Supplemental: Got no explanations!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2014

With race, you just get to complain: On Monday, Piers Morgan became perhaps the ten millionth person to write a rather pointless column about the use of the N-word.

According to Morgan, if black people want white people to stop using the word, they’ll have to stop using it first. None of these things will ever occur, but it does kill a column.

Morgan’s column appeared in The Daily Mail, which is published in a different country. You’d think it would be easy enough to ignore such emanations.

Easy for others, but not for Salon! At Salon, Joanna Rothkopf swung into action, trailing a string of motive assessments behind her. She condemned Morgan for his “very poorly conceived article,” without ever quite explaining what made it so “poorly conceived.”

What was wrong with Morgan’s piece? This is the closest Rothkopf came to answering that question:

ROTHKOPF (11/11/14): Morgan argues that since he is white, he has no right to “demand” that a black person refrain from using [the N-word]. “But as someone who believes passionately in civil rights, I just think it’s the right thing to do.” In a clever turn of phrase, he both relinquishes his right to make requests of an entire race while doing just that.

Unless you think that demands and requests are one and the same, you’ll see that that passage fails. But so it goes when the modern “liberal” decides to sound off about race.

Increasingly, no explanation is needed when we wail about race. This brings us back to Margaret Sullivan’s reaction to Alessandra Stanley’s lengthy profile of Shonda Rhimes, the high-profile TV producer.

Stanley’s profile appeared in the September 21 New York Times. Sullivan, the public editor, hit back hard the next day.

Sullivan offered a lengthy post on September 22, followed by a second post two days later. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

Plainly, Sullivan agreed with readers who thought the profile was racially offensive. Eventually, she even said those readers were “justifiably offended.”

Sullivan’s judgment may even be correct! But can you find a single place where she tries to explain or justify that conclusion?

In her two posts, Sullivan devoted roughly 2300 words to this topic. We can find no explanation for the conclusion she reached.

Early in her initial post, Sullivan simply reprinted a post from an aggrieved reader. On some unstated basis, this was apparently meant to explain the judgment Sullivan reached:

LETTER TO DEAN BAQUET: I am deeply offended by the story written by Alessandra Stanley about Shonda Rhimes being an angry black woman. At first, I tried to give Ms. Stanley the benefit of the doubt and thought that she was attempting to be irreverent. Then I realized that she was being racist, ignorant, and arrogant. It is interesting that I have never seen any of Ms. Stanley's stories refer to any white producers of TV or film programs in racist, stereotypical terms. As awful as the story is, she got her facts wrong because Shonda Rhimes is not the executive producer of the new show, "How To Get Away With Murder."

I am a black woman and a lawyer. I have worked very hard to achieve in my profession and earn respect. I live in a very nice suburban community in Maryland. And yet, none of that makes one bit of difference because a New York Times writer can make whatever offhanded, racist opinions about a successful TV producer who is a black woman she cares to make, and because she has the protection of The New York Times behind her, can publish it. Because Ms. Stanley is a New York Times writer, her story has reached a national audience. Why is Ms. Stanley allowed to characterize Ms. Rhimes as she did and get away it? Why is she allowed to characterize Viola Davis as she did in her story and get away with it?

Ms. Stanley's story was a backhand to me and it hurts. For the first time, I am considering cancelling my New York Times subscription because this story is much more than disagreeing with the writer's opinion. This story denigrated every black woman in America, beginning with Shonda Rhimes, that dares to strive to make a respectable life for herself. No matter what we do, as far as Ms. Stanley is concerned, we will always be angry and have potent libidos as we have been perceived from slavery, to Jim Crow, and sadly in September 2014, the 21st century.

Please remove Ms. Stanley from the New York Times. None of us who read your paper should ever be subjected to this.

(Note to readers: Shonda Rhimes is, in fact, an executive producer of How to Get Away with Murder. The Times has corrected a headline and caption that referred to her as the creator of the show.)

This writer asserted, several times, that Stanley’s profile was “racist.” That said, she made no attempt to support her claim. For good measure, she even included a large mistake right in her opening paragraph!

It was close enough for the New York Times! Sullivan posted the whole thing, howler and all. She went on to support the reader’s view without explaining why.

This is one of the many new rules which help explain why we progressives will never succeed. In matters of race, you don’t have to explain. You just have to get mad, feel offended.

To us liberals, this seems to make sense and it feels very good. Elsewhere, folk roll their eyes.

IMITATIONS OF NEWS: The place to go for cherry-picked news!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2014

Part 3—Rachel keeps conning her viewers: Yesterday, the children were clowning hard at the new Salon.

Did you know there were this many lunkheads on the face of the Earth? That they could all be gathered under one roof?

The children offered two different posts about an important recent matter. On Fox, Megyn Kelly almost said “Fuckabee” instead of Huckabee!

This troubling matter was offered to help us see how dumb Kelly is. No one bothered to offer recent ratings:

Total national audience, 9 PM and 12 midnight
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Megyn Kelly, Fox: 3.652 million
Rachel Maddow, MSNBC: 874,000

Ratings aren’t a measure of quality. Beyond that, last week was good for Fox News types, less so for the liberal crowd.

That said, things weren’t much better the week before, when Maddow was preaching about the nation’s transplendent economy. This is the way the numbers looked the previous Thursday night:

Total national audience, 9 PM and 12 midnight
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Megyn Kelly, Fox: 2.947 million
Rachel Maddow, MSNBC: 1.016 million

Ratings aren’t a measure of quality. That said, Kelly starts looking a lot less stupid if you factor them in.

At Salon, they don’t. At Salon, the children keep themselves busy writing about how wonderful cereal is, about the things you shouldn’t feed cats, and of course about every pointless blip on the screen concerning race and/or sex.

On the Maddow Show, the host keeps herself busy handing you mountains of crap. Consider the propaganda she churned about our great economy.

For this performance, we must return to the Maddow program of Friday, October 31. Granted, it was Halloween. Perhaps for that reason, Maddow started with an unusually dishonest presentation, even for her.

In the first four minutes of her program, she failed to acknowledge or correct her previous absurd misstatements about what “Fox” was saying about the price of gas. She continued to mock Stuart Varney (Fox Business Network), even as she kept withholding what Varney had actually said.

Oddly, Maddow has become one of the most dishonest players we’ve ever seen on cable. That faux presentation was a good example of the relentless dishonesty her bosses let her present.

Maddow’s start was extremely bad that night. But then, she handed us this:

MADDOW (10/31/14): Thank heavens. We have Fox to now clear that up for everyone! So this is fun.

But the news here is this. Gas prices are way down. Gas prices are lower than they have been in years. Thanks to Fox, we know that’s good news for the economy. Good news for both your family budget and good news for the economy overall. Hooray!

But it’s definitely not the only piece of good news about the economy right now. The unemployment rate right now is below 6 percent. That’s the first time since the recession that it has been that low.

In terms of people putting in claims for unemployment benefits, that number is at a 14-year low right now. The economy is growing at 3.5 percent, which is a robust growth rate, robust enough that the Federal Reserve at least is stopping doing the monetary stimulus they have been doing since the recession. The chairman of the Fed, Janet Yellen, will be meeting with President Obama on Monday about that. They’re able to stop the stimulus basically because they believe the economy has been coming back on its own enough that it doesn’t need that booster shot anymore.

I mean, all that stuff that I just listed, that’s good news right now. Gas prices down. The unemployment rate, down. Jobless benefits, way down. Economic growth, way up.

It’s all going the right way right now. And both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 today closed at record highs—a record for both of them today. The Dow closed at 17,390 points today.

To watch the whole segment, click this.

In that passage, Maddow was explaining how the economy looks to someone who is paid $7 million per year. Or to someone who simply reads the statistics she receives from the White House.

Was it “all going the right way now?” Not exactly, no. Maddow was citing real statistics. But she was leaving other statistics out.

As she continued, she explained why “people are in a pretty good mood” about the economy. In this passage, we get a good example of what faux news can look like:

MADDOW (continuing directly): The consumer sentiment index, which is a measure of how consumers feel about the economy, it seems like one of those touchy-feely sociology measures of the economy. It’s actually one of the most important predictors of future economic growth. It’s how much confidence consumers have in the economy. That number is the highest it has been in more than seven years right now.

And as if all of that were not enough, happy freaking Halloween! The price of Halloween candy is down. It’s been stable for the past couple years, but this year’s Halloween candy is cheap. Ha, ha!

Add all that together and people are in a pretty good mood. And in politics, usually all of the economic indicators being up with an exclamation point except for the ones that are good when they’re down, and those right now are down with an exclamation point, usually that means good things for the party in power, right?

Things are going well, don’t change horses. That’s been the easiest principle in political prognostication since political prognostication.

Remember “It’s the economy, stupid?” Right, right. It’s the economy, stupid. And the economic news right now is good.

Were people really “in a pretty good mood?” Such sentiments are hard to measure, even if you’re actually trying.

Basically, Maddow wasn’t. With respect to the consumer sentiment index, her blog linked to an AP report by Christopher Rugaber. These were his first two paragraphs:

RUGABER (10/31/14): Consumers expect better economic growth and rising incomes in the coming months, pushing a measure of confidence to a seven-year high in October.

The University of Michigan said Friday that its index of consumer sentiment rose to 86.9 from 84.6 in September. That's the highest since July 2007, five months before the Great Recession began. Still, the index regularly topped 90 before the downturn.

Maddow reported that the index was up. She failed to say that it still lagged far behind its status before the Great Recession.

Maddow was picking and choosing her facts, as she frequently does. As she continued, she mocked the way “Washington” was uniformly saying that the elections would display a Republican wave. (This claim by Maddow was utterly bogus, though such predictions turned out to be right.)

Then, she offered cherry-picked polls to suggest that four major Senate races were “virtually tied right now.” She included a cherry-picked poll from Iowa, where Joni Ernst ended up winning by 8.5 points. She included a cherry-picked poll from Georgia, where David Perdue won by 7.8.

Republicans won all four races which Maddow said were “virtually tied.” But this is the way it tends to go on this rotted-out, faux news program.

Maddow’s first ten minutes that Friday night were a tribute to the procedures which constitute faux news. Truth to tell, Maddow’s content is often much worse than her ratings.

At Salon, the children write about breakfast foods and about near-slips of the tongue. All around the corporate dial, we liberals keep getting it faux.

Tomorrow: The corporate selling of Maddow

Supplemental: Remember that thing from a few weeks ago?

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2014

We refer to our fund-raising drive: A few weeks ago, we started our semi-annual fund-raising drive.

Then we stopped! Did that make you think it was over?

We’ve been a bit under the weather the past few weeks. If you aren’t feeling especially well, an onerous task like a fund-raising drive will be the first thing to go.

That said, our fund-raising wasn’t over! In this, the final week of our drive, we’re going to say it once again:

If you want to contribute to this site, you can just click here.

Supplemental: Live and direct from Paris, France!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2014

The planet’s most foppish person: Until today, there was still a debate on a very basic question.

As of today, that debate has been settled. Rather plainly, Pamela Druckerman is the most foppish person on Earth.

As usual, Druckerman’s New York Times column is live and direct from Paris, France, scene of her various conquests and musings. She has lived in Paris for something like a dozen years with her (inevitably) British husband, who doesn’t seem able to spell his own last name.

According to the leading authorities, the husband in question—Simon Kuper—“writes about sports ‘from an anthropologic perspective.’” We’ve seen no one explain why you’d go to Paris to do something like that.

As for Druckerman, she has steadily documented her greatness since decamping for Paris. Examples:

In 2012, she wrote a best-selling book about the fact that French children and parents are just so much better than ours. The year before, she wrote an autobiographical thriller for (what else?) Marie Claire:

September 10, 2011
How I Planned a MÉNAGE À TROIS
When Pamela Druckerman's husband asked for a threesome for his 40th birthday, she reluctantly agreed, on one condition—that she pick the other woman.
By Pamela Druckerman

Warning: the piece goes on and on and on. No one has ever finished it.

Last year, Druckerman published a piece in the New York Times about the delicate task of doing psychotherapy in French. In this morning’s piddlerich column, she helps us see just how different everything is over there:

DRUCKERMAN (11/11/14): Even the rituals of friendship are different here. The Canadian writer Jean-Benoît Nadeau, who just spent a year in Paris, says there are clues that a French person wants to befriend you: She tells you about her family; she uses self-deprecating humor; and she admits that she likes her job. There’s also the fact that she speaks to you at all. Unlike North Americans, “the French have no compunction about not talking to you.”

Those French! They’re nothing like us!

Druckerman had been documenting her difference for quite a long time now. Today, though, the foppish pundit settled our longest-running dispute with the very subject of her column.

Druckerman’s column starts like this, headline included:

DRUCKERMAN: How to Be French

I have an unusual item on my to-do list, wedged between home repairs and unwritten thank-you notes: Become French. I’ve begun the long process of gathering documents to apply for French citizenship.

I’ll remain American, too, of course. I’d be a dual citizen. But becoming French would bring perks. I could vote in French and European elections, stand in faster lines at some airports, work anywhere in the European Union and—crucially—make my children French, too.

But adopting a new nationality, even one from the place I’ve lived for more than 10 years, raises existential issues. I’ve gotten used to being a foreigner. I’m not sure I’m ready to abandon my otherness, which has become an identity in itself.

Tremendous volumes of nonsense follow. But Druckerman ended the longest-running dispute with her reference to the “existential issues” involved in her attempt to abandon her otherness.

At that point, we had a winner. Rather plainly, Pamela Druckerman is most foppish of all!

It’s astounding that the New York Times wants to publish drivel like this. More depressing is the reverence which gets extended through comments.

Readers bow to the obvious greatness of the Parisian analyst. Do you want to know why there’s no hope for the world?

Just read the Druckerman comments!

Poor Druckerman! She wrestles today with the existential questions raised by her otherness, which has become an identity in itself.

Across the nation, enthralled Times readers continue to swallow her cant.

IMITATIONS OF NEWS: The economy!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2014

Part 2—Democrats, losing elections: The foppistry of our upper-end press corps almost defies description.

On Sunday, Margaret Sullivan tackled the problem in her New York Times public editor column. Responding to complaints from readers, rolling her eyes at the Times’ “Wealth” section, Sullivan asked executive editor Dean Baquet to describe the typical Times reader.

According to Sullivan, Baquet responded like this:

SULLIVAN (11/9/14): I asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, whom he has in mind when he directs coverage and priorities.

“I think of The Times reader as very well-educated, worldly and likely affluent,” he said. “But I think we have as many college professors as Wall Street bankers.”

On the question of all that high-end content, he called it “one of the bigger tensions” in The Times’s big picture. The paper has become expensive to subscribe to, and it is supported financially by advertisers who want to reach a high-earning readership, but “you don’t want to become an elitist news operation.” And it’s not just The Times that pitches to the rich, he said, noting that The Wall Street Journal’s real estate section is called “Mansion.”

Mr. Baquet said that stories about $56 million apartments and parents who buy houses near their children’s boarding schools are a legitimate part of the mix. But there are also stories about people struggling to get by, he noted.

We’d call that a fairly amazing response.

In Baquet’s mind, New York Times readers are “likely affluent.” That said, he thinks the Times serves “as many college professors as Wall Street bankers!”

Don’t blame us, the boss man says. The Wall Street Journal fawns to the super-wealthiest too!

We don’t know what Baquet meant by the quoted remark about professors. We don’t know what else he might have said in his chat with the public editor.

That said, Sullivan’s column appeared five days after a national election. The election went badly for Democrats and seems to have featured a record-low voter turnout.

Why did Democrats do so poorly? Different people will have different answers. Ever so briefly, let’s consider the state of the nation’s economy.

For ourselves, we aren’t giant fans of the Times editorial board. That said, the newspaper offered these pensees in the aftermath of the election:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (11/8/14): The employment report for October, released on Friday, reflects a steady-as-she-goes economy. And that is a problem, because for most Americans, more of the same is not good enough. Since the recovery began in mid-2009, inflation-adjusted figures show that the economy has grown by 12 percent; corporate profits, by 46 percent; and the broad stock market, by 92 percent. Median household income has contracted by 3 percent.

Against that backdrop, the economic challenge is to reshape the economy in ways that allow a fair share of economic growth to flow into worker pay. The October report offers scant evidence that this challenge is being met...

The economy added 214,000 jobs last month, in line with its performance over the past year. Consistent growth is certainly better than backsliding, but growth is still too slow: At the current pace, it will take until March 2018 for employment to return to its pre-recession level of health.

Even then, more jobs would not necessarily mean higher pay. Updated figures by the National Employment Law Project, a labor-advocacy group, show that about 40 percent of the private-sector jobs created in the last five years have paid hourly wages of $9.50 to $13, and 25 percent have paid between $13 and $20. Those findings are underscored by the new jobs report, which shows that nearly all of the private-sector job gains were in restaurants, retail stores, temporary work, health care and other low-to-moderate-paying fields.

Wages have barely kept up with inflation for several years running, and there are no economic or political forces to push them up.

Even at the lordly Times, the board seemed aware of the contraction in median income. At Salon, Thomas Frank was perhaps a bit more pointed in his remarks:

FRANK (11/9/14): Low turnout is one reason for these contradictory results. Big money is a second. But a third reason voters did these futile, clashing things is that this is our fourth hard-times election in a row. Lashing out blindly and in all directions against the powerful—against low wages as well as against a comfortable “class” that is amply represented in Washington—is still our political default position, some six years after the financial crisis and the Wall Street bailout. For many Americans, the recession is still on. They know that their region hasn’t recovered, that their household wealth isn’t coming back, that people like them no longer have a shot at the middle-class life in which they were raised.

According to Frank, many Americans know that “people like them no longer have a shot at the middle-class life in which they were raised.”

Middle-class lifestyles are going away! At the same site, Paul Rosenberg had offered a similar analysis one day before:

ROSENBERG (11/8/14): The economy has done just fine for the Mitt Romneys of the world. But not for anyone else.

As my former Open Left blogmate Ian Welsh pointed out, “Two Charts Show Why the Obama Economy Sucks.” The first shows the portion of the working-age population that’s working. It was hovering around 63 percent before the Great Recession, and has been between 58 and 59 percent since late 2010. The second shows median household income, falling from over $56,000 in 2007 to roughly $52,000 in 2011, about where it’s been ever since. These two charts show why the headline economic numbers showing a recovering economy fail to register with the American people. It’s not the people who are mistaken—it’s the pundit class that’s out of touch, clinging to an outmoded set of increasingly misleading statistics.

Oof! According to Rosenberg, median household income was over $56,000 in 2007, before the great economic collapse.

Seven years later, median income is still well below that figure. Unless you're an out-of-touch pundit class, low gas prices do not offset that large economic problem.

Different people will blame different people for the state of the nation’s economy. Then again, some members of “the pundit class” may not acknowledge or discuss this problem at all.

Are those people “out of touch?” Are they simply churning the propaganda they received from the DNC?

It’s very hard to answer such questions. Tomorrow, we’ll show you how the economy looks to a well-known TV pundit—a pundit is reportedly paid $7 million per year.

Tomorrow: It’s all good in Faux Pundit Land

Supplemental: Still pounding a tale from 1992!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2014

Bob Schieffer never quits: There is no reason to think that Ross Perot destroyed the re-election bid of President Bush the Elder in 1992.

There is zero reason to think that any such thing occurred—and the tired old story is now 22 years old. But God help us!

On yesterday’s Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer interviewed his personal friend, George Bush the Younger, and he seems to have raised this tired old tale again.

Schieffer’s too slick to let us see how it happened. But this is the relevant part of the Face the Nation transcript:

BUSH (11/9/14): The ’92 defeat was really hard. And it—ironically, enough, it did make it easier for me, because when people criticized my dad, somebody who I admire greatly, I didn’t react well, at times. And it really, really affected me.

[...]

SCHIEFFER (voice-over): Would his father have won reelection if Texas billionaire Ross Perot had not entered the race unexpectedly and made it a three-way contest with Bill Clinton?

BUSH: I think he’d have won.

SCHIEFFER: You do think so?

BUSH: I do, yes. Absolutely. I think he’d have won and I just can’t prove it. I mean it’s just all conjecture, of course. But I think he would have won, because I think ultimately there would have been a, you know, a clear choice between, you know, a guy who had a very good first term and a untested governor.

It looks like Schieffer probably raised the point. Some hacks never quit.

Schieffer is an old personal friend of Bush the Younger. His brother, Tom Schieffer, was a business partner of Bush with the Texas Rangers, then became a major ambassador under President Bush.

Despite these facts, Schieffer was allowed to moderate one of the Bush-Kerry debates. Virtually no one mentioned the friendship. Professional courtesy, people!

Why do we say that Perot didn’t cost Bush the 1992 re-election? Duh!

In that year’s exit polls, Perot voters were asked how they would have voted had Perot stayed out of the race. They split evenly between Clinton and Bush.

(Text below. With Perot in the race, Clinton won the popular vote by a six percentage point margin.)

Whatever! In the modern era, no Republican has ever lost an election. Instantly, the spin machines start explaining all losses away.

In the case of Campaign 92, Perot was chosen as the demon. Twenty-two years later, Schieffer won’t let it go.

Neither will the New York Times, of course! In this morning’s hard-copy edition, Michael Shear did a ten-paragraph report about the Schieffer-Bush interview.

Twenty percent of the “news report” got burned away like this:

SHEAR (11/10/14): Mr. Bush appeared on the CBS morning program to promote his new book, “41,” about his father. In the interview, Mr. Bush said he thought his father would have won a second term in office if Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire, had not run as a third-party candidate.

“I mean, it’s just all conjecture, of course,” Mr. Bush said. “But I think he would have won, because I think ultimately there would have been a, you know, a clear choice between, you know, a guy who had a very good first term and an untested governor.”

No matter how bogus such stories may be, they’re never permitted to die. Nor do reporters ever present the basic background information.

Bob Schieffer simply never quits. In a slightly more rational world, someone would step up and make him.

The real-time news report: In the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne did the news report about the exit polls, in which 15,000 voters were interviewed:

DIONNE (11/12/92): The notion of a constituency torn asunder was reinforced when Perot backers were asked how they voted in elections for the House and who would have been their second choice for president.

In House races, Perot voters split down the middle: 51 percent said they backed Republicans, 49 percent backed Democrats. In the presidential contest, 38 percent of Perot supporters said they would have supported Clinton if Perot had not been on the ballot and 37 percent said they would have supported Bush.

An additional 6 percent of Perot voters said they would have sought another third-party candidate, while 14 percent said they would not have voted if Perot had not run.

That is what the exit polls said. After that, the spin machine started to whir.

Supplemental: A portrait of a famous journalist!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2014

The people who hand you the news: Jonathan Yardley’s book report is worth the price of the Sunday Washington Post, even before you compute the value of the weekly coupons.

Yesterday, Yardley reviewed the latest book by Gregg Herken—the very same Gregg Herken with whom we graduated from high school in 1965!

We can’t exactly tell you what Yardley thinks of Herken’s new book, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington. But early in his review, Yardley recalled an evening he spent, long ago, with Joseph Alsop, a famous journalist of the time:

YARDLEY (11/9/14): I met Alsop once, at a small and informal gathering in the late 1960s of youngish journalists at which he was the invited speaker. He was a famous columnist published in and syndicated by the New York Herald Tribune, and we were eager to hear him, but we’d have done better to spend the evening drinking beer at any nearby tavern. He was utterly repellent: arrogant, patronizing, imperious, uninterested in anyone except himself. His “reporting” relied “mostly on official sources,” Herken writes, which was consistent with the attitude he brought to our little gathering: He hadn’t the time of day for us because we were ordinary as opposed to the glittering stars whom he sucked up to and bullied in the Washington he claimed to know so well.

Oof! As he nears the end of his review, Yardley extends his portrait of the “self-confident if not unbearably arrogant people” Herken portrays in his book.

For what it’s worth, Yardley is directly quoting Phil Graham in the following passage. Herken sources the quotation to an earlier book:

YARDLEY: This is interesting and more than a little scary, but what it had to do with the self-confident if not unbearably arrogant people who gathered for martinis and terrapin soup at Alsop’s place is a little difficult to discern until you read what Phil Graham once said in a toast at a black-tie party in his own house: “Georgetown [is] an entity unto itself, home to the great, the near great and the once great in government and in journalism. . . . In other cities, people go to parties primarily to have fun. In Georgetown, people who have fun at parties probably aren’t getting much work done. That’s because parties in Georgetown aren’t really parties in the true sense of the word. They’re business after hours, a form of government by invitation. . . . It’s fair to say that more political decisions get made at Georgetown suppers than anywhere else in the nation’s capital, including the Oval Office.”

The mood of that gathering was “self-congratulatory,” as Herken puts it, and if anything that’s an understatement. If Graham’s words help explain why there really was a connection between Georgetown parties and Wisner’s antics, they also—albeit inadvertently—help explain why Washington is so roundly detested by so many people elsewhere in the country. The Georgetown Set may have vanished by the 1980s, thanks mainly to attrition, but the culture it represented still flourishes, one of people utterly isolated from the normal run of American life, politicians and policymakers and journalists who talk only to one another.

We don’t know what Joseph Alsop was like. We can’t tell you about Phil Graham.

But Yardley describes a famous journalist of that day as “utterly repellent.” He says the culture within which those famous journalists functioned “still flourishes” today—a culture of “people utterly isolated from the normal run of American life, politicians and policymakers and journalists who talk only to one another.”

Yardley says that Graham’s words “help explain why Washington is so roundly detested by so many people elsewhere in the country,” even today.

We can’t say those claims are true. We do think they’re worth considering.

IMITATIONS OF NEWS: Gently shaken awake!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2014

Part 1—Is Lyndsey Layton human: This morning, we were gently shaken awake at our usual 3:15.

Already, the analysts were debating a crucial question:

Is Lyndsey Layton human?

The source of the problem was clear. In this morning’s Washington Post, Layton (Wesleyan, Class of 1986) had written an error-strewn, incomplete news report about an important topic the Washington Post should have been covering for decades.

Is “Lyndsey Layton” human? That’s what the analysts were asking. We weren’t sure what to tell them.

Layton’s multiply-bungled report appears on page A3 of this morning’s Post. Excitedly, her headline shouts a fact which has been clear for decades.

The relevant data have always been there, open for everyone’s review. We’ve been linking to those data for many years now.

Nothing is new in Layton’s report. But because an interest group released a report, she was able to say the sky is blue, bungling as she went.

This is the way her report began, hard-copy headline included:

LAYTON (11/10/14): Hispanic pupils make gains in math

Hispanic students have made significant gains on federal math tests during the past decade, and Hispanic public school students in major cities including Boston, Charlotte, Houston and the District have made some of the most consistent progress, according to a report released Monday.

Child Trends Hispanic Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center, analyzed 10 years of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, that U.S. students have taken every two years since the early 1990s. Also known as the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP is the country’s most consistent measure of K-12 progress.

Between 2003 and 2013, when the most recent NAEP tests were given, the average math scores for Hispanic students in U.S. public schools rose nine points in fourth grade and 13 points in eighth grade. NAEP is graded on a scale of 1 to 500; the gains realized by Hispanic students are roughly equivalent to one grade level.

Hispanics attending public schools in major cities posted similar gains, with 10-point and 13-point increases in grades four and eight, respectively.

“According to a report released Monday!” Go ahead! Enjoy a sad belly-laugh!

According to Layton, the author of the exciting report called the score gains by Hispanic students in the cities surprising. We don’t know why anyone would say such a thing, or why a Post education reporter would treat such a statement as news.

(Layton has been at the Post since 1998. She moved to the education beat in 2011.)

In fact, Hispanic students have been recording substantial score gains in math for as long as the NAEP has been conducted. In the case of the NAEP’s “Long Term Trend” study, that dates to the early 1970s.

This may seem like news to Post subscribers, but that is only because the Post never reports such facts. Today, Layton excitedly reports this “news,” but only because an interest group has published a report on widely-cited federal data she herself has apparently never reviewed.

Is Lyndsey Layton human? How about her editors? We didn’t know how to answer.

Layton makes several errors in her report, errors which took thirty seconds to check. Beyond that, she fails to report the large score gains in math produced by white, black and Asian-American students over these same many years.

On its face, Layton produced a faux report. Whatever this pile of verbiage is, you can’t really list it as “news.”

That said, giant chunks of American news are now essentially faux. Consider the wonderful headline which appeared last Friday at the new Salon, a faux news site which seems to come from the corporate pseudo-left.

By now, everyone knows that you can’t trust the headlines and photographs at Salon. Persistently, the headlines fail to capture the actual point of the piece.

This headline was even better than that. It appeared late Friday:

“Clueless, lifeless zombies”: Why Chris Hayes is right about Democrats, principles, and fighting back
Even a humiliating midterm defeat can be recovered from—if Democrats learn the right lessons and battle back
BILL CURRY

“Why Chris Hayes is right,” the encouraging headline screamed.

Unfortunately, Curry had rather plainly said that Brother Hayes was wrong:

CURRY (11/7/14): Democrats must now navigate the stages of grief, a tough task for a party so prone to denial. On MSNBC, Chris Hayes argued that Democratic candidates erred in running away from Obama. So did an indignant Al Sharpton and even Republican Joe Scarborough. Many liberal pundits had urged Democrats to stand by their man. Paul Krugman recently called Obama “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.”

I think they’re all wrong. Obama left the Democrats in Congress long before they left him. They know their districts and states better than any pundits do and only bailed on Obama when voters started bailing on them, by which time it was too late. Their real mistake was failing to speak up years ago when Obama abandoned many of their party’s principles, or even to realize he’d done it.

The MSNBC analysis is part of a larger fallacy; that the problem is merely tactical; a matter of message, not policy. The worst thing about the theory is how it disrespects voters; if only we had better slogans, they’d appreciate all we’ve done for them. The condescension alone is enough to blow an election.

Curry didn’t focus on Hayes. Salon apparently wanted to.

Rather plainly, Curry said Hayes was wrong in his analysis of the election. He said Hayes and the others named were in denial, condescending.

In its upbeat headline, Salon simply changed “wrong” to “right.” Presto! The news had been improved!

Salon has become a non-stop gong-show. But vast amounts of what we see around us is faux news.

All week, we’ll highlight species of faux news from the corporate pseudo-left.

Tomorrow: The state of the economy

Supplemental: More unworkable work from Pew!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014

More true belief from Marcotte: It’s painful to watch the way the liberal world now pretends to “reason.”

Consider what happened when Amanda Marcotte engaged in some true belief.

Yesterday, as we quit for the day, Marcotte seemed to have swallowed some rather unlikely statistics.

We were only four paragraphs into a recent piece at Salon. Already, though, Marcotte was serving us this:

MARCOTTE (10/24/14): That this polarization is going on isn’t a myth. Previous Pew research shows the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” conservative has grown from 18% in 2004 to 27% in 2014. During that same period, the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” liberal stayed a little more consistent, growing from 33% to 34% in 10 years. (These statistics don’t measure what you call yourself, but what you rate as on a scale of beliefs about various issues.) While liberals became more liberal, conservatives both became more numerous and more rigidly conservative over time. What gives?

Enter right-wing media, which has a nifty trick of convincing audiences it’s the other guys who are the liars, all while actually being much less trustworthy in reality. From conservative screaming about the “media elite” to Fox News’s old slogan “Fair and Balanced,” conservative media is rife with the message that everyone is out to get you, conservative viewer, and only in the warm blanket of right-wing propaganda will you be safe.

People loved this at Salon. Marcotte was saying The Other Tribe contains the vile propagandists.

Still, there were those peculiar statistics from Pew. Do they seem to make sense?

Tell the truth! Is it your impression that 34 percent of the American people are mostly or consistently liberal? Is it your impression that there are substantially more liberals than conservatives out there at the present time?

Is it your impression that conservatism was on the rocks in 2004—that there were almost twice as many liberals as conservatives in the year when we re-elected Bush?

Those numbers seemed a bit unlikely to us—and we happen to know how bad Pew’s work often is. So we decided to check Marcotte’s work.

This is what we found:

First, Marcotte was possibly conning her readers a bit with her selection of that 2004 starting-point. In fact, Pew has been tabulating the number of liberals and conservatives at intervals since 1994.

These are the numbers they’ve deathlessly found. Click here, scroll down a tad:

Percentages of liberals and conservatives (Pew)
1994: Liberals 21 percent/conservatives 30 percent
1999: Liberals 31 percent/conservatives 20 percent
2004: Liberals 33 percent/conservatives 18 percent
2011: Liberals 31 percent/conservatives 26 percent
2014: Liberals 34 percent/conservatives 27 percent

Those numbers have jumped around a fair bit, especially after 1994, when conservatives were said to be ascendant. But according to Pew, we seem to be living in a plurality-liberal land.

On their face, do those numbers make sense? Do you believe that 30 percent of Americans were conservative in 1994, with the number dropping to 18 percent as of 2004?

That didn’t seem to make sense to us either—until we looked at the way Pew has gathered its numbers.

Gack! In all these surveys, Pew has questioned respondents about the same ten topics. In each case, respondents have been asked to choose between two statements.

One statement represents the “liberal” position; the other statement is “conservative.” These are the choices respondents have always been given for Question 1:

Choices offered for Question 1:
Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient.
Government often does a better job than people give it credit for.

In this case, the second choice is the “liberal” position. The first choice is “conservative.” To review the choices for all ten topics, click here.

In the beginning, this may have seemed like a good way to run a survey like this. But as it turned out, several of Pew’s questions may have been poorly chosen.

Why were there so many fewer conservatives as of 2004? Just a guess: In large part, it seems that respondents answered some of these questions based on their view of the sitting president, rather than based on matters of principal.

Consider Question 1, about wasteful government, with the two choices shown above. In 1994, 74 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners chose the (rather over the top) first position.

(Click here, scroll down to Growing Gaps between Republicans and Democrats.)

People, Bill Clinton was president! In 2004, with Bush in charge, that number had dropped to 46 percent among Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Pew interprets that to mean that we had fewer conservatives in 2004. We’d offer a different, fairly obvious interpretation—it simply means that Republicans thought the government was more frugal under Bush.

In 2014, with Obama in charge, that number was back at 75 percent. In short, that question doesn’t seem to be measuring conservative values. In many cases, it seems to be measuring what respondents think of the sitting president.

Routinely, Pew does bad analytical work. Routinely, true believers use Pew’s data—when their data advance true belief. It seems to us that that’s what was happening here.

Amanda Marcotte is full of fire. That said, she’s often a horrible analyst, assuming she’s actually trying.

This was the latest sorry example. The progressive world will never succeed with people like this in charge.

THE WAY WE ARE: The way we are is really quite sad!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014

Part 5—Good-bye, east end of Cambridge: How many undergraduate women get raped while students at MIT?

We have no idea. In part, that’s because we’ve perused MIT’s report on the subject, which is extremely murky. In part, it’s because we read the New York Times news report about this important topic.

Ideally, young people shouldn’t get assaulted on MIT’s campus, or anywhere else. Perhaps with that thought in mind, the MIT brass composed and conducted a voluntary survey about every conceivable aspect of students’ sexual lives.

Many students completed the survey; the majority of students did not. MIT then composed a bewildering report about the survey’s findings.

Can we talk? If MIT students composed such a survey, we will guess that the school’s professors would have raised two questions:

Possible questions from the professors:
How did these kids ever get in this school?
Who put these kids in my class?

The news report by the Times was no better. Richard Perez-Pena never cited the most straightforward statistic to emerge from the survey: five percent of undergraduate women who took the survey said they’ve been raped while at MIT.

Perez-Pena had a larger question in mind: Why won’t the youngsters admit that they’re being “sexually harassed” when they hear dirty jokes?

How many undergraduates get raped while students at MIT? There’s no way to tell from the survey.

That five percent figure seems troubling to us. But there’s no way to know what kinds of experiences these young women were listing as “rapes.” Nor is there any apparent sign that adult elites even care.

Beyond that, the nature of this survey likely means that the five percent figure is a bit of an understatement.

Many respondents to the survey were freshmen and sophomores. One can imagine that the percentage claiming rape must have been higher among women in their senior year. But since no one actually seems to care about any of this, MIT didn’t release such figures, and the New York Times didn’t ask.

In our view, the numbness of that Times report makes it a piece for the ages. Believe it or not, this is the sort of thing that has Perez-Pena tearing his hair:

PEREZ-PENA (10/28/14): There was a similar result on sexual harassment. Among undergraduate respondents, large majorities of men and women said they had heard sexist remarks and inappropriate comments about people’s bodies; more than one-third said someone had uttered crude sexual remarks to them directly; nearly as many had been subjected to people’s tales of sexual exploits; and a smaller number had received offensive digital messages. About one woman in six said someone had repeatedly asked her for a date, even after being refused.

But the number who described what had happened to them as sexual harassment was relatively small: 15 percent of undergraduate women, and 4 percent of men.

Five percent of undergraduate women say they’ve been raped while students at MIT?

At the Times, Perez-Pena skipped that statistic entirely. He’s upset because the youngsters won’t say they’ve been “sexually harassed” when exposed to “sexist remarks!”

The original survey, MIT’s report, and the news report in the Times form an unholy trifecta. Boyden Gray's daughter then came along, sweetly reciting for Time.

Here’s what we almost thought we saw when we perused these sad examples of our elite culture:

We almost thought we saw the pitiful practice in which we liberals try to embellish preferred statistics, thereby aping the methods of Fox. We’ll mention a gruesome example:

Everyone knows that women are not paid 77 cents on the dollar “for doing the same work as men.” Still, we modern liberals love that claim. We seem to be willing to dissemble and lie in order to sustain it.

Similarly here:

In the course of a multiply bungled survey, 11 percent of undergraduate women directly said they’ve been sexually assaulted or raped while students at MIT.

A serious person might be disturbed by a figure like that. At MIT, though, that number may not have been high enough. So the commissars imposed their own definitions, which were never quite explained.

Presto! We could now say that 17 percent of undergraduate women said they’ve been sexually assaulted! And as her students get raped and assaulted, the chancellor clucks about the way the kids won’t admit how often they’re being harassed.

How many MIT students get raped and/or assaulted? We don’t have the slightest idea. Nor does anyone seem engaged in an attempt to find out.

To appearances, we’re trying to generate pleasing statistics—the kind we can cluck and worry about at our cocktail parties.

Increasingly, this is the way our liberal elites pretend to do politics. We then wonder why those Iowa rubes won’t vote in the ways we demand.

Links to MIT documents: To peruse the survey, just click here.

To examine MIT's report, you can just click this.

Supplemental: Propaganda about propaganda!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2014

Marcotte sounds off at Salon: Two weeks ago, Amanda Marcotte sounded off but good at Salon. (Originally, her piece had appeared at AlterNet.)

Marcotte discussed a favorite topic of us on the pseudo-left. She was setting the record straight about the other tribe’s propaganda.

Everybody loves to hear that the other tribe is dishonest and vile! This is the way Marcotte began, with Salon’s headline included:

MARCOTTE (10/24/14): Why conservatives prefer propaganda to reality

Pew Research set out to find what’s behind what it considers the increasing political polarization of the United States; why the country is moving away from political moderation and becoming more and more divided between liberals and conservatives. Its first report on the phenomenon, which examines where people are hearing news and opinion in both regular and social media, shows that this is happening for very different reasons among people moving to the right than for people moving to the left.

Or that’s the charitable way to put it. The less charitable way is to say Pew discovered that conservatives are consuming a right-wing media full of lies and misinformation, whereas liberals are more interested in media that puts facts before ideology. It’s very much not a “both sides do it” situation. Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.

We liberals love this kind of talk, in which those in Our Own Flawless Tribe are good and honest—devoted to facts—while those in The Other Tribe are stuffed full of lies.

Make no mistake; given the way our discourse works, conservatives are routinely subjected to lots of misinformation. Increasingly, though, so are those who labor on our side.

As we read the Marcotte piece, we were struck by a peculiar fact. As it denounced the propaganda of The Right, it seemed to carry a propagandistic tone of its own.

By the time her piece was half-done, Marcotte was cherry-picking unflattering facts about people who watch Fox News. Truth to tell, we were already concerned about her piece after reading just four paragraphs.

It seemed like Marcotte might be truly believing. Does anything in this passage strike you as implausible?

MARCOTTE (continuing directly): That this polarization is going on isn’t a myth. Previous Pew research shows the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” conservative has grown from 18% in 2004 to 27% in 2014. During that same period, the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” liberal stayed a little more consistent, growing from 33% to 34% in 10 years. (These statistics don’t measure what you call yourself, but what you rate as on a scale of beliefs about various issues.) While liberals became more liberal, conservatives both became more numerous and more rigidly conservative over time. What gives?

Enter right-wing media, which has a nifty trick of convincing audiences it’s the other guys who are the liars, all while actually being much less trustworthy in reality. From conservative screaming about the “media elite” to Fox News’s old slogan “Fair and Balanced,” conservative media is rife with the message that everyone is out to get you, conservative viewer, and only in the warm blanket of right-wing propaganda will you be safe.

Without any question, “conservative media” is rife with bogus messages. Having said that, do those figures from that Pew survey seem to make sense to you?

True believers will truly believe whatever serves their interest. In this matter, Marcotte seemed to be truly believing some rather peculiar statistics.

Question: Is it your impression that 34 percent of the American public is mostly or consistently liberal? Is it your impression that liberals outnumbered conservatives by a margin of almost two to one just ten years ago?

Marcotte plowed forward with true belief; those figures seemed a bit strange to us. Beyond that, we’ve learned a sad fact down through the years:

On a purely intellectual basis, Pew’s analytical work is often horrible—just plain flat-out bad.

For those reasons, we decided to fact-check Marcotte’s work. For starters, how did Pew come up with those statistics—statistics which didn’t quite seem to make sense?

There is no question about it! In the modern context, conservatives are subjected to lots of propaganda. Increasingly, though, so are people over here, on our flawless liberal side.

Tomorrow, we’ll show you what we found when we reviewed Pew’s work. Links are provided in Marcotte’s piece for those who would jump ahead.

Supplemental: Who is Richard Perez-Pena?

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2014

Who is Eliza Gray: Who the Sam Hill is Richard Perez-Pena?

You’re asking a very good question! Before we answer, consider a second question:

Who the heck is Eliza Gray?

Eliza Gray graduated from Harvard in 2008. Her father is C. Boyden Gray (Harvard 1964), the former Bush Administration honcho.

Today, Eliza Gray writes for Time magazine. A recent piece bore this pregnant headline:

“The Troubling Statistic in MIT’s Sex Assault Survey”

Interesting! Which statistic from that survey did young Gray find so troubling? Was she troubled by the fact that five percent of undergraduate women said they’d been raped during their time on this prestigious campus?

Actually, no! Reciting like a trained bird, Gray gave her readers dictation:

GRAY (10/29/14): A new survey of student experiences with sexual assault at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an encouraging step for schools working to put an end to the shamefully widespread problem of campus rape.

That the prestigious school released the study publicly is helpful in erasing the stigma surrounding sexual assault. And the numbers show that even an institution far better known for Fields Medals than frat parties has an incidence of campus rape comparable to other colleges. Roughly 35% of MIT’s 11,000 graduates and undergraduates took the anonymous survey. Of the undergrads, about 17% of women and 5% of men reported experiencing sexual assault while at the Massachusetts school.

But a deeper look at the numbers points to a more troubling statistic. Even though 17% of female undergraduates reported an experience that fits the survey’s definition of sexual assault (“unwanted sexual behaviors...involving use of force, physical threat, or incapacitation”), only 11% of female undergraduates checked “yes” when asked directly if they had been “raped” or “sexually assaulted.” Despite a concerted effort by the Obama Administration, state officials and campus leaders, MIT students were uncertain about what qualified as sexual violence—even when reporting that they had experienced assault.

Instantly, Gray conflates “rape” and “assault.” That said, she isn’t mainly concerned by the fact that five percent of undergraduate women directly said that they’ve been raped while students at MIT.

A different statistic was “more troubling!” Some of the student don’t seem to agree with the institute’s “definition of sexual assault,” which Gray may have misstated!

It isn’t most troubling when students say they’re being raped and assaulted. More troubling is the fact that they don’t echo their elders’ rather shaky definitions of such crimes.

Gray’s piece at Time represents a perfect example of copying down whatever you’re told by elites and elders. To appearances, Mother and Popsy sent her to school so she could acquire dictation skills.

As for Perez-Pena, he took a different route to the New York Times. The leading authority on his life lays it out like this:

Richard Pérez-Peña (born 1963) has been a journalist with the New York Times since 1992. He has covered Albany, New Jersey, healthcare, the media, and is currently reporting on higher education. He was featured in the film Page One: Inside the New York Times.

A 2012 news story by Pérez-Peña on Yale University quarterback Patrick Witt was criticized by Witt and some journalists for unfairness and poor sourcing. The New York Times defended the accuracy of the story.

Pérez-Peña was born in Santiago, Cuba and raised in Southern California. He studied European History at Pomona College. In 1987, Pérez-Peña appeared on Jeopardy! and became a 5-time champion, later appearing in the show's first reunion invitational, Super Jeopardy! in 1990.

Two different routes to a very similar place.

Many undergraduate students say they’re being raped at MIT. “More troubling” is the fact that they don’t agree with their elders’ (extremely murky) definition of what “assault” now is!

We’ll suggest you read Gray’s full report. You’ll be looking at perfect stenography, at “manufactured consent.”

THE WAY WE ARE: Jacking up preferred statistics!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2014

Part 4—It’s all propaganda now: Let’s suppose you’re chancellor of a major university.

Let’s call your school MIT.

You construct a long, bewildering survey for your students—a survey about their sexual experiences on your campus. Your curiosity knows no bounds, so you even include this early question, along with six possible answers:

How often do you hear MIT students or see online posts from MIT students that say that a test or assignment "raped them?”
Never
Less than once a month
Once a month
2-3 times a month
Once a week
More than once a week

Yes, that question is written in English. At any rate, there’s nothing you don’t want to know!

At some point in time, your survey was taken by several thousand students. (You forgot to say when the survey was taken when you released your long, confusing report on your findings.) As you survey your voluminous data, these two findings emerge:

Two findings from the MIT survey
Many students don’t think they’ve been subjected to “sexual harassment” if they hear a sexist remark from a fellow student.
A substantial percentage of undergraduate women say they’ve been raped while students on your campus.

Remember, you’re chancellor at this school. Which finding will seem disturbing?

At this point, we’re forced to rely on an unreliable narrator. We refer to Richard Perez-Pena, the frequently hapless, long-time reporter for the New York Times.

Warning! You shouldn’t assume that Perez-Pena’s report about this survey should automatically be trusted. Still, to judge from his news report in last Tuesday’s New York Times, it was the first of those findings which rang alarm bells in the world of our modern elites.

Forget the fact that five percent of undergraduate women said they’ve been raped while at MIT—a figure which almost surely understates the size of the apparent problem.

(Many respondents were freshmen and sophomores. The survey may have been given at the start of the current academic year; freshmen would have been on campus for ten minutes at that point. Presumably, a larger percentage would emerge from undergraduate women at the end of their senior year.)

Forget the large number of undergraduate women who say they’ve been raped on your campus. If we go by Perez-Pena’s reporting, Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart was mainly concerned about the fact that the youngsters weren’t willing to say how often they’re being “assaulted.”

A bit later, Professor Foubert (Oklahoma State) voiced a similar concern:

PEREZ-PENA (10/28/14): Large numbers of undergraduates, male and female, also agreed with statements suggesting that blame for the assault did not always rest exclusively with the aggressor. Two-thirds agreed that “rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved”; one-third said it can happen “because men get carried away”; about one in five said it often happened because the victim was not clear enough about refusing; and a similar number said that a drunk victim was “at least somewhat responsible.”

Such views were less prevalent among graduate students, as was sexual assault itself.

Dr. Foubert said he considered many of those responses a form of “excusing the perpetrator and blaming the victim,” and was very concerned about it.

The professor is very concerned.

Again, let’s be clear. We have no way of knowing what Barnhart and Foubert actually said to the Times reporter.

But in Perez-Pena’s news report, no one voices any concern about the large number of young women who say they’ve been raped on this campus. True to the org which funds his life-style, Perez-Pena seemed to be upset about world-class piffle like this:

PEREZ-PENA: There was a similar result on sexual harassment. Among undergraduate respondents, large majorities of men and women said they had heard sexist remarks and inappropriate comments about people’s bodies; more than one-third said someone had uttered crude sexual remarks to them directly; nearly as many had been subjected to people’s tales of sexual exploits; and a smaller number had received offensive digital messages. About one woman in six said someone had repeatedly asked her for a date, even after being refused.

But the number who described what had happened to them as sexual harassment was relatively small: 15 percent of undergraduate women, and 4 percent of men.

Did a large number of undergraduate women say they’ve been raped on this campus? Yes they did—but Perez-Pena was really upset about manifest nonsense like that:

The children are hearing sexist remarks and they aren’t claiming “harassment!”

Perez-Pena’s peculiar news report should be preserved in a time capsule. We say that for two reasons.

First reason: Perez-Pena is deeply invested in manifest nonsense. He skips past widespread claims of a very serious crime. What rocks his socks is the fact that many youngsters won’t give voice to a silly script.

Here’s the second reason why this report should be preserved: Because it appears in the New York Times, no one noticed how absurd its values and reasoning were.

We’re past the point where anybody seems to think that the New York Times is supposed to make sense. That helps explain how such a peculiar report could pass right by without occasioning comment.

Might we tell you what we saw when we read that report? We saw a large indifference to the fact that many teenagers are alleging a very serious crime.

We also saw a large investment in a culture which has been seizing the liberal world—a culture which is devoted to jacking up favored statistics.

Is it all propaganda now? We think your question is very good.

Tomorrow, we’ll answer your question.

Tomorrow: A pair of inflated statistics

THE WAY WE ARE: Narrative all the way down!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2014

Part 3—Bumping statistics way up: Of the universe, Professor Russell once said, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

Today, the famous professor would surely be able to make out his error. Consider what happened when MIT conducted a survey among its students about harassment, rape and assault.

For yesterday’s post, click here.

First, the university’s scholars constructed a long, bewildering set of survey questions. At times, the survey reads like it was translated from the Norwegian by native speakers of Urdu.

At some point, the survey was taken by MIT students. Last week, MIT issued a report on its findings—a report which is extremely hard to interpret.

The New York Times then swung into action, praising MIT for the “clarity” of its work. So it tends to go inside our elite press.

The survey produced a bewildering pile of statistics. MIT didn’t explain when the survey was given.

How many undergraduates who responded were in their first or second years at the school? That didn’t get explained either.

Whatever! Jumbled though the report may be, one statistic did leap out, a statistic which seems fairly straightforward. According to Table 2.1, five percent of undergraduate women seem to have said that they’ve been raped while students at MIT.

Presumably, the statistic was larger among women in their senior years. But let’s stick with that five percent figure:

Given the seriousness of the crime which is being alleged, that strikes us as a very large number. Apparently, though, the number wasn’t large enough for the brass at MIT.

Here’s why we say that:

When we read the New York Times news report, we were struck by the extent to which Richard Perez-Pena emphasized a certain complaint:

According to several observers, MIT students weren’t willing to acknowledge how often they’d been raped and assaulted. In paragraph 5 of the Times report, the chancellor—she’s is in her mid-50s—issued a sad complaint about These Kids Today:

PEREZ-PENA (10/28/14): “Sure, the data tells us things that we maybe didn’t want to hear,” said Cynthia Barnhart, chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But she said one of the clearest—and most disturbing—conclusions she drew from the results was that “there is confusion among some of our students about what constitutes sexual assault,” indicating a need for more open discussion.

The children weren’t willing to say how often they’d been assaulted! Luckily, though, Chancellor Barnhart knows best.

So does Professor Foubert, an expert on these matters at a distant university. Before we review the lament he offered in the Times report, let’s review the part of the piece which highlights a “disturbing” problem concerning the students’ “confusion.”

In the passage shown below, Perez-Pena laments the way the MIT students weren’t willing to jack up the numbers. We’ll focus on the passages which concern claims of harassment:

PEREZ-PENA: M.I.T. asked about several forms of unwanted sexual contact, from touching to penetration, “involving use of force, physical threat or incapacitation,” that it said clearly constituted sexual assault—the kind that 17 percent of undergraduate women and 5 percent of undergraduate men said they had experienced. In addition, 12 percent of women and 6 percent of men said they had experienced the same kinds of unwanted sexual contact, but without force, threat or incapacity—some of which, depending on the circumstances, can also be sexual assault.

Yet when asked if they had been raped or sexually assaulted, only 11 percent of female and 2 percent of male undergraduates said yes.

There was a similar result on sexual harassment. Among undergraduate respondents, large majorities of men and women said they had heard sexist remarks and inappropriate comments about people’s bodies; more than one-third said someone had uttered crude sexual remarks to them directly; nearly as many had been subjected to people’s tales of sexual exploits; and a smaller number had received offensive digital messages. About one woman in six said someone had repeatedly asked her for a date, even after being refused.

But the number who described what had happened to them as sexual harassment was relatively small: 15 percent of undergraduate women, and 4 percent of men. Also, 14 percent of women said they had been stalked, and 8 percent said they had been in a controlling or abusive relationship.

Damn kids! They refuse to acknowledge the frequency with which they’re being raped and harassed. Or so we might think if we’re willing to swallow Perez-Pena’s apparent stenography.

We’ll suggest that you shouldn’t do that. For starters, look at the kinds of behavior Perez-Pena seems to list as sexual harassment.

According to Perez-Pena, large majorities of undergraduate students “said they had heard sexist remarks and inappropriate comments about people’s bodies.” And not only that: “More than one-third said someone had uttered crude sexual remarks to them directly.”

The world would be a better place if people weren’t exposed to sexist remarks, inappropriate comments or even “crude sexual remarks.” It would be better if youngsters weren’t “subjected to people’s tales of sexual exploits.”

Depending on the circumstances, such experiences can be annoying. But as he continues, Perez-Pena seems to scold the youngsters for failing to denounce such experiences as “sexual harassment.”

Question: Why would anyone describe those experiences that way? More specifically, why would intelligent college students describe those annoying experiences in the way Perez-Pena seems to want?

We don’t know how to answer that question. On their face, the experiences Perez-Pena lists don’t seem like obvious instances of “harassment” to us. Why in the world is a Times reporter complaining that MIT students weren’t willing to list them as such?

Do you mind if we cut to the chase? A surprising fact seems to appear all through the Times report:

Perez-Pena and other elites seem less concerned about the fact that substantial numbers of young women at MIT say they’re being raped during their time on campus.

They seem more “disturbed” by the fact that the youngsters won’t overstate the hideousness of their experiences. Later, Perez-Pena clucked about the students again, and Professor Foubert sounded off:

PEREZ-PENA: Large numbers of undergraduates, male and female, also agreed with statements suggesting that blame for the assault did not always rest exclusively with the aggressor. Two-thirds agreed that “rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved”; one-third said it can happen “because men get carried away”; about one in five said it often happened because the victim was not clear enough about refusing; and a similar number said that a drunk victim was “at least somewhat responsible.”

Such views were less prevalent among graduate students, as was sexual assault itself.

Dr. Foubert said he considered many of those responses a form of “excusing the perpetrator and blaming the victim,” and was very concerned about it.

Let’s be fair. We’re forced to rely on Perez-Pena’s account of what the chancellor and the professor said about these matters.

It’s possible that Barnhart and Foubert were sane and balanced in their overall statements. But as we read Perez-Pena’s report, no one seems disturbed by the fact that many young women at MIT say they’re being raped while students at MIT.

Instead, these people say they’re disturbed and deeply concerned because the students aren’t willing to say they are being “harassed” when they hear a sexist remark.

In our view, Perez-Pena’s report is straight outta Bedlam. Because it appeared in the New York Times, very few people noticed.

In the world of that New York Times report, nobody cares about the fact that many young women say they’re being raped at MIT. Instead, our elites were concerned because those same young women failed to say that dumb remarks constitute harassment!

Professor Russell, please take note:

Lunacy lies at the heart of the Times, where it’s actually narrative all the way down. Narrative, and the desire to jack up preferred statistics.

Tomorrow: Amanda Marcotte and that recent Pew survey

Supplemental: Maddow continues her cry for help!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Nonsense every night now: Rachel Maddow continued her cry for help on last night’s eponymous program.

Rather plainly, Maddow has decided to use “our friends at Fox News” as a nightly punching bag. Leaving aside the rest of last evening’s nonsense, let’s examine one part of her opening segment.

Maddow had the same peculiar look on her face she has had for weeks now. In the part of her opening segment shown below, she explained what will happen if the GOP takes control of the Senate.

Note the wild accusations aimed at Fox based on one statement by Chris Wallace—a single statement she had “edited” to hype its exciting effect:

MADDOW (11/3/14): President Obama has said that, after the election, he will take executive action without Congress on the issue of immigration. If you want to know what else is going to happen, right, if history is right and the Republicans have a great day tomorrow, if you want to know what else that is going to mean in your life and in our political life as a nation, our friends at Fox News are already so excited about the prospect of President Obama acting on the issue of immigration that they have started planning out loud for what they are going to do in response.

What they are going to do in Congress if Republicans get control of both Houses of Congress starting tomorrow and then President Obama acts without them. They are already talking about what they are going to do in response.

I don’t want to give it away, but its initials are “impeachment.” They are already talking about impeachment:

WALLACE (videotape): The White House has basically said he’s going to, right after the election, the mid-terms, he is going to issue an executive action. And there’s talk, there was this big story in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, that he might take action that would delay deportation—in effect, give a permanent path, not to citizenship but legalization, to up to 4 million people.

I promise you, if he does that, if he by executive action goes against Congress and legalizes 4 million people who are in this country illegally, there is going to be a firestorm on Capitol Hill. You’re going to see calls for impeachment. (End of videotape)

MADDOW: Impeachment. They’re already calling for it. They’re already planning on it.

TONY PERKINS, FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL (audiotape): If the Republicans do capture the Senate, there’s no more excuses about impeachment. See, what we’ve heard so far is why we can’t do that because we would never get it through the Senate—the House could impeach him but the Senate would never convict. They would never—it would just be a waste of time.

Well, if they have control of the Senate, it won’t be. So we’ll see how they deal with this post-election if they happen to win the control of the Senate. (End of audiotape)

MADDOW: That’s Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council, a social conservative group.

Over at World Net Daily, your source for “Where’s the birth certificate” t-shirts and bumper stickers, it’s our old friend at World Net Daily, Tom Tancredo, banging the drum for impeachment there as well. Quote, "Given the likely new political circumstances post-November 4th, impeachment is no longer impractical.”

So on Fox News, on right-wing talk radio and the conservative blog world, they’ve already got it in motion as best as they can. Tomorrow, they take the Senate. The day after that, they start working toward impeachment.

To watch the full segment, click this.

Maddow presented one lone person from Fox—Chris Wallace, speaking on the mid-day program, Outnumbered. On the basis of that statement, in which Wallace predicts what others will do, Maddow said that “our friends at Fox News are already so excited about the prospect of President Obama acting on the issue of immigration that they have started planning out loud for what they are going to do in response.”

On Fox News, “they’ve already got it in motion as best as they can,” the increasingly crazy TV star said. “Tomorrow, they take the Senate. The day after that, they start working toward impeachment.”

Maddow based her cri de coeur on a single mid-day statement by Wallace. Needless to say, she had “edited” his statement to give his words extra impact:

FULLER TEXT OF WHAT WALLACE SAID (11/3/14): I promise you, if he does that, if he by executive action goes against Congress and legalizes 4 million people who are in this country illegally, there is going to be a firestorm on Capitol Hill. You’re going to see calls for impeachment—I don’t mean that necessarily they’ll do it, but there will be calls for it. You’re going to see lawsuits. There’s going to be howling that he has overstepped his executive authority. It’s going to be a big deal.

To watch Wallace’s segment, click here.

Does anyone doubt that Wallace’s predictions are accurate? Of course, since Rachel wanted us to think that that “our friends at Fox” are spoiling for impeachment, she didn’t want you to see the highlighted passage, where Wallace says he only means that there will be calls for impeachment.

As the segment continued, Wallace listened to four Republican script-readers praising the GOP’s glorious efforts. Eventually, he broke in with his next statement:

WALLACE: But I think we’re letting Republicans off the hook here. And one of the reasons that they’re not going to pay a price for this is because, in the key battleground states [this year], Hispanics are not a very large voting bloc. They just aren’t in a lot of these states. The only one where they are is in Colorado.

You get to a presidential election and this is the fastest growing voter bloc in America. If you don’t somehow get Hispanics on your side, if you end up losing by 44 points, as Romney did to Obama in 2012, you might not get a Republican president.

Those are all obvious statements too. Does it sound like Wallace—sorry, like “our friends at Fox”—have actually “started planning out loud” for their glorious drive toward impeachment?

Maddow has never had a discernible clue about domestic politics. That said, she’s an excellent salesperson, one who is especially good at the project of selling herself.

In recent weeks, an illness has invaded her TV show. The show is now a loud train wreck, night after night after night.

To our eye, the host of this program doesn’t seem especially well. It’s a shame that no one is in charge at The One True Liberal Channel.

Alas! The IQ of the liberal world falls farther down into the well.

Just for the record: Even if Republicans take the Senate, Perkins’ statement doesn’t make sense. It takes 67 votes to convict a president on an impeachment charge.

Needless to say, Maddow didn’t explain that basic fact. Blunderbuss and hype to the side, she almost never does.

Supplemental: It’s another one of those pitiful days!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2014

The inquiring minds at Salon: The so-called democratization of media has taught us many lessons.

Elite gatekeepers are no longer there to censor and sift the things we can hear. Each separate tribe now gets to have its own say.

This morning, the corporate “liberal” tribe was saying the things shown below at Salon. These reports were all sitting there when we clicked to a site which started out as an intelligent liberal org:

The right’s Lena Dunham nonsense just won’t stop
Imputing predatory notions and alleging "abuse" is really an attempt to silence and victimize courageous women
EMILY GOULD
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 06:22 PM EST

What Dunham’s defenders are missing: Her story about her sister could have been a teaching opportunity
The National Review piece is vitriolic and offensive. But it should still be a starting point for more conversation
CAROLYN EDGAR
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 04:09 PM EST

“People narrating their own experiences”: Lena Dunham allegations overlook her sister’s perspective
Sex abuse and white privilege are real. But that doesn't change the facts or importance of Grace Dunham's position
KATIE MCDONOUGH
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 02:54 PM EST

Lena Dunham reportedly threatens lawsuit over sexual abuse allegations
The conservative website Truth Revolt issued a fiery, misguided response to the star's cease and desist letter
JENNY KUTNER
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 03:59 PM EST

Lena Dunham’s sister responds to “sexual abuse” allegations
"I'm committed to people ... determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful"
JOANNA ROTHKOPF
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 12:46 PM EST

The right’s “abuse” claim against Lena Dunham is deeply misguided
Her childhood anecdote may be sketchy, but the way it's been twisted is disgusting
MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 10:15 AM EST

The right’s Lena Dunham nonsense won’t stop? Pseudo-libs, let’s heal ourselves!

This latest deeply delicious flap concerns an anecdote in Dunham’s book which pretty much couldn’t have happened in the way it’s described. To her credit, Edgar was able to spot this apparent problem in her piece at Salon.

Elsewhere in the culture, the ability to spot an apparent absurdity has pretty much gone by the board.

We don’t mean to suggest that Salon was pursuing no other hard-hitting topics this morning. We were also invited to click on these thoughtful “think pieces:”

Emma Watson dedicates prestigious acting award to her late hamster
The film star gave a different kind of invigorating speech in honor of her deceased pet, Millie
JENNY KUTNER
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 10:54 AM EST

Ann Patchett sends New York Times correction, clarifies she is not married to her dog
"While my love for my dog is deep, he married a dog named Maggie at Parnassus Books last summer," the author wrote
JENNY KUTNER
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 01:31 PM EST

Strip clubs! G-strings! Sex work! The GOP tries to sell a new “war on women”
Forget the assaults on reproductive rights. The GOP is attacking Democrats for accepting "dirty strip club cash"
TRACY CLARK-FLORY
MONDAY, NOV 3, 2014 07:01 PM EST

Who decided to create this new Salon? Has the approach worked out on a financial basis?

For someone with investigative skills, those questions beg to be answered. In the meantime, we all continue to learn a lesson from the democratization process:

For the first time in human history, we’re finally getting a chance to see how remarkably dumb we all are!

Just a guess:

The plutocrats are counting on this as they tighten their grip on the world.

THE WAY WE ARE: A ball of confusion!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Part 2—“Clarity,” as seen by the Times: It’s a bit like what they used to say about New England weather:

If you don’t like the weather, wait a while.

So it was with Richard Perez-Pena’s New York Times news report. The report appeared atop the front page of last Tuesday’s National section.

For part 1 in this series, click here.

In his opening paragraph, Perez-Pena delivered an unpleasant statistic: “among undergraduates who replied to a survey, at least 17 percent of women [at MIT] said they had been sexually assaulted” during their time on campus.

If you didn’t like that statistic, you just had to wait a while. In paragraph 11, Perez-Pena delivered a different number: “when asked if they had been raped or sexually assaulted, only 11 percent of female...undergraduates said yes.”

Whatever! If you read Perez-Pena’s report, you can tease a possible explanation for the dueling statistics, each of which seems quite troubling to us. That said, the confusion starts with MIT itself, which composed a bewildering, less-than-coherent survey, then produced a report on its findings which defies cogent analysis.

How confusing is MIT’s report—a report produced by one of the world’s leading educational institutions? The report is very confusing. In Table 2.3, to cite one example, two consecutive lines of data seem to report contradictory findings:

Table 2.3
Total number of respondents experiencing sexual harassment, rape, sexual assault, and other unwanted sexual behaviors while at MIT:

[...]

Been sexually assaulted or raped, combined from Table 2.1: 11 percent
Sexual Assault: Experience of unwanted sexual behaviors while at MIT, involving use of force, physical threat, or incapacitation from Table 2.2: 17 percent

Those may be the dueling statistics with which Perez-Pena was wrestling in his report. They appear in consecutive lines of data in MIT’s brilliantly confusing Table 2.3.

Can we settle this apparent contradiction from looking at Tables 2.1 and 2.2? We’d have to say we cannot. In Table 2.2, we seem to be told that 17 percent of undergraduate women said they had experienced one or more of a set of “unwanted sexual behaviors while at MIT, involving use of force, physical threat, or incapacitation.”

That too is a troubling statistic. But in MIT’s introduction to Table 2.2, we seem to be told something different:

We seem to be told that something like half the complaining respondents said those factors were involved in the unwanted sexual acts in question. Simply put, confusion is MIT’s trademark all through its bewildering work.

Whatever the state of affairs on campus, MIT’s work is quite unclear all through its survey and its report. But so what? Inside the bubble of the elite, Perez-Pena quickly praised the institution for the unusual “clarity” of its work!

MIT’s work is a ball of confusion. The Times found it brilliantly clear.

Given the current state of elite culture, are we able to conduct coherent discussions of serious issues at all? Again and again, we’d say the answer seems to be no. With that in mind, let’s get clear on one more aspect of MIT’s puzzling work.

To his credit, Perez-Pena warns his readers, two separate times, about a limitation built into the MIT survey. We highlight the dual warnings:

PEREZ-PENA (10/28/14): M.I.T. asked all of its nearly 11,000 graduate and undergraduate students to take the survey, and about 35 percent did so. Dr. Barnhart cautioned that it was not possible to say how different the results would have been if everyone had taken part.

John D. Foubert, a professor of higher education at Oklahoma State University who studies campus sexual assault, praised the M.I.T. study, noting that “very few schools have publicly released any data.” But he expressed concern that different surveys have not asked the same questions, or have worded them differently, making comparisons harder. He added that a survey of a random sampling of students, with a high response rate, might carry greater weight than M.I.T.’s self-selected sample.

Only 35 percent of MIT students responded to the survey. (Among undergraduate women, the response rate was 47 percent.)

And not only that—this sample was “self-selected.” It wasn’t a random sample.

Students who have been assaulted might be more likely to respond to a survey of this type, as compared to other students who haven’t been assaulted. Barnhart and Foubert offered sensible words of warning, which Perez-Pena didn’t clearly explain.

That said, at least one other aspect of this survey should have been explained in the Times. It suggests that the numbers generated by this survey may be misleading low.

Duh. In line with the general state of confusion surrounding the MIT report, the institution doesn’t seem to have said when it conducted its survey. It may have been conducted last spring, at the end of the academic year. It may have been conducted this fall, at the start of the new school year.

Presumably, that would make a substantial difference. First, though, understand this:

This wasn’t a survey of MIT seniors as they approached graduation. Presumably, those numbers for undergraduate women also involve responses from quite a few women in their freshman and sophomore years.

If the survey was conducted this fall, the first-year women had been on campus for only a couple of weeks. No one had been on campus for anything like four years.

Presumably, this aspect of the survey would tend to drive numbers way down. Presumably, the percentage of students reporting misconduct would be substantially higher if you surveyed undergraduate women at the end of their senior years.

In the MIT report, there is no sign that Chancellor Barnhart, or anyone else, gave this matter any thought:

MIT didn’t say when its survey was conducted. Invariably, high-end reporters like Perez-Pena simply fudged this point in their “news reports.”

MIT also didn’t report how many freshmen and sophomores are included in the overall numbers for “undergraduate women.” It didn’t occur to Perez-Pena that he should clarify so basic a point about the survey he was praising.

Is anyone here even trying to play this game? MIT’s survey and report concerns a very important subject. But the institution’s work is an unholy mess. And at the New York Times, the reaction was obvious:

At the Times, MIT was quickly praised for the “clarity” of its performance!

When our highest elites function this way, we are learning something basic about the state of our culture. We’re learning something that has been fairly obvious for a fairly long time.

We’re learning that our highest elites don’t have the focus, or the smarts, to conduct real discussions of serious topics. Are our nation’s public discussions really “storyline” all the way down?

Come back tomorrow to see what we find as our discussion continues.

Tomorrow: Professor Foubert knows best