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Posted on By Patrick Maines

‘Breaking Bad’ Elevated Television

If you’ve been out of the country for the past six years, you have an excuse for being unfamiliar with Breaking Bad, perhaps the best show that’s ever been on television.

The story of Walter White, a humble high school chemistry teacher who, upon learning he has lung cancer, decides to team up with a former student to make methamphetamines, BB portrays the transformation of White from “Mr. Chips into Scarface,” as the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, describes it.

Fresh off its Emmy award as best drama series, a recognition that was too long in coming, the question now is when will we see another TV series that is as astonishingly good?  And another question: Why is it so hard for truly excellent programming to get air time?

In his book Difficult Men, Brett Martin recounts the lengthy and harrowing path traversed by Gilligan on the way to securing a deal with AMC, one of the several channels that comprise AMC Networks.

Martin tells the tale of Gilligan’s meeting with executives of the TNT cable network, who liked the show but were afraid of the drug-making aspect of it: “We don’t want to be stereotypical philistine executives, but does it have to be meth?  We love this, but if we buy it, we’ll be fired.”

Nor was TNT the only cable network that turned thumbs down on Breaking Bad.  So too did Showtime, HBO, and FX, meaning, as Gilligan put it, “there was no place left in the known universe.”

Elsewhere in his book, Martin usefully recounts the words of the AMC executive (Rob Sorcher) who decided to take a chance on the show: “We had had success with Mad Men,” he said.  “And once you’ve had that cookie it tastes good.  You want another one.  The decision to go another way, believe me, it was … terrifying.  But once you did, once you chose quality over everything else … you could do anything.”

At a time when so much video programming – film as well as TV – is demographically driven, PC themed, and/or scripted for cardboard characters, Breaking Bad is something very different.

Incorporating tremendous writing, directing, acting, and visuals, BB delivered a series that was marked by ambiguity, complexity, surprise, and sophistication.

As many have noted, in recent years the Emmy’s have been dominated by cable rather than broadcast network programming.  Indeed, both pay and basic cable channels have gained a reputation as the place to find smarter, edgier original series like Mad Men, The Sopranos, and of course Breaking Bad (despite the initial drug-themed hesitation about BB).  And this raises the question of why much of the best programming has been gravitating to cable.  

One explanation is that broadcasting is much more heavily regulated.  For this reason, programming that is marked by sexual or violent content carries greater risk for broadcasters than for cable networks.  And the risks involved don’t issue from government only.

A case in point is the Showtime program Dexter, a series that, though critically acclaimed, features both sexual situations and violence.  In 2007, CBS announced that it was considering broadcasting reruns of Dexter over the air.  In response, a conservative group, the Parents Television Council, warned CBS affiliates to preempt the show, and threatened the show’s advertisers.

As it happened, CBS edited the reruns down to a TV-14 rating and aired them on its affiliates, but only for a single season.

None of this is to suggest that violence equals excellence, or that excellence can only be achieved with the inclusion of violence – only that where violence is a necessary ingredient in the excellent telling of a good story, its inclusion ought not to preempt the airing of it.

For years now, many people have bemoaned the “dumbing down” of America, a phenomenon defined by Wikipedia as “the deliberate diminishment of the intellectual level of the content of schooling and education, of literature and cinema, and of news and culture.”

The popular and critical success of Breaking Bad demonstrates that there is both the talent and the audience for something better.

                                               

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  A version of this article appeared in the online edition of USA Today on Sept. 29, 2013.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Opinion Journalism vs. Objective News Reporting

The rise of opinion journalism, not just among cable and the newer media but elements of the legacy media as well, magnifies the problem of the dearth of objective news reporting.  About five years ago even the Associated Press announced a turn toward opinion, euphemistically referred to as “accountability journalism,” while the Washington Post and the New York Times have for years now been foundering in the stuff.

Makes one wonder where to turn (outside, perhaps, of the business and financial journals) for investigative and feature news that is not in service to some political party, ideology, or special interest.

And what a loss!  At the very moment that this country desperately needs an independent, credible, and objective press to describe and chronicle the country’s manifest economic problems, there’s practically nobody in the Fourth Estate who commands widespread trust and respect.

For all the talk about the new media, much of it online, is there anyone so credulous as to believe they’re getting unvarnished facts in a “news report” published by such as Slate, Salon, or the Huffington Post?  Or, at the other extreme, by Breitbart, Drudge, or Newsmax?

