War of the Worlds - New York TimesFebruary 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
War of the Worlds
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Since 9/11, whenever the Bush team has found itself in political trouble, it has played the national security card against Democrats. It has worked so well that Karl Rove, in a recent speech to the Republican National Committee, made it a campaign theme for 2006.
He said America today faces "a ruthless enemy" and therefore needs "a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in. President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."
Mr. Rove added: "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."
I particularly like the line "that doesn't make them unpatriotic," when that was exactly the political slur Mr. Rove was trying to implant.
So I understand why Democrats were eager to turn the soft-on-terrorism card back on President Bush when it was revealed that P&O, the navigation company based in London — which has been managing the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia — had been bought by Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the Dubai monarchy in the United Arab Emirates, an Arab Gulf state, and that the Bush team had approved the Dubai takeover of the U.S. port operations.
I also understand why many Republicans are now running away from the administration. They know that if they don't distance themselves from Mr. Bush, some Democrats are going to play this very evocative, very visual "giving away our ports to the Arabs" card against them in the coming elections. Yes, you reap what you sow.
But while I have zero sympathy for the political mess in which the president now finds himself, I will not join this feeding frenzy. On the pure merits of this case, the president is right. The port deal should go ahead. Congress should focus on the N.S.A. wiretapping. Not this.
As a country, we must not go down this road of global ethnic profiling — looking for Arabs under our beds the way we once looked for commies. If we do — if America, the world's beacon of pluralism and tolerance, goes down that road — we will take the rest of the world with us. We will sow the wind and we will reap the whirlwind.
If there were a real security issue here, I'd join the critics. But the security argument is bogus and, I would add, borderline racist. Many U.S. ports are run today by foreign companies, but the U.S. Coast Guard still controls all aspects of port security, entry and exits; the U.S. Customs Service is still in charge of inspecting the containers; and U.S. longshoremen still handle the cargos.
The port operator simply oversees the coming and going of ships, making sure they are properly loaded and offloaded in the most cost-effective manner. As my colleague David E. Sanger reported: "Among the many problems at American ports, said Stephen E. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is an expert on port security at the Council on Foreign Relations, 'who owns the management contract ranks near the very bottom.' "
What ranks much higher for me is the terrible trend emerging in the world today: Sunnis attacking Shiite mosques in Iraq, and vice versa. Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and violent Muslim protests, including Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria and then Christians killing Muslims. And today's Washington Post story about how some overzealous, security-obsessed U.S. consul in India has created a huge diplomatic flap — on the eve of Mr. Bush's first visit to India — by denying one of India's most respected scientists a visa to America on the grounds that his knowledge of chemistry might be a threat. The U.S. embassy in New Delhi has apologized.
My point is simple: the world is drifting dangerously toward a widespread religious and sectarian cleavage — the likes of which we have not seen for a long, long time. The only country with the power to stem this toxic trend is America.
People across the world still look to our example of pluralism, which is like no other. If we go Dark Ages, if we go down the road of pitchfork-wielding xenophobes, then the whole world will go Dark Ages.
There is a poison loose today, and America — America at its best — is the only antidote. That's why it is critical that we stand by our principles of free trade and welcome the world to do business in our land, as long as there is no security threat. If we start exporting fear instead of hope, we are going to import everyone else's fears right back. That is not a world you want for your kids.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds - New York Times
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds - New York TimesFebruary 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
MUMBAI, India
I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.
To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.
Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin.
India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually — better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies.
Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:
"Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. ... According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years. ...
"[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed."
No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran — who have miserably failed their youth — are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.
Op-Ed Columnist
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
MUMBAI, India
I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.
To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.
Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin.
India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually — better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies.
Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:
"Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. ... According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years. ...
"[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed."
No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran — who have miserably failed their youth — are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Warriors drown out the voices of reason in Islam
New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Warriors drown out the voices of reason in IslamWarriors drown out the voices of reason in Islam
During the 1960s a white Southerner made me aware of a problem that now seems to be common to the complexity faced by modern people of many different societies and religions: The loose screws among them have come to represent the entire group.
