Dana Blankenhorn

Journalism's Biggest Mistake

As a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism, I'm here to tell you that the biggest mistake you'll hear at that school will likely come on the first day you're there. (That's Joe Medill at right, a real 19th century man.)

Someone will call it a profession.

Journalism is not a profession. Journalism is a trade. Just like cooking is a trade, and plumbing, and tree surgery. That is, journalism is a market process and no journalist -- no matter what they think or what some asshat "professor" tells them -- stands above or apart from the market.

I was fortunate that, in my time at Medill, we had a few teachers who understood this and emphasized it. Ben Baldwin chided anyone who dared call him "professor" or (worse) "doctor" -- noting he only had a master's. Dick Schwarzlose got it. Elizabeth Yamashita introduced her business journalism class by giving us the "good news" that "you're all going to get jobs."

The canard that journalism is a profession came from, among others, Mr. Medill. Along with Mr. Pulizer, whose name is on the Columbia school, and Mr. Annenberg, whose name adorns USC's school. None of these men were journalists. They were businessmen. And their claim that journalism is, or ever was, a profession was designed merely to keep the workers in their places, which was (and is) under the thumb of the boss.

Notice. Those who work for established publishers are deemed members of the profession. Those who don't aren't, unless they're freelancing for the same established publishers.

The Russert Error

You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, especially when they have just departed.

But Tim Russert defined a horrible era in journalism, the era of my life, an era I was given scant chance to participate in, perhaps the worst era in the profession's history.

To Russert journalists were referees, access was all, and he was the star. This is the opposite of how I was taught.  Journalists are witnesses, sources are to be used, and we're all anonymous. Russert's role was a burlesque of the character Burt Lancaster played in 1957's The Sweet Smell of Success. Process was everything, inside baseball took the place of policy, the the public's interest in the crimes of his time was lost.

The "hard questions" Russert asked were mainly "gotcha" questions, false premises piled on phony sanctimony, which he got from his guests' political opponents. He never asked the really hard questions, never challenged the run-up to the Iraq War, never really challenged the war. As a result neither did anyone else.

It was because of Russert's Rule:

My personal policy is always off the record when talking to government officials unless specified.

Fighting Over Scraps

Despite ongoing efforts on the TeeVee to make this seem like a close election, the plain fact is even Robert Mugabe would have a tough time pulling this election out for ol' John McCain.

Smart Republicans know this, so most are either trying to deflect their own blame for the coming debacle or position themselves to feast on the scraps.

It's fun to watch.

• Ron Paul is planning a right-wing version of 1968's Chicago games outside the Republican convention in Minneapolis. Maybe Gov. Pawlenty can fire some tear gas at 'em.
• Bob Barr has already left the reservation, and the Libertarians (who once were a big part of any Republican coalition) are following him.
• Richard Viguerie (right), the grand old man of the conservative coalition (or the grand old p%&@ if you prefer), has practically given up and is dumping on his old tactics in order to diss McCain.
• Even former Bush donors are keeping their wallets closed.

Put it this way. Five months out from the election, in the middle of Georgia, the center of the Republican coalition, I still see more W'04 bumper stickers than McCain ones. I'm seeing more Obama stuff every day.

Self Delusion

Self delusion is a common human trait. Only by convincing ourselves that change is possible does change become possible.

Journalists are supposed to keep a check on this. We're taught in school, and at work, to play straight with all others, so we can play straight with our readers.

Yet we are human. We lie to ourselves all the time. And when we do it's up to others to call us on it.

One hallmark of this era, within journalism, has been a self delusion among its elite practitioners that they are somehow above the market, and above the fray, that they are impartial arbiters of what is happening around them.

This is a misreading of our role. We're not umpires. We are witnesses.

But thinking ourselves umpires gives us a feeling of power. It boosts our egos. This is a very dangerous way to live and work, but on TeeVee it's often encouraged, because TeeVee is a "hot" medium, excitement a form of acting, so puffing yourself up and preening is what makes you acceptable to the camera.

I got a nasty taste of this on MSNBC recently, during Keith Olbermann's Countdown. He was chatting with Jonathan Alter (left) about the constant right-wing refrain that "the press is biased." Both laughed, called it "working the refs," and agreed that it never works.

Bullshit.

(It's at around 5:10 in the video which follows)

The 1896 Game

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 24 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Thanks in part to best-sellers like Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, and in part to their own self-referential nature, TeeVee blowhards are  falling all over one another to compare this year with 1968, the year of the last American crisis.

I started playing around with this two years ago as The 1966 Game, and while it's fun it's really very bad historical analysis. It does nothing but look backward. It teaches us nothing about what's coming.

While it's true we're in a crisis period, the nature of today's crisis is quite different from that of 40 years ago. The 1960s were a social crisis, in which the previous era's foreign policy assumptions were validated and became the new political divide.

The current crisis is economic. Those old assumptions have fallen apart. They led us into Iraq. We the People no longer believe them. All this constant harping on 1968 does is justify those assumptions anew, trying to make John McCain the New Nixon, Barack Obama the late Bobby Kennedy.

It's stupid. It's brain dead.

Every generational crisis in American history has been different. Every emerging Thesis has been different. But there is one such crisis to which valid analogies can be made.

1896.

The 1896 Crisis was the only one in which the majority party going in was the majority party coming out (maybe that will get the bloviators interested). But more important it was about economic organization and America's place in the world.

The 1890s created America as a single national market, with national brands, an industrial organization, and an imperialistic sense of itself. At the heart of solving the crisis was the Spanish-American War of 1898, which not only gave us Teddy Roosevelt (the crisis' central figure) but also gave us our first true foreign possessions. We even fought a colonial war, in the Philippines, to keep that empire alive, and created Panama out of Columbia to extend that empire.

The current crisis is in some ways a mirror image of the 1890s.  In others it is its polar opposite. The trends, thanks to technology (which also drove the 1890s) are leading us in a new direction:

• The Internet is the new railroad.
• Knowledge is the new resource.
• Sustainability is the new industry.
• Consensus is the new imperative.

Let's take a look at these trends, one at a time, and see what they portend:

Ending the Duopoly

One interesting fact, told on CNBC this morning, is that while most people are very pessimistic about the current economy most think things will get better in the next year or so.

They will. That's because the present trends are pretty easy to reverse, and once reversed should stay that way. Simply placing a priority on the War Against Oil should enable U.S. demand to fall fairly dramatically. Insulation, grid improvements, and smaller cars driven somewhat less will force oil prices down in the fairly near term, if we are serious about it.

The same is true for the other big economic problem we have, the one no one really talks about. The telecom duopoly. Throughout this decade, just as the Bush Junta has given oil producers a stranglehold over our economy, so he has allowed telecom monopolists to be given the same stranglehold. This was done deliberately, to gain more control over the American people. With "one throat to choke" it's easy to get your demands for data satisfied, assuming you pay the bills. So a policy of fewer Internet providers was in the authoritarians' best interest.

It has been good for the telecoms'. As I've noted here many times, the price of "broadband" has remained stable for a decade, and its definition has not stretched one bit. This despite the improvements in equipment and technology of Moore's Law -- we now have efficient fiber switches, and fibers which can handle hundreds of streams of data at once.

The new way the monopolists seek to screw us is with bandwidth "caps," which have come into effect on all the major networks -- Comcast, Cox, and AT&T, in amazingly short order. This is indeed designed, as Om Malik notes, to force you into keeping your cable TV. While the nominal cost of cable broadband is $50/month it's only available with a viewing package in most areas, and that can come to $80/month or more, even if you're not using pay per view or a service like HBO. The phone company does the same thing. Their broadband also costs $50/month, but they nick you for another $50 (or more) for the phone line, and then add a long distance plan.

The result is that Americans are now paying about $120-150/month for 1.5 Mbps downloads which can only get video clips, while Europeans and Asians pay a fraction of that for lines which can do far more. Innovation is being throttled. It's hard to telecommute on such slow lines, especially if you're in a business where the movement of large files is commonplace. So winning the war against the telecom duopoly is a component in winning the War Against Oil.

Now, here's how we win it.

Attitude

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We all have a little voice in our head saying "no, you can't." (Picture from A Year in Pictures of Working.)

Sometimes we call it our mothers. This is unfair to mothers. It is, in fact, the voice of caution, even of reason. Caution is not always a bad thing.

But in our modern world caution needs to be put in its place. Sometimes it needs to be shut down entirely. Sometimes it needs to be transformed, through adrenaline, into that which gets us through.

I have been making a study of attitude most of my life, partly because I find it so hard to adjust my own. I get nervous in front of people, always have. I can't shut down the voice. I admire those who can.

