Press bias: having the conversation

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, back to Jay Rosen. And for those who think the whole thing to be a tempest in a teapot, I respectfully disagree; because it really comes down to some larger issues about the role bias might play in the press, whether that subject is even worth discussing, and, if so, what might be done about the phenomenon.

In Rosen’s new thread on the subject–the opening of which, as I’ve said before, was a good idea–he provides some links to previous posts of his. I have not read them all, but I have just read the two essays on press bias.

In Rosen’s original Austin Bay/Rollback post, he most definitely should have linked to these two essays of his if he didn’t want the “bias” argument to dominate the comments, especially since he should have foreseen that his Austin Bay post would attract people who are not ordinarily readers of Pressthink and hadn’t read his previous discourses on the subject of press bias. If somehow he failed to see this coming at the beginning, he certainly should have understood what was going on by the time of his first comment. The professor was trying to give a seminar with required reading first, and he didn’t supply the reading assignments and then got angry at the class.

The tone of his remarks was both impenetrable and profoundly condescending. Neither furthers the aim of having a productive conversation, nor does cutting off comments do so–it ends it.

So I’d request that he abandon the use of the word “dumb” in this context as being needlessly inflammatory and insulting hyperbole. It’s not dumb to have what Rosen calls “the bias discourse,” although in some ways he is very correct in the point I believe he is actually trying to make, which is that it is often unproductive or even counterproductive. But there’s nothing dumb about those who are annoyed at what they see as evidence of press bias in a press that so often claims to be objective, and who want to talk about this–even if such arguments (like most in politics, or perhaps even in life!) don’t tend to change many hearts and minds, or to lead to solutions, at least right away.

I have always been upfront about my position on the press–at least, I’ve tried to be. But I’ll attempt to clarify it here and expand on it, and in the process make a stab at responding to some of the questions Rosen’s poses in his two “bias” articles.

Keeping in mind that “you can’t always get what you want”:

I want an objective press, but since I recognize it’s an impossible dream, humans being what they are, I accept that the press will always be biased.

If that be so, then I want that bias to be represented by reporters from both sides (using here, for the sake of simplicity, the somewhat misleading dichotomy of left/right) who are roughly equal in number; but I recognize that this will never happen without some sort of crazy unenforceable and undesirable quota system for reporters.

If that be so, then I want journalists and the papers they write for to drop their obviously false claim of objectivity and to be upfront about their general political affiliations, much as many bloggers are.

And I also want journalists on all sides to labor mightily to achieve far more accuracy than many of them display at the moment in their reporting–specifically, perhaps most especially, that they strive to quote people correctly and to fact-check more rigorously.

I also want members of the press to respond more vigorously when they are found to be in error, printing retractions and corrections that are prominently featured and highlighted.

I don’t think I tend to use the word “bias” much anyway when critiquing the press–although I certainly haven’t gone back and reread my pieces on the subject to make sure, so I could be incorrect on that. My impression is that I tend to use the word “distortions” to describe those things I see in the press that I dislike. I believe that the vast majority of what is usually called press “bias” constitutes such distortions, and that they are an unconscious result of the political viewpoint of the journalist skewing his/her selection of the facts, a process that is inevitable and can occur on both sides. I think, however, that the more scrupulously a journalist is aware of this phenomenon and tries to be as evenhanded as possible (knowing of course that complete evenhandedness is impossible), the better. I think that the journalists who succeed the best in this endeavor (IMHO, of course) are the ones I most admire. This success would include the ability to admit when one is wrong, and not to defensively cling to the original distortions and try to justify them.

I think most people who are angry at what they call press bias (and I believe it is still the best shorthand term around for the phenomenon; I would submit “press distortion” to replace it, but somehow I don’t think it will catch on) are especially angry at the uses the press makes of techniques such as truncated quotes that misrepresent the actual point of the speaker, mistakes of fact, subtly shaded shaping of opinion in the choice of “unbiased” [sic] words such as “militant” instead of “terrorist” when the latter would seem more appropriate in many cases, neglecting to provide background and context, the overuse of the anonymous source (see this for my take on solutions to this problem), and opinions stated as fact without backup or documentation (that is, editorializing presented as news). I don’t like either side using these techniques, and their use is a big part of whatever “bias” does exist in the press, and it’s the thing that makes most people who criticize the press hopping mad.

