Boffoblog

Disgrace in Story on Bush Tapes

I was shocked by what I read in the Washington Post today about the leaked Bush tapes.  Here is the passage:

Bush also seems to infer on one tape that he has tried marijuana, which he has never admitted publicly.

Come again?  At least three professionals at one of the country's finest newspapers -- reporters Lois Romano and Mike Allen and an anonymous copy editor -- don't know the difference between "infer" and "imply."

Either that or Bush was so hopped up on booze and cocaine that he couldn't say for sure whether he was smoking grass, too.  In which case they used the correct word.

Corrections of the Week

Geography lessons desperately needed at the Chicago Tribune:

In Thursday's main news section, a map showing the location of U.S. nuclear power plants incorrectly labeled Arizona as New Mexico. There are three nuclear reactors at Arizona's Palo Verde site; New Mexico has no nuclear reactors.

Because of an editing error, a New York Times news story Tuesday about Chinese military sales to Iran referred to Iran as an "Arab nation." It is not.

Finally, because some may have missed the original story, the LA Times correction gives us most of what we need to know:

A story in some copies of [Wednesday's] Calendar suggested that Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," was being considered as a "potential inheritor" of an anchor role on the "CBS Evening News." In his session Tuesday at the Television Critics Assn. meeting in Universal City, CBS Chairman and Chief Executive Leslie Moonves did not characterize Stewart as such but said he wouldn't rule out approaching Stewart for some other type of role in the newscast after Dan Rather retires. Also, noting that Comedy Central and CBS are both owned by Viacom, the story quoted Moonves as saying, "Jon Stewart is part of our company, so we would talk to him." Moonves actually said: "Jon Stewart is part of our company. We speak to him regularly about all sorts of different things."

Correction of the Week: Holiday Edition

Ellen Goodman's column in yesterday's Boston Globe lists the corrections and regrets from her year's columns.  Here is but one:

Have you noticed that the only thing that the abstinence-only crowd cannot abstain from is criticizing their critics? Writing about their sex mis-education, we chided a text for teaching, among other things, that "cervical cancer is the result of premarital sex." Dozens of readers wrote to insist that since the human papillomavirus strain may cause cervical cancer, this cancer qualifies as a sexually transmitted disease.

Well, folks, it's still not the premarital sex that causes the cancer. But let's make a deal: We will add that STD footnote to our annual list if they will add condoms to their curriculum.

Persons of the Year

This via Crooked Timber: In the wake of you-know-who being named Time Person of the Year, take a look at who Time Canada called its Newsmaker of the Year.  Makes for a fascinating juxtaposition, no?

Exhibit #347a that Canadians are a fundamentally more decent people.

Correction of the Week

From the December 16th Chicago Tribune:

A Dec. 5 story about a rally in Chicago misquoted Victor Wojtychiw, a Ukrainian American, in describing this statement as an old Ukrainian saying: "It doesn't matter how many votes there are; it matters who counts the votes." In fact, the saying is widely attributed to Josef Stalin.

Rah, Rah! Fight, Fight, Fight!

At the risk of getting depressed and pissed off all over again, read the CNN transcript Atrios has posted of the night bombing began in Baghdad.  Shock and awe, indeed.

Needless to say, none of the principals has engaged in any public introspection about their cheerleading that day.

A Rose Is a Rose

As IsThatLegal points out, a certain rightwing gadfly has been caught showing her blatant hypocrisy.  (No, not that rightwing gadfly, the other one.)

CBS Hypocrisy

Joshua Marshall has already dissected the highly tendentious claims by CBS as to why it would not run the innocuous UCC spot advertising diversity.

Now Pudentilla points out the naked hypocrisy of the network's decision.  It turns out the network had accepted a pro-diversity campaign by the Methodists in 2001.  The only difference was the Methodists didn't include gays pictorially, whereas the UCC ad did.

Had CBS changed its policy in the meantime?  Possible, but unlikely.  Which brings us back to the network's claim that because the president has proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, it cannot run an ad which says a church welcomes gays.  Leaving aside the bizarre policy itself, which Marshall and Pudentilla and others discuss, what is revealing is the leap taken from the question of gay marriage -- an important but discrete topic -- to, apparently, any mention or implication of gay people whatsoever.

(Finally, as Pudentilla reminds us, this is the same Methodist church that yesterday defrocked a lesbian minister.)

Like Our World, But Different

Check out this well-crafted spoof of CNN -- now! -- before their lawyers force the page to be taken down.

Alas, all the Canadians did was serve him Alberta beef.  They're definitely much too polite.

They Flinched

As Joshua Marshall reported initially, a rather innocuous spot produced by the United Church of Christ to advertise itself as a church tolerant and welcoming of difference has been rejected by NBC, CBS and UPN because it is "too controversial."

Jerome Armstrong at MyDD explains further that various cable networks owned by Viacom, among others, will be running the ad.  Why?  Until we hear otherwise from the UCC, my best guess is that the broadcasters are running scared from the FCC due to its overzealous and capricious crackdown on "indecency," as I have discussed before.

Since cable networks are not covered by the FCC, they have a little less to worry about.  They seem to have made the calculation that while the FCC might step in due to even a few complaints from rightwing groups like Focus on the Family, it is less likely these groups would be able to mobilize sufficient numbers over the UCC spots in order to influence other advertisers to pull theirs.

In other words, the religious right has already achieved the victory they desired: Getting the broadcasters to self-censor due to the merest threat of FCC intervention.  Thus it is no longer a First Amendment issue since no governmental action occurred, leaving no legal remedy to fight the networks' decision.  (Free speech lawyers, please prove me wrong.)

Postscript at 12:35pm: Go check out Pudentilla's discussion of this as well.  She makes some good, pragmatic points on this issue along with her usual witty dose of righteous outrage.

Lying Liars and the People Who Study Them

News reports yesterday and today tout a study that suggests one can learn whether a subject is lying by using a functional MRI to scan their brain while the person is testifying.  According to the study led by Dr. Scott Faro of Temple, seven "deception areas" of the brain were identified.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy quotes a news account which seemed to reveal a fundamental design flaw in the experiment.  The key passage in the Reuters story is:

Faro and colleagues tested 10 volunteers. Six of them were asked to shoot a toy gun and then lie and say they didn't do it. Three others who watched told the truth about what happened. One volunteer dropped out of the study.

As even Lindgren's high school-age daughter identified, there are two variables when there should be only one -- whether one is shooting the gun, and whether one is lying about the gun being shot.  One would expect that the activity of shooting a gun would have an effect on the activation of brain centers and not just the lying about it.

Curious, I decided to see whether the study really was this poorly designed.  What I noticed, however, is how poorly it was reported.  Some stories said there were ten volunteers, other stories said eleven.  Some, clearly cribbing off this Reuters story, described the three who watched, while others said simply that six were told to lie about firing the gun and the others were told to tell the truth, eliding what those others were doing in the experiment.

A Daily Bulletin from the RSNA conference (hey, why doesn't APSA release Daily Bulletins?) reveals a crucial level of detail:

The research group used 11 volunteers and asked six to shoot a toy gun with blank bullets. Five other participants did not shoot the gun.

In two experiments, both shooters and non-shooters were asked to alternately lie and tell the truth about their participation. Scientists then examined the individuals with fMRI, while simultaneously administering a polygraph exam.

This sets my mind more at ease, because with two rounds of experiments and switching roles presumably they were careful enough to distinguish the act of lying from the act of shooting.   I say this, of course, without having seen how they performed their tests, which were not included in the press release, naturally.

This is a line of research going back several years.  Here is a July press release from the American Psychological Association on one study which involved leaving money on a table rather than firing a gun.  A study from two years ago had identified four deception centers in the brain, though this research sounds like it had a needlessly complex research design.  I have not read any of these papers yet and I am not a specialist in this field, but it does appear to be an active line of research.

Which leads to a question: Why is this, possibly flawed, Temple study getting so much play in the media?  One possibility is that the RSNA and/or Temple Medical School have much more aggressive public relations officers than the other institutions where the research has been conducted.  Another is that it took the presence of (toy) guns in the study, rather than money on the table, to get the attention of reporters.  In any case, rather than a bold shot out of the blue as the reports imply (no pun intended), this is an incremental contribution to an ongoing line of work.  As so much of scholarship is.

Jumping Naked Into Terrell Owens' Arms

As Frank Rich writes in today's New York Times, these outcries about indecency are manufactured by a small number of very active interest groups.  As he points out in regards to the latest controversy, outcry over the indecency on Monday Night Football two weeks ago did not occur during or immediately after the broadcast, but more than a day later.  In other words, after these groups got the word out to their members  -- who apparently were nonplussed until they were informed otherwise.

He also cites a little FOIA discovery by Jeff Jarvis that the tiff over Married By America was (gasp!) vastly overstated.  You recall that the FCC apparently received 159 public complaints against the show, which resulted in a $1.2 million fine imposed on Fox.  Now, a fine like that couldn't happen to a nicer network, but Jarvis finds that the basis for it was spurious at best.  Here is Rich's synopsis:

Though the F.C.C. had cited 159 public complaints in its legal case against Fox, the documents obtained by Mr. Jarvis showed that there were actually only 90 complaints, written by 23 individuals. Of those 23, all but 2 were identical repetitions of a form letter posted by the Parents Television Council. In other words, the total of actual, discrete complaints about "Married by America" was 3.

That seems a rather thin basis for exerting regulatory muscle.

This story has been commented on widely in the blogosphere already, but I want to add two more thoughts to the discussion.  First, these moralistic rabble rousers have one clear advantage in a fight like this: Many of the things they criticize certainly are crass.  While I believe the FCC is overstepping its authority and networks are exercising unnecessary and potentially damaging self-censorship in order to stem its wrath, I can't exactly defend Married By America with full heart.  The MNF controversy doesn't have quite the right ring, either: "I will not jump naked into the arms of Terrell Owens on national TV, but I defend to the death Nicolette Sheridan's right to do so."

In a perfect world, all this reality TV drivel would go the way of "Cop Rock" and "My Mother the Car."  No, the best ammunition we have against these groups is not to defend network marketing and reality TV per se, but to expose, as Jarvis and Rich do, the utterly cynical manipulation of public morals by these groups and the capitulation by the FCC.

Second, while we should fight their efforts, we should not be surprised.  No, not because they are crazy moralistic right-wingers at war with modernity, though there is that.  Instead, these are interest groups who seek to maintain an active and generous membership and attract more dues-paying members.  This kind of publicity is golden for them, whether or not the FCC comes down hard on ABC and Fox.  (Of course, if it does then that's icing for them).  With conservatives in control of the White House and Congress and with the federal judiciary soon to become a wholly owned subsidiary, the mainstream media continues to be fodder for their membership drives.

When I was working on the Hill, my boss got a weekly tally of petitions, cards, letters and phone calls (this was in the pre-email days) received by the office on various topics.  The staffer responsible for the list separated the form letters from the letters drafted personally.  It is my understanding that network executives on the receiving end of the campaigns to save the latest greatest ratings-challenged show on TV also separate the form letters from the personal letters.

One would think the FCC is smart enough to do the same.  There are three possibilities to explain their apparent failure to do so: They are too lazy to keep separate tallies, they are too naive to realize some are just form letters, or they are predisposed to believe such letters and therefore have no interest in discounting them.  You be the judge.

Correction of the Week

From the Washington Post:

One of the headlines on Richard Morin's Nov. 21 Outlook article on exit polling might have left a misimpression. It should have read, "Exit Polls Can't Always Predict Winners, So Don't Expect Them To," rather than, "Exit Polls Can't Predict Winners, So Don't Expect Them To."

Oh, I think rather it's the exit polls themselves that left the misimpression.  Thanks, though.

Intelligence Failure

While there has been every indication for months that the Pentagon was trying to scuttle the intelligence overhaul, House leaders are trying to turn it into a bicameral fight.  Hunter and Sensenbrenner were pushing for anti-immigration provisions in the bill and would not drop the issue even at the White House's request.  So much for the president's vow to spend some political capital after the election.

Minutes ago Sensebrenner was being interviewed by Lou Dobbs, if one can call it an interview.  Cracking down on immigration is one of the two topics Dobbs can't get enough of (the other being outsourcing; corporate crime doesn't seem to rank anymore).  There was this exchange:

Sensenbrenner:  Senators didn't raise objections to this bill until Tuesday of last week, saying they were extraneous, they were too controversial, we ought to deal with them in separate legislation or study them.
Lou Dobbs (in his incredulous voice): Too controversial??

Lou then paints Sensenbrenner as the reasonable one, willing to compromise with the Senate at the president's request.  Oh yes, that sure sounds like Sensenbrenner: Always seeking common ground and comity.  Staffers involved in the negotiations tell a different story, one where he backtracked at the last minute on a promise to drop the provisions after the House and Senate thought they reached a compromise.

Of course, this is not the first time Dobbs and Sensenbrenner have read from the same script.  I remind you of this nugget from the Daily Howler, which dissected the RNC lie that Gore had embellished his leadership on the internet:

On March 11, for example, Sensenbrenner’s press release carried this headline: “DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: VICE PRESIDENT GORE TAKES CREDIT FOR CREATING THE INTERNET.” On March 12, Lou Dobbs cribbed from the statement on Moneyline, his nightly CNN program. Dobbs called Gore’s remarks “a case study tonight in delusions of grandeur,” just as Sensenbrenner had done.

So now Dobbs portrays Sensenbrenner as the noble, sensible statesman standing up for what's right against a White House and Senate who are clearly in bed with the illegal aliens and terrorists.  Or something like that.

Correction of the Week II

Since the previous correction was past its sell-by date, here is a bonus Correction of the Week, from today's NYT:

A front-page article on Saturday about a decision by House and Senate negotiators to add an anti-abortion provision to a $388 billion spending bill referred incorrectly in some copies to the number of female senators who called for the measure to be changed because it had not gone through committee or to the Senate floor for a vote. It was nine, not eight.

So the purge of GOP moderates has begun in earnest, and the NYT has already stopped counting them.  Poor, forgotten Olympia Snowe, R(-for-the-moment)-ME, the lone GOP senator who signed the letter.

Correction of the Week

Yes, it's a little over a week old, but I don't want this one to slip away.  Here is an apology from David Brooks in his NYT column on November 13:

Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.

You can read the Daily Howler vent at Brooks, Russert and Stephanopoulos for repeating the false claim late in the campaign, and at Pelosi and the DNC for not knowing any better.

As always, please submit your favorite correction, apology and mea culpa to me.  Thanks!

Home Slice

My poor hometown of Modesto, California, its days in the national spotlight are quickly growing dim.  Of course, not many there are sorry to see that happen: For the last five years it has been the Tabloid Murder Capital of America.  First it was the Yosemite beheading case in early 1999, then two years later the Chandra Levy-Gary Condit saga, and then since Christmas Eve 2002 the murder of Laci Peterson.

The Chamber of Commerce wants to remind everyone that Modesto is a great place to do business.   Of course, it doesn't help when all of the links under "Progress News" on their website say "Coming soon."

Consider our prominent citizens:

• George Lucas, graduate of my high school, who wrote and directed the very fine film American Graffiti about coming of age in Modesto.  Of course, he was a poor student, didn't like the place much, and didn't even come back when the town dedicated a statue to honor  him.  Not to mention that the film was actually made in Santa Rosa and not Modesto.  Then there's the whole Jar Jar Binks fiasco, which I'm sure brings back ugly memories for all of us.
• Ann Veneman, the soon-to-be-former Secretary of Agriculture under President Bush.  But it seems the thing most people are going to remember about her tenure is blocking black farmers from collecting on a lawsuit settled with the department for years of racist policy.
• James Marsters, who starred as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the best television programs in recent years.  (Really, I'm not kidding.)  No word yet on a second role...
• Er, that's it.

Writers covering the various murders described Modesto as "sleepy," "dusty," "gloomy," or -- my favorite backhanded compliment -- "increasingly sophisticated."  Compared with San Francisco, yes, but then so is nearly every city in the country.  The town is quiet (at least when there aren't any tabloid murders), but it's hardly sleepy.  According to the 2000 census, almost half a million people live in the metropolitan area (and yes, the Census Bureau does call it a metropolitan area).  That would make it the second largest in Illinois, but for California seems small.

That's the same sort of mistake many writers make whenever they venture out from the big cities, and yes it may have a small impact on why some red staters sound so defensive and resentful.  I recall one horrendous story about the mass poisonings in New Sweden, Maine, written by David Montgomery for the Washington Post Style section last year.  The poisonings were horrendous, but the story was as well.  Condescending through and through.

Modesto isn't all that interesting, but it's no one-horse town, either.  It's just  another big town that grew up from a small town, with not much else around for dozens of miles in any direction, and a few distinctive charms.  Now the place has to get used to life outside the tabloids.

A Nattering Nabob No More

The New York Times has announced that William Safire will step down as a regular creep columnist for their Op Ed page.  Now, I'm every bit as supportive of polite appreciation for a long career as the next guy, but what I can't stand is when that career is consistently misrepresented out of some misplaced professional courtesy.

It seems that every appreciation of Safire today calls him a "libertarian conservative."  At least some do justice to that label by adding "self-described" to the front.  Let me say first that, for a conservative, a libertarian is OK by me.  Much more so than their paleo and neo cousins.  But William Safire is about as strong a libertarian as Pat Boone is a metalhead.  Here's what the Washington Post says about the foundations of his libertarianism:

Safire said the late columnist Stewart Alsop offered advice on the art of writing, including "Never sell out, except for a really good anecdote." Safire's passion on privacy and civil liberties issues stems from his discovery that Nixon had him wiretapped during his White House tenure.

I see.  Questions about civil liberties, especially during the years he worked for a White House infiltrating opponents to the Vietnam War and seeking to block newspapers from printing information critical of the administration, didn't really arise until he found his own phone bugged.  That's deep.

To get a better sense of how strongly he adheres to libertarian ideals, consider his spirited defense of gay marriage.  Oops, perhaps not.  That sounded something less than spirited.  Well, certainly he is fairminded on questions of gay rights generally, right?  Try again.  Ok, maybe that's a bad choice.  How about the rights of the accused?  Thank you, come again.  Now, it is true that he opposed the Patriot Act, but that only means he learned something from his Nixon days.  Bottom line: If Safire's columns are what counts as a defense of liberty, then we are in serious trouble.

The Times did say that he was convinced to keep his Sunday "On Language" column, but that thing's been on autopilot for years.  A Lexis-Nexis search for the Word of the Week and a few emails from tweedy, pipe-smoking former English majors, and it practically writes itself.

No Sooner

When Tom Brokaw was announced at the Oklahoma-Nebraska game on Saturday, the Sooner crowd booed him.

Man, they really don't like the liberal media elite in those red states.  You'd think they would at least give him courtesy applause on his impending retirement.

Trending down

Reading my Sunday New York Times, I was shocked by what I read.  Was it the story entitled "Despite Warnings, Drug Giant Took Long Path to Vioxx Recall" about how Merck delayed and resisted attempts to take the drug off the market, even when serious questions were raised about its safety?  Sadly, no, that was all too predictable.  Was it the one called "Will Meets Resistance in Deadly Logic of War" about the fighting in Falluja?  Alas, it was not that one either.

Instead it was the piece at the bottom of the front page, "These Days, the College Bowl is Filled With Milk and Cereal."  Lisa Foderaro tells us:

While affection for cereal among the young is certainly not new, anecdotal evidence suggests that they are eating it like never before, and industry analysts say that such pervasive consumption by teenagers and young adults makes that age group one of the strongest markets for manufacturers.

Hmmm.  Let's parse that sentence because the rest of the story hinges on this claim.  Translating the first half of the sentence, Fodero says that college students have been eating breakfast cereal during non-breakfast meals for a long time, but that a few students she talked to seem to be eating a whole lot of it.  Then, in the second half of the sentence she writes that "industry analysts" say that it's profitable to market cereals to young adults.  Go figure.  I always thought that cohort on the miserly side, but I guess those "industry analysts"  know what they're doing by trying to sell them stuff.  But note also that the latter claim is not linked to the former except by inference; she wants us to believe that the marketing is caused by increased demand by students for cereal without ever showing that's the case.

On the basis of this "evidence" of a cereal-eating trend, she then spends the rest of the article talking about all the marketing  that targets the age group.  Oh yes, and with the requisite references to the post-9/11 world and Sigmund Freud.  To further buttress her trend story, Foderaro writes, "While NPD Foodworld does not specifically break out college-age consumers, anecdotal evidence of cereal's popularity on campuses abounds."  In other words, there really isn't any data, it's just a bunch of students going cuckoo for Coco-Puffs during the p.m. hours.  Clearly, this is all the news that's fit to print.

Now, I did have a college roommate who ate cinnamon toast in the evenings by smuggling a few slices of bread, a few pads of butter and a bowl of cinnamon and sugar out of the dining hall and back to our room.  But then again this was the late '80s, long before the cereal boom, so maybe she's right.

Might I be so bold as to ask for a moratorium on these non-trend "trend" stories?  Enough of the shark attack frenzy.  Write the story if it's intrinsically interesting, but don't manufacture a trend to sell it, either to scare us from going to the beach or from eating dinner with a Cap'n Crunch-scarfing teenager.  And above all, don't waste my time with anecdotal stories that don't amount to a hill of Honey Smacks.  There must have been something going on in the world important enough to displace the 56 column inches this story took up (including photo and graph).