On Birmingham’s most famous Sunday!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

What two ministers said: Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Birmingham’s most famous Sunday.

As many people mentioned yesterday in the formal commemoration, Birmingham is not the same city today. We were struck by one part of the editorial in yesterday’s New York Times.

Three days after the bombing killed four children at Sunday school, Dr. King described the four girls as “victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” Reading yesterday’s editorial, we were struck by what two Birmingham ministers had already said:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/15/13): The city has planned a full day of remembrance and prayer on Sunday, along with a food festival and music. The commemorators have every right to blend somber and light as they mark a half-century of progress. But it’s worth remembering a point [Diane] McWhorter has powerfully made: the civil rights struggle was not simply a victory of good over evil, of the righteous defeating the Klansmen who gave “Bombingham” its bloody reputation. The struggle was good against “normal”—against the segregation that was seen as the natural order of things, buttressed by government, tradition and the law. In this, Dr. King and his allies were the radicals.

The most radical thing was their willful commitment to peace as a weapon for change and as a check on justified rage. The clouds from the dynamite blast had not even cleared when the Rev. John Cross stood before a furious crowd on the church’s front steps and said, “We should be forgiving as Christ was forgiving.” Then he handed a megaphone to the Rev. Charles Billups, who said: “Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed. We must have love in our hearts for these men.”

To recall what Dr. King told a crowd in 1957 when his own home was bombed, just click here.

(His own later account of his remarks that night included this: “We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them.”)

Back to Birmingham Sunday:

“We must have love in our hearts for these men?” Reading the words of the two ministers, we were struck again by the radical strangeness at the heart of the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Not everyone felt the same way about that nonviolent approach, which had been derived in large part from Gandhi. But we’re always struck by how radically strange it is that people could have reacted to such events in such unusual ways. That they could have said such things, were willing to act upon them.

We think we all have a lot to learn from those highly unusual reactions. In our view, the instinct behind those reactions is barely visible in today’s liberal world.

“We must have love in our hearts for these men?” What in the world did those ministers mean? And why was their movement successful?

Tomorrow: A car ride with Bull Connor, 1961

Dr. King's full eulogy: On September 18, 1963, Dr. King spoke at the funeral service for three of the children. To read his full speech, click here.

Among other things, Dr. King said this: “Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a new day.”

Read More

DIVISION AND CONQUEST: The one percent are making up time!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

Part 1—The Wreck of the Whole 99: “The Wreck of the Old 97” is one of America’s most famous train songs.

You couldn’t make Johnny Cash stop singing it. When Vernon Dalhart recorded it in 1924, it became perhaps the first million-selling country music recording.

The song memorialized the wreck of the famous “Fast Mail” train, which had been trying to make up time heading south toward Danville. According to the famous lyrics, the engineer “was going down the grade making ninety miles an hour when his whistle broke out in a scream.”

That was The Wreck of the Old 97. In modern times, there’s the ongoing Wreck of the Whole 99, which Annie Lowrey described again in last Wednesday’s New York Times.

Saez and Piketty had released new information about the gains of the highest earners. As Lowrey began (headline included), she even referred to “a new Gilded Age:”

LOWREY (9/11/13): The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.


[...]

The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression...jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.

Is this pre-tax or post-tax income? Lowrey didn’t explicitly say, although certain parts of her report implied that she was discussing income after taxes.

Whatever! New records for income inequality are being set, Lowrey reported. You might even say that the top one percent has been making up time!

Lowrey wasn’t completely gloomy as she reviewed the new data. In this passage, she reported “a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent:”

LOWREY: There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again—if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.

Incomes grew by one percent last year! As an example of “good news,” you might file that under the heading, “seeing the glass one percent full.”

Different people will have different ideas about the meaning of these data. For example, should the federal government try to address this level of inequality?

Different people will have different ideas about that. Lowrey reported something the authors have said on that score:

LOWREY: Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty have argued that the concentration of income among top earners is unlikely to reverse without stark changes in the economy or in tax policy. Increases that Congress negotiated in January are not likely to have a major effect, Mr. Saez wrote, saying they “are not negligible, but they are modest.”

Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, plan to update their data again in January, after more complete statistics become available.

Should Congress try to level incomes a bit? That is a matter of judgment. But in the absence of some such action, it seems the trend toward income inequality will continue.

By now, it hardly qualifies as “news” when such information appears. Indeed, Lowrey’s report appeared on page B4 of Wednesday’s New York Times. The release of these new data occasioned little reaction in the public discourse.

Nor will everyone agree about the meaning of these data. Do data like these represent a problem? Not everyone will agree, but let's make one basic observation:

In theory, progressives think that these data do represent a problem. But if they represent a problem, they represent a problem that is being felt on both sides of the tribal divide.

Within that 99 percent, the income of conservative voters is failing to rise; so is with the income of liberal voters. Then too, red and blue voters are all being looted through the massive overspending which characterizes American health care—a looting the liberal world has generally been too lazy to discuss.

At some point, you’d think the 99 percent might get mad at the one percent. You’d think the whole 99 percent might get mad about data like these:

Health care spending, per person, 2011:
United States: $8508
Finland: $3374

As compared with Finland, $5100 per person is disappearing every year in our health care spending. (For a family of four, multiply accordingly.) That’s money that isn’t going into the stagnant wages of the 99 percent.

Where is all that money going? At some point, you’d almost think the whole 99 would want to figure that out!

In our view, data like these could be part of a modern-day song, “The Wreck of the Whole 99.” Incomes are stagnant for almost the whole population. Meanwhile, ridiculous looting affects this huge group in various obvious ways.

That said, something seems to keep the 99 percent from fighting against this type of looting and income stagnation. These problems affect red and blue alike, but The Whole 99 fails to unite and put up a fight.

What keeps the 99 percent divided against itself? Some of the division comes from the so-called right. This has been true for a very long time.

But some of the division comes from the so-called left. It seems to us that instincts toward division have been growing on that side of the aisle.

Why can’t The Whole 99 fight back? We’ll examine that question all week.

Tomorrow: Ways to divide, thus to conquer!

Through the miracle of YouTube: Through the miracle of YouTube, you can hear several versions of Vernon Dalhart’s historic 1924 recording.

For one such recording, just click here. Musically, we’ve come a long way since that time, as have the top one percent!

Read More

Jim Lehrer was more than a writer of novels!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2013

News anchor also wrote plays: There’s nothing wrong with writing plays. Shakespeare did it a lot!

That said, we were surprised by Thursday’s report about Jim Lehrer’s new play. We didn’t know the newsman wrote plays, though we knew all about his novels.

Laura Bennett handled the history in the New York Times:

BENNETT (9/11/13): Mr. Lehrer’s career in television news has made him famous. But far less well known is that he has always loved writing for the theater, and that he is the author of four plays. (He also has 21 novels to his name.) His first play in two decades opens at the National Geographic Society here on Thursday: “Bell,” a one-man show about Alexander Graham Bell.

[...]

Growing up in Wichita, Kan., Mr. Lehrer decided he wanted to write fiction. In college, he studied playwriting, but after a short stint in the Marines, he became a journalist. Then in 1983, after watching the Redskins, he had a heart attack. His doctor advised him to make two lists: things he most enjoyed, and tasks that ate up his energy and time.

So Mr. Lehrer sat down with a notepad. He hated flying between Washington and New York. He was done with business lunches. But he knew what he loved: his family, and writing fiction. Finally, he thought, he’d like to try his hand at a play. The first script he finished was “Chili Queen” in 1986, about a small-town chili parlor. Then came “Church Key Charlie Blue” in 1988 and “The Will and Bart Show” in 1992.

It wasn’t just the 21 novels. He also wrote three plays!

There’s nothing wrong with writing novels, as Jane Austen proved. Still, it has become increasingly hard to keep up with the news as the news has been “democratized.” And we'd assume that writing 21 novels takes a lot of time.

(We could be wrong about that.)

Un-oh! As the news became “democratized,” the discourse came to be dominated by all kinds of shaky assertions, bogus claims and ridiculous Standard Press Corps Tales. It’s hard to get clear on all the bogus claims floating about, some of which are flatly false, many of which are only grossly misleading.

It’s hard to get clear on claims of this type even if you have a staff. We’d assume it’s even harder to do if you’re writing 21 novels.

We only say this because Lehrer sometimes seem a bit clueless about even some famously bogus claims in The Big Golden Book of Standard Press Corps Tales. In recent years, he keeps repeating the famous old groaner about Nixon winning that first debate among people who listened on the radio. He also keeps suggesting that Gennifer Flowers was a figure of rectitude.

As he worked on all those novels, was Lehrer keeping up?

Whatever! Observing the rules of the game, Bennett profiles Lehrer as a patient, civil person who doggedly seeks the truth. Beyond that, she lets him advance his ongoing rehab campaign concerning events of last year:

BENNETT: In the society’s Grosvenor Theater, Mr. Lehrer, 79, had the same patient air he brought to “PBS NewsHour” and the 12 presidential debates he moderated: the quiet civility, the eagerness to listen.

“Jim has a passion for complete ideas,” said Jeremy Skidmore, the director of “Bell.” “ ‘NewsHour’ was unique in that they didn’t want to do interviews that were sound bites. And as a playwright, Jim wants to sit with an entire section of Bell’s life before he moves on.”

Rick Foucheux, who plays Bell, once aspired to be a news anchor himself. “When I watch Jim, I see the reason he went that direction and I didn’t,” he added. “He’s got that natural curiosity to figure out the way the world works.”

Mr. Lehrer said he has no plans to return to television, especially given the bruising he endured after moderating the first presidential debate last fall, for which he came out of semiretirement. His wife, Kate, warned him not to: Twitter could be brutal. His style of polite discourse was no longer the norm.

“She had told me, you know, you could get hurt,” Mr. Lehrer said. “And she was right.” He shook his head. “It’s something that I did not have to do. But I convinced myself I had to.”

Poor Lehrer! He was badly mistreated by Twitter! His style of polite discourse was no longer the norm!

Within the guild, everyone knows to say these things about Lehrer. He's a patient, civil man who is eager to listen. Why did he become an anchor? Because he has that natural curiosity to figure out how the world works!

In some sense, in most contexts, those portraits may all be true. But even now, 53 years later, Lehrer doesn’t seem to know what happened in that first Kennedy-Nixon debate. And in his books and his public appearances, he still pretends he doesn’t know why Candidate Gore refuses to speak with him for public consumption about the 2000 debates.

(We don’t know why Gore keeps refusing to be interviewed by Lehrer. But we can make a pretty good guess; Lehrer keeps playing dumb.)

We’re sure that Lehrer is a good decent person among his family and friends. That said, he played a remarkably inappropriate role in the presidential debates of 1996 and 2000, with a bit of his stance lingering on in 2004. Oddly enough, he described his peculiar conduct in the Clinton-Dole debates in his own book, Tension City, in 2011. But he’s still largely playing it dumb about the Bush-Gore debates.

We think Lehrer showed very bad judgment in those crucial sets of debates. Rather plainly, he was part of the insider cult which had come to resent and dislike Clinton and his chosen successor, Gore. Good God! In the second debate in 1996, he tried to get Candidate Dole to talk about Gennifer Flowers, he weirdly reveals in his book. (Gennifer Flowers!) In 2000, we’d have to say that he behaved rather badly all through the Bush-Gore debates.

In his book and his public appearances, he pretends he doesn’t understand the complaints about 2000. The key word there is “pretends.”

Judging from what he himself has written, Lehrer got himself tangled up in the cult which believed that Clinton and Gore had large “character” problems. Our view? Maybe if he hadn’t spent so much time writing novels (and even three plays), he might have had a clearer grip on the real events of the world.

We know, we know! You’ve never heard anyone say that Lehrer did something wrong in those debates. That is exactly the problem! No one but us will ever tell you, including, it seems, Laura Bennett.

On Thursday, Bennett typed the same familiar old piddle about Lehrer’s civil ways. And she let him advance the claim that he was criticized unfairly in 2012. By Twitter, it now seems!

This is very familiar stuff. As we’ve told you about mainstream news: it's novels, all the way down!

Visit our incomparable archives: This summer, Lehrer discussed his role in various presidential debates. For our review, click here.

In 2011, when Lehrer’s book appeared, it fell to Gloria Borger to pretend that his various stories weren’t bogus. For our first reaction to the book, click this.

In October 2012, we did a longer series about Lehrer's book and his past work in presidential debates. For part 6 in that series, just click here. All six reports can be accessed in the margin to the right.

Read More

The Times reports why Christine Quinn lost!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

Nobody cares about issues: Yesterday, Gail Collins tried to explain why Bill de Blasio rolled to victory in this week’s mayoral primary.

As we noted yesterday, she said de Blasio won because of race—because one of his TV ads generated an “urban feel-good moment.” You see, de Blasio's wife is black. And in the TV ad in question, the whole family seemed very happy!

Like Collins, we don’t know why de Blasio won. It wouldn’t be easy to answer that question, since it involves the votes of many New Yorkers.

That said, we were struck by how little Collins seemed to care about the policy issues involved in the campaign. We had a similar reaction to the lengthy analysis piece in which Jodi Kantor and Kate Taylor tried to explain why Christine Quinn lost.

Right off the bat, we were struck by the banner headline on the large, sprawling piece. This was the headline in our hard-copy Times:

“Questions About How Big a Role Gender and Sexuality Played in Quinn’s Loss.”

Gender and sexuality might have played important roles in this race—although, to be perfectly honest, the reporters didn’t turn up much information. For the most part, they offered anecdotal accounts and complaints which added up to very little.

Still, we were struck by their focus. We wondered—could we imagine banner headlines like these in the New York Times?

“Questions About How Big a Role Stop and Frisk Played in Quinn’s Loss.”
“Questions About How Big a Role Early Childhood Education Played in Quinn’s Loss.”

It was hard to imagine those headlines. Those articles didn’t appear.

In truth, the Times did little reporting in the last few months about the issues of this campaign. The paper obsessed on Anthony Weiner’s sexual problems while showing little interest in much of anything else.

Yesterday, Collins discussed a feel-good moment concerning de Blasio's family; Kantor and Taylor speculated about sexuality and gender. In truth, these are the types of things which interest the New York Times. To judge from its emphasis and focus, the Times doesn’t care about the issues which got discussed in de Blasio's ad, the ad which made Collins feel good because his family seemed happy.

It isn’t Kantor and Taylor’s fault that they received this assignment. The questions they raised are perfectly valid, although they came up with little real information.

But land o Goshen, some of the glimpses they offered from within the Quinn campaign! Welcome to the cultural frameworks surrounding the upper-class Times:

KANTOR AND TAYLOR (9/121/3): Critiques of Ms. Quinn’s physical attributes came from many corners, even the wealthy Upper East Side women who helped raise money for her mayoral bid. “Why can’t she dress better?’” they would ask Rachel Lavine, a Democratic state committeewoman who was on Ms. Quinn’s finance committee.

“I might think that St. John is not the end all and be all of fashion,” Ms. Lavine said, referring to the upscale clothing line favored by wealthy, older women. “But that’s what they’re saying. ‘Why isn’t she wearing a size two St. John’s dress?’ There’s that kind of constant commentary.”

Remember—those were the people supporting Quinn. And this is part of the cultural framework which spills from the upper-class Times.

In fairness, Kantor and Taylor sounded somewhat clueless on their own at times. Who is betraying a hopelessly upper-class outlook now?

KANTOR AND TAYLOR: [Quinn’s] fall from front-runner status to a distant third place finish in the Democratic primary is now stirring intense debate about whether her femaleness, or her homosexuality, played any role in her struggle to win over voters.

Exit polls showed no gender gap in the results and indicated that Ms. Quinn lost for a number of reasons—her close association with the plutocratic incumbent mayor, her rivals’ ability to outmaneuver her on the issue of stop-and-frisk policing, and her inability to be a change candidate in an election in which voters sought new direction.

Still, her supporters wonder: Why has New York, home of tough, talented women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Wintour, proven resistant to female candidates? And was it simply too much to expect the electorate to embrace a candidate who would be not just New York’s first female mayor, but its first openly gay one, too?

According to that middle paragraph, it sounds like de Blasio won because of the desire to move away from plutocrat approaches. Kantor and Taylor moved quickly past that, saying Quinn's supporters had other things on their minds.

Wintour is editor in chief of Vogue. She was all over yesterday’s Times, mainly in the highly foppish Thursday Styles section.

But good lord! Who could be so clueless as to ask why the city where Wintour lives could “prove resistant to female candidates,” if that is really what happened? Granted, Kantor and Taylor attribute that question to Quinn’s supporters. But they were willing to type it up as if it made perfect sense.

Collins talked about race, but only concerning that “feel-good moment.” Kantor and Taylor's analysis piece went on and on about sexuality and gender. Increasingly, this is the stuff of press corps discourse, and not just in the upper-class Times. We were struck by this statement by Gloria Steinem:

KANTOR AND TAYLOR: [T]rue to the concerns of the women who met with Ms. Quinn in July, some allies thought the campaign could have handled the tricky matter of being a woman candidate with more finesse.

Gloria Steinem said in an interview that Mr. de Blasio effectively “took over the language of gender” in the race with his proposal to expand preschool programs with a tax increase. (The proposal was widely seen as impractical but politically effective.)

Even though Ms. Quinn passed a Council bill to provide paid sick leave, she stalled action on the measure for so long that she was widely viewed as an opponent, which hurt her credibility as a fighter for women.

In this account, de Blasio didn’t make a proposal which many voters favored. Instead, he “took over the language of gender,” aside from which nothing exists. (Steinem may have said a great deal beyond the remark which was quoted.)

Reading this piece after reading Collins, we were struck by the lack of interest in the lives of average people. The Times likes to talk about race and sex, not about people in Queens who might yearn for preschool programs because that would help them with their everyday lives, not because it helps them figure who’s saying what about gender.

Not about people in Manhattan who may think that preschool programs would create a better society.

Why did people vote as they did? Without any question, gender and sexuality might be involved, though Kantor and Taylor offered little real information.

But the Times likes to talk about sexuality and race. Does it like to talk about preschool programs for low-income children?

People! Possibly not quite so much! Collins blew right past that crap. On assignment, so did Kantor and Taylor.

Read More

ADULT ABUSE: What the Times should report!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

Part 4—Return from Gilligan’s Island: Does anyone at the New York Times know jack-spit about schools?

Certainly, very few readers do. Consider the way of the Times:

Last month, the former executive editor, Bill Keller, wrote in his weekly op-ed column that the United States has experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education.”

Among journalistic elites, such claims are very familiar. They’re also extremely hard to square with our best educational data.

That said, who gives a dang! Last Sunday, the Times handed the keys to the gloom machine to Robert J. Gordon, a self-regarding economics professor who doesn’t seem to know a lot about the public schools.

Beneath a visual of a broken-down school bus, beneath a headline which announced “the great stagnation of American education,” the self-regarding economics professor rattled a list of familiar scripts about “the poor quality of our schools.”

He failed to mention the last two decades of NAEP scores, which show large gains in reading and math by black and Hispanic students. Also by white kids!

Those large score gains didn’t get mentioned. But then, they never are!

Does anyone at this upper-class newspaper know jack-spit about schools? In fairness, they all seem to know the standard scripts, which all bring in the gloom.

More on the clueless Times:

Last year, the former editorial page editor, Gail Collins, staged the most embarrassing excursion since Gilligan attempted to stage his now now-famous three-hour tour. In support of a snark-laden book about Texas, Collins paraded about the land, warning crowds about the way the clownish red state was failing to educate its Hispanic kids.

The red-state failure had Collins upset. In Chicago, she warned a collection of blue-state liberals:

COLLINS (6/10/12): [Texas is] not doing the job of educating young Hispanic children that it needs to do if they’re going to become critical skilled workers for the next generation.

Right now, Texas imports college graduates. It imports as many as it creates on its own. So when you are paying to help make the universities in Illinois top-tier universities, you are paying to help staff businesses in Texas because a lot of your graduates are going to wind up down there.

Now, unless Texas antes up and really, really, really steps up to the education plate—

In the future, ten percent of the work force of America is going to be Texas born, bred and educated. And unless they do a better job than they’re doing now, that’s when we all go south.

Poor Illinois! The state was funding top-tier universities while Texas was frumping around!

Using evocative tribal language, Collins warned the Chicago crowd that, if Texas didn’t improve its schools, we might “all go south.” She showed no sign of knowing that Hispanic students in Texas schools strongly outscore their peers in Illinois on the National Assessment of Educational Testing, the federal testing program she had praised at length in her thoroughly clueless book.

In short, the New York Times is a clueless disgrace when it comes to the public schools. From its most famous players on down, the paper pimps the gloomy scripts which constitute upper-class conventional wisdom—gloomy scripts which advance conservative political themes and corporate privatization strategies.

Its readers are rarely—actually, never—exposed to even the most basic data about the state of the schools. If you read the New York Times, you are the victim of adult abuse with regard to this major part of American life.

Keller and Collins should crawl on their knees, begging forgiveness from Times subscribers for their absurd presentations. After that, someone should explain why Gordon was invited to rattle the scripts about a topic he seems to know little about.

Someone should also awaken the children, the horrible children at The One Liberal Channel, to ask them why they sleepwalk through life concerning the state of the schools. If they complained about the endless spewing of corporate-laced nonsense, the New York Times might be forced to perform some real reporting for once.

That said, the children aren’t going to complain. These topics don't exist on The One True Channel. The adult abuse will continue.

Still and all, a person can dream! If the Times got off its big fat asparagus aspic and did some reporting about public schools, what would that reporting look like?

The schools are constantly in the news. If the Times decided to do its job, this is what several series of front-page reports might attempt to cover:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress: What has been happening in public schools over the past few decades? At newspapers like the New York Times, everybody praises the NAEP, the gold standard of domestic testing.

Nobody ever tells the public what NAEP data show.

Check that: Reporters frequently cite the “achievement gaps” found in NAEP data. Those data enable the gloomy tales which constitute the memorized upper-class line.

But alas! Big newspapers never report the large score gains among all major groups in the student population. Readers are never told about the large score gains in reading and math recorded by black and Hispanic students.

Darlings, that would sound like good news! In the world of the Times, good news about schools is withheld.

If a paper like the New York Times decided to do its job for once, it would start by telling the public about those NAEP data. This couldn’t be done in a single report. The issues are too complex.

Times readers would finally hear about those very large score gains. Through interviews with NAEP officials, the Times would try to explain how large the gains in achievement may actually be.

The Times might even inform its readers about the different scores achieved by different states. (Don’t forget to disaggregate!) By the way, is there any chance that higher scores in some states result in part from retention procedures? Are fourth- or eighth-graders in some states older than those in the others?

We’d like to see that report. We can't find a way to tease that out through the NAEP’s public data, which are quite voluminous and are almost wholly ignored.

Might there be problems with the NAEP data? A real newspaper would examine that question—would have done so long ago. But alas! During those years, the Times has been off on Gilligan’s Island, clowning around with the Thurston Howells and advancing their upper-class dreck.

The Times has been dishing the adult abuse, has done so for a long time.

The PISA, the TIMSS and the PIRLS: As everyone knows, newspaper readers are constantly told about our nation’s gruesome performance on international tests. Last Sunday, the self-impressed Professor Gordon made a standard presentation:

GORDON (9/8/13): Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.

According to Gordon, results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show “the poor quality of our schools.” In a rather standard move, he didn’t mention results from the other major international tests, on which American students have sometimes performed rather well.

The most recent PISA results are from 2009. But uh-oh! In 2011, American students did rather well on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), a major international assessment of fourth-graders’ reading achievement.

How well did American students do? They outscored their peers in Canada, England, Germany and France, four well-known large nations. They outperformed Spain, Italy, Australia and Taiwan, four other famous countries. (Technically, Taiwan is still part of China.)

They outscored every smaller European nation save one, including Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. They outperformed the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. They outscored New Zealand and Israel.

They were outscored by only two nations—Russia and Finland—and by Singapore and Hong Kong, two small, wealthy city-states. Other than that, they outscored all comers.

Following established practice, Professor Gordon said good-bye to all that. But then, such strong performances almost never get mentioned. Based on the quality of Gordon’s piece, we wouldn’t assume that he’s ever heard of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or the PIRLS.

What is the overall picture on the PISA, the TIMSS and the PIRLS? If the New York Times ever returns from its stay on Gilligan’s Island, that would make for a fabulous, highly relevant series of front-page reports.

Is the PISA a better test battery than the TIMSS and the PIRLS? Does that explain why the Times tends to ignore the stronger performance on the latter tests while screeching about the lower scores on the PISA?

And by the way: Did the PISA over-represent low-income kids in its 2009 American test group? We don’t know the answer to that. A real paper might want to report it.

Such a series of reports would include the truly gloomy news about what happens when you “disaggregate” American scores on international tests. The scores by white kids look pretty good. The scores by black and Hispanic kids don’t.

The Times might also report what happens when you disaggregate scores by income. In short, there is a slew of information Times readers have never heard.

The Times could fill its front pages for weeks with reports on these seminal topics. Readers of the famous newspaper might start acquiring some information. At some point, the Times might even develop the types of skill which would let it examine the sorts of programs occurring within our schools.

At present, the Times is simply too unskilled to tackle such topics. Last month, the paper created a world of confusion trying to report a bone-simple matter—the transition to more difficult statewide tests in New York based on the new Common Core standards.

That was a stunningly hapless performance by a grossly incompetent newspaper. But the Times is persistently over its head when it tries to discuss even the simplest classroom topics.

In short, if the world were split into reading groups, the New York Times would be grouped with “the buzzards,” not with the robins or bluebirds. On average, American students may not be half bad. The American press is a mess.

What is the actual state of our schools? What could we possibly do to help our low-income and minority kids improves their performance faster? Enjoy their lives in school more?

At the New York Times, they don’t seem to know and they don’t seem to care. But then, the career liberal world doesn’t seem to give a rip either.

Welcome to the horrible world through which the Dowdism crept! In this world, the news is mainly entertainment, although it’s also a way of driving plutocrat scripts.

Like the Times, MSNBC is off on that three-hour tour when it comes to the public schools. So is the gang at Salon; so too for “career liberal” writers.

Relentlessly, public school teachers get trashed as the swells suppress those rising NAEP scores. We’re told that the teachers have ruined the schools through their infernal unions.

We’re told we need to privatize schools. We need to bring in the Princeton kids. We’re told the government can’t do anything right, not even in “government schools.”

We aren’t allowed to know about the large score gains achieved by our black kids. We ought to be pleased by what seems to be happening. But by the current rules of the game, we can’t even be told!

That said, the children at the corporate liberal orgs are talented with their R-bombs. They love to flounce about, announcing that we’re The Very Good People and The Others Are Just Very Bad.

The public schools and their kids can go jump in the lake. Who gives a shit about scores by black students?

The adult abuse has been widespread. But also, who cares about kids?

Read More

Roxane Gay mocks “wealth porn” in the Times!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Then quickly breaks our hearts: According to Nexis, the term “wealth porn” does not enjoy a rich history.

Within the Nexis archives, the term tracks to Matt Zoller Seitz, then of the Newark Star Ledger. He reviewed a TV documentary in 2002 as the swells made ready to summer:

SEITZ (6/1/02): "The Hamptons" is an impressive achievement—a serious work of social anthropology that can be enjoyed as pure entertainment. The fact that it's running over two nights on a major broadcast network is amazing all by itself. (When a network has nothing to lose, it rolls the dice on art.)