I believe that most journalists believe themselves to be honest brokers who are striving for objectivity. But most of them need to be made far more aware of the ways in which the above (and other) tools creep into their work and cause the charges of bias to stick. Bias is very rarely conscious in a journalist (although on occasion it is). That’s what often makes the protestations of most journalists that they are not biased, and their anger at the charge, take on so much strength. Journalists need to look longer and harder at what is going on here–even if they think they’ve already looked at it long and hard–and try to correct it as best they can, knowing that the corrections will always be flawed and inadequate. But at least improvement is possible, if the will is there and the effort is made.

So I don’t believe–to try to answer Jay’s question couched in his own words–that “wanting from journalists what is also impossible for journalists” (i.e. objectivity) is unfair, although it may indeed seem to be a confused and oxymoronic request when stated that way. I would rephrase the request, however, in the following way: wanting what is impossible doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for the closest approximation to it, as long as we realize the ideal is not achievable in absolute terms. We humans always strive for things that are impossible: truth, justice, fair play, perfect love, etc. But the impossibility of their achievement has nothing to do with the fact that these goals are always worth pursuing, and that in fact the effort towards those goals may help us come closer and closer to them. That they recede forever from our grasp is actually true and worthy of stating and acknowledging, but it is largely irrelevant to the fact that they must be pursued nevertheless, and that every millimeter closer we can get to them is still an achievement.

(ADDENDUM: A question Rosen posed in the comments section of the new thread goes as follows:

If you had the opportunity to advise Jim Lehrer just before he moderated and asked questions at a make or break Presidential debate, in addition to telling him to be careful not to take sides, would you say something like, “and remember this, Jim, you are not an actor in this event.” And if you did say something like that, would it be true?

My answer? I would say to Lehrer, “Remember, Jim, you are an actor in this event whether you like it or not and whether you intend it or not. But the performance for which you should be striving is to be as evenhanded as possible in your manner and your questions, in order to try to prevent, to the best of your ability, your actions tilting the results in either direction.”]

Update on the update: Rosen redux

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that Jay Rosen has opened up shop on comments again, which is, IMHO, a good thing.

I am going to be very busy (with non-computer things) until fairly late tonight, and won’t have a chance till then to take a good look and do some thinking about what he’s actually saying. Maybe I’ll respond later, if I have more to say on the subject. But I just wanted to direct the attention of those who are still interested in this subject to the new thread at Jay Rosen’s Pressthink.

Grieving parents, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

Dymphna at Gates of Vienna has posted a very personal and utterly heartrending essay on the loss of her daughter. It’s couched as a letter to Cindy Sheehan from one child-bereaved mother to another, and demonstrates great compassion. I urge you to read it as a testament to Dymphna’s much-loved daughter Shelagh, and as a description of the profound grief that flows from such a terrible loss.

I’ve recently written on grieving parents in wartime, but of course parents can lose their children in other ways. Every time a child dies and a parent survives it seems as though the natural order of the world has been upended. As Dymphna writes to Ms. Sheehan:

But the condition you and I share is unnamed because since time immemorial parents have dreaded this loss. It is the worst. There is nothing else that can be done to us. A motherless child is a pitiful creature and carries a life-long emptiness he or she tries to fill with other grown-ups. A childless mother is a crazy person and nothing can fill the hole, not if she had a baby a year for the rest of her life.

“Time heals all wounds.” Facile words, and sometimes incorrect. I quote Kathe Kollwitz once again, the artist featured in my previous post on the subject: There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it.

Time may not heal, but something happen over time to most parents to allow them to live with their grief. I don’t know what name to give this thing; perhaps it’s wisdom. It comes slowly, if at all, and I don’t think it ever feels like recompense for the loss.

Kollwitz’s art expressed some of her grief–expressed it, not extinguished it–and in that process I believe there was some small bit of healing. Likewise, bereaved poets turn to their art, as Cindy at Chicagoboyz discusses in this post concerning one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost, and his wonderful poem “Home Burial.”

The poem deals with a couple’s reaction to the death of a child (the post contains the full text of the poem). It is no accident that Frost himself suffered the loss of a child, an event from which it is said that his marriage never recovered. The poem describes the same sort of phenomenon that Dymphna touches on, the contrasting forms grieving sometimes takes between men and women, and the anger and rift that difference can engender. (You can also discern a subtle contrast between the mother and father in Kollwitz’s statues of the bereaved parents, featured in my first “Grieving” post; the father is more stoic and rigidly controlled, although he still grieves.)

In “Home Burial,” the man takes refuge in action, the woman in feelings. This causes estrangement:

God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,
A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.’
‘You can’t because you don’t know how.
If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand–how could you?–his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.

There’s another famous poem by a bereaved parent, one I discovered as a teenaged high school student when I was assigned to write a paper on it. I remember that experience as being one of the first times–perhaps, in fact, the very first time–I truly understood that famous people of long ago had not just been statues or icons or entries in the encyclopedia, but had actually once been living, breathing people, just like us.

Until I read this particular poem, written on the occasion of the death of his first son, I’d thought of Ben Johnson as a fusty old guy who had written some fusty old play that I’d been forced reluctantly to read. This poem made Ben Jonson seem almost alive himself. Despite the poem’s archaic language, I instantly recognized the voice of a real person, an anguished cri de coeur:

Ben Jonson – On My First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

Oh, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age!

Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

In this poem, Jonson struggles mightily to take the high road and accept his son’s death with grace and equanimity. He struggles, but he fails–and in this futility of effort lies his tremendous humanity. “Oh, could I lose all father now!” cries Jonson, overwhelmed by the almost unbearable weight of the burden he carries and the hopelessness of ever shedding it. All he can do is to say of his son’s grave, “Here doth lie/Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.” The laurels of fame, everything Ben the Elder had written and had given him pride, were as nothing compared to the son and namesake who now lay buried in the earth, along with Jonson’s joy.

But Jonson still had his next-best piece of poetry, the poem itself, and the transforming task of writing it. As did Frost. Kollwitz had her art. And in that written and plastic art we all are reached–and some are comforted, if only briefly.

Others turn to different efforts. John Walsh dedicated the rest of his life to finding criminals. MADD founder Candy Lightner fought to reduce drunk driving. And Cindy Sheehan wants President Bush to pay.

What do most people think about and feel in such circumstances? Memories, love, faith, despair, guilt, anger. Sometimes they turn to drink, sometimes to divorce, sometimes to both. Sometimes they try therapy; there are therapists who specialize in dealing with grief and loss, and groups for the bereaved, including special ones for grieving parents. Sometimes faith gets them through; sometimes they lose their faith. But it’s a rough journey for all.

I will close with another poem, a sonnet by a lesser-known contemporary poet named William John Watkins. The poem appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of the poetry journal Hellas, and is dedicated to his son Wade. It’s about the weariness of such loss, and the carrying on despite that weariness.

We Used to Take Long Walks, My Son and I
for Wade 1963-1993

Footsore on this road of sour surprises
whose sole consistency is going down,
this road of dips and sharp but lower rises
that lead like stairs back up toward the crown

I did not know for summit when we crested,
as far behind as now it is above
the strength I had when I was young and rested
and thought all mountains flattened out by love

that now I know makes mountains only higher
and fills the road with rock-bruised barefoot hurt
and sun that sets the shuffled dust on fire
and hides the sharp shard buried in the dirt.

I’d lay me down and join the roadside dead,
but that I see you walking on ahead.

Spambots: the next generation

The New Neo Posted on by

I just spent several minutes of my life that I’ll never get back again cleaning up after the spambots. They come in clusters and apparently are only able to hit the top thread of the day (in a few minutes, therefore, I may have to tidy up this post).

There were six of them this time, arriving in the span of approximately one hour.

Why mention them–other than to vent my spleen? Well, I noticed that they seem to be evolving even as we speak, becoming ever more creative, chatty, and conversational.

I subtitled my previous post on the topic “the invasion of the comments snatchers,” after the movie in which the aliens looked so much like humans that it was difficult for mere humans to tell the difference. At the time I was joking, but now I wonder if this isn’t the way spambots are going–trying to sound so much like a real live human that they will end up fooling us stupid bloggers into thinking that’s what they actually are.

Here, for example, are portions of the text of two of the spambot comments I just deleted. I’m eliminating the links, of course, because I don’t want to do their nefarious work for them. As you will see, they are now making political comments and other observations about the world (it appears, by the way, that even spambots aren’t too keen on CBS):

Black Rock Discovers Blogging
You have to hand it to those little troopers at CBS News. After a year filled with what we’ll delicately call, uh, crap, they’re doing their best to make a precious little bounce back towards respectibility.

Great input, you have a great blog here! I’m definitely going to bookmark you! [Link follows]

This one is less political, but it has a rather pleasant personality, don’t you think?:

10 Years That Changed The World
A decade ago, Netscape went public, blasting the Web into everyday life. Now, Wired talks to the inside players – from Marc Andreessen to Shawn Fanning to Steve Jobs – about 10 years of boom, bust, and sock …

It’s nice to read blogs and learn about other people. I’m just discovering all this – guess I should bookmark your blog, eh? I have a rose gardening site. You wouldn’t guess that by the title, would you? LOL – lots of rose gardening related things. Come and check it out if you get time 🙂

Notice the clever “and learn about other people” [italics mine]. Wants us to think it’s “people.” Well, spambot, you didn’t fool me–yet.

Update on Rosen’s rollback: be careful what you wish for

The New Neo Posted on by

[Note: the following is an update to this post from yesterday.]

Reader Rick Ballard has kindly let me know that Jay Rosen has pulled the plug and closed comments on the Bay/Rollback thread. Rosen’s reasons for doing so remain somewhat murky to me. But there is no doubt that he had an unusually intense reaction to the discussion there–a discussion that I have to say seemed rather mild and decorous to me compared to some I’ve seen in the blogosphere.

Although I am somewhat at a loss to know exactly what is going on with Mr. Rosen, it is clear that he is embarrassed. Very very embarrassed.

He tells us so himself, in the final comment he lodged before closing the thread down:

I’m embarrassed that this thread appeared at my weblog. I’m embarrassed that something I wrote and edited was the occasion for it. I embarrassed that the letters “edu” appear in the Web address at the top of this page, since most of this is the opposite of education. I’m embarrassed for having entertained, even for a second, the notion that Austin Bay, a Bush supporter and war veteran, might get a hearing for some of his warnings from those who agree with him on most things.

And I’ve had enough of anonymous tough guys with their victim’s mentality raging at their own abstractions…

Those who wish to continue can head over to Austin’s thread, where the story is pretty much the same. But four days of this pathetic spectacle is enough for me. Thread closed. My advice: Go home to your wives and children, and breathe some truth.

The entire thread plus its comments section is so long that I hesitate to ask you to go over to Rosen’s blog and read it, but without doing so it’s hard to get the full flavor of the discussion that so angered Mr. Rosen. But fortunately blogger Neuro-Con has done us all the service of summarizing it extremely well in this post. Neuro-Con’s analysis of the back-and-forth exchange is very much in accord with my own, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I gratefully direct you to his post.

The entire situation becomes increasingly puzzling once one learns more about Mr. Rosen. On the face of it one might think his reaction is that of an elitist ivory-tower academic, resistant to hearing from readers, and interested only in controlling the discussion. His behavior on the thread in question certainly points in that direction.

But that has hardly been Rosen’s profile in the past. In fact, for more than a decade, Rosen has been a vocal champion of “people-first, bottom-up ‘public journalism’.”

And that’s not all. Just two short months ago Rosen won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for “outstanding defense of free expression” (see here).

And then there’s this October 2003 interview with Christopher Lydon. Here is Rosen speaking:

The terms of authority are changing in American journalism…Blogs are undoing the system for generating authority and therefore credibility of news providers…And the one-to-many broadcasting model of communications–where I have the news and I send it out to everybody out there who’s just waiting to get it–doesn’t describe the world anymore. And so people who have a better description of the world are picking up the tools of journalism and doing it. It’s small. Its significance is not clear. But it’s a potentially transforming development…I like [it] when things get shaken up, and when people don’t know what journalism is and they have to rediscover it.

Is this the same Jay Rosen who shut down the comments section with the stern and vaguely archaic (not to mention sexist–which is actually the least of its problems) “Go home to your wives and children, and breathe some truth”? (By the way, the expression had such an odd tone that I Googled it, thinking Rosen was quoting some famous saying of which I wasn’t aware. But I couldn’t find a source. Does the phrase ring a bell with anyone?)

Here’s another conversation in which the Jay of old was a participant. He was actually the interviewer in this one, speaking about a year ago with Dan Gillmor, a syndicated technology columnist who does most of the talking. Note the extreme relevance of the following passage, and Rosen’s responses:

Gillmor: The first thing we’d need to do is listen, pay attention to what is being said. To really get out of the lecture mode that we’ve been in and to recognize that something new is going on that will benefit not just our journalism–which of course we want to do–but benefit the people who are reading or listening to or viewing our journalism. Those are the people who we say we want to serve. So, the conversation part of it–the listening part, the responding part–is not just for journalists. It’s for all of us, it’s for everybody. And it comes back to what I’ve made a kind of a cliche in my own world, which is that my readers know more than I do.

