Tuesday, November 29, 2022

ONE OF THE MANY THINGS THAT IRRITATE ME ABOUT CABLE NEWS SHOWS

One of the continuing challenges in teaching is to figure out what your students do not know. Especially when teaching graduate students, this is difficult because graduate students have learned to put on their game faces and pretend to understand everything, hoping desperately that what they do not understand will be explained along the way without their having to acknowledge that they are mystified. I watch a good deal of cable news and I am struck by how often the “experts” who appear on those shows completely fail to understand what the audience does and does not know. Let me give you some recent examples.

 

Yesterday, I was listening to a well-known newspaper reporter talk about something she learned through a “foyer” request. I knew that “foyer” or “foya” is the way that the acronym FOIA is pronounced. I also knew that the letters FOIA stand for Freedom of Information Act, a federal law that for almost half a century has made government records available to ordinary citizens. I knew that, and of course everybody on the show knows that, but I would be willing to bet that 80% or 90% of the viewers did not know that and therefore did not really understand what the newspaper reporter was talking about. What is more, it simply never occurred to the host of the show to take 10 seconds to explain it so that the viewers would know what was being talked about.

 

Here is another example, which I will flesh out with my own made up explanation. Whenever defense or intelligence experts appear on a show to talk about the classified documents that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago with him, they make reference to the possibility that these documents will compromise “sources and methods.” Since this phrase reappears so often in the discussions on television, I assume it is a standard expression used by people who spend their life dealing with government secrets of one sort or another. But the phrase is never explained and therefore it is never clear to ordinary listeners like me exactly how Trump’s having those documents could compromise “sources and methods.” I thought about it for a while and I came up with the following hypothetical example.

 

Suppose some branch of our government is trying to keep track of who is in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle of advisors. This is important, we may suppose, for getting some insight into his plans regarding the war in Ukraine. Imagine that one of our spies in Moscow, masquerading as a McDonald’s hamburgers executive, learns of some low-level nobody whose job it is to bring tea and coffee and snacks to Putin when he is meeting with people in his office. This nonentity sits in the pantry until a buzzer tells him to get up, pick up a tray, and bring the snacks into Putin’s office. He does so without saying a word and leaves, and he has been doing this every day for years. Our spy somehow gets to this nobody and persuades him to keep track of the people he sees there and report any changes. Some while later, after the information has been passed back to CIA headquarters in Langley, an analyst writes a memorandum calling attention to the fact that there has been a change in the circle of Putin’s closest advisers. He does not say where the information comes from, simply that it is well confirmed.

 

If one of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago guests manages to take a picture of this document surreptitiously when it sits in Trump’s desk drawer and passes the picture back to Moscow, folks there pretty quickly can figure out that the information must come from one of only three or four people who have regular access to Putin’s inner office.  Our “sources” have been compromised.

 

This would take only a few moments to explain to several million viewers, who would then have a much clearer idea of why experts are so exercised by the fact that Trump took these documents and kept them in an insecure fashion.

 

Here is a third example. Senate rules dictate that if the Democrats and Republicans each have 50 senators, then all committees have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, which makes it very difficult for the Democrats to issue subpoenas and also very difficult to get Biden’s judicial and other nominees through committee to the floor of the Senate. If Warnock wins, that will not change control of the Senate, but it will dramatically change what the Democrats can do with their control. This is not rocket science and has actually been mentioned once or twice on cable news shows that I have watched but most of the time the commentators talk as though nothing major is at stake in the runoff as the Democrats already have 50 senators.

14 comments:

  1. "[G]raduate students have learned to put on their game faces and pretend to understand everything, hoping desperately that what they do not understand will be explained along the way without their having to acknowledge that they are mystified."

    I love this observation. I think it has something to do with the deep appeal of philosophy - whose practitioners make a point to find nothing too "obvious" or "basic" to be worth explicit, painstaking acknowledgement. And sadly, of course, one continues to need a game face well beyond one's student years.

