Sunday School Extra Credit 12/29/19

In our final Sunday School Extra Credit of the year, I sat in on what could be the one of the most un-self-aware moments of 2019, Meet the Press and "National Menace" Chuck Todd (hear that reference at around 23:30 of this video) looking at "the assault on truth" and "our post-truth society, and how a changing media landscape has created chaos out of order."

The opening of the show include Kellyanne Conway ("alternative facts"), Rudy Giuliani ("truth isn't truth"), Donald Trump ("what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening") -- and Bill Clinton ("it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is").

That's right: he brings in a two-decades old example, suggesting equivalency between what's happening today, every single day, and Bill Clinton answering a question on whether he is or is not still not having "sexual relations with that woman" while fighting for his presidency. I'm not pretending Clinton wasn't a liar - of course he was - but if the point of the show is to delve into our "post-truth society," is Todd really trying to sell us on this being a two-decades-old problem? And if yes, where the hell has he been for the past 20 years? 

Anyway. The first segment begins with fake news being pumped out by Russia, not, he said, to influence the Trump/Clinton race, but to make money on Facebook. And, he continued, the idea of "fake news" has become a growth industry, morphing into "a political weapon in our nationalized politics." 

After giving some pretty well known examples, including the lies about the inaugural crowd, the 15,413 false or misleading Trump statements; the administration's campaign against the press, and social media disinformation. Todd also quoted UK author/tech expert Ben Nimmo on the "four things that disinformation actors" do: Dismiss, Distort, Distract (this includes whataboutism, which is Todd's interview stock-in-trade) and Dismay.

So, let's hear from the print media experts - Martin Baron (exec editor of the WaPo) and Dean Baquet (exec editor of the NYT) on this. Baron noted our current environment is one where conspiracy theories and lies are spread regularly, and how people tend to pay attention to 'news' sources that "confirms their pre-existing points of view..." but that

...(journalists) still have the responsibility for determining what's true and what's false and, in particular, holding our government officials accountable for what they say and telling people they're telling the truth, or they're not telling the truth. That's fundamental to the responsibilities that we have as a journalistic institution.

Todd shared data from a CBS poll showing that 91% of Trump supporters said he, Trump, is where they go for accurate information, and wondered how that challenges the papers. Baron said that's how Trump likes it, saying

(Trump) wants to disqualify the mainstream media as an arbiter of facts and of truth... And he wants to disqualify the courts. He wants to disqualify historians. He wants to disqualify scientists, any independent source of information.

Todd wondered if they need to "market the truth" and "start campaigning, around the country" to explain how facts work. Here's Baquet on that.

What I think we're going to have to get very aggressive at is to be really transparent, to assume nothing, and to make sure people know where we are, how we do our work, to show our work more aggressively. That's a different muscle for us.... To my mind, that's a form of marketing our journalism... as well as what we're doing now...for Marty and I and others to be out in the world, talking about what we do and very aggressively defending our institutions, defending the truth and defending our important role in democracy. 

They also talked about whether voters want to be lied to, something that the MTP executive producer apparently says often, according to Todd, and there was some disagreement on that. Baquet noted

I'm not convinced that people want to be lied to. I think people want to be comforted. And I think politicians sometimes say comforting things to them, and our job is to jump into the breach and jump into those conversations, to do the deep reporting, to say "look, I'm sorry. What I have to say may be uncomfortable. But that think you just heard that made you feel good is a lie." And I think that's our job. 

Todd brought up an example, saying  "Coal jobs is what comes into my head. "Oh, we're going to bring coal jobs back." And you're like, "That's not going to happen," right, Marty?" Baron was more circumspect than Todd ever is.

I think we have to be careful. I don't want to be dismissive of people who support the president. I think they're owed our respect, and they certainly have mine. But you know, they've, they feel the so-called elites in Washington have not paid attention to them, that they don't understand their lives... their concerns... and that they're not being heard. And they feel that the president is actually listening to them and addressing their concerns and so they tend to believe him. And they're deeply suspicious of so-called elites, like us, at least people who are described as elites. 

Baquet said he struggles with being considered one of the elite, having grown up poor in New Orleans, but that "we have to do a much better job."

I agree with what Marty said, understanding some of the forces that drive people in parts of American that maybe are not as powerful in New York or Los Angeles. We have to do a better job covering religion. We have to do a better job understanding why some people support Donald Trump... we cannot dismiss everybody who supported Donald Trump... First off, that's not journalistically moral. It's journalistically moral to reach out, understand the world, and be read. That's our job.

They moved on to a discussion of how to describe journalism at mainstream news organizations, with "fair" or "objective" or "balanced" as possibly appropriate. Baron mentioned fairness, open-mindedness, being listeners more than talkers, and being fair to the public.

We can’t -- you know, we need to be direct and straightforward and tell people what we've actually learned. And so I believe in being fair in the sense of being open-minded, going into a story, but being fair with the public at the end, once we've done our jobs, telling them what we've found.

Todd offered his own thoughts, first saying

The phrase I like to use these days is simply -- Go ahead.

Baquet added a couple more descriptors.

I was going to add my two. I agree with all those, of course. But empathetic, I think great journalists are empathetic, which means they listen, and they try to understand. That's not pandering. And then, I think the most powerful word, for me, is independent -  independent, which means independent of everybody, by the way, except, except our principles and our readers.

And here's where they left this segment, with a second thought from Todd ('Go ahead' not being simply enough, apparently).

All, all good words, there. I use a phrase these days, around here -- “Don't round the edges. Simply, say what you see.” 

There were other segments in the show, as well as the roundtable discussion. I'll pull together a highlight reel of anything noteworthy, and I'll also share some thoughts on this, because while I think it's good to talk about this kind of thing, there were many things left unsaid.

See you around campus. 

The System is Rigged (Part Three)

Is the system rigged? I remember fondly the days when Trump first spoke of a rigged system --It was to try and coax Bernie Sanders supporters over to the dark side.

Now, though, in the World According to Trump, there is not a single independently-thinking person who believes we are #StrongerTogether, no one who decided on their own to purchase an #ImWithHer t-shirt or plant a Clinton/Kaine yard sign, and certainly no one who is a #NeverTrump thinker has become one without being influenced by the Clinton Machine. Only Kool-Aid drinkers and indiscriminate Skittles eaters buy into that stuff.

No, all the Dems are in bed with Clinton, who is in bed with the media, when the media isn't in bed with itself, or digging up liars (whom Trump will sue as soon as the election is over and he's done suing the New York Times), or being banned when they say something mean or nasty.

Need proof? Look at all of these media contributions to the political candidates! 96% of those who contributed gave to Clinton, not Trump. Clearly the election is rigged by these television critics, sports and fashion editors, restaurant reviewers, local beat and tech gadget reporters, and so on, especially by those in, say, Shelter Island, NY and Liberty, MO.

Missing from the list: Any national political reporters or anchors. No George Stephanopoulous or Keith Olbermann here - because if there was, we wouldn't be reading about Russia Television's Larry King donating to HRC. The study did not consider talking heads and paid gabbers to be journalists, but if the finance director of the Washington Post is included, how is a talking head not?

I believe there should be a wall between journalists and the people and stories they cover, but absent a connection between donors and articles they wrote or influenced, what are we to make of this? Is 'the media' against Donald Trump, and complicit in creating the 'rigged system' of which Trump recently grown so fond?

Well, that might not be the case, or at least, not the way Trump thinks. There's an interesting study, released back in June without a lot of mainstream media attention; folks at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy looked at coverage in 2015 leading up to the primaries, or what they called the 'invisible primary' season, and found that

...during the year 2015, major news outlets covered Donald Trump in a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbers - a high volume of media coverage preceded Trump's rise in the polls... The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of the Republican polls. 

The Democratic race in 2015 received less than half the coverage of the Republican race... For her part, Hillary Clinton had by far the most negative coverage of any candidate. In 11 of the 12 months, her "bad news" outpaced her "good news," usually by a wide margin, contributing to the increase in her unfavorable poll ratings in 2015.  (Note: all emphasis added.)

Huh?. Rigged system, you say?

So what explains the news media's early fascination with Trump?...Although journalists play a political brokering role in presidential primaries, their decisions are driven by news values rather than political values. Journalists are attracted to the new, the unusual, the sensational... Trump fit that need as no other candidate in recent memory. Trump is arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee. Although he subsequently tapped a political nerve, journalists fueled his launch. 

