had to hunt down the comments through Rosen's bio page. Hope Josh gets a whopping refund---this software is a pile of crap.
March 21, 2008 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
"People wnet out of their way to ognore the acts."
Going out of my way to ignore the typos.
March 21, 2008 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom,
They were never going to talk about Afghanistan. They didn't want Afghanistan in the first place, and were forced into invading that country because Americans wanted the enemies behind 9/11 directly attacked. Whatever successes might come out of Afghanistan still pointed directly back at the Bush administrations' complete failure to prevent 9/11.
Iraq was a different game. It was desired by the Bushies from the get-go, and they had talked themselves into belief that it was not only good foreign policy (both a threat to other Middle Eastern nations, and a demonstration of the superiority of Western conservative values and economics), but that it was also a demonstration of the superiority of conservative free market - small government ideology.
Also, they are conservatives. Policies don't succeed, only leaders succeed. They had Ahmed Chalabi to take over Iraq. He was primed, ready, had the right attitudes, and was one of them. Or at least so he convinced them. What did they need a post-war plan for? The free market and the great leader, Chalabi, were going to solve all teh problems as long as the government (what was Bush's recent statement about the current financial statement?) didn't overplan and overreact.
Post-war Plan for Iraq? No one needed a plan. Plans just tie the hands of the leader and of entrepreneurs.
March 22, 2008 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink