Year: 2013

by Patrick Appel

Stephen Walt complains that the Obama administration “never bothered to lay out a clear strategic framework that explains why they are acting as they are” with regards to the Arab Spring and other foreign policy issues:

The problem with this ad hoc approach to policy formation is it leaves the administration perennially buffeted by events and vulnerable to pressure from all those factions, interest groups, GOP politicians, and ambitious policy wonks who think they know what ought to be done. If you don’t explain what you are trying to do and why it makes sense, it is hard for anyone to get behind the policy or see the common thread behind each separate decision.

By failing to lay out a clear set of principles — which in this case means explaining to the American people the basic points that Friedman made and why it doesn’t make sense for the US to toss a lot of resources into these various struggles — Obama & Co. end up looking inconsistent, confused, and indecisive.

By the way, laying out a clear set of strategic principles wouldn’t force the country into a rigid political straightjacket. Sometimes broad goals have to adapt to particular circumstances, and foreign policymakers often have to accept what is possible rather than what is ideal. But if you don’t explain what your underlying objectives are, why those objectives are the right ones, and how your polices are on balance going to move us in the right direction, then you are giving your political opponents a free gift and your supporters little with which to defend you.

by Tracy R. Walsh

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Watch “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Why did ESPN pull its support of League of Denial – a Frontline documentary based in large part on work by two ESPN journalists – less than three weeks before the film was scheduled to air? James Andrew Miller and James Belson broke the news last week:

On Thursday, ESPN, which has spent heavily in recent years to build its investigative reporting team, abruptly ended its affiliation with Frontline, a public affairs television series that was weeks from showing a jointly produced two-part investigative project about the N.F.L.’s contentious handling of head injuries. The divorce came a week after the N.F.L. voiced its displeasure with the documentary at a lunch between league and ESPN executives, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Marc Tracy is troubled:

If ESPN will bow to its most powerful broadcasting partner when it is doing its most lacerating journalism, we have no choice but to assume that it would cut other, lesser corners as well. What happens next time there is a National Basketball Association lockout? What happens when it’s concussions in hockey? More troubling still: What happens when it is not investigative journalism? Can ESPN be trusted to be fair-minded about soccer now that it is beefing up its soccer coverage (including with a new show) given that it broadcasts Major League Soccer? Or given that NBC is making its Premier League coverage more prominent?

Over the weekend, blame shifted from the NFL to Disney:

According to the Times, about a week before Frontline officially announced ESPN’s departure, ESPN president John Skipper had lunch with ESPN executive vice president of production John Wildhack, NFL Network president Steve Bornstein, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, where the two NFL suits made their displeasure with the documentary known. Soon thereafter, ESPN broke up with PBS for good. Both the league and ESPN have released statements denying that version of events. Skipper told ESPN ombudsman Robert Lipsyte that he terminated the partnership after he saw the “sensational” trailer, which features a series of bone-crunching hits and promises to “change the way you see the game.”

But over the last 48 hours a counter-theory has emerged, alleging that calls to dump the documentary — despite the fact that much of the research for it was done by ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru — came not from the NFL, but from ESPN’s parent company, Disney. Not only is ESPN owned by Disney, the sports cabler, which airs Monday Night Football, provides the bulk of the parent company’s profit. In fact, ESPN’s relentless, often maddening coverage of the NFL is a big reason it’s now worth $40 billion.

Robert Lipsyte, for his part, hesitates to point fingers:

So what just happened? Beats me. At best we’ve seen some clumsy shuffling to cover a lack of due diligence. At worst, a promising relationship between two journalism powerhouses that could have done more good together has been sacrificed to mollify a league under siege. The best isn’t very good, but if the worst turns out to be true, it’s a chilling reminder how often the profit motive wins the duel.

Dave Zirin reports that reporters at ESPN are demoralized:

One top [ESPN] journalist described it to me as follows. “Our corporate strategy right now is to go all-in on football no matter the cost [to journalistic integrity]. We are going all-in on football at a time when you have damn near 5,000 people suing the sports that made them famous [for head trauma]. You have empirical evidence that something is going on with this game that is really dangerous. We are now carrying water for a game that is on a deeply problematic trajectory. We are going all in on this sport and this sport is in peril.”

But Viv Bernstein, who was a contributing writer for ESPN’s women’s sports affiliate, argues the network can’t be neutral and shouldn’t even try:

Look, it was business that trumped journalism when it came to the Frontline documentary. And there should be no shame in that. After all, ESPN is a business and its success is inextricably tied to the NFL. The shame is in misleading the public by trying to maintain a pretense of unfettered journalistic integrity that simply cannot exist.

To read the Dish’s long-running thread on head injuries in professional sports, go here.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader reminds us of a popular and now-controversial classic:

Here’s an Oscar-winning film that Disney has tried to flush down the memory hole for years: 1946’s “Song of the South.” It features former slave Uncle Remus, a shuffling stereotype who nonetheless is the most decent person in the film. Disney has refused to release the movie on DVD, even though Remus’ stories about Br’er Rabbit are thinly veiled tales of a black person’s ingenuity and cunning against arrogant crackers. A website dedicated to preserving the film’s memory is here. The song from the film that won the Oscar, “Zip a Dee Doo Dah,” is here.