But wait - it's gets better.

Journalists seemed unmindful that they and not the electorate were Trump's first audience. Trump exploited their lust for riveting stories. He didn't have any other option...The politics of outrage was his edge, and the press became his dependable if unwitting ally.

Here's another interesting finding, that goes to what was reported. For Trump, a mere 12% of his coverage was about the issues, with 43% of the coverage being negative (particularly after the Muslim ban comments). For Clinton, more than double the amount of coverage was issues-related (stil a meager 28%) but the negative coverage was an overwhelming 84%.

In 2016, things continued on the same general level; Trump's overall coverage was 49% positive to 51% negative, with most of the negative coming after both Ted Cruz and John Kasich had dropped out of the race, when the balance tipped to 61% negative/39% positive.  Making things worse, the 2016 study notes,

The press did not heavily cover the candidates' policy positions, their personal and leadership characteristics, their private and public histories...Such topics accounted for roughly a tenth of the primary coverage. 

And yet, Trump is the one making the 'the media is against me' claims; it seems likely that argument could most substantively by made by the Clinton campaign, based on the Harvard studies and on the amount of free media the campaigns have received. According to this analysis published in The Economist,

Data from mediaQuant, an analytic firm, show that Mr. Trump has enjoyed a healthy advantage in 'earned media' or free media coverage, throughout his campaign....And Mr. Trump has consistently dominated the news compared with Mrs. Clinton - sometimes by margins as large as six to one.  

Trump's plan - hog the limelight "by crossing a sacrosanct political line, bask in the attention for several days, then do it again before your opponents have a chance to get noticed." - worked well against his 16 Republican opponents, but Clinton's free media eventually caught up with Trump after the Democratic convention, when his strategy was proving less successful.

What does this all boil down to?

As noted in The Economist's article, which was published in mid-August but still rings true today,

As his polling numbers drop, Mr. Trump is doubling down on his media bashing... this seems an unlikely strategy to win votes. After decades in the spotlight, Mr. Trump may at last be learning that not all publicity is good publicity.

I would only add that not all negative publicity is a sign that the system is rigged against you.

An Easter Message

Easter sunrise, 2015/veritablepastiche

Today is a day of celebration for some, a deeply religious holiday for those who celebrate that The Son is risen. For others, it's a 'normal' day, filled with content that the sun has risen.

For me, being in the latter half of that equation, Easter Sunday has always been a day of family, food and laughter, with heavy emphasis on the laughter part, certainly while my Dad was alive, and we have done well to keep that going since he's been gone.

When we were kids, we colored eggs, and had our Easter egg hunts, searching high and low for the ones we had colored and the coveted plastic ones with coins or jelly beans inside them.  I can picture my brothers, one and two years older than me, and taller, wandering around the house on Easter morning, checking things out, making mental notes of where the good ones were. My oldest brother had a way of tilting his head and raising an eyebrow when he saw a treasure waiting in what I'm sure Mom and Dad thought was a particularly good hiding place.

I also remember us getting chided by my Dad, for doing reconnaissance before he and Mom got up, for trying to take more than our fair share, not playing well together, and so on.

Even though we stopped going to church when we were young, around nine or ten I think, there was always an expectation  that we would 'behave' appropriately.  Not just from a discipline perspective, such as riding your bike into the charcoal grill (me), or succumbing to peer pressure and shoplifting (me), or playing with matches (NOT me), or a classic, 'spelling' bad words by writing 7734 upside-down (yeah that was me again), but from the larger perspective too.

You did not need to go to church, you did not need to believe that Christ died on the cross, or in the Resurrection, or in the rest of it, to understand that treating people fairly and with respect was the right thing to do, that taking everything you saw or could get your hands on and leaving others with nothing was the wrong thing to do, that being mean and calling people names or picking on people who were 'different' was not acceptable, or that being charitable, even to your annoying little sister, was the better path to take.

