Everyone knows that the Washington Post has the worst opinion section in America. But yesterday, one man took it upon himself to actually set up a loudspeaker system outside its downtown D.C. offices and yell at the building.
The Post’s editorial board is well-known for carrying water for Rhee, which is a nice example of how it is terrible even on parochial matters of little interest to non-D.C. residents.
(Post Metro reporter Bill Turque once critized this cozy relationship on his blog, but then the Post pulled and edited his post for violating its rules against its bloggers having opinions about the things they write about.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
The Washington Post’s new “MentionMachine” tool explains in its introductory post precisely what is wrong with it. The “candidate trend app” simply maps Twitter mentions of candidates and then ranks them. Here the Post attempts to make this sound useful:
When Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination Aug. 13, the same day as the Ames Straw Poll, those watching social streams could have rightfully assumed he had won the Iowa contest. Twitter exploded with Perry mentions, even though he didn’t participate in the straw poll, while the winner, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), drew far less attention. Social media was the writing on the wall. Perry would soon trend up in polls, surpassing Bachmann and the rest of the field. Twitter was the early — scratch that — Twitter was the real-time warning system.
And then, a few short weeks later, all that “buzz” added up to precisely nothing. So, no, you should not be forgiven for having assumed that Perry had won the Iowa contest. Because if you assumed that, based on “social media buzz,” you’re horrible at forecasting elections and analyzing campaigns. Twitter was the “real-time warning system” for a media-fueled Rick Perry coverage bubble that burst months before anyone actually voted for a 2012 nominee.
Now, thanks to the Post, we will have a real-time map of ill-informed “buzz” from now until the general election. (And until it adjusts its algorithm, Ron Paul will “win” every day, because he’s got a psycho nternet cult.)
This is the distorting effect of minutiae-driven campaign coverage made animate. Here’s the Post again:
There are a few ways Twitter variables, or mentions, can be measured or extrapolated to examine trends in campaigns. Growth in number of legitimate followers or a high recurrence of retweets are both indicative of growing grass-roots support. A spike in the number of times a candidate is mentioned on Twitter might signal an event that could alter a campaign.
Even as information-free buzz-tracking this tool is flawed, because it fails to distinguish between positive and negative Twitter attention (I’m guessing Perry’s rank on the “leaderboard” would’ve surged when he forgot that third federal agency). Beginning tonight and continuing on through this year we will have an actual leaderboard for the GOP nomination, ranked by votes and delegates instead of retweets, rendering this entire thing even more useless.
The @MentionMachine (what a name) is too silly to get worked up about (sorry!), but it’s decidedly symptomatic of the awfulness of most campaign coverage, which mistakes volume for “grass-roots energy,” suffers from staggering historical amnesia, and regularly insults its audience by putting forth ridiculous speculative bullshit (Donald Trump could win!). This isn’t a call for the press to simply report on “the important stuff” — I find Santorum’s endorsement from the guy with a zillion kids just as gross and interesting as everyone else — it’s just a call to be smart about the dumb stuff. I’d like to know what it means that an old paleo-libertarian crank with a history of embracing conspiracy theories and white populism has a fanatical base of mostly young followers, not that those young followers give him enough “buzz” to win the nomination (they don’t).
Horse race coverage has an audience and a purpose — I’d just like to see it done well.
The Washington Post had a big problem. It failed, twice, at hiring a proper “Conservative blogger,” a commodity every newspaper website needs. Its first hire was a plagiarist, and then it accidentally hired a reporter who wasn’t conservative enough. The third time, it got someone directly from the neocon Weekly Standard Commentary, ensuring her bona fides. The only problem with Jennifer Rubin as a “conservative blogger,” though, is that while she’s most definitely a Republican, she doesn’t seem invested in any conservative issues, bar foreign policy. And by foreign policy, I mean a fanatical hatred of Arabs and Muslims accompanied by constant fear-mongering about the jihadist menace and regular accusations of anti-Semitism (and tacit support for terrorism) levied against anyone slightly critical of Israeli government policies or remotely sympathetic to Palestinians.
So, good work, Washington Post editors, you have finally provided some “balance” for your newspaper’s many left-wing Palestinian voices, like … Mary Worth?
Rubin’s a very good blogger, in a quantitative sense, able to produce several hundred words several times a day. And she sparks a lot of “debate,” by posting incendiary and outrageous things regularly. What she isn’t is a good writer, or human being. Her prose is overwrought, her tone apocalyptic, her constant bile exhausting. I’m not sure Avigdor Lieberman could read her daily without soon wishing she’d dial it back a bit.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
“This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.” That’s Rubin on the July mass shooting in Oslo, which the world soon learned had been carried out by a white right-wing anti-Islam zealot. The post was not corrected for a full 24 hours (while Rubin observed the sabbath) and was never apologized for. In her follow-up post she reiterated her claim that this shooting showed the necessity of large-scale military action against … Islamic jihadists.
- – - – - – - – - -
(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson is an exercise in how often and for how long one can continue repeating the exact same received conservative economic dogma when observable reality contradicts each of your arguments before people begin to stop taking you seriously. (The answer is “always and forever.”)
