Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, April 20, 2024
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33 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Feature, not a bug: Rise in pregnant women turned away from US emergency rooms, papers show
They’re just women after all, not real people, right?
More horror stories at the link
The most searing criticism of a New York Times columnist you’ll probably ever read.
I’m doing some long range planning for a trip to Europe in August 2026. It’s way too far away to get prices on flights or lodging, but I’ve been browsing around airline and travel sites looking up August of this year.
Thus far the cheapest option I’ve found for getting from Mexico to Madrid (the primary purpose of the trip is to catch a total eclipse in Spain*), is to go via El Salvador in Avianca. A reasonable but slightly more expensive option is Avianca via Bogota.
I find this a bit baffling, because both Aeromexico and Iberia fly nonstop MEX-MAD more than once per day.
Also, booking Iberia through British Airways yields a lower fare, albeit not lower than Avianca’s.
Commercial aviation pricing is just plain weird. Yes, I know it’s largely the effect of demand and supply.
*The secondary purpose is to visit some archeological sites in Italy.
@Kingdaddy:
Someone here, I don’t recall who, maybe @DK was asking, perhaps rhetorically, why these people are so often so bad. My answer was that there is no incentive to be right, the incentives are just about filling a hole, having something, anything to say. (Interesting that Joyner and Taylor seem able to produce columns on a nearly daily basis. Of course that’s because they’re so well-paid.)
I had a weekly column in the Maine Sunday Telegram, and later in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and had no difficulty, but I had a beat to write about: restaurants. As long as there was a meal to be eaten, I had a column. It seems odd but having limits – time, space, subject – is sometimes better than having none.
We reward glibness and ignore depth. You can’t be deep with 800 words twice a week, you have to be glib.
@Kingdaddy:
I have mixed feelings. For as long as I can remember, people (eg, self-satisfied underemployed writers, [adjective adjective] internet commenters) have been bitching about columnists.* It’s not that I disagree with the general point. I just wonder if it could be any other way.
The, ahem, system seems built for such (insipid) writing. It demands such writing. It could not abide the “interesting” writers that us wise and deeply clever people crave.
It does, however, give us something that might be even better — a biweekly opportunity to elevate ourselves. And pwn those elitist columnists with the mostest cleverist of dismissives: “Their careers are like room temperature bowls of cream of wheat left on a table, still edible but not appetizing.” #savage
And sentences like this make me wonder if the author is 3 sd above or below the mean of self-awareness: “The ability to succeed in this work depends not on education or intelligence or good character, but on having a particular personality type that causes you to always be thinking about stuff, along with an accompanying personality deformation that causes you to want to share those thoughts with the world.”
Again, I don’t disagree with the author’s overall point about the stale writing of columnists. I just don’t find it necessarily worse than the stale writing of columnists/commenters about the stale writing of columnists.
*Who are the current/past columnists that did not attract such complaints?
Max Azzarell0, the man who set himself afire yesterday, has died.
@Mimai:
Smart columnists arm themselves with a back-up, non-political topic: George Will and baseball, the late lamented (?) William Sapphire and language. (Steven Taylor does photography.) Actual reporting can also help fill the 800 word hole.
@Kingdaddy: And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving target.
@CSK: “Max Azzarell0, the man who set himself afire yesterday, has died.”
That he died, and that he died so quickly, can only be described as a blessing for him. Every second he was alive after setting himself on fire would have been agony.
@Michael Reynolds: Krugman is sometimes mentioned as an exception. He fits your category of having a beat. Also, and IIRC he’s said himself, the government regularly publishes the information of his beat. He doesn’t need inside information, so, somewhat contrary to your usage of “beat”, he doesn’t need to do beat sweeteners.
Somebody did a study of pundits years ago and concluded there’s a correlation between financial success as a pundit and correctness on verifiable predictions. A strong inverse correlation. The secret to success as a pundit seems to be to find an audience and write what they want to hear.
And it seems petty to pick on Pamela Paul while George Will and David Brooks are still working.
Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko wrote about a different kind of American unity…
@Mimai: My feelings are less mixed. The piece does a good job of nailing some serious problems with news outlets such as The New York Times and the Washington Post, particularly on the opinion page:
(1) Often, people are promoted to these positions as a sinecure, not because they have anything useful to say. These are not the Walter Lipmanns, Mike Roykos, Molly Ivins, or H.L. Menckens of our time. They have these positions because they were Maureen Dowd’s protege, or the book editor, the token Trump defender, or some other category.
(2) There is no penalty for being spectacularly, repeatedly wrong. Not only are the reasons for putting people into these jobs often perverse, but so too are the reasons for keeping them in these jobs. After “Friedman Units” became a running joke, and everyone knew how frequently Thomas Friedman was full of superficial, wrong opinions nonetheless stated with great intensity, he was still a featured columnist. He was a commodity that the NYT felt it should continue to market, not someone who was a reliable source of insight and advice.
(3) There’s already too much opinion. As the article says, opinion is cheap and easy. So, too, are crappy knock-off action figures, but Target doesn’t need to expand the toy section of the store to peddle more of them. Every useless columnist takes salary away from someone who could write news. Every op-ed column dilutes the main purpose of a newspaper, to provide news. Unless, of course, newspapers don’t see that as their mission any longer. In fact…
(4) Flagship newspapers are morphing into lifestyle platforms. I’ve already fulminated here in the comments section about how the WP and NYT electronic front pages are overloaded with noisy and trivial non-news. The second-from-the-top story on the WaPo’s electronic front page today is, “Riding the baddest bulls made him a legend. Then one broke his neck.” Below that, there are stories about Iran and Israel, followed quickly (after a couple of token actual news stories) by “Artists are all-in on vinyl. See how records are made in 2024” and “15 Passover recipes for a meaningful and delicious holiday.” These former news outlets are now disproportionately interested in engagement by presenting them with non-news items that a particular class of Americans will presumably find interesting. The actual meat, the news, is getting increasingly thinner, sandwiched between filler like “Sasha Velour sashays into the culture wars” and “I saw the stars of ‘Succession’ onstage. One is astonishing.”
(5) You can’t be an expert in everything. Good editorial pieces provide context, missed details, fresh perspective, and other benefits that supplement the news. However the columnists who headline the opinion section can’t be experts in everything, so they can’t provide as much context, missed details, or fresh perspective as, say, someone who had more than a passing familiarity with the topic. Therefore, the investment in high-salary columnists is like hiring a very affable handyman when what you need is a pool specialist to install your new hot tub.
I have many other thoughts, and I’m clearly having a cranky old man moment here. Clearly, the piece I linked hit a nerve, since we live in an age when reliable news, covering a wide range of important topics (particularly in an age when local news outlets and international correspondents are both in steep decline), is becoming a very precious commodity.
Kind of music for the weekend:
Dystonia for Speaker and Trailer Queen in V* minor
*I understand this denotes the tone of the composition, which in this cases is “Vacate.”
Oh, more bad news for Xlon, Cisgender Emperor Mars of God and Phobos (or xomething). a flaw in the accelerator prompts a recall
I don’t really understand why a refrigerator needs an accelerator, or wheels, or why it’s called a Xybertruck. But here we are.
Flagship newspapers are morphing into lifestyle platforms.
There’s far more talent in fashion and style and overall lifestyle journalism. If you read some of these pieces in the Times, it’s pretty clear that the writers have autonomy. They can sound intelligent and tuned-in. Unlike some hack writing about trans people or culture war things on a campus or how Hamas weaponized rape, they get to write about real culture and what’s of interest to people like them, none of whom are thankfully like Pamela Paul.
That last comment had one “clearly” too many. Shame on me for typing while rushing off to breakfast.
@Michael Reynolds: ” Actual reporting can also help fill the 800 word hole.”
Note that for the past 8 years or so, we’ve had:
1) The election of one of the craziest and most unsuitable Presidents in over 200 years,
2) That President living *down* to his previous career as a crooked, cheating, lying real estate mogul with whom no US bank would do business (only the Russian mafia front bank),
3) Running *everything* as if he were compromised by Putin.
4) F*cking over everything, for clear cruelty and open corruption, to an extent rarely seen.
