Why listen to public radio?

Is there any more smug and elitist institution than taxpayer subsidized “public” broadcasting?

This week, NPR’s ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, takes a “whack” at answering the question “Why Listen to Public Radio?” Basically he proffers five reasons, the fifth of which applies to broadcast media in general. This leaves us with:

First, in my opinion, most public radio provides a certain reflection and appreciation of the community it serves… It can also act as a pretty good mirror for many of the values of that community.

Perhaps, but doesn’t commercial radio do just that? The radio bands are filled with local commentators of virtually every stripe and affiliation reflecting local values, many of whom express views that would never be aired on public broadcasting

Second, it provides a level of news and information that does not exist in broadcasting anywhere else. A long report on television is under three minutes on the nightly news. NPR reports average around six minutes. It's important that people on the radio are allowed to think and to speak in paragraphs, not just in sound bites.

I suppose that it does provide a service for those who don’t read, but newspapers and magazines do a far better job of providing in-depth information, and do so without government funding. Cable television has also shown that more in-depth programming can exist without government subsidy. There is no “National Public Newspaper,” and The Learning Channel and The History Channel are both commercial.

Third, it also provides cultural experiences and the exchange of ideas -- intellectual and artistic -- which are essential to our civic well being. It's because public radio considers the listeners to be citizens first and listeners second. Commercial broadcasting can do some things quite well, but I think it sees its listeners as consumers first, listeners second and citizens third. In a market economy, I guess that's just the way it is.

Jeffrey must not listen to his competition all that much, because there is far greater “exchange of ideas” in commercial broadcasting than on public radio. And, again, this is an area handled even better by newspapers and magazines – despite being subject to a “market economy.”

Fourth, it should "delight and surprise," as a former boss once told me. That means it needs to have aspects that are different from other media. It should present alternatives in ideas, voices and programs. It should find people who don't usually command the attention of the mass media in this country -- or in others. It should make people occasionally nervous, upset every once in a while, but mostly, public radio should make people think…

This is really more of a goal than an attribute, and merely cruising the AM and FM dials will present far more variety and “alternatives” than you’ll ever experience on NPR, which is largely inhibited by its own corporate culture and adherence to political correctness.

I think Jeffrey needs some help. Would anybody like to help him come up with a good reason that we should have public radio?

UPDATE: Charles Johnson provides a good reason not to listen to NPR:

I haven’t listened to NPR (National Palestinian Radio) for quite a while, and the program I just heard reminded me why. In at least a half hour of slobbery pro-Arab coverage, speaker after speaker talked about Arab “anger” at “US policy” toward Israel. No one mentioned specifics. The “news” report from Saudi Arabia uncritically repeated Saudi claims that they have “called” for an end to the hate speech in their mosques and media, without mentioning that the hate speech hasn’t actually stopped. In the whole program there was not one word of truth about Arab rejectionism and anti-Semitism, or their open support of Palestinian terrorism. And not one word of balancing opinion from the Israeli side. It was pretty shameful, and all delivered in that semi-spooky over-earnest NPR voice.

Don Wycliff and Daniel Pipes on John Allen Muhammad's motives

Don Wycliff, ombudsman for The Chicago Tribune, takes a swipe at Daniel Pipes for stating that:

It came as no surprise to learn that the lead suspect as the Washington, D.C.-area sniper is John Allen Muhammad, an African-American who converted to Islam about 17 years ago. Nor did it surprise that seven years ago he provided security for Louis Farrakhan's `Million Man March.' Even less does it amaze that he reportedly sympathized with the Sept. 11 attacks carried out by militant Islamic elements.

Wycliff takes exception to Pipe’s assertion that “it fits into a well-established tradition of American blacks who convert to Islam turning against their country.”

Wycliff disputes this, and distinguishes between “ABMs--Angry Black Males--doing what Americans have done from the nation's beginning: exercising their right to flap their jaws in criticism of the country and its shortcomings, often in hyperbolic and incendiary terms,” and "turning against their country." He then attacks Pipe’s, because:

In speaking of an alienation that "goes back decades," Pipes is being either disingenuous or willfully ignorant. Only in very recent decades has America ceased to impose alienation on its black citizens. The wonder is not that an [Nation of Islam leader] Elijah Muhammad defied the draft during World War II; the wonder is that many more African-Americans did not.

But if Wycliff is right that until only recently America imposed "alienation on its black citizens," isn't that a tacit admission of an aliention that "goes back decades?" Wycliff goes on to argue that:

to suggest that John Allen Muhammad undertook his alleged homicidal odyssey out of some ideological motivation is not only to pop off without so much as a shred of evidence, it is to go against the evidence that does exist and that suggests this was a man with a terribly diseased mind.

Assuming that, by “diseased mind,” Wycliff is asserting that Muhammad has a true brain disease, i.e. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc., I’m not aware of any evidence to support his assertion. If he is asserting that what Muhammad did is crazy and that therefore he must be crazy, that is a tautology that doesn't address Pipes' assertion.

It is known, however, that Muhammad has expressed sympathy for the Islamic terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, which would seem to at least partially support Pipe’s view of ideological motivation.

The problem with Pipe’s view is that Muhammad appears to have been a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), which is by no means Islamic. Pipes may, however, be correct in linking conversion to Islam with anti-Americanism in the black community. For one thing, it appears Muhammad may have converted first to Islam before converting to the NOI --which might as well be called the Nation of Borgledork. For another, there are well-documented cases of black converts to Islam being recruited by Iran in the 70's and 80's, including Daoud Salahuddin (formerly David Belfield), who was recruited while at Howard University and who fled to Iran after assassinating a leading political opponent of the Ayatollah Khomani in Washington, D.C.

Yesterday, PostWatch posted an interesting exchange with Daniel Pipes about the relationship between the NOI and Islam. Pipes asserts that the NOI “has been moving steadily toward normative Islam for 40 years,” which I think ignores the split between those who followed Elijah Muhammad's son and migrated to Islam and those who followed current NOI leader Farrakhan. By providing security for Farrakhan it would appear that Muhammad falls into the later camp.
posted at 10:45 AM

Our friends in the E.U.

Finnish blogger, Teemu Lehtonen, finds it “beyond pale” that his country refuses to sell Israel computerized chemical weapons detection kits. Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja claims that EU policy forbids the sale to Israel.

Iraq is expected to use chemical weapons against Israel in the event of a U.S. invasion.

UPDATE: In an update, Teemu Lehtonen points to an article in Helsingin Sanomat, which quotes "Researcher Siemon Wezeman from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) [who] says there is nothing in the EU directives that would hinder Finland from exporting detectors of chemical warfare agents to Israel." According to the publication, the real reason for rejecting the sale may be fear that the Israeli Army would copy "the technical solutions of the Finnish products for their own applications." They point out that the blocked sale only involved two chemical detection units.

Richard Cohen defends Martha Stewart

James DiBenedetto takes issue with Richard Cohen's paean to, “personification of American values -- thrifty, industrious, creative and solidly honest,” Martha Stewart. After all, according to Cohen, “For Stewart, her ImClone holdings were petty cash. The stock sale brought her $227,000. Had she waited a day, until ImClone itself announced that its cancer drug was not going to pass government muster, she would have received about $45,000 less.”

Quite frankly, I’m surprised that Cohen doesn’t blame big-Democratic Party contributor Stewart’s legal problems on a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” just as he used, noted commodity futures trader, Hillary Clinton’s phrase to describe the impeachment process for disbarred former-President, Bill Clinton.

Culture and anti-culture

From Bjørn Stærk:

Europeans who consider themselves intellectuals typically look down on American culture and/or politics, but at the same time they and everyone else are so submerged into the same culture that I'm not sure you can talk about separate cultures anymore. For the urban younger generations there is only culture and anti-culture - you don't choose European culture, you choose anti-American culture, which is just a dull subsection of American culture.

Masonry, the Founders and Michael Novak

There’s so much wrong with Michael Novak’s most recent advocacy piece to erase the separation of Church and state that I’m only going to address a small part. Novak is asserting that the United States is founded on the unique relationship between man and God found only in Christianity and Judaism. Hence, he is upset by an ACLU lawsuit to remove God’s law, the Ten Commandments, from a courthouse.

What then are we to make of the Founders? George Washington, like his father, was a Deist. The very term “Creator,” that Novak ascribes exclusively to Christianity and Judaism, is in fact a Deist term. Many of the Founders were either Deists or Unitarians. And many, including George Washington, were Masons. (Eight signers of the Declaration of Independence, and thirteen of the Constitution, were Masons.)

Over at Lex Communis, Peter Sean Bradley has some interesting commentary on Masonry, and why he objects to it.

Freemasonry clearly developed during the Enlightenment and sought to promote the philosophies of the Enlightenment. The ideas of "natural" religion and Christianity being a sect on a par with other sects was entirely consistent with Enlightenment ideas.

A devout Catholic, he goes on to explain that he finds the religious tenets of the Rotary Club acceptable, but not those of Masonry:

if Rotary … wrapped itself up in religious rituals and blood-oaths and made no distinctions between Islam, Budhism or Christianity, I would be out of there in a flash.

How would the "Father of the Constitution," James Madison, view the posting of the Ten Commandments on a Courthouse?

Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history

The Ten Commandments have no more place in a civil court than does the Koran or the Tipitaka. It is Michael Novak, not the ACLU, who distorts the beliefs and intentions of the Founders.

The civic duty to endorse political candidates

The Oregon Spokesman-Review’s ombudsman, Doug Floyd, responds to the complaints of “many readers,” who “see endorsement editorials as the paper's attempt to impose its views on the entire community.” Floyd disagrees. He argues that “Self-imposed silence … would be an abdication of civic duty by the newspaper -- or, for that matter, by the North Side businessmen and [Gonzaga University] law professors" who also endorse candidates.

Civic duty-minded celebrity, Barbara Streisand, has also produced a list of endorsements.

AP reports possible link between shooters and Five Percenters

The AP is reporting the possible link between the Washington DC-area shooters, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, and the Nation of Islam offshoot the Five Percenters.

”'I am God' is something a Five Percenter might say," said Robert Walker, a consultant based in Columbia, S.C., who helps police identify gangs. "All black men who are followers and members of the Five Percenters refer to themselves as God and will even refer to someone else who is a Five Percenter as a God also."

The letter also included the phrase "word is bond," widely used by Five Percenters, who often call their movement the Nation of Gods and Earths.

The letter ... had five stars on the title page. Walker said the stars were similar to ones that symbolize children to followers of the movement.

But Walker also pointed to an important discrepancy:

He said Five Percenters typically end letters with the word, "peace," which members mean as an abbreviation for "please elevate all children everywhere."

The letter's postscript had no such good wishes: "Your children are not safe anywhere at anytime.”

Empirical research and bilingual education

Of the hurdles facing recent immigrants, some of the most avoidable are government-imposed policies encouraging linguistic isolation. Rather than being encouraged to learn English, immigrants are catered to in the tongues of their old lands on everything from driver’s tests to ballots (despite the fact that the law supposedly requires naturalized citizens to demonstrate proficiency in English.) As a result of their lack of fluency in our de facto native tongue, many are consigned to a linguistic ghetto of low-paying, menial jobs where fluency is not as important.

Of all the misguided policies, however, one stands out as particularly pernicious, because it extends the linguistic isolation to the children of immigrants. And that policy is so-called bilingual education. USA Today has an excellent editorial on the failure of bilingual education and on developing alternative approaches.

Congress launched bilingual education in 1968 as a civil-rights remedy without a stitch of evidence that it helped ease students into U.S. culture. Today, too many of the nation's 4.4 million non-English-speaking students are trapped in bilingual courses that not only fail to teach them English, but deprive them of other needed academic skills, too.

USA Today rightly points out that the solution is not just to jump to another unproven policy, but rather to use empirical methods to determine the best way to educate children. Fortunately it appears that just such an effort is taking place.

Bilingual education and other important education methods haven't been subjected to that kind of study because most educators assumed experiments couldn't be conducted on children. They were proved wrong in 1998, when the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development released results from a medical-style experiment on the best way to teach reading.

Now, the federal agency has stepped into the bilingual-research vacuum. Federal health researchers have joined the U.S. Education Department in a five-year, $32.5 million experiment focusing on 5,400 children in eight states. The goal is to find the best methods for teaching Spanish-speaking children reading and writing skills in English.

Let's hope the research is allowed to proceed without being hijacked by political interest groups.

More reader thoughts on fishy statistics

Reader Fred Ray has some more thoughts on “fishy stats about rape and violence to women.”

Glad to see this area of fishy stats about rape and violence to women are getting an airing. It's about time. Just a few more random thoughts:

The [National Crime Victimization Survey] is still the best measure, especially since it's been kept over a period of time. Even that has problems, however. In '94 (I think) the survey was revised to include specific questions about rape, including a preamble to the effect that it is an underreported crime and many women don't like to talk about it. Now in terms of survey technique this is a no-no, because you are prompting the respondent and suggesting to them what the "right" answer is. Predictably, the rate jumped about 30%, leading to cries of a "rape crisis" in the US.

Now this leads into the next problem -- if you try to contest the high numbers you run into the fall back position -- that "only one rape in seven is reported." Now you may ask, as I did, why if they were not reported, how we know they happened. To date I haven't been able to find out where this figure comes from, but activists accept it as a sort of gospel.

Looked at objectively (a hard thing to do) the NCVS seems about right -- the difference between reported crimes and the NCVS IS higher, but not seven times as high.

The other big problem is definition. Your graph included both rape and sexual assault. Defining this is often a problem, and activists have worked industriously to broaden the definition of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Under some definitions of sexual assault, for instance, ANY unwanted touching of a sexual nature (what used to be called copping a feel) is now lumped in with rape and attempted rape. In some cases no touching at all is needed -- the respondent need only FEEL that a sexual touching MIGHT occur. Couple this with the fact that this is all done through interviews with no attempt to establish the actual facts, and you have a situation where you can prove pretty much anything you like.

I'm attaching a copy of the domestic violence study that everyone cites. [Editor's note: Please email me if you want a copy of the 2.2 megabyte .pdf file] It's interesting because it's almost 20 years old and comes from inner-city Detroit at the height of the crack epidemic. When people cite this study to show that the top cause of women's admission to emergency rooms is domestic violence, I say "Yes, but it also shows that there is no significant statistical difference between the injury rates for men and women." The look you get is priceless.

The real question, though, is why no one in the press has bothered to debunk all this nonsense, even tho the information is readily available.

Further reader comment is invited.

Previous posts on this subject can be found at:
How likely is a woman to be raped?
Rape statistics
Rape Statistics, Part II
Domestic abuse statistics
Fishy sex abuse statistics

How The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram “Borked” a potential candidate for high government office by smearing an author

Harry Stein recounts, in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, how he was used to “Bork” Bob McTeer, president and CEO of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and potential nominee to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Needless to say, no one who actually liked the speech was quoted; but, in the sort of flimsy pretense to fairness such reporters describe as balance, the “conservative author” who’d “stunned” the gathering with his “offensive” and “inappropriate” remarks is allowed a single quotation in self-defense: “ ‘When I was telling the Huck Finn story, he just heard the n-word,' Stein said. ‘Ninety-five percent of the people in that room got it.' ” But lacking the essential context that my point was the book’s powerful anti-racist message, even the most astute reader surely wondered: Got what?

It is truly a sickening feeling being slandered in this way, the outrage mixing with a profound sense of helplessness. Yet rereading the article, I finally grasped something else: I was not really the main target here. Bob McTeer was.

via Media Minded

Wrapping dissent in the flag

Ombudsman Mike Needs, of The Akron Beacon-Journal, received a complaint that The Beacon-Journal is “un-American” for reporting on dissent within the government to the President’s wartime policy toward Saddam Hussein. Needs resorts to the age-old tactic of wrapping dissent in the American flag to defend his newspaper. He asked “a group of readers whether a newspaper should seek out alternative points of view to the government's official word.” Not surprisingly, the 14 “sample” viewpoints he reports on all support his stance. For example:

”Those who proclaim that it's `un-American' to speak out against our government or our president (irrespective of party), don't apparently realize that there's really nothing more ’American’ than the concept and right to free speech.''

The First Amendment guarantee of free speech is a limit on government action. The Beacon-Journal is, of course, within its rights to oppose the war, just as the northern Copperhead press was within its rights during the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be un-patriotic and un-American.

And, as with Lincoln, Bush is implicitly compared with odious tyrants:

”Know what the American flag stands for before you go waving it. It stands for all of us and all of our ideas. When something is wrong, only free debate is appropriate.... We cannot allow patriotism to be a hammer held over our heads to make us fear speaking our minds. That is what Hitler and Stalin did to the people of Germany and Russia. Will we do that now in United States?''

I have no general objection to publishing dissenting opinions, but where was all this highfalutin language in favor of freedom of expression while I was in college? It seems the same voices considered it their duty to shout down any conservative speaker who might dare risk appearing on campus. Perhaps the qualifying phrase “when something is wrong” explains why much of the left regards only their side as worthy of free expression. And, quite frankly, when the anti-war left starts wrapping itself in patriotism and the flag it strains credulity.

Another comic strip popularity poll

This is really too good to pass up. Ombudsman David House, of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, announces that his newspaper is conducting an on-line survey to help determine their comic strip line-up:

Beginning today, readers will have a week to vote on which five comics are their favorites and which five are absolute duds. The ballot can be found in the State & Region section today, but check for it in other sections through Saturday.

They’re seeking suggestions for new comic strips, too. Might I suggest that, in the tradition of a similar survey for The Washington Post, Dennis the Menace and Mary Worth might make a strong showing. Just a thought...

Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter speaks out on North Korea

James DiBenedetto reports that former President Jimmy Carter is now an apologist for Pyongyang.

[Carter] writes in defense of his stop in Pyongyang as part of the early 90's Appeasement Tour. This is fairly brazen of him, considering that North Korea has torn up the "Agreed Framework" (the purpose of which was to bribe Pyongyang into giving up its nuclear weapons program), and then stomped on the bits.

But, see, it's not their fault:

the two replacement nuclear plants (that we promised to provide to NK) have not been built and the United States has assumed what the North Koreans consider a belligerent attitude toward them

It's all America's fault. Everything is America's fault. I wonder if he was listening to Ramsey Clark earlier today and nodding along in agreement. Probably.

That's it! A brutal, impoverished Stalinist dictatorship, reportedly rich in untapped hydroelectric power, needed not one, but two, nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. I guess all that oil and foreign aid we sent them throughout the '90s just wasn't enough to keep them happy - so they built some atomic bombs to show their displeasure.

”Heroin Town”

Is the Willimantic section of Windham, Connecticut, “Heroin Town?” Ombudsman Karen Hunter reports that, according to the Hartford Courant, it is.

Understandably, Willimantic residents were offended that their entire community was branded "Heroin Town."

"I think it's a very unfair characterization of our town," said Pat Banning of Windham. "We've got problems, sure. And a lot of other towns do too. But we have a lot of good things going on and you never - almost never - put the good stuff in."

Heroin Town
Photo gallery

The International Herald Tribune follies

The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, is also the former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune -- up until now a joint venture between The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Times recently forced The Post to sell its stake in the Tribune for $70 million. Getler notes that:

There was also a touch of irony for those with long memories. In 1966, the owner of the venerable New York Herald Tribune, John Hay Whitney, began to shut that paper down but sought to keep alive its Paris edition, which had been started in 1887. The Washington Post's Katharine Graham joined Whitney as a partner that year and the Paris Tribune had another life. By 1967, an earlier six-year effort by the New York Times to produce an international edition was failing financially, and Whitney and The Post welcomed the Times into a new three-way partnership that gave birth to the International Herald Tribune. The two papers have owned the IHT 50-50 since 1991.

Jack Shafer observes, in Slate, that:

The International Herald Tribune lost money in 2001 and 2002, making it more of a philanthropic enterprise for American expatriates than a going newspaper concern. USA Today owns the tourist market in Europe and savvy business readers seek out the Financial Times and the regional editions of the Wall Street Journal. As James Ledbetter reported in Slate over the summer, in Europe the International Herald Tribune generally serves the news a day late and at a steeper price ($1.75 for 16 to 20 pages) than its English-language competition. The Post should be grateful about the no-fault split-up, stop smashing up the china, and count its money.

It’s not clear to me that the Tribune has much of a future in the modern Internet-enabled world. Why pay a premium to get the news a day late in the Tribune when you can get more current information at lower cost from other sources, or for free from The Post, The Times or any of a number of first-rate online media outlets?

Link to Jack Shafer's piece in Slate via Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.

Unbelievable anonymous sources

The AP recently fired reporter Christopher Newton for making up sources. The Orlando Sentinel’s ombudsman, Manning Pynn, doesn’t think anonymous sourcing is any more believable.

...five of this month's nine "sources" appeared in items written by Sentinel staffers -- attributing information to "sources close to the search," "a source close to the ongoing investigation," "a source close to the team," "sources close to the CEO" and "a source close to the board." None made clear why the source couldn't be identified.

I'm sure the writer, in every case, could explain why that was necessary. But I wonder if readers find those "sources" any more believable than made-up names.

I don't.

Who is a terrorist?

Tapped makes the argument that the right is cheapening the word “terrorist” by applying it incorrectly to the two shooters who have been terrorizing the Washington, DC area. While there has been speculation that they might be linked to terrorism, I don’t believe that Tapped’s concern is well founded. The ingredient missing has been the intent to coerce. Mere wanton killing isn’t sufficient and I don’t think that too many conservative commentators have referred to the shootings themselves as terrorism, except those who imply (perhaps incorrectly) the missing element.

Meanwhile CNN, Reuters and other media outlets won’t use “terrorist” to describe actions that clearly are terrorism. Meryl Yourish describes an AP article about the recent taking of about 700 hostages by Chechen terrorists who sought political concessions from the Russian government. AP describes the terrorists as:

Captors. Gunmen. Hostage-takers. Not terrrorists, though many of them were clad in the latest of bomb-belt fashions. Dozens of their hostages are dead today, many wounded, and these simple "rebels" are described as above.

The terrorists have won the language war. Or is it the multicultis and the PC crowds? Certainly, the newsroom staffs across the globe have succumbed to the mindset of—captives. Why else are they so afraid to call a bloodthirsty killer a terrorist?

The real problem is not overuse of the word “terrorist” by the right, but the refusal of so much of the media to use the word “terrorist” to describe people who so clearly fit the description.

Tapped link via Rhetorica. Meryl Yourish link via InstaPundit.

”Proximity bias” and the news

Andrew Cline observes that “proximity bias” has prevented television news from covering the Moscow hostage situation. With the Washington DC-area snipers apparently captured, the networks provided some coverage this morning. What hostage situation? Here’s a link for those who missed it.

UPDATE: Jennie Taliaferro has been following this closely.