Forty years ago, the white Southerner said to me that all of the televised redneck violence in reaction to the civil rights movement had made his Southern accent a social liability. Northern white people tended to assume, once they heard his accent, that he supported the Ku Klux Klan, had probably brutalized a black man and could easily have taken advantage of a black woman, who might be the mother of his unacknowledged child!
It took them a while to discover that he was a supporter of the civil rights movement who had to leave the South because his opinions endangered the safety of his wife and children.
I am sure that this problem is now felt in what one Muslim scholar calls "liberal Islam." I encountered the term while reading material written by Radman Masmoudi, founder and president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, a nonprofit think tank. Masmoudi, from Tunisia, has a degree from MIT in robotics and automation, and is an advanced control engineer. He is also the editor in chief of his think tank's publication, Muslim Democrat, and president of the Tunisian Scientific Society.
So he's been around. But there is much to be learned from reading his 2003 piece "The Silenced Majority," from the Journal of Democracy, about the battle between secular and religious extremists. "Between these two extremes," he writes, "we find the majority of the people, who want to practice their religion faithfully, but who also want to live in the modern age - i.e., they want a modern, moderate and appropriate interpretation of Islam."
Masmoudi does not see this happening overnight but is sure that the first thing that must come about is the freedom to debate issues and to criticize Islamic governments and policies, a basic tenet of democracy. This sort of freedom exists under neither secular nor religious Islamic governments, both of which tend to take the position that it will be their way or "the highway."
"The reformation of Islam," writes Masmoudi, "will require freedom and democracy, and right now the only place where we have them is in the West."
We should not be naive about a reformation taking place within the Islamic world next week, next month, or next year, even in the next decade. But neither should we be prematurely cynical about liberal Islam. All we are actually talking about are things we take for granted, such as free speech, freedom of the press and a diversity of freely expressed opinion.
When we look at the most conservative versions of Islam, we can easily understand why all of those freedoms were hard to come by at certain points in Western democratic history.
But when we realize that the conception of liberal Islam is being championed by an award-winning scientist who observes his religion in ways he considers rational, we can have faith in what Masmoudi represents and set aside some of our most hysterical reactions to the massive stereotyping that always arrives in times of war.
Warriors are only interested in, understandably, the nuances of command and performance in battle. But recognition that humanity always means endless nuance is a foundation of democracy. Masmoudi says the majority of those in the Muslim world want what we know as freedom, and do not believe their religion is threatened by it.
Let us hope that he is right, so that some of us may live to see that old saying become true in the Islamic world: it is always darkest before dawn.
Originally published on February 12, 2006
During the 1960s a white Southerner made me aware of a problem that now seems to be common to the complexity faced by modern people of many different societies and religions: The loose screws among them have come to represent the entire group.
Forty years ago, the white Southerner said to me that all of the televised redneck violence in reaction to the civil rights movement had made his Southern accent a social liability. Northern white people tended to assume, once they heard his accent, that he supported the Ku Klux Klan, had probably brutalized a black man and could easily have taken advantage of a black woman, who might be the mother of his unacknowledged child!
It took them a while to discover that he was a supporter of the civil rights movement who had to leave the South because his opinions endangered the safety of his wife and children.
I am sure that this problem is now felt in what one Muslim scholar calls "liberal Islam." I encountered the term while reading material written by Radman Masmoudi, founder and president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, a nonprofit think tank. Masmoudi, from Tunisia, has a degree from MIT in robotics and automation, and is an advanced control engineer. He is also the editor in chief of his think tank's publication, Muslim Democrat, and president of the Tunisian Scientific Society.
So he's been around. But there is much to be learned from reading his 2003 piece "The Silenced Majority," from the Journal of Democracy, about the battle between secular and religious extremists. "Between these two extremes," he writes, "we find the majority of the people, who want to practice their religion faithfully, but who also want to live in the modern age - i.e., they want a modern, moderate and appropriate interpretation of Islam."
