Ed Driscoll, Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds take the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to task for their decision to not republish the stolen emails from climate scientists on the grounds that they were illegally obtained and written with the expectation of being kept private.  After all, these outlets famously publish illegally obtained classified national security information at the drop of a hat.

While that’s a pretty persuasive critique on its face, the comparison is ultimately false.

In the case of the East Anglia listservs, the victims are private individuals.  By contrast, the Pentagon Papers and various intelligence leaks published during the Bush era were owned by the United States Government and arguably kept secret partly to shield elected leaders from political fallout.  Nor were the latter “stolen” in the same sense as the former.  Rather, people authorized to receive the information shared it with reporters who are under no obligation to protect classified secrets.

What would be interesting is to see how the NYT and others handle illegally obtained documents from people with whom they don’t politically agree.  Have they republished similarly stolen emails that were harmful to, say, tobacco companies or investment bankers?

If so, then were have a much better case for hypocrisy.

A few months ago, when Ross Douthat became a New York Times columnist, I was pretty excited that the Times had chosen a fresh, conservative perspective for its editorial pages. Since then, I admit I’ve been a little disappointed. Douthat’s columns have, by and large, been pretty lackluster–there was none of the depth, wit, or thoughtfulness that made his blog a daily read for me.

However, this week Douthat has started blogging for the Times and I have to say that in one week of blogging, he’s already produced better stuff than his six months of columns. Go check it out–it’s good stuff.

Rush Limbaugh has gotten everyone from Media Matters to The Guardian to Andrew Sullivan to Paul Krugman to Raw Story to FireDogLake up in arms because he allegedly suggested that a NYT reporter kill himself.  Except that, to anyone familiar with either Limbaugh or the conventions of American English, it’s rather obvious he was illustrating absurdity by being absurd.

Here’s the actual quote, as supplied by Media Matters:

I think these militant environmentalists, these wackos, have so much in common with the jihad guys. Let me explain this. What do the jihad guys do? The jihad guys go to families under their control and they convince these families to strap explosives on who? Not them. On their kids. Grab your 3-year-old, grab your 4-year-old, grab your 6-year-old, and we’re gonna strap explosives on there, and then we’re going to send you on a bus, or we’re going to send you to a shopping center, and we’re gonna tell you when to pull the trigger, and you’re gonna blow up, and you’re gonna blow up everybody around you, and you’re gonna head up to wherever you’re going, 73 virgins are gonna be there. The little 3- or 4-year-old doesn’t have the presence of mind, so what about you? If it’s so great up there, why don’t you go? Why don’t you strap explosives on you — and their parents don’t have the guts to tell the jihad guys, “You do it! Why do you want my kid to go blow himself up?” The jihad guys will just shoot ‘em, ’cause the jihad guys have to maintain control.

The environmentalist wackos are the same way. This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

Rather clearly, Limbaugh isn’t so angry about a silly blog post that he actually thinks Revkin deserves to die.  Rather, he thinks Revkin is an idiot with really screwed up priorities. Limbaugh is employing standard reductio ad absurdum logic here:

• Revkin argues that we should reduce the number of babies being born as a means of reducing CO2 emissions and thereby saving the planet.
• By that logic, “the planet” is more important than people
• Revkin should demonstrate his commitment by ending his own life.

Update (Alex Knapp): Actually, Rush Limbaugh’s big crime here isn’t “telling someone to off himself” — it’s plagarism. This is almost exactly the same joke that the late, great comedian Bill Hicks did in his act around 1991:

People pay lip service to saving the planet, but they don’t – they fail to make the big leap that if you want to save the planet, kill your fucking self. The planet will be saved without you. And what a delightful place it’ll be.

I’ll give Limbaugh credit: he’s stealing from possibly the best comedian of the 20th Century.

Corporal John Harrison (left) was killed in the SAS-led operation to rescue British journalist Stephen Farrell (right), which was launched after officials received intelligence that he was about to be moved into Pakistan's tribal areas

Tunku Varadarajan argues the New York Times has a moral obligation for getting two people killed by sending Stephen Farrell into a situation it knew was treacherous in order to get a scoop.

Stephen Farrell was a British citizen reporting from Afghanistan. He’d received very strong advice from British troops to stay out of a Taliban-controlled sector into which he was planning to venture in search of a story. Ignoring that advice, Farrell entered the sector with his Afghan interpreter. Both men were seized by the Taliban within hours, and held captive in conditions that led the British to fear for the life of one of their citizens–hence the rescue mission, in which a British soldier was killed. (The hapless interpreter died, too.)

