Month: December 2014

So Who The Heck Will The GOP Nominate?

Nicholas Confessore reports that “dozens of the Republican Party’s leading presidential donors and fund-raisers have begun privately discussing how to clear the field for a single establishment candidate to carry the party’s banner in 2016.” Kilgore is fascinated by such maneuvering:

I continue to be amazed at the confidence of GOP elites in the political strength of Bush, Christie and Romney. The first two continue to do relatively poorly in both nominating contest and general election polling; Bush in particular is saddled with problems that will never go away. And Mitt Romney would be the first defeated presidential nominee to attempt an immediate comeback since Hubert Humphrey in 1972. That’s a long time ago.

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake consider Rand Paul as the most likely candidate:

People used to roll their eyes when we said Paul had a real chance to be the Republican nominee in 2016. No one rolls their eyes anymore.

Paul has a unique activist and fundraising base thanks to his dad’s two runs for president, and has shown considerable savvy in his outreach efforts to the establishment end of the party over the past few years. Paul still says odd things — his blaming of high cigarette taxes for Eric Garner’s death being the latest — that are going to get him in trouble in the heat of a presidential race. But, Paul is the candidate furthest along in the planning process for president and the one with the most current strength in early states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Jonathan Bernstein strongly disagrees:

I understand the math: It’s a large field and Paul is more or less guaranteed to get 20 percent of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire. All he needs then is to exceed his father’s performance by a few thousand voters and he could easily capture those early states against a splintered group of Republicans. That’s an illusion. There probably won’t be a dozen candidates in Iowa; Republicans have efficiently winnowed their field pre-Iowa for several cycles. But it doesn’t matter; even if Paul wins with 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, he’s not going to win the nomination unless he can eventually reach more than 50 percent. And as long as a substantial clot of party actors opposes his candidacy and most of the rest are indifferent at best, he’s not going to get the favorable publicity he needs to do that.

Kilgore thinks Bernstein goes too far:

I’d say it’s always a good idea to show some healthy respect for the unpredictable aspects of politics, especially in intraparty contests. I, too, have a hard time envisioning Rand Paul accepting the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. But his successful maneuvering on foreign policy so far makes it a lot more possible than ever, and I’m sure there were political scientists who laughed and laughed at the idea this loopy dude would beat Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked Senate candidate in 2010.

Allahpundit, meanwhile, ponders Jeb’s chances:

There are enough “somewhat conservative” voters to carry Bush to victory if conservatives are split — and if he doesn’t turn into Huntsman along the way. Huntsman’s problem, though, wasn’t that he lacked “clarity of thought,” it’s that in ways large and small he showed contempt for the base of the party whose nomination he was seeking. Remember when he introduced himself to primary voters with a profile in “Vogue”? Remember when he tweeted during the primary campaign, apropos of nothing, that unlike certain people he believed in evolution and global warming? Remember when one of his consultants, John Weaver, complained that the GOP consisted of “a bunch of cranks”? “Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him,” wrote Ross Douthat in November 2011, “but they need to think that he likes them.” Jeb Bush’s difficulty right now is that he seems almost eager to run against the party’s base, which is a recipe for disaster in the general election if not the primaries: The nastier things get, the more likely it is that some conservatives will stay home in November 2016 if he’s the nominee. Maybe he can survive the primaries backing Common Core and an amnesty deal with Democrats — Romney survived RomneyCare, didn’t he? — but he can’t get elected if he’s openly disdainful of grassroots righties. It’s not a policy thing, it’s a not-wanting-to-be-represented-by-someone-who-hates-you thing.

Ramesh also analyzes Jeb’s predicament:

As I’ve argued here before, Bush can still win the nomination: Because most of his primary votes would come from the center and left of the party, he doesn’t need to win big among the conservatives most fired up about immigration and Common Core.