Rosen: I want to ask about that cliche, because I don’t think it’s a cliche. I think it’s a major insight. First of all, tell me what happened to make you realize “My readers know more than I do.” And why didn’t it just freak you out?

Gillmor: Well, it did freak me out at first. But what happened was, I went to Silicon Valley in 1994 to write about technology. And I wrote about it in a place where most of the people I was writing about were already on email. And invariably they knew collectively much more than I did. You know, you write about tech in Silicon Valley, by definition your readers know more than you do. And I saw that happening, and I thought, “Hmm, this is really different.” And then I thought about it and realized that it wasn’t different at all, that it had always been true. That whatever the subject I was writing about, the people who cared enough about it to read it knew more than I did–collectively. It was only now, however, that there was a quick-response mechanism –this feedback loop established through email at first and then later through other tools, that made it possible for them to let me know, in a hurry. And I can assure you that people in the Valley are never shy about letting you know when they think you’re wrong or when you’re missing something.

Rosen: So, it’s not just, “My readers know more than I do.” It’s, “My readers know more than I do and I can tap that because they will tell me.”

Gillmor: Exactly. The ability to find out things that you don’t already know and then to incorporate them into what you do in the future–it’s a great advantage for any journalist. I think all journalists on any beat need to understand that this is an opportunity. It’s not remotely a threat. And journalists have skills that the people writing to us may or may not have. And why don’t we, in the best sense of the expression, all take mutual advantage of this situation to do a better job?

Rosen: Well, let’s cut a little deeper into that. Because even though what you say is logical, and good advice, I can think of lots of reasons why “My readers know more than I do” might be resisted by journalists. For one thing, the basic transaction in mainstream journalism is understood to be–I’m the journalist. I know things because I’ve done my reporting. I’ve inquired, I’ve asked questions, and I’ve hunted down documents. And you don’t know. You weren’t there. You’re not a reporter. You don’t have the time. You’re off living your life. And so the whole idea of informing the public, informing the readers, assumes that the news organization knows and its customers–as it were–don’t.

And secondly, the authority of the journalist–the way it has evolved in the United States–is very much tied up with the journalist knowing things that others don’t. Having access that others don’t. Witnessing things that others can’t–a press conference, etc. And it’s almost like in the deep grammar of American journalism, the assumption is that knowledge moves from the news organization to a public that lacks it. So, it’s not surprising to me that “My readers know more than I do” is hard to grasp.

So strangely enough, in this interview of about a year ago, when Rosen described so well the thought process of journalists who try to exercise authority over their readers–a sort of intellectual snobbery on their part–he also ended up describing the tenor of his own response to the comments in that recent thread. His insight was both eerie and prescient–applied to himself. The very thing he noted in so many journalists seems to have worked its irresistible siren call on him.

So this is my question for Jay Rosen: have you forgotten this interview? If so, could you perhaps read it again, and review the idea of the new journalism as a conversation, a conversation that you cannot control by the force of your authority?

My guess is that Rosen is an idealist who truly does believe (or thinks he believes) in extending the principles of democracy to the institution of the press–what he calls “public journalism.” Ideally, that is; in his head. I’m not sure, though, that he has the stomach or the heart for the results–the sometimes messy and unwieldy reality of a truly public forum such as blog comments, in which the press is often accused of bias.

If Rosen wants a conversation, he certainly got one on his blog. It may be a demonstration of the old saying: be careful what you wish for.

[UPDATE: Dean disagrees.

Here’s a copy of my response to Dean, which I posted as a comment there:

I certainly agree that any blogger has the right to cut off comments for any reason, any time, on his/her blog. You have that right, I have that right, and Jay Rosen has that right, which he exercised.

However, to those who haven’t plowed through the comments section in question, I’ll say that that particular thread didn’t seem to feature a high volume of nasty attacks on Mr. Rosen himself. Nor was it even a particularly rabid group of comments in general, especially considering its great length. Comments threads sometimes degenerate into mindless name-calling, but this one had quite a bit of substance–and, in the main, I think people were trying to be relatively polite (especially for the blogosphere) and to discuss the issues. That’s why Rosen’s behavior seemed so puzzling to me.