Masmoudi does not see this happening overnight but is sure that the first thing that must come about is the freedom to debate issues and to criticize Islamic governments and policies, a basic tenet of democracy. This sort of freedom exists under neither secular nor religious Islamic governments, both of which tend to take the position that it will be their way or "the highway."
"The reformation of Islam," writes Masmoudi, "will require freedom and democracy, and right now the only place where we have them is in the West."
We should not be naive about a reformation taking place within the Islamic world next week, next month, or next year, even in the next decade. But neither should we be prematurely cynical about liberal Islam. All we are actually talking about are things we take for granted, such as free speech, freedom of the press and a diversity of freely expressed opinion.
When we look at the most conservative versions of Islam, we can easily understand why all of those freedoms were hard to come by at certain points in Western democratic history.
But when we realize that the conception of liberal Islam is being championed by an award-winning scientist who observes his religion in ways he considers rational, we can have faith in what Masmoudi represents and set aside some of our most hysterical reactions to the massive stereotyping that always arrives in times of war.
Warriors are only interested in, understandably, the nuances of command and performance in battle. But recognition that humanity always means endless nuance is a foundation of democracy. Masmoudi says the majority of those in the Muslim world want what we know as freedom, and do not believe their religion is threatened by it.
Let us hope that he is right, so that some of us may live to see that old saying become true in the Islamic world: it is always darkest before dawn.
Originally published on February 12, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch - Stanley Crouch: Free speech will win
New York Daily News - Stanley Crouch - Stanley Crouch: Free speech will winFree speech will win
Tech renaissance forces the East to take a far West turn
The problem that faces the Chinese at the moment is how the issue of free speech and free access will be resolved in the face of extraordinarily sophisticated technology.
It seems now that the Chinese have underestimated the power of information and the addiction to varied perspectives that it can create in the masses once they have been exposed to even the smallest amount of it.
This was not always true.
Once upon a time, it was clearly understood that information was the enemy of any regime built on repression.
Totalitarian leaders dared not be compared with the supposed decadent exploitation of the capitalist world.
When Soviet officials could no longer keep information out because those who were supposed to maintain revolutionary morale began to do international work that required travel, they started to see how far their Marxist state was falling behind the West. Then, morale began to fade, and cynicism and disregard began to build. That has not yet happened to the Chinese, but it will come down in its own way, and we can be sure that way will be the result of information.
We now see elected officials in Washington getting all bent out of shape because Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco are willing to submit to the Chinese demand for censorship in order to gain access to what is becoming perhaps the biggest single market in the world.
Such is capitalism, or the most basic and crude version of it.
Right now, it is quite easy to see that big Internet companies submitting to totalitarian demands must deepen the contempt the purist Chinese Marxists have for capitalism and the ease and the speed with which it will set aside its principles to make a buck. But what the Chinese President Hu Jintao must realize is that you threaten the order if you let even a little air in. Never lift your foot off of the people's neck; they will then become obsessed with standing up. Some already are standing up. Uh-oh.
For now, the Chinese seem to believe that they can manhandle capitalism, bending its rules of conduct whichever way they want, and duck the Western blues by making money with one hand but repressing free speech and access to information with the other. That will only work for so long. As one writer, Taylor Dinerman, said to me, "The Chinese people can get access to whatever they want through their satellite phones and have been able to do so for at least seven years."
In other words, it is all or nothing at all. Eventually, if they are lucky, the Chinese will be in the same struggle that we find ourselves in: how to keep at bay the overweening decadence of immeasurable pornography, misogyny, narcissism and all of those appetites satisfied by ever-cheaper thrills. That, as much as anything else, is what comes with our technology. It offers the same beauty and the same horror to the entire world.
Originally published on February 16, 2006
Tech renaissance forces the East to take a far West turn
The problem that faces the Chinese at the moment is how the issue of free speech and free access will be resolved in the face of extraordinarily sophisticated technology.
It seems now that the Chinese have underestimated the power of information and the addiction to varied perspectives that it can create in the masses once they have been exposed to even the smallest amount of it.
This was not always true.