[...]
That said, let us put moral questions to one side and ask what–now–the duty of The New York Times is. What price should it pay for the trouble caused by its reporter? Here’s my answer: If The New York Times really does subscribe to this philosophy–the public’s right to know, the journalist’s duty to be skeptical of authority, etc.–it should reimburse the British government for the cost of the mission to save Farrell (even if it means taking another loan from Carlos Slim) and compensate the dead soldier’s family. (That it should compensate handsomely the family of the Afghan interpreter who died is not even open to discussion.) After all, the military has quite enough on its plate not to have to worry about extracting reporters from deadly contretemps of their own making.

Farrell took a huge risk on behalf of his for-profit employer to give it an edge in the news business. Afghanistan is an extremely competitive beat; and war and competitive journalism make for a very perilous–and profitable–alloy. So whereas one would be loath to corral and stifle reporters, why can’t there be some financial incentive for journalists to behave responsibly when they venture into battlegrounds? Why not bill publications for the cost of a rescue and require journalists to give half the royalties from any books they write to the military, in the event of a costly rescue?

Andrew Exum links without comment, aside to say these are “some really good questions.”  And I suppose they are, if by “good” we merely mean “likely to spark debate.”

Now, Varadarajan states clearly in the article that governments will be overly cautious — and even sometimes have ulterior motives — in making decisions about where journalists should go and that there are times when journalists simply have to go where the story is.   But, while he’s right that the NYT is in business to make money and that they often treat safety concerns as if war was a game, they’ve got every right to do so.  And, more often than not, the public profits from their willingness to take risks, even when it’s foolish.

The commandos who risked their life to save Farrell did so for the same reason that Farrell put himself into a situation where he could be captured:  It’s what they do.

The NYT owes the family of Corporal John Harrison, the SAS trooper who died in the rescue, nothing more than gratitude.  He did what he trained and bloody well knew the risks when he signed up. Frankly, it would be insulting to offer them money.  Their son died fighting for queen and country, not as a private mercenary for a newspaper.

Yes, journalists are a pain in the ass and Harrell’s capture led to a mission that put troops in harm’s way without any foreseeable advancement in their overall mission.  But, while I’m not sure how think tanker Exum feels about it, I’m quite sure that Ranger Exum would have gladly led such a mission.  (1LT Joyner’s skill sets would not have been suited for such a mission, although I’d have been happy to send a few rockets downrange after it.)

Who Dares  Wins. Rangers Lead the Way.  They’re more than slogans. They’re a way of life.  All too often, a short one.

Photos: Daily Mail

This weekend, I got one of those fake “virus clean” popups after clicking a link to a New York Times article from Memeorandum.   Apparently, I wasn’t alone as there are a dozen or more posts about it today at Techmeme.

The NYT itself has this Note to Readers:

Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser.

That’s in fact what I did. But it’s very annoying since it either means losing all of the other pages you’re currently browsing or risking the malware popping back up when your browser tries to helpfully reload the unexpectedly closed pages.

Troy at Inputs & Outputs has some very technical details.  And Riva Richmond, writing for the NYT Gadgetwise blog, offers these helpful tips:

If you are a Windows user and saw a suspicious antivirus warning on your screen, it is possible that the ad’s creators infected your computer with a malicious program, even if you avoided all contact with it. “Click or not, the user could still get infected,” said Neil Daswani, a founder of Dasient, a security firm that specializes in Web site security issues.

Some similar antivirus scams have been known to use security vulnerabilities in Web browsers to automatically install malicious software in what are known as drive-by downloads, Mr. Daswani said. As a precaution, those who encountered a pop-up warning should run a scan using their favorite (legitimate) antivirus software.

If you don’t have such software installed, it’s time to get some. The big brand names in the field include Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro, although it is not known whether their programs are able to detect any infections that might be caused by these latest ads. One analysis of the problematic ads indicated that an antivirus program called Avast, which has a free 60-day trial available, was able to spot them before they caused trouble. Another good free tool for Windows users is Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, which checks for the most common malicious programs on the Internet.

Peter Kafka at Media Memo:

You generally have to travel farther down the Internet publishing food chain to find this kind of bogus ad–go hunting for porn and/or illegal downloads, for instance, and you’ll find plenty of this stuff.