Update from a reader:

Just one word of correction for the description that the reader provided for “Song of the South”. Anyone who has seen the film knows that, for all Br’er Rabbit’s cleverness, he is not triumphing over “arrogant crackers”. The primary dynamic in the animated scenes is between Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear, all of whom are voiced by black actors. It’s an animated version of Amos and Andy. To be honest, what strikes me most of all is how much this dynamic reminds me of the Ice Cube movie Friday. When Chris Tucker is jumping for joy that the neighborhood bully has been knocked out, it is very much reminiscent of the joy these animated characters take in seeing each other bested.

I would also like to add that the idea of the clever African American triumphing over the arrogant whites does not carry over to the live-action portion either. While Uncle Remus does teach the lesson, it is the young aristocrat who applies this lesson to best the local racist white trash. It should also be noted that the main tension in that part of the story is between the land-owning whites and the poor whites who occupy the lowest rung in this world, though it doesn’t stop them from disrespecting Uncle Remus.

I was lucky enough to find a company in Georgia that distributes remastered (though not restored) copies of the film on DVD. From what I’ve read, this is not sanctioned by Disney in any way and may even be a pirated copy. It will be interesting to see if Disney fights to retain the rights to this film and prevent it from entering the public domain, even though it does not want to have anything to do with the film.

Another sends the above video, which brings sexism into the mix:

I’m loving this thread. Eddie Cantor is one of my favorite old movie stars. Fast-talking and action-packed, his movies were early examples of screwball comedy, but most are virtually unairable on television today and thus nearly forgotten. Like so many other performers of the era, Cantor came up from vaudeville, with its traditions of blackface, “coon shouting” and racial humor. Most of his movies (like Whoopee!, Roman Scandals, The Kid from Spain) rely on some form of broad racial humor. The best one can say is that he didn’t target any group in particular; black, Jewish, Asian, Hispanic and Native American stereotypes all enjoy ample screen time.

I remember AMC’s Bob Dorian introducing Whoopee! in the mid 1990s, prefacing it with a plea not to focus on the racial stuff, but to look at it as an “indicator of how far we have come.”

by Tracy R. Walsh

Obama thinks it should:

This is probably controversial to say, but what the heck, I’m in my second term so I can say it,” Obama said during a stop at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “I believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years because [….] in the first two years young people are learning in the classroom.” In the third year, he said, “they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm, even if they weren’t getting paid that much. But that step alone would reduce the cost for the student.”

Ed Kilgore cheers:

It’s been a long time since I was in law school, and I gather schools have gotten better at offering practical experience both in-class and in out-of-class placements. But it’s long been a byword among young lawyers that an extraordinarily high percentage of instruction has been irrelevant to the actual practice of law, unless you take very seriously such chestnuts as the critical importance of learning to “think like a lawyer.” For one thing, an awful lot of law students, in my experience, have been “thinking like a lawyer” since about the third grade, which made them very unpopular children. More importantly, the cult of legal education seems to depend on the perpetuation of what amounts to an intellectual hazing system, where the student’s tolerance for tedious content, arbitrary testing, and self-imposed pressure is presumably preparation for the agonies of being on the low end of the professional totem pole for years.

But Martha Nussbaum and Charles Wolf worry that two-year degree programs would worsen the quality of legal education. And Matt Bodie claims shorter programs may not offer tuition savings:

If someone magically changed the J.D. program at my law school to two years, I wouldn’t shrug my shoulders and go, “Oh well – guess we’re only two years now!” I would work with my colleagues to figure out how we could make those two years meet the needs of our students – and pack as much in as possible. If the same U.S. News rankings remained in place, don’t you think schools would continue to compete on class size, expenses per student, and educational reputation? And wouldn’t that drive up costs? What if, in the new two-year law school, we added a clinical component, an externship component, and a 10-person small section component to the basic Contracts class, and then assigned it to a doctrinal professor, two clinical professors, and four adjuncts? That would be a better class, no?  But it’d also be a lot more expensive. A school could easily justify spending $60,000 or more a year per student – again, if the market rewarded schools for offering such classes.

Meanwhile Elie Mystal, who says he spent his third year of law school drinking and playing Madden, describes Obama’s call as “literally the least useful thing he could have done” for the two-year cause:

If Obama wants oversight over things like “how long does law school have to be,” he could have instructed the U.S. Department of Education to assume regulatory authority. Or at the very least, he could have had the Education Department signal to the ABA that its rules limiting experimentation with two-year law school programs needed to stop. … [Instead,] Obama just told the ABA, “Don’t mind me, I’m just a lame duck who intends to spend zero political capital bringing about substantive change.”

The average indebted law student in the class of 2012 graduated with $108,293 in loans, Carmel Lobello notes.

by Patrick Appel

Bernstein explains why gerrymandering only has a small effect on the number of seats each party wins:

In order for a party to win the maximum number of seats in a state, it’s necessary to stick as many of the other party’s voters into a small number of very lopsided seats. As a result, the victim party “wastes” votes in those seats, since in first-past-the-post elections there’s no bonus for winning by a large margin. Meanwhile, in the rest of a state, the party tries to be “efficient” by winning with relatively small margins.

The problem? No incumbent wants to win by a relatively narrow margin, even if it’s good for the party.

After all, a district that gives Republicans a 5 percent head start can easily produce a Democratic win if it’s a good Democratic year overall. Or a district with a 5 percent edge in 2012 can drift to even or worse by 2020. Or—well, no incumbent wants to win by five percentage points, anyway; they want to have districts with 30 or 40 point margins so that they don’t have to worry at all about re-election.

In other words, because incumbents often think mainly about their own careers, many states produce bipartisan gerrymanders—maps with only lopsided districts that give incumbents from both parties easy re-elections.