For the Record: I Was Proved F*ing Right

Used this back in 2018.

Or at least that's where Professor Rosen seems to have ended up, though he doesn't seem clear himself whether he's saying it or not:

Here's the AP: "Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure deal was thrown in doubt Friday as Republican senators felt 'blindsided' by his insistence that it must move in tandem with his bigger package." https://t.co/1PhLSHt4ao

Again: Why did @AP buy the "we were blindsided" gambit? 2/2

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) June 26, 2021

Schrödinger's Group of 21 Update

Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP, via.

Jordan in comments trying to figure out what I was saying:

I'm having real trouble following this (not because your explanations and analyses have been lacking in any way, but just because it's so complex and multilayered).

Basically, you're concluding by saying that the deal is done — both parts of it — despite McConnell etc. publicly bitching, because if it wasn't, then Biden wouldn't be talking about it being accomplished...right?

To clarify, I'm afraid it was basically bad writing--or blogging, web-logging, in the most literal sense, just typing up information as it came in. I'm feeling very uncertain whether this was a brilliant plan or an awful error.

I started off just to record how Rosen jumped on me, with the idea that I'd then try to figure who was right—was it a group of 10 senators or was it 21?—but can't even draw a conclusion on that at this point, let alone on the significance of what happened. The thing Jordan mentions is from inside the argument with Rosen (what do Biden's remarks mean, what are they evidence of, with reference to that?). Rosen later sent some tweets without tagging me, complaining that USA Today had been irresponsible in claiming that it was a group of 21. He still thinks he and The Times were right, and I can't say I even have a right to disagree, only at best that I don't think it matters much who was right: I mean, I still don't know the answer, but my best defense is that the question itself, 10 or 21, wasn't at all the major thing.

For the Record: Schrödinger's Group of 21

 

President Biden with the Group of Ten Minus Two (Tester and Collins invisible behind Portman?), or something. Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/AP via Deseret News. 

They already claim to have 11 Republicans. https://t.co/BFe61ZM6cL I think it's that earmarks are back

— Specter of Happiness (@Yastreblyansky) June 25, 2021

I just meant to be helpful, I'd got this thing nobody was talking about from Wonkette, reading for the previous post. But Professor Rosen kind of snapped at me.

Citizens Agenda

Photo by Reuters via The Atlantic.

Jay Rosen has been pushing the concept of a "citizens agenda" in political campaign coverage, meant to ground the coverage in the discussion of what voters want to hear the candidates talking about:

It revolves around the power of a single question: “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” From good answers to that everything else in the model flows.

Judging from this interview of Senator Kamala Harris, who has just published a book and may or may not be a presidential candidate in 2020, by Rachel Martin on NPR, it's going to be a long, hard couple of years for the citizens agenda.

Questions on the political purpose of writing the book:

People like you write books like this mostly when they are getting ready to launch a campaign — it's a "get to know me on a national level."

Questions on material in the book, relating to her parents:

RIP, I guess

By Freakshow, via Freaking News.

Reporters in the era when McCain flourished saw themselves as sitting between parties, creatures of neither, equal opportunity cynics, un-ideological, in possession of the most awesome crap-detectors in politics. They also loved him because he reflected this image back to them. 3

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 26, 2018

Jay Rosen's Proustian theory of McCain ("Proustian" doesn't mean it's a joke; it's pretty good) https://t.co/33bmjzkrR9

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 26, 2018

I had in mind one of a number of passages like this one, from À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, as cited in this quotes compendium:

Rancid

Jay Rosen throws a fit in the grand style over an especially slimy piece by Aaron Blake of the higher campaign criticism in the Washington Post bloglet "The Fix" (named, I guess, for the expression "the fix is in", for the first item in the Credo of the Church of the Savvy).

The item is a refined appreciation of Romney's continuing use of Obama quotations stripped from context to say things Obama did not say and then castigating him for saying them—a discussion of how such things work, how effective they are as a technique, without reference to how they knowingly deceive and distort (besides, everybody does it—the fix is in).

Uncredited portrait of Elijah. From the Archdiocese of Washington.

Rosen thunders:

Fight for what is true. That is how I would put the alternative to “first, show you’re savvy.” From this point of view, it is a regrettable loss for the polity, and for political journalism–and for the voters, the public–when dubious claims gain traction and quotes pulled from their context appear to “work.” What the press can do to prevent this is try to raise the costs of making false or misleading claims, which is the whole point of fact-checking.

Recognizing that there are no angels in competitive politics, recognizing also that our choices are typically binary, journalists can point out to voters (or at least the portion of voters who are users of political journalism) which candidate is stretching the truth more often or more strenuously. If it’s fair game (Blake’s term) to assess which candidate is connecting more effectively with voters or following a shrewder strategy, then it is equally fair to judge who’s being more deceptive.

Later, he starts saying something that I think is pretty new:

I could be wrong, but I think a growing number of Blake’s colleagues in journalism are losing patience with the kind of analysis on view in his rancid item. They are not for the most part political reporters, for whom the savvy is everything. They are journalists from other beats and other persuasions. And they’ve had it with the “who cares if it’s true? it works” attitude....

The savvy is still in charge. It is the worldview of choice in pro journalism; in the political reporting wing it wins maybe 95 to 5. But it has a potentially fatal weakness built in: it brackets questions of truth, suggesting that they have become either quaint (meaning: of interest only to the unsavvy) or irrelevant in making distinctions (because both sides do it.) The more open this attitude becomes among political reporters–and this is what distinguished Blake’s post, its baldness–the more repulsive it feels to their colleagues. 

To which I would like to add just a few words.

While it may be exceptionally sexy to be among the savvy, it also requires a lot less work than the truth, and less actual information about the world, and maybe rather less brain. Because savvy is what everybody (everybody who matters) already knows. It doesn't take digging through files, or interviewing people whose clothes aren't very nice, or learning economics or military science or what have you, the things that are relevant to government policy; all you have to do is get invited to the right parties. What a gig!

Those "journalists from other beats and other persuasions" have to do all these things, and more, and most strenuous of all, they have to use their own judgment; you can't just take down the quote, you have to ascertain (a) whether it's true or not and (b) why the speaker is telling you.* And my suspicion is that if Rosen is right and those journalists are starting to get annoyed with the situation in political reporting as it is, it is at least in part because the politicoes are lazy, shabby, and not very bright, in spite of the mountains of money that come their way. The Emperor in the story was savvy too, but as was eventually pointed out he was naked all the same.

*Why are you telling me that Valerie Plame works for the CIA? The answer to that question was the only newsworthy thing in the whole affair, but nobody ever asked. If an intelligence reporter instead of a savvy political reporter had been on the story, maybe we'd know.