The Immigrant Wrong

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the debate over the use of the term "illegal immigrant."

Here's the opening shot:

"Unfortunately, you can probably set your watches and begin the countdown to the cries of 'white privilege' showing up in the comment section or getting aimed at me on Twitter, but here goes nothing: There isn’t a thing wrong grammatically or journalistically with the term 'illegal immigrant.' Sure, I understand that some very well-meaning people find “illegal immigrant” personally offensive and feel that it shouldn’t be used by any reputable media outlet, but the issue they have with the phrase is, yes, personal and is in no way related to whether it holds up as proper English, no matter how much anyone would like to make you — or him- or herself — believe otherwise."

Read the Rest Here

A Storied Life

He had been held against his will in Libya, dodged bombs in Iraq and been shot in Ramallah. And through it all, he brought to life some of the most stirring and vital accounts of years of tumult in the Middle East that you could read anywhere -- which is why he was awarded the Pulitzer not once but twice.

Yesterday, the intrepid Anthony Shadid -- reporting for the New York Times -- died of an asthma attack while covering the popular uprising and the government's punishing response to it in Syria.

He was 43-years-old.

If you're not familiar with Shadid's life and work, you really should be.

The New York Times: Remembering Anthony Shadid/2.16.12

Assistant Quote of the Day

"Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal? We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this. Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

-- Anonymous bank CEO to New York Times financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin

This revealing line comes from a piece published in yesterday's Times, the first Sorkin has written on the Occupy Wall Street movement. I know this because Glenn Greenwald, predictably, is complaining about the tone of the piece, why it took Sorkin this long to get around to writing it, and the fact that his decision to take on the assignment seems to have come at the request of the very bank CEO referenced above.

I'd suggest taking a look at Sorkin's column and judging for yourself what you think of it, then check out Greenwald's pedantic dissection of it -- if for no other reason than to see Glenn Greenwald actually refer to someone as displaying "characteristically snotty, petty, pseudo-intellectual condescension" with what I assume is a straight face.

Picture of the Week (Honorable Mention)

This remained on the New York Times web site until late this afternoon when someone realized the error.

As Andy Borowitz said on Twitter, if the Times continued making mistakes like this, it might actually be worth paying for.

You Didn't Buy It, You Own It

As usual, David Carr of the New York Times makes a damn astute point about the mainstream media's unwillingness to pay for stories but absolute willingness to cover stories that have been broken by outlets that have no problem paying for stories.

Case in point: the Brett Favre sex scandal, which was broken by Gawker media, who, you could easily make the claim, violated every tenet of responsible journalism in its handling of the story.

Carr's assertion is essentially that these days the mainstream media don't need to break their own rules and piss all over their own standards; all they need to do us play a little "ethical rendition" and allow the supposed bottom feeders to do what they do best, then make the case that once the story was out there and percolated up, they had no choice but to cover it.

The New York Times: Favre, Deadspin and the New Tawdry Journalism/10.18.10

Math Problem

For the country as a whole, trickle-down economics haven't worked. At least they haven't worked for most Americans who aren't ultra-rich -- the middle-class and underprivileged entreated to sit beneath the the table of the wealthy and wait for the scraps to fall, to "trickle down" as it were. More than any other socio-political paradigm, this overarching pseudo-Randian belief that wealth should and will flow top-to-bottom, from the elite to those who supposedly benefit from their actions and largess -- espoused and imposed nationwide by Ronald Reagan -- has been the defining ideal of the last thirty years. It's been the one factor that's remained constant throughout the tenures of five presidents. Despite plenty of lip service paid to a constantly expanding economic inequality in this country -- with, as the zero-sum cliché goes, the rich seeming to get richer while the poor get poorer -- no one's ever attempted an honest-to-God sea change in the way America practices capitalism.

Maybe until now.

Today there are a couple of really interesting articles highlighting inequality in this country and what's being done about it. I'll say right off that bat that I'd be one of the first people to agree that while the Declaration of Independence stakes its claim on the notion that all are created equal, it doesn't mean that all are entitled to reach the same level of status. Equal human dignity at birth and throughout life won't guarantee equal wealth, power or prestige; it just doesn't work that way. I'd also agree that we don't outright punish people for striving to be the best or get the most they can out of life, provided they're not breaking the law or depriving others of the same opportunity. But you're a fool if you deny that something is very wrong in this country when a tiny portion of it -- the insulated elite -- are allowed to seemingly run roughshod over a middle-class that's dwindling in numbers. There were always the very rich in our nation, and it helped to make us powerful -- but there was also a strong middle-class to provide a foundation for the American dream. More and more, that foundation is weakening -- due in large part to an entire way of thinking, fomented by a government and media that themselves have become tools of the super-rich, which held that the quest for wealth above all was the greatest good and that anybody could get to the prize at the end of the rainbow.

