From the 60 Minutes piece:
60 Minutes checked that and found a report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, saying that 7,000 is the number of leprosy cases over the last 30 years, not the past three. The report also says that nobody knows how many of those cases involve illegal immigrants.
"We went to try and check that number, 7,000. We can't...," Stahl says.
"Well, I can tell you this. If we reported it, it's a fact," Dobbs replies.
"You can't tell me that. You did report it," Stahl says.
"I just did," Dobbs says.
"How can you guarantee that to me?" Stahl asks.
Says Dobbs, "Because I'm the managing editor. And that's the way we do business. We don't make up numbers, Lesley."
CNN still pays the fact- (and ratings-) free Glenn Beck, the man who asked America's first Muslim Congressman to prove his loyalty to the U.S. to an extent that would satisfy Beck. Dobbs at least attracts good viewership. Why should CNN give two shits about whether he makes up racist lies?
You know what's really good, though? That NYT article is actually well hyperlinked. Holy shit. Maybe there's hope for the Republic, after all.
Maybe I'm still being overly cranky, but if you read it on paper, the article didn't say Dobbs was wrong until after the jump. Is it too much to ask that the nut of the article should make it into the first paragraph?
5: That aspect of print journalism doesn't get enough attention, but it should.
Yeah, this one popped for me because I'd been following the story already, so I was waiting for the eviceration. If you just read what was on page one of the Business section, it was a dullish he-said/she-said -- I probably wouldn't have followed it past the jump if I hadn't already known what it said.
Dobbs is one more example of the way a glib person with a TV voice and a TV face can be an opinion leader. He does the serious frowny-face so well, and the thoughtful face, and the indignant face, and the caring face. It's hard to do, and a lot of newspeople look like they have tics because they overdo the little facial movements that keep their TV zombie talking head from putting people to sleep.
Is it weird that the NY Times only offers eviscerating takedowns of known liars over things like the number of leprosy cases?
9 -- you wake up in the morning with the Paper of Record you have, not the one you wish you had.
I've been flying a lot the last month and a half, and I have to say: the worst thing about being stuck in any American airport is the way you pretty much can't escape the patronizing, ridiculous voice (and opinions) of Lou Dobbs from the near-ubiquitous CNN feeds that seem to always be playing.
Yeah, I wouldn't have read it at all if it hadn't been linked here, and by the end of the first page I was totally thinking "who gives a shit."
Can someone generate a list of which reporters we're all to ignore and why? Kthx.
I don't understand 7 and 11. If you had read the article before seeing the link/comments here, would you really have not been able to guess that he was calling Dobbs a liar? He starts the fourth or fifth paragraph by referring to Dobbs' "If we reported it, it's a fact" as an Orwellian chestnut.
I mean, we all know some of the Times' writers are lame, but Leonhardt's not exactly burying the lede here.
Okay. (A) As you said, that's the fourth or fifth paragraph, not the first (I think it was above the jump, but you'd have had to have read to the bottom of what as on page one to see it). (B) You're saying, effectively, obviously the writer wouldn't have used a loaded adjective like 'Orwellian' if they weren't poised to say that Dobbs had said something untrue. And yes, someone with a well-honed sense of literary tropes who was reading attentively would certainly have been able to effortlessly decode the foreshadowed attack on Dobbs.
That's still very different from putting "Lou Dobbs made an easily checkable incorrect statement of fact, claiming that immigrants were the cause of 7000 cases of leprosy in the last three years, and defended it repeatedly after having its falsity pointed out to him. He has still not corrected the falsehood on the air." in the first paragraph.
which reporters we're all to ignore and why?
The entire American media outside of course of the Daily Show and Colbert Report, naturally.
Fair enough. I guess I thought the first couple of paragraphs were more like the ambient-sound scene-setting that you often get to start off (say) an NPR news story. You know how you hear the street sounds, the cars and voices and whatnot, then some commentary, and finally... the radio reporter sorta tells you what this piece is going to be about?
Ira Glass has taken this style to its logical conclusion, on the radio. A lot of print articles in something like the Atlantic or the New Yorker work this way too. I like it, but maybe it's just a matter of taste.