5) Refusing to leave office until his coup had failed.
6) Converting the Republican Party to his cult, in a literal sense, such as denying the coup.
7) Openly promising, along with his cult/GOP to make term II look like a wave of vengeance, cruelty, corruption and evil not seen before in the USA.
8) The press deciding that Trump is good for ratings, and to hell with the USA (and the world).
9) The press looking at Biden vs Trump, and putting their collective weight on the scales for Trump, to an extent reminiscent of an authoritarian government.
The reason that these columnists b*tch about material is that they support the above (IMHO).
Heck, Michael, would the past years have been acceptable for a work of fiction in the past?
@Kingdaddy:
I’ve never read Pamela Paul or Hamilton Nolan before this morning. But not terribly impressed with the criticism of Paul, perhaps because it reeked of pissiness, and I don’t see the need to take down someone who writes insipidly (okay, if you say so) about mostly mundane events.
Not sure why he chose to write this take-down the day after the eclipse piece. Yes, the eclipse was way over-hyped and commercialized. But can’t this Nolan person appreciate some otherwise mundane observations on human interactions when we come together, geographically at least, to experience a remarkable natural event? Maybe I’m put off by the criticism because I, like Paul, traveled to upstate NY to see this month’s eclipse and to the intermountain west to see the 2017 eclipse. Hell, I convinced my Mom to drive us about 100 miles (yes, we were close) to see the 1979 total eclipse.
As for what a Times columnist makes and what else they do, I don’t really care. And maybe I’m just not meant to understand the shortcomings of most columnists. I mean, I thought Friedman has generally been a voice of reason since the Oct 7th attacks.
Since the link didn’t name the columnist, I did wonder for a moment who it was… perhaps Ross Douthat, although that’s recency bias on my part because he was interviewed on the Bulwark podcast earlier this week and some of that rehashed on the the Next Level podcast. He would have been a valid target for actual substantive reasons. As was said on the latter podcast, Douthat refused to rank the last few presidents (and perhaps say Obama and Biden have been better than Trump) “because you can’t be the conservative New York Times columnist and say that” (the host’s summarizing words).
Maybe we can acknowledge that fluff pieces are just that, but save our actual most searing criticisms for disingenuous columnists who give cover to incompetent, corrupt, and malevolent actors.
Now I’ve got go do Wordle and try to finish Spelling Bee… the real reasons I have an NYT subscription.
@Kingdaddy:
I can feel that burn 3000 miles away. And it is a good summation of why I don’t read the NYTimes.
I don’t give a crap about Paula Paul. I am aware she’s written some transphobic columns under the veil of “just asking questions”. Try getting some answers, Paula. You know, by asking people who might know something, who have direct experience?
But of course, those people can’t be trusted, they didn’t go to Yale or Harvard…
As follow up to Ozark’s piece on pregnant women there are laws that say a pregnant woman should not be turned away from an ED, however, some hospitals have been ignoring that all along. The law exists but the issue is enforcement. We are virtually always talking about women with no or poor insurance, often a POC. They will be a financial loss for whatever hospital accepts their care. It is generally the nicer hospitals in the better off communities, the ones that could actually afford to provide care, that turn them away and they end up at the less well off hospitals that do provide care for “those kinds of people”.
There is no enforcement since the poor women who get turned away dont generally have the means or education to know how to follow up. The hospitals that accept them dont have the money or time, often the interest, to follow up. The communities seldom care. Finally, there is nearly always a gray area. A “good” lawyer can make it seem plausible the person was turned away, when we all know they shouondt have been. Now add in the abortion issue where the laws have been deliberately vaguely written (hospital groups and physician groups have asked for more clear definitions) and breaking them can mean large financial penalties and/or jail time.
Steve
@Kingdaddy:
Since when is the job of a columnist to be right (in diagnosing the current thing and/or forecasting the future thing)? Or to be an expert? I ask these questions with 90% seriousness ad 10% rhetorical snark.
Seems to me that the primary job of a columnist is to generate discussion. Dare I say engagement? And to do so with above average writing.
And the secondary (though related) job of a columnist is to flatter their reader. Play to the readers’ vanity with tasty morsels of agreement (we = wise, moral, advanced; they = ignorant, evil, backwards) and tastier still morsels of disagreement (“let me enumerate all the ways this columnist is halfwit”).
Finally the Ukraine et. al. aid bill passed the House.
Funny how it was just a matter of putting up for a vote.
So, when does the Trailer Queen force her vote to vacate?
@Kathy:..vote to vacate…
My guess: Putin Princess Punts
@Barry:
I’m working on a thing involving ludicrously unlikely science – even for me – and yet it is still more believable than the MAGA madness.
We need to get that 60 billion to Ukraine as fast as humanly possible. If Trump wins he’ll stop it cold.
@wr:
Nah, Miranda Divine. Not American, but the NY Post brought her in.
@Jay L Gischer:
Haha. I loved that one as well. The funny thing is, the NFL is definitely closer to a meritocracy than the hiring of columnists. But it still doesn’t reach the status of being true.
Pedigree matters–high draft picks who have failed to produce get far more opportunities to continue failing than a low draft pick gets opportunities to produce. Brady’s success required Bledsoe to sustain internal bleeding and a head coach willing to break with the tradition of a player never losing his starting job to injury.
Following @Kingdaddy’s: link to well deserved criticism of Pamela Paul, and the MSM punditry generally, may I offer a palate cleanser? Balloon Juice links to an interview with Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Mr. Quinn got some attention a couple weeks ago for Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts: Letter from the Editor
Balloon Juice then links to Dan Froomkin’s interview yesterday with Mr. Quinn.
I hope this has come to the attention of Kid Sulzberger and Jeff Bezos. I’ll add that at WAPO Perry Bacon Jr. is very good and Jen Rubin has been lately. At NYT Krugman is reliable and Jamelle Bouie is a national treasure.
@Kurtz: Have to note that it’s much easier for the NFL to be a meritocracy than for pretty much any publisher, football has objective standards by which to identify high achievers. Publishing’s standard is more will this sell (depends, who’s your market?) and essay/short form writing is loosie goosier than fiction or non-fiction. The number of people who can write well enough that they “should publish” is yuuuuuge.
I’ve had lots of people tell me “Wow, you should publish this” when they read stuff that I’d written. Mostly, they were probably mistaken, though. (Although I did win a writing award once.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Fair, as far as that goes. But that is kind of my point. That it seems as if it would be easier for the NFL to be a meritocracy, but it still doesn’t really fit the bill. And the NFL presumably spends a lot more resources identifying college talent than media companies use to locate opinion writers.
There are other key differences, of course. Perhaps the biggest being that the NFL has a strict financial structure that constrains teams in a way that doesn’t exist for media companies. There are market constraints in the media business, but they are much different.
Another fair note world be that the choice of nose tackle as an example is interesting. For one thing, there are far fewer of them today than there were even 20 years ago. But in this specific context, a DT who has a long career is far more likely to have earned their continued employment via solid production than many other positions. IOW, a miss on a DT signing is much less likely to lead to firings than missing on a QB, WR, or EDGE.
On the other hand, and maybe this also cuts against my position somewhat, a writer’s style, ideology, and general worldview is probably easier to predict than whether that giant, fast person will be able to remain productive when every other person on the field is also giant and fast. No college player has ever truly been in that situation. Even when two SEC schools play, the vast majority of snaps are taken by players who are not NFL prospects, much less elite ones.
PSA: EU 261 flight delay compensation explained.
About halfway down the page, it’s noted that duty of care applies in circumstances where flight delay compensation does not. Duty of care means overnight accomodations, meals, and phone calls, if needed, provided by the airline at no charge.
@Kurtz: I’m inclined to see the problems in professional sports as centered around training thousands of prospects for dozens of jobs. The arts (in general) have the same issue. Politics/who you know/who you’ll b**w to get the job are bound to contaminate the system.
It’s why the cynics keep saying meritocracy is a myth. Too many eminently qualified candidates chasing too few actual positions. On the plus side (well, mostly anyway), it keeps compensation in check. ETA: Particularly near the median level.