Media Sin

The bogus NYT story on the missing explosives is found at this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html?ex=1099368000&en=9ce7b708a2986170&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

If you go to the article, you will see a boxed sidebar that says the following:

'This article was reported in cooperation with the CBS News program "60 Minutes.'' "60 Minutes" first obtained information on the missing explosives. The New York Times article was reported and written by Times reporters in Baghdad, Europe and Washington.'


The information was, surprise, wrong, and as usual wrong in a way damaging to the Bush campaign. Just by chance some errors should run in the other direction, but only if chance is in play. Do you suppose "60 Minutes" supplied the NYT with any funny-looking documents? It is a cliché to say that you can't make this kind of stuff up, but in all honesty, who could? The major media are literally destroying themselves in their frantic push to make sure Bush is not re-elected.

Robert Oppenheimer said that by developing the atomic bomb, physics had "known sin". He meant that physics had discovered its own power to change the world, and the science would be forever changed and corrupted by that knowledge. Physics had eaten from the tree. Watergate did the same for the news media, when they discovered their power was sufficient to drive a president from office. Now journalism majors are out to change the world, and NBC News promos feature Tom Brokaw crowing, "We can make a difference!" But who ever asked them to take on that task?

The media have come to believe that they, together with their allies among the foundation/academic elites, have the expertise, right, and obligation to guide the politics of the nation, including the outcome of national elections. The results of this hubristic delusion include the systematic corruption of the civic information stream that the First Amendment was designed to protect, the deliberate manipulation of public opinion much as described by C. Wright Mills many years ago in "The Power Elite", a great increase in public cynicism about the validity of our entire election process, and the progressive destruction of the news business itself, where credibility depends on getting the facts right and reporting them straight.

Fifties comedian Wally Cox once said the tragic thing about the mass media was that the greatest educational tool in human history was being used to sell laundry detergent. We should be so lucky.

Byron

Statistics and Trends

It's interesting that if you look at the graph of Iowa Electronic Market futures prices you see the same rapidly increasing spread during September, then trending back together after the first debate at the end of Sept, now spreading apart again. The IEM and Den Beste graphs are remarkably similar.

This is consistent with den Beste's media manipulation hypothesis if futures buyers are taking their cues from media polls. On the other hand, poll respondents and futures buyers may simply be responding independently to the same information, whatever that is. That latter case might still be blamed on the media, of course, since they create the information environment to some degree. That may be especially true when it comes to heavily-hyped news blips and kerfluffles that, in the absence of really important events, may drive poll results pretty dramatically for short periods of time.

The extreme version of this argument would have the media jimmying the information environment and jimmying the polls, those results becoming part of the information environment, which influences the perceptions of futures buyers and subsequent poll respondents, and so on. But even this has its limits. The media can't control the interaction between events of real importance and the gradually developed public perceptions of candidates -- that interaction is what creates the overall trends.

Byron

WMD

Saddam Hussein, his regime, and all like it -- they are the WMD. If Kerry is elected, the dreamers who refuse to understand that may get the opportunity to find out what that means. I still can't believe we would actually elect a man like that, but in a democracy you get the government you deserve. The media have been incredibly, shamefully irresponsible and will deserve a good slice of the credit.

There were many reasons to go into Iraq, including the weapons Saddam would have very quickly resumed making once the sanctions had further unravelled, thanks to the best efforts of our allies and the UN, who were being paid off. The only reason the inspectors, Blix and his Merry Band, were back in there is that we had 100k troops and their equipment baking and degrading in the desert sun; that was not sustainable. The CIA's George Tenet made the case for weapons stockpiles to a skeptical GW (see Woodward's book), assuring him those facts were "a slam dunk"; everybody agreed Saddam was a threat and had to be disarmed, including Kerry. Negotiations through the UN are working out nicely with respect to Iran, who should have nuclear weapons in a year or so to go with their new rockets for delivery. If Kerry is elected, that is the future. He even came out against developing the deep-bunker tac nukes that might deal with hardened underground sites. Incredible.