Anyway, "Orwellian chestnut" is way before the break (maybe a third of the way down the page, and certainly within the first screen-ful of text), at least online.
It's a perfectly reasonable way to write, but it's not how one conventionally reports news. (And the flat statement that Dobbs said something untrue is before the jump in the online article, it just wasn't on paper.)
14: At this point it probaby *is* easiest to whitelist US media/reporters, rather than blacklist.
How depressing.
13: "You're saying, effectively, obviously the writer wouldn't have used a loaded adjective like 'Orwellian' if they weren't poised to say that Dobbs had said something untrue. And yes, someone with a well-honed sense of literary tropes who was reading attentively would certainly have been able to effortlessly decode the foreshadowed attack on Dobbs."
But don't you, and B, have well-honed senses of literary tropes? I had kinda gotten the impression that you did.
I think "Lou Dobbs made an easily checkable incorrect statement of fact, claiming that immigrants were the cause of 7000 cases of leprosy in the last three years, and defended it repeatedly after having its falsity pointed out to him. He has still not corrected the falsehood on the air" is a great one-sentence summary of the article. But if I wanted to just read the story in one sentence, I'd read blogs. Which I do.
Instead, I had a few more minutes, and I could afford to read the entire two-page story. I thought it was a pretty deft takedown of Dobbs, all the more hilarious because Dobbs is such a buffoon, and totally deserving of the word 'evisceration.' Also, somewhat more convincing than just "Dobbs is a tool, he lies and makes baldly offensive statements on the air, and refuses to correct things he knows are wrong." I knew that already. Dobbs deserves to be (metaphorically) eviscerated, not just publicly corrected.
18: I do have such a well-honed sense. I don't have a practice of reading each article in the business section, particularly ones about cable TV hosts, start to finish -- there's a good shot I would read the first paragraph, skimmed the rest, and skipped the jump after missing the 'Orwellian' tell.
So maybe we agree that it's an evisceration, and we agree that it's not a straightforward one, and then we simply disagree on our personal tastes for such roundabout takedowns on the business page? In matters of taste? May I declare comity?
No comity, whether LB agrees or not.
This is a common thing the legit media does -- Saying things in such a way that smart sophisticated readers understand the truth, but flatfooted unsophisticated readers don't quite get the point.
An obnoxious thing about this is that it allows the sophisticated readers to sneer at the flatfooted readers. Smart people get to feel superior this way, at the cost of bad government.
The bad reader isn't necessarily dumb. Maybe it's a aspergy engineer, or someone pressed for time, or someone not sure what Orwellian means exactly (the word is thrown around and misused a lot).
The scary thing is that this style of writing (called "Aesopian") was invented under the Czarist censors, so that the truth could be communicated to the elite without rousing the commoners. Writers thought that they were fooling the dumb censors, but it's quite possible that the censors didn't care what was communicated to the literati, as long as the truth wasn't told in plain and simple language.
We have a president who has lied to us repeatedly and cannot ever be trusted, and who has subverted due process in several different ways, and who started a war on false pretexts. This is straightforward fact, but very few in the major media says it.
Because wow, John, all the unsophisticated readers in the country picked up the New York Times business section this morning and said, "Me not understand what this article saying about nice guy Lou Dobbs!" Notoriously, New York Times business section readers need a first paragraph for a story like this that goes something like, "LOU DOBBS IS A BIG FUCKING RACIST LIAR". That'll work! Tomorrow there will be a riotous crowd of unsophisticated readers gathered outside of the CNN Center howling for his blood.
You're full of shit this time, Timothy, and your caricature was stupid. There's nothing unreasonable about a headline and a lede laying it out to someone skimming the article that Dobbs told a flat, implausible untruth and then repeated it after it had been shown to be false. I like literary nuance as much as anyone, but there's no need to write news stories that way. (The Times was lawys pretty forthcoming about Gore's major problems with shoes and three button suits.)
The news biz have been convinced that straightforward reporting is unprofessional, especially when it involves contradicting conservatives.
A lot of print articles in something like the Atlantic or the New Yorker work this way too.
Would it kill the New Yorker to put a sentence that actually gives you a fair idea of what the article is going to be about in the snippet that shows on the RSS feed? (Or maybe they do and I'm not paying attention, but it seems like they just include a very small bit from the start of the article.)