The earliest example I can offer is from the summer of 1975. I took a summer "job" selling knives, door to door. They were nice knives, I still have some. But I had no aptitude for it. I could not shut down the voices, and give myself the proper attitude.

There was one young person, of about my age, who could. Her name then was (yes it was) Candy Cotton. I remember her as short, wide-hipped, with long blond hair. And she never took no for an answer.

She was a great salesperson. She sold knives like no one's business. I like to think she learned to sell other things, and had a happy life, marrying someone with a different last name. But in retrospect maybe that name was her great ally. Forcing people to get past it, and pointing them where she wanted them to go, may have been the necessary life-skill which made her the salesperson she was.

Since then I've met many salespeople, and while most never knew it I admired them all. It's a tough life, sales. You are constantly facing the wall of "no," and you have to find a way to break it down. First in yourself, then in others.

McCain-Bloomberg?

It's hard not to feel bad for ol' John McCain, the way you feel bad for the Valkyries at the end of Gotterdammerung, or Ike Clanton at the end of Tombstone.

He's struggled all his life to get to this spot and finds himself a no-hoper, a joke, a punchline. Not Rocky, but one of those one-or-two-round palookas the champ thought Rocky was before the fight happened.

It's not all his fault. Had McCain been his party's nominee in 2000 he might have won. But he also would have been the prisoner of all those dark forces which swirled around Bush, and no more likely to have avoided his mistakes. Besides, he asked for it. He was taking a birthday cake from Bushie when New Orleans was drowning, and he was smiling.

So I should be kicking myself for suggesting this, but there may be a way for ol' John McCain to make this thing closer than it has any right to be.

It's the War, Stupid

Let's get past the speeches, the media, all the rest of it.

The election of 2008 is, for all intents, over.

It's the war, stupid. It's the stupid war.

That is what this election is about. It's what this election has always been about.

John McCain supports the war. He will lose.

Hillary Clinton supported the war. That's why she lost.

Barack Obama opposed this war from the start. That's why he will be the next President of the United States.

It's as simple as that.

Despite all the talk that we've forgotten the war, that we've forgiven the war, that we feel differently about the war because it's not on TV every night, the war is still uppermost in our minds. It's the nightmare we can't close our eyes against. And it continues.

We care about our men and women dieing in this war. We care about the innocent loss of life in this war.

We hate this war. This damnable, despicable war. We hate it. We hate everything about it. We hate, deeply hate, the people who lied us into it. We hate, we are disgusted by,  the people who believed the lies -- the politicians and the media both.

We hate what this war has cost us. The lives. The wounded. The trillions of dollars. The economic loss. The $4/gallon gas. Mostly, we hatethe loss of America as the special place, the home of the good guys. The war killed that, too.

We hate looking in the mirror every morning and seeing a war criminal. And that is what the majority of us see in that mirror. That's the reality of it. The blood won't wash off -- not now, not ever.

What we see in Barack Obama is the hope of bringing some of that feeling back. Some of it. We're not so naive as to think that just because we elect a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan with a smooth speaking style as President, that the work is done.

That begins the work.

Rice Science Tuesday: It's Alive!

A lot has been written in the last week about the Rice Mech E's success in using nanoparticles to trap oil.

A team under Prof. Pulickel Ajayan hung gold nanowire on carbon nanotubes. These structures, which the team called nanobatons, then spontaneously surrounded oil droplets.

But the reporters ignored a key part of Dr. Ajayan's quote, the goal of his research, to create "self-assembling, functional nanomaterials."

Translation: It's Alive!

Well, not really. These are structures consisting almost entirely of carbon and other metals. There's no hydrogen, no oxygen inside these structures. But the structures can spontaneously self assemble and function, which is how the original amino acids, deep in the sea, spawned the first primitive life forms billions of years ago.

There is no intelligence in these structures. They are not really "alive." Individual amino acids aren't "alive" either. But when amino acids spontaneously self assemble and function to reproduce their own structures, they are taking the first steps down the road of life.

What we're really talking about here, after you get rid of the scary imagery of science fiction, is something Rice scientists have been working on for decades, namely tearing down the walls separating organic and inorganic chemistry. Organic compounds combine into larger structures for reasons, scientific reasons, in response to stimulus from the environment. By creating nano-structures on an atom-by-atom which can mimic self assembly, and then then providing a specific stimulus, you get the result you seek.

Now here's how the wall really gets breached.