The Washington Post and Islam

PostWatch corrects The Washington Post, pointing out that the Nation of Islam is not Islamic. The Post is reporting that:

Muhammad, born John Allen Williams, changed his name after converting to Islam. In court papers, his ex-wife Mildred said that the couple, who married in 1988, were members of the Nation of Islam and attended a mosque in Seattle.

As PostWatch previously observed:

In strict theological terms there is no overlap--you might as well call the Nation of Islam the Nation of Borgledork for all its fidelity to Islam.

That's Louis Borgledork, to us white creations of the evil God YaKub.

UPDATE: MediaMinded speculates that John Muhammad may have been a member of Nation of Islam offshoot, the Five Percent Nation of Islam. That would seem to explain the notes saying "I am God." According to the ADL:

Five Percenters believe that blacks are the original people of Earth, that they founded all civilization, and that in fact the "blackman" is god. They also believe that whites have deceived the whole world, causing it to honor and worship false gods and idols.

UPDATE: PostWatch has more on why he is "awestruck ... when big outlets like the Washington Post describe this Muhammad guy as having converted to Islam."

Another Blogger defects to Movabletype

James DiBenedetto has defected from Blogger and taken his site, The Eleven Day Empire, to Movabletype. It looks good, but he still needs to iron out a few bugs. For example, it is real, real hard to read black text on a black background. Anyway, check it out and tell him what you think.

UPDATE: The black text has been replaced with yellow text.

Domestic abuse statistics

In an earlier post, Fred Ray observed that:

Yup, there are a lot of bad stats out there about rape and domestic violence, and nobody in the press eeeeeeeeeever checks 'em. I live in Asheville and I constantly fight with the local paper, the Citizen-Times, about this. Three times now (once in an oped, once in a column, and once in an editorial) they have repeated the old saw that the majority of women admitted to hospital emergency rooms are victims of domestic violence (the real figure is about 0.5%). Can't seem to get them to admit it or issue any kind of correction (and they have no ombudsman).

PostWatch writes that:

These stats are like killer zombies. You can cut their heads off and they stumble for awhile, but eventually they stand up and start wandering all over the place. This is almost certainly sourced to a domestic-violence study that was done in emergency rooms--in some very tough neighborhoods--some years ago. Debunked from here to hell and back again. Though slightly out of date, much of this is in Christina Hoff Sommers' book Who Stole Feminism, and much of it is updated with her more recent book, The War Against Boys.

He provides a link to an excerpt from Who Stole Feminism:

The same Time magazine story that reported on the nonexistent March of Dimes study [Jan.18,1993, making the false claim that "the battering of women during pregnancy causes more birth defects than all the diseases put together" - RS] also informed readers that "between 22 percent and 35 percent of all female visits to emergency rooms are for injuries from domestic assaults." This bit of data is one of the most frequently cited statistics in the literature on violence against women. It regularly turns up in news stories on wife abuse. It is in the brochures from domestic violence agencies, and it is on the tip of many politicians' tongues. Where does it come from?

The primary source is a 1984 article entitled "Domestic Violence Victims in the Emergency Department," in the Journal of the American Medical Association [June 22,1984]. Going to the study, we find that it was conducted at the Henry Ford Hospital in downtown Detroit. The authors candidly inform us that their sample group was not representative of the American population at large. Of the 492 patients who responded to a questionnaire about domestic violence, they report that 90 percent were from inner-city Detroit and 60 percent were unemployed. We also learn that the 22 percent figure covers both women and men. Thirty-eight percent of those complaining of abuse were men.

The authors of the Detroit study took care to point out its limited scope, but the editors at the Journal of the American Medical Association who reported their results were not as careful.....

According to PostWatch:

The link takes you to the source of the excerpt on the web. It's attached to a DV study that finds a lower rate than what Sommers is attacking but a higher rate than, uh, other reports. I hasten to point out that it concludes with a 54% "cumulative lifetime exposure;" it is not clear what that stat is based on, but I do know that many domestic violence activists consider harsh words as "emotional" violence and do include that in some of their domestic violence tallies.

Fishy sex abuse statistics

In September, the Oregonian’s ombudsman, Dan Hortsch, investigated a claim that “one in 10 men has [sexually] molested children.” It seems that figure is far from set in stone.

He found another source, Boston University School of Medicine researcher Jim Hopper, who reports the number is about 1 in 20 using what seems to be a broad definition of sex abuse. According to Hortsch:

Hopper is candid about the misuse of research and the ease with which it can be misleading.

"Even the most objective scientific research is imperfect," he wrote in a paper, "Child Abuse: Statistics, Research and Resources" (available online at www.jimhopper.com/abstats).

Those experts "who claim to be without bias are fooling themselves or trying to fool you," he wrote.

Furthermore, "All statistics on the incidence and prevalence of child abuse and neglect are disputed by some experts."

The media don't help in the matter of using statistics thoughtfully, he said.

People often do not believe the extent to which a problem is significant, he wrote, unless someone backs it up with "impressive-sounding statistics."

As a result, the media often insist on such numbers for their stories "even if no good ones exist."

Hortsch observes that reporters and editors “can be our own worst enemies when we spot an attractive set of numbers.”

UPDATE: Hopper's website, linked to above, contains a defense of Mary Koss's research showing that one in four women in college has experienced rape or attempted rape since age 14.

Watch those analogies!

Bill Dennis asks if nationally syndicated columnist Clarence Page is calling the Rev. Al Sharpton a spear chucker? Page wrote that “…Sharpton's value is like the old joke about the near-sighted javelin thrower: He probably won't win but he keeps the crowd alert.”

Why the Missouri contest for the U.S. Senate is so important.

The Senate must confirm nominees for many important Federal offices, including judgeships. Because Sen. Jeffords of Vermont switched allegiance to the Democratic Party shortly after the last national election, President Bush has been unable to get many of his nominations confirmed, especially for the now numerous vacancies for Federal Judges. There are also reported to be Supreme Court Justices who would like to retire, but who remain on the bench until they can be assured of a suitable Republican replacement.

In 2000, Democratic Senator, Mel Carnahan, died before the Senate election. He won; his wife filled the seat. Next month the person for the remainder of the term will be elected. Most congressional winners wait until January to be seated; the winner of this election can take his seat immediately. If the winner is a Republican, and a lame duck session is held, the Senate will revert to Republican control. Republican nominees can then be quickly confirmed, absent (and that's a big if) any holds being placed by Senators on the process.

What’s in a name?

The mysterious ombudsman for The Boston Globe, previously known as both Christine and Christopher Chinlund, has now apparently been transmogrified into Ronald Brownstein. (Check the bottom of the column.)

Rape Statistics, Part II

This is a continuation of our discussion about the enormous apparent discrepancy between the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), which reports that only about 1 in 10,000 Americans is raped in a given year, and the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), which purports that one in seven American women will be violently raped in her lifetime.

Reader Fred Ray writes from North Carolina, that:

Yup, there are a lot of bad stats out there about rape and domestic violence, and nobody in the press eeeeeeeeeever checks 'em. I live in Asheville and I constantly fight with the local paper, the Citizen-Times, about this. Three times now (once in an oped, once in a column, and once in an editorial) they have repeated the old saw that the majority of women admitted to hospital emergency rooms are victims of domestic violence (the real figure is about 0.5%). Can't seem to get them to admit it or issue any kind of correction (and they have no ombudsman).

You have to wonder how much of this is just political correctness -- that you can't challenge any stats showing women's victimhood, no matter how bogus they are. One problem, as you noted, is that all this bad information is pasted all over the web, and that's as far as most reporters seem to go.

Of course the activists know it's all a lie -- but you'd think just once in awhile the press would stop to check out the real figures or at least ask where they came from.

The other thing you see is the Appeal to Authority -- they quote a "domestic violence expert" and go no further.

The other thing that bothers me is that no one ever mentions how much the figures have declined. As your graph shows, the rate of rape is now half of what it was in the early 90s, which in turn was a dramatic decline from the previous ten years. Never hear much about that.

The Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) did take a look at the NVAWS and reported that:

… it is illuminating to look at the absolute numbers that the percentages represent. The study reveals that 0.1% of the 8,000 male respondents reported that they had been raped in the last year - 8 instances. The number of actual instances for female rapes was 24 - 0.3% of respondents. Extrapolating from such small numbers of instances to the population in general, even from a scientifically-drawn sample, is always risky. So saying that exactly one-thousandth of the male population of the country is raped each year is a somewhat arbitrary conclusion.

To extrapolate from 70 rapes of 24 women surveyed to 876,100 rapes of 302,100 women in the entire population is a calculation which would raise red flags for most statisticians. The extrapolation from 10 rapes of 8 men to 111,300 rapes of 92,700 men is even more dubious. The rounding of the extrapolated figures to the nearest hundred also gives the figures an unwarranted air of precision. Perhaps the Health and Human Services Department could issue another heath warning - this time about its own figures.

Even the authors of NVAWS admit that its margin of error was “relatively high.” One signal that there is a problem with the survey is that they used similar questions to those used in the earlier Koss study. Koss found an extremely high rape rate on college campuses, but 73% of the women classified as rape victims did not consider themselves to have been raped, and 42% of those continued to engage in intercourse with their attacker after the alleged assault had occurred.

On the other hand, doesn’t the NCVS figure of 1 in 10,000 persons being raped in a year sound suspiciously low? Agree or disagree with what's been written? Comments about this and other rape statistics are welcome. The OmbudsGod.

The velvet glove or the iron fist?

The Sand Diego Union-Tribune’s ombudsman, Gina Lubrano, responds to an angry reader:

A reader was furious with the Union-Tribune when he saw a correction Tuesday in Sports that said Marine aviator Joe Foss "was awarded the Medal of Honor, not the Congressional Medal of Honor." The caller, who insisted that "Congressional" was part of the name of the medal, chastised the newspaper for what he considered a sign of disrespect.

No disrespect intended. The correction was made in the interest of accuracy. Although the medal is awarded by Congress and there are associations that use "Congressional Medal of Honor" as part of their names, the correct name for the medal itself is "Medal of Honor."

It's not surprising that readers are confused. In addition to "Congressional" being part of Medal of Honor societies, the Union-Tribune has been inconsistent, sometimes calling it the Medal of Honor but too frequently calling it the "Congressional Medal of Honor."

The Associated Press stylebook, used by this newspaper, is clear. It defines the Medal of Honor thusly: "The nation's highest military honor, given by Congress for risk of life in combat beyond the call of duty. There is no Congressional Medal of Honor."

Now compare that with how The Salt Lake Tribune’s ombudsman, Connie Coyne, handles a comparable situation:

Poor Sport? One angry reader (who did not leave his name or phone number) called on Friday to excoriate The Tribune for running a story in Sunday's Salt Substitute about the cost of gear for deer hunters.

"If you would sit your ass in your chair, I might be able to talk to you instead of your voice mail," the reader said. Ooooooh, maybe I should put my chair in the kitchen, where women should be, too.

"It's none of your damn business what hunters spend for updated equipment," the man said in reference to Skip Knowles' article that detailed what various kinds of equipment cost and featured an illustration (reminiscent of an automobile ad) that said a base model hunter would be $400 and "Price as shown" for the decked-out woodsman was $3,645.

"All that equipment puts meat on my table. It doesn't matter what I use," the caller said.

The article pointed out that the cost per pound of venison (if a hunter bagged one on the first trip) would be about $200 per pound.

Call it intuition, call me crazy, but I believe the little woman who belongs to that burly hunter found out what his hobby costs when she read the article on Sunday.

Examples of media bias dissected

John Rosenberg takes a look at media bias in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

OmbudsBitch

I received a letter from a reader who asks:

I've recently read your blog with interest. One thing that strikes me about the ombudsmen you report: they never seem to act on behalf of the public, they more frequently seem to defend the newspaper against complaints. Is that really their role?