What’s the significance of it all, and why bother talking about it? Is Rosen “just a guy?” Well, of course he is. But he is also a guy who is a champion of the idea that journalists need to engage in a conversation with readers, of “people-first, bottom-up ‘public journalism’ “. When in that thread he seemed to cut off such “conversation” in an especially testy and condescending manner, and seemed angry that people were accusing the press of bias, his behavior was arguably both hypocritical and a microcosm of the larger issue of whether the press is guilty of arrogance and one-sidedness (the subject matter of many of the comments). So, although certainly not of earth-shattering importance, his act took on a somewhat larger significance than the simple and rather unremarkable fact that Jay Rosen had closed down comments on a particular thread.]

Rolling back with Rosen and Bay

The New Neo Posted on by

[Note: I’ve posted an update to this article here.]

Jay Rosen and Austin Bay have recently posted an interesting exchange of ideas about Bush and the press. You can find it here on Rosen’s blog, and here on Austin Bay’s blog.

It began with a question Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and a press critic and reviewer, posed to Bay: whether the Bush administration is essentially stonewalling the press (Rosen calls the process “rollback”) by giving it as little information and cooperation as possible; and furthermore, if so, whether this policy is wise or necessary.

Austin Bay answers in his usual insightful, straightforward, and thorough manner, and then Rosen responds to Bay.

I’m not going to enter into a discussion of the issues myself, since they’ve been well-aired by both Bay and Rosen, and in the voluminous comments on both blogs. Instead, I want to discuss Rosen’s reaction to the discussion that ensued in the comments section of his own blog.

Many of the commenters there were about as fed up with the MSM as any you’ll find anywhere, the consensus being that whatever “rollback” has occurred on Bush’s part was a justifiable reaction to press bias and distortion. Here is Rosen’s response:

This is depressing. Austin and I had hoped that perhaps we’d move the dialogue a tiny bit with this.

I’ll let it go for a day or so, and see if anything changes. If not, PressThink will go on full vacation mode, and comments will shut down. Cheers, everyone.

Understand that the comments section on the thread had not degenerated into the sort of overwhelmingly vicious nastiness that sometimes occurs on so many blogs. Nor was it filled with bad language or racial insults or spambots any of the usual reasons bloggers might have for deleting comments; not at all. In fact, in general, the tone was unusually refined–at least, as blog comments sections go–rather than lowdown and dirty. Yes, some of the comments may have overstated the case (on either side), and the comments were certainly polarized. But that’s hardly remarkable in a comments section; in fact, it is to be expected. On the other hand, many of the commenters made some excellent points. And yes, many accused the press of bias, but this would hardly seem to be off-topic in the discussion at hand, whether or not Rosen disagrees with the accusation.

I’m not exactly inexperienced in this arena; after all, I moderate a comments section myself that features a certain amount of lively argument, and plenty of commenters with whom I disagree. Rosen’s response on his blog made me wonder what might move me to close down comments on a thread. Suffice to say it would have to be something a great deal worse than what Jay was experiencing (and please, commenters, don’t take that as a challenge!).

It’s Rosen’s blog, so he of course is allowed to do whatever he wants with his comments section, including closing it down, either in a single thread or completely (so far, by the way, he has allowed the comments to remain open).

From later remarks Rosen made on the same thread, it appears that he is upset with the comments to the post in question because he thinks the claims and accusations of press bias are too extreme. But even if that were true, would the proper remedy be to shut comments off? Wouldn’t it be to refute them himself–or to let other commenters refute them–with facts, argument, and logic?

I found Rosen’s threat to close down comments disturbing, especially in someone who is dedicated–as I believe he would say he is–to the free and open exchange of ideas. I’ve read Rosen with interest every now and then, and I must say I’ve never seen this particular side of him before. He’s always seemed relatively evenhanded to me–although he is upfront about his own liberal orientation–and he is certainly not above criticizing the press himself (remember, his bio bills him as a “press critic”). So something about this thread seems to have pressed his buttons–“big time,” as Dick Cheney would say.

I hope I’m not being too harsh in stating that Rosen’s reaction reminded me of some of my grade school teachers who would open a topic up for discussion and then, if the responses weren’t to their liking for whatever reason, would purse their lips and tap their feet in exasperation, waiting for the right answer–the one that agreed with their own point of view.

What is most strange about this reaction of Rosen’s is that his post contains a critique of the Bush administration for supposedly shutting off the flow of information to the press in retaliation for what it perceives as press bias against it. But in the very same thread Rosen threatens to close his own comments section for engaging in free speech that doesn’t quite suit him, apparently because it doesn’t go in the direction in which he wants it to go. There’s a certain fearful symmetry there.

I didn’t know Mick was a fan of mine

The New Neo Posted on by

The nearly geriatric Rolling Stones have a new song out called “Sweet Neo Con.”

