David Spett

Every now and then, I wonder if the decline of newspapers could actually be good for democracy. Today was one of those days, with two pretty disturbing items in the Washington Post.

First, a superficial, uncritical front-page profile of Ben Bernanke. Dean Baker has a pretty good summary of what this misses (in a nutshell: even a passing mention of the possibility that Bernanke and his ideology might have some responsibility for the economic crisis). One passage particularly stood out:

[Bernanke's leadership] strategy has paid dividends. At the December meeting, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher didn’t want to cut rates and initially dissented from the decision, sources said. At the last minute, in the spirit of public unanimity, he changed his vote.

Disturbingly, the writer implies dissent is bad, while Bernanke’s “strategy” must be the reason the Fed governors were unified. Like so many other stories in the MSM, this one’s littered with superficial, uncriticial (hate to use those adjectives again, but I really think they’re the best) assumptions mired in conventional wisdom.

The second concern from today’s paper: A response about halfway down in this online chat with WaPo congressional correspondent Paul Kane.

The anonymous questioner asks, “Care to defend yourself against this criticism from Media Matters” suggesting you didn’t provide proper context when quoting GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe criticizing Democrats?

Kane reacted strongly: “Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness.” (Sensitive much, Paul?)

The real problem comes later. “We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us,” Kane writes.

Unintended sexual innuendo aside, that response is ethically bankrupt. Have reporters no responsibility to provide some context and point out that these very senators criticizing Democrats for circumventing the filibuster, themselves circumvented the filibuster when they held a majority… and criticized minority Dems who disagreed? (To be fair, the doubletalk applies to both parties, but that’s not the point.)

If you’re just going to copy down what senators say, I might as well watch C-SPAN, and I see no reason to lament the loss of your job or the death of your industry.

I’ve been getting this Facebook ad a lot lately. Are they really sure they want me back? Also, is this a guarantee that every Medill graduate will get jobs (note the plural)? Lastly, who hyphenates “multi-media”?

Missing from all the news stories about Obama’s pick for education secretary, Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, is any mention of the fact that several dozen children in Duncan’s school system have been murdered or injured in each of the past few years, largely due to gun violence. In fact, the toll (more than three dozen) eclipses that of the Virginia Tech shootings in the spring of 2007.

Duncan proponents hail him as a visionary who’ll make a great education secretary. Maybe so. A fair argument can be made that since most of the violence occurred outside of school property, and since it doesn’t have much to do with education policy, he doesn’t deserve all (or any) of the blame.

Still, the mainstream national media’s downplaying of the killings — with a few notable exceptions — has always irked me. None of the murdered children were white or wealthy; if they were, we might have paid more attention, as we did with the Virginia Tech massacre. If the killings had been more sensational, or had they been less related to gang incidents in an inner city, they might have actually registered on a national level.

Whether or not Duncan deserves blame for the disturbing spate of violence against schoolchildren, they’re a part of his legacy as Chicago’s public schools chief, and they ought to be included in any news article about his nomination. Senators would be wise to address the issue in confirmation hearings as well.

Further reading: The Chicago Tribune published an interactive map chronicling the killings of the 07-08 school year. And a year and a half ago, I wrote about this issue for my school newspaper and interviewed a sociology professor about possible causes of the violence.

(Cross-posted at Pushback.org)

When a story about a college paper hits Jim Romenesko’s web site, a news hub for journalists, it’s a big deal–at least in the media world.

On Friday, Romenesko featured a Seattle Times story about a paper at the University of Washington that ran the following illustration alongside a column opposing gay marriage:

The student columnist, John Fay, argued his case:

Once you’ve legalized gay marriage, why not polygamy, incest, bestiality or any other form of union?

Students at the school were outraged, the Times reported:

Organizers of the campus group “Students for a Hate Free Daily” say they expect about 300 people to show up for a campus rally today after more than 1,000 signed up with the group online. The Graduate and Professional Student Senate, meanwhile, passed a resolution this week demanding the paper apologize. [...]

Freshman Kyle Rapinan, who is organizing today’s rally, said the column is homophobic and incites “fear and hate.” The Daily staff should take sensitivity training, he said, and have better protocols for dealing with delicate topics.

I’d agree that the column and accompanying illustration are wrongheaded, disrespectful, and irrational, and I admire the outrage of Rapinan and others. Yet I have to differ with my fellow progressives in blaming the student paper, which simply served as a medium for a conservative argument we’ve all heard before.

Frankly, when critics say the column “incited fear and hate,” I think they mean to say they were offended. So what? We should tolerate ideas that differ from our own and that we find abhorrent, just as we expect others to do for us. There’s no other option in a free society.

The appropriate response to a laughable, conservative argument like this one isn’t to stamp it out–it’s to engage it.

If progressives want to win the fight against homophobes and gay marriage opponents–and right now, we’re not winning–we need to convince people that legalizing gay marriage is not a slippery slope to bestiality, polygamy, and incest, among other things. (Another fine solution: Get government out of the marriage business.)

We can start by focusing criticism on the proper target: the incredibly strong forces working to perpetuate intolerance, not the mainstream student press for printing what has become, sadly, a widely-accepted belief.

(Cross-posted at Pushback.org)

I’ve just begun a job with the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C, administering the group’s program to fund and support college student publications. More on my About Me page.

I’m excited to work with college journalists across the country. No longer will I write and report every day, but I should be able to occasionally post to Campus Progress’ web site and Pushback.org.

HARRISBURG (Nov. 20) – When compared to other states, taxes and spending in Pennsylvania aren’t very high, according to a new study from the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center.

“Unlike what we hear in the Capitol, Pennsylvania is not the highest-taxed state or the highest spending state,” said Sharon Ward, director of the left-leaning think tank. “In fact, we are in the lower half of the country. We rank 32nd [highest] on taxes and 30th on government spending, as a share of personal income.”

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HARRISBURG (Nov. 19) – The Civil Service Commission is violating “the spirit of the law” by not enforcing the Veterans’ Preference Program, which requires state agencies to give preference to qualified veterans applying for civil service jobs, Auditor General Jack Wagner said at a news conference Wednesday.

Wagner’s agency released an audit finding that from the three-year period ending in mid-2006, “25 state agencies filled 569 civil service employment positions without considering eligible veterans.”

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HARRISBURG (Nov. 18) – Pennsylvania’s system of funding special education isn’t broken, but it still could benefit from changes, a state official testified Tuesday.

“We’d be very open to working to reform the special education funding system, but is our system broken? No,” said John Tommasini, director of the state’s Bureau of Special Education.

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HARRISBURG (Nov. 18) – Attorney Chris Hobbs, 36, the son-in-law of the late Sen. James Rhoades, R-Schuylkill, said Tuesday that he is definitely in the running for the 29th senatorial district seat.

Rhoades, who had been in the state Senate since 1981, was reelected on Nov. 4 after a fatal car crash in October while he was on his way to a high school sporting event.

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HARRISBURG (Nov. 17) – Several individuals on both sides of the aisle say they are either running or considering a run in a special election to fill the seat of state Sen. James Rhoades, R-Schuylkill.

After dying in a car crash in October, Rhoades was posthumously reelected with 63 percent of the vote on Election Day. He defeated Democrat Peter “P.J.” Symons, the Schuylkill County prothonotary, who received 35 percent, and independent candidate Dennis Baylor, who received 2 percent of the vote.

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