But Bush’s stand on Common Core won’t help him much in the general election. For the most part, it isn’t an issue of federal policy. So he has stumbled into a fight with the party base that won’t yield him any long-term political gains. And while his stand on immigration could arguably help his chances in 2016, it doesn’t solve the party’s basic economic problem. The risk is that these stances will exhaust Republicans’ tolerance for heterodoxy, and leave Bush with less room to adopt a new economic platform. A nominee who conservatives viewed as an ideological soul mate might have more leeway.

Waldman’s two cents on Jeb:

[F]aced with this argument between someone like Bush they can’t stomach on one hand, and a candidate like Ted Cruz they know would get blown out on the other hand, they’re going to look for a middle alternative. That could end up being any one of a number of people, but at the moment it’s awfully hard to see Bush building that bridge.

The Torture Defenders Fan Out

Everything the president said above is untrue – and it appears that the looming Senate Intelligence Committee report on the torture program will soon prove it. The US did torture many many people with techniques devised by Nazis and Communists, sometimes in former KGB facilities. The CIA itself admits in its internal documents that none of it worked or gave us any actionable intelligence that wasn’t discovered through legal means. The torture techniques were not implemented by highly-trained professionals, but by goonish amateurs who concealed what they were doing and lied about it to superiors. All the techniques were and are clearly illegal under US and international law.

And we’re told there is some exculpatory evidence in the report, suggesting that Bush and Cheney and even Addington were misled as well – giving the former president some lee-way to explain how he came to create a torture program that will forever taint this country and has already done so much to damage its soft power. Maybe he could tell the truth and say that the extent and nature of the torture was kept from him and that he can now see what went so horribly wrong. But nah:

Some former administration officials privately encouraged the president and his top advisers to use the report to disclaim responsibility for the interrogation program on the grounds that they were not kept fully informed. But Mr. Bush and his inner circle rejected that suggestion. “Even if some officials privately believe they were not given all the facts, they feel it would be immoral and disloyal to throw the C.I.A. to the wolves at this point,” said one former official, who like others did not want to be identified speaking about the report before its release.

The question I posed publicly to the president back in 2009 – whether he could come to terms with the reality of torture and explain how it occurred – has therefore been answered a second time. In his own book, Bush owned the torture and took full responsibility for it. Now, he has decided he will not allow a sliver of daylight to come between him and war crimes. You can chalk this up to admirable loyalty, even to those who lied to him. Or you can simply reflect on a president who cannot admit to being the first in that office to authorize such an assault on core American values and decency. Which means to say he does not have the fortitude or character to deal with reality.

And now, we’re seeing a full-court press for those Bush loyalists who want to permanently suppress the evidence of war crimes under the program. If you want to get a clue about how devastating the forthcoming report might be, just observe the pre-emptive strikes:

The defense of the program has been organized by former C.I.A. leaders like George J. Tenet and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, two former directors, and John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy C.I.A. director who also served as acting director … General Hayden added that the former C.I.A. team objected to the Senate’s characterization of their efforts. “We’re not here to defend torture,” he said by email on Sunday. “We’re here to defend history.” General Hayden appeared earlier on Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS News to say that any assertion that the C.I.A. “lied to everyone about a program that wasn’t doing any good, that beggars the imagination.”

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who ran the C.I.A. interrogation program, said Sunday that critics now assailing the agency were pressing it after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to do whatever it took to prevent a recurrence. “We did what we were asked to do, we did what we were assured was legal, and we know our actions were effective,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in The Washington Post.

Rodriguez was so sure that he did nothing wrong that he destroyed the tapes recording the torture sessions! Nothing to see here … so move long. A reader writes:

I just watched the CBS Morning News report on the SSCI report, featuring two persons: Michael Hayden was featured in excerpts from Sunday’s Face the Nation, then “CBS News terrorism consultant” Juan Zarate. Both offered an identical analysis: the release of the report would “fan the flames of violence against America.”

