Stromata Blog

CNN’s Goldberg Incursion

Jonah Goldberg, a prolific pundit and co-founder of The Dispatch, which aspires to be the central repository of non-Trump conservatism, has signed on for a gig with CNN. For this act, he has drawn a fair amount of criticism from commentators such as the inimitable Stephen Green (a/k/a Vodkapundit), who foresees that “Goldberg will likely fall into the role of the ‘concerned conservative’ at a far-left network, earning his keep by [bathroom vulgarity] on conservatives”.

Why foresee that? Jonah (in this informal age, I can call him that, because we once shook hands and conversed for several sentences) hasn’t followed the path of Jen Rubin or Bill Kristol or Joe Scarborough. Occasionally, he takes shots at Donald Trump, some of them less than entirely fair. (He seems to believe that the allegations of Putin-Trump collusion were “fake but accurate” and not always to be sure of “fake”.) Still, any right winger who reads a selection of his non-Trump columns without seeing his byline will be bound to conclude that he is no new-fledged leftist, nor even very close to the center of the political spectrum.

It’s obvious to me why CNN made this hire. It wasn’t to get a tame house conservative (I think that Max Boot is available for that job) but because, in the wake of multiple scandals and the prospect of much flinging of soiled laundry as Fredo Cuomo fights for a golden severance package, the higher-ups at its owner, Warner Media, have figured out that the Liberal Bias space in the infotainment ecosphere is overcrowded while opportunities abound for straight news coverage and multifaceted commentary. Somebody in the C-suite (well, maybe a lower level of the alphabet; CNN probably rates little more than Z-suite attention at this point) evidently thinks that Jonah Goldberg will help with the transition from Jeff Zucker’s disastrous reign.

Curiously, when Kevin Williamson, no more of a Trump booster than Jonah, was hired by The Atlantic, nobody on the Right claimed that he was going to earn his keep by subjecting conservatives to unfossilized coprolites. There was universal dismay when the magazine, in an act of idiotic cowardice, fired him for offending the staff with his wrongthink. Jonah would probably have an equally short tenure, were it not for the fact that no sane executive at Warner Media cares whether the current CNN mob is offended. I suspect that their mass resignation would be welcome. It would certainly do CNN a great deal of good.

So, my best wishes to Jonah. May he torment Tapper and Acosta and the rest until they flee to safe spaces at MSNBC.

The Olbermann Kerfuffle

The best thing – in fact, the only good thing – I can say about Keith Olbermann is that his idea for ending the Harry Potter series (Harry can defeat Voldemort only by sacrificing his wizardly powers) was far superior to the muggle’s breakfast that J. K. Rowling served up. Otherwise, I concur that –

Certainly, the faux journalist Olbermann, whose “Special Comment” is among the most hyperbolic, exaggerated, and mean-spirited political commentary available, is the least deserving of sympathy of any figure on the left in America. He oozes a sneering, self-righteous superiority that only liberals who feel similarly blessed with outsized notions of transcendence can stomach. Reportedly, he is not a very nice fellow either, but how could he be otherwise given the manner in which he routinely portrays the opposition as a cross between the devil and Hitler?

Nonetheless, like Bill Kristol, Andy McCarthy, Keith Williamson (former winner of Olby’s “Worst Person in the World” award), Jonah Goldberg (multiple WPITW laureate) et al., I can only shake my head in disbelief at the way that MSNBC has treated him. Sure, if the network has promulgated and consistently enforced a prohibition against making political contributions, someone who violates it ought to incur some punishment – but a punishment proportionate to the crime: something on the order of docking pay equal to a few times the amount contributed plus an on-air act of contrition. Indefinite suspension without pay, which appears to be a euphemism for dismissal, is preposterous, particularly for a guy whose job is to scream progressive shibboleths at the top of his lungs.

We all knew that Keith Olbermann was a lefty commentator on a lefty network. His every appearance was an in-kind contribution to left-wing office seekers. If he contributed his money as well as his mouth, I fail to see how MSNBC can reasonably claim that he seriously breached any standard of ethics.

There’s no point in trying to figure out what was going through the higher-ups’ minds. These are, after all, geniuses who devised a business model focusing like a laser beam on a tiny, temperamental demographic segment for whose custom there is already formidable competition from Old and New Media. That strategy hasn’t worked very splendidly, but the response to dwindling ratings has been to push ever further to the left. A decade ago, it wouldn’t have been laughable to say that MSNBC was not a lot less fair and balanced than Fox News. Today, it has all the intellectual bandwidth of al-Jazeera or The Nation.

The best outcome for MSNBC from this debacle would be for its owners to wake up, smell the wood alcohol, and replace their current crew with competent reporters and interesting pundits. As for Mr. Olbermann, I have an idea for a career change: His mind is full of fantasies; why not put them into a novel? His wacky conspiracies, grotesque characterizations and distorted realities might have the oomph to relegate Harry Potter to the remainder shelves.

Ian McDonald, Non-Fiction Writer

Brasyl, Ian McDonald’s 2008 Hugo nominee, opens with a scene from a rather deranged “reality TV” show . I’d assumed that it was all fiction set in an alternative universe’s Brazil. Looks like I was wrong:

SAO PAULO, Brazil — In one murder after another, the Canal Livre TV show had an uncanny knack for being first on the scene, gathering graphic footage of the victim.

Too uncanny, say police, who are investigating the show’s host, state legislator Wallace Souza, on suspicion of commissioning at least five of the murders to boost his ratings and prove his claim that Brazil’s Amazon region is awash in violent crime.

“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos charged in an interview with The Associated Press.

The killings, he said, “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.” . . .

Souza’s son, Rafael, has been jailed on charges of homicide, drug trafficking and illegal gun possession. Police said the father faces charges of drug trafficking, gang formation and weapons possession, but remains free because of legislative immunity. No charges have been brought against him in the killings.