But Web advertising is still a wild and woolly place, and this type of thing still plagues high-end publishers too. Sometimes it’s the fault of ad networks the publishers use to move their unsold inventory; sometimes the bogus ads are bought directly from the publishers themselves.

Indeed, I’ve accidentally inflicted these type of malware pop-ups on my own sites, as several ad networks that run third-party advertisements — Google is the most noteworthy — do too little to prevent it from happening.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A news executive has a plan to start charging for online news.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations. “How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air,” Barber said in a speech at at a Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night. But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content.”

Barber is the latest leading executive to suggest the newspaper industry has to radically overhaul its existing business model.  Rupert Murdoch said in May that he expected his News Corporation newspaper websites to start charging for access within a year. The News Corp chairman and chief executive said free newspaper websites were a “flawed” business model. Murdoch’s rival, the New York Times, could begin charging for online news within the next three to four weeks.

Barber said last night that the Financial Times had pioneered the concept of a “frequency model”, giving access to a limited number of articles on the web before asking users to subscribe.  “We are seeing sustained and growing revenue as a result of our strategy of premium pricing for quality, niche global content – crucial at a time of weakening advertising,” he added. “Many news organisations are following suit in charging, latterly the New York Times which had previously come down in favour of free access to its own content.”

The Financial Times website, FT.com, has more than 1.3 million non-paying registered users worldwide, with another 110,000 paying subscribers.

The only news organizations that have had even a modicum of success at charging for online content are:  WSJ. FT.   That’s the list.  Both, not coincidentally, are specialized publications aimed at businessmen and provide news not readily available elsewhere.  Often, the subscriptions are paid for by companies or at least written off on taxes.

If NYT goes behind a subscription wall, people will simply stop reading the NYT.  I’m not one of those conservatives who thinks that would be a good thing; the paper puts out some extraordinarily good reporting on a wide variety of topics.  It would be missed.  But not for long.  Its best reporters would simply move on to a company less stupidly run.

I’m a news junkie and make a living consuming and analyzing news.   I do some occasional reporting but, fundamentally, I’m a commentator not a reporter.  But, even though I wouldn’t really miss $60 a year, I won’t subscribe to the NYT if they go through with their plan.  I simply can’t imagine that enough others would do so to keep the paper afloat.

Newspapers have been going under at a fantastic rate for years now.  Most cities are down to one significant paper.  But, aside from niche consumers of local news, no one who doesn’t make a living in journalism much cares.  So long as one can chose from a dozen or more terrific products online, who needs the local paper, anyway?

Having apparently learned nothing from its TimesSelect debacle wherein, by charging a nominal fee to read its opinion columnists, the NYT ensured no one read said columns much less linked to them, the paper is floating a trial balloon of charging $5 a month to read its online edition.

Michael Crowley is enthusiastic:

Given that some people spend $5 per day on coffee, paying that much per month for online access the best newspaper in the world strikes me as an absolute no-brainer. I myself would pay twice as much. I hope the idea catches on, and I hope this marks a shift from the days of newspapers panicking to the start of successful new business models.

Matt Yglesias, however, injects a note of sober economic analysis:

A big part of the selling point of The New York is that it’s “the best newspaper in the world.” I can see why you would pay money to read the best newspaper in the world. But why would you pay money to read the sixth-best newspaper in the world?

[...]

Note that BBC News runs the world’s second-best international news website and they don’t charge anything and show no sign of ever needing to charge. That’s not the kind of firm you want to compete against.

Quite right. Charging for access to generic, perishable content is a sure way to ensure its irrelevancy.  The only way NYT could get away with it would be to band together with all the other quality news providers and form some sort of cabal that all charged for access.   And even then, I’m not sure we wouldn’t get around it.

I’d gladly pay $5 a month to have the NYT delivered to me via the magic of the Internet.  If this were 1995.  Back then, the prospect of getting “the best newspaper in the world” delivered to my house and office in an electronic format that I could easily save and share would have been exciting. Fast forward a few years, though, and there’s an amazing array of great content available for free on the Web. The only limitation is my ability to find and read it all.

In early 2003, when I started this blog, I used to read the NYT, WaPo, Slate, RealClearPolitics, and several other sites every day.  Soon, I was also checking out 40 or more blogs a day via my blogroll.   Somewhere along the way, however, I quit doing that.  Because of various aggregation techniques that I employ, virtually everything I read online is at the individual page level and it’s generally irrelevant to me which organization produced the news.  That is to say, I read content, not newspapers.

Contrary to the views of many of my brethren on the right, I continue to think NYT is a superb paper that produces an extraordinary amount of outstanding content on a daily basis along with the occasional dreck.  But it’s not indispensable. There’s just too much great content out there, even if others produce it in smaller amounts and ratios.  Indeed, I wouldn’t much notice if it were gone.

As President Obama settles into his fifth month in office, his personal popularity remains high but his job approval is slipping drastically, according to a new NYT/CBS News poll.

A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which also found that support for his plans to overhaul health care, rescue the auto industry and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, falls well below his job approval ratings.

A distinct gulf exists between Mr. Obama’s overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.

As Mr. Obama finishes his fifth month in office and assumes greater ownership of the problems he inherited, Americans are alarmed by the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to boost the economy. A majority said the government should instead focus on reducing the federal deficit.

But with a job approval rating of 63 percent, Mr. Obama has the backing of Democrats and independents alike, a standing that many presidents would envy and try to use to build support for their policies. His rating has fallen to 23 percent among Republicans, from 44 percent in February, a sign that bridging the partisan divide may remain an unaccomplished goal.

Compared to President Bush’s abysmal numbers, these numbers are quite good.  And, certainly, he inherited some extraordinary challenges, what with arguably the worst economy in decades and two ongoing wars.

Still, we’re finally witnessing something I predicted would happen during the Democratic primaries but did not.  Obama has been unrivaled in being all things to all people.   He managed to get the staunchly liberal base of his party on board while also gaining the support of libertarians like Megan McArdle and conservatives like Andrew Sullivan.

Now, though, he can no longer issue carefully crafted statements that people inclined to like him can imagine are exactly their preferred policies.  Instead, he has to make actual policy choices.  Inevitably — no matter how fantastic any group might think each decision is — this makes enemies.

Fiscally conservative types are aghast at the enormity of the bailout and the unprecedented intervention in the economy, such as the GM and Chrysler takeovers.  Meanwhile, the netroots are disappointed with Obama’s relative moderation on the social issues, like gay marriage.

The gaps on the “Views of the President” part of the poll and the “Views of the [Specific Issue]” would seem to indicate that there’s a lot more room for Obama’s support to soften.  A whopping 57 percent think he’s doing well on the economy, for example, yet only 41 percent think he’s doing the right thing on the budget and only 30 percent think he’s got a clear plan.  Something has to give, eventually, and I’d lay my bets on the 57.

Similarly, Obama has only 44 percent approval on health care.  I strongly suspect that this number will plummet, not increase, once he’s actually worked out a deal.  The left will be outraged that a Democratic president and Democratic Congress didn’t move us much closer to Single Payer.  The right — and my guess, the moderates, too — will think we’ve gone too far towards socialized medicine.   That’s just the nature of making hard decisions on divisive issues.

None of this is a prediction on the 2012 election, by the way.  Obama is an outstanding campaigner and is likely to be personally popular three and a half years from now.  And there’s no sign at all that the Republicans have revitalized their message and have a strong candidate ready to carry it.   Unless those things happen, Obama could get reelected with a 45 percent approval rating.

UPDATE: The new NBC/WSJ poll is out and it shows similar trends.

Nearly seven in 10 have serious reservations about the federal government’s ownership stake in General Motors. Almost 60 percent say that President Obama and Congress should worry more about keeping the deficit down — even if that means it will take longer for the economy to recover. And fewer than half of Americans have confidence in the president’s policies to improve the economy.

Obama remains a popular figure in the poll. But these numbers on the deficit and the government’s intervention seem to mark a new period for the administration, as the public moves from welcoming his inauguration and first days in office to examining his initial actions as president.

[...]

The drop mainly comes from independents, who backed Obama by 60 percent to 31 percent in April, but approve of him now by a 46-44 clip.

These trends are also interesting and conform to what I’d have guessed:

26 percent view Dick Cheney favorably, which is up eight points from April

24 percent view Nancy Pelosi favorably, which is down seven points from April

25 percent hold a favorable view of the Republican Party, which is an all-time low for it in the poll

45 percent hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

Nicholas Carson points out that, “it costs the [New York] Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.”

Andrew Sullivan terms this “A devastating little insight into the obsolescence of newspapers” but it strikes me as a merely cute apples-to-oranges comparison of the nature of Jesse’s Jackson’s line, “It costs less  to send a child to Yale than to send them to jail.”

That printing and delivering newspapers is expensive while making plastic electronic crap is cheap is rather obvious.  The real question is whether people want to read their news on 6-inch screens and the New York Times company can figure out how to make a profit delivering it to them in the appropriate format.

Of course, newspapers may be on their way to obsolescence under their current business model, anyway, if neither the readers nor the advertisers are willing to fork over enough money to keep them afloat.  Perhaps the Kindle or some as-yet-uninvented technology will rescue them.  But I don’t see how a competing delivery technology will kill them unless they can also fund content creation.

Michael Scherer had an epiphany yesterday searching for a transcript of Dick Cheney’s CNN interview and stumbling on nine different stories in Politico about it.

What struck me about all this was not just that Politico had created a hassle for me, the reader. It was that they were doing news online smarter than the rest of the old-school organs of print journalism–from the New York Times to TIME magazine–and that Politico’s insights about how the web works could have ill effects for the future of my profession, political journalism.

Here’s why: The Internet has changed the incentives for news producers. Once upon a time, the incentive of a print reporter at a major news organization was to create a comprehensive, incisive account of an event like Cheney’s provocative interview on CNN. (Open the New York Times or the Washington Post tomorrow, and you will still be able to read  versions of this story.) That account would then be packaged into a container (a newspaper, a magazine, a 30-minute network news broadcast) and sold to the consumer. In the Internet-age, by contrast, what matters is not the container, but the news nugget, the blurb, the linkable atom of information. That nugget is not packaged (since the newspapers, magazine, broadcast television structure do not really apply online), but rather sent out into the ether, seeking out links, search engine ranking and as many hits as possible. A click is a click, after all, whether it’s to a paragraph-length blog post or a 2,000 word magazine piece. News, in other words, is increasingly no longer consumed in the context of a full article, or even a full accounting of an event, but rather as Twitter-sized feeds, of the sort provided by the Huffington Post, The Page, and The Drudge Report. Each quote gets its own headline. Context and analysis are minimized for space. The reader, choosing her own adventure as she clicks, creates her own narrative of the world, one that is largely dependent on the aggregators she employs.

Much more at the link, which ironically undercuts his larger point — as he himself acknowledges:

But I do wonder where it all leads. I wonder how long it takes before people view a 600-word web story as too long? What about a web story that is longer than 140 characters? What about this very blog post, which is now more than 1,000 words, two or three times the length of a proper blog post? I am sure most of you have stopped reading.

Look, I’m in sympathy with the desire for context and a larger understanding of the issues.  At the same time, however, we want what we want.  Faced with a choice of sitting through sixty minutes of drivel, reading a 5000 word transcript, or reading as many short articles discussing nine aspects of the interview as I’m interested in, I’ll take the latter every time.  Package them smartly and I’ll be interested in more of the articles.

One irony of the way the Internet is evolving is the move from text to audiovisual, thus undercutting its natural advantage.  Occasionally, it’s great to have a video — especially a short one — to illustrate something.  This is especially true with things like the recent flap over the Rush Limbaugh “I want Obama to fail” speech or the Jon Stewart vs. Larry Cramer confrontation.  For the most part, though, I’ve stopped watching long form television shows — including the Sunday talk shows — in favor of blog- and Politico-style discussions of said shows.   The vast majority of what happens on a 60 minute segment of these shows is either old news or simply uninteresting to me.  I’d far prefer to wait a couple of hours and just get the few minutes worth that I would have cared about and examine that in depth.

In a rare display of sound editorial judgment for the op-ed page, the New York Times has hired Atlantic editor Ross Douthat as a new opinion columnist.

It’s one step back for the Atlantic, but an order of magnitude forward for the country: my colleagues and I learned today that senior editor Ross Douthat will, in short order, become an opinion columnist for the New York Times.

Ross is late-twenties-year-old public intellectual with the sensibility of a 60-year eminence grise, the range of a Hitchens, the pitch of a conservative AJP Taylor, the conscience of a Neibuhr and the intellectual honesty of his frequent sparring partner, Andrew Sullivan.

I concur with Marc Ambinder on this. This is a particularly fine choice for the New York Times. Douthat is intelligent, creative, honest, and a fresh voice offering new applications of traditional conservative principles. I don’t agree with him on many things, but I admire his thoughtful opinions. This is a great prize for the Gray Lady.

UPDATE (James Joyner): I concur wholeheartedly and am surprised by the boldness of the choice.  Daniel Larison was my first choice but Douthat among those I suggested.   Of those, Douthat was the most likely, in that he was proven with a mainstream publication.