I suppose their role is dictated by their employment, but this past weekend did produce a choice example of The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Reader Advocate,” Connie Coyne, displaying marked intolerance toward a reader registering a complaint.

Poor Sport? One angry reader (who did not leave his name or phone number) called on Friday to excoriate The Tribune for running a story in Sunday's Salt Substitute about the cost of gear for deer hunters.

"If you would sit your ass in your chair, I might be able to talk to you instead of your voice mail," the reader said. Ooooooh, maybe I should put my chair in the kitchen, where women should be, too.

"It's none of your damn business what hunters spend for updated equipment," the man said in reference to Skip Knowles' article that detailed what various kinds of equipment cost and featured an illustration (reminiscent of an automobile ad) that said a base model hunter would be $400 and "Price as shown" for the decked-out woodsman was $3,645.

"All that equipment puts meat on my table. It doesn't matter what I use," the caller said.

The article pointed out that the cost per pound of venison (if a hunter bagged one on the first trip) would be about $200 per pound.

Call it intuition, call me crazy, but I believe the little woman who belongs to that burly hunter found out what his hobby costs when she read the article on Sunday.

Well, Connie certainly put him in his place. Does Salt Lake City have an alternative newspaper? Did The Tribune train their ombudsman at the Department of Motor Vehicles?

Anti-war activists get no respect

Formerly known as Christine Chinlund, The Boston Globe’s ombudsman, Christopher Chinlund, reports on complaints that The Globe is providing inadequate coverage to the anti-war movement.

Says reader Thea Paneth, ''The Globe attitude to peace concerns is ''Oh, them again - ho hum - how passe.'' Concludes retired teacher and activist Pat McSweeney, ''We expected more from the Globe.''

UPDATE: The Globe's website has been updated to restore Christopher to her former identity as Christine.

Rape statistics

Last week I questioned a statistic used by The Orlando Sentinel’s ombudsman, Manning Pynn, who stated that:

Statistics presented at the Poynter gathering -- that one-seventh of the women in America have been forcibly raped at least once -- opened everyone's eyes.

I pointed out that it is hard to reconcile that number with the results of The National Crime Victimization Survey.

A reader contacted me and provided the information that the statistic is drawn from the National Violence Against Women Survey, which she thinks is “fishy.” I’d be curious to learn more about why there is such an enormous apparent discrepancy between the two surveys. Any thoughts?

UPDATE: PostWatch provided a good deal of information, but I especially like his observation that:

You know, what happens in these situations is that people like Neil Gilbert and Murray Strauss (two researchers beloved by NOW until they started upsetting some of their assumptions) and Christina Hoff Sommers take a lot of time and effort to expose the facts behind these issues, so the false numbers are buried for awhile. But then the phony stats start coming back, or are mildly repackaged, and we have to go through this all over again. If you do a search for "one in seven raped" you'll find it all over the place, still being used by a variety of women's "advocates" who are teaching all women to fear all men.

He also provided a link to this article by Yggdrasil that contains some interesting observations on rape, rape statistics and on teenage dating (or the lack thereof).

I’ve done a little bit of research on this myself, and I’ll share some of what I’ve found later. Please feel free to email me a comment. Meanwhile, here are some interesting (but by no means exhaustive) links:
Christina Hoff Sommers
Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women ...
NIJ Workshop on Criminal Justice Data Women and Crime

Mental illness

In a column appropriately titled “Mental health issues are news but not easily reported,” Mike Clark, ombudsman for The Florida Times-Union, reports on some of the difficulties in reporting on mental illness. What he doesn’t mention, and probably doesn’t know, is why information about mental illness is so confused.

In other areas of healthcare there is a more or less clear line between quackery and empirical science. While progress has been made, psychiatry and psychology still remain mired in muddled, unscientific and pseudoscientific ruts. Cults such as Scientology and Re-evaluation Counseling (a Scientology off-shoot) have a surprising influence on national policy. Despite overwhelming evidence of the organic nature of severe mental illnesses, influential psychiatrist Thomas Szasz continues to promote his theory that mental illness is a “myth.” (Szaz is also founder of the Scientology front, Citizens Commission on Human Rights.)

Influenced by Szasz, the ACLU’s Mental Health Law Project, now known as the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, made it increasingly difficult to provide treatment for persons whose severe mental illness prevents them from voluntarily seeking treatment. As a result, there has been a huge trans-institutionalization of the severely mentally ill from hospitals to penal institutions and to the “homeless population.” Today, a person with a severe mental illness is far more likely to be locked up in a jail or prison than to be treated in a hospital.

There is also a tendency to lump every emotional scrape and bruise under the rubric of “mental health,” which ignores the enormous qualitative difference between severe illnesses, such as schizophrenia, and minor anxieties, phobias and situational difficulties. This is particularly true since persons with severe mental illnesses (with the exception of clinical depression) typically don’t have private health insurance and are difficult and largely unprofitable patients for psychiatrists. As a result, few psychiatrists have much experience in treating the severely mentally ill.

The result is that an inordinate amount of resources are expended in treating the “worried well,” while those with severe illnesses are largely ignored, and, for the most part, the mental health establishment is happy to keep it that way.

These are two groups advocating for better treatment of the mentally ill.
NAMI
The Treatment Advocacy Center

The soft bigotry of newspaper ombudsmen

Sanders LaMont, ombudsman for the Sacramento Bee, addresses the issue of the Boondocks comic strip that compared President Bush unfavorably to Adolf Hitler. He reports that his editor “pointed out that if readers don't find a comic funny, they are not obligated to ‘consume the entire menu’ of comics in the paper.” Ordinary that would seem to be sensible advice for the comic strips, although I haven’t noticed a similar editorial attitude towards politically incorrect strips.

But what I find truly offensive is the blind defense of a comic strip that carries moral equivalence to its logical conclusion. The President of the United States is placed on the same moral plane as an absolute dictator who plunged the world into the Second World War, attempted to exterminate an entire people because of their race and who killed countless others he considered to be “undesirable.”

Every ombudsman who has addressed this issue has, either explicitly or implicitly, defended the comic strip, and even complimented it for its edge. I see this differently. I don’t think The Washington Post’s Michael Getler, the Chicago Tribune’s Don Wycliff or The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Mike King really believe that President Bush is another Adolf Hitler. I think Media Minded had it exactly right when he observed of Wycliff’s column that he:

seems to be saying that black people have a blank check to make stupid, inflammatory political statements because they've been so damaged by this racist country that we really shouldn't expect anything better from them.

These defenses of the comic strip are a prime example of what Condoleeza Rice labeled the “the soft bigotry of low expectations." It’s a shame that, nearly four decades following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the mainstream media hasn’t moved beyond their patronizing treatment toward blacks.

Anglican follies

Uncle alerts us to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation news report that:

The head of the Anglican Church in Australia [Peter Carnley] has blamed the Bali bombings on Australia's outspoken support for the United States in planning military action against Iraq.

Uncle also reports that Carnley "thought we should take heed of the view he ascribes to many Muslims, that Western culture is 'degenerate.'"

Would it be a low blow to mention the Church's child sex abuse scandal?

Graphic pictures, inflammatory political statements

The Washington Post’s ombudsmen, Michael Getler, reports on the editorial process that culminated in controversial, graphic shots of the victims of the shooter currently terrorizing the Washington , D.C. area being published.

Five people had been shot dead within a 17-hour span that day, which turned out to be the start of the shooting spree. "There would be hundreds of inches of prose in that next day's newspaper," said night photo editor Luis Rios, "but that will never match the impact of that photo. This didn't just happen once. It happened five times and it put the horror of the day more clearly."

Getler also reports that The Post did not run the controversial Boondocks comic strip that compared President Bush with Adolf Hitler. According to Getler:

"Boondocks" is a clever and edgy comic strip by 28-year-old African American artist Aaron McGruder. It generates a small but steady stream of complaints and has been pulled a few times since it started in 1999. Executive Editor Len Downie said about last Sunday's decision that it was a matter of taste: "We edit the newspaper, all of it, including the comics. The only way we can edit comics is by choosing to run or not to run each strip. We review them all for taste and legal issues. 'Boondocks' is not the only comic that has occasionally not been run."

Getler goes on to incorporate the observation of The Chicago Tribune’s ombudsman that:

complaints often come from readers who believe McGruder is allowed to get away with some things because he is black. "It would probably be more accurate to say," [Don] Wycliff wrote, "that he is able to see the things he sees because he is black. Loath though many Americans are to accept it nowadays, having a different historical perspective . . . gives one a different perspective on life and issues. And that perspective, while not the sole determinant of a person's point of view, will assert itself in ways and places both expected and unexpected -- even, sometimes, on the funny pages."

MediaMinded notes, of Wycliff’s column, that he:

seems to be saying that black people have a blank check to make stupid, inflammatory political statements because they've been so damaged by this racist country that we really shouldn't expect anything better from them.

UPDATE: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's ombudsman, Mike King, seems to argue that it was appropriate to print the Boondocks comic in question because, "I am a fan of the First Amendment, which means McGruder has the right to make fun of the president of the United States and to make my life complicated by doing so, which he does -- often." The Journal-Constitution also has a First Amendment Right to use the N-word, but presumably they exercise the restraint not to do so. The First Amendment is a restriction on government action, not editorial judgment.

Journalistic independence or withholding evidence?

Ombudsman Manning Pynn, of The Orlando Sentinel, relates a story that shows just how self-important and wrongheaded the press can be.

In the presence of jail guards, a reporter tape-records confessions to two murders and a savage beating. The confessions are then reported in his newspaper, The Orlando Sentinel. Both the prosecution and defense ask a judge to force the paper to turn over a copy of the tape containing a confession to one of the killings and the beating. No one is asking a reporter to reveal a confidential source. The newspaper resists. Why?

Sentinel attorney David Bralow explained, "It is very important that we not be perceived to be an agent of either side in the litigation process. By introducing the tape, it becomes a question of whether we are introducing it for the prosecution or for the defense."

Sheesh, and this from an attorney.

Presumably the tape has been subpoenaed. The newspaper is legally obligated to turn it over and the only reason they are in court is because they have not complied. The newspaper is not a party to the case and they are not “introducing” evidence. They are merely being asked to produce material that may be useful to the prosecution, the defense, or both. A newspaper story is generally inadmissible in court. A properly authenticated tape-recorded confession is not only admissible, but compelling evidence. The recording was made in the presence of third parties and the substance published in a newspaper.

There are certain legal privileges that are generally recognized. These include attorney-client, priest-penitent, doctor-patient and husband-wife. In addition, many courts recognize a qualified privilege for reporters not to reveal confidential news sources. In each case the privilege is designed to serve a public purpose. For example, the attorney-client privilege exists so that a person may freely seek legal advice from his attorney. It does not exist so that he may conspire with his attorney to commit a crime.

In this case it is clear that no privilege applied and that The Sentinel was merely taking the stand that they don’t have to cooperate in the administration of justice. They tried to finesse the issue by posting:

both the audio and a transcript of the interview on the Sentinel's Web site, releasing it to the public rather than to either side in the legal case.

Without proper authentification, the recording would have been useless at trial. To his credit, Judge Mark Hill ordered the reporter to testify. The defendant has since plead guilty to some of the charges and is awaiting trial on others.

Pynn argues that The Sentinel’s position is “designed to preserve open access to and independent monitoring of the judicial process.” He never adequately explains how withholding the tape serves that purpose. Let's just call this another attempted application of The Rule of Fisk.