According to Samuelson, the American federal government debt will (any minute now!!!!) lead to hyperinflation. This was in November of 2009. We’re all still waiting.
The last decade has repeatedly and gratuitously made Samuelson’s entire political philosophy look ridiculous. Instead of ever changing his tune, though, it’s the exact same bullshit, over and over again.
Longtime Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is, like most longtime Washington Post columnists, an eminently predictable fount of polite elite Beltway-area opinion. She’s generally a good moderate liberal. She dreams of bipartisan compromises, and lavishes praise on politicians willing to reject party “orthodoxy” in order to come to very orthodox centrist positions. She cares very much about tackling our long-term federal debt. She thinks Republicans are too extreme. She liked Mitch Daniels, except for the antiabortion stuff. She agrees with Robert Gibbs that liberals are “deranged” to criticize Obama, who, after all, has done the best he can, a few wasted opportunities, betrayals and inexplicable tactical missteps aside.
I think a brief post like this one, in which Marcus says Congress should name Gabrielle Giffords the honorary chairwoman of the deficit reduction supercommittee, sums up her general uselessness. There’s that traditional craving for “bipartisan unity” that all hack centrist columnists share, treating “bipartisan unity” as a self-evidently good thing instead of a hazy myth of questionable democratic worth. There’s the idea that the supercommittee was actually a serious idea designed to address a major and immediate crisis, instead of a can-kicking waste of everyone’s time in the service of looking serious about one of the least pressing problems currently facing the nation. There’s the idea that a silly symbolic gesture would create agreement among two groups with diametrically opposed policy goals. There’s an invocation of “common sense,” which is always meaningless and usually used to stand in for ideas popular among elites but hated by actual voters.
If you want to know what the world’s most boring establishmentarian liberal thinks about the issues of the day, Ruth Marcus has you covered.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
When 18-year-old high school student Emma Sullivan tweeted that she thinks Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback “sucks,” Brownback’s staff ratted this student out to school authorities, leading her principal to demand that the student write a letter of apology to the governor for disliking him. That’s weird and gross, except to Ruth Marcus, who imagined herself Sullivan’s mother, and fantasized about forcing that young woman to learn proper deference to authority figures. “If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smartalecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip,” Marcus wrote. Marcus then asserted that teenagers have no constitutional right to be rude to politicians, which is an interesting interpretation of the language and purpose of the First Amendment, to say the least.
It should be noted, for the record, that Gov. Sam Brownback, an anti-gay fanatic who once did this, does in fact suck.
- – - – - – - – - -
(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s education columnist, writes a blog for the paper’s local section that is mostly about Washington, D.C.-area school news and politics, though he also writes thoughtfully on national education policy questions. Here is his challenge, though: A vital revenue source for the Washington Post Co. is Kaplan Inc., a test-prep company that branched out into owning and running for-profit online colleges. For-profit colleges, as Mathews knows, are a huge rip-off, targeting poor and minority students with deceptive and aggressive marketing, then burying them in loan debt and barely graduating anyone. The for-profit college sector has come under fire from the government for basically being an elaborate scheme to reap government-subsidized loan money, and the industry has responded with a massive, well-funded lobbying and public relations campaign. This post that Mathews published yesterday seems depressingly like a part of that campaign.
It is headlined “5 reasons for-profit colleges will survive,” and it seems like the author isn’t particularly thrilled to be writing it:
Enter Andrew S. Rosen, Kaplan’s chairman and chief executive officer, with a new book called “Change.edu: Rebooting for the new talent economy.” Who does Rosen think he is, extolling the virtues of for-profit schools while his company faces such threats?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to read the book or write about it. As a 40-year employee of The Post, anything bad I say might seem too little too late, and anything good would be taken as trying to protect the company. I was glad Rosen agreed his company had messed up. He did not shake my feeling that profits and teaching are a bad mix, but I did learn things I needed to know.
Despite the industry’s troubles, Rosen convinced me that for-profit educational ventures are here to stay. People who feel as I do will have to adjust to that.
Emphasis mine. Then there are the five reasons, which basically read like they came directly from a Kaplan press release. (“For-profit schools are less of a drain on tax dollars than non-profit or public schools.”) From this specific press release, perhaps.
It’s the tone of a sort of strongly encouraged attitude-adjustment that makes this whole thing even more depressing than the usual defensive for-profit college propaganda that the Post editorial board publishes in the Opinion section. “People like me may want for-profits to disappear,” Mathews writes, “but that is not going to happen.” Well, his bosses certainly hope so!
Bonus sadness: This comment, which comes after a small torrent of anti-Kaplan vitriol:
Maybe this wasn’t an assignment from on high, but it certainly looks like corporate press materials forced on a skeptical columnist.
Are Taxes Historically High or Low? 
Bishops' rift with Obama about politics, not religion 
Generation F**ked Over 
The things I carry 
When I lost the ability to type 
Pop art, the beaded edition 
The beautiful banality of high school 
The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
Whip-it 
