Category: media and media people

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media and media people term limits

Term Limits, Good

During the last few weeks of Egyptian unrest, a phrase got bandied about with an unusual degree of assumed support: Term limits. We heard of their importance from The Christian Science Monitor,  The New York Times, and other news sources, some of which would normally pooh-​pooh any push to establish, say, legislative term limits in America.

The writers and editors in question should find this odd. Why is it good for an executive in America to be term limited (as our Commander-​in-​Chief is), and even essential (as was often said) for commanders elsewhere, while it’s verboten for U.S. legislators?

Term limits’ rationale is clear. Journalists who wrote about the lack of term limits for Mubarak got the idea. They’re familiar with Lord Acton’s dictum: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Term limits for executives prevent tyrannies from forming — or, if formed, from continuing till the rigors of mortis set in.

What do term limits for legislators prevent? 

Not full-​blown tyranny, exactly, but corruption. In a representative democracy, corruption can be subtle. 

Term limits are just unsubtle enough to check some of that.

Take John Dingell, the politician to serve longest exclusively in the House. He took over his district from his father, who had served there 22 years — a 78-​year dynasty!

Aristotle argued men should “rule and be ruled in turn.” Term limitation: a democratic principle to ward off both wannabe dictators and legislative dynasties.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

What Gets Lost in Washington

The current battle over “health care reform” is a great example of why representative government frustrates. 

It’s not just that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the Democrats’ bill didn’t get their way. It’s that the proponents of socialized medicine (and that’s the real goal, here: The eventual complete government takeover of medicine) are playing a sort of obstacle-​course race … as I argued yesterday.

Meanwhile, how the anti-​Obamacare message hits Washington vexes, too. 

Some partisan pundits and pollsters go so far as to say that the Democrats’ reform legislation suffers because it lacks a good name. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a catchy moniker. “Obamacare,” used primarily by its opponents, is super-​catchy. And the Republicans repeal effort is pretty clever: “Repealing the Job-​Killing Health Care Law Act.”

Though “job-​killing” may reference a hot, current topic, it is far from the most salient thing one might say against the Democrats’ rushed-​through plan.

Standard politics: Even when politicians do the right thing, they push it for the wrong reason.

Media folk are now beginning to spin the popular opposition to Obamacare. Carefully worded polls “prove” that Americans aren’t overwhelmingly against the plan.

Which misses the real point: Incredulity. Democrats ballyhooed the notion that further government intervention into medicine would reduce costs. Nonsense, of course. And Americans know it. 

That common-​sense skepticism is precisely what gets lost in all the politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

Killer Apprehended, Vitriol’s to Blame

On Saturday, a mentally unstable 22-​year old man opened fire in a shopping center in Tucson, Arizona, seriously injuring a congresswoman, murdering six and wounding eleven more.

According to the New York Times, “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics.” The Washington Post’s coverage could have run under the same headline: “The mass shooting Saturday morning that gravely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D‑Ariz.) and killed a federal judge raised serious concerns that the nation’s heated political discourse had taken a dangerous turn.”

No mention of the person who actually pulled the trigger. Instead, insinuations that those who have strongly expressed their political opinions are the real culprits.

“The rhetoric has devolved and descended past the ugly, and past the threatening, and past the fantastic, and into the imminently murderous,” argued MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. Olbermann’s guest, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, while admitting he didn’t know the shooter’s motivation, suggested the violence was the “inevitable” result of “violent political rhetoric” and “incitement.”

The Huffington Post trotted out Arizona Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva to relay the day’s message against “vitriolic rhetoric” from “extreme elements of the Tea Party.” Grijalva attacked Sarah Palin, arguing, “if she wants to help the public discourse, the best thing she could do is to keep quiet.”

Let us mourn the deceased, support the injured, prosecute the guilty. Yes. But it is indecent to twist an act of violence into an excuse to smear opponents and silence robust political debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

Feeding the Narrative

Liberal NPR fired liberal reporter Juan Williams after he admitted on O’Reilly Factor to feeling nervous when sharing a plane with passengers dressed in Muslim garb. Williams also told O’Reilly it’s important to combat prejudice against Muslims, but that sentiment didn’t protect him. Honest man, out!

Some liberals, including Jesse Jackson, have joined conservatives in blasting NPR for the precipitous dismissal.

Various commentators have also been saying, “Hey, I never did like NPR’s smug condescending liberalism, so why are my tax dollars funding it?”

There are many reasons government shouldn’t be funding broadcasting — the unfairness of forcing us to pay people to noxiously condescend to us is surely one of them. 

Some hate to admit that National Public Radio is what it is. For example, Politico​.com scribe James Hohmann, relaying Jackson’s support for Williams, adds: “NPR CEO Vivian Schiller apologized for saying Williams should keep his views about Muslims between himself and ‘his psychiatrist or his publicist,’ but her remarks fed into the narrative that NPR is liberal, smug and condescending.”

Hohmann’s reluctance to state that Schiller’s remarks support that unflattering view of NPR, rather than merely “feed into the narrative” about it, is but a pretense at objectivity. Should another damning bit of evidence come up — for example, another NPR broadcast — would that, too, constitute just another incidental detail to be “fed into the narrative”?

No, Politico, let’s instead accept the obvious conclusion warranted by the abundant evidence.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

Alaska Misfire

The wrong man was fired.

The campaign of U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller seems to have been at least twice targeted as November 2 approached. In one case, questionable doings came to light after a reporter with CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA forgot to turn off his phone after leaving a message with a campaign spokesman. Newsroom reporters then chatted about how to sabotage Miller’s campaign — for example, by finding that “one person” among campaign supporters who is a child molester. The station claims that a recording of the incident gives a “misleading” impression.

Then we have the campaign of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Miller’s opponent, acting to kick conservative talk-​show host Don Fagan off the air. 

After the Alaska Division of Elections aided Murkowski’s write-​in campaign by deciding to distribute lists of write-​in candidates at polling places, a listener said he had now become a registered write-​in candidate himself. Fagan then suggested — on-​air, as part of his regular talk programming — that other listeners might want to do the same. Uh oh. The station fired him after the incumbent’s campaign threatened to sue the station for so-​called “electioneering.”

Compare the two cases. It’s fine for any media outlet to push its political opinions — but not to fabricate smears. It’s fine for candidates to make any complaint they wish to media outlets — but not to coercively curdle speech they happen to abhor.

I say, the wrong man got axed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Sometimes a Great Reversal

After World War II, European Social Democrats — the heirs of Karl Marx’s delusional vision — broke with their heritage. They rewrote their political principles, compromising. No longer would they go for socialism whole hog; they abandoned its key feature, the replacement of markets with total government control.

This was a great moment for modern civilization. It bequeathed Europe (and, perhaps, America) a clunky and intrusive (and unsustainable) welfare states, sure … but that’s far, far better than Communism.

We may be witnessing a similar groundswell of ideological shift in America’s stronghold of the status quo, the media. This week the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times endorsed budgetary rules that would take power and unlimited budgetary discretion from California’s out-​of-​control legislature:

It’s unfortunate that automated budgeting is necessary. But it is necessary. The state must continue to invest in the social welfare of its people, but we must do it in accordance with California’s projected growth so that we do not repeatedly yank from the young, the elderly and the poor the very services that we provided only a year or two before.

This may not sound revolutionary. But, as Tim Cavanaugh put it on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, the Times — long an opponent of spending limits — has “acknowledge[d] clearly and publicly that out-​of-​control spending, not insufficient tax revenue, is suffocating the Golden State.”

And that is revolutionary. Not American Founder-revolutionary, but Social Democrat-compromise‑y revolutionary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.