On CNN, Candy Crowley still could not say the t-word, and let Mike Rogers argue that evidence of the gravest crimes by government officials should be suppressed because … they will inflame opinion abroad, and possibly lead to demonstrations and violence. Notice that for Rogers, the fact that the US government committed barbarisms more commonly associated with Nazi Germany or Communist China is of no concern. No one should be prosecuted, because, well, because American officials cannot be subject to the Geneva Conventions, which must be observed by every state actor – except the US. And no evidence of crimes by government officials should be released, for fear of undermining faith in said government. Those arguments belong in a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Then this detail from this morning:

Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it. Mr. Bush made that clear in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the C.I.A. serving on our behalf,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base.” These are “really good people and we’re lucky as a nation to have them,” he said.

“Whatever the report says …”

Denial doesn’t get much clearer than that – and it is of a piece with the reckless disengagement, sickening indifference and grotesque negligence that marked his catastrophic time in the Oval Office. In the wake of the shock of Abu Ghraib, Bush disavowed the atrocities, insisting that they did not represent America, that they were counter to American values, and that he was shocked and disgusted by them. And yet, when a report is imminent outlining acts of torture and abuse far worse than Abu Ghraib, and directly under his own authority, he insists that whatever is detailed in the report, the culprits are heroes and patriots, and “we’re lucky as a nation to have them.”

How does one begin to square that cognitive dissonance? How to explain how a believing Christian can describe brutal torture sessions as things to defend and be proud of? And how can the torture of human beings – and the cover-up of the same – be part of American “patriotism”? This is a man not just without a conscience, but a man proud of it. He had a chance to reflect on what his fateful decision to waive the Geneva Conventions after 9/11 produced; and he has decided to own all of it. And we shall soon see what exactly that is.

Chart Of The Day

Grand Juries

Aaron Blake highlights a poll finding “that 60 percent of Americans disagree with the lack of an indictment against officer Daniel Pantaleo”:

Although 40 percent disagree “strongly” with there being no indictment in Garner’s case, just 24 percent say the same about the case in Ferguson. And in Ferguson, there’s majority support — 52 percent — for no indictment. So basically, Americans as a whole favor no indictment in Ferguson. In Garner’s case, they overwhelmingly think there should have been one. And in fact, just one-quarter of Americans agree with the grand jury’s decision not to indict.

This suggests, does it not, that the gloomiest assessments of America’s ability to see through race are too dire. If we were truly racially polarized, we’d see similar responses to similar white-cop-black-victim scenarios. Which means we have some common ground to stand on.

The Closing Of The Back-Of-The-Book

Josh Chafetz mourns it:

[N]o one else in Washington, nor precious few outlets anywhere, does what Leon did with the back of the book. Leon cared about culture and about ideas, not as adornment, but as ends in themselves. And he cared enough to write passionately and to commission passionate pieces about them. In an era of click-bait, the TNR back of the book ran long-form, thoughtful pieces about the arts, about culture, about ideas and their histories. In an era of vanishing book reviews, the TNR back of the book routinely ran lengthy reviews of books one might not otherwise encounter. In an era of laid-off critics, the TNR back of the book had a deep bench of drama, art, music, dance and literature critics. In a city obsessed with “winning” the 24-hour news cycle, the TNR back of the book played a much, much longer game.

Think for a second about what has happened to book reviews. Most newspapers got rid of them years ago. Try finding them on the NYT app. With TNR’s back-of-the-book gone, we’re left with a few pages in The New Yorker, the TLS, the wonderful New York Review of Books (but that institution too seems vulnerable, given its aging leadership), and a bunch of newish cultural outlets that vie for attention when TNR could command it. Everything else is Amazon and stars. But the review section is not just a feature; it’s part of a critical eco-system that sustains a higher culture in a democracy. Losing it can be fatal to a democracy that hopes to rise above mass-cult.

