It isn’t usually a good idea to predict what will appear in this weekend’s newspapers. News, by definition, involves the unpredictable. Still, by late Thursday afternoon there were signs that the New York Times was poised to finally publish its account of reporter Judith Miller’s role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, which the paper has been promising to do since shortly after Miller was mysteriously sprung from jail two weeks ago. Some observers now expect the report to appear Sunday. The question is, will that be too late?
For months, the paper of record has been under fire from critics for essentially putting up a smoke screen around its beleaguered reporter. By lagging behind other papers in reporting on Miller, critics have been left to speculate that the mighty Times is running scared, that it’s been reluctant to look into just what Miller knew and what political figures she may have been in bed with.
Until now, the Times has offered a legalistic and none too convincing explanation for the paper’s reluctance to answer countless important questions about whom Miller was talking to in the summer of 2003, when the White House apparently launched a campaign to discredit former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson. Even though Miller was released from jail on Sept. 29, Judge Thomas Hogan, who is overseeing the grand jury investigating the Plame leak, did not immediately lift the contempt order he’d issued when Miller initially refused to testify. Times editors have said that Miller’s lawyers advised her not to talk to reporters until the judge lifted that order; and without getting the full story from Miller, the Times simply couldn’t publish anything on Miller’s role in the Plame case, they explain.
On Wednesday afternoon, that justification vanished. Miller made her second appearance before the grand jury, and Hogan then lifted the contempt order. Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, told Times reporter David Johnston that the judge’s ruling “should clear the way for The Times to do what we’ve been yearning to do: tell the story.” Asked by Salon to clarify this statement — did Keller mean that Miller would talk to Times reporters who are charged to investigate her role in the Plame case? — Keller was cagey: “If you’re patient, you’ll read your answer in our paper,” he wrote in an e-mail. (Miller’s attorneys did not return calls for comment.)
An explanation this weekend of Miller’s role in the Plame case wouldn’t come a moment too soon. “The New York Times is now being criticized by its friends,” says Alex Jones, a former Times reporter who heads Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The Times’ silence about its own role has not only riled its longtime critics; the paper’s stance has also discomfited admirers, folks both inside and outside the paper, who, Jones says, “feel that its position as an institution is important, and is threatened.” The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz spoke to some at the Times who said the mood in the newsroom is more sullen now than it was during the Jayson Blair scandal.
“No matter what Jayson Blair turned out to have done,” says Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, “this touches on something more important: the Times’ relationship to power.”
In not-for-attribution conversations with Salon, staffers at the paper cautioned that things aren’t as fevered as they were with Blair — nobody at the Times is calling for the editors’ heads yet — but the despair is real, and many would like answers from their bosses.
The questions about Miller reach back to her controversial reporting on weapons of mass destruction and her role in publicizing the Bush administration’s rationale for going to war. Her sharpest critics accuse her of aiding and abetting the attacks on Wilson and Plame, and of taking a stand as a First Amendment martyr only to rehabilitate her image. They hold the Times guilty by association; by protecting her, they say the newspaper is complicit in the Bush administration’s rush to war.
Critics have further speculated that the paper has warned its Op-Ed columnists not to write about this case. Gail Collins, the Times’ editorial page editor, has denied this charge, and one columnist told Salon that columnists had been given no direction whatsoever about what to write — or what not to write — on Miller. On Wednesday, Nicholas Kristof told the New York Observer that he may well write about the case: “I’m waiting, as a lot of people are, for the Times opus on it, and I don’t feel right now that I understand it well enough to weigh in. I’m eagerly looking forward to that piece. I think it’s important, and I may write about it if I have something useful to add.”
Byron Calame, the paper’s public editor, has also been accused of ignoring this case. Charged with pursuing the public’s questions with editors and reporters at the paper, he’s appeared to make no effort to determine Miller’s role in the Plame case. “I continue to watch developments in the Plame investigation with special interest,” he told Salon when asked about the case earlier this week. “If and when I have something to say, I will say it to the readers of the Times.”
On Thursday, Calame was more forthcoming. “The lifting of the contempt order against Judith Miller of The New York Times in connection with the Valerie Wilson leak investigation leaves no reason for the paper to avoid providing a full explanation of the situation,” Calame wrote on his weblog. Miller has already agreed to speak to him about the case at some point, Calame said.