18: Sure I can do literary tropes. But when one reads/skims news headlines and introductory paragraphs, one is *skimming*, and specifically for (1) facts; (2) intriguing tidbits. Lou Dobbs, in and of himself, does not interest me. I don't give a shit about leprosy, either, or years-old news stories. What I want when I read/skim the news is: what's newsworthy about this?
And a news article that doesn't get to this right up front is one that's unlikely to be read. Because one literary trope is that *news* writing is supposed to be very direct and tell you the story in the first few paragraphs.
Clicking through, it turns out this was one installment of a weekly column on business matters: presumably those are done in different styles than regular news stories.
You know what? Balls to the idea that a news story which doesn't serve up every fucking piece of information in the first paragraph won't be read. It's one thing if you're talking about "25 people died yesterday in Iraq". It's another thing if it's "I've been watching this show by this guy Lou Dobbs and he lies quite a bit". The leprosy misreporting happened weeks ago: you can't just put a story that says, "Last night, Lou Dobbs lied". So if it's going to be "There's this show where this guy lies", why not write it with an initial teaser? I find teaser leads in stories of this kind just as likely to make me read on as J-school amateur hour what-who-where-when ledes.
Right, right, I'm still forgetting the unsophisticated readers. All the ones reading the NY Times business section. Come on, Emerson, we're not talking about the front page story in the NY Post, where you might have a point. A teaser lead in the context of *this particular publication* strikes me as just as plausible a way to get someone to read on when they don't need to have a journalistic telegram sent to their frontal cortex.
More importantly, some of the people who listen to Dobbs wouldn't discover that he's a liar even if he said that a Mexican immigrant ass-raped Santa Claus at the North Pole yesterday. Because they want to believe what he's selling. We're talking about a fraction of readers who might change their view on Dobbs if they were confronted with undeniable evidence of how meretricious he is. I don't think the difference in that case is where the lede is buried. It's more a case of repetition, that there need to be a lot of stories in order to move the goalposts up the field a bit.
some of the people who listen to Dobbs wouldn't discover that he's a liar even if he said that a Mexican immigrant ass-raped Santa Claus at the North Pole yesterday.
Wait, you're saying that didn't happen?
It totally happened, but the immigrant was Salvadoran.
Right, right, I'm still forgetting the unsophisticated readers. All the ones reading the NY Times business section. Come on, Emerson, we're not talking about the front page story in the NY Post, where you might have a point. A teaser lead in the context of *this particular publication* strikes me as just as plausible a way to get someone to read on when they don't need to have a journalistic telegram sent to their frontal cortex.
I disagree. Look, I'm a pretty sophisticated reader, and I'm interested in media issues, accuracy in reporting, and so on. And while if you were reading carefully, rather than skimming, you would certainly have gotten the idea that the story was building up suspense to say something negative about Dobbs, there wasn't anything that would have tipped you off to how bad his conduct was until you followed the story onto another page. Seriously, if I didn't know the story already, I wouldn't have followed it past the jump.
Do I think it was malicious in intent, trying to get credit for telling the truth about Dobbs while minimizing the impact? I don't have any reason to think so. But I do think it was badly written in that regard -- there's no good reason, in a newspaper context, not to put the meat of the story up front.
Leprosy gets my attention. Oh boy, does it ever.
32 -- me too. I don't usually read the business section so I would not have seen the article without -gg-d's link; but my "wha?" reaction to "Lou Dobbs and leprosy" in the first sentence would have impelled me to read the article however I had first come to it.
32: You really are working the kink angle, aren't you.
It's very easily treatable with modern medicine, I believe. I had a friend who (among other ridiculously worthy projects) worked with lepers in Samoa, and while you did get people who were short a couple of fingers here and there, even in a developing country people got treatment enough that they weren't dramatically scary to look at.
Dobbs responds to the NYT article.
Again, it was a column. And from the looks of it this is how the author writes most of his columns: intro, then the story. Probably had it not been a column by an established writer, it wouldn't have been written at all, or would have been, because of the different norms of opinion vs. news-reporting, more like the "he-said/she-said" start than the "this guy really is a liar" end.
I'm intermittantly paralysed with fear over some statistically improbable disease and have been so all my life, though the two or three years researching historical plagues haven't helped.
Then steer clear of ttaM.
I think you can get pummeled for accusing a Scot of suffering from the English sweate.
Timothy, no one in the big media ever flatly says, in so many words, that right-wingers (in power, especially) are lying. They've developed these coy ways of hinting that maybe Bush or Cheney's words are not entirely what someone would have hoped for if it were important for them to get completely accurate information, but you never see "Today George Bush misrepresented X for the third time in a week." With luck, you might get "Shape of the earth: others differ."
All the media people -- Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Carlson, etc., etc. -- frequently misrepresent plain facts, but they're never called on it. (To me it's plausible that Dobbs got called because he's a bit pro-labor at times).
So it isn't a problem for you and me, or anyone who reads literature or social science. So it's our privilege to sit and watch while the non-liberal-arts-type voters (you object to "unsophisticated", don't you?) elect liars and idiots. And don't we feel good feeling smarter than them!
38: Some of the literature of plague years turns out to be funny.
One of leprosy's last outposts was Scandinavia.
Do I think it was malicious in intent, trying to get credit for telling the truth about Dobbs while minimizing the impact?
No one seems to agree, but when one of the best newspapers in the world consistently (over a period of ten years+) prints bad, dishonest political news with a specific center-right bias, that's something that needs to be explained. "Shit happens" isn't good enough. The normal place to look is management and ownership. I realize that it's paranoid heresy to claim that management manages, or to point out that Graham and Sulzberger are both managers and owners, but I'm a paranoid heretic.
If there were some other actual naive, NY Post-type newspaper printing the facts in unmistakable form, the Times' evasiveness in this case wouldn't bother me as much. But there isn't -- the Post is winger agitprop.
Ah, and Dobbs goes for the "the left *and* the right hate me, so I'm a good centrist guy!" defense.
You know, I agree with you generally on this issue, but this column specifically does rip the shit out of Dobbs. I can't picture someone writing the second half of the column if they were intending to pull their punches or be hard to understand. I think it was written poorly in this regard, but this specific column does look like a fuckup rather than malice to me.
One of the commonalities of the plague literature seems to be that quarantines are always a good idea and they always fail.
Which is why you should run away if you can. The English plague lit I've read (for an undergrad paper) is full of city vs. country stuff.
48 -- did you notice that this month, for the first time in history, urban population exceeds rural?
48.---This is why Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn is so fucking wierd. The main character sensibly runs away from yellow fever-ridden Philadelphia, then runs back. Okay, the whole novel makes no sense, but running back is just crazy.
50: I haven't read Brown, but Defoe's H.F. wanders the streets (or else there wouldn't have been much of a novel).
49: Worldwide? I hadn't seen that. London was growing rapidly during the plague era (1665 was the last of a number of epidemics).
Yeah, worldwide. I am looking around for the link as we speak, I saw the paper linked from somebody's blog just this morning but am not remembering whose.
Isn't it in Defoe where there's that bizarre little novella about the brothers who wander out into the wilderness, collecting refugees and temporarily building a new society?
53: Thanks. I like how it's framed with a "but don't forget the rural people!" message.
54: I don't remember if it's as coherent as building a new society, but yes, there's a section out in the country with runaways banding together. It might be written a bit like a dialogue or a play. (Yes, I could look this up, but really I should head for the library for other reasons.)
No, it's not in play or dialogue form, but it's written in a markedly different style than the rest of the book: sort of sing-songy story-telling, dotted with Biblical references. It's fairly obvious it's supposed to be read with an eye to the allegorical: a sort of mini-Robinson Crusoe.
"a sort of mini-Robinson Crusoe."
Tiny little island. Itsy-bitsy coconuts.
Ok, so I'm still here (for just a few more minutes) and I looked it up. There's a brief dialogue (I remembered the punctuation) between John and Thomas, but mostly it's story-telling.
dialogue between John and Thomas
Awesome euphemism for a three-way.
For the longest time, I always seemed to read the phrase "Third Way Democrats" as "Three-Way Democrats."