Vasconcelos said the crimes appear to have served the Souzas in two ways: They eliminated drug-trafficking rivals, and they boosted ratings.

“We believe that they organized a kind of death squad to execute rivals who disputed with them the drug trafficking business,” he said. Souza, he charged, “would eliminate his rival and use the killing as a news story for his program.”

In Brasyl’s show, Canal Quatro merely set up car thefts. Of course, poor McDonald suffered from the disadvantage of having to keep the reader’s disbelief suspended. Reality has no such constraints.

Quote of the Day

A friend sent me a bit from an interview with David McCallum – Ilya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – that appeared in the British magazine Cinema Retro. Asked why he moved from Scotland to America, McCallum replied,

Britain went socialist. My politics have always been pretty far to the right, which makes me an exception in Hollywood these days. I believe people should be allowed to work as hard as they can and reap the rewards. I think it’s part of the human spirit to do that. That’s why I’ve always thought that Ronald Reagan was an amazing man and it was an amazing time when he was president. They used to say he was an idiot – that he didn’t know what he was doing, that he was drooling, that he didn’t write any of his own speeches . Then you see his writing today and many of his speeches and letters are in his own handwriting, beautifully written with no corrections. Of course now, many of the people who were so mealy-mouthed about him when he was President are now extolling his virtues. Such hypocrisy. But right now is a very interesting time to be an American and to be involved in what I think is a huge watershed moment in the Middle East, with everything that is going on.

A pity we can’t send U.N.C.L.E. after al-Qa’eda.

The Prisoner’s Return

OpinionJournal Political Diary provides more than just politics for $3.95 a month. Today it reports that one of the great TV show concepts of all time will be returning to the screen:

No TV series – not even “Star Trek” – has quite achieved the quirky cult status of “The Prisoner,” which first ran on British and U.S. networks almost 40 years ago. It now looks as if the show, which still airs in re-runs in some 60 countries, will be making a nearly simultaneous comeback on both movie screens and a TV network.

In the original 1967 version, Patrick McGoohan played Prisoner No. 6, a former British secret agent who is kidnapped and dumped in a strange seaside village where everyone is known only by a number and where he is told that “by hook or by crook” the reasons for his resignation as an agent will be extracted from him. For 17 surreal episodes, the series explored profound issues of privacy, individualism and mind control. . . .

Universal Pictures, which has movie rights to the series, is producing a feature-length picture directed by Christopher Nolan (“Batman Begins”). At the same time, the AMC cable network is set to launch an updated version of the show for a planned January 2008 airdate. “What we’re doing is an entirely new reinterpretation that stays true to the components of the McGoohan [show’s] vision,” an AMC executive told Daily Variety.

That quote sounds ominous. I suppose that the “new reinterpretation” will take the suicide pact view of the Constitution. Still, it’s the Christmas season, so one can hope for a pleasant surprise.

The Hugo Season Begins

Word has just arrived, via the Interaction mailing list, of the 2006 Hugo Award nominees. An official announcement will, I’m told, appear on the L.A. Con IV Web site RSN. (I hope that I’m not guilty of breach of the Fannish Espionage Act.)

I’m particularly pleased to see that my friend John Hertz made the ballot for “Best Fan Writer”. For reasons why I think that John in a good choice, vide my review of his zine Vanamonde. He is, I realize, an underdog against the co-favorites, perennial winner David Langford (who also has a topnotch entry in “Best Related Book”) and up-and-coming Cheryl Morgan, who came close to ending the Langford string last year.

In the other categories, I’ve read or seen some of the nominees but not all, so I’ll forbear comment. My biggest disappointment is that Thud!, IMHO Terry Pratchett’s best novel since Pyramids, wasn’t nominated. Least surprising nominations, aside from the usuals in the Artist, Editor, etc. categories, are Connie Willis’ “Inside Job”, featured in my “Recent Fiction” sidebar on the left, Serenity and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which Famous Fannish Bookseller Larry Smith literally forced into my hands.

The “Best Interactive Videogame” category, which L.A. Con created as a one-off for this convention, didn’t attract very many nominations (to my complete non-surprise, though I tried to help by consulting 20-something friends and making the nominations that they recommended) and was dropped from the ballot. In a way that’s a pity, since familiarity with high-tech weapons systems instilled by hours of pointing, clicking and shooting in Quake, Doom, etc. is reportedly one of our soldiers’ big edges in Iraq.

In the “Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form”, “Best Professional Artist” and “Best New Writer” (Campbell Award) categories, ties resulted in more than five nominees.

The complete list of nominees appears in the continuation.

Knowing Who Your Friends Are

Bookworm Room, just relocated from Blogspot to WordPress, links to a most interesting item by Tom Gross, writing in Mideast Dispatch:

Wrongly believing that the British government colluded with Israel on Tuesday [to seize convicted terrorists about to be released from prison by the Palestinian Authority], Palestinian militants attacked many British targets. Among these, the offices of the British Council were burned down, and an HSBC bank was ransacked. . . . Armed gunmen also raided the offices of the German TV station ARD, shooting in the air. But what is interesting is that the BBC is housed in the same building as ARD in Gaza, and yet the Palestinian militant groups – who are much better organized and more sophisticated in their choice of targets than some in the media would have us believe – deliberately did not enter the BBC offices.

It seems that even on a day of widespread attacks on western targets in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian gunmen know who their friends are.

Conservatives frequently complain that MSM journalists are overly eager to portray themselves as disinterested neutrals in the War on Terror. How I wish that they really were neutral. That would be a great improvement from the anti-Islamofascist point of view.

High-Minded Distortion

To a great extent, I sympathize with the reluctance of major newspapers and television networks to reproduce the Danish cartoons that so upset a select subset of Moslems. Their employees haven’t volunteered for combat. The prudent course is to avoid giving Islamofascists an excuse to kill or maim them.