The paper’s defenders note that there’s no evidence for the most fevered speculations about Miller’s role. And reporters at the Times — even a few who were concerned about the way Miller’s role has been handled — said there was one reason to be optimistic that things might turn out OK for the paper: The Times has assigned a solid, no-nonsense team of reporters and editors to the Miller story. The reporting team is headed by Jonathan Landman, a deputy managing editor admired for the facility with which he performs tough assignments. Outside the Times, Landman is best known for a famous e-mail warning colleagues about Blair’s journalistic transgressions: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.” Staffers spoke glowingly of Landman’s independence; if higher-ups at the paper had wanted to whitewash the Miller story, they wouldn’t have put Landman on it, they said. Landman doesn’t do whitewashes.
Stephen Labaton, one of the few Times reporters willing to go on the record about the case, wrote in an e-mail: “I have a lot of faith in the professionalism of the reporters who have been assigned to examine what happened. I, along with my colleagues, are hopeful that they will provide a definitive account of this saga that will both lay to rest some of the myths that may be out there and also aggressively look at how events were handled by Judy, her editors, and the leadership of the paper.”
But observers still see storm clouds on the horizon for the Times, notwithstanding the journalistic talent it has put on this story. In many conversations about what the Times is facing, these were the most common questions:
Will Miller talk? And if she does, how much will she say?
Rosen, who has been unrelenting in his criticism of the Times on his blog Pressthink, believes the Times hierarchy — Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher — have expressed a kind of blind faith that Miller will cooperate with the paper. But any thorough report on Miller’s role in the Plame story will inevitably raise a host of uncomfortable questions for Miller and for the paper that she may feel she cannot answer — questions about the nature of her relationship with key Bush administration officials both in the summer of 2003 and for months, and maybe years, before that.
Rosen stresses that he’s only guessing that Miller won’t feel comfortable divulging everything Landman’s team asks of her. Still, if she balks, he sees disaster for the Times. “The moment of truth is going to come when they determine she’s not cooperative,” he says.
What happens if Miller doesn’t talk?
In that event, one thing the paper might do is hang Miller out to dry — Landman’s team can treat her as a kind of hostile witness in much the same way reporters investigating Blair’s sins did with him. “At that point you begin to report against the things she says,” says Rosen. “If her story’s not holding up, you build up the anomalies and report those — like the Times does all the time when they’re doing investigations of corrupt officials.”
This scenario presents some obvious problems for the paper, not to mention for Miller. So far, Miller has been zealously protected by the Times — in public statements, Keller and Sulzberger have offered fierce support of her stand, and the paper has praised her in its editorials. To produce a report that was the least bit negative about Miller — a report that suggests either that she got too cozy with Bush administration officials, or that she was just being cagey about her actions — wouldn’t look good for the paper, let alone for the woman it had held up as the paragon of journalistic ethics.
That’s why the paper could take another tack if Miller refuses to tell all: It could respect her secrets, and produce a report that didn’t tell all. But this too wouldn’t look good. As Alex Jones points out, everyone at the paper knows that a report it’s been promising for weeks will be microscopically scrutinized when it’s finally published. “If the account addresses the questions of why and who and what and has the feeling of a story that lets the chips fall, then it settles the question,” Alex Jones says. “But if the account has gaping holes people are going to notice. That’s not going to do.”
What story was Miller working on when she first became entangled with the Plame case?
According to notes Miller’s attorneys found last week, she first spoke to I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, about Wilson in June 2003, before Wilson published his Op-Ed questioning the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear material from Niger. Why did she meet with Libby then? Why was Plame discussed? At the time, Wilson had been discussing his theories with many journalists — so was the White House trying to quietly tamp down this whisper campaign by contacting reporters like Miller?
No story by Miller on Wilson or Plame ever appeared in the Times. But did Miller ever write such a story that was never published (a thing that happens often in the news business)?
Who at the paper was Miller working for at the time, and did anyone else at the paper know of her conversations about Wilson and/or Plame?
There is considerable mystery over how Miller operates at the Times — who assigns her stories, who monitors her work, and who keeps her in line. Like any newsroom, the Times operates according to a hierarchy of editors and reporters where there are clear delineations between departments and coverage areas. Miller’s role, though, seemed sui generis; since 9/11 she’s worked in Washington, New York and Iraq, and according to some reports had no real boss for much of that time.
In July, Times reporter Douglas Jehl wrote that in the summer of 2003 Miller was working for “Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.” But lawyers for the Times declined to tell Jehl “whether she tried to write a story about [Wilson's Niger trip], or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.”