Nor is there any relief to be found in the product offered up by outlets like Politico, an online journal that has never spotted an issue of such gravity it can’t be covered by resort to rumor, superficiality, and the banalities of horse race journalism.

The complete failure of the media to adequately explain complex policy issues first became unavoidably clear during the presidential election of 2008 when, despite the obvious nature of our economic distress at the time, the media demanded precisely nothing of substance on the subject from McCain or Obama.

This failure has also been a persistent feature of the coverage since of the Affordable Care Act, sequestration, the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing,” and unemployment.  A recent headline from Mediaite, summarizing a new Pew poll, put it this way: “Biased, Frivolous, And Liberal: Poll Shows Most Americans Still Distrust The Media.”

A number of academics have aided and abetted the collapse of objectivity as a journalistic standard, premising their arguments on the sophomoric notion that objectivity isn’t attainable.  Of course it isn’t attainable if there’s no interest in attaining it, but it’s not like objectivity is a Zen koan or some such. What’s required is editors who are smarter and tougher and more fair-minded than the reporters who work for them, and owners who care about the editorial product itself and not just the ads the editorial product attracts.

The need for objective news reporting grows in proportion to the number and kinds of societal problems, especially those with an important economic element.  Take, for instance, the recent scandals centering on the actions of the IRS.

For most political reporters, and most politicians, the targeting of conservatives by that agency is only of real importance if it can be shown that the president or senior administration officials ordered it.  But that’s just exactly backwards.  The targeting is vastly worse if there was no Administration input; if, instead, these were just the acts of a politicized bureaucracy.

Indeed, the accuracy and value-free qualities of government data collection and government-supplied information are indispensable to this or any well functioning democracy.  Whole markets, after all (not to mention laws and regulations) turn on the truthfulness and clarity of data such as that supplied every month by the Commerce and Labor departments.

A story posted on Aug.11, by Bloomberg reporter Jonathan Weil, adds a wrinkle to the subject. According to Weil, the Justice Department admitted to having grossly overstated the number of mortgage fraud cases the department had filed as part of a multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group.  Weil characterizes the false numbers originally given out as appearing to have been “willfully filed,” and only belatedly corrected because of the pressure put on by some other Bloomberg reporters.

In the larger scheme of things, this particular example of governmental malfeasance is probably not going to bring down the Republic, but the point of it all is to say that if the nation’s news media were to multiply Bloomberg’s reportorial effort by, say, a hundred (or a thousand) additional examples, the media might resurrect their own faltering reputations, and help sustain our democracy in the process.

                                               

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Reflections on the Sale of the Washington Post

Much is being said, almost all of it guesswork, about why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, what he plans to do with it, and what it all means.  Some argue it’s just a kind of trophy purchase, others that it was done to gain political influence, for Mr. Bezos and/or Amazon, in the Nation’s Capital.

Still others see in the purchase a path leading to a future in which important elements of the news media are nonprofit entities, either by design or in consequence of operations that, while unprofitable, are subsidized by owners with deep pockets.

I would guess, and hope, that all of these speculations are false.  The more likely reason that Mr. Bezos bought the Post is because he suspects he can operate it, using the tools of the new technologies, at a profit.  That by doing so he would also, serendipitously, save professional journalism may be a by-product of his purchase, whether it’s part of his motivation or not.

In 2000, The Media Institute gave Mr. Bezos its Free Speech Award, largely in recognition of the global reach of his book selling operation, sometimes over the objections of local governments.  In his acceptance speech, Mr. Bezos talked at length about the path he and his wife had followed in the creation and growth of Amazon, and the picture that emerged was not that of a politician or a philanthropist.

Instead, Mr. Bezos came across as an ambitious, disciplined, and hard-charging businessman.  (That same year, the Institute gave its other annual award to Robert Johnson, founder of BET, and I have often thought how similar the two men are.)

To put it another way, I think Mr. Bezos has too much self respect, and too little ego, to have purchased the Post either as a kind of grandstanding event, the better to aggrandize himself or Amazon, or to stand by and subsidize indefinitely a financially failing company.

After all, if news organizations are not created to make a profit, what are the standards of success or failure?  The idea that nonprofit status produces a more value-free product is belied by the reality that most philanthropists operating in the realm of the media have decided political views, a la the Knight Foundation, ProPublica, Open Society Institute, etc.