Today's New York Times looks at how, despite what many claim is a payout to the insurance industry, the new health care reform bill is actually the first major piece of legislation in thirty years to attempt to turn the tide against the very ideals of Reaganomics.

From that piece:

"Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.

Speaking to an ebullient audience of Democratic legislators and White House aides at the bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday, Mr. Obama claimed that health reform would 'mark a new season in America.' He added, 'We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.'"

The article goes on to spell out the ways in which the Reagan-era's laissez-faire attitude toward big business practices and corporate excess contributed to our current Great Recession. But make no mistake: A minor step in the direction of changing our views on Greed-is-the-Ultimate-Good economics doesn't mean we're all suddenly all living in Utopia (as if something like that would even be possible). A short piece in the Examiner Online gets into not simply the current fight over extending unemployment benefits to the 14-million Americans still without jobs or severely underemployed but details what would've happened had the money given wantonly and without restriction to failing Wall Street titans instead been put in the hands of average Americans.

"Think of all the trillions that have been spent on banks and insurance giants yet underemployment has reached record levels. I mention this stat on occasion because it shows you just how much money has been wastefully thrown at corrupt and insolvent financial institutions. According to numerous reports, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have pumped upwards of $14 trillion to support failing financial institutions. There are approximately 100 million households in the US. So if you divide that $14 trillion by 100 million and that means that each and every US household could have been sent a check for $140,000. Just think of what the American consumer would have done with $140,000 in their checking account. Instead of a failed trickle-down economy, we would have had a robust trickle-up economy."

Of course this is a pie-in-the-sky notion, but as an object lesson it goes a long way in showing how our government's priorities have always been the people at the top -- and how its efforts to appease them have rarely benefited the rest of us. No, contrary to the knee-jerk idiocy you'll hear from the tea baggers, this isn't a suggestion that socialism is the way out; as I said, not everyone can be assured an equal standing in our culture, nor should they be. But the massive inequity just can't be overlooked or disregarded.

Far too many of us are getting screwed by this system -- and we're tired of it.

New View Review

If you've read Night of the Gun you know that, by all accounts, David Carr of the New York Times shouldn't even be alive much less be able to formulate a coherent thought -- but damn if he isn't one of the sharpest weapons in the Times's arsenal these days.

In today's edition, he argues that the "failure" of Conan O'Brien on The Tonight Show is more the fault of a new generation of viewing audiences than anything else. His point is basically that unlike the days of Carson, when one person had the power to bring an entire country together and could be a kind of human zeitgeist, our popular culture is now endlessly fragmented because the media is now endlessly fragmented. You don't have to watch an entire episode of Conan or Jay or whomever at whatever specific time it happens to air, and even if you do, by the time a late night talk show host gets to put his or her spin on the day's news events, they've been spun to death across the internet by a million separate outlets. The country doesn't gather around the TV anymore the way it used to; it doesn't need to.

What Carr doesn't get into, though, is why Conan is hamstrung by this brave new world while Leno seems less affected. It all comes down to the average age of their respective audiences. All you have to do is look at Leno's brand of humor to know that he skews much older; his audience is 55+, people much more likely to still take in TV the old-fashioned way rather than go looking for a requisite dose of snark or the pertinent clips from their favorite shows on the internet every hour on the hour. Conan's audience, meanwhile, is made up of younger people, many of whose brains' addiction centers would scream bloody murder if they found themselves detached from their iPhones, Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts or DVRs for longer than a couple of minutes. The irony, though, is that it's these younger viewers that are most prized by advertisers, so although Leno had a larger audience during his Tonight Show gig than Conan has been pulling since he took over, Conan's crowd could easily generate more money in the long run for the people paying NBC's bills.

Too bad there won't be a long run.

Either way, Carr's piece takes a smart look at what's quickly become a very ugly situation -- and one that says more about our media culture as a whole than you might think.

The New York Times: "It's Not Jay or Conan. It's Us" by David Carr/1.18.10

Faulty Powers

"We live in a society today that loves a soap opera. Three months ago it was David Letterman, six weeks ago it was Tiger Woods’ problems. Today it’s NBC’s problems."

-- Jeff Zucker in an interview with the New York Times yesterday

The story that features this quote is in today's Times; it essentially chronicles NBC's downward spiral, making a lot of the same points that I've made here and at the Huffington Post over the past week. What's astounding, though, despite the fact that it shouldn't be at this point, is the level of thickheaded hubris on display in the article from both Jeff Zucker and NBC News's painfully smug president, Steve Capus. Both are so thoroughly detached from reality and unwilling to accept responsibility for the mess NBC is currently in that the only argument they can make is that the entire thing is much ado about nothing. Zucker blames the public for stopping to gawk at the trainwreck while refusing to acknowledge that there is a trainwreck and that he caused it; as a reader noted here recently, it would be like shooting someone then blaming that person for getting blood on your carpet and the police for having the temerity to make a big stink and arrest you.