What’s Judy Miller’s relationship with powerbrokers in Washington?
This is the most volatile question the Times will need to address — and, for many readers, the most important. Critics of Miller’s flawed reporting on weapons of mass destruction have long suggested she has a propensity to cozy up to Bush insiders. The story of her dealings with key players in the Plame investigation threatens to underscore that relationship — witness exhibit A, for instance, the bizarrely familiar letter Libby sent to Miller to release her from her confidentiality promise. In the letter, Libby effusively praised Miller’s work and suggested that she report next on the question of Iranian nuclear capacity. He also added an inscrutable — and, some bloggers say, perhaps coded — reference to Aspens turning out West because “their roots connect them.” You don’t have to be a critic of the Times to wonder: How are Miller’s roots connected to Libby’s?
“I want to know how Miller fits into this whole world of operatives and information hounds that stretched out from the Bush White House outward,” Rosen says. “Where does she interact with these people, this network of Republican activists, Republican campaigners, opposition research people.”
Answering this question fully would lead one much beyond Miller’s involvement in the Plame investigation, all the way back to the “origins of some of these events,” Rosen says, “when the whole case for war began to be put together. What was her role? Was the kind of relationship she had to sources during the WMD period mirrored in the reporting?”
If the Times dares to ask those questions — and if Miller ventures any answers — the result could prove more disconcerting to the paper even than its most recent scandal.
New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane got a lot of grief last month for a blog post in which he asked readers whether the Times ought to be “a truth vigilante.” I didn’t join the pile-on, because truth be told, I kind of understood what he was getting at. Sure, “truth vigilante” is a shrill, easily mocked term: It doesn’t take “vigilantism” to get at the truth, only good reporting. But there can be questions for editors and reporters about how far is too far – what’s good reporting, and what’s hectoring? What’s debunking, and what’s partisan water-carrying? (Also, I don’t like the practice of mocking people for asking questions, even when we think the answer should be obvious. Better that Brisbane ask than to ignore the issue entirely.) I can understand why some cases aren’t clear.
But now I have a case that’s very clear for Mr. Brisbane: the Times’ story on Rick Santorum’s lies (yes, I call them lies) about John F. Kennedy’s 1960 religion speech, headlined “Santorum Makes Case for Religion in Public Square.” Since it’s the New York Times and all, I don’t expect the paper to call it a “lie.” But the story contains not one word suggesting that Santorum might be, I don’t know, misrepresenting, misremembering, distorting or otherwise being completely wrong about what JFK actually said.
I’m getting a lot of credit on Twitter and Facebook today for my piece, but this is one of those rare times when I’d rather not be recognized, because – don’t tell my editors – what I did was easy. It took me exactly 10 seconds to Google JFK’s speech and another few minutes to read it. Then I cut and pasted Santorum’s comments next to JFK’s and voila, kids, I had a story. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart credited me with a “deep-dive,” and I appreciate the praise, but really, I barely got my feet wet. (The Post’s own news story wasn’t any better than the Times’; Capehart was the first person on staff to note Santorum’s distortion more than 24 hours after it aired on ABC’s “This Week.”)
I assumed I’d be late to the Santorum story because I was sick yesterday and didn’t even watch him live, I just heard about his remarks online. But I’m writing a book about the Democratic Party and Irish Catholics, and as you’d expect, there’s a little bit about Kennedy in there, and so I thought I’d take a moment to explain what Kennedy said – and how rabid anti-Catholicism, as late as 1960, made it necessary.
I made a comment last week in passing that I’d like to elaborate on here: I’ve spent a lot of time, in the book as well as on Salon, pointing out the anti-Catholic Nativism that hobbled my people and that accounts for some of our pugilism, shall we say, in the public square. But Santorum makes me realize I haven’t said enough about why some people were and still are suspicious of Catholics. His disrespectful comments about mainline Protestant churches somehow being agents of Satan is just one example of the contempt for other faiths that has gotten us in trouble over the years. I came of age after Vatican II; my parents were devout Catholic ecumenicists, attending seders at our local Jewish temple and telling the neighbors, no, we’re not supposed to blame Jews for killing Jesus anymore, and Protestants love Jesus, too. Santorum is an example of the mind-set that liberal Catholics and lapsed Catholics have been fighting in my lifetime, and he’s really a disgrace.
I don’t expect the New York Times to call him a disgrace in its news pages, but I do expect the paper to do a minimum of fact-checking, to see whether our first and only Catholic president actually said what Santorum attributes to him. There was a reserved, respectful, Timesian way to do it, and the paper missed an opportunity to reassure its readers that the paper is all about the truth, and that it’s not cowed into printing untruths by the GOP culture warriors who’ve spent decades now insisting the Times has a raging liberal bias.
I don’t mean to single out Michael Barbaro, either, who does good work, or the team of writers the Times lists as providing additional reporting at the end of the piece. Or Kit Seelye, who wrote the earlier Caucus post, on a tighter deadline, about Santorum’s remarks without fact-checking the JFK claim. I’ve always loved the singular way the paper almost always attributes mistakes, in its Corrections column, to “editing errors.” This was an editing error. Someone at some point should have said, “Hey, I know you’re on deadline – but what did JFK actually say?” It’s not vigilantism. It’s journalism.
You’re welcome, Mr. Brisbane.
As he often does, in his column Friday New York Times columnist David Brooks offered what looks like a “nonpartisan” analysis. Social movements, he warned, are suffering because everyone thinks they should make up their own belief system. Unless you’re Nietzsche, Brooks advises, this is a guarantee of failure. Every man is not a political genius.
It’s not a hard task to figure out whom Brooks is really criticizing: Occupy Wall Street. But it’s not alone. The democratization of ideology is vastly more tempting to the self-inventing liberal left than to the authoritarian right. Nobody does emotionally consistent talking points like the conservative right. Nobody does “whatever floats your boat” like the liberal left. The belief that every man is a philosopher makes progressives vastly more vulnerable to the destructive dynamic Brooks describes. It is an irony Brooks would appreciate that the left acts more like the right believes (and vice versa).
Brooks’ criticism is dead on. Letting every person with a “mic check” suggest a fundamental strategy for the movement is a recipe for disaster. Not only have existing intellectual traditions been the product of superior minds, they have stood the test of time. Anyway, how to act collectively when everyone is pursuing his own quixotic dream?
Of course, anyone who follows the debate knows the left must beware of Brooks bearing gifts. The Times’ conservative columnist is always making sensible sounding suggestions to the left, which, upon closer examination, turn out to be ticking bombs. In this case, the right has a perfectly good foundation in the libertarian tradition, Brooks reports. So it doesn’t need to reinvent its first principles .
For his friends on the left, however, Brooks advises a simple reversion to their philosopher, Karl Marx. Now there’s a thought. When the centrist Democrats of the filibuster-bound Senate passed a healthcare plan modeled on the Republican scheme from Massachusetts, the Republicans branded their leaders as socialists, or worse, as taking their beliefs from Paris, if not Nairobi. Imagine if they started actually quoting Karl Marx.
Fortunately, should the left be capable of giving up its endlessly proliferating individual belief systems, two schools of thought other than the return to the specter of communism would be available to them. There is a robust utilitarian tradition, represented most recently in the work of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, that asks people to rise to the demands of altruism. As a matter of ordinary morality, you’d pause on a walk to pull a drowning child out of a pond, Singer begins. Why would you not give up a trivial expensive treat to rescue someone starving in Africa?
Or, closer to home, living in a shelter somewhere in New York, or in Washington’s McPherson Square. The well-worked-out analysis of Singer’s argument for beneficence is a vastly better foundation for a long-term social movement than any of the slogans on OWS placards. “Tax the rich” is catchy, but dissolves when confronted with Brooks’ comrades’ libertarian first principle: “It’s my money.” Singer offers the opportunity to argue about why keeping every last penny of it when others are in real need is, well, immoral.
Another great 20th century philosopher, the late John Rawls, made a very well-worked-out argument for why it’s not “your money” at all. It’s only your money, as citizens of many less well-favored societies than the United States know, if other people are willing to refrain from killing you to get it. Otherwise, life is, famously, “solitary, POOR, nasty, brutish and short.” Rawls set forth elaborate conditions for when societies agree to let the rich keep the money without having to live behind walls topped with ground glass.
Most important, Rawls posits, inequality must also benefit the people on the bottom, e.g., by expanding the size of the pie. This was the case for much of American history, and the society was the better for it. But now that finance has replaced manufacturing as the engine of the economy, not so much. The endless claims of money movers like Mitt Romney that they are “creating jobs” reflects the deep power of Rawls’ construct. If they’re not, what is he doing with all that money? Rich people’s claims to be complying with Rawls’ condition can only go on so long in face of the robust evidence to the contrary.
Brooks is right about one thing: Ideas matter. The resurrected right has relied on the power of libertarian ideas for decades. During the same period, the left has relied on mic checks and bumper stickers (“the audacity of hope”). When we see them start to use the rich store of liberal thinking available to them, David Brooks, watch out.
Has the term “education” become a code word? And if so, a code word for what?
These are the major unasked — but resoundingly answered — questions to emerge from two much-discussed articles about the future of American manufacturing. One is a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly about why jobs are being shipped overseas. It concludes that “to solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces” — the first of those being “a broken educational system.” The second and even more talked about article comes from the New York Times. It looked at why Apple Computer has moved its production facilities overseas, concluding in sensationalistic fashion that “it isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad” but that America “has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need.”
These pieces were clearly written with a very specific objective in mind: to draw media attention to the supposed “education crisis” in America — a favorite topic of these publications’ elite readers, who have a vested interest in blaming the recession on the poor rather than on the economic policies that enrich the already rich. No doubt, both the Times and the Atlantic achieved their goal, with various NPR shows, cable gabfests and elite magazines spending the last week frothing over the articles’ central thesis.
The tragedy in all of this is that in both the articles and in most of the discussions that followed, few bothered to question the fundamental assumptions about education in America — and fewer still bothered to ask if “education” in the modern parlance has now become a synonym for “acquiescence.”
To see how this linguistic shift is occurring, reread the Times article with a critical eye. Specifically, notice that after the reporters structure their piece around Apple executives’ (unchallenged) claim that “the U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” there’s not a single shred of proof — empirical or otherwise — offered in support of that assertion. On the contrary, after a sweeping declaration at the top of the piece that wage and human rights differences between Chinese and American workers have little to do with offshoring, the article inadvertently goes on to prove those differentials — not skill levels and education — are the driving force behind the domestic job losses in America.
In one section of the piece, for example, the Times notes that Apple’s big Chinese factory, Foxconn, attracts American investment because “over a quarter of (the) work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day” — and “many work six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant.” In another section of the piece, the Times notes that the cost of “building a $1,500 computer in (California) was $22 a machine … In Singapore, it was $6 … In Taiwan, $4.85.” While the Times unquestioningly forwards Apple’s impossible-to-believe explanation for these figures (“wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities”), the statistics are yet more proof that wage differences, not education, are the real offshoring motive.
The Times also quotes an Apple executive saying the company must outsource because “the entire supply chain is in China now” — and though the article doesn’t bother to mention it, that is true precisely because other factories in that supply chain have moved to China for the cheap wages and lax human rights/labor regulations. The Times later talks to Eric Saragoza, an American worker laid off by Apple, who says that Apple told him to keep his job he didn’t need to acquire more skills, but instead “to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays.” And in another part of the piece, the Times quotes a former Apple executive who insists Apple was forced to move to China because there’s no “U.S. plant (that) can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms” — an admission, again, that Apple’s move to offshore isn’t about skills, but about a desire to employ a “flexible” (read: exploitable) workforce.*
In light of all this, the absurdity of the Times’ “education crisis” conclusion is obvious. Somehow, Dickensian realities are meticulously recounted, but Apple is permitted to plead helplessness without so much as a contradictory fact being mentioned — as if the company isn’t making calculated choices that are generating record profits off sweatshop conditions. China’s super-low wages and nonexistent labor, environmental and human rights protections are shown over and over again to be the driving force behind American corporate offshoring, and yet the conclusion is nonetheless that the problem for America is our education system. And somehow, that conclusion is made without the Times, the Atlantic Monthly or any part of the media echoing their stories measuring it against actual data from the American education system.
And what, pray tell, does that data say? It says that far from a drought of skilled high-tech workers forcing supposedly helpless victims like Apple to move to China, America is actually producing more of such workers than Apple and other high-tech companies are willing to employ. As I noted in a previous newspaper column (looking at yet another New York Times piece making the same education argument):
No doubt, you’ve heard (the) fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles do not emanate from neoliberals’ corporate-coddling trade, tax and deregulatory policies, but instead from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experts. Indeed, this was the message of this week’s New York Times story about corporate leaders saying America isn’t producing “enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms.”
As usual, it sounds vaguely logical. Except, the lore relies on the assumptions that American schools aren’t generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand…
To know (that) supposition is preposterous is to consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges “in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year.”
These facts were most recently corroborated in mind-boggling detail by the Senate testimony of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ron Hira. But, of course, they are nowhere to be found in the Times. That’s not altogether shocking (even if it is offensive) — the Times is a newspaper whose ombudsman recently challenged the very idea that the paper’s journalists should actually fact-check statements made by its sources. It is also a newspaper that has helped construct a larger political and media consensus around what I’ve called both “The Great Education Myth” and the “Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch.”
These sleights of hand simply stipulate as unchallenged, unquestioned fact that all of our economic problems can be solved with better STEM education and more STEM graduates. The idea is that this educational improvement would fix the alleged problem of high-tech companies like Apple not being able to find enough STEM workers. This myth endures even though the data indisputably proves that there is no such dearth of STEM worker supply — indeed, we are already producing more STEM graduates than the domestic economy can employ, meaning the only worker shortage that exists in America is a shortage of workers willing to toil at slave wages with no labor or human rights. But, alas, those facts don’t matter because the Great Education Myth isn’t about economic reality — it is an instrument of propaganda designed to distract attention from the tax and trade policies that allow companies like Apple to make so much money off the current system of exploitation.
So that gets us back to the key question of whether the term “education” is effectively being redefined? In all of the elite media’s stories about offshoring and the STEM “education crisis,” does the term “education” no longer mean “learning a set of skills”? Does it in practice now mean American workers learning not new technological crafts, but learning to quietly accept the wage, labor and human rights standards of China — the standards we thankfully improved after our own crushing Industrial Age a century ago? In short, does “education” now mean “teaching American workers to be subservient”?
The answer, almost certainly, is yes, because that’s the only way that the media and political establishment’s entire “education crisis” meme makes any logical sense.
The fact is, while our cash-starved schools would obviously benefit from more resources, and while better schools clearly couldn’t hurt our society, there’s no empirical, data-based reason to believe that improving our schools would reverse the trend of America losing high-tech jobs to slave-labor nations like China. Without a change in tax and tariff-free trade policies that economically incentivize companies like Apple to keep moving production to cheap labor havens overseas, the only “education” that will bring those jobs back is the kind that indoctrinates high-tech American workers to compete with Chinese workers by accepting the horrific labor conditions those Chinese workers experience. Based on the New York Times’ own reporting on Apple, that means an education system in America that teaches our workers to simply accept being paid $17 a day, to work six days a week in 12-hour shifts and to live in crowded dormitories so that they can be stampeded into the factory at any hour of the day. It means, in short, an education system that tells Eric Saragoza to shut up and accept the employer’s draconian demands.
Not surprisingly, the curriculum for this new education system is already being championed by the very political and media realms that originally constructed the Great Education Myth. In Congress, a group of senators is proposing to eliminate overtime protections for vast swaths of the America’s high-tech workforce in the name of competing with China. In state legislatures, lawmakers are looking to weaken child labor statutes, also in the name of competition. And on the New York Times Op-Ed page, Thomas Friedman implies that Americans are lazy and declares that “average is over” and that “everyone needs to find their extra” — elite-speak for the notion that Americans, who already log some of the longest workdays in the world and who are already among the planet’s most productive laborers, must work even harder than they already do.
In beginning to construct this kind of pedagogy, our mandarins are not coincidentally promoting a key part of the educational ideology of their Chinese counterparts. No, not the part of that ideology that is focused on training high-tech workers — the part that prioritizes obedience. Indeed, as my friend Michael Levy recounts in his terrific book “Kosher Chinese,” that educational method teaches Chinese workers never to question their station, demand basic rights or ask for better conditions.
That same ethos is now being proudly promoted here at home. Should we accept it — and the redefinition of “education” that comes with it — we may end up bringing a few jobs back, but we will have reversed the very labor, wage and environmental progress that once defined our basic concept of human rights — and America itself.
*It’s important to note that the Times did eventually publish this follow-up piece to its original article about Apple and offshoring. The follow-up piece looks more closely at how Apple mistreats its workers in China, and that kind of scrutiny is certainly necessary and laudable. However, the fact that the Times made the decision to separate the later piece on labor rights from the earlier article on Apple’s employment decisions implies that the two issues — worker exploitation and offshoring — are separate, when in fact they are inextricably intertwined. That kind of distinction is a real problem. Indeed, pretending that these two issues are wholly different topics (as Apple and other high-tech executives so often do) perpetuates the deceptive notion that exploitation is just a “liberal” feel-goody concern while business practices are more serious, dispassionate, non-ideological decisions. But only when these issues are looked at in aggregate will we be able to start having an honest debate about how globalization really works.
Time was when newspaper journalists prided themselves on being working stiffs: skeptical, cynical and worldly-wise. “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I’ve always preferred the unofficial motto of my native New Jersey: “Oh yeah, who says?”
Fact-check politicians? Here’s how H.L. Mencken saw things in 1924: “If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to the surface in my time I’d have heard of him, for I have always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult.”
Mencken could recall no such excitement. “The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know, excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy,” he added “… is that since the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not out for himself, and himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of life in the United States.”
Alas, such attitudes went out of fashion with snap-brim fedoras, smoke-filled rooms and bottles of rye in desk drawers. Today’s national political reporters have attended fancy colleges, regard their professional affiliations as valuable status symbols, hence give every sign of identifying more with Washington courtiers and political professionals than the great unwashed.
To the extent they may share Mencken’s exuberant disdain for hoodwinker and hoodwinked alike, ambitious reporters are well-advised to keep it to themselves. As a career strategy, thoughtful circumspection is advised. The uphill path to a sinecure on “Meet the Press” must be trodden carefully.
Many readers, for example, can probably identify a name-brand journalist such as Judith Miller, who fell into disrepute for parroting Bush administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. But can you name anybody whose skeptical reporting made them famous? No, you cannot.
Columnists have more leeway, but even there it’s safer (and easier) to stick to anodyne topics such as dorky clothes, bad hair, which candidate resembles what character in “Pride and Prejudice,” and who mistreats his dog. To me, it’s significant that an honorable exception like Paul Krugman — my nominee for progressive MVP — is not a product of newsroom culture.
So now comes New York Times “public editor” Arthur Brisbane with maybe the most disingenuous question of the year: Should Times reporters be “truth vigilantes”? When politicians lie, should reporters call them out?
And if so, how?
Brisbane’s two columns on the subject drew widespread astonishment and hilarity from readers and journalists alike — partly because journalists love talking about ourselves as much as the average Hollywood starlet. They also drew a sharp rebuke from Times editor Jill Abramson, who insisted that the “kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.”
Abramson gave instances of the newspaper supplying proper context for politicians’ statements such as Mitt Romney’s preposterous charge that President Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Know what he means?) She said that the Times reported that “the largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”
Of course, that’s not what Romney’s really saying. Look, as somebody who spent more than a decade waging a quixotic war of words against the New York Times over its role in the Whitewater hoax, the subsequent “War on Gore,” and its shameful (and acknowledged) role in “catapulting the propaganda” that led the U.S. to invade Iraq, I have two observations.
First, the Times has rebounded since those dark days of 2003. Far less unmediated government propaganda and make-believe scandal characterizes its news columns. Abramson’s 2011 appointment as executive editor gives further reason for optimism.
Second, the answer to Brisbane’s real question — exactly how reporters are supposed to go about calling Mitt Romney a liar — has no good answer. Because the more forcefully it’s done, the more the GOP candidate’s apt to like it.
Take Romney’s oft-repeated charge that Obama goes around apologizing for America. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler did this one to a fare-thee-well, showing conclusively that the allegation is completely false — an absurd mix of misrepresented circumstances, doctored quotes, etc. And it took him 1,800 words.
And who read them? Certainly nobody who’d already swallowed the lie on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or any of a hundred right-wing websites. So the Washington Post says it’s a lie. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The Times agrees? Even better.
Romney’s not talking to reporters, but over and through them, seeking not nuanced news stories, but five-second video clips and TV ads. Reporters who ask confrontational questions can be ignored, or worse, made characters in the story. Well-paid operatives can make their editors’ lives miserable.
The uncomfortable truth is that no newspaper today has the power and moral authority the New York Times so thoughtlessly squandered, and it ain’t coming back. Obama will have to defend himself.
Rick Santorum and John F. Kennedy (Credit: AP/Wikipedia) 
Anthony Shadid, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with The Washington Post (Credit: AP) 
David Brooks, philosophe 
A production line in Suzhou Etron Electronics Co. Ltd's factory in Suzhou, China on June 8, 2010 (Credit: Reuters) 
(Credit: Library of Congress/U.S. Farm Security Administration) 