If you tune in expecting a shallow spoof of privileged people, a trashy so-called "reality" series or a voyeuristic slab of wealth porn, you'll be pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised.

Two years later, he used the term again, this time reviewing Trump TV:

“Like HBO's Sex and the City, The Apprentice is wealth porn—a weekly showcase of privilege that lingers over limousines, aircraft, champagne, caviar, fancy clothes and expensive shoes with the same loving care that soft-core sex movies lavish on naked bodies.”

Since then, the term appears in the Nexis archive about two dozen times. In 2011, Seitz used the term in Salon to describe the TV adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s wealth porn best-seller, Too Big to Fail.

Yesterday, the term appeared in a headline at Salon. We were thrilled, then instantly saddened:

SALON HEADLINE (9/11/13):
Why we read New York Times wealth porn
Their stories of the 1 percent are gruesome real-world fairy tales—and I can't look away

Doggone it! The piece was written by Roxane Gay, who doesn’t use the term “wealth porn” herself. In her piece, Gay describes her subject as “the fawning wealth journalism of the New York Times.”

In our view, that subject is very much worthy of exploration. But doggone it! Why did Gay have to say that she enjoys the New York Times’ wealth journalism so much?

GAY (9/11/13): “Blue Jasmine” is very much one of those movies trying to make a subtle statement that ends up doing the opposite. While the film is supposed to be some kind of high-minded critique of excessive consumption and who pays the real price for the wealthy to remain wealthy, the movie falls desperately but unapologetically short of that ambition. Instead, there is an aspirational quality to the filming, with loving depictions of wealthy New York—homes in the Hamptons, the impeccably designed apartment in the city, Jasmine’s exquisite wardrobe, ladies lunching. Oh how wonderful it would be, the film suggests, if we could all have nice things.

This reminds me of one of my truly guilty pleasures: reading articles about rich people in the New York Times. I cannot get enough of the breathless, thinly veiled envy in so many of these articles written by journalists who are, like most of us, on the outside looking in at the wealthy as they breathe such rarefied air. What I particularly enjoy about these articles is the shamelessness. These people have money they have earned (or stolen, or inherited), and by god, they will enjoy that filthy lucre.

The fact that the Times does a lot of “wealth journalism” is an important observation. We only wish Gay hadn’t said that she enjoys the product so much.

We also think Gay misunderstands the relationship between those struggling New York Times journalists and the “wealth journalism” they’re forced to produce. Sorry—in most cases, the writers are not, “like most of us, on the outside looking in at the wealthy as they breathe such rarefied air.” It’s true that most of those journalists won’t ever become super-rich. But if they work for the Times, they have already earned a shot at the lower rungs of the culture’s guild of the pointless and over-compensated.

Just a guess: In their hearts, those journalists are often playing on the same team as their wealthy subjects. Nor do they plan to risk their gigs at the Times by getting their ascots out of line.

We recommend Gay’s piece, which catalogs the types of pieces she regards as “fawning wealth journalism.” We wish she had discussed the way the cultural values involved in such work inform the Times’ entire package of news reporting and opinion journalism.

Increasingly, the New York Times is designed to tiptoe around the concerns and the interests of the mega-rich. You see that in the obvious ways they avoid reporting the types of looting which increasingly define the society. In a lighter vein, you see it in the type of porn Delia Ephron smeared on our faces last Sunday.

Ephron went on and on and on and on, letting us know about all the fancy pastries the wealthy enjoy. We rubes are expected to admire her conspicuous self-admiration.

This Hamptons culture suffuses the Times. You see it in the ridiculous piffle Gail Collins plies you with two times a week—work which seems designed to keep you chuckling and clueless.

In our view, people like Gay shouldn’t wink at this work. It comes from a pernicious culture and it’s spreading fast, even as the upper-end hacks at Salon chase the brass ring of success.

Amanda Hess noticed the wealth porn too: At Slate, Amanda Hess noticed the wealth porn too, although she treated it more as a manifestation of sexism.

Under the circumstances, three cheers for Amanda Hess.

Read More

What the heck happened to Candidate Quinn?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Fascinating portraits today of Times journalistic culture: Christine Quinn was ahead in the mayoral race. She ended up losing badly.

This morning, the New York Times offers two assessments of this electoral reversal. In our view, these two pieces, taken together, provide a fascinating portrait of Times journalistic culture.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at this long analysis piece by reporters Kantor and Taylor. They focus on the possible role played by “gender and sexuality”—and on nothing else.

Not for them the tedium of the campaign’s various issues—of the possible role played by the candidates’ stands on stop and frisk, let’s say, or early childhood education.

At the Times, piddle like that tends to flow down the drain. In a very long piece, Kantor and Taylor discuss gender and sexuality and nothing else.

Gender and sexuality are important, of course. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with discussing the role they may have played in the campaign.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at that long analysis piece. For today, we’ll suggest Gail Collins’ new column.

Today, the reporters talk about gender and sexuality. Collins talks about race.

Race is important, of course, just as gender is. But Collins talks about nothing else, and her take about race is rather bougie—we’ll even say upper-class.

As usual, Collins spends the first half of her column apologizing for making you read about something other than kittens and letting you read about sex. After she finishes killing time in these ways, she starts explaining how Bill de Blasio came from way behind to register a big win.

According to Collins, “One very big factor was a TV ad.” In this passage, she starts to describe the ad:

COLLINS (9/12/13): Politicians around the country are going to be looking at de Blasio’s campaign to figure out how he made his meteoric rise. One very big factor was a TV ad he aired that featured his son, Dante, talking about his father’s stand on the issues. Michael Barbaro of The Times, in a postelection analysis, called it “the commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race.”

De Blasio’s son did a TV ad in which he talked about his father’s stand on the issues! But according to Collins, that isn’t why this ad (supposedly) transformed this campaign.

According to Collins, the ad changed the campaign because of race. Because of a “feel-good moment:”

COLLINS: The thing viewers remember most about the de Blasio ad is not the candidate’s housing policy but the fact that his family is racially mixed: he’s white, his wife is black and Dante has the most impressive Afro since Angela Davis. That was what Mayor Michael Bloomberg was referring to when he called the de Blasio campaign “racist” in a New York magazine interview. “It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote,” he added.

The mayor’s remarks were an excellent example of why the other big factor in de Blasio’s ascension was Bloomberg fatigue.

They also missed the point. The real key to the Dante ad was not that it reminded black voters that the candidate had an African-American wife. It was the way it appealed to our multiethnic yearning for racial harmony. The de Blasio family seems so happy. The pictures of them laughing together remind you both of how far we’ve come and where we’d like to go. It’s the same effect the nation got when Barack Obama talked about his background and you remembered that when Obama was born, less than 10 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage.

De Blasio is still going to have to prove himself as a candidate, but, at the minimum, we’ll remember that he was a guy who made one ad that created one urban feel-good moment, just before Election Day.

Why did that ad turn the race around, if it did? In the analysis piece to which Collins referred, Barbaro said that de Blasio and his wife “instantly recognized the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.”

To Barbaro, the ad conveyed de Blasio’s personal understanding of the problems of stop and frisk. To Barbaro, it also conveyed de Blasio’s understanding that contemporary New York is “a tale of two cities.”

Collins didn’t mention stop and frisk. To Collins, the ad didn’t work because it spoke to policy matters confronting average New Yorkers. Instead, she said the ad gave voters an “urban feel-good moment.”

The de Blasio family seems so happy! Collins said the ad “appealed to our multiethnic yearning for racial harmony.”

Did that TV ad change the race? We can’t answer that. Nor do we know how voters perceived the ad, although we’ll assume that some voters reacted one way, while others reacted another.

But we were struck by the way Collins busted past any discussion of day-to-day issues affecting average New Yorkers. Let’s just say that she may not be getting stopped and frisked on her way in and out of those Town Cars.

Going back to the famous Dowd quote about welfare reform, Timesmen and Timeswomen don’t give a shazam about policy issues. They give a shazam about upper-class life—about the ways they themselves feel.

Collins said the mayoral campaign turned on a feel-good moment. We can’t tell you she’s wrong in that assessment. If she's only describing the way she reacted, we won’t tell you that she was wrong to react that way.

That said, she skipped right past the issues affecting average people to talk about a feel-good moment. Needless to say, she offers no evidence supporting the claim that others reacted this way.

Tomorrow, we'll see what Kantor and Taylor reported about Quinn’s defeat. Through no obvious fault of their own, we thought their piece emerged from deep within upper-class Gotham culture.

What the ad actually said: Here's how the ad in question started, Dante de Blasio speaking. To watch the ad, click this:

DE BLASIO AD: I want to tell you a little bit about Bill de Blasio. He’s the only Democrat with the guts to really break from the Bloomberg years. The only one who will raise taxes on the rich to fund early childhood and after-school programs. He's got the boldest plan to build affordable housing and he's the only one who will lend a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color...

To Collins, it wasn't about any of that. The ad worked because the family seemed so happy at the end of the ad!

We can’t tell you she’s wrong in that assessment. We can tell you that’s very typical of upper-class Times culture.

Who gives a fig about stop-and-frisk? How did the ad make me feel?

Read More