Barack Obama is taking great pains to reach out to opinion journalists, Michael Calderone reports for The Politico, and it’s paying off.  After some anecdotes about Obama personally calling pundits who wrote negative things with respectful explanations of why they were wrong, Calderone observes,

The communications team for President George W. Bush would have been much more likely to let the initial response stand and then blast the Times after publication — all the better for fanning the passions of a political base deeply distrustful of the mainstream media.

Andrew Rosenthal, The Times’ editorial page director, says the Obama White House has been more “proactive” than the Bush White House was, offering up policy thinkers to more fully explain the administration’s positions — both before and after columns and editorials run. “I’ve had more unsolicited offers for participation from the Obama people in 45 days than in the last eight years from Bush,” said Rosenthal.

[...]

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt said in an e-mail that the Obama team has been “open and responsive” to requests from The Post’s editorial writers. Hiatt said that helps The Post “produce smarter and more knowledgeable editorials.”“My general view is, the more exchange of views, the better,” Hiatt added. “I welcome any outreach from the White House to my columnists or editorial board.”

One could quibble about whether this is a good use of a president’s time but it’s a perfectly reasonable aim. Why not try to influence the influencers?

There’s a downside to all the media-courting, a risk that the new administration will seem preoccupied with the chattering classes from Georgetown and the Upper West Side and therefore out of touch with flyover country.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is sensitive to that perception. As The New York Times Magazine reported just weeks after the election, the Obama campaign “bragged that [Obama] never even visited with the editorial board of The Washington Post.” And Gibbs talked about how “you could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and understand that people aren’t reading The Washington Post.”

But the White House knows that what gets written in Washington and New York filters out into the country — and that it needs support from those who are most likely to get their news from the inside-the-Beltway press, members of Congress, policy wonks and, of course, other journalists.

This strikes me as a silly objection, indeed. Talking to the pundits doesn’t preclude crafting a message aimed at the heartland.  For that matter, a not insignificant number of people live in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

And I think this is right, too:

Part of the reason for [a more aggressive outreach effort than displayed by the Bush team], says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, is that, like former President Bill Clinton, Obama “likes this sort of thing — the exchange with pundits.”

For good or ill (or perhaps both) Obama is an intellectual.  It’s not surprising that he cares what opinion leaders think and write.

Story via memeorandum.  Photo from Reuters Pictures.

Barry Ritholz has a depressing list of companies the were going gangbusters quite recently and are now damned near worthless.  A partial list:

• AIG (39 cents)
• Citigroup (98 cents)
• E*Trade (66 cents)
• Unisys (37 cents)
• Ford ($1.83)
• GM ($1.83)

For those of us who don’t buy individual stocks, here’s some perspective: The bankrupt New York Times, in the dying print media business, currently sells at $4.00.

Photo by Flickr user frogmuseum2 under Creative Commons license.

Mark Dillen’s precis of recent developments in the news media is staggering:

The news out of Philadelphia is that there is no news — no newspapers, that is. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News have joined the swelling ranks of American print media that have gone bankrupt. Last month, it was the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. Late last year, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, owned by the same parent, declared their insolvency. The two newspapers in Detroit, the News and the Free Press, now have home delivery only three days a week. The print version of the Washington Post is stagnant. Even the colossus of American journalism, the New York Times, no longer stands so tall, as several accounts have noted. In its own peculiarly self-conscious way, the NYT recently reported on its own economic plight, although its senior management refused to comment (!) to its own reporter on the company’s travails.

Internationally, the situation is not that much different. The wired world is reading fewer newspapers and, as publishers compensate by raising newstand prices, more readers are driven away. We are left with cable and satellite television, Internet media, and other evolving approaches.

I’ve been vaguely aware of all these developments, of course, but seeing them aggregated so succinctly adds some perspective.  Granted, bankruptcy is not the same as “out of business,” so many of those papers are still around.  Whether that’ll be the case in the longer run, though, is doubtful.

This all has implications for US public diplomacy, too, which is the actual point of Dillen’s setup.

(Why this post, dated Feb. 24, is just now showing up in my RSS reader, I dunno.)

Photo by Flickr user Giu Giu under Creative Commons license.

