Alternate Realities TV Style

I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia-fest watching the first two seasons of The Greatest American Hero on DVD. Fuller reviews will be posted here and/or at the LogBook some time soon, but as I was enjoying the show’s goofy charm, I also realized I do not have nearly enough suspension of disbelief to accept some plot developments. But it did make me ponder a question.

What would the world be like if it were like the world in Stephen J. Cannell shows?

I mean, we’re talking about a world where gun runners trying to supply anti-American insurgents in South America want to finance their purchase by winning a large bet on who wins the National League pennant and try to injure various players on the California Stars in order to ensure the bet goes their way. And at no point in this procession does the baseball team hire bodyguards for their players or even a car service that will prevent them from having to park their cars in underlit garages where the yare easy prey for hired muscle.

And that’s just oen episode of Hero. I have not even begun to ponder The A-Team yet.

Dead (Tired) Line

I get into such terrible habits when a major deadline looms, especially when writing is involved. Books, articles, and other notes pile up on the desk, a small maze of books forms near my chair, and all sorts of little things like laundry start stacking up. I cleared a major deadline this past weekend, and things should be pretty relaxed for the next month or so. The projects I’ve started scribbling in my planner will probably take up a large amount of that time, especially with Christmas shopping to worry about. But it still feels less pressured. The nice thing about coming out of this mess on the other side is that I get to clean it up. Today the top of my desk re-emerged from a long period of hiding. Some of the books are heading back to the library, others up to the shelves . . . and others to wait for me to get some new shelves, because man, I have too many books.

Black Is White, Up Is Down

I’m pretty sure Eddie Murphy did this already back on Saturday Night Live:

A black family learns what it’s like to be white while a white family becomes black in the six-part documentary series “Black.White,” scheduled for broadcast on the FX cable network in March.

Makeup temporarily transforms the two families for the series developed by filmmaker R.J. Cutler and actor-rapper Ice Cube.

It seems like there are few ideas so outlandish that a television producer will not attempt them.

Reporting in the Balance

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been tracking some press coverage of the legal problems of Republican Congressmen such as Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham, along with the associated scandals. One thing he has pointed out is that the media seems to be bending over backwards to depict the story as being part of an overall political culture of corruption in which both parties are equally guilty, even when most of the federal cases right now involve Republicans. (Conversely, if you want to talk about corruption in Philadelphia, you have to focus the attention on the local Democratic Party, which has been unchallenged for a long time and shows plenty of signs of bloat.) He mentions today a Washington Post chat in which a reporter acknowledges that sometimes the effort for balance creates its own distortions.

Around the same time, Next Hurrah linked to a very good article in the NY Review of Books about how the emphasis on balance, along with corporate pressure and the overall culture of journalism, keeps the press from challenging the public with information about the powerful and the consequences of their actions. There are a number of good anecdotes in the article, many of which focus on issues like poverty and Iraq. Michael Massig strives for accuracy, but he is clearly concerned with facts that do not paint American society or government in the best of lights. I leave it to you to determine if he is being unfair or if, as Rob Corddry once joked on The Daily Show, the facts on the ground have a bias.

When it comes to the balance issue, I admit that I simultaneously see the problem and want to leap to the press’s defense. Part of that, I think, is an effort at self-defense. When I worked on the campus newspaper at Fordham, the effort to “get both sides” was one of the things that I emphasized when covering news stories. I still clearly remember one story where there was a dispute between another campus publication and the administration (via the student-run budget committee) that resulted in the publication being shut down. The narrow focus of the dispute was whether or not the publication was bringing in enough outside ad revenue to keep it going – the publications had to be somewhat but not entirely self-supporting – and whether enough of an effort was being made to increase that revenue. My reporting and writing pretty much boiled down to interviewing the two sides and presenting their alternate takes on what had happened, filling in some basic context where necessary. I felt at the time that it was the right approach because I didn’t really have the resources at hand to try and verify some of the claims about what had gone on in the past. (The budget cutbacks so many media organizations face today definitely make this a concern for reporters in the field today.) Nor did I have sources who were willing to go on the record and tell me that there was any kind of larger agenda involved – which there probably was, because the administration had long had its problems with the other publication. But I didn’t want to seem like I was gloating over a rival publication’s troubles or trying to kick the administration, so that whole balance thing was definitely in my head when I wrote the article.

I actually just now pulled my copy of that year’s paper off my shelf and reread it. In the narrow context of events, I actually think the strive-for-balance approach worked. The various sides had different perspectives on what was fair and appropriate, and a lot of basic facts weren’t really in dispute. It was more a question of how to interpret them – was the administration/committee being ham-handed or unrealistic in its demands, or was the publication failing to live up to its obligations? So presenting the sides wasn’t a bad thing to do. On the other hand, I did nothing to establish the larger context of the administration’s feud with the publication and raise the question of whether this was some kind of payback. Student leaders at Fordham were a fairly incestuous group – one of the leaders of student government was my editor-in-chief the year after this story ran, and she worked on or ran several other organizations as well. (No way to avoid that, because there were far more positions than people who wanted to fill them.) But as a result we heard plenty of rumors about “what was really going on” – but no one was willing to say anything on the record. Which brings us back to the issue of sources and why cultivating them is so important if reporting is to have any credibility. That cultivation sometimes results in compromises being made and reporters having to sit on information that they have but can’t source or prove. That’s part of the territory, but the sources have to be put to good use rather than being accumulated for their own sake.

Ghosts and Blessings

Related to the last post – I’m sitting at my desk with an open can of Coke in each hand, making sure that every one of the four on my desk are empty.

I go upstairs to throw out the cans and see the Holy Ghost newsletter on the table. Then I realize the annual R.E.M. holiday fan club package is also in the mail. This year there’s a DVD, so I grab it and the newsletter and head downstairs again. The DVD has two live performances from a concert in Germany, including a performance of “Turn You Inside-Out,” a song from Green, an album I first started listening to in high school. It feels appropriate.

I’m making my way through the newsletter, checking out the alumni news. One of my old classmates just had a baby. We’re all growing up, that’s for sure.

I start reading a column by Edward Glowienka, an alum from the class of 2000, who’s teaching philosophy at a Spiritan missionary in Tanzania. And I see him telling a story about the late Diane Garforth.

Damn.

I knew Mrs. Garforth had passed away from cancer this past May. I heard about it at the wedding of one of my old friends from the school paper. In retrospect, I think I was so stunned I didn’t feel anything. Tonight I got to the back of the newsletter and saw her picture and read the tribute penned by Mrs. Osborne, my sophomore year homeroom teacher and one of the nicest people that exist on this planet. And now I’m laughing and crying.

Ed’s story was about Mrs. Garforth rejecting a paper he had written, saying that he was capable of better work. And oh, that is so true to who she was. I had her for freshman lit, at a time when Holy Ghost rearranged the order of its periods every day. I can remember the bemused look when I walked into her room at the wrong time. More to the point, I remember how she ripped the first paper I wrote in high school to shreds. She had no patience for anything less than your best effort. But most of the time, you could be sure the high demands were because she cared and because she knew you were up to the task.

I do think that in a lot of ways I disappointed her. She didn’t seem too happy with my interest in journalism, or my fondness for science fiction. I think she saw something more serious and literary-minded in my future. And she definitely didn’t approve of my choice of colleges, something that I felt no small amount of bitterness about. But she was someone I always made sure to see when I visited the school, and she always cared to know how I was doing.

More than anything else, the thing that made Holy Ghost the school that it was is that Mrs. Garforth was far from alone there. So many of those teachers cared, damn it. You could feel it. I could, anyway. And that made such a difference. I wouldn’t be where I am now, I wouldn’t be in front of a classroom at al, if it weren’t for their inspiration. If it weren’t for her, and for so many like her.

So, thank you, Mrs. Garforth. Thank you.

We Interrupt This Broadcast…

ABC News reports tonight that the 9/11 Public Discourse Project Final Report on 9/11 Commission Recommendations has handed failing grades to the U.S. government on many points of its attempts to increase the nation’s security and stabilize other parts of the world. On page 3 of that document, however, I found this interesting:

Provide adequate radio spectrum for first responders – F (C if bill passes)
The pending Fiscal Year 2006 budget reconciliation bill would compel the return of the analog TV broadcast (700 Mhz) spectrum, and reserve some for public safety purposes. Both the House and Senate bills contain a 2009 handover date — too distant given the urgency of the threat. A 2007 handover date would make the American people safer sooner.

Could it be that the constant attempts to consolidate media ownership in America (link leads to an article I originally wrote in the Not News forums in May 2003) might be backfiring on the government itself? The thought that we’re waiting for the continually-delayed NTSC-to-HDTV cutoff date to take hold before doing anything about allocating emergency communications spectrum, or researching alternative communication frequencies or methods, is frankly ludicrous. That’s like saying we’re going to wait until ten million people are driving hybrid cars before we look at the problem of dependency on foreign fuel sources.

The problem lies with the FCC, and with the erosion of ownership regulations. The FCC continues to move the HD start date back because, and this isn’t a bad reason, the realization is sinking in that HDTV is not going to be something everyone can afford anytime soon. And of course, the major media companies are loathe to give up their chunks of the standard-definition broadcast spectrum, because they’re not going to be able to command the advertising sales figures they need to keep the doors open by broadcasting only to the narrow demographic of “people who have been able to afford an HDTV set.” And you better bet that the bigger these media conglomerates are, the more likely they are to have real lobbying power with Congress and the FCC that keep sliding the HDTV switchover date back…and back…and back. It’s not going to happen in 2007. I’ll be amazed if it happens in 2009.

We’ve backed ourselves into a commercial and legislative corner. And we’ve gambled part of our national security on a deadline that has been pushed back several times. The answer isn’t to force broadcasters to give up their frequencies, however – the answer was to find a more feasible, less pie-in-the-sky solution that wasn’t at the mercy of so many other uncontrollable forces.

Seeing the Future

Louis Menand has written and edited a number of books about the pragmatist philosophers. I use his anthology Pragmatism: A Reader in my American Thinkers courses. Thanks to a post by Lore Sjoberg at Slumbering Lungfish, I found this terrific book review Menand has written about a book that sounds fascinating: Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? The book is the result of a long-term study of pundit predictions, and it shows that quite frequently so-called experts have no idea what they’re talking about.

Now, on one hand, this is kind of a troubling thing for Deweyan pragmatists like me. We’re all about doing empirical research and using that to make better decisions. But it’s important to note that Dewey warned that experts can quickly get cut off from the experience of the rest of society and start getting too wrapped up in their own concerns. Dewey believed in the ability of the average person to use information provided by experts to make sound decisions on their own. So Tetlock’s findings may fit with that.

Also, Menand writes that Tetlock has found that certain psychological traits can improve predictions. Don’t get wrapped up in a big idea; appreciate the complexity and context of particular situations; admit when you’re wrong; don’t fall in love with particular details. It’s a great discussion of how purely “logical” or “rational” thought is not human beings’ natural mode of dealing with the world. Our brains are wired to take certain shortcuts and use certain devices which may well be necessary given the world’s complexity, but which can often blind us to the mistakes we’re making.

Go check out the review. Well worth the read.

Immoral and Ineffective? Sign Us Up!

So tonight on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Goran and Eames are trying to figure out who dropped a soda machine on a guy. They find a suspect, and then their attention turns to the suspect’s psychiatrist. The doctor was a military reservist who had served at Guantanamo Bay helping with the interrogations, and was so wracked with guilt that she came back home and tried to see if she could use the interrogation techniques in a therapeutic way. Instead she drove her patient to a psychotic episode. At one point during the investigation, we take a break from the crime-stopping so that Goran and Eams can have a slightly heavy-handed conversation with their superiors about whether such interrogation techniques are justifiable in war.

Nice little ripped from the headlines bit, especially when I see this headline that the Bush Administration is trying to find a compromise to Sen. John McCain’s recent Senate bill prohibiting the United States from using “cruel, inhumane and degrading” means of interrogation. I can not wrap my brain around the fact that we have to have this conversation. First there’s a moral argument – we should be better than the people we’re trying to fight. Then there’s the reciprocal treatment aspect – we don’t want to contribute to an atmosphere where our own servicepeople can be subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment if captured. Plus the moral standing concerns – if we want to go preaching to other countires about how they behave, it behooves us to have our own house in order. And then there’s the whole question of whether tortue is even an effective means of interrogation anyway – if it just motivates people to tell the tortuers what they think they want to hear, it can produce as much false evidence as good leads. This article in the Washington Post tells of some of the mistakes that have been made in the CIA’s program to snatch up and interrogate suspects. I couldn’t help but be particularly struck by this passage:

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

I guess I should be careful with the grade book this term, huh?

Philadelphia Business Tax Agenda

Interesting discussion going on at Young Philly Politics about the local Chamber of Commerce’s efforts to drum up support for a reduction in the local business-privilege tax.

Now, I am not a tax expert. The city’s Tax Reform Commission did say that our system needs simplifying, which surprises me not at all, and that tax rates ultimately needed to go down in order to keep the city competitive. Ray at YPP seems to have some doubts about that, and I see where he’s coming from. Cities provide a certain critical mass of customers and workers that companies are always going to need to be around. But the suburbs do try to compete with the city. I live right near the border with Bucks County, and when we drive to one of the suburban malls we’re greeted by a “Welcome to Business-Friendly Bensalem” sign. And the city and commonwealth wind up providing huge incentives to companies on a case-by-case basis anyway, that maybe we wouldn’t have to provide if we had abetter system in the first place. So simpler and lower taxes are fine by me, if they’re affordable. And there’s the rub. Even the head of the Commission has pointed out that it isn’t cheap to run a city, and wonders where the city will find the money to pay for the Commission’s grand 10-year plan. It may well be that any tax simplification plans are going to have to turn out to be revenue neutral for the time being.

But the Chamber is clearly going great guns to try and get this particular tax cut enacted. It’ll be interesting to see how this fight turns out.