Once upon a time, it was clearly understood that information was the enemy of any regime built on repression.
Totalitarian leaders dared not be compared with the supposed decadent exploitation of the capitalist world.
When Soviet officials could no longer keep information out because those who were supposed to maintain revolutionary morale began to do international work that required travel, they started to see how far their Marxist state was falling behind the West. Then, morale began to fade, and cynicism and disregard began to build. That has not yet happened to the Chinese, but it will come down in its own way, and we can be sure that way will be the result of information.
We now see elected officials in Washington getting all bent out of shape because Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco are willing to submit to the Chinese demand for censorship in order to gain access to what is becoming perhaps the biggest single market in the world.
Such is capitalism, or the most basic and crude version of it.
Right now, it is quite easy to see that big Internet companies submitting to totalitarian demands must deepen the contempt the purist Chinese Marxists have for capitalism and the ease and the speed with which it will set aside its principles to make a buck. But what the Chinese President Hu Jintao must realize is that you threaten the order if you let even a little air in. Never lift your foot off of the people's neck; they will then become obsessed with standing up. Some already are standing up. Uh-oh.
For now, the Chinese seem to believe that they can manhandle capitalism, bending its rules of conduct whichever way they want, and duck the Western blues by making money with one hand but repressing free speech and access to information with the other. That will only work for so long. As one writer, Taylor Dinerman, said to me, "The Chinese people can get access to whatever they want through their satellite phones and have been able to do so for at least seven years."
In other words, it is all or nothing at all. Eventually, if they are lucky, the Chinese will be in the same struggle that we find ourselves in: how to keep at bay the overweening decadence of immeasurable pornography, misogyny, narcissism and all of those appetites satisfied by ever-cheaper thrills. That, as much as anything else, is what comes with our technology. It offers the same beauty and the same horror to the entire world.
Originally published on February 16, 2006
Saturday, February 04, 2006
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Bush's good deed for minorities
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Bush's good deed for minoritiesBush's good deed for minorities
It is more than a bit ironic that President Bush is out ahead of the civil rights establishment and its friends who spend more time crying crocodile tears for monsters like the recently executed Tookie Williams than they do addressing the issue of education. It is odd because education always has the greatest chance to close performance and income gaps between our country's majority and our minorities.
The President has not been playing around in that area, but the men around him often leave the President with egg on his face. Bush appointee Michael Brown was so incompetent as the head of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina that it was easy for many to take a rapper seriously when he said that Bush didn't care about black people.
Now New Orleans lays in the waste left by the rage of nature and the $600 million earmarked for aid to New Orleans is log-jammed in our federal bureaucracy. Such things could easily lead one to suspect Bush's intentions, and they provide the best defense for the President.
Bush has the elephants preparing to put into law a measure that would provide low-income students with grants to aid them in their college education if they do well in math, science and the other technological fields considered important if our country is to compete in the global economy. The measure stretches over five years and the tab is $3.75 billion, providing grants to students while assessing the academic strengths and weaknesses of our 18,000 public high schools.
As Sol Stern wrote in the Manhattan Institute's publication, City Journal, this all began with the President's No Child Left Behind program, which promoted scientific ways of improving reading skills when Bush was governor of Texas, making use of the expertise of Dr. Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Health beginning in 1995.
"The National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonic-based instruction," wrote Stern.
Within a week of taking his seat in the Oval Office, Bush put a $6 billion Reading First phonics program in the balance. This led to a boom in national education since federal funds could be turned down - but if they were accepted, the schools were held accountable for higher performance.
The plan worked. Between 2003 and 2005, fourth-graders posted the best reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the test's history. Minority children, especially, are closing the performance gap.
President Bush may take a hard paddling in history for his handling of the war in Iraq, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the eavesdropping on American citizens, and what some consider the worst examples of cronyism since Grant was President. But like the dung hosed off of a man dipped in sewage, his record on education could clean him up and make him one of the most important and forward-thinking Presidents in our history.
