BAD GRAMMAR, WORSE EXAMPLES

NY Times columnist Tom Friedman offers a powerful, and pointed indictment of American education.  Unfortunately, he undermines his own points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/friedman-obamas-homework-assignment.html?hp&rref=opinion

Friedman cites journalist and author Amanda Ripley, 2 heart-breaking, spirit-broken classroom teachers and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to indict public education as the intellectual nullifier it has become.  He frames his discussion with a familiar question: “Are we falling behind as a country in education, not just because we fail to recruit the smartest college students to become teachers or reform-resistant teachers’ unions, but because of our culture today: too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?” 

Such a run-on catalog would hardly seem to need additional culprits, but I’d like to suggest a few, among them the columnist himself.

America has been in measurable competitive decline for more than a generation now, and it is useful that Friedman and his sources offer such dramatic and appalling evidence of how and why.  But -- Friedman’s sentence is not just too long and rambling (an offense I commit far too frequently – so I’m an “expert”), it gets an F for basic grammar.  The clause “because we fail to recruit the smartest college students to become teachers or reform-resistant teachers’ unions,” cannot be allowed to stand.  

As Tom and his vigilant copy editors at the Times know, those last 3 words dangle like a parasitic fungus off the trunk of his sentence.  The all too automatic (did someone trigger the infamous Column Generator?) reference to bad unions is in no way parallel to the preceding phrase.  If it had been written “because of our failure to recruit,” the logic might not have been improved, but at least the grammar would have passed muster, especially, if the second phrase had been changed to either “because of reform-resistant,” or “the reform-resistance of” teachers’ unions.”

But Friedman didn’t write that, and his editors, if there were any, didn’t correct a fourth-graders’ error in the copy, and the rhetorical mess got published by America’s “newspaper of record.”

Thus, the Times’ writer and its editorial process actually enacted for us what’s wrong with Friedman’s climactic portion of blame: “because of our culture today: too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?”

Instead of saying, students are often led to lower their own performance standards when respected writers like himself, and fabled systems like the NY Times’ copy-editing go wrong, Friedman blames America’s disastrous failure in education on “our culture” and parents and kids.  This sounds to me just like the argument that the Great Recession was caused by “the culture of Wall Street” and improvident homebuyers? 

Sure, blame “the cloud” and the victims.

But what makes “culture,” and how are its malign aspects distributed to people?  In America, culture for the past 60 years has been created, defined and spread through the mass media, especially by the great elite institutions of those media, like the NY Times and the television networks, and the people who work there.

It is those elite institutions, and their star reporters, columnists, editors and publishers who cultured moral failure through their often indiscriminate celebrations and rare critical examinations of the ascendance of, not a “culture,” but a cohort of identifiable corporate criminals. 

No one seemed to notice when these managerial superstars serially shifted money away from contracted responsibilities to pay for their workers’ pensions and medical care to exploding executive salaries and shareholder profits, or in the case of one of the great stars of 20^th Century business management, GE’s Jack Welch, when his company poisoned the Hudson River.  He and his equally culpable corporate underlings did it, but none of them went to jail, or even paid a penny of personal earnings.

More and more blatantly, over the past 40 years, America’s media, and its “top” academies of finance, business, political “science,” economics, and ethics have all actively promulgated, or silently assented to, again, not a “culture of financial impunity,” but a series of individual perpetrations of fraud and theft, obsessive self-interest, and unbridled greed by elite institutions and their highly-paid leaders, all at the expense of their customers and the American public. 

When the NY Times cheaps out on, or disempowers lowly sub-editors, and publishes avoidable illiteracy like Friedman’s, or cranky, vicious inaccuracy like Bill Keller’s recent rant against blogger Lisa Bonchek Adams, it robs and cheats its customers as blatantly as hedge fund villain John Paulsen and his Goldman Sachs collaborator Lloyd Blankfein robbed the sucker-buyers of the made-to-fail Abacus “investment opportunity.”

One more time, this has nothing to do with “culture,” and everything to do with personal failure and malfeasance.  Blaming “the culture” means blaming no one and rewarding misbehavior.

To say, subprime mortgage customers were equally to blame for taking the word of corrupted rating services and trusting the reputations of a big Wall Street money shops like Goldman Sachs is simply wrong.  And so is blaming a “culture” of parents and teachers who can’t seem to get students to do their homework. 

Yes, the home-buying schnooks should have known better the limits on their wealth and income, and yes, many parents and school systems need to do better in instilling in their children the will to work hard and learn much.  But, just as it’s tough to say, “I can’t afford this,” when you’re being told by “experts” that you can, and all the world seems to be on a go-go buying spree based on an unsustainable spike of rising house prices; it’s tough to convince your kid to do his homework, when every day, the authorities in the media industry tolerate sloppy errors or celebrate “winners” who substitute marketing for competence and bluff for preparation or knowledge.  (Democrats and Republicans may each see in the last sentence the recent President of their choice. If politicians got “Board scores,” theirs’ would be slipping even more drastically than the students rated by the testing services.)

Why would anyone who watches Fox News or MSNBC or the more august networks’ Sunday morning Washington talkfests suspect that governance (or journalism) consists not of bloviation, but hard work?  Why would anyone cognizant of Tom Friedman’s fame or salary believe they need to “dot every i and cross every t?”

It isn’t a “cultural choice” to shift budget money from teacher’s salaries or training to buy  standardized tests or common core curricula, it’s a bureaucratic method of ass-covering.  As if a rote list of lessons, and a close count of check marks on worksheets could help students learn how to think, and how to work with others, which are, after all, what schools are for.

It’s not the culture, but the political hacks who perpetrate these frauds, seeking to prove to their constituents that they are “doing the right thing,” when, in fact, they know no more about education than they do about Iraq or Afghanistan.  The unending repetition of these ignorance-based choices is clear evidence that some folks haven’t been doing their homework.

We all need to do our homework, and hold ourselves responsible to throw the political bums out and send the financial crooks to jail. Learning precisely who did wrong, how and why, are all necessary steps to making things better.  It’s not America’s culture, but us, who need to set the better example.

RUPERT MURDOCH: JUDGMENT DEFERRED

Feeling kinda droopy?  Like you had “tired blood?”  Well, better than Geritol would be a dose of David Folkenflik’s new book Murdoch’s World (Public Affairs Press, NYC, 2013).

If NPR Media correspondent Folkenflik’s tale of the “buccaneer” Rupert Murdoch doesn’t get your blood percolating, call 9-1-1.

Most of your bloodboil will come direct from Murdoch, but once in a while, you may sizzle when the author’s “fair and balanced” reporting seems to lack a spine of judgment.

Let’s first dispense with what Murdoch’s World is not.  It is not a meticulously detailed, deeply meditated “definitive biography.”  That title still goes to Michael Wolff’s The Man Who Owns the News.  What Folkenflik has written is a breezy and bright update of Wolff’s 2008 account, emphasizing the phone hacking, cop-bribing scandals that have wracked Murdoch’s London tabloids for the past decade.

Even there, Folkenflik has pulled together an excellent summary, full of reporting and research, but the book finesses a judgment of the sordid mess, the cover-up that followed it, and the Murdoch culture that enabled everything.  He does have one significant scoop: that Murdoch’s “best friend”, Robert Thomson, then the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal, tried, according to reporters there, to kill, and then helped to neuter a WSJ investigative report on the phone-hacking of a dead 13 year old girl, Milly Dowler, by the now-closed Murdoch London tabloid, The News of the World. 

Even now, the former editors of The Sun, Murdoch’s “surrogate daughter” Rebekah Brooks, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s one-time spokesman Andy Coulson,  are on trial in London, charged with buying cops and lying about it, paying private investigators and paying off the people the PI’s hacked and spied against.  Ms. Brooks is also in danger after she, her husband and her assistant were discovered hiding and trashing and apparently attempting to destroy evidence that might be held against her. 

Barely relevant, but supremely titillating, and, alas, too late for Folkenflik (or, perhaps for Murdoch’s World’s first edition) came news this week that over this very period of gutter journalism, Brooks and Coulson were having “a romantic affair.”  Both were separately married at the time.

The hacking-bribing scandal forced Coulson to quit his political job, and eventually, forced Rupert’s Ms. Brooks to resign.  Perhaps it is they Murdoch was talking about when he whined to Parliament, “People I’ve trusted – I’m not saying who – I don’t know what level, have let me down, betrayed the company and me, and it’s up to them to pay.”

Folkenflik’s book strongly suggests that this cold dismissal and pathetic blame-shifting is the worst kind of chutzpah, the unbelievable arrogance of assumed impunity. 

After detailing more cringe-inducing Murdochian testimony before a Parliamentary Committee (“This is the humblest day of my life,” he all but sobbed) including this pathetic denial of responsibility for his newspapers’ spying and lying: “I didn’t know of it.  I’m sorry [but] the News of the World is less than 1% of our company,” Folkenflik adds only, “He was a notoriously involved CEO, especially when it came to his tabloids.”

Throughout the book, he seems to accept as unknowable the answer to the questions, "What did Rupert know and when did he know it?"  Too bad.

But, Murdoch’s World shows Rupert to be more than just notoriously involved in his media empire; he was amazingly delusional about it and himself.

Murdoch revels in his self-created role as an “outsider,” a hater of “the elites” and “the toffs,” forgetting, perhaps, that he was the son of a well-off Australian newspaper publisher, privately schooled until he was sent off to Oxford for his B.A.

Folkenflik reports that Murdoch’s deep-seated “contempt for government interference” stems from the Australian “taxes levied against his father’s estate.”  Left over, it must be noted, was more than enough capital to be the cornerstone of Murdoch’s later investments in journalism and entertainment; influence and power. 

The affronts of being forced to pay taxes and work his way through, or weasel his way past, government regulations meant to enforce standards and limit competitive dominance on news media ownership are, Folkenflik says, what lies behind the consistent agenda of almost all Murdoch media:  a strong military, smaller government, less regulation and resistance to immigration. 

The first and last may only be sops to his right-of-center, nationalist audiences, although Murdoch himself is a successful immigrant, whose devotion to Australian nationhood – a big meme in his Aussie papers – didn’t prevent him from selling this Ozzie passport for a mess of American TV stations. 

But it’s the Murdoch mantra of smaller, weaker government and radically diminished public oversight that seeps self-interest.

One howler that Folkenflik lets go unremarked is Murdoch’s definition of “the public interest” as that in which the public is interested.

Let me put this in another great journalist’s nutshell. “A great salesman never asks you what you want,” wrote Russell Baker.  “He tells you what he’s got and why you want it.”

By and large, public interest depends on public knowledge.  You cannot express interest in something you’ve never heard of.  When Rupert Murdoch publishes “between 60 and 70% of the newspapers sold in Australia,” he effectively limits and controls what most Australians can have any interest in.

This kind of dominance not only distorts the news, it corrupts the political world.  Folkenflik tells us, for Murdoch in Australia, government favors have included “a paltry” price for prime publically-owned waterfront property for his Sydney film studio, and a sweetheart deal with the Federal government that gave him a 25% share and effective control of a national near-monopoly on pay-TV.

In the UK, Folkenflik recounts, Murdoch jawboning, and a lot of editorial and campaign funding support was rewarded when Margaret Thatcher hand-carried him past British media regulators.  When he was courting UK citizens, Murdoch said, “I think that the important thing is that there be plenty of newspapers, with plenty of different people controlling them, so there are a variety of viewpoints, so there is a choice for the public.”

40 years later, Murdoch owned 4 national newspapers, a network of satellite TV channels doing everything from news to sports to entertainment, and he had high hopes (shattered for now by the hacking scandal) of absolute control over the UK’s top satellite content provider.

In the US, he has somehow acquired and kept “waivers” that allow him to breach both kinds of bans on media “cross-ownership.”  He has TV channels and newspapers in the same market.  He has more than one TV channel in some markets.  His film production company is allowed to supply his Fox TV network with programming.

This is exactly what strong government and intelligent regulation is supposed to prevent. 

And again, Murdoch’s “legalized” forays outside the rules have had a terrible spillover effect.  Giving NYC Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani unprecedented front page as well as editorial page support advanced their political ambitions, and, not coincidentally, helped grease the skids for the not-yet-naturalized Murdoch to buy not just the NY Post, but WNEW-TV (now WNYW-TV) as well.  While both his financial and editorial support for Federal-level politicians has enabled continuing breaches of the rules others must follow on “cross-ownership.”

Folkenflik revels along with Murdoch and several of his top henchpeople in their self-description as “pirates.”  But this ain’t cute Johnny Depp.  These are real pirates, outlaws who survive by breaking or evading legal and professional codes, by pillaging their legitimate competitors.

And yet, so far at least, no Murdoch has been prosecuted or dispossessed of his ill-gotten gains, despite clear evidence that he and his company have broken British and American laws.

In the US, a rival London tabloid reported, Murdoch’s News of the World tried to corrupt a former NY cop-turned private investigator by hiring him , “to hack electronic phone records for people who had been killed in the 9/11 attacks.”  Although the report was based on just 2 anonymous sources, it produced calls, from Rep. Peter King (R-NY) among others, for an investigation.  If one was done, no one has seen a result.

Then there is the 1997 Federal Corrupt Practices Act, which banned American companies, like Murdoch’s News Corp, from bribing public officials abroad. As Folkenflik says, “Illegal payments to police officers fell squarely within that definition.”  As the ongoing trials in London show high-ranking Murdoch executives did just that. Federal prosecution anyone?

And where is the corporate outrage?  As credentialed observers of American business Nell Minnow of GMI Ratings and Laura Martin of Needham and Co noted respectively, “Murdoch’s leadership is a big, big mess,” and “if this had happened at a normal company, in theory, the board would have required the CEO to resign.”

Not our Rupert.

Here’s how Murdoch deals with questions from in-house.  At the 2009 annual plutocrat party at Sun Valley, Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney asked Murdoch to address the phone-hacking, cop-buying scandals, and got:  “I’m not talking about that issue at all today.”  “No worries, Mr. Chairman,” said Varney, “That’s fine with me.”

Rather than romanticizing them as rebels, let’s call pirates what they are, Mafiosi on the high seas.  Murdoch’s “matey” army, “built,” Folkenflik says, “on personal and family ties [had] a clubbiness or mateship that was almost impossible for outsiders to penetrate.”

And as the UK scandals outrageously demonstrate, the “mates” subscribe to the Mafia  ethic of omerta, silence to protect the Boss.

Folkenflik prefers a different, more legitimizing reference; “People invariably compared Murdoch to William Randolph Hearst, [but] that seems too limited a comparison.  Perhaps he was more like the nation’s oil barons who pockmarked the countryside in drilling, [and] provided millions of Americans with a product they came to view as indispensable.”

Maybe you can see where this is heading.  Incredibly, depressingly, Folkenflik outdoes even Murdoch’s latest fetid bribery defense, made off-the-record to employees at The Sun: everybody does it. “Payments for news tips from cops,” Murdoch was secretly recorded saying, “that’s been going on for a hundred years.  It was the culture of Fleet Street.”

Everyone who reports does it, Murdoch says; and everyone who reads of watches is complicit, Folkenflik volunteers.  He ends his book by saying, “Murdoch could not have accumulated his fortunes without our help.  We are all, as consumers of media, involved and even responsible for the creation of Murdoch’s World.”

As guilty as the people of Bhopal were for swallowing Union Carbide’s lethal gas.

Now there’s a comparison in which the real-world relationship of corporate pirates and government regulation are revealed.  It’s that kind of bite, of passion, of judgment, which David Folkenflik has unfortunately eschewed.

Murdoch’s World is a good book, full of interesting material, but for me, it’s one failure is a big one: it doesn’t add up.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT: HYPOCRISY

If hypocrisy were oil, Washington would be Saudi Arabia.  But even by the standards of a town where disingenuousness and moral falsity frame also every public discussion, President Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney yesterday blew smoke fouler than the air in a Chinese coal mine.

“We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools,” said Carney, specifically ignoring the zeal in the Democrat’s house, the Senate, to demand changes, limits, and procedures that would certainly re-mantle the Federal Government’s universal surveillance system.

But here’s the Big Hoot:  “This blunt approach,” Carney went on, “is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process.”

So true!  But whose fault is that?  Why, I believe it is no one other than the Press Secretary’s boss, President Barack Obama.

Until Edward Snowden spilled to Glen Greenwald in The Guardian, and later, the Washington Post, the extent of telephone, snail and email, cellphone, GPS record-keeping underway at the National Security Agency, President Obama was zealously protecting keeping all the secrets of that cuddly “Intelligence Community.”  (Anybody ever hear references to a Health and Welfare Community?  Even though they deal, literally, with community concerns.  Education community? Housing community?  Yes, it is common to invoke the Defense Community, because, it, too, like Intelligence, benefits from painted on warm and fuzzies.)

Before Snowden, all the American people were allowed to know came from some, dare I call them “cryptic” hints from a couple of well-briefed Senators, and important whistleblower coverage of phone-record-napping in the NY Times and elsewhere.  That should have alerted the public that traceable digital systems, not just phones, but computers, and GPS connectors could, and therefore were likely to be scanned for Big Data.

That the snoops are also clocking postal communications seems so “last century,” that it caught me by surprise. It shouldn’t have.  Surveillance covers all, or it’s almost nothing at all.    

That’s why turning off parts of the surveillance machine won’t work.

What will work is rule of law, covering the whole damn surveillance system, what the people’s representatives will legislate as limits, not on data collection – a blind eye sees no dangers, but on data selection: what triggers actually examining a person’s collected data, and who gets to do the examining? Is some form of warrant needed before selection can begin, and what level of cause will be required to obtain one?  Will anyone argue on behalf of privacy? What parts of a person’s data can be examined?  Who monitors the process to see that set limits are respected, that every search doesn’t simply strip-mine personal data? And who has oversight over the monitors, and how much are they allowed to share with the public?

These are all difficult, subtle, and vitally important questions.  A Congress which having taken its feet from their normal resting spot in their mouths, should not now use them to out-run their brains.  Carney and his boss are right about that. 

Information, deliberation and openness will all be required if Americans are to exercise any influence on perhaps the most important legal and political decisions of our time. But it ill behooves the man who has smothered all of them, either because he uncritically trusts the men and systems whose secrets he’s been hiding from voters, or because he mistrusts the wisdom of those citizens and finds it safer compulsively to cover his ass, to say so.

Let’s not forget that the most flagrant known examples of abuse of surveillance data come from the Obama Justice Department’s pursuit of phone records of journalists at Fox News, CBS News and the Associated Press who were working on revelations, not of strategic secrets, but of undisclosed CIA and State Department ineptitude and dishonesty.

You know the kind of thing, like that Attorney General Eric Holder was Bill Clinton’s end-of-term-pardon go-between (and might one guess, in the usually politically correct, indirect way, bagman?) with the convicted fugitive billionaire Marc Rich.  That was supposed to be a secret, too.

This of the embarrassment President Clinton and then Deputy AG Holder might have saved themselves with a little information, deliberation and openness, even at the cost of a crook’s Get Out of Jail Free card, and whatever it might have produced.