Month: June 2012

The Trouble With TV News

Pareene pummels CNN:

According to the sort of people for whom CNN’s ratings woes reflect a moral failing of the American people as opposed to a series of boneheaded decisions by CNN executives, CNN is posting its worst ratings in 20 years because people only want to watch biased news that they agree with, and they no longer care about Original Reporting and Unbiased Fact-Based Journalism. In reality, CNN is failing because CNN sucks. It doesn’t fill its daylight hours with hard-hitting reporting from far-flung locales, it fills it with Wolf Blitzer sputtering softballs at politicians followed by shouting partisans (from both sides!) having idiotic arguments. For hours. 

Felix Salmon piles on:

TV news is ultimately much more an arm of the entertainment industry than it is of the news industry. Its star anchors get paid millions of dollars because they’re popular on TV, not because of their reporting skills; and while the occasional news magazine program will sometimes break news, newspapers and websites have always been the undisputed leaders on that front.

Buzzfeed’s Secret?

Farhad Manjoo claims to have revealed it:

How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret? The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell, deliberately—their posts are hard to trace back to the original source material.

Ezra Klein defends Buzzfeed.

Might Republicans Repeal Obamacare?

Sarah Binder considers the roadblocks:

[T]o do real damage to the future of health care reform, Republicans need to hold the House, and win the White House and (presumably) with it, the Senate. Even then, however, they will find it hard to repeal and replace, assuming that Senate Democrats exploit an effective filibuster against any such effort to deny the GOP the sixty votes they would need to succeed via the regular legislative process. My hunch is that today’s decision will be critical in bolstering Senate Democrats’ back bone to defend the law, even if they were to find themselves in the minority. Because most of the law’s popular insurance coverage protections kick in only in 2014, the window of opportunity for the GOP will be widest in 2013. After 2013, the GOP’s road to repeal would get even steeper.

Ryan Lizza, like Frum, doubts repeal is possible:

If the Supreme Court had gutted the law today by throwing out the mandate and the regulations and several of the other “non-scoreable” items, a President Romney with a G.O.P. Congress might have had a relatively easy time finishing the job of killing Obama’s law, even without sixty votes in the Senate. But today the Court did two things that make repeal of the A.C.A. nearly impossible now: it has given its not-inconsequential stamp of legitimacy to the law, and it has made the parliamentary path of repeal through Congress highly unlikely and probably impossible, at least in the near future.

Chait disagrees:

If Romney is unwilling to break faith with his base after he has already secured the nomination, and needs to command the center, then he’ll be unwilling to break faith with them immediately upon taking office. I would take the Republicans at their word that they will use their power to the absolute maximum extent, at any human cost, to avenge what they consider a monstrous and tyrannical wrong. The 2012 elections are now primarily a fight over whether health insurance is a right or a privilege, which is to say, a fight for decency.

Ask Scott Horton Anything: Biggest Civil Liberty Fears?

Scott Horton is a contributing editor of Harper’s who blogs about civil liberties at No Comment. If you haven’t yet read his award-winning piece “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides‘”, you should definitely do so. Here is my long take on the report. Previous Horton videos here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

The Fast And Not So Furious Scandal, Ctd

Robert VerBruggen challenges Fortune's counter-narrative:

[G]un dealers who cooperated with the ATF report a shift in policy that coincided with Fast and Furious — from stopping sales and questioning customers, to telling store owners to just go ahead and sell the guns. While Fortune reports that the ATF had no chance to interdict the guns that killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry — the shop that sold the guns informed the ATF that the transaction was suspicious, but it was a holiday weekend and the fax wasn’t seen for days — the gun store’s owner has said he was told in advance to go ahead and sell guns to people he normally wouldn’t. The entire Fortune piece seems to neglect the distinctions between probable cause for an arrest, the act of at least questioning people who are trying to buy guns illegally, and the ATF’s advice to store owners that they refuse to make any sale that they "doubt" is legal.

The latest reporting on the scandal here. Meanwhile, the House is currently convening to vote on whether to hold Holder in contempt over Fast and Furious, which, if successful, would be a first for a US attorney general and a Cabinet member in general. Live-blogging here. Latest update:

And the debate is done. Now there’s a fifteen-minute vote on a motion to refer back to the committee, introduced by Representative John Dingell (D., Mich.), which looks like it’s going nowhere. In other news, the man of the hour is in Disneyworld today.

Update: "And the motion passes, 255-67, with 17 Democrats voting to hold the attorney general in contempt."

Does Hyperconnectivity Make Us Safe?

Jerry Brito thinks so:

Identity theft and cyber-espionage are not among the greatest threats to world security. No one has ever died as a result of a cyber-attack. Truly existential threats—if the 20th-century's death-tolls tell us anything—include scourges like war, pandemic and genocide. Yet these real risks are precisely the ones lessened by increased connectivity.

The Dentistry Crisis

Frontline examines it:

Watch Dollars and Dentists Preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

June Thomas gives the show two cheers:

"Dollars and Dentists"—about the extreme difficulties millions of Americans, including children with government-provided insurance, experience getting dental treatment—tells an important story about a key part of the U.S. health care system that is usually ignored. But squeezing a complicated story into a 50-minute film leads to scapegoating and avoids the most fundamental questions about dentistry: Why does dental treatment cost so much, and why do we treat health problems of the mouth so differently from medical issues that afflict the rest of the body?