Originally published on January 29, 2006
It is more than a bit ironic that President Bush is out ahead of the civil rights establishment and its friends who spend more time crying crocodile tears for monsters like the recently executed Tookie Williams than they do addressing the issue of education. It is odd because education always has the greatest chance to close performance and income gaps between our country's majority and our minorities.
The President has not been playing around in that area, but the men around him often leave the President with egg on his face. Bush appointee Michael Brown was so incompetent as the head of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina that it was easy for many to take a rapper seriously when he said that Bush didn't care about black people.
Now New Orleans lays in the waste left by the rage of nature and the $600 million earmarked for aid to New Orleans is log-jammed in our federal bureaucracy. Such things could easily lead one to suspect Bush's intentions, and they provide the best defense for the President.
Bush has the elephants preparing to put into law a measure that would provide low-income students with grants to aid them in their college education if they do well in math, science and the other technological fields considered important if our country is to compete in the global economy. The measure stretches over five years and the tab is $3.75 billion, providing grants to students while assessing the academic strengths and weaknesses of our 18,000 public high schools.
As Sol Stern wrote in the Manhattan Institute's publication, City Journal, this all began with the President's No Child Left Behind program, which promoted scientific ways of improving reading skills when Bush was governor of Texas, making use of the expertise of Dr. Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Health beginning in 1995.
"The National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonic-based instruction," wrote Stern.
Within a week of taking his seat in the Oval Office, Bush put a $6 billion Reading First phonics program in the balance. This led to a boom in national education since federal funds could be turned down - but if they were accepted, the schools were held accountable for higher performance.
The plan worked. Between 2003 and 2005, fourth-graders posted the best reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the test's history. Minority children, especially, are closing the performance gap.
President Bush may take a hard paddling in history for his handling of the war in Iraq, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the eavesdropping on American citizens, and what some consider the worst examples of cronyism since Grant was President. But like the dung hosed off of a man dipped in sewage, his record on education could clean him up and make him one of the most important and forward-thinking Presidents in our history.
Originally published on January 29, 2006
New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Oprah revenge served warm
New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Oprah revenge served warmOprah revenge served warm
Oprah Winfrey, American queen of goodwill, had a barbecue for millions on her show last week. She was not serving sausage, chicken or beef; the meat on the pit was our most famous recent con man and liar, the author James Frey. He had become a millionaire because Winfrey's book club had chosen his book, which immediately shot to the top of the nonfiction charts. But it was not what it was supposed to be and neither was the man himself.
Frey presented himself in what was supposed to be a memoir as a roughneck who had been addicted to drugs and alcohol and had terrible experiences, including time in jail. His lies were exposed by thesmokinggun.com and Winfrey defended Frey when he appeared on "The Larry King Show."
But as the stack of evidence and the criticism began to become more impressive, Winfrey called him out when she could have easily stonewalled.
Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the U.S., but she also is one of the most responsible. Her admission that she was duped and that she made a mistake defending a pack of lies is further proof of why she remains so highly respected. One does not expect her level of integrity from your average billionaire.
So it was surprising to see that Winfrey was so hurt by Frey and so disappointed in herself that she had to make him heel on her show. Some said that we saw a host far different from what her audience is accustomed to viewing. Her reputation comes from being an enthusiast and an empathizer. But she was on the attack and James Frey felt it.
Or did he? All Frey had to do was sit there for an hour and be called a liar and listen to his publisher, Nan Talese, pretend - against all documentation - that everyone was confused and unaware that Frey was a lying sack of dung. After those minor embarrassments, our millionaire author could count on what amounted to everyone's goodwill toward him. All of the invited commentators agreed, finally, that this admission of monumental fudging of the facts was the first step in his coming to terms with the truth.
Ever a con man, Frey had told Winfrey during a break that if there was a gun backstage he would end it all! Yikes. He was just fishing; she took the bait and said that it wasn't worth all of that. Of course, it wasn't. It was worth a very large fraud to the tune of a few million dollars.