Bill Clinton is no Ronald Reagan

E.J. Dionne writes in The Washington Post that, like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton “hopes to create a political legacy...” Clinton has a lot of repair work to do. James DiBenedetto compares their respective legacies to date.

Well, E.J., President Reagan's legacy was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the freeing of hundreds of millions of people from Communism. It was also a rebuilt military capable of handling any challenge the world could throw at it. And it was a strong economy.

Clinton's legacy is a weakened military, nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea, al Qaeda terrorists running free and slaughtering Americans, a recession that began in early 2000 and that continues to this day, not to mention debates over the meaning of "is" and pardons of fugitives who bribed their way to freedom at Bill's hands.

That’s not entirely fair. After all, Clinton isn’t entirely responsible for North Korea possessing nuclear weapons. He had help from Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter.

Paternity and child support

Every lawyer has war stories, even judges, and this story was related to me years ago by a judge. During a vacation, a car with four boys and a car with four girls met up and the boys and girls got together for some sex. One of the girls got pregnant and had a baby, and all four boys were called into court to determine paternity. Each boy admitted to having sex with the other three girls, but not with the one who became pregnant. The mother claimed to have had sex with all the boys. Presumably one was the baby’s father. Needless to say, no one wanted to take a paternity test.

An estimated 30 percent of all paternity tests determine that the person tested is not the biological father. In divorce litigation, it is not unusual to discover that one or more of the children born during a marriage turns out not to have been fathered by the husband. (Most divorces involve infidelity by at least one of the partners. Money problems come in a close second as a cause for divorce, and often the two are related.)

There is a presumption at law that the husband is the father of children born to the wife during the course of the marriage. (In some states this presumption is irrebutable.) But what if it is proven that the husband, who usually does not get custody, is not the father of the child? Should an effort be made to collect the money from the biological father, or should the husband remain on the hook regardless of who the biological father may be? Is the husband a bad person or a bad father if he seeks to avoid paying child support for a child he is not the biological parent of? What of a mother who seeks child support from a husband after having a child as the result of an affair she never admitted to her husband?

Many children are born out of wedlock today. What if a man is told he is the father, admits to paternity, pays child support and then learns that he is not the biological father after all, and the woman knew it all the time. Should the woman bear any consequence for her own fraud? Since the child is an innocent party to all this, should he suffer as a result of his mother’s fraud? What of the biological father who is not paying support for his biological child because someone else is?

These are tough questions, and the law is by no means settled as to how to handle them. RiShawn Biddle argues that DNA is destiny. Ellen Goodman asks “What makes a father?” in a column from last year. Robert E. Pierre has a recent article in The Washington Post entitled ”States Consider Laws Against Paternity Fraud: Child Advocates Worry About Effects”.

Moral equivalence in The Washington Post

According to The Washington Post:

In the past four years, religious conflicts between Muslims and Christians have erupted in several Indonesian areas, in particular the eastern regions of the Moluccas islands and in Poso in central Sulawesi. These battles have left more than 5,000 people dead, according to official estimates.

PostWatch takes The Post to task for creating a moral equivalence between victims and perpetrators of violence in Indonesia. He points out that it is the “radical Muslims [who] have been systematically assaulting, killing and forcibly converting Christians.”

Identity politics in the comic strips

[The Boondocks] depicts [a character], Riley Freeman, reading a newspaper (!!) and observing: "Whoa. Some people in other countries are comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler because of his warmongering."

To which Riley's perpetually scowling brother Huey responds: "That's preposterous. Even I would never compare Bush to Hitler ..." And in the second panel, the kicker: "I mean," says Huey, "Hitler was democratically elected, wasn't he?"

Ombudsman Don Wycliff, of the Chicago Tribune, dismisses numerous complaints that, “to a certain category of readers, [the Boondocks] has become like a torturer's needles shoved under their fingernails--a persistent source of pain and anger and outrage.” Presumably, Wycliff is referring to “white readers,” because he “can't recall a single [complaint] from someone who said he was black.”

According to Wycliff, The Boondocks cartoonist, Aaron McGruder, “is able to see the things he sees because he is black.” He explains that an ethnic background “gives one a different perspective on life and issues,” and that “To judge from his work, McGruder's purpose in life is to unsettle people, to rearrange his readers' mental furniture so that they trip over things and are forced to see them in new and unaccustomed ways.”

Presumably Wycliff means white readers who, being of the wrong race, are unable “to see the things he sees because he is black” – like, comparing President Bush to Der Fuehrer. I wonder how veterans, both black and white, of the Second World War feel about that comparison?

UPDATE: Media Minded observes that "Wycliff seems to be saying that black people have a blank check to make stupid, inflammatory political statements because they've been so damaged by this racist country that we really shouldn't expect anything better from them."

NPR report on Middle East “flawed”

If even NPR’s ombudsman, Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, admits that their series, “The Middle East: A Century of Conflict," was “flawed” then you know that it must have been really, really biased.

Dvorkin also faults NPR for not providing sufficient coverage to the “groundswell of [anti-war] opinion -- both inside and outside of Congress.” That opinion polls don’t reflect any such “groundswell” is dismissed because “Polls are not supposed to be predictive, only a snapshot in time.” But if the “snapshot” fails to reveal a “groundswell,” what rational basis does Dvorkin have to state that there is one?

How likely is a woman to be raped?

Ombudsman Manning Pynn, of The Orlando Sentinel, discusses reporting the names of rape victims in the media. He attended a gathering of a small group of people put together by the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride. For the most part his observations are fairly routine. The group discussed the possible benefits of reporting the names of victims, what he perceives as unfairness in reporting the names of alleged rapists but not their alleged victims, and the harm that can be caused by releasing the names of victims.

What interests me is the following observation:

Statistics presented at the Poynter gathering -- that one-seventh of the women in America have been forcibly raped at least once -- opened everyone's eyes.

I’ve seen a lot of numbers thrown around, but that number strikes me as awfully high. Probably the best measure of crime victimization is The National Crime Victimization Survey, and the summary for 2001 shows that only about 1 in 10,000 Americans over the age of 12 was raped or sexually assaulted in that year. Even assuming that almost all rape victims are female, and that some rapes occur before the age of twelve, it is hard to make the leap from 1 in 10,000 per year to 1 in 7 during a lifetime.



NOTE: This graph Includes both attempted and completed rapes. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

She's right, of course

Vanderbilt Law School Professor Carol Swain is interviewed by the Washington Times, and states what should be obvious to everyone - that identity politics cuts both ways.

Q: You are also critical of multiculturalism, and you've called white nationalism "the monster that identity politics created." What do you mean by that?

A: Multiculturalism provided white nationalists with the language to justify a parallel form of identity politics for white Americans. If all people have the right to protect their distinct cultural, political and genetic identity then, the white nationalists say, white people have the same rights. They use the language that minorities have developed and apply it to white people, and it works just as well.

I think multiculturalism itself has gone too far. It takes us too far from the American ideal of having one national identity. And it encourages all groups to think in terms of distinct group interests that compete with the interests of all other Americans.

via PostWatch

Facing reality

For a brief period after 9/11/01, it appeared that the media would stop using euphemisms for terrorism, but within a few months many outlets had returned to their policies of not using the “T” word. Among others, newspaper ombudsmen Lou Gelfand, of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Michael Getler, of The Washington Post, defended this sordid policy in print. NPRs ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, at first denounced the use of euphemisms for terrorism, but within a few months was again advocating their use.

This use of euphemisms is due primarily to implicit sympathy for the perceived goals of the terrorists, and the belief that western society (especially the United States and Israel) is responsible for forcing aggrieved peoples to resort to such desperate means. Hence we are treated to such scenes as “peace rallies” replete with demonstrators wearing mock suicide bomber outfits. The European Union continues to send large sums of money to Yasser Arafat, despite the knowledge that the money is used to facilitate terrorism -- which makes the EU itself complicit in supporting terrorism.

Perhaps the recent bombings in Bali, Indonesia marks the beginning of a real sea change. Steven Plaut observes that, among other things, with the most recent bombings in Bali, Indonesia:

Not a single media outfit has referred to the perpetrators of the Bali bombings as "activists" or "militants". Not even the BBC and CNN. Indeed, both uncharacteristically used the "T" word to refer to the bombers. CNN even called it "an atrocity" and not a protest...

Europe and the rest of the western world must now face the reality that international terrorism is a very real and present danger, and that blaming George Bush, America or Israel isn’t part of the solution – it’s part of the problem.

I only wish that it hadn't taken the loss of more innocent lives to make the point.

Pat Buchanan strikes again

Ronald Radosh reviews Pat Buchanan’s new magazine, The American Conservative, and paints a very unappealing picture of a publication that draws from the least attractive elements of conservativism in America:

WHEN THE FIRST ISSUE of The American Conservative, the new weekly edited by Patrick J. Buchanan, recently hit the newsstand, readers might have been excused for wondering if they had accidentally picked up The Nation. Buchanan's magazine, which he co-edits with the journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, resembles its left-liberal counterpart in appearance and is printed on the same cheap newsprint. Even more remarkably, much of The American Conservative's contents could just as easily have appeared in the flagship publication of America's left.

For example, we have contributor Jason Raimondo:

…it seems that Raimondo is now attempting to forge his own Red-Brown alliance, as Europeans refer to the coming together in post Soviet Russia of right-wing nationalists and unreconstructed Communists. In August 2001, he even published an article in Pravda (yes, that Pravda) in which he dismissed the idea that ''America is a civilized country,'' and, referring to World War II, maintained that ''the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.'' As for Israel, last week Raimondo continued to proclaim the myth that ''Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11,'' a claim that puts his Web site in league with the most extreme anti-Semitic canards coming from the Arab world…

This is the latest attempt at reincarnation by the seamy underside of conservatism; the same misfits and losers that William F. Buckley ejected from the movement decades ago. May it die an early death.

via Jim Romenesko

UPDATE: Justin Raimondo responds to Radosh. Stefan Sharkansky accuses Raimondo of, inter alia, lifting copyrighted work and misrepresenting it. David Horowitz responds to an email he received from Raimondo.

It’s not just an American problem

The most recent bombings in Bali, Indonesia confirm that international terrorism is not just an American problem and that it needs to be rooted out. The bombings should also be seen as a painful rebuttal to the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which chose to use this year’s Nobel Peace Prize as “a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

Tim Blair is following developments from Australia.

It’s getting close to Halloween

Ombudsman Connie Coyne, of The Salt Lake Tribune, reports that she:

was forced to listen to strident reality from readers who could not prepare for life Friday using Thursday's [astrology] advice.

That terrible things you wanted to do to this gentle person of the fish persuasion. Please reconsider all those threats. Imagine what they are doing to your karmic progression. Perhaps if I sniff some lavender now I can settle myself down.

Yes, it appears that lives were impacted when The Tribune inadvertently ran Thursday’s astrology column on Friday.

Ombudsman Mike Clark, of The Florida Times-Union, reports that the Jacksonville Amateur Ghosthunting Society was offended when an article about them entitled “Ghost hunters rely on science," printed a “map of local residences and office buildings where paranormal activity has been reported.” The Society’s President, Jodie Batten, complained that the map contained “unfounded rumors and the addresses of private residences.” She states that “The group seeks to maintain ‘the highest respect for privacy and legitimacy.’"

The Tarot card media circus

The Toronto Star's ombudsman, Don Sellar, comments on the Tarot card incident, where The Washington Post revealed that an at-large killer, who has been randomly shooting people in the Washington, DC area, had left a note found by police.

Do you run with the pack and divulge the taunting clue, or suppress it and get beaten by your competitors? Is harming a huge police investigation even your problem?...

Ethically, the right thing to do is obvious: save the blabbering, unprofessional cops from themselves and withhold the sensitive information. I have yet to hear of any media outlet that spiked the Tarot card story. But some news stories, like elephants, are unstoppable. Speaking of elephants, this is a tawdry media circus.

Is there anything lamer than a grown-up trying to be hip?

Andrew Cline opines that CNN’s latest ploy at gaining audience share, by incorporating slang into its Headline News broadcasts, is destined to fail. For one thing:

There's no quicker way to get kids to drop slang than for an adult to start using it.

EPN reports that:

An internal Headline News memo obtained by the Daily News encourages the consultation of a slang dictionary. Among the list of phrases suggested are: “jimmy hat,” meaning condom, “fly” for sexually attractive, and “ill,” meaning to act inappropriately.

Like, gag me with a spoon.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that broadcast media goes out of its way to give news broadcasters (i.e. talking heads) a certain gravitas. This would seem to make them flippant.

Some thoughts on the media and the D.C.-area shootings

Montgomery County, Maryland’s notoriously short-fused Police Chief, Charles Moose, denounced a local television station and The Washington Post for publishing information about a note left by the killer who has been shooting people in the Washington, D.C. area. As The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, describes Moose’s performance:

It was a long, angry and rambling denunciation, and the chief threw in for good measure an even longer blast at retired law enforcement officials who go "ranting and raving" on TV trying to analyze things.

Getler points out that The Post and the television station obtained the information separately from police sources and that neither had been instructed that the information should be kept secret. As usual, Getler finds voices both defending and denouncing The Posts decision to publish the information.

I suspect the real reason for Moose’s anger is that this was a classic police screw-up, with too many law enforcement officials competing to satisfy media contacts. It should serve as a signal to the current “task force” to be careful about disseminating information.

On the plus side, the information would seem to confirm that the shooter is more likely a mentally ill “nut” than a terrorist, which I find somewhat comforting.

There is another problem with media coverage that is not addressed by Getler, and that is the linking, by anti-gun advocates and their sympathizers in the media, of the killings to a “sniper subculture” in the United States. Given the facts of this case, it is almost certain that the shooter has had no training or experience (either professional or amateur) as a sniper. He is going for body shots instead of head shots. He uses a rifle firing a .223 round, which is smaller than ammunition favored by snipers. And the distance from which he is shooting (about 100 yards) is much closer than snipers are trained to shoot from. It is close enough that he may not even be using a scope.

To the extent that there is a “sniper subculture” of sniper wannabes, who obtain sniper-style eqipment and train using sniper methods, it would appear that these killings are unrelated, and the attempts to tie the shootings to the subculture are irresponsible.

UPDATE: Ombudsman Mike King, of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, discusses newspaper coverage of murders, and why some murders receive more coverage than others. King boils it down to:

Randomness and risk. Two very important factors that readers almost always want to know more about when they read stories about crimes. And that's also why some crimes are more newsworthy than others.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds notes that The Washington Post has in fact demolished the "sniper subculture" argument.

Multicultural update

ABCwatch has an update on aboriginal “child-bride buyer Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira.” Among other interesting tidbits, it appears that the child was paid for from welfare payments, purchased from the mother against the father’s wishes, and that Mr. Jamilmira enjoyed the benefits of western-style justice, compared with aboriginal-style justice, after he murdered his first wife.

As for the young, involuntary bride:

Meanwhile, the raped girl is in hiding, waiting for Jamilmira and his family to make their next assault - with the full backing of Judge Gallop of the Northern Territory Court, and the lawyers of the Aboriginal legal aid service.

More Clinton sleaze disclosed

Dick Morris reports that a list released by the House Government Reform Subcommittee confirms that former-President Bill Clinton, and his wife New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, failed to disclose over a million dollars in gifts while in the White House. This is a sweet vindication for Morris, who previously revealed some of this information only to have then-First Lady Hillary Clinton denounce “the story as ‘false’ and [criticize Morris] for ‘not bothering’ to check the facts.”

Return the prize Mr. Carter.

The Nobel Peace Prize, previously awarded to such luminaries as the Godfather of Terrorism, Yasser Arafat, has been awarded to former-President Jimmy Carter. This would seem to be an improvement, until you learn the prize committee’s reason:

"It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said in Norwegian. "It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

The Nobel Peace Prize has become so politicized by the left in recent years that it should be retired as a profound embarrassment to the cause of international peace and justice. Mr. Carter should refuse to be a party to this political act of anti-Americanism and return the prize.

via The Eleven Day Empire

Damned if we do, shamed if we don’t

The Chicago Tribune’s ombudsman, Don Wycliff, on the standard for armed American intervention…

Don Wycliff, on August 1, 2002:

when the U.S.--to its great shame--failed to lead the way into Rwanda, nobody else stepped up to stop the slaughter of some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis [by Hutus].*

Don Wycliff, October 10, 2002, on why Bush has failed to make the case for intervention in Iraq:

Everybody … wants some proof that [Saddam Hussein] poses a direct, immediate threat to the United States of America.

Let’s see, we are “shamed” by our failure to intervene in a conflict that clearly posed no threat to the United States, and we lack sufficient “proof" of "a direct, immediate threat to the United States,” that would justify military intervention to remove a mass-killer who clearly does pose a threat to our security.

Saddam has killed off hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people by, inter alia, launching two failed wars against his neighbors and using poison gas against civilian ethnic Kurds. He has admited to having developed militarized stocks of aflotoxin, a poison that causes slow, painful death by liver cancer. And he has been linked to terrorism, an attempt to assassinate a President of the United States and is known to be developing an atomic bomb.

To The Tribune's ombudsman, when it comes to military intervention to prevent mass murder, we are not justified if we do and shamed if we don't.

* Wycliff omits to mention the inter-tribal genocide in neighboring Burundi where the Tutsis were killing the Hutus.

Virginia Postrel on America’s favorite right-wing telebimbo:

[Ann Coulter is] giving her opponents exactly what they want: a shrill, silly conservative who's careless with the facts and telegenic to boot. By focusing on her, they get to feel superior and smear everyone to the right of the NYT editorial page. In exchange, Coulter gets oodles of free publicity and the sales it brings. Not a bad racket. Coulter's act is, as a (male, non-pundit) friend of mine recently observed, rather like the minstrelry in Spike Lee's Bamboozled. The performer is rewarded handsomely for confirming a negative stereotype.

That pretty much says it all.

The color of guilt

David House, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram’s ombudsman, reports on his newspaper’s “weeklong series, ‘The color of hate,’ that will provide readers with an unprecedented examination of how the Jim Crow era unfolded in Fort Worth.” So far so good. The Jim Crow era represents an interesting, if unappealing, aspect of America’s history, and it is useful to know how things were to provide perspective on how things are today.

Unfortunately “The color of hate” isn’t just about history. Is seems that “many local residents who are in their 30s and 40s, and younger, have never heard about what life was like here during the Jim Crow era.” That didn’t sit well with staff writer Tim Madigan. Despite House’s assurance that the series “is not about placing blame or finding guilt,” Madigan asserts that it is about “reconciliation,” which “means that wrongs must be acknowledged, apologies offered and amends made.”

So what does this have to do with the “many local residents who are in their 30s and 40s, and younger, [who] have never heard about what life was like here during the Jim Crow era?” Madigan has been quite clear in other venues that when he speaks of amends, he means racial amends, not just amends to persons who have personally suffered under Jim Crow.

Madigan is the author of a book about the Tulsa Oklahoma race riot of 1921, in which as many as 250 blacks were killed by a white mob. He asserts that writing about the riot allowed him to question the inherent racism that seems to be at the core of America. He has said that after writing the book, “I can’t look at a black person the same way again." He goes on to assert that “I have no problem admitting that I was or am a racist. I think we all are.”

And if “the many local residents who are in their 30s and 40s, and younger” don’t feel his guilt (anger) and understand that “we are guilty of the same sort of evil against our own people as Osama bin Laden was,” he’s there to help them.

Me? I grew up in a racially integrated neighborhood and attended racially integrated schools. Jim Crow was before my time. I appreciate the strides toward racial equality we have made in this country, but I am no more responsible for Jim Crow than I am for Lord Amherst delivering his smallpox-infested blankets to the Indians. I feel no guilt and share no responsibility for what other people who share my skin color did in the past.

Safety or revenue?

It appears they have itinerant revenue collectors in Australia, too.

He was a nice policeman, and while he was completing the forms that would subtract $180 from my bank account, we had a pleasant conversation… Australians are receiving speeding tickets at a rate that makes them more a tax than a penalty.

Cultural rights trump women’s rights

At least in this story from The Australian. ABCwatch gives us the condensed version:

A fifteen year old girl has been raped by a middle-aged convicted wife-killer who asserts that he has bought from the girl's parents the right to go on doing it. And to beat her at his sole discretion and pimp her for profit.

According to The Australian, Northern Territory Supreme Court “Justice John Gallop said Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira was exercising his conjugal rights in traditional society and the girl ‘knew what was expected of her.’” Apparently the girl was none too happy with the arrangement, but was dissuaded from leaving when Mr. Jamilmira produced and discharged a shotgun. According to Justice Gallop, “She didn't need protection (from white law) ... It's very surprising to me (Pascoe) was charged at all."

Subsidizing anti-Semitic art

New Jersey Poet Laureate Amir Baraka is an anti-Semitic bigot, and his poetry is an embarrassment to the state. So Ed Koch thinks the state should simply abolish the paid position of Poet Laureate, and Richard Cohen agrees. I agree, too, but not for the same reason.

Cohen writes that “withdrawing a state subsidy is not censorship.” The problem is that it is censorship. They are suppressing speech that they consider objectionable by punishing the speaker with loss of his sinecure.

The real question is why the state is subsidizing political speech in the first place. That’s the problem with subsidizing the arts. All too often art involves political expression, and using government funds to subsidize it is inevitably subsidizing political expression. Even the bodies that award these grants and sinecures are inevitably political.

Thomas Jefferson had it exactly right when he observed that:

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.

The reason Baraka’s position should be eliminated is because it should never have been created in the first place. And that goes for the National Endowment for the Arts and the rest of the art world’s taxpayer subsidized gravy train.

You can’t punish Baraka for having the wrong opinions, but you can recognize that using taxpayer funds to subsidize the propagation of opinion through the arts is just plain wrong.

via The Eleven Day Empire

UPDATE: News from a society seeking to limit political/religious speech. Natalie Solent covers the first conviction in Great Britain under a new law designed to "to outlaw religious hatred." From The Telegraph:

AN ENGINEER was convicted yesterday of religiously abusive behaviour after insulting a Muslim neighbour who hailed September 11 as a "great day", praised Osama bin Laden as a "great man", and thought all Americans "deserved to die".

The tolerance police strike again...

This would explain a lot

According to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, [William Phelps Eno] “The man who penned the first traffic laws never drove a car himself… Eno was always a great fan of horseback riding but did not place all that much faith in the automobile, thinking it but a fad. He never learned to drive, and when events in his life necessitated car travel, he relied on a chauffeur.”

Making obituaries “interesting”

Sometimes life imitates art. Reading today’s column by The Boston Globe’s ombudsman, Christine Chinlund, I was reminded of an old P.G. Wodehouse tale. In it, Sir Watkyn Bassett has completed his memoirs, which are basically a scandalous exposé of London Society. Members of Bassett’s family assign Bertie Wooster the task of stealing the manuscript, before it is mailed to the publisher, because of the shame and embarrassment publication of the memoirs will cause.

The Globe’s Ms. Chinlund describes a recent obituary in her newspaper:

The obituary begins by describing the late Mrs. Corrigan as ''a no-nonsense woman who knew how to take control of a situation but found it difficult to crack a smile. Her lack of humor was probably the result of the many trials she endured ...''

The obituary went on to explain how, ''when she was a young girl, her father ran off with his secretary and married her. ... '' then left that wife for yet another, ''without bothering with the technicality of a divorce.''

There are comments from Mrs. Corrigan's daughter about the deceased's short-lived career as nun - poverty, obedience, and possibly chastity ''just weren't her things'' - and her even shorter career as a nursing school student: ''They had three rules nurse trainees couldn't break - no smoking, no drinking, and no dating the interns - and she broke all three in one night.'' And there are comments from her son, who called her ''bossy.'' She never smiled, her daughter recalled, until a stroke softened her demeanor.

This obituary is the result of new policy by Globe editor Martin Baron.

The paper, he says, had ''a wonderful opportunity to portray the interesting characters that have molded the history, culture, and personality of New England.''

Another recent choice for an obituary profile was a “loud-dressing, fast-talking salesman-by-day-rock-groupie-by night.”

The OmbudsGod has never been a fan of obituaries, and it is my fervent desire that at most I receive a death notice, and preferably not even that. But if The Globe insists on doing profiles of non-public figures, they might consider that they are plumbing depths where even the tabloids seldom tread by providing unnecessary and embarrassing details about people who no longer have the ability to defend their reputations.

As if this weren’t enough, Ms. Chinlund reports that obituary editor Karen Weintraub, “seeks to present an obituary page that is not just about white men - a mission she says is complicated by the fact that many women who are now in their 70s, 80s, or 90s spent their career years as housewives and thus missed out on the adventures that make for a rich life story.”

Far be it from me to criticize an effort to look for interesting lives beyond those of the Pale Penis People, but the judgment that housewives have “missed out on the adventures that make for a rich life story,” sounds more like biased value judgment than news judgment. If raising a family isn’t an adventure, then I don’t know what is. On the plus side, at least for now housewives won't have to worry about being the subject of one of The Globe’s new, interesting obituaries.

UPDATE: Rishawn Biddle takes a very different view and compares The Globe’s new obituaries with the “fascinating” Fleet Street kind.

The British obits aren't kind to anyone and because of that, they are also fascinating to read. On the other hand, the sterile obits drummed up by American newspapers and magazines--replete with by-the-numbers listings of surviving relatives--are usually unworthy of a tampon applicator…

No newspaper should delve into the depths of rumor--if it doesn't check out, don't run it--nor do I believe in simply embarrassing anyone. But the Globe isn't merely recycling town gossip. Instead the paper is portraying lives as they were--including their flaws. Last I checked, this, along with comforting the afflicted and the converse, is what journalism is all about.

Fighting the wrongs of the nineteenth century: The Hartford Courant publishes a polemic in favor of racial reparations.

In 1774, Connecticut banned its citizens from participating in the slave trade. In 1784 the legislature enacted a Gradual Emancipation Act, which provided that slaves born after 1784 would be free at the age of twenty-five. A second Act was passed in 1797 that reduced the age to 21. Three years later, 83% of Connecticut’s 6,281 Blacks were free. By the time general emancipation was enacted in 1848 there were only six slaves remaining in the entire state. And, of course, tens of thousands of Connecticut Yankees died fighting for the Union during the Civil War, which resulted in the emancipation of all slaves in the United States.

Given those facts, it would seem difficult to make a case for racial reparations to persons whose skin color happens to be black and who may have one or more slaves in their lineage. But that didn’t stop the Hartford Courant, on September 29th, from publishing a polemic in favor of reparations.

I wouldn’t have known about "Complicity: How Connecticut Chained Itself To Slavery," were it not for Karen Hunter’s column. Hunter, who serves as The Courant’s ombudsman, reports that:

It also was more than simply a special issue about slavery or a vehicle promoting reparations. It was a staggering history lesson, not just the history of slavery in Connecticut, but your history and my history - a lesson most of us were not afforded in school. Courant editors expect "Complicity" to change that.

"I suspect that this project will have a lasting impact," said Managing Editor Cliff Teutsch. "If teachers use it to deepen their understanding and teaching of this fundamental issue, students for years to come will emerge with a clearer, more honest picture of our history."

I’ve read Complicity. It is a mixture of facts, conjecture and questionable conclusions. It is a political document supporting the divisive goal that people of one race should be rewarded from the public purse for the way the world was over a century and a half ago.

Curiously Complicity doesn’t concern itself with African slavery and the slave trade that exist in the Sudan and Mauritania to this day. Better to distort history and focus on ancient racial grievances than to try to correct current injustice -- especially when there’s money to be made.

Just because a Kennedy speaks doesn't make it important

There exists a shrinking, but still powerful, segment of the press that remains in thrall of the Kennedys. To them, if a Kennedy speaks out on an issue of the day it is important news and should be treated as part of the serious discourse, no matter how dissipated the speaker or inconsequential the speech.

Hence when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) spoke out against war with Iraq, and the “next day, The [Washington] Post devoted one sentence to the speech,” which “was deep inside an article based on an interview with Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) that dealt with his distrust of President Bush's political motives about congressional resolutions authorizing action against Baghdad,” The Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, decided to devote his entire column to complaining about the newspaper’s failure to provide more comprehensive coverage of Kennedy’s speech.

The Post has given plenty of coverage to the de facto majority Senate Democratic position, which can be described as anti-Saddam, anti-war and anti-Bush. Kennedy’s speech, which Getler describes as “arguably the most comprehensive case yet offered to the public questioning the Bush administration's policy and timing on Iraq,” is merely a small part of this motif. The Post rightly devoted coverage to Daschle, who controls the flow of legislation through the Senate, while treating Kennedy as just another anti-war Senator.

Getler, who places only the smallest fig leaf over his own anti-war opinions, has become something of a one-note Johnny criticizing The Post for not providing enough coverage to anti-war opinion. While I agree that The Post is notorious for giving short-shrift to views with which its editors disagree, for example opponents of Title IX as it effects men's college sports (as reported by Post Watch), there has been no shortage of anti-war opinion expressed either on the pages of The Post or elsewhere in the national media.

UPDATE: For an interesting juxtaposition, compare Kennedy's speech, linked to above, with this post by Jeffrey Goldberg on Slate. Link via Andrew Sullivan

Reporting on Creationism in the public schools

When I learned of the latest attempt to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design (nee Creationism) in public schools, this time in Cobb County, Georgia, I found myself agreeing with Bill Dennis, who observed that:

If Georgia schools are to teach creationism as a science, then they will have to stop teaching biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy and even mathematics because these fields of study, when applied to the question of the origin of the universe, inevitably lead to conclusions that conflict with the word of God, which is perfectly reflected in the King James Version of the Bible.

As an Illinoisan, I don't have many good things to say about our schools. They are burdened with bureaucracy from the state and the federal government and from tenured teachers who should be doing something else. But at least we teach real science. Our kids will grow up to be doctors. They can hire graduates from Georgia schools to water their lawns.

Still, poking fun at Creationists has become something of a national sport and it is tempting to use it to score cheap points. As reported by The Atlanta Journal’s ombudsman, Mike King:

virtually all of the national [media] outlets described Cobb as a "conservative Republican stronghold." Many called it "affluent." Several said it was "predominantly white," although what race, income and party membership had to do with this issue was not clear. In fact, it was probably irrelevant.

King discusses his newspaper’s coverage of the controversy and states that they “worked hard” to “navigate the obvious biases of the participants as well as to explain what the proposed policy said and what it might mean inside Cobb County classrooms.”

Environmentalist Jackboots

Whenever I’m confronted by news stories with dubious statistics, I turn to see if Numbers Watch has had anything to say. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything on the breast cancer research there, but there is this interesting story on how:

The British Wind Energy Association has published a list of names of people who have publicly opposed its aims under the heading We know where you live. These people, who were rightly protesting at the outrageous granting of planning permission for Enron to erect 39 giant windmills on the beautiful Welsh coast, have received the classic veiled threat. We are now only too familiar with the extortion that goes on (for example, the British nuclear industry, which is in deep financial trouble, has to pay a carbon tax, though it produces no carbon, which is diverted into the pockets of the wind machine mobsters) but the fact that it is now so open is somewhat disturbing.

Medical research in the news

The Toronto Star’s ombudsman, Don Sellar, tackles the issue of “confusing, contradictory news on medical research,” and there’s a lot of it out there. For example, did you know that:

After more than a decade, researchers found women who were trained to examine their breasts had the same chance of dying from breast cancer as women with no training.

Of course, the population studied was 266,000 factory workers in Shanghai, China, where presumably the quality of cancer treatment has not reached the same level as in the United States or Canada. Still, Sellar reports that:

The findings backed an earlier decision by Ontario's cancer authority to stop routinely teaching women to examine their breasts for lumps.

Not surprisingly:

The Canadian Cancer Society ... has continued to say breast self-examination can save lives.

Maybe we should call them the Blue Party

At the risk of offending Rand Simberg, I offer you a picture of the Libertarian candidate for the United States Senate from Montana.




According to the Associated Press:

Montana's Libertarian candidate for Senate has turned blue from drinking a silver solution that he believed would protect him from disease. Stan Jones,a 63-year-old business consultant and part-time college instructor, said he started taking colloidal silver in 1999 for fear that Y2K disruptions might lead to a shortage of antibiotics... Colloidal silver dietary supplements are marketed widely as an anti-bacterial agent or immune-system booster, but some consider it quackery...

Now how's the Green Party going to top this?

National Public Radio and the Rule of Fisk

As reported by National Public Radio’s ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin:

The War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has begun calling journalists to testify against former Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic. Milosovic is on trial for his role in the Serbian war against Bosnia and the massacre of thousands of civilians.

But many journalists are deeply divided about the professional and moral obligation such testimony might invoke.

Dvorkin discusses the opinions of several journalists before endorsing Robert Fisk’s view that:

even though he's happy to chat with any war crimes investigators, he won't show up in court, even if subpoenaed.

"...if we ever have an independent court to try all the villains, I might change my mind. But until then, a reporter's job does not include joining the prosecution. We are witnesses and we write our testimony and we name, if we can, the bad guys. Then it is for the world to act. Not us."

Fisk, who has reported on more horrors than probably anyone else, says that journalists are not being asked to testify in the interests of international justice... only for the side that's won. He believes that journalists who give evidence in these courts are pawns of their governments.

Concludes Dvorkin:

Robert Fisk's definition may be the only workable one for now. Until a more universal system of justice exists, journalists and their employers will have to keep their distance from tribunals.

Dvorkin is referring to Fisk’s August 24, 2002 column, in The Independent, in which he explains why he disapproves of journalists testifying before international tribunals. Fisk’s problem isn’t that he disagrees with such tribunals, far from it, but that:

journalism includes an element of masquerade if we cover wars as reporters and then participate in the prosecution of the bad guys at the request of a court whose writ extends only to those war crimes which it sees fit – or which the West sees fit – to investigate.

In other words, his real gripe is that Ariel Sharon, who “is now the Prime Minister of Israel,” and others he personally disapproves of aren’t also being prosecuted, in which case he “might change [his] mind.” Until then, he feels that “We journalists are not being asked to testify in the interests of international justice.”

This is an interesting position put forward by Fisk and endorsed by NPR's ombudsman. Fisk asserts the ability to decide whether or not he should cooperate with international tribunals, based on his own determination of "the interests of international justice." In other words, he and Dvorak believe that journalists should be excepted from a rule of law that requires subpoened witnesses to testify, and instead make cooperation subject to their own notions of justice. Call it the Rule of Fisk.

Nativism on the Left

The Chicago Tribune’s ombudsman, Don Wycliff, devotes his column to discussing issues raised by anti-immigration activist Dave Gorak. Gorak is head of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration, which has ties to the left-leaning NumbersUSA. Unfortunately, Wycliff never provides any context about Gorak or anti-immigration groups of the left.

Commonly associated with the right, nativism also has a long association with the left. As Virginia Postrel has observed:

the leading anti-immigrant group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, has its roots … on the green left, among population-control advocates. And the Carrying Capacity Network, dominated by environmentalist intellectuals, strongly opposes immigration.

As background, the Federation for American Immigration Reform was founded by John Tanton, who served on the Board of Zero Population Growth and was Chairman of the National Sierra Club Population Committee. Tanton is also founder and publisher of The Social Contract Press, which according to The Public Eye:

Publishes journals and books that support immigration restriction and calls for strengthening ties to “our” British cultural roots. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Social Contract Press "publishes a number of racist works, including a reprint of the "gripping" 1973 book, The Camp of the Saints...a French racist fantasy novel about the obliteration of Western civilization by dark-skinned hordes from India. The novel, like the race war fantasy The Turner Diaries, has become a key screed for American white supremacists." Prints a quarterly journal, TheSocial Contract (archives available on the web at www.thesocialcontract.com)

Postrel attributes the left's anti-immigration movement to "stasists" who believe that an:

ideal society should resemble an ecosystem whose flora and fauna remain constant, the so-called "climax" stage. The eminent environmental historian Donald Worster thus yearns for "a stable, enduring rural society in equilibrium with the processes of nature" and deplores the "constant innovation, constant change, constant adjustment [that] have become the normal experience of this culture."

She notes that:

In one of the most influential environmentalists tracts ever, Small Is Beautiful, green guru E.F. Schumacher condemned modern transportation and communication for making people "footloose" and allowing mass migrations.

Wycliff's puff-piece on Gorak would have been more interesting had he provided some background on the reactionary anti-immigrant left.

It’s a good thing he didn’t have a pocket knife

The Associated Press produces still more evidence that idiots are running the public schools. From the same people who have brought you “zero tolerance” for such heinous offenses as carrying a pocket knife or giving a friend an aspirin, comes this:

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A substitute teacher who says he was surrounded by armed guards, detained for an hour and suspended over remarks perceived as supportive of Osama bin Laden is suing the school district… school officials found notes about bin Laden he had scrawled on a newspaper.

[John B.] Gardner said the notes were related to a book he was writing about how to overcome adversity.
"Osama bin Laden did us a favor," the notes read. "He vulcanized us, awakened us and strengthened our resolve."

According to the lawsuit, Gardner threw the paper in a wastebasket in the teachers' lounge. He was then allegedly surrounded by armed school guards and detained for an hour in front of Arthur J. Rooney Middle School….

If this is what obtaining UN permission entails, then why they Hell do we want it?

Officially, the Russian position is that no new UN resolution is required, as long as Iraq accepts the return of international inspectors.

In private, however, the Russians are more amenable to a deal with the Americans over Iraq, provided that the price Moscow can extract from Washington is high enough.

via Professor Bunyip

What inspections in Iraq were like the first time around

The Washington Post, 1998:

…Iraq developed a 15-minute standard for evacuating evidence from a site or, if necessary, destroying it… inspectors had to halt when confronted by armed force.

Good luck and audacity sometimes gave UNSCOM a break. Diane Seaman, a … mirobiologist, decided to go in the back door… One of two men holding briefcases literally ran into her on his way out… the man was so flummoxed that he handed over his bag. Inside were documents … discussing Iraq's biological weapons program…

When David Kay … showed up for a surprise search… the gate guard would not let him… The guard did not stop three of Kay's men from climbing a 50-meter water tower ... the men spotted tank transporters beating a hurried exit from a side gate … Maj. Richard Lally [drove] alongside the convoy until Iraqis fired warning shots, he photographed doughnut-shaped machines that proved to be calutrons – 20-foot electromagnets used to enrich uranium for an atom bomb…

…a major break in 1995 shocked the commission with proof of its massive failures… [Hussein's son-in-law] Kamel [defected and made] revelations [that] forced Iraq to "discover" 1.5 million new pages of weapons research documents at a chicken farm owned by Kamel. Still, the disclosures did not lead to the core of what UNSCOM sought. Internal evidence showed that Iraq had removed the most important documents…

France used its swing vote in the Security Council to force UNSCOM to scale back the team and accept a French intelligence officer, Patrick Haimzadeh, as one of its members… At one point UNSCOM received a specific warning that Russian eavesdroppers were listening to UNSCOM's telephone calls and passing some of the information gleaned to Iraq… As far back as 1992, Roger Hill … had caught a French military attache helping himself to the commission's files and bringing them to the copy machine. He and Ritter complained to Jeff St. John, the Canadian chief of the Information Assessment Unit, UNSCOM's euphemism for an intelligence section. St. John replied they could not afford a diplomatic incident…

Andrew Sullivan on the subject of anti-anti-terrorism

In an essay on Christopher Hitchen's decision to leave The Nation, Andrew Sullivan discusses the advent of anti-anti-terrorism:

9/11 presented the American left with an awful quandary. Its intellectual and literary leadership, long marinated in anti-Americanism, was simply unprepared for the stark moral choice in front of them. They couldn't afford the cheap and easy carping of the European and British Left: this was their country under attack, after all. Yet most, with a few honorable exceptions, couldn't make the leap toward support of the war either. So they engaged in a campaign of anti-anti-terrorism, the position of the coward and the sophist...

Problems with eXTReMe Tracking

I use eXTReMe Tracking to keep track of The OmbudsGod's traffic. eXTReMe Tracking is a free service and the reports are public -- anyone can view them just by clicking on the link. It's the small button on the left underneath the Blogger logo. They've been having some problems recently, and for the past couple of days the tracker has been missing visitors. I know, because I know when I access The OmbudsGod and not all the visits have registered. The OmbudsGod is a hobby and I'm not terribly concerned about tracking access, but if anyone else who is using the service is wondering if there is a problem -- rest assured, there is.

UPDATE: (10/17/02) I contacted eXTReMe Tracking about the problem and they responded that there had been a change on The OmbdsGod to the code that allows them to track hits. I don't recall making any such changes, but I copied the code back into the template and it now appears to be working. My apologies to eXTReMe Tracking, for stating that there is a problem with their service. It appears the problem was closer to home.

Now this is how to do a watch blog

ABCWATCH is keeping an eye on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. There's a certain edge to Australian blogs that I find very appealing, and this one is no exception.

The Hartford Courant: A Jewish War?

Marking Pat Buchanan’s exit from mainstream conservatism, William F. Buckley wrote on December 30, 1991 that Buchanan is “a Gentile who said things about Jews that could not reasonably be interpreted as other than anti-Semitic in tone and in substance.” Many of the remarks that led to this ex-communication were said in the lead-up to the Gulf War.

One of Buchanan’s arguments was that, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States,” which Buckley termed "a massive inaccuracy, namely that 'only' two specified groups favored military action against Hussein."

Buchanan’s methodology in attempting to paint the first Gulf War as a Jewish war is now being echoed on the Left, mainly in Europe and on campus, but also now apparently in a respected regional American newspaper.

Last Tuesday’s The Hartford Courant managed a hat trick of implicit anti-Semitism, starting right on the front page. According to The Hartford Courant’s ombudsman, Karen Hunter, the newspaper ran a “front-page package on the public's response to U.S. plans to attack Iraq.” She states that, “the presentation ... framed the debate as Jewish Americans vs. the rest of Connecticut.”

"Do Or Don't: A Public Divided" was the headline over two stories and two photos reporting on the issue of Iraq. "Don't" was the subhead over the story that reported on the overwhelmingly anti-war calls being received in Connecticut's congressional offices. "Do It" was the subhead over a story that surveyed national Jewish leaders supportive of military action against Saddam Hussein.

Hunter states that she believes the false dichotomy, depicting Jews versus the rest of Connecticut, was “unintentional,” and she may be right, but that such a presentation was allowed to appear on the front-page is disturbing.

Moreover, the problem wasn’t limited to the front page. The day’s editorial cartoon, and one of those Israel-less maps of the Middle East, completed the hat trick.

"The Englehart cartoon implies that Israel is the only other country that agrees with Bush's push for a strike against Saddam Hussein," wrote Cathrine Fischer Schwartz, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the public affairs voice of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford. "The truth is that Britain, Italy and Poland are solidly behind Bush and the United States in this effort. Kuwait, for obvious reasons, is in support of any effort to topple Saddam. Qatar and Saudi Arabia would allow the U.S. to use their bases for a strike on Iraq."

Then, to top things off, a map of the Persian Gulf region also published Tuesday did not label Israel - "as though it doesn't exist," Schwartz said.

Karen Hunter is to be commended for calling attention to the “impression” The Courant made. Now let’s hope it won’t be repeated in the future.

The Hartford Courant: A Jewish War?

Marking Pat Buchanan’s exit from mainstream conservatism, William F. Buckley wrote on December 30, 1991 that Buchanan is “a Gentile who said things about Jews that could not reasonably be interpreted as other than anti-Semitic in tone and in substance.” Many of the remarks that led to this ex-communication were said in the lead-up to the Gulf War.

One of Buchanan’s arguments was that, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States,” which Buckley termed "a massive inaccuracy, namely that 'only' two specified groups favored military action against Hussein."

Buchanan’s methodology in attempting to paint the first Gulf War as a Jewish war is now being echoed on the Left, mainly in Europe and on campus, but also now apparently in a respected regional American newspaper.

Last Tuesday’s The Hartford Courant managed a hat trick of implicit anti-Semitism, starting right on the front page. According to The Hartford Courant’s ombudsman, Karen Hunter, the newspaper ran a “front-page package on the public's response to U.S. plans to attack Iraq.” She states that, “the presentation ... framed the debate as Jewish Americans vs. the rest of Connecticut.”

"Do Or Don't: A Public Divided" was the headline over two stories and two photos reporting on the issue of Iraq. "Don't" was the subhead over the story that reported on the overwhelmingly anti-war calls being received in Connecticut's congressional offices. "Do It" was the subhead over a story that surveyed national Jewish leaders supportive of military action against Saddam Hussein.

Hunter states that she believes the false dichotomy, depicting Jews versus the rest of Connecticut, was “unintentional,” and she may be right, but that such a presentation was allowed to appear on the front-page is disturbing.

Moreover, the problem wasn’t limited to the front page. The day’s editorial cartoon, and one of those Israel-less maps of the Middle East, completed the hat trick.

"The Englehart cartoon implies that Israel is the only other country that agrees with Bush's push for a strike against Saddam Hussein," wrote Cathrine Fischer Schwartz, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the public affairs voice of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford. "The truth is that Britain, Italy and Poland are solidly behind Bush and the United States in this effort. Kuwait, for obvious reasons, is in support of any effort to topple Saddam. Qatar and Saudi Arabia would allow the U.S. to use their bases for a strike on Iraq."

Then, to top things off, a map of the Persian Gulf region also published Tuesday did not label Israel - "as though it doesn't exist," Schwartz said.

Karen Hunter is to be commended for calling attention to the “impression” The Courant made. Now let’s hope it won’t be repeated in the future.