The doyennes of the media have, however, taken a different line. Their decision to withhold information from their readers and viewers doesn’t stem from fear. Oh, no, it represents high-minded respect for the dignity of Islam. NRO’s Media Blog has rounded up a sample of editorial justifications, such as this one from CBS:

At CBS News, the decision was made not to run the cartoons. “We could explain it, so we didn’t need to show it,” says Linda Mason, CBS News senior vice president, standards and special projects, who compares the decision to one not to show dead soldiers. “Any rendering of Muhammad is an insult to Muslims, and desecration is even worse,” she says, adding that the decision was made out of a desire not to unnecessarily offend, not because of the demonstrations or “out of fear of retribution.”

On CBSNews.com, a photo appeared featuring a man holding a newspaper that contained an image of the cartoon. Mike Sims, director of news and operations at CBSNews.com, quickly ordered it taken off the site. “You could not read the cartoon, but I even thought [what was there] was too much,” he says. “I think we’ve proven we can tell the story without offending Muslims.”

I’m willing to take CBS News at its word: that it isn’t afraid that its employees will be shot, stabbed or bombed. Unhappily, its lofty motives lead to a serious distortion of the news. To call these drawings an “insult” or a “desecration” leaves the impression that they are vile images that would offend a reasonable adherent of Islam. Yet the fact is that they aren’t.

By my reckoning, which the reader can check for himself, five contain nothing critical of Islam (one pokes fun at Jyllands-Posten’s “PR stunt”), three present ambiguous or positive views of Mohammed (e. g., calming overexcited followers), two deplore the status of women under sharia law, one expresses fear of Islamofascist retaliation, and one links Islam to terrorist bombings. The range is from favorable to innocuous to critical of specific doctrines or practices associated with Islam. The last group are “offensive” only if disagreement counts as offense.

Do men like Mike Sims of CBSNews.com believe that Islam, uniquely among religions and ideologies, deserves to be shielded from negative commentary? Yes, I suspect that they do. A combination of loathing for the leaders of their own country, muzzy-headed sympathy for “oppressed” non-Westerners and subliminal fear has turned them into dhimmis. Their endorsement of the extremists’ characterization of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, coupled with refusal to let the public see for itself, is strong evidence that, in their hearts, they now serve the Caliph-to-be rather than Western civilization.

The GOP’s Best Friends

Will the Democratic Party hang its collective head shamefacedly over the performance of its Senate Judiciary Committee members during the Alito hearings? Senators Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin et al. were simultaneously repulsive and inept. Tom Smith’s critique is not one degree overheated:

In case you haven’t noticed, the Democratic Party has reduced itself to a pathetic and dysfunctional state. The best they can do is tell Bush to respect the privacy of people in the terrorist cell calling plan, and hurl around accusations of racist and homophobe the way only the most cretinous Birchers would throw around “communist.” I cannot help but think most Democrats would be embarrassed and ashamed by Kennedy’s and Schumer’s antics, if they bothered to inform themselves, and who can blame them for not doing so? Most people know intuitively that it is very wrong to impugn a person’s integrity and imply he harbors all sorts of morally disreputable motives on the basis of “evidence” the most feeble minded can see amounts to nothing. It’s offensive. I mean, for heaven’s sake, we are supposed to be so finely tuned that we can see why being “heteronormative” is offensive, but not see that calling a man financially dishonest, a bigot and a misogynist, on the off chance that some marginal political gain might be gotten out of it, is not just dandy? Is just politics? It is a risky business to underestimate the decency of the American people, and I really think the Democratic leadership has taken the wrong end of this bet.

Yes, they have. But they don’t read The Right Coast. Instead, they see news stories that unanimously characterize their solons’ interrogation of Alito as no worse than “spirited” and “aggressive” probing of the nominee’s “inconsistencies”. Not a word indicates that these guys looked more like second rate goons than pillars of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Assembly.

Nor will there be any media examination of the causes of this absurd performance, particularly the perceived need to cozy up to a party “base” that is increasingly irrational and extremist. No criticism (that is, no criticism from quarters they respect) will come the Senators’ way for parroting talking points from left-wing nuthouses and paying no attention to Judge Alito’s thorough, patient answers. All in all, the onslaught will go down in the perpetrators’ minds as a valiant, if unsuccessful, battle against the forces of darkness.

Hence, there will be no Democratic self-examination, just as there is no internal concern that Michael Moore and Daily Kos are not the ideal boon companions for a party that wants to appeal to mainstream America. Corollarily, Democratic leaders won’t restrain the gallop of the party’s left wing into the fever swamps.

From a conservative Republican point of view, there could be nothing better, yet it would all come to naught if the media were “fair and balanced”. The divergence between the dominant segment of the Democratic Party and mainstream American opinion is approaching Landon-like proportions. If the media covered what is happening, rather than playing down all radical connections, rank-and-file party members would (I’m pretty confident – I know plenty of thoughtful, liberal-but-sane Democrats) exert pressure for pulling back from the swamplands. But the information needed to spark that kind of protest remains obscured from everyone who gets his news from the TV networks and the elite press.

By way of contrast, the inadequacies of Congressional Republicans have been widely reported, stirring rebellion among the party masses and inspiring contenders for Majority Leader to pledge to put a stop to overspending and kanoodling with K Street lobbyists. Suppose, though, that the media were stridently pro-Republican. Then Tom DeLay’s lame insistence that all fat had been cut from the budget would have been trumpeted without contradiction. The “bridge to nowhere” would have garnered a few snooze-evoking paragraphs on page B7. Stories about Medicare Part D would ignore its complexities in favor of admiration for the “brilliant” political tactics behind its enactment. Whenever Jack Abramoff made the news (which would be much less often than he does in reality), there would be reminders that he directed a third of his and his clients’ political contributions to Democrats (rising to nearly half during the current election cycle) and that two of the five members of Congress under the most intense prosecutorial scrutiny are Democrats. There might also be more observations like this one from OpinionJournal Political Diary (which, I believe I’ve said before, costs only $3.95 a month):

“Jack as a Republican would often direct contributions to Republicans because he liked them, they were friends or he agreed with their positions that had nothing to do with his clients,” says one Abramoff friend. “But if Jack steered campaign cash to a Democrat you can bet that he wanted something in return for it.”

In that alternative universe of conservative media bias, Republican legislators’ decline into comfortable incumbency would be a non-story – until the cumulative effects eventuated in an economic crisis or Canadian Liberal-sized scandal, succeeded by a decade in the wilderness. Happily, the reforming impulse hasn’t been stifled by friendly reporters. If Republicans do poorly this November, they already know why and are in the process of applying remedies, so that a bad 2006 is likely to prelude an excellent 2008. The Democrats, free of any such checks and balances, won’t be reformable until after palpable disaster strikes them.

Thank you, Dan Ra^ther!

Update (1/13/06): As an example of rank-and-file pressure inspired by blessedly biased media coverage, we have an Instapundit-fueled” (with plenty of high-powered help) “Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers”, using the House Republican leadership contest as a hook to “call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process”. It’s impossible for an outsider to form a judgement on the merits of the candidates (whose success in office will depend on working with the insiders who elected them, not pleasing bloggers), but all three at least proclaim their allegiance to a reform agenda. That wouldn’t be the case if the media had been nice to the GOP for the past several years. (Mind you, I don’t think that it would be a bad thing if they were fair and balanced; my point is that their hostility has redeeming value for the Right.)

On the other side of the aisle, Howard Kurtz tries to pretend in today’s Washington Post that “a pretty spirited argument is taking place within the Democratic Party: not just the usual soul-searching about finding a winning message for 2008, but about the war and national security and the essence of what the party stands for”. As his evidence – an exchange between a New Republic editor and Markos “Screw ’em” Moulitsas – shows, the “debate” is one-sided, more personal than political, and all but invisible: not an uprising of the party faithful against extremism but a lonely plea by an evanescing faction, lightly brushed aside. “Screw ’em” jeers that TNR’s circulation is waning. But if an impartial press gave him half as much coverage as Pat Robertson, cyberspace would be filled with “Appeals from Center-Left Bloggers”, and Democratic leaders would have to accommodate anti-radical sentiment, not just the denizens of the ideological marshlands.

Prisoner’s Return

The connection to politics may be only tangential, but OpinionJournal Political Diary (free today; normally $3.95 a month) says that The Prisoner, the quintessential 1960’s paranoia drama, will be returning to TV.

In the original 1967 version, Patrick McGoohan played Prisoner No. 6, a former secret agent who is kidnapped to a strange seaside village where everyone is known only by a number and where he is told that “by hook or by crook” the reasons for his resignation as an agent will be extracted from him. For 17 surreal episodes, the series explored profound issues of privacy, individualism and mind control. . . .

The British magazine Broadcast reports that the Sky One channel has commissioned eight new episodes of the series. Executive producer Damien Timmer says they will deal “with themes such as paranoia, conspiracy and identity crisis.” The episodes will be partly written by Bill Gallagher, a creator of the BBC series “Conviction,” an edgy police drama about vigilante behavior in society.

To my mind, The Prisoner was much more about style than substance. The show was imbued with Mr. McGoohan’s quirky brand of libertarianism (he did much of the writing as well as being the star), but it wasn’t a preachy tract on privacy and civil liberties. I much fear that a 2006 version will sell the original’s birthright for a pot of message. Here’s hoping that I’m wrong.

Biased by Law

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s inspector-general has made public the report that led to the ousting of Kenneth Tomlinson, an unabashed conservative, from his position as CPB chairman.

Mr. Tomlinson’s offense was stark and simple: He “violated federal law and internal ethical guidelines by improperly interfering with programming to include more shows featuring conservatives and by using ‘political tests’ in hiring decisions”. In plain English, he sought to balance the overwhelming liberal bias in federally funded television by adding right-of-center programs. He left the left-wing jeremiads intact, but competition of any kind was intolerable to the closed cadre that runs “public” broadcasting. By the inspector-general’s logic, ideological bias in CPB funding is in line with the law’s requirement of nonpartisanship, while correcting that bias is “political interference”.

While the Tomlinson-appointed CPB president apparently will remain, it’s obvious that the effort to turn the organization into an ideology-free conduit has failed and can’t, under the rules that have been locked into place, ever be revived. A sign of the Left’s triumph is the cancellation of The Journal Editorial Report, which for two years had offered the perspectives of the WSJ’s editorial board. The program was specifically conceived as a counterweight to Bill Moyers’ outrageously one-sided show. The inspector-general singled out for criticism the steps that Mr. Tomlinson took to help get it on the air. Its demise supposedly is a coincidental, unconnected event.

If the state of the law is that federal funds can be used to subsidize political programming on one side of the spectrum but not to support the other side, the only solution is to stop spending government money on this activity. People who want to see Bill Moyers prevaricate can pay for the privilege. They shouldn’t ask their fellow citizens to underwrite their preferences, unless they are willing to see subsidies doled out to more than one point of view. But that, needless to say, is too much to ask of people who treat “fair and balanced” as a mock-worthy shibboleth.

Serenity: A Half-Thumb Up

My plan for yesterday was to go the Maryland Renaissance Festival in company with old college buddies. Unluckily, eastern Maryland was under the spell of Tropical Storm Tammy. Last year we went to the Festival in the rain and didn’t have to prove anything by reprising the performance. Instead, we saw Serenity, the Firefly spinoff movie that has been buzzed very favorably by both SF-oriented and mundane bloggers.

I’ve seen two episodes of Firefly, the two that were nominated for Hugos. One was pretty good; the other was the umpteenth Seven Samurai remake, with a true touch of absurdity: bad guys shooting their lasers from horseback. So I entered the theater with a slight bias against what I was about to see – and came out with feelings pretty much unchanged.