In my time at TNR, I wrote for both the front and the back, and no one seemed to mind. In fact, you were expected to be a reporter or political writer who could always dip your toes into the high culture of the back-of-the-book. I also had the privilege of being the second-in-command at the back of the book for a while. There are too many stories to tell, but I always revered that section and protected it almost as fiercely as Leon did. We became estranged for lots of reasons – and Dishhead will be aware of the long-running feud (another characteristic of TNR-style journalism). But we were and are as one on the role of high culture in our democracy, even if I sometimes felt that TNR’s literary section was sometimes unnecessarily obscurantist and impenetrable on purpose. Alyssa remembers “the publication’s simple confidence that culture was an important subject that required no justification to sell to readers”:

You didn’t have to have a policy hook, or even the draw of Misty Copeland’s rising star, to write about dance there, as Jennifer Homans, the magazine’s dance editor who resigned [Friday], did so beautifully. Culture could provide answers that policy analysis could not, as it did in Rebecca Traister’s marvelous “I Don’t Care If You Like It,” a synthesis that drew on everything from Esquire’s beauty metrics to Amy Poehler’s rebellious, dirty sense of humor, to the criminalization of parenting to explain how women have been kept subject to men’s opinions. I return to that piece at least once a week. I don’t necessarily agree with Jed Perl on the politicization of art, but we are of accord that the fate of art matters even if it shifts no policies.

This is a philosophy that guides a lot of more general-interest publications, including the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books where Daniel Mendelsohn, among my favorite living critics, brings the same attention to Greek poetry and the spasms of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Broadway. But it’s a bit rarer, I think, among Washington publications that think of themselves as policy-oriented, or in sections like op-ed pages where culture yields pride of place to policy and politics.

Damon Linker calls Leon “one of the greatest editors in the history of American letter”:

From 1983, when he took over the back of the book, through the early years of the 2000s, Wieseltier’s pages were just about the only game in town for serious writing about culture. Only The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, each with a couple dozen reviews in every issue, came close to matching the cultural heat and light that Wieseltier managed to generate with a handful of essays and reviews, and a modest budget, in nearly every issue of TNR.

Today the cultural landscape is different. Not only are old-media opinion journals (The Nation, for example) publishing much smarter and unpredictable review essays than they used to, but there are a slew of digital outlets covering cultural topics in a variety of interesting ways — The Believer, n+1, The New Inquiry, Tablet Magazine, and many others — as well as old-time (Boston Review) and new-fangled (LA Review of Books) cultural journals whose content can be easily and instantly accessed online.

The question, as always, is whether the increased quantity will match (let alone surpass) the quality Wieseltier managed to achieve in issue after issue of TNR.

Cynthia Haven is pessimistic:

At this point, saving TNR will not be done by will alone. It takes more than ideology and snark to produce something that endures. You cannot buy gravitas, any more than you can buy reputation. What’s missing is what Czesław Miłosz used to call “piety” – a feeling of hierarchy of value in works of art and works of literature – or perhaps what Susan Sontag called “an education of the heart.”

It has less to do with education and more with a certain amount of living, suffering, patience, tenacity, endurance, wisdom, and the willingness to pay, pay, pay (and I don’t mean with cash). My concern is that people such as Hughes and Vidra have no idea what it means to be caretakers of a century-old literary institution.

Or maybe they’ll learn.

Did Jackie Not Want Her Story Told?

Rape survivor Jade Reindl argues that “Jackie”, the victim at the center of Sabrina Rudin Erdely’s disputed Rolling Stone piece about rape at the University of Virginia, was violated a second time when she asked Erdely to remove her from the story and Erdely refused:

Here’s the thing about rape that most people seem to get: it’s violating. It requires a lack of consent. It’s an event full of pain and regret. Here’s the thing about sharing a rape victim’s story without their permission that most people don’t seem to get: It’s violating. It requires a lack of consent. It’s an event full of pain and regret.

If someone agreed to have sex with you earlier in the day, but when it came time to actually do it they no longer consented, and you had sex with them anyway, was it rape? When you share the story of a rape victim without her consent, even if she formerly consented, it is a complete re-violation of her personal space and narrative. It doesn’t matter why Jackie, the subject of Rolling Stone’s article about UVA and sexual assault, later retracted her statements. And the aim of this article is not to justify or analyze her hesitation. What I’m saying is this: By publishing an article that the victim retracted her support of, Rolling Stone essentially violated Jackie, and every other survivor, all over again.

