Monthly Archives: October 2005

en route

I try to post something substantive here every workday. In fact, I’ve addressed one topic or another for the last 700 days except during family vacations. However, as Monday, Oct. 10 begins, I’m waiting for a delayed midnight flight from Atlanta to Columbus, OH. (We were in rural Georgia for a true Southern family reunion, complete with a pig roast. I’m going to Columbus for a meeting on service-learning that John Glenn will address.) I feel tired enough, as I await this late flight and the prospect of two days of meetings, that I don’t expect to be able to manage a substantive post until Tuesday at the earliest.

PS, By the time I got online and had a chance to post this, I learned some news that’s exciting to acknowledge. The great Tom Schelling, a colleague at the Maryland School of Public Policy, has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. He joins Amartya Sen as one of my two favorite winners ever. He’s not only a brilliantly original social scientist who has wrestled with the vital questions of the day (from nuclear war to global environmental threats); he’s also a beautiful writer and a true gentleman.

all the news that’s fit to print

Jay Rosen captures one’s attention with the lead to his latest post: “Just one man’s opinion, but now is a good time to say it: The New York Times is not any longer–in my mind–the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the least year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position.” (And this from a quintessential New Yorker!)

Here is what I take away from Jay’s argument. First, the Times represents a traditional conception of the daily newspaper as an institution that tries to extract significant information from politically powerful people and present it to a judicious public. This is not the only valid conception of a newspaper’s role; I have defended a rival view (that journalism exists to promote public participation). However, if the Times has a claim to excellence, it is the conventional one.

Jay cites a series of disturbing recent cases in which the accuracy of the Times’ news coverage has been found wanting: the “breakdown in controls in reporting Weapons of Mass Destruction, … Jayson Blair, Wen Ho Lee, Paul Krugman’s correction trauma.” But everyone makes mistakes, and an outsider could imagine that the Times must now be tightening its internal controls.

The Judith Miller story reflects a deeper problem than mere error. As she investigated the Valerie Plame case and faced a subpoena for her information, Miller became part of a classic Washington story about the secret behavior of powerful people. The extraordinary list of her visitors in jail (John Bolton, Bob Dole, Tom Brokaw) illustrates how close she has come to power, and how tightly linked are our media leaders and politicos. Jay notes that “Miller is a longtime friend of the [Times] publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. They socialize. It’s not a scandal, but it is a fact.” Indeed, it is the Times’ traditional role to get close to the powerful; to offer coveted space in its news columns in return for information. Thus Sulzberger, Brokaw, Bolton, Dole, and others like them move in similar circles, as do reporters like Judith Miller. Readers potentially benefit from those connections, when the Times presses to reveal as much as possible from its exalted sources. That, after all, is the heroic story of the Pentagon Papers and Times v Sullivan.

Miller, however, became a newsmaker, a decision-maker, someone with information that she could deploy strategically. She did not choose that role: a subpoena dragged her into it. However, her contacts, her friendships, and all of her tactical choices underlined her close connections to insiders and “newsmakers.” This impression presented a challenge to the Times, whose role is to explain what decision-makers are up to. We want to assume that some have power and others gather independent knowledge about them; the state and the press do not mix. But here, through no deliberate choice of Miller’s, the lines were blended.

It was then the responsibility of the Times to show that it was a trustworthy explainer. Every instinct should have pressed the newspaper’s editors and staff to extract information about its own reporter and to explain what she had done. Instead, the Times’ coverage of Miller’s legal predicament has been confusing, low-key, half-hearted, and passive. Its columnists have been virtually silent. And it is has issued no meaningful public statements or press releases.

The implicit deal that the Times offers is this: We will cozy up to the power-brokers, but we will do it in your interests, so that we can keep you informed about their wheeling and dealing. When the Times becomes a power-broker itself, the deal comes into question. At that moment, the editors should understand that their whole justification is at stake, and they should rush to serve the public’s “right to know.” Failure to do so raises fundamental questions about the value of the New York Times that go far beyond any cases of misreporting or run-of-the-mill bias.

philosophy, the profession

On Crooked Timber recently, Harry Brighouse observed that graduate students in philosophy are wise not to publish too much. If they do choose to publish, they should reserve their work for prestigious journals. He wasn’t too sure about the hierarchy of prestige, but Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs were clearly top venues in his field (which is also, nominally, mine).

This whole discussion fills me with a vague anxiety that I rarely feel at my current stage of life. It transports me back 10 or 15 years to my days as a grad student and aspiring professor. I was extremely fortunate in some ways: for example, my doctorate was free. However, studying abroad and very much on my own, I received absolutely no tactical advice about how to play the academic game. So the idea that you shouldn’t publish would never have occurred to me.

Brighouse’s post provoked some discussion of the major journals. I admire the work that appears in venues like Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs. I must have read 50 articles from those publications in my life. Most have been difficult, challenging, and rigorous. But I don’t read the journals regularly or keep up with the overall discipline of philosophy in any organized way.

Continue reading →

the Meiers nomination and the opacity of political motivation

A a general rule, I strongly oppose the kind of political analysis and argument that asks about the motivations of decision-makers. People’s motives are often mixed or downright mysterious, even to themselves. Motives may be irrelevant: politicians often do good things for selfish reasons and bad things with good intentions. When we look for leaders’ motives, we must rely on insiders (who are powerful and rarely trustworthy). They become authorities, and citizens are mere spectators. If, in contrast, we consider whether a policy is good or bad on its face, we can make up our own minds based on public documents and evidence. Finally, the search for motives in a second-term presidency is genuinely baffling. GW Bush cannot be reelected; he may not care particularly about the outcome of the 2008 election; his financial backers have no leverage over him; he may not trust the “history books” to treat him fairly, whatever he does. So what does he want? You can go crazy guessing.

The nomination of Harriet Miers is, unfortunately, something of an exception to the rule that we shouldn’t think about politicians’ motives. That is because of what my Maryland colleague and friend Mark Graber calls the information advantage: “What both John Roberts and Harriet Miers have in common is that the administration knows a lot more about them than the rest of us.” Graber subscribes to “a political regime theory of the judicial function. On this view, the constitution may be plausibly interpreted in different (not infinite) ways so presidents (and senators) are authorized by election to seek federal justices who share their constitutional vision.” If that’s the case, then it’s crucial for presidents or their nominees to explain their visions, so that we can hold them accountable at the next election. But Bush won’t say what his vision is, beyond uttering “cliches about modest justices and judicial restraint. In short, President Bush is clearly moving the court in a particular direction. He just isn’t telling us what that direction is other than vaguely conservative.”

Since we cannot debate Bush’s or Mier’s theory of the Constitution, which is unknown, all we can do is speculate about the president’s motives. The blogosphere is great for such speculation, and in this case, it provides many options. For example:

Jack Balkin: The ruling conservatives want policies friendly to business, meaning “stability, comfort, predictability, and an agile, productive, submissive and demobilized population.” They don’t really care about divisive social issues that might mobilize voters. Hariet Miers is a corporate lawyer. While she may vote conservatively on issues like abortion, she doesn’t have a big plan for moving the country rightward on those questions–and that’s fine with business and with George W. Bush.

Kevin Drum: The President wants to avoid a fight; he wants to “fold.” If he picked a well-known moderate, that would be folding too obviously. Harriet Miers, because she is a cipher with no relevant record, gives him the opportunity to back down without actually saying “uncle.” (The implication, which Drum doesn’t spell out explicitly, is that Bush would be disappointed and surprised if Miers made controversial decisions from the Court on his watch.)

GreyBlog (and others): Meiers is personally loyal to the president. Bush’s biggest concern is a Supreme Court case involving his administration, say, on a matter of corruption or something to do with presidential powers. Miers is a safe vote if his interests are at stake.

David Bernstein: The President’s priority is the War on Terror (including Guantanamo and the Patriot Act), just as FDR’s priority was the New Deal. Roberts, because of his appelate rulings, and Miers, because of her work in the Bush White House, seem two of the most likely candidates to uphold the Administration on those issues.

These are some of the most interesting theories, but there is also plenty of speculation that … Miers is willing to overturn Roe and Bush knows it; Miers is a relatively uncontroversial woman and Bush wants a female appointee; Miers is nice and respectful to Bush and he just likes her. Who knows, and–I would normally say–Who cares? But in this case, it seems impossible to have any more intelligent conversation than the snippets quoted above. It is now up to the Judiciary Committee to force Miers into a discussion of the Constitution, so that we can stop worrying about what GWB wants.