Serenity is basically a series of high-tech shoot-’em-ups, mostly exciting and all well-done, around which are draped hastily sketched characters and a preposterous, government-conspiracy-driven plot. Well, that’s too harsh. The action sequences display a high degree of imagination, and the characters have the limited, but real, virtues of space operatic commedia dell’arte. Within the confines of their types, they can be striking: As a cynical trader/smuggler/mercenary, Mal Reynolds (Natan Fillion) makes Han Solo look like a soft-hearted sissy.

In fact, realizing that not every movie can be The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I’d give Serenity a hesitantly upraised thumb. What cuts the thumb off at its joint is the plot and, particularly, its political subtext. The basic outline is ho-hum: a Terrible Secret that the Evil Government doesn’t want exposed. The twist is that the Evil Government is a parliamentary democracy, which seizes one of the heroines right after she criticizes its “meddling” with the uncivilized parts of the galaxy. While one could, of course, develop a believable setting like that, the movie takes it for granted that barbarism and civilized society are moral equivalents (except that the barbarians are freer and nobler) and that democracy is an illusion. In my boyhood, those prejudices were harmless. In the midst of a war against barbarians, it is surprising, to put it mildly, that they are part of the mental furniture, too ingrained to question, of someone making films for distribution to civilized audiences.

During the Cold War, there were pro-communist motion pictures, but they weren’t innocently and unconsciously pro-communist. Their auteurs knew what they were doing. I’m quite sure that Joss Whedon doesn’t.

Quote of the Day

From the OpinionJournal Political Diary (a bargain at $3.95/month):

“You make a radical Muslim mad, and he won’t rip off your bumper sticker, he’ll rip off your bumper – then your car will be found in another state, and he’ll put a fatwa on you. I think fearing for your life is a pretty good reason not to do it” – veteran TV producer Larry Gelbart on why the film industry doesn’t make movies portraying Islamic extremists as bad guys (quoted in the Hollywood Reporter).

Does CBS Have Redeeming Social Value?

Last Monday CBS News showed Ken Starr, a hero to much of the Right, saying, in apparent response to a question about Senator Frist’s plan to prohibit filibusters of judicial nominees, that it would be “radical, radical departure from our history and our traditions, and it amounts to an assault on the judicial branch of government”. When I saw that quote, I was surprised by its vehemence but not by the sentiment. Many conservatives regard the filibuster as an important safeguard of limited government, and some fear that barring it for nominations of judges will lead ineluctably to its total demise.

Now we learn that Judge Starr did not, by his own account, take that position at all.

I sat on Saturday with Gloria Borger for 20 minutes approximately, had a wide ranging, on-camera discussion. In the piece that I have now seen, and which I gather has been lavishly quoted, CBS employed two snippets. The “radical departure from our history” snippet was specifically addressed to the practice of invoking judicial philosophy as a grounds for voting against a qualified nominee of integrity and experience. I said in sharp language that that practice was wrong. [emphasis added]

So, unless Judge Starr is lying as bold-facedly as Bill Clinton ever did, CBS News attached his answer to a different question in order to attribute to him a position that he does not hold. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation, though I can’t think of one off-hand. It certainly looks like the network of Rathergate fame has again engaged in forgery to promote the Democratic Party’s side of an important national debate. If that isn’t the case, it should release the complete, unedited interview, so that we can see for ourselves what Judge Starr said.

Assuming that matters are as they appear to be, this incident exudes the arrogance of power. Did CBS think that it could claim Ken Starr as a filibuster supporter without his noticing? Surely not. It must, then, have assumed that it could lie without consequences, that the denial would never overtake the falsehood.

I can think of no reason why anyone who values honesty should ever again watch a minute of CBS. Delendum est!

Procurement Follies, Parliamentary Croggle, Anti-Trek Politics

■ I brunched this morning with a friend who works for a conservative think tank. He specializes in national security issues, particularly relations with mainland China. Last week he was on a panel at a seminar on military procurement. One of the other panelists was a Department of Defense official.

According to my friend, the DoD fellow said that the Iraqi government wants its army to continue using Soviet-style equipment, presumably because it has a large “installed base” of weaponry provided by the ex-USSR. Therefore, the U.S. is looking for suppliers (we’ll be paying to upgrade and replace what is left over from the Ba’athist era) and has decided to give the order to Red China, because it is the cheapest source.

Romania is also willing and able to meet Iraq’s needs but has higher price tags. My friend asked whether this wasn’t a case of “procurement wise, strategy foolish”, given that Romania is an ally that supported liberating Iraq while Red China is a strategic competitor that did what it could to block the effort. He was told that DoD Procurement has no instructions to worry about such matters; its sole objective is to acquire goods at the lowest possible price.

Our funds are not unlimited, of course, but is it prudent to give the world’s last significant communist power an entrée into the Middle East, an entrée that carries no cost but even comes with a profit attached?

■ Recently I introduced a friend to the quondam BBC mini-series, By the Sword Divided, not because she is interested in the English Civil War (she claimed not to have known that England had a civil war) but because she owns a player that can handle Region 2 DVD’s.

To my mild surprise, she liked the show and mentioned it to a couple of her English pixel-pals, both women with at least a normal British education. One, in fact, is attending Oxford. Both assured her that the series, one character in which is elected to Parliament in the pre-war period, wasn’t historically accurate, because, they said, Oliver Cromwell founded Parliament.

No wonder the Labour Party has been doing so well lately.

■ While I didn’t agree with Orson Scott Card’s Star Trek obituary, his dislike of the multi-series was based on arguable aesthetic grounds. Frank Ahrens’ gloating “The End of a Space Odyssey” in today’s Washington Post displays the political motives behind many a leftist’s anti-Trek sentiments. The payoff, after many paragraphs of snide reflections on the show’s various incarnations, comes near the end:

Also working against “Trek” may be our different attitude toward space. The Cold War, which moved us to the moon, is long over. The Columbia and Challenger shuttle explosions still resonate. President Bush has said the United States should send people to Mars, but why?

The “Trek” franchise appealed to the exploratory curiosity of mankind. Once upright, we set out across the next mountain range; later, we set sail on the oceans. Space is the logical extension. Except it’s not. Space is not a good place for humans. The more we know about it, and the more lives we lose to it, the better Earth seems.

Needless to say, people like Frank Ahrens never regarded Cold War rivalry as a good reason for doing anything. He now hopes that the notion of “boldly going where no man has gone before” will fade away, to be replaced by contentment with the timid, secular welfare state.

Anyone, incidentally, who thinks that setting out across the next mountain range wasn’t a life-endangering enterprise has never read Kipling’s “The Explorer”. A few stanzas:

So I went, worn out of patience; never told my nearest neighbours –
Stole away with pack and ponies – left 'em drinking in the town;
And the faith that moveth mountains didn’t seem to help my labours
As I faced the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down.

March by march I puzzled through ’em, turning flanks and dodging shoulders,
Hurried on in hope of water, headed back for lack of grass;
Till I camped above the tree-line – drifted snow and naked boulders –
Felt free air astir to windward – knew I’d stumbled on the Pass.

Thought to name it for the finder: but that night the Norther found me –
Froze and killed the plains-bred ponies; so I called the camp Despair
(It’s the Railway Gap to-day, though). Then my Whisper waked to hound me:
“Something lost behind the Ranges. Over yonder! Go you there!”

Then I knew, the while I doubted – knew His Hand was certain o’er me.
Still – it might be self-delusion – scores of better men had died –
I could reach the township living, but. . . He knows what terror tore me. . .
But I didn’t. . . but I didn’t. I went down the other side.

Sailing to the New World wasn’t so safe either: The death rate on Atlantic crossings in the 16th Century was, as I recall, well over fifty percent. Once upon a time, science fiction writers expected similar dauntlessness from space pioneers. Here is how Robert A. Heinlein, in his classic tale “The Green Hills of Earth”, imagined the psyche of that generation:

The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of the Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.

James T. Kirk wasn’t quite that bold, but one can see why effete, safety first-and-last liberals prefer that he be retired from popular culture.

Is Star Trek Obsolete?

Orson Scott Card says “no”: it was never worth watching in the first place (via Professor Bainbridge):

So they’ve gone and killed “Star Trek.” And it’s about time.

They tried it before, remember. The network flushed William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy down into the great septic tank of broadcast waste, from which no traveler…. No, wait, let’s get this right: from which rotting ideas and aging actors return with depressing regularity.

Now, I’m not the world’s most avid defender of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, I stopped watching midway through the first episode of The Next Generation, at the point where the Enterprise goes into Battle Stations mode by jettisoning the pod containing the women and children’s quarters. Right there, I knew that this would be a series where the writers were inventing rather than imagining. I’m told that quality picked up as time went by. Maybe so, but I remain a fan only of The Original Series and a Laodicaean fan at that. Mr. Card can’t be accused of any such lukewarm attitude:

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance.

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all. . . .

Here’s what I think: Most people weren’t reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren’t reading at all. So when they saw “Star Trek,” primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

A plausible analysis, Orson, but utterly ahistorical. If anybody was reading the “so many different kinds of excellent science fiction” of the 1960’s, it was the hard-core fen who attend World Science Fiction Conventions. They were bestowing Hugo Awards on writers like Heinlein and Ellison and Aldiss and Niven and Silverberg, and Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke was the acknowledged grandmaster triumvirate.

At the 1966 Worldcon Gene Roddenberry, known till then only for an unsuccessful cop show, showed the pilot of his new SF television series to this audience and received a reception that I have heard described by an eyewitness as “rapturous”. During the three years that Star Trek ran, it had a devoted trufan following, and some of its “grade school” scripts came from the pens of figures of the “science fiction revolution”: Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Jerome Bixby.

I’m not surprised that someone who calls those posturing, post-modernist bores Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (what a waste of a great title) “the two finest science fiction films of all time” thinks that Star Trek: TOS “was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad”. De gustibus non disputandum est. Still, let’s get history right. If Star Trek appealed to non-readers getting “their first glimpse of science fiction”, it also won a following among the SF intelligentsia. Its time may now be past, but it did have a time.

Addendum: In a comment on Trufen.net, Dr. Gafia (rich brown) gives more detail about the original Star Trek’s writers:

The problem with Card’s comments (besides the ones others have provided here) is that the first three seasons of Star Trek had numerous episodes written by names that would be familiar to any science fiction reader.

Starting with one of the writers Card mentions, Harlan Ellison (“City on the Edge of Forever”). But also including George Clayton Johnson (“The Man Trap”), Richard Matheson (“The Enemy Within”), David Gerrold (“The Trouble with Tribbles”), Norman Spinrad (“The Doomsday Machine”), Jerry Sohl (“The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Whom Gods Destroy”), Theodore Sturgeon (“Shore Leave,” “Amok Time”), Robert Bloch (“What Little Girls Are Made Of,” “Catspaw,” “A Wolf in the Fold”) and Jerome Bixby (“Mirror, Mirror,” “By Any Other Name,” “Day of the Dove,” “Requiem for Metheselah”).

Jordan: Eason Past the Obvious

Is the Eason Jordan story about the lynching of a mild-mannered, perhaps slightly inarticulate news executive by a howling mob of bloggers? That has certainly become the favored version among large segments of the media, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which insists that accusing American soldiers of systematic murder of journalists “hardly looks like a hanging offense” and laments that CNN “apparently allowed itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew” into “throwing Mr. Jordan overboard . . . despite faithful service through his entire adult career”.

Those words ring oddly, because Bret Stephens, a member of the editorial board, ended his account of Mr. Jordan’s Davos panel with this query:

Mr. Jordan deserves some credit for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way out of a bad situation of his own making. Whether CNN wants its news division led by a man who can't be trusted to sit on a panel and field softball questions is another matter.

This answer, his colleagues seem to believe, is, Yeah, that’s just the kind of leader CNN news needs. Okay, I can see why CNN’s competitors might think that, but really. . . .

The most obvious fact about the whole Jordan affair, which the elite media’s anti-blogger spin should not be allowed to obscure, is that Eason Jordan was fired because his “defamatory innuendo”, as Mr. Stephens called it – and, more important, the mindset that it revealed – broke the bounds of decent liberal opinion. Barney Frank – not my idea of a neoconservative – challenged him directly while the panel was in progress, forcing his attempt “to weasel his way out”. Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was in the audience, said later that he was “outraged”. Even moderator David Gergen, the Dr. Perne of contemporary American politics, was, according to an eyewitness, “clearly disturbed and shocked”.

The notion that CNN could be intimidated by the howls of a thousand pajamahadeen, is more than faintly ludicrous. The “lynch mob” metaphor fits badly when the mob is wielding only words. What’s more, it was chanting, not Immolate Jordan! but Release the tape!. All of the most vehement anti-Jordanites clamored to learn what the man actually said before deciding whether he deserved to hang. (A lynch mob that wants to hear from witnesses?) It was the “victim” who proclaimed that the evidence would exculpate him and didn’t lift a finger to make it available.

At most, bloggers made enough of a stir to persuade the top echelon at CNN to look closely at what their employee was saying in their organization’s name. They didn’t like what they found and gave him the boot. It tells us a lot about the low repute of the mainstream media that so many observers, including others in the MSM, can’t believe that a TV network would refuse to let its newsroom be overseen by an anti-American conspiracy theorist. To my mind, CNN’s firing Eason Jordan was no more startling than a university’s dismissing a chemistry professor who taught phlogiston theory. Or am I holding the media to an impossibly high standard?

Addendum: Eugene Volokh has a very sensible view of the “lynch mob” comparison:

[B]loggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they are persuasive. . . . So Jordan’s critics (bloggers or not) aren’t a lynch mob: If they’re a mob, they’re at most a “persuasion mob.” What’s more, since they’re generally a very small group, they’re really a “persuasion bunch.” . . .

We should love persuasion bunches, who operate through peaceful persuasion, while hating lynch mobs, who operate through violence and coercion. What’s more, journalists – to the extent that they love the First Amendment’s premise that broad public debate helps discover the truth, and improve society – ought to love persuasion bunches, too. When the only power you wield is the power to speak, and persuade others through the force of your arguments (and not through the force of your guns, clubs, or fists), that’s just fine. Come to think of it, isn’t that the power that opinion journalists themselves wield?

Idiot Spotting: Eason Jordan

Best of the Web is so taken with reader Jay Lesseig’s observation, “Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots”, that it has begun a new “Spot the Idiot” feature. Eason Jordan was not the first exhibit, but he really should have been.

To summarize for the couple of denizens of Mars who have missed the story so far: Mr. Jordan is in charge of news operations for the Cable News Network. Two weeks ago, during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he asserted, according to at least eight eyewitnesses, that U.S. troops in Iraq have targeted and killed (that is, deliberately murdered) 12 reporters. The first public report came from Rony Abovitz, a Florida businessman who describes himself as apolitical. Blogging on a site provided by the WEF itself, he reported on a session titled “Will Democracy Survive the Media?” Mr. Jordan was among the panelists.

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times. . . .

Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to back up these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters. . . .

To be fair (and balanced), Eason did backpedal and make a number of statements claiming that he really did not know if what he said was true, and that he did not himself believe it. But when pressed by others, he seemed to waver back and forth between what might have been his beliefs and the realization that he had created a kind of public mess. His statements, his reaction, and the reaction of all in attendance left me perplexed and confused. Many in the crowd, especially those from Arab nations, applauded what he said and called him a “very brave man” for speaking up against the U.S. in a public way amongst a crowd ready to hear anti-US sentiments.

So far, nine other persons present at the meeting have offered their recollections, seven essentially confirming Mr. Abovitz’s account, two – one of them Mr. Jordan himself – insisting that he merely contradicted another panelist, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had put forward too benign a view of the conditions under which reporters work in Iraq.

Around the right side of the blogosphere, “Easongate” has become a a veritable firestorm, reportedly discussed at greater or lesser length on over 400 blogs to date (no idea how anybody had the patience to count). The heat can be judged by the strongly negative reaction in many quarters to a short piece that appeared on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial page. That’s not a notably liberal venue, and the author, Bret Stephens, has never before been accused of left wing deviationism. One might think, too, that his conclusion would be adequate for anybody deeply offended by Mr. Jordan’s accusation that American troops murder members of the press corps:

I’ll leave it to others to draw their own verdicts, but here’s mine: Whether with malice aforethought or not, Mr. Jordan made a defamatory innuendo. Defamatory innuendo – rather than outright allegation – is the vehicle of mainstream media bias. Had Mr. Jordan’s innuendo gone unchallenged, it would have served as further proof to the Davos elite of the depths of American perfidy. Mr. Jordan deserves some credit for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way out of a bad situation of his own making. Whether CNN wants its news division led by a man who can’t be trusted to sit on a panel and field softball questions is another matter.

Michelle Malkin dismisses Mr. Stephens’ message as “Run along, nothing more to see here, move on, huh?”, while Dinocrat accuses him of whitewashing Jordan out of a diaphanous conflict of interest. (Stephens was named last year to the WEF-sponsored Forum of Young Global Leaders, and Jordan’s bio on the WEF site includes an entry “World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow Programme”, with no indication of his relationship to that organization or its to the group – probably just a goat feather – to which Mr. Stephens belongs.)

If characterizing Jordan’s statements as “defamatory innuendo” and strongly implying that CNN ought to fire him is a whitewash, I wonder what would constitute slander. Perhaps it would be a good idea for some of the more fervent souls to take deep breaths and cold showers, before we get into a full-scale slugfest between those who want to see Jordan dismissed from his position and those who won’t settle for less than burning at the stake. My own conclusions are these:

1. Keeping the flames burning is the WEF’s retroactive decision that “Will Democracy Survive the Media?” was off-the-record. (I say retroactive, because it’s obvious that no one thought that at the time. Would a blogger’s account have appeared on a WEF-sponsored site if the panel had been assigned that status in advance?) One of the loudest demands is, Release the tape. In my opinion, that isn’t necessary. The eyewitness accounts are unanimous in all material respects, except for Mr. Jordan’s own self-serving apologia and a corroborating statement from one of his buddies. Among the backers of the Abovitz narrative are such liberals as Rep. Frank, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and former Clinton spin doctor David Gergen. The clincher is that those calling for making the tape public do not include Eason Jordan. It doesn’t seem likely that he isn’t interested in presenting evidence that, if his version of the affair is accurate, would exonerate him. I don’t see a lot of point in squabbling further with the WEF over what was and wasn’t on the record.

2. Releasing the tape isn’t just unnecessary; it may be harmful to the War on Terror. So far, the Arab media have been silent about Jordan’s accusations – not because of self-restraint, I’m sure, but because they harvest their anti-American “news” from the U.S. media, which have devoted hardly a word to the controversy. Once there is a videotape, ripe for selective editing, that reticence is bound to disappear. Momentarily satisfying as it might be to see Eason Jordan, live and in color, slandering our military, I’d just as soon that Jihad TV didn’t have the opportunity to present his twisted paranoia to the Arab public.

3. While Jordan’s charges haven’t been converted into Islamofascist propaganda (at least not yet), he had no way to anticipate that happy lack of publicity. Rony Abovitz’s immediate concerns were entirely credible:

I am quite sure that somewhere in the Middle East, right now, his remarks are being printed up in Arab language newspapers as proof that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt nation. That is a real nightmare, because the Arab world is taking something said by a credible leader of the media (CNN!) as the gospel, or koranic truth. What is worse is that I am not really sure what Eason really meant to communicate to us, but I do know that he was quite passionate about it. Members of the audience took away what they wanted to hear, and now they will use it in every vile and twisted way imaginable.

Is Eason Jordan such a fool that the same thought didn’t occur to him? Either he is completely oblivious to the consequences of his words, or he isn’t bothered by their probable use as terrorist propaganda. He has thus demonstrated that he lacks either (a) the intellectual or (b) the moral qualities required by his position (or (c) both).

Which brings us back to “idiot spotting”. The real importance of these events is that they furnish incontrovertible proof that CNN, under its present leadership, is not a neutral news gathering organization. It is, in its leader’s soul if not in every reporter’s praxis, a propaganda arm of the our enemies. During any prior war, any similar organization would have been kept under close watch by the authorities, if not booted out of the country. Nothing of the sort will happen in our day and age, nor should it, but American television viewers should keep in mind, when they flip to CNN, that they are watching a contemporary equivalent of Signal, the Nazi wartime picture magazine. It’s useful to know that.

Bias or Idiocy?

A moiety of the blogosphere is up in arms over the failure of CBS’s internal report on the Dan Rather scandal to blame political bias for the network’s readiness to pass off obvious forgeries as genuine documents. It is, indeed, hard not to boggle when the investigators conclude that there is no “basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias”. In noteworthy contrast, as Power Line observes, they casually assumed that criticism of CBS was informed by right-wing prejudice.

Almost every report commissioned by an institution in trouble has some implicit ne plus ultra line. In this instance, that was evidently the question of whether CBS is an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Messrs. Thornburgh and Boccardi knew, I suspect, that the price of getting their report released to the public in full, rather (no pun intended) than being presented in selected excerpts, was a declaration that the phony 60 Minutes II segment involved only bad judgement by underlings. Like an accounting firm caught in an auditing blunder, CBS’s management hopes to fire the engagement partner and selected staff, while declaring that the incident says nothing about the overall quality of its procedures.

Hmm, that doesn’t always work, does it? Or so my colleagues who used to work at Arthur Andersen inform me.

But let’s take the report at its word. If CBS’s failure to subject fictitious documents to so much as minimal scrutiny sprang purely from competitive pressures, doesn’t that suggest that the network’s news operation is fundamentally incompetent and untrustworthy? Only a relatively small fraction of the news has a strong partisan angle; “myopic zeal” to get a story out before one’s competitors can infect anything – not just accounts of a politician’s past but also stories about tsunamis and lawsuits and corporate transactions and baseball teams.

If the staff at CBS News thinks in a politically skewed fashion, that is a problem; if it is incapable of thinking at all, one wonders why the public should bother paying attention to whatever it “reports” on any topic. Just as I place more credence in the New York Times, for all of its one-sidedness, than in politically disinterested supermarket tabloids, I shall in the future consider CBS as the place to go for impartially reported nonsense. Apparently that is how Mr. Moonves wants me to think of his organization, and I am happy to comply.

Addendum: I see that Rathergate.com made a related point earlier this evening:

The Memogate report concluded that former Producer Mary Mapes misled her co-workers, misled her sources, and misled supervisors.

So if there is no political bias at CBS, like Dick Thornburgh and Lou Boccardi conclude, why should we conclude that this news story was the first that Mapes fudged?

Investigations into bad journalism at The New York Times (Jayson Blair) and USA Today (Jack Kelley) examined all of the stories written by said authors and uncovered a litany of errors and falsehoods.

CBS’ substantial credibility issue is not over yet. It needs to pull together a team of reporters to pick apart her other stories, contact her sources and determine what other falsehoods she has foisted on us.

For those who are interested, the Spot Formerly Known As Kerry has reprinted Miss Mapes’ apologia. It looks like she aims to become a heroine of the Loony Left à la Cynthia McKinney. Any bets on how long before she starts blaming Zionist neo-cons for her plight?