College students increasingly expect to be rewarded for trying hard, Max Roosevelt claims in NYT:

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement. “I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading. “I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory. “I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

Given that I heard the same pleas fifteen years ago when I first started teaching, I’m dubious of the idea that this is something new.  We all had students who felt entitled to good grades on the basis of how hard they thought they tried, because they got good grades in other classes or — and this was always my favorite — because “It’s my major!”

King Banian, a hard-hearted economist, tells students “I don’t grade inputs.”

I have tried to overcome this by telling students they start with zero and must reach certain marks to attain grades. (I don’t use curves for grading.) Never use -2 or -5 when grading. Give +7 or +2 instead. Add, don’t subtract. A dean at Vanderbilt in the article uses the right noun-verb combination: “students make grades,” not “teachers give grades.”

[...]

These students have not been taught correctly. Freshman classes are meant to impart values for learning, and one of them is “you are graded in life on what you accomplish, not how much sweat you produced.”

He was referring to, among others, this quote:

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. [Jason] Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?” “If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

This also caught the attention of my sometimes co-blogger Chris Lawrence, a political scientist at Texas A&M International, who displays a shared bias among many in the academy:

It will come to no surprise to any observer of contemporary collegiate culture that Mr. Greenwood is a kinesiology major, often a refuge for future gym teachers and meathead football coaches who think the education school’s curriculum is far too challenging. “Doing everything the teacher asks of [you]” isn’t A-worthy; doing everything the teacher asks of you better than most other people do it and achieving mastery thereof is A-worthy. And I say that as someone who has historically been a relatively lenient grader.

[...]

Snark aside, I think “consumer demand” by students is a less compelling aspect of the problem—or at least the dimension of the problem I see at TAMIU, which is rather different than the dimension I observed teaching at selective private institutions—than the complicity of faculty and—particularly—administrators in encouraging faculty to reward students for occupying space and going through the motions in a misguided effort to retain students (and, perhaps more importantly, their associated free money from state and federal coffers—the marginal cost of student instruction is essentially zero from an administrative perspective) in college who have neither the interest nor actual need to complete a four-year degree.

I had a similar experience at Troy State, where deans and higher administrators took the position that the students shouldn’t be held to high standards because, after all, they were from rural Alabama and the mere fact they were in college trying to better themselves was a big achievement.

UPenn English prof Erin O’Connor blames “the self-esteem movement” and offers an anecdote:

When I was in grade school (public, Indianapolis, 1970s), report cards were such a big deal. You’d get them every six weeks or so–these intimidating folded documents on stiff colored paper. The teacher would have hand-written your grades for everything from spelling to reading to math to science on them. There would also be handwritten comments directed to your parents on the back, and a place where your parents had to sign to say they’d seen the report card. We had to take the cards home to our parents in manila envelopes, and then bring them back to school the next day with the signatures on them. It was a big deal, all that kid-style accountability.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened–but I would guess it was along about third grade. The format of the report cards changed, and suddenly we didn’t just get a single grade for each subject. We got two: one for achievement, and one for effort. You might get an A for handwriting–but you’d perhaps get a B for effort. Or you might get a B in math, but an A for effort. It could go both ways–and it was a genuine way for the teacher to register both effort that was not translating into a good grade, and a good grade that was gotten without trying.

But I think that subtlety has been flattened out over the years; somewhere along the line, introducing grades for effort has translated into the assumption that effort matters more than achievement, or even that effort is the achievement. Along the way, “effort” has also been diminished; no longer necessarily synonymous with really giving your all, it’s become something students can gesture at, or approximate, by just going through the motions of showing up, more or less doing the reading, more or less completing the work.

Florida International lawprof Howard Wasserman offers the depressing observation,

The story deals with undergrads, but surely the same attitudes have or soon will trickle into law schools. Apparently, the legal writing listserv has been talking about this all day today, with one commentator capturing the issue as it relates to law school: “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit not getting sued for malpractice. What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

I have not yet had a student dispute a final grade on these grounds. But I have had a student demand to know why he received no credit for class participation (which is worth 10 % of the final grade) when he was in class and prepared every day–but never spoke once the entire semester. He did not quite seem to understand that a) you don’t get credit for showing up, since that is the independently required as part of the class; b) it’s not entirely clear that you “participated” in class if you never actually, you know, participate; and c) even if doing the reading were enough, how am I supposed to know that you’ve done the reading if you never speak.

Timothy Burke, a Swarthmore College history prof, is reflective.