Sarah Kliff also considers this an ethical violation on Erdely’s part:

Publishing a story about a rape victim against her will is dangerous, and arguably unethical, journalism.

It goes completely against the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, a respected advisory group at Columbia University’s Journalism School, guidelines for how to report on sexual assault. There is an entire section that directs reporters to “respect a potential interviewee’s right to say no.”

“Be fair and realistic. Don’t coerce, cajole, trick or offer remuneration,” the guidelines instruct. If Rolling Stone published the story against Jackie’s will, that is a terrible mistake on the magazine’s part — and a violation of the ethical guidelines reporters should follow when reporting difficult, and sensitive stories about rape. And it’s coupled with the fact that Rolling Stone didn’t track down the accused rapists.

In Hanna Rosin’s view, in a post we noted last night, one of Erdely’s biggest errors was in making a promise to Jackie that she, as a journalist, should not have kept:

Jackie told the Post that she felt “manipulated” by Erdely. She said that she was “overwhelmed” by sitting through interviews with her and asked to be taken out of the story, but Erdely said it would go forward anyway. Jackie said she “felt completely out of control of my own story.” Erdely has implied that she made an agreement with Jackie that she would tell her story but not try to contact her assailants. Rolling Stone explained in their statement today: “Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.”

Such agreements are apparently not uncommon. In survivors’ groups, advocates advise victims to strike these kinds of deals with reporters so they don’t lose control of their own stories, or anger their assailants, both of which they consider paramount to healing. But this creates an impossible situation for journalists: Ask too many questions and you lose your source. But don’t ask enough and you end up in this situation, with a story that’s falling apart.

But what really puzzles Rosin is that the account Jackie’s friends gave to the WaPo last week, though very different from the one Jackie told Erdely, was more than horrible enough to get the point across:

The baffling thing here is, if what Jackie told Andy is true, that would have made an explosive enough story about campus sexual violence. A group of men force a freshman to perform oral sex. She reports it to the university and they don’t investigate. That’s a disturbing story. But if Andy is to be believed, that means Jackie told an exaggerated story to Erdely, and that Erdely was all too happy to create an even more perfect victim, one who was brutally gang raped and then left at the curb by her so called friends, thus further traumatizing her, and leaving her to fend for herself in a culture too backward for progressive thought.

Too-good-to-leave-unembellished. Libby Nelson wonders if Jackie was properly informed of what she was getting herself into:

If a journalist were completely honest with a source about what it means to be interviewed for this sort of story, it would go something like this: you are going to tell me about the worst day of your life, because you think there is value in sharing that story with the rest of the world. You need to trust me, but you need to know I am not your friend. I will seem as sympathetic as I can be, but I will also note the exact moment you start crying so I can write about it. I will ask questions that might make you uncomfortable. I will call other people and tell them what you’re saying about them. I will open you up to the judgment of the entire world. And then I will walk away. And if you aren’t ready to deal with that, you shouldn’t talk to me.

I don’t know if anyone would consent to that. And I don’t know if I could really shoot myself in the foot with that much honesty. No decent human wants to appear to doubt the word of a rape victim. But if you don’t do that work in private, you make it that much easier for the rest of the world to do it in public. That’s what Rolling Stone — and Jackie — are about to learn.

Like Rosin, Peter Suderman suspects Erdely of erasing the line between journalism and advocacy:

Advocates for rape victims and sexual assault awareness understandably tend to prioritize support, communication, and community building; they do not have a great responsibility to doubt, to verify, and to rigorously check all the minute details of the accounts they hear or share. But journalists do. To be sure, this sort of checking is almost always difficult, time-consuming, and stressful. Inevitably, some mistakes will be made (I’ve certainly made a few regretful errors of my own). There are tradeoffs between time and accuracy. But the more sensational the story, the more shocking and potentially consequential its allegations, the more that effort is necessary—especially with a long-form account that is not under the pressures and deadlines of daily journalism, and especially when the subject and major source of the story tries to back out, as Jackie apparently did.

The way Morrissey sees it, that’s the core of the problem:

[T]he damage wasn’t limited to just “Jackie.” The fraternities at UVa got shut down for no good reason, the one fraternity named got vandalized on top of that, and several men came under suspicion for a crime that they not only didn’t commit but maynot have happened at all. That is what happens when activists hijack journalism to further their agenda at the expense of the truth, a value which clearly wasn’t a high priority for either Erdely or anyone at Rolling Stone. If the truth had been their agenda, they would have doubled their efforts to make sure their story was solid, rather than simply act as stenographers for someone who told Erdely what she not only wanted to hear, but actively campaigned to find.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, on the other hand, blames Rolling Stone and the magazine industry writ large for preferring sensationalism over facts:

There are few industries as cynical and craven as magazine publishing. They love a good sex scandal or true crime story. You can watch out for the next longform piece of a college campus rape story that’s corroborated. Do not believe for A SECOND that Rolling Stone did not speak to alleged rapists because they were trying to be “sensitive”. It was because they were abiding by a bad promise they made to “Jackie” to not contact her alleged assailants. If they did contact those supposed assailants, they would lose a sensational and lurid first person account of a gang rape. If Jackie rescinded her claims, then the magazine would lose its hook to lure readers into a story about the much-reported — and possibly inflated — “epidemic” of sexual assaults on campus.

Where Are The Sugar-Daddies Of Yore?

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Chris Hughes wants to turn a profit:

At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity. There is much experimentation in nonprofit journalism – ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are proving the model — and that may be the right path for certain institutions. At the New Republic, I believe we owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business and not position ourselves to rely on the largesse of an unpredictable few. Our success is not guaranteed, but I think it’s critical to try.

This is relatively new in the history of persons of sugar. And I don’t think it’s because Hughes is somehow a different sort of mogul than those in days gone by, just that the incentives have shifted rather dramatically in a very short period of time. The truth is: when there were only a handful of magazines that had a monopoly on opinion journalism, owning one gave you a real cultural gate-keeper power. It was worth losing money for the huge gains in influence you received in return, the social status, access to the powerful and pursuit of a cause. You could shape the discourse around your pet causes, and alter and shape the debate in ways no one – outside the Kochs and liberal ad-buyers – now can. This was a bad thing in some respects – the debate about Israel, for example, was far less open and diverse than today – and a few men (and they were almost all men) really shouldn’t be able to wield that kind of influence in a democracy. But it also provided a way for great writing and sharp thinking to endure. As a simple formula, it worked. And owners were relatively happy.

Fast-forward to today and the benefits of owning TNR or the Atlantic or the Nation have all but evaporated. There is no incentive for cultural gate-keepers any more, because there are no gates to keep. Anyone with an Internet connection can reach a mass audience, and the power and prestige that once accrued to a publisher are thereby eviscerated. You end up where Hughes ended up: spending millions to fund ornery, if talented, writers, and wondering what’s in it for you. Sure, you get to interview the president once in a while. Maybe you can get Nancy Pelosi to come to your wedding. But, once that thrill is gone, what’s left … but a giant headache and a company that hemorrhages money?

In response to my hankering for the TNR of old, Dreher argues that there is “no way to be that kind of magazine today and make money. Maybe there never was”:

[W]hen people like Freddie de Boer, a true leftist, sneer from a left-wing perspective at the demise of TNR, I understand where he’s coming from and don’t begrudge him his opinion. But I think he shouldn’t be quite so confident, because the same dynamic that’s brought TNR down threatens all small magazines of opinion in this country. I would be surprised if any of us could pay our bills on subscriptions and ad sales alone. We depend on the generosity of donors — many of them wealthy and public-spirited — who believe that the work we do is important, even if it is not money-making.

Somebody said yesterday that TNR doesn’t need a better business model, it needs a better owner. Yes, exactly. I don’t know how many rich people are willing to subsidize a money-losing journalistic operation out of principle and for the common good, but we sure need to find them.

Chait makes related points in response to Ezra:

The odd thing about Klein’s column is that, other than this small disagreement about TNR’s character, I cannot find anything in it with which I disagree. He straightforwardly described the problem of highbrow magazines that serve a public-interest function and have always lost money. He proceeds from that accurate description straight to the conclusion in his headline — TNR must change — without explaining why. One could just as easily conclude that TNR will always lose money, and its value should be assessed in non-market terms and subsidized accordingly by a willing donor.

That unacknowledged leap of logic contains nearly all our disagreement. It seems to be rooted in a deep faith in the power of the free market when it comes to media. Klein has always been very explicit about his view that media functions that earn money are good …

That sort of market fundamentalism is largely associated with the political right. You can find traces of it on the center-left among the winners of the new media economy, like many otherwise-liberal winners of other sectors of the new economy. They implicitly associate success with virtue. They may understand that an institution like The New Republic creates externalities that are not captured through market value, but this factor does not intrude upon their model.

Yet the fact that TNR does not meet a market need does not mean it serves no purpose. The main thing it needed to change was its owner.

There is a middle ground, of course, and it seems to me that TNR’s staff were prepared to find it. A magazine that has no interest in paying its way becomes a sad vanity publication. But a magazine that can pay for the bulk of its operations but still needs some sugar-money to keep it afloat is a perfectly good model for a place whose standards and intellectual heft will never make it a mass publication. And it remains a good model. It’s just that few of the super-rich today really respect that model, or have even a crude interest in sustaining it.

(Image from The Federalist)

A World Awash In Cheap Oil

Michael Specter fears that low oil prices will persist:

Many environmentalists had assumed that if neither fear nor reason helped us to lessen our reliance on oil, then at least we could count on scarcity. But scarcity is not an economic or environmental policy. Humans have long had a habit of expecting the sky to fall. Yet from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, predictions that the planet was on the verge of starvation have never come to pass (or at least not as broadly as expected). Nonetheless, the drop in oil prices comes at a terrible moment. Last month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that our only chance to halt the rising temperature of the Earth, and to prevent the calamity that rise will cause, would be to eliminate fossil-fuel emissions by the end of the century.

A plan to end U.S. fossil-fuel dependence would be an unlikely goal in any case, but, if oil remains easily accessible, it becomes politically impossible. “It is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy,” Youba Sokona, the co-chair of one of the I.P.C.C.’s working groups, says. “But what is lacking are appropriate policies and institutions. The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change.”

Ronald Bailey hears that oil may remain cheap:

During the last decade, even as alarums about the advent of “peak oil” grew ever more frenzied, world oil production actually increased from 77.6 million barrels per day in 2003 to 86.8 million barrels per day in 2013. Lynch’s book The “Peak Oil” Scare and the Coming Oil Flood, scheduled for publication this coming spring, predicts even larger leaps in the global production of crude. Lynch thinks world oil production will increase to around 110 million barrels per day during the next decade. In the meantime, global oil prices will hover around $60 per barrel over the next couple of years and conceivably drop to $40 per barrel in five years. At $40 per barrel, the price of oil would, in inflation-adjusted dollars, just about equal the annual average price of $17 per barrel in 1998.

I asked Lynch if this meant oil markets might be in for a replay of the price collapse that occurred in the 1980s. He replied that he thought so. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the price of oil reached its peak annual average of $106 per barrel in 1980 and then collapsed to an annual average of $30.80 per barrel in 1986.

Jordan Weissmann sees some advantages to the low prices – beyond more money in the pockets of consumers:

Right now, the band of small and midsized oil companies that have fracked their way to riches aren’t the most efficient or strategic bunch. As one executive put it in 2010, the early days of the boom were mostly driven by “brute force and ignorance” as drillers tried to get crude out of the ground as fast as possible. That approach has led to lots of poorly structured wells that quickly run dry on oil and wasted effort fracking shale deposits that don’t produce much to begin with. When prices for oil were lofty, the industry could afford to be that sloppy. With prices sinking, however, it will be forced to improve its methods. That could be good for the environment. Fracking involves pumping a toxic mix of water, chemicals, and sand into shale deposits to crack them, and the more sparingly it’s used, the fewer problems it creates. A more cautious industry could also be good for investors, who would see less of their money sunk into failed wells.

When Silicon Valley Dabbles In Journalism

In response to TNR’s implosion, Lucia Moses considers why applying tech solutions to media so often ends in tears:

“They’ve arrived from Mars with the typical arrogance of a tourist, over-noticing the wrong things,” said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. “If there were a simple solution, smart people like me would have done it. Publishing is an extremely fidgety business with a direct cost, a base that is in many cases unwilling to pay for the product, and an indirect audience in marketers and advertisers who have found increasing efficiencies, which have driven down CPMs.”

Apart from that, it’s a great industry to work in! McArdle compares media and tech industries:

In many ways, a company such as Facebook and eBay is the opposite of a media company.

Those companies have huge network effects, and they get their content for free or nearly free. Making a lot of money out of a business like that is hard — many more attempts have failed than succeeded. But a prestige media company makes expensive content that has zero network effects; you can’t copyright a fact. In the new digital world, hours after your expensively reported story is out, dozens of other outlets will have re-reported the same facts and taken some of the traffic. Making a lot of money out of a business like that is much more difficult. Chris Hughes was not insane to think that he could make something like a New Yorker for Washington. It was, however, pretty crazy to think that you could do so without losing a bunch of money.

You need only read the stories about FirstLook and The New Republic to understand how badly tech-style management assumptions translate into media. When that approach failed, spectacular public meltdowns ensued. So the new moguls now learn another key difference about the media business: You are always being closely watched, so communications, and effective crisis management, are supremely important. A spectacular HR crisis translates more directly into loss of reputation, and sales, than it does almost anywhere else.

Drezner is in the same ballpark:

I’ve heard a lot of nonprofit sector folk complaining that Silicon Valley investors want to revolutionize their field without really understanding it.

The pattern in each of these cases is that a fabulously wealthy and successful investor enters a new and not-terribly-successful sector and tries to apply the lessons learned from the investor’s past successes to this new area. Except that there’s not a ton of evidence that those lessons are truly generalizable. One almost wonders if there is an extension of the Peter Principle for investors.

The 73rd Most Disruptive Idea In History Is … Kitty Litter?

Paul Ford makes a compelling case:

Ed Lowe was working at his father’s delivery business in southern Michigan when he had a brilliant idea: take some fuller’s earth (a type of clay) and sell it to local farmers for chickens litter-heartto nest. He called it Chicken Litter. It was 1947. The farmers weren’t interested—which is why Lowe had a big pile of it when a local woman came by. She’d brought her cat in from the January cold and needed some sand for her cat box. On an impulse, Lowe offered her some fuller’s earth instead.  The stuff turned out to absorb the ammonia smell of cat pee. The woman soon came back for more. So did her friends. After enough requests, Lowe put some fuller’s earth in bags, wrote KITTY LITTER on them, and dropped them off at a hardware store. The product sold, and it sold in supermarkets and pet stores. The market grew ever outward, from southern Michigan to the world.

The introduction of Kitty Litter meant that after millennia of scratching at the door cats could come indoors and stay there. They had long been visitors in American homes; now they were residents. In some ways it has been a hostile takeover: There are millions more cats than dogs in the U.S. This also means that Lowe is the indirect father of countless Internet cat memes. Anyone who sells recreational laser pointers, fuzzy mice, scratching posts, cat furniture, or electric-fountain cat water dishes should thank him, too.

(Photo via Cheezburger.com)

Quote For The Day

“I have known cops who haven’t had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend; and these are white cops. They really weren’t overtly racist. They weren’t consciously racist. But you know what they had in their minds that made them act out and beat a black suspect unwarrantedly? They had fear. They were afraid of black men. I know a lot of white cops who have told me. And I interviewed over 900 police officers in 18 months and they started talking to me, it was almost like a therapy session for them I didn’t realize that they needed an outlet to talk,” – Constance Rice, civil rights attorney.