If she were a little more angry about making a liar a rich man, Winfrey could have rhetorically squashed his head. But if she was that rough and tumble, she wouldn't be Oprah Winfrey, which is part of her appeal and part of her strength. She was hurt, she was mad, but she couldn't even be reasonably cruel. That's our queen of goodwill. Yes, she had a barbecue, but the meat, in the final analysis, wasn't as well cooked as it could have been.
Originally published on February 2, 2006
Oprah Winfrey, American queen of goodwill, had a barbecue for millions on her show last week. She was not serving sausage, chicken or beef; the meat on the pit was our most famous recent con man and liar, the author James Frey. He had become a millionaire because Winfrey's book club had chosen his book, which immediately shot to the top of the nonfiction charts. But it was not what it was supposed to be and neither was the man himself.
Frey presented himself in what was supposed to be a memoir as a roughneck who had been addicted to drugs and alcohol and had terrible experiences, including time in jail. His lies were exposed by thesmokinggun.com and Winfrey defended Frey when he appeared on "The Larry King Show."
But as the stack of evidence and the criticism began to become more impressive, Winfrey called him out when she could have easily stonewalled.
Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the U.S., but she also is one of the most responsible. Her admission that she was duped and that she made a mistake defending a pack of lies is further proof of why she remains so highly respected. One does not expect her level of integrity from your average billionaire.
So it was surprising to see that Winfrey was so hurt by Frey and so disappointed in herself that she had to make him heel on her show. Some said that we saw a host far different from what her audience is accustomed to viewing. Her reputation comes from being an enthusiast and an empathizer. But she was on the attack and James Frey felt it.
Or did he? All Frey had to do was sit there for an hour and be called a liar and listen to his publisher, Nan Talese, pretend - against all documentation - that everyone was confused and unaware that Frey was a lying sack of dung. After those minor embarrassments, our millionaire author could count on what amounted to everyone's goodwill toward him. All of the invited commentators agreed, finally, that this admission of monumental fudging of the facts was the first step in his coming to terms with the truth.
Ever a con man, Frey had told Winfrey during a break that if there was a gun backstage he would end it all! Yikes. He was just fishing; she took the bait and said that it wasn't worth all of that. Of course, it wasn't. It was worth a very large fraud to the tune of a few million dollars.
If she were a little more angry about making a liar a rich man, Winfrey could have rhetorically squashed his head. But if she was that rough and tumble, she wouldn't be Oprah Winfrey, which is part of her appeal and part of her strength. She was hurt, she was mad, but she couldn't even be reasonably cruel. That's our queen of goodwill. Yes, she had a barbecue, but the meat, in the final analysis, wasn't as well cooked as it could have been.
Originally published on February 2, 2006
Sunday, January 29, 2006
State of the Union - New York Times
State of the Union - New York TimesJanuary 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
State of the Union
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Tuesday President Bush will deliver his State of the Union address and map out priorities for his last three years. The direction in which America needs to go is obvious: toward energy independence. If Mr. Bush steps up to that challenge, this speech could be a new beginning for his presidency. If he doesn't, you can stick a fork in this administration. It will be done — because it will have abdicated leadership on the biggest issue of our day. Here's the speech I'll be listening for:
My fellow Americans, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy gave an extraordinary State of the Union address in which he called on the nation to marshal all of its resources to put a man on the Moon. By setting that lofty goal, Kennedy was trying to summon all of our industrial and scientific talent, and a willingness to sacrifice financially, to catch up with the Soviet Union, which had overtaken America in the field of large rocket engines.
"While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first," Kennedy said, "we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last."
I come to you this evening with a similar challenge. President Kennedy was worried about the threat that communism posed to our way of life. I am here to tell you that if we don't move away from our dependence on oil and shift to renewable fuels, it will change our way of life for the worse — and soon — much, much more than communism ever could have. Making this transition is the calling of our era.
Why? First, we are in a war with a violent strain of Middle East Islam that is indirectly financed by our consumption of oil. Second, with millions of Indians and Chinese buying cars and homes as they join the great global middle class, we must quickly move away from burning fossil fuels or we're going to create enough global warming to melt the North Pole. Because of that, green cars, homes, offices, appliances, designs and renewable energies will be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. If we don't dominate that industry, China, India, Japan or Europe surely will.