Capus's decision to get involved and comment, meanwhile, makes me honestly wonder if he's in immediate need of a little "rest and relaxation," preferably in a place where he can be watched by doctors 24/7. First of all making the transparently opportunistic claim that there are more important things right now for the American public to be paying attention to -- specifically the situation in Haiti -- is a laughable conceit, especially considering the fact that he's saying it to a reporter from the New York Times who's there to cover the NBC story; it takes balls of titanium for an ostensible journalist to imply that news coverage is a zero-sum game and to basically tell another journalist that he's wasting his time and should be off doing something more "important." What makes Capus's horseshit argument even more egregious is that it's coming from Steve Capus, the man who played ethical Twister on national television a couple of years back in an attempt to defend the indefensible -- namely his decision to air excerpts of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho's videotaped manifesto, giving Cho the posthumous forum he counted on and rubbing salt in the wounds of the victims' families. Allowing Capus to make a ruling on what is and isn't news is like taking dating advice from Ralph Nader.

And think about this: Steve Capus, a guy who most days is in the business of distracting you with all sorts of ridiculous nonsense, has the chutzpah to suddenly and pompously complain that you're being distracted.

Zucker and Capus can delude themselves all they want; they can dismiss the terrible numbers and the loss of millions in revenue, the resentment from the NBC rank and file and the very public drumbeat calling for change at highest levels of management; they can ignore the laughter of those who are reveling in a kind of mass Schadenfreude, the jokes of insiders and outsiders like Jon Stewart, who called Zucker "the Cheney of television" because he "(shoots) shows in the face"; they can fiddle their asses off while Rome burns (and if ever there was a "Rome" of television networks, it was NBC). They can pretend that nothing's wrong and that if there is, it's no one at the top's fault anyway.

Or they can just read the article in the New York Times -- you know, that paper that apparently is just rubbernecking at a soap opera -- and see what network vet Fred Silverman and even Bob Wright, who just a few years ago was doing Zucker's job only infinitely better, have to say about the state of NBC right now.

Guys like Zucker and Capus aren't just asleep at the wheel -- they slept right through the car crash.

Quote of the Day

"Both studio and television audiences are lapping it up, but it can’t feel all that great to hand someone the megaphone of a nightly show and proceed to have them rain ridicule on you. It comes at an inopportune moment, because the whole rest of the media apparatus is focusing on deconstructing NBC’s travails and whenever they need a little punch-up, they can just check YouTube or NBC’s own Web site for the latest grenade that was set off inside the bunker. There is no resolution in sight and until the Olympics, when NBC will be able to focus on the spectacular crashes in men’s giant slalom, they will be more or less be the ragdoll bouncing haplessly down the hill."

-- David Carr of the New York Times on the non-stop bombardment of mockery being volleyed at NBC by both Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien and the general dangers of pissing off comedians with big audiences

Seethe the Day

A couple of weeks ago, I finally cracked and admitted that I thought the ongoing right-wing rage directed at Barack Obama was based at least partially in a certain amount of racism. I instantly caught crap for this, both in my e-mail inbox, at the Huffington Post and on other websites. The thing is, in the initial piece I wrote that brought up the issue of racism, I went out of my way to mention that the race factor is by no means the only thing at play in the virulent, supposedly populist uprising aimed at the White House. There's a hell of a lot more going on than just that.

In today's New York Times, Frank Rich gets into that -- into, say, Glenn Beck's ability to tap into the vague and silly feeling some Americans have that they're living in the Matrix -- and does so with a really commendable level of balance.

"Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of [Joe] Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center."

The New York Times: "Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day" by Frank Rich/9.20.09

Quote of the Week (Honorable Mention)

"For Glenn Beck to devote 45 minutes of his show to ACORN and Van Jones says more about his news judgment than mine."

-- Dean Baquet, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, responding to Glenn Beck's complaint that other news organizations besides Fox News Channel and talk radio (whose work he credits with "saving the republic") are biased in their coverage of the various "scandals" supposedly plaguing the Obama administration

Yes You Can

From yesterday's New York Times, by artist Barry Blitt

Bad Sex

It's the little things in life that make it worth living.

Like the fact that The New York Times -- let me repeat that: The New York Times -- just called the new Sex and the City movie "vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow -- and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong."

While I'll avoid the obvious joke about anyone keeping it "turgid" for 2 hours and 22 minutes with someone whose face looks like it should have a bag of oats strapped to it, I appreciate the irony of these drag queen look-alikes and their legion of vapid fans being pimp-slapped by the paper of record for the city they worship so unabashedly.

It's sort of like Big suddenly turning and pushing Carrie down a flight of stairs.

(The New York Times: Sex and the City Review/5.30.08)