    Made me smile - thanks. :)

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  2. Good points.

    However, point 3 is unclear to me. So if the D to R relationship is 51-49, each committee will reflect this distribution?

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  3. JF, "Rules Governing Senate Committee and Subcommittee Assignment Procedures Congressional Research Service Size and Ratios of Committees. Although the size of committees is provided for in Senate Rule XXV, in practice the Senate does not adhere to these restrictions. Instead, the size and ratio of majority to minority party members on each committee are negotiated by party leaders following an election and prior to the start of a new Congress.9 Committee ratios typically reflect the makeup of majority party to minority party Senators in the chamber.10 The size and ratio of Senators on each standing committee are reflected in the contents of the appointing resolutions adopted by the Senate.11"

    https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46806/4

    The important thing is that Dems have a majority on committees so there is no need for using discharge petitions which slows down approving appointments and legislation.

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  4. Some of what you’re objecting to is perhaps due to just plain sloppiness and/or marginal professional competence. I don’t want to read too much into this, but here’s a related example from a recent opinion piece in the (online) Washington Post, written by Henry Olsen, one of the Post’s token conservatives. The headline reads: “The GOP’s path to dumping Trump will be torturous.” And this solecism is repeated in the text of the article: “It’s become clear that there’s a path to defeating former president Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries. But that path will be torturous for the GOP to navigate.” Now, any competent, attentive editor, proofreader, or professional writer ought to have spotted the mistake here: there are plenty of warnings about this staple error in standard usage books. Unless, as seems implausible, the writer is telling us that this path will take the GOP down a hellish road through hanging, burning, and the rack [to borrow the only passage from Herbert Spenser that I like], then the word to use is “tortuous,” not “torturous.” All right, so not everybody knows this distinction, but the journalistic professionals are supposed to know it. [I’ve looked over what I’ve written and don’t see any typos or other errors, so if there are any, mea culpa—but I’m not getting paid to write this, so I have a face-saving excuse.]

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  5. Ouch. I spelled Herbert Spencer's name wrong--it's not Spenser. The latter, though, is the spelling for that Elizabethan poet--Edmund Spenser, who wrote "The Faerie Queene," far too much of which I read in 1970.

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  6. Point three is interesting and significant. I am being inundated with emails urging me to contribute money to Sen. Warnock’s campaign, but not a single email has explained this point as a basis for improving Warnock’s chances of being elected. This is a reason for my contributing more.

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  7. Fritz,

    Actually, your confusing Spenser with Spencer is quite explicable, since The Faerie Queen was one of Herbert Spencer’s favorite poems, because it exemplified the survival of the fittest – those who could survive reading all 4,000 stanzas.

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  8. “Sources and methods” is also the legal standard for certain classifications of documents, which is the reason the phrase is used. Still should be explained.

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  9. Wrt part of your post, have you by any chance been reading Patrick Cockburn?

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/29/the-perversions-of-political-punditry/

    On Spencer, It's rather amusing (at least to me) that he's buried on the other side of a Highgate Cmy. pathway from Marx.

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  10. Anonymous 8:12PM: Why amusing? Wouldn't you expect as much of business partners?

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  11. I have started reading In Defense of Elitism. It’s author, Joel Stein, is very amusing and a good writer. The readers and commenters on this blog would, I believe, enjoy his sense of satire. Here are two examples:

    “Populists choose incompetent leaders because their main criteria is whether they’d like to get a beer with that person. Elitists detest this idea, and only partly because we rarely drink beer, and when we do, we are less concerned about whom we drink with than if it’s made by a small craft brewer who was able to balance the malt with the International Bitterness Units. It’s also irrelevant. Do you think Abraham Lincoln was fun to get a beer with? Our greatest president said drinking made him feel ‘flabby and undone,’ which is what your friend says right before you never take her anywhere ever again. The president who was the most fun to drink with was lifelong bachelor James Buchanan, who had a fauxhawk, was nearly expelled from college twice for partying, bought a ten-gallon cask of whiskey every Sunday, complained that the White House’s champagne bottles were too small, and led us into the Civil War.

    “Peoples disdain for the elite has led us to downplay our importance, claiming, like Biden did, that we’re all equal in every way. We learned this method of self-protection the hard way after being picked on in high school and beheaded in late-eighteenth century France. It’s why people who went to Harvard say that they ‘went to school in Boston’ and people who went to Yale say they ‘didn’t go to Harvard.’”


    “Instead of fighting back, elites smugly quote Martin Luther King Jr., who rephrased these lines form minister Theodore Parker in 1853 about the evils of slavery:

    ‘I do no pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.’

    “That’s arguably true, but it’s undeniable that the arc of a launched nuclear missile is short and bends toward the cities where most elites live.”



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  12. ‘One of the continuing challenges in teaching is to figure out what your students do not know. Especially when teaching graduate students, this is difficult because graduate students have learned to put on their game faces and pretend to understand everything, hoping desperately that what they do not understand will be explained along the way without their having to acknowledge that they are mystified’.

    Well said – and of course this habit of not asking questions for fear of looking a fool is not confined to graduate students. It is characteristic of students in general and also academics, businessmen and businesswomen and committee members of all sorts.

    But there is an upside to this. You can gain yourself enormous kudos by being prepared to ask the ‘dumb’ question that is on everybody’s lips. With the exception of a few assholes, most people in teaching roles or teaching-like roles – seminar speakers, CFOs explaining a budget, COOs explaining the organisation’s building plans, politicians or bureaucrats explaining a pet policy – LIKE explaining themselves, so they are usually happy to respond. And the fellow members of the audience who wanted to know the answer but were afraid to ask will often be grateful to you. Being prepared to ask the ‘dumb’ ‘point-of-information’ or clarificatory question has stood me in good stead for for over forty-six years. And it has stood my Mother (about the same age as Professor Wolff) in good stead for even longer. To this day she is a valued member of things like the Village Hall Restoration committee because she is not afraid to ask these kinds of question (especially of architects). Paradoxically, being prepared to ask the ‘dumb’ questions can (help) give you a reputation for intelligence.

    Of course when you are in the teaching role yourself encouraging these ‘dumb’ questions can be quite a challenge. I usually say something like this: ‘Look , this is difficult stuff. It took me a long time to really get to grips with it. And I have perhaps been using a lot jargon / assuming a lot of background knowledge that I have gotten used to but which not everyone is familiar with . So please, if i I have said something puzzling or obscure, don’t let me get away with it.
    We’re here to get an education and that includes me. I often learn form student questions. [Something I can say in all sincerity as I often do.] So questions please’

    I usually find this works though I have met a few exceptionally silent classes which have forced me to use the kinds of tricks that the Higher Education Team recommends – for example dividing the class up into little discussion groups with a elected report-back leader – but if can’t get them to talk and ask questions WITHOUT resorting to such techniques I tend to feel like a failure

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  13. aall,

    Thanks, that's something I didn't know!

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  14. Sorry to be commenting so late in the game but I would like to share a couple of thoughts.

    First. Ideology triumphs over reason every time when it comes to political coverage. We have the 'myth of the middle' which leads to the hue and cry,'why can't everyone get along and compromise' from everyone who doesn't know better. Once the southern democrats left the party and the republicans drove out their moderates the area of compromise shrank until eliminated. Also, the blame for the situation gets apportioned equally when in fact it shouldn't be.

    Second, we have the widespread and never-ending use of misleading terms. My favorite, or the one that bugs me the most, is the term "unhinged." It is another way of saying crazy, nuts, outside the bounds of reasonable sane behavior. I don't know what, if any, political conclusions flow from being called unhinged, but I know what malignant narcissist would tell people and how the political dynamic would change once it is used.

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