Going forward, there is one thing I would recommend to the gentleman: that he insist that the editors and reporters at the Post understand how important it is that the media be a watchdog on government. After all, if the media are not a check on government, who is?  If the only role of the media is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, the media wouldn’t deserve a First Amendment and the Founders wouldn’t have produced one.

Which is not to say that the Post is in all ways politically or ideologically one dimensional.  As contrasted with the New York Times, where the right-leaning Ross Douthat toils away in solitary isolation, the Post’s editorial page features lots of conservative columnists.

The problem so defined is not in the editorial pages but in the news pages – the paper’s breaking, feature, and investigative reports.  No subject better illustrates this point than the paper’s coverage of the ruinous, not to say corrupt, fiscal antics of Congress and the Administration.

Perhaps the greatest threat not just to the financial health but to the very security of this country’s citizens is the growth of government, and of the corresponding governmental debt, at the federal, state, and local levels. Nor is this a new development. It’s been going on for years and the Washington Post has looked right past the kind of things that, were they done in the private sector, would yield indictments and incarceration.

There are things to admire in the Washington Post, and it’s to be expected that Mr. Bezos would not come out with early comments of concern about the editorial product there.  But if he cares about the promotion of excellence in journalism, and would like to add conservatives and Republicans to the newspaper’s admirers, this is something he ought to put in his cart.

                                               

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Google’s Impact on Journalism

The products and services offered by Google are well known and highly regarded.  Every day, millions of consumers around the globe visit the company’s search engine or sites like Google News or YouTube.  And for this, the company’s employees and (especially) its founders have been well compensated.

But there’s another side to Google that consumers know very little about.  That is Google the corporation, and the effect its business practices are having on competitors, and most dramatically on the professional media, news and entertainment alike.

In important measure, people know little about Google the corporation because news stories and commentary about the company’s business practices are mostly confined to industry trade publications, or technology and economic journals.

Even the public policy issues that the company addresses are complex, and hard to write about in a way that wouldn’t cause most readers’ eyes to glaze over.  How, for instance, would one popularize such issues as the district and appellate court rulings in Viacom v. YouTube, or the FCC’s “network neutrality” proceedings, or the FTC’s recently concluded investigation of Google’s search and advertising policies?

So it’s easy to understand why the public at large doesn’t know much about Google’s role in these matters, but book and newspaper publishers do.  So too do movie studios and Google’s competitors in the online travel business, to name just a few.

And what all of these other companies know is that Google’s scale, business tactics, and aggressive lobbying amount to a distinct threat to their very existence.  A single datum provides a startling view of the challenge: Through the first half of 2012, Google by itself took in more ad dollars than the entire U.S. print media, magazines and newspapers, excluding only the ads on newspaper websites, which even today generate only about 25 percent as many ad dollars as print advertising.

The ways in which Google uses its dominance in search to monetize, by corralling and aggregating (without permission) the content of others, is a story that is long in telling.  But a common feature, as stated in a White Paper submitted to the FTC in 2011 by The Media Institute, is that Google’s “main search page biases Google News results over results of news organizations and other publishers.”

Nor is this the perception and complaint just of American publishers.  On June 25, a coalition of hundreds of Europe’s leading publishers urged the European Commission, which is the EU’s antitrust authority, to  reject outright some remedies that Google offered to end an investigation by the Commission of the same kind of practices the company is accused of by publishers on this side of the Atlantic.

As summarized by GigaOm, “Google is accused of surreptitiously favoring its own services in its search results, locking advertisers onto its platform and scraping content from rival, subject-specific search engines.”

In elaboration of the European publishers’ rejection of Google’s proposals, the president of AEDE, a Spanish association of daily newspapers, put it this way: “In short, Google’s proposed remedies do not address the overarching problems and fundamental harms that Google’s conduct causes in search-related markets and none of them aims at restoring effective competition….  In some ways, they might actually make matters worse by entrenching dominance and misleading consumers.”

Here, as in Europe, the principal venues of appeal for those being harmed by Google’s business practices are the antitrust authorities, which is to say quasi-political bodies.  And that’s a problem. In this country, the FTC has already dismissed an opportunity to do a full antitrust review of Google, in part, we can speculate, because there is no great public support for the news media generally.

Indeed, a Pew poll, released on July 11, found that only 28 percent of respondents believe that journalists “contribute a lot,” down from 38 percent four years ago.  And a Gallup poll, published on June 17, revealed that only 23 percent of the public have “overall confidence” in newspaper and TV news.

Given this lowly rating by their own customers, one might be tempted to dismiss the news media’s cannibalization by Google as something they had coming to them, and there’s an element of truth in that, as with the special contempt for them that the media have inculcated in conservatives and Republicans.

But there’s a much larger issue involved in Google’s anti-competitive behavior, and that is whether this (or any) country will in future have a robust and profitable news media industry, marked not by opinion but by objective news, investigative, and feature reporting.  Surely people of all political persuasions can agree that blogs and content aggregators are not going to fill that role.

At a time when the Internet is obliging mainstream news outlets to publish online, it is not yet clear whether a way can be found to make up, in that process, for the necessary advertising revenue that once came their way – a problem not confined just to the legacy media but to prospective newer entrants in the news reporting business as well.

And it is at this crossroad where Google, the company whose fraying motto is “Don’t be evil,” may prove decisive.

                                               

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  This piece was first published in USA Today on July 19, 2013, under the headline "Beware of Google’s Power."

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Seeking Shared Values Amid the Scandals

Reflecting our fractured political landscape, much of the discussion of the recent scandals erupting from the Executive Branch of government has been thoroughly politicized.

It’s understandable, but it’s also myopic and deeply troubling for those who believe that our civic life depends crucially on free and unfettered speech, and on the shared understanding by all parties that the First Amendment belongs to everyone, even those with whom we disagree.

Some of the things done by the State Department, the Justice Department, and the IRS – no matter who did, or did not, order them – are patently offensive, and can’t be allowed to stand.

When the State Department attributed the atrocity in Benghazi to a YouTube video, they weren’t just making a mistake, they were trafficking in the all-too-familiar refrain that “the media did it.”

When the Justice Department subpoenaed the phone records of AP reporters in search of a leaker – and in a related matter, when a FOX reporter was accused by the FBI of being a co-conspirator in the leaking of a confidential report – they weren’t just exceeding their constitutional authority, they were criminalizing investigative reporting itself.

And when the IRS decided to slow-walk the applications for tax exempt status of conservative groups, because they were conservative groups, and leaked to progressive media outlets information about conservative groups (as with the “Tea Party” applications delivered to ProPublica), they weren’t just injecting politics into what should be a value-free process, they were poisoning the well of what we as a nation have long considered to be the highest and most protected form of speech: political speech.

None of this can be tolerated.  But more important still is that people and organizations of all persuasions condemn it.  That way lies the preservation of our most precious freedom, and the civic virtue of shared values.  If, in the alternative, people in Congress and the press treat these matters as political footballs, we’ll all be the losers.

Going forward it will be easy to tell which path the players have taken.

                                            

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils. A version of this article titled "Seeking shared values amid the IRS, AP scandals" was published online in the May 24, 2013 issue of USA Today, and can be viewed here.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Putting a Coda to the Myth of That YouTube Video

The congressional Benghazi hearings may leave room for debate about why the Administration acted as it did before, during, and after the tragedy, but they surely put to rest any lingering claims that the attack was a consequence of that YouTube video, “Innocence of Muslims."

As noted here and here, this was not the first time people rushed to link a murderous act with controversial speech, and it won’t be the last.  But it should stand as an abiding lesson for producers and consumers of the news, and for commentators of all stripes, to be deeply skeptical of similar claims in the future.

                                            

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Facebook Jumps Into the Political Fray

The resolution of the flap over campaign ads paid for by a group (Fwd.us) funded by some leading tech barons, most notably Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, is going to be revealing of many things.

Perhaps for the first time the tech industry is giving financial and intellectual support to political campaigns that are bound to attract the enmity of many of the most fanatical people and organizations in the country: nativists, the public education lobby, and environmentalists among them.

The goals of Fwd.us are few but clear.  They want immigration reform, education reform, and support for scientific research.  It doesn’t sound all that radical, but in fact it puts the political neophytes from Silicon Valley directly in the crosshairs of a number of groups, evidence of which has come already via an organized campaign mounted by the Sierra Club in opposition to the campaign ads at issue.

The ads support two U.S. senators, a Republican (Graham) and a Democrat (Begich), both of whom favor immigration reform but who represent deep Red states whose citizens are believed to be hostile to the idea.  So the thrust of the ads is not about immigration, but about the senators’ views on environmental issues.  Graham favors the Keystone pipeline and Begich favors drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

In feverish opposition to this, the Sierra Club and like-minded “progressives” have organized “Dislike” campaigns against Zuckerberg, and held demonstrations outside of Facebook’s headquarters.  Given the cachet that environmentalists enjoy with the press, it’s clear that this campaign is going to create some ripples within Fwd.us, and among some of that organization’s tech industry backers.

So the question is, what will they do?  Will they buckle under the pressure and bad press, or will they dig in and move on?  It is, of course, ironic that the first of the organization’s kerfuffles is with environmentalists, since neither environmentalism (nor anti-environmentalism) is part of the group’s mission statement.

Not so in the case of their stance on public education.  The thrust of the spare language in the Fwd.us statement of principles is unmistakable.  It says they favor “Education reforms that produce more graduates in the science, technology and math fields and ensure all children receive a high quality education from effective teachers and accountable schools” (emphases added).

How, as a practical matter, this will sit with a public education lobby that resists any and all attempts at such reform, even as evidence of its manifest failure is everywhere apparent, is predictable and certain to embroil Fwd.us in other fractious debates.

Finally, there is the issue of immigration reform.  The two most prominent fears associated with the concept are (1) that it amounts to a kind of political power grab, or as Jay Leno quipped, that the new immigrants would go from being illegal aliens to “undocumented Democrats,” and (2) that there would be a huge rise in the social welfare cost of massive new immigration.

These are not irrational fears, but they could be ameliorated by legislative language. Meanwhile, the need for the USA to attract and retain large numbers of immigrants is clear if we are to stay competitive around the world, especially in the area of technology, and if we are to enlarge the work force that will soon be needed to pay for the retirement of millions of baby boomers.

For many years now, the tech industry has operated above and beyond the kind of messy and rancorous issues that the rest of us live with, and that Fwd.us has now engaged. It is a welcome development, but time will tell whether they are up to the challenge.

                                            

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Blessings Amid the Gloom

Just as men don’t live by bread alone, bloggers too are people of many parts.  Which is why I give you the following, all courtesy of YouTube.

Robbie Firmin, age 7, a contestant on “Britain’s Got Talent,” who reveals something about his auntie that she was probably not expecting: youtube.com/watch?v=HMNTlPa4Xi8.    

From an unemployment office in Madrid, a flashmob performs “Here Comes the Sun”:  youtube.com/watch?v=fHK2lxS5Ivw.

An orchestra, and chorus of 10,000! Japanese singers, performing (in German) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (long and grainy, but impressive and touching): youtube.com/watch?v=X6s6YKlTpfw.

And from a concert in 1980, the peerless Luciano Pavarotti sings “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot”: youtube.com/watch?v=TOfC9LfR3PI.

There are lots of problems in the world, not the least of them things that we rail against in this space, but life is not without its blessings, among which are beauty, talent, and lovely people.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Britain Opts To Censor the Press

With its peerage and royals, Beefeaters and such, Britain in the 21st century sometimes seems like a large theme park, but its historical influence on the USA is clear.  From language to culture, and above all to law, what’s happened in Britain hasn’t stayed in Britain.

Which is precisely why that nation’s new press law, which creates by “royal charter” a speech-suppressing media “watchdog,” is so much to be rued.  Briefly stated, the watchdog will have the power to oblige participating media to post apologies and take complaints into arbitration, thereby creating a system of government regulation of the press that hasn’t happened there since 1695.

It is commonly said that the tracks that led to this train wreck were laid by the misbehavior of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, and there’s truth in that.  Caught in the act after years of hacking into private e-mail and phone calls, and bribing public officials, the tabloids acted outside the bounds not just of ethical journalism, but of the law.

But the better explanation for why the British have now endorsed regulation of the press (rather than relying just on the enforcement of criminal laws already on the books) is because that country has no First Amendment. That, and also because there (as here?) there exist large numbers of people who value political correctness, and political advantage, over freedom of speech.

Indeed, though the new press rules are said to have become inevitable given the failures of Britain’s (recently extinct) Press Complaints Commission (PCC), another way of looking at it is to say that the very existence of the PCC inadvertently cleared the way for the more intrusive regulations.

Some years ago there existed in the United States a National News Council (NNC), whose charter was similar to the PCC.  It failed to take root for many reasons, but perhaps most notably because the New York Times’ Abe Rosenthal wisely refused to cooperate with it.  Rosenthal’s concern was that the NNC would fail to satisfy press critics, and that some sort of government program would then be invited to succeed it.