“It is not really aimed at anyone,” Jagger said on the entertainment-news show’s Wednesday edition. “It’s not aimed, personally aimed, at President Bush. It wouldn’t be called ’Sweet Neo Con’ if it was.”

Not aimed at anyone? Right, Mick; I’ll never tell.

For tomorrow morning

The New Neo Posted on by

I took the day off from heavy posting, and expect to return tomorrow.

But I thought I’d offer the following passage from one of my favorite authors, something to think about for tomorrow morning. For those of you who love snooze alarms and Milan Kundera as much as I do, here’s an excerpt from his book Immortality (Chapter 2):

I’m in bed, happily dozing. With the first stirrings of wakefulness, around six in the morning, I reach for the small transistor radio next to my pillow and press the button. An early-morning news program comes on, but I am hardly able to make out the individual words, and once again I fall asleep, so that the announcer’s sentences merge into my dreams. It is the most beautiful part of sleep, the most delightful moment of the day: thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep which in itself is enough to keep us from regretting our birth.

And here, from my archives, is the way to rescue yourself if you find that you are overindulging in the blissful pleasure of the snooze alarm.

Egyptian psychiatrist: on suicide bombers

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr Sanity calls attention to a program that aired in July of 2005 on Al-Arabiya TV, featuring the wife and young children of a Palestinian suicide bomber named Salah Ghandour. The following text is taken from the MEMRI translation of the interview. Here is an excerpt:

Reporter: “Hizbullah filmed Salah’s operation and final message, and the entire program was aired on Al-Manar TV, which belongs to Hizbullah.”

Salah Ghandour’s son: “This is the operation that daddy carried out. This is the convoy that came from here, from Palestine. This is his operation…”

Salah Ghandour’s daughter: “This is the place of the operation in which he was gone.”

Salah Ghandour’s son: “This is the car daddy blew up.”

Maha Ghandour: “Of course I miss him and remember his words. Sometimes it saddens me, but I love to watch him.”

When the widow says, “I love to watch him,” she is apparently referring to the film of his matyrdom “operation,” which the children seem to have watched, as well.

As Dr Sanity writes, “Do you imagine that these children will grow up to be psychologically healthy and productive individuals in the new Palestinian state?” And a commenter on the thread asks Dr. Sanity, “As a mental health professional, what do you make of this woman’s attitude?” Dr. Sanity’s answer can be found here.

Unfortunately, such attitudes as those expressed by Salah Ghandour’s family seem far from unusual among people in that part of the world; the fact that Palestinian culture seems to revel in and glorify death to an unusual extent has been remarked upon many times. Although it doesn’t cut much ice with the PC “it’s racist to judge any culture, with the exceptions of the US and Israel” crowd, the best evidence is that Palestinian society has some markedly unhealthy traits in the psychological sense–and, in addition, any already-existent emotional problems of Palestinians are eagerly exploited by those whose business it is to enlist new bodies for suicide matyrdom. One thing feeds into the other, and vice-versa.

One especially shocking aspect of this “cycle of violence” (and this time it really is a cycle of violence) is the cooperation of some Arab mental health professionals themselves in promoting the near-worship of suicide bombers by the society as a whole. MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, does an invaluable service by offering translations of Arabic texts of newspaper articles and television programs, giving us a window on a dark and inverted world, one in which famous psychiatrists act as shills for those who choose to blow themselves apart in the act of doing the same to innocent women and children.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with this MEMRI article, which received quite a bit of blogosphere publicity when it first came out. But, in light of Dr. Sanity’s post, I thought I’d point it out again.

Here is what passes for psychological health, according to Dr. ‘Adel Sadeq, whose credentials as a psychiatrist are impeccable–he is chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at ‘Ein Shams University in Cairo, and a recipient of the 1990 Egyptian State Prize. During an April 2002 interview on Iqraa, a Saudi-Egyptian satellite television channel, Dr. Sadeq said the following:

When the [suicide bomber] dies a martyr’s death, he attains the height of bliss. As a professional psychiatrist, I say that the height of bliss comes with the end of the countdown: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. And then, you press the button to blow yourself up. When the martyr reaches ‘one,’ and then ‘boom,’ he explodes, and senses himself flying, because he knows for certain that he is not dead. It is a transition to another, more beautiful world, because he knows very well that within seconds he will see the light of the Creator…

This war will not end, and anyone who deludes himself that there will be peace must understand that Israel did not come to this region to love the Arabs or to normalize relations with them. Anyone who thinks that peace will come, either now or in the future, has limited historical vision. Either we will exist or we will not exist. Either the Israelis or the Palestinians – there is no third option…

There are no Israeli civilians. They are all plunderers. History teaches this. Remove the Apache [helicopter] from the equation, leave them one-on-one with the Palestinian people with the only weapon [for both sides] being dynamite. Then you will see all the Israelis leave, because among them there is not even one man willing to don a belt of dynamite…

The goal of all of us is to liberate Palestine from the Israeli aggressors. To use words that some people no longer like to use today: “We will throw Israel into the sea.” This phrase, by the way, is the truth. Either they will throw us into the sea, or we will throw them into the sea. There is no middle ground. Coexistence is total nonsense…

The real means of dealing with Israel directly is those who blow themselves up. According to what I see in the battle arena, there is no [other means] except for the pure, noble Palestinian bodies. This is the only Arab weapon there is, and anyone who says otherwise is a conspirator…

Remember, this man is chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists Association and head of the Department of Psychiatry at a major Cairo university. He is not on the fringes of Egyptian society nor of his profession; he is at the center of it.

Now, is it any wonder that Salah Ghandour’s wife loves to watch films of her husband’s suicide “operation?”

Light, heavy; heavy, light

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote two other posts today that are of what you might call the “light” variety–not about anything deeply emotional, or about politics or any earthshattering world events. Until yesterday I’d been doing “heavy” post after heavy post, and I realized I need to vary things a bit, both for my sake and perhaps for yours.

For those of you who prefer heavy, though, don’t worry–more will be coming, soon.

And remember a while back I said I was working on the next post in the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series? Well, I lied. No, actually, I didn’t lie–I fully meant to work on it, and in fact I have been working on it somewhat– in my head. But it’s going to be delayed a bit more.

Part of the reason is that I’m still very heavily involved in dealing with my mother’s illness. For those of you who are following that event, she is doing considerably better: her hand is about 85% back to normal, in my estimation, which is wonderful. Her leg has a great deal further to go, but she can move it quite a bit now, and the physical therapists are hopeful that some day she will walk with a walker or even perhaps just a cane. She finds that very hard to believe. But her spirits are better, and at times she even seems like her old self.

I’ve graduated to not visiting her every single day, although I still do go most days. She will probably be in the rehab facility for at least a month more. At some point I plan to write about that experience, too, which will be partly heavy and partly light.

Even if the shoe fits, I don’t think I’ll wear it

The New Neo Posted on by

On beautiful days–and we’ve had an awful lot of them lately–I exercise by doing some fast walking at a local park that features a lighthouse, cliffs, and spectacular ocean views. All around me I can see people relaxing and having fun, or at least trying to–playing frisbee, pushing their kids on swings, flying kites, walking dogs (or being walked by their dogs).

Sometimes I take my radio headset, but sometimes I go without and watch the scenery and the people. If I get there around dinnertime, which I often do, there are invariably some picnickers who are using the grills near the wooden tables and benches, and the aromas of barbecuing meat reach out to tantalize me as I walk by.

Yesterday I was passing one of the playing fields and noticed a young Asian couple throwing a frisbee and speaking to each other in a language I couldn’t place. The woman was the one who caught my eye first because she was nearest to me and, as I passed, she flipped the frisbee towards the man with an unusually smooth and practiced motion that it made it seem as though she’d been doing this virtually all her life. And perhaps she had.

He was a good frisbee player, but she was better. Very very petite, and dressed in denim shorts and a tank top. I watched for a moment as I drew near, thinking well, she can throw awfully well, but how’s her catching? and the answer came right away: excellent. Very deft indeed. And that’s when I noticed what she had on her feet.

What did she have on her feet? Something that looked pretty much like this (and thanks, Blogger, for making photos so much easier to insert now):

I could barely believe my eyes. She was running in them. She looked swift and agile. I don’t think I saw her leap, but she didn’t need to; she anticipated exactly where that frisbee was going and was there to meet it.

I don’t think I could have walked in those shoes for more than a few minutes, even at her age. How did she keep them on her feet, how did she keep from tripping and breaking her ankle? And, more importantly and mysteriously, why hadn’t she taken them off to play frisbee??

Astounding. It reminded me of that old saying about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only she did it backwards and in high heels. But I can understand why Rogers had to wear high heels to dance in stupendously glamorous evening gowns. And at least her high heels had backs.