Surely, we did not learn these lessons perfectly, sometimes to the chagrin of my Methodist mom and my non-religious Dad, but I suspect they hadn't learned the lessons perfectly either. My Dad never met a dumb blond joke he didn't like, for example, and never missed an episode of All in the Family, but made sure that 'Polack' jokes became 'Peter, Andy and Susan' jokes.  They never stopped trying - and never stopped encouraging us, through word and deed, to keep trying as well, not because there'll be a place for us in Heaven if we do, but because our place on Earth can be better for the effort.

And that's where we are today, some 45 or 50 years later. Our collective place on Earth can be better for the effort, for the simple wisdom that we were taught when we were kids:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 

Let's not do things to others in the name of our religious beliefs or our politics that we would not willingly accept if done to us by others in the name of their religious beliefs or their politics.

Let's not be the reason why, in what is arguably the greatest democracy in the history of the world, we need to have laws on the books reminding us that we cannot discriminate against others based on their

race, color, religion, ancestry, age, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identify, or United States military service

This doesn't mean that we can't find things distasteful, or that we have to like everyone, or that our circle of friends needs to look like a Target ad or an Applebee's commercial or the stock photos we see in our company's publications, or that we have to agree with everyone on everything, or even that we have to understand everyone else.

After all, we are not perfect, and I don't think (for believers or non-believers) that perfection is the expectation. But can we strive to do better, be more accepting, more tolerant, more forgiving, more understanding?

Make room. Do unto others.

Happy Easter.

Health Insurance and Cable TV: Separated at Birth?

The other day, I talked about what might be behind the hatred and vitriol that are flooding comment streams on the Hobby Lobby case. I didn't much think it was about contraception.

In researching that post and in doing lots of other research since the Affordable Care Act was passed, I uncovered what might be an educational opportunity.  It seems that, once you get past complaints about people being required to have insurance, or complaining about all those other, shall we say unworthy  people getting insurance under the ACA (which don't really seem to be about health insurance any more than the contraception argument is), some people are complaining about something they don't understand.

So today, I thought I'd try to make health insurance understandable by comparing it to something else that most of us are familiar with.  Because for most practical intents and purposes, health insurance works like cable TV. (I'm using cable as the example for this post, but it's true of the dish guys and fiber optic guys too).

I mean, think about it: you know which stations you really want to watch, but it's just about impossible to get only those stations; instead, you end up getting 30, 50 or a hundred or more stations in your all-in-one or bundle-of-joy package that you will maybe watch once or twice a year,  along with the 20, 30 or 40 you've convinced yourself you're going to watch regularly.

Why do you get so much more than you want? Because the cable companies would rather give you a bunch of stuff that you have no intention of watching (in addition to what you really want), because it's easier and/or more cost effective for them to do so. Or, if you're really cynical, they do it because they can, because they're giant conglomerates and in some cases monopolies, and they don't give a hoot about you and me. Of course, the cable guys would probably prefer to say that they can deliver better benefits to more people by having everyone have only a limited number of packages to choose from, a couple of sizes fitting most customers, and by sharing the cost across all users instead of individually charging us for what we actually watch.

Now, look at that description above, and replace cable guy with health insurance company, and see if it makes sense. "Better benefits than you need or want, because it's easier and/or more cost effective to do it that way than it is to individually charge us for what we actually use" sounds pretty much like health insurance, right?

(And yes, so does "giant conglomerates" and "monopolies" and "they don't give a hoot about you and me" -- that's one more similarity between the two, sometimes -- but it's kind of off topic).

When it comes to cable TV, I hate the 'more is better' concept. Frankly, I'd much rather pay for what I want than get a bunch of junk that I don't care about, even if it means I pay more.  Most people think that's nuts -- why pay more than you have to? -- but I think it would help me determine what I really want, versus what I think I want, and frankly if I had to pay what it really cost to watch TV, I'd probably watch less and save money.

When it comes to insurance, however, I'm actually OK with paying for more than I need, (or at least more than I hope I need) and sharing the costs with other people. Why? Because doing it this way means I actually end up paying less for what I need/want than I would if I had to pay the full shot myself.

Most folks know that generally, preventative care is 'free' under the ACA and under most plans in most states, either because of mandates that have been around since before the ACA, or because of what's commonly referred to as 'conforming legislation' that brought many state regs up to the level of the new federal regs.

In addition to the preventative care, and no waiting periods for preexisting conditions, and no annual or lifetime limits on a set of 'essential' services, there are other mandated benefits that are covered under most plans.

For example, here's just a partial list of the ones that are covered (at least to some extent) here in NY:

• home health care
• second surgical opinion, and second opinion for cancer diagnoses
• medical conditions leading to infertility, and some infertility treatments
• reconstruction after breast cancer related mastectomy
• enteral formula
• chiropractic care
• treatment for eating disorders, chemical dependence/abuse and mental health
• autism spectrum disorders
• bone density screening and related treatments
• diabetic education, supplies and equipment

I don't know about you, but I don't have desire to use some of these, or I'm the wrong age, or I don't have the specific illnesses that benefit from the treatments offered.  And I sincerely hope that I won't need to use some of the other benefits on the list  At the same time, however, I understand that lots of people do need these benefits, that some people are particularly passionate about making sure they're available, and that the passion they exhibit can drive legislators to pass laws that translate into benefits that you and I will have to pay for, even if we will never ever use them.

Let's go back to our analogy:

• Somehow, all the folks out there who are passionate about things like alligator wrestling, hoarding, cooking, decorating, shopping, sports (individually or collectively), movies, history, antiques, guy stuff, girl stuff, animals, kid stuff and everything in between have convinced someone that they deserve air time, (just like the people who are passionate about health insurance benefits have convinced people to cover them). 
• Someone figured out that it's cheaper if we all get stuck with the whole shebang even if we're not interested (just like the ACA and state insurance regs do). 
• And the local TV stations have convinced people that we should be able to get them 'for free' (just like preventative care), and that we should all be able to have it all now (like not having to wait for waiting periods to pass). 

When I look at the similarities between health insurance and cable TV, I'm left wondering why we so readily embrace the concept of subsidizing other people's entertainment, but balk at the same process when it's applied to health insurance?

And why we don't see that our own television -- and health insurance -- are subsidized by coworkers or neighbors or family members or complete strangers, so when we complain about people who are getting 'something for nothing' or who are not 'paying their fair share', we're really talking about ourselves?

I'd like to think it's less like the contraception argument and more because people don't know how it works. Do you think maybe this analogy will help?

All My Tax Dollars Are Sacred

Rand Paul is wondering whether we should punish people on public assistance if they have more kids.  

His comments came at a Commerce Lexington luncheon; he got to talking about the benefits of not having children out of wedlock, including the increased likelihood that the mom and family would end up living in poverty, when compared to married couples with children.

I'm OK with that; and besides, particularly when he was talking about high school kids having children, it's good advice. But here's what he said that is causing an uproar.

...there are all kinds of ways to stop having kids.

You know, but we have to teach our kids that. But some of that's sort of some tough love too. Maybe we have to say 'enough's enough, you shouldn't be having kids after a certain amount.' I don't know how you do all that because then it's tough to tell a woman with four kids that she's got a fifth kid that we're not going to give her any more money. But we have to figure out how to get that message through because it's part of the answer. 

He went on to note

Some of that's not coming from government. It needs to come from ministers and people in the community and parents and grandparents to convince our kids to do something different.

Now, I'm not going to argue whether a cap on benefits for people who have more kids is a good thing or a bad thing, or whether it 'works' or doesn't work. In this link to Think Progress, you can read up on that for yourself.

But I have to ask, if we are to stop rewarding people for having children, why isn't Rand Paul suggesting that we stop granting people additional tax benefits for each added dependent?  I mean, with the incentive, what's to stop some married couple from just popping out more kids so they can get the savings on their income taxes?  And what does having kids have to do with income? If you want to dis-incent people from having children, then take away all of the birth incentives for all of the moms.

This is just like drug testing for welfare folks; if you want to test people who receive money from government programs for drugs, test ALL of them, including anyone collecting a pension through the state or federal system, anyone who works directly in a government job, anyone who works for a company that has a government contract, and so on.

Of course, by the time we make all of those connections, we'll have government-mandated urine tests every week for just about everyone in the country.  Sure is a good thing we all have insurance now!

The only way we are going to spend less money is to treat all of our tax dollars as sacred and worthy of protection, not just the ones we spend on the less fortunate.