In Which We Learn How Came To Be President Trump

This article could prove prophetic if the baby-fingered orange noise machine does win.  Also: why oh why can't we have better journalists.

Journalistic Neutrality

Further my last post/comment is this Greenwald article.  I think that there is another side of the coin which is journalistic objectivity, which is also probably not historically representative (especially if you go back a century or two) but which is important and is fairly rare to find today.

Objectivity and Neutrality sound like similar things--and I think the big media outlets operate as though they are the same--but they are not and they have dramatically different effects on how journalism [could] work.  Neutrality is everything Greenwald describes: it is failing to say an obviously bad thing is bad or that an obviously good thing is good. Objectivity requires mediation that understands facts and counters lies.

I think Vox generally tries to be objective, and sometimes but not always neutral.  CNN certainly pushes neutrality often at the expense of objectivity.  MSNBC is fairly show dependent: Maddow and Hayes are fairly objective (though with a definite point of view), Matthews is neutral and not really objective (and most likely thinks of himself as such), O'Donnell and Scarborough are really neither but again they take on airs as though they are.  Fox is neither neutral nor objective.  

Most of the bigger left leaning journalistic entities are more objective than not (fairly easy since most facts align well with more liberal positions).

In the case of journalist as mediator (whether between people as in a debate or just when relaying a story managing to convey relevant facts and appropriate conclusions) objectivity is obviously quite important.  For other types of journalism, namely opinion pieces, it seems like it would be less so but that isn't really the case.  Even opinion pieces should be supported by facts, and claims of relevance that are both true and appropriate.  It's why I have been bitching a bit about some of Krugman's recent pieces, and that's why pretty much nothing on Fred Haitt's crayon scribble page is worth the effort of reading.

One Little Problem With That

Reading through this Vox piece on the Internet's effect on politics is interesting, but I'm struck by a particular note where Timothy discusses the downsides. He states:

...Scurrilous rumors spread more easily. It's harder to hold candidates responsible for their misstatements.
...
On the right, Republican candidates have been proposing tax plans that are several times as large as the George W. Bush tax cuts. Maybe you think big tax cuts are a good idea, but candidates like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have also been pledging to boost military spending and balance the budget. There's no way they can deliver on all these promises simultaneously.

This is actually kind of a bad argument to make since it is the media's utter failure in halting the spread of "scurrilous rumors", particularly with respect to the Clintons and to never hold any Republican plan to light, and e.g. allowing things like climate change to be "debated" between an actual scientist and a political consultant, that has led people away from those outlets and toward more obviously biased but in some cases more accurate reporting venues (particularly on the left).

A Post That Could Only Have Been Written by a Harvard Grad

While I understand and follow everything Dylan says in this piece I'm pretty sure that it takes a pretty pretentious ass to come to his conclusion.  The data out there says that with the exception of Harvard and to a much lesser extent Yale and a handful of top top tier universities, where you go to college (provided you graduate) makes approximately zero difference in your earning potential, and there is no fucking way that all those people who take advantage of the scholarship would have ended up at Harvard instead.

Maybe the people who took the scholarship were less enthused about college than those who did not.  Maybe those who took the scholarship were more likely to be in the bottom part of that top 25% and had fewer scholarship options outside of the Massachusetts one, and so didn't actually fare worse than if they hadn't taken it.  Maybe they are happier as a result (I know student loan debt pisses me off).

It's just a really bad bit of writing.  There are plenty of real reasons that Romney would be a horrible president, you don't need to try and twist crap like this around to use against him.