The British have long been accustomed to a significant degree of governmental oversight of their broadcasting companies’ content through what is called Ofcom (Office of Communications), but until now the print media have been spared that oversight.

Though billed by its parliamentary sponsors as a voluntary arrangement, the terms of the new press regulation carry onerous potential liabilities, specifically including “exemplary damages” in court, for media companies that don’t join the quango.  This may even include some companies that are based elsewhere. Indeed, one of the most powerful criticisms – from such as the New York Times and the Committee To Protect Journalists – is that the regulation assumes authority over bloggers and websites, large and small, foreign and domestic.

“In an attempt to rein in its reckless tabloid newspapers,” said the New York Times, “Britain’s three main political parties this week agreed to impose unwieldy regulations on the news media that would chill free speech and threaten the survival of small publishers and Internet sites.”

But the most compelling and powerful criticism has come from The Spectator, the British publication said to be the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language.  As Nick Cohen wrote on March 18:

The regulator will cover “relevant publishers.”  If they do not pay for its services and submit to its fines and rulings … they could face exemplary damages in the courts.  It is not just the old (and dying) newspapers, which the state defines as “relevant publishers” but “websites containing news related material.”

What “news related” material can get you into trouble?  It turns out to be the essential debates of a free society.  Dangerous topics to write about include “news or information about current affairs” and “opinion about matters relating to the news or current affairs.”  Any free country should want the widest possible range of opinions about current affairs.  As of tonight, Britain does not. 

There will be a temptation among many in this country to look past what the British have done as nothing more than the antics, as someone once put it, of an exhausted stock; not to worry about anything similar happening here.  And there’s some truth in that.  Because of our First Amendment and strong case law in defense of it, such regulation is unlikely in this country.

But it’s worth remembering that this happened in Britain at the hands of parliament and that we too have a “parliament,” and regulatory agencies, and that, as in Britain, we have organizations, like the cynically misnamed Free Press, that are constantly pushing for an expansion of government oversight of the media.

Thanks to the Founding Fathers we have some additional protection against the kind of thing that’s just happened in Britain, but vigilance is required, now more than ever.

                                             

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  A version of this article titled "Keep U.K. media rules out of U.S." appeared in the print and online editions of USA Today on April 23, 2013, and can be viewed here.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

David Stockman Riles the Commentariat

Unless you’re a demagogue or an ideologue (or, like Paul Krugman, both), it might have occurred to you that this country’s outsized money printing by the Fed and our ongoing fiscal deficits are going to end badly; that the debts being piled up, at the velocity of a hurricane, will never be repaid (indeed couldn’t be repaid other than with greatly devalued dollars); and that the likely end result therefore is going to be destabilizing inflation, and the passing along to future generations of staggering debt.

To harbor such thoughts is not only rational but wise, and undoubtedly on the minds of millions of Americans.  Which – along with the fact that he’s promoting a new book – perhaps explains why David Stockman recently wrote a lengthy op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he elaborates on these concerns, and lays the blame on Keynesianism and what he regards as other destructive concepts, past and present.

Titled “State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,” Stockman’s piece is powerful stuff and so, of course, has attracted the wrath of legions of the “progressive” members of the commentariat.  Taken together, their criticisms speak volumes about the impoverishment of the progressive mindset but almost nothing about Stockman’s concerns.

Indeed, one gets the impression that the important thing for the sort of people encountered at places like the Huffington Post, Washington Post, and New York Times was to be early to the scene; rather like a contest, the winner would be the person who scored on Stockman the first and punchiest ad hominem attack.

So it is that Stockman’s piece is variously described as “spittle-filled,” a “horrific screed,” and the “unfortunate rant” of a “cranky old man.”

None of this is unprecedented, of course, and in fact it positively guarantees that Stockman’s book will be a best seller. But there’s something a little creepy about the invective employed by people who profess to come by their opinions as a consequence of sweet reason.  Creepier still is the intolerance displayed by Krugman, who characterizes his employers’ decision to publish Stockman’s piece as “mysterious.”

Whatever else one might say, the only people who would question the Times’ decision to publish Stockman’s piece are those who think that only their own views deserve a hearing.

Nobody is going to agree with everything that the gentleman wrote, but the decision to publish his piece was not only not mysterious, it was correct and, if anything, belated.

                                            

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.