My personal sensibility shifts a bit from year to year. I’m not terribly consistent in my internal understanding of what I’m doing when I grade. In general, I tend to imagine the B as the default grade, and an A as a grade that says, “You did something considerably better than ordinary”. The C means, “This is really not as good as ordinary work”. Failures are either, “This is dramatically worse than the norm” or “You blew this off, and I can see that you did”.

I freely confess that I tend to have a slightly different understanding of how this scaling works out based on my understanding of what a student is capable of. The more I’ve graded a student, the more I form an expectation about what they can do. A student who has done consistently excellent, original work for me is likely to draw a much more negative reaction from me for doing ordinary work than a student who has done fine, decent but undistinguished work consistently. If I graded blind, I suspect I’d still have some pretty good guesses over time about the identity of writers, but maybe that would help shake up some of my assumptions. I’m weighing trying to do that next year for the first time.

Among non-academics, TNR’s Michelle Cottle seems most worked up by the report.

While I understand the self-defeating doubt that we’re trying to short-circuit here, there are, practically speaking, lots of ways to fail–much less fail to get an A. One of those is by not having much of an aptitude for a particular area of study. Not all of us are equipped to be rocket scientists, economists, or playwrights, just as not all of us are equipped to be actors or professional basketball players. If anything, a student who tries really, really, really hard at something and still repeatedly falls short might benefit from realizing that his talents lie elsewhere. (As could the rest of us: Not to state the obvious, but I don’t want a brain surgeon who graduated at the top of his class because he had perfect attendance. I want one who is an artist with a scalpel.) Go ahead: Aim for the stars. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do something. But if you actually try that thing and it turns out that you’re not so hot at it, don’t whine about unfair grading. Acknowledge that you have major room for improvement and decide where to go from there. The sooner kids learn how to deal with failure and move on, the less likely we are to have a bunch of whiny, fragile, self-entitled, poorly qualified adults wandering around wondering why their oh-so-stellar efforts aren’t properly appreciated in the real world.

Bruce McQain also gets on the “self-esteem” bandwagon.

When little Johnny gets a trophy and a party for being on a 12th place Pee-Wee Baseball team – the very same reward the first place team gets – why in the world wouldn’t he correlate “effort” with “result”? In his case his effort landed him the same rewards as the first place team. So 12th is just as much an “A” as 1st to him, isn’t it? And he gave his all to end up in 12th, so that just has to be good enough, right?  Multiply that over a 18 year life time and it isn’t difficult to understand where this sense of entitlement comes from, is it?

Surprisingly, Megan McArdle, the world’s tallest female econoblogger, is sympathetic to the students:

I’m of two minds on this.  The purpose of a grade is to show mastery (or not) of some volume of material.  Is it fair to set the bar higher for me than for someone who isn’t as capable?  Or vice versa?  Is it fair to send the signal to employers that I wasn’t up to scratch even when I did objectively better work than some other student?

Maybe.  After all, one of the things that employers and graduate schools are presumably looking for is ability to exert oneself consistently.  Still, doesn’t this penalize students who develop a relationship with a professor?

Jacob Levy, a McGill political scientist, thinks much of this is “overwrought.”

[I]n any field of endeavor, “But I tried very hard!” is the first response to being told that you didn’t do a good job. It’s not strictly speaking relevant, but it’s part of how a person defends him- or herself, and tried to redeem his or her standing in the eyes of the other person. If you really make it the grounds of an appeal of a grade, of course, that’s a silly mistake. But the mere fact that you can find some undergrad sentences that express a sense of desert and entitlement doesn’t mean that there’s some new crisis wave of such things.

[...]

[A]t the end of the day: I like undergrads, and in my experience they try to do well. To the extent that they don’t understand what it means to do well, I think they respond well to having it explained to them. Making fun of them, by name, in the pages of the New York Times doesn’t seem to me like the way to go. Neither does the Allan Bloom/ Harvey Mansfield approach of elevating “Kids these days!” into social criticism.

I think that’s largely right.   Professors were almost invariably excellent students, for whom their subject matter came easily and who were enthusiastically interested in their field of study.  They were not, therefore, typical undergrads.

Further, as Burke notes, there’s a wide disconnect in grading practices from professor-to-professor and department-to-department.  While that’s life, it’s also incredibly confusing to a teenager trying to get decent marks and figure out how the game is played.   I was a much tougher than average grader, holding to the idea that “C is average, B is above average, and A is excellent.”  But, when most professors are grading on a curve with B as the default median and A merely an above average grade, it’s not entirely unreasonable for students to be frustrated wtih the inequity.