But to lead, we must impose the highest energy-efficiency standards on our own automakers and other industries so we force them to be the most innovative. I want to inspire girls and boys across America to study math, science and engineering to help our nation achieve green energy independence. President Kennedy said, Let's put a man on the Moon. I say, Let's make oil obsolete.
Finally, my call for spreading democracy will never be achieved if some of the worst regimes on the planet — Iran, Sudan, Venezuela — have so much oil money they can misbehave and ignore the world, and if the rest of us — Europe, America, China and India — are forever coddling them to get access to their crude.
With all of this in mind, I am sending Congress the Bush Energy Freedom Act. It is based on ideas first offered by the energy expert Philip Verleger and it argues the following:
Transportation accounts for most of our oil consumption. And many Americans have purchased big cars and S.U.V.'s, expecting gasoline to remain cheap. That is no longer the case. Therefore, I propose creating a government agency that will buy up any gas-guzzling car or truck in America at the original new or used price, and crush it. This national buy-back program will be financed by a $2-a-gallon gasoline tax that will be phased in by 10 cents a month beginning in 2008 — so people know what is coming and start buying fuel-efficient cars right now.
By removing so many gas guzzlers, we will quickly reduce our oil consumption and create a huge demand for new energy-efficient cars from Detroit, which will rescue our auto industry. We have to do something drastic. The Harley-Davidson motorcycle company is worth more today than General Motors! But by sharply raising the gasoline tax, we'll also make sure that Detroit shifts its fleet to energy-saving plug-in hybrids and hydrogen- and ethanol-fueled vehicles, which will force Detroit to out-innovate Toyota. And by generating so much income from a gasoline tax, we will be able to give gas-tax rebates to lower-income folks and have plenty left over to pay for new investment in education and scientific research.
Impossible? Read my lips: Nothing is impossible when Americans put their hearts and minds to it.
One last thing: I have accepted the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney, who felt he could not be a salesman for the Energy Freedom Act. I am nominating Jeffrey Immelt — the C.E.O. of General Electric, who has focused G.E.'s innovation around "eco-imagination" — as Mr. Cheney's replacement.
Good night, and God bless America.
Op-Ed Columnist
State of the Union
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Tuesday President Bush will deliver his State of the Union address and map out priorities for his last three years. The direction in which America needs to go is obvious: toward energy independence. If Mr. Bush steps up to that challenge, this speech could be a new beginning for his presidency. If he doesn't, you can stick a fork in this administration. It will be done — because it will have abdicated leadership on the biggest issue of our day. Here's the speech I'll be listening for:
My fellow Americans, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy gave an extraordinary State of the Union address in which he called on the nation to marshal all of its resources to put a man on the Moon. By setting that lofty goal, Kennedy was trying to summon all of our industrial and scientific talent, and a willingness to sacrifice financially, to catch up with the Soviet Union, which had overtaken America in the field of large rocket engines.
"While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first," Kennedy said, "we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last."
I come to you this evening with a similar challenge. President Kennedy was worried about the threat that communism posed to our way of life. I am here to tell you that if we don't move away from our dependence on oil and shift to renewable fuels, it will change our way of life for the worse — and soon — much, much more than communism ever could have. Making this transition is the calling of our era.
Why? First, we are in a war with a violent strain of Middle East Islam that is indirectly financed by our consumption of oil. Second, with millions of Indians and Chinese buying cars and homes as they join the great global middle class, we must quickly move away from burning fossil fuels or we're going to create enough global warming to melt the North Pole. Because of that, green cars, homes, offices, appliances, designs and renewable energies will be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. If we don't dominate that industry, China, India, Japan or Europe surely will.
But to lead, we must impose the highest energy-efficiency standards on our own automakers and other industries so we force them to be the most innovative. I want to inspire girls and boys across America to study math, science and engineering to help our nation achieve green energy independence. President Kennedy said, Let's put a man on the Moon. I say, Let's make oil obsolete.
Finally, my call for spreading democracy will never be achieved if some of the worst regimes on the planet — Iran, Sudan, Venezuela — have so much oil money they can misbehave and ignore the world, and if the rest of us — Europe, America, China and India — are forever coddling them to get access to their crude.
With all of this in mind, I am sending Congress the Bush Energy Freedom Act. It is based on ideas first offered by the energy expert Philip Verleger and it argues the following:
Transportation accounts for most of our oil consumption. And many Americans have purchased big cars and S.U.V.'s, expecting gasoline to remain cheap. That is no longer the case. Therefore, I propose creating a government agency that will buy up any gas-guzzling car or truck in America at the original new or used price, and crush it. This national buy-back program will be financed by a $2-a-gallon gasoline tax that will be phased in by 10 cents a month beginning in 2008 — so people know what is coming and start buying fuel-efficient cars right now.
By removing so many gas guzzlers, we will quickly reduce our oil consumption and create a huge demand for new energy-efficient cars from Detroit, which will rescue our auto industry. We have to do something drastic. The Harley-Davidson motorcycle company is worth more today than General Motors! But by sharply raising the gasoline tax, we'll also make sure that Detroit shifts its fleet to energy-saving plug-in hybrids and hydrogen- and ethanol-fueled vehicles, which will force Detroit to out-innovate Toyota. And by generating so much income from a gasoline tax, we will be able to give gas-tax rebates to lower-income folks and have plenty left over to pay for new investment in education and scientific research.
Impossible? Read my lips: Nothing is impossible when Americans put their hearts and minds to it.
One last thing: I have accepted the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney, who felt he could not be a salesman for the Energy Freedom Act. I am nominating Jeffrey Immelt — the C.E.O. of General Electric, who has focused G.E.'s innovation around "eco-imagination" — as Mr. Cheney's replacement.
Good night, and God bless America.
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic - New York Times
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic - New York TimesJanuary 29, 2006
Guest Columnist
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic
By TED KOPPEL
Washington
NOT all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn't enough of a cliché, this novel's hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.
After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:
The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.
They wander the battlefields of other people's wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.
The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.
A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life's imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.
Where to begin? Confession of the obvious seems like a reasonable starting point: I have become well known and well-off traveling the world on ABC's dime, charged only with ensuring that our viewers be well informed about important issues. For the better part of those 42 years, this arrangement worked to our mutual benefit and satisfaction. At the same time, I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress.
Once, 30 or 40 years ago, the target audience for network news was made up of everyone with a television, and the most common criticism lodged against us was that we were tempted to operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis.
This, however, was in the days before deregulation, when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth, and its mandate that broadcasters operate in "the public interest, convenience and necessity" was enough to give each licensee pause.
Network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs. News divisions occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones. The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know.
With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today's marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them.
Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.
Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors.
Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers.
Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks' foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance.
Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions.
You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over.
No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.
The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see.
Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care."
Even Fox News's product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.
Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers' unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.
What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks' greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage.
Oddly enough, there is a looming demographic reality that could help steer television news back toward its original purpose. There are tens of millions of baby boomers in their 40's and 50's and entering their 60's who have far more spending power than their 18-to-34-year-old counterparts. Television news may be debasing itself before the wrong demographic.
If the network news divisions cannot be convinced that their future depends on attracting all demographic groups, then perhaps, at least, they can be persuaded to aim for the largest single demographic with the most disposable income — one that may actually have an appetite for serious news. That would seem like a no-brainer. It's regrettable, perhaps, that only money and the inclination to spend it will ultimately determine the face of television news, but, as a distinguished colleague of mine used to say: "That's the way it is."
Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of The Discovery Network.
Frank Rich is on book leave.
Guest Columnist
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic
By TED KOPPEL
Washington
NOT all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn't enough of a cliché, this novel's hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.
After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:
The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.
They wander the battlefields of other people's wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.
The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.
A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life's imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.
Where to begin? Confession of the obvious seems like a reasonable starting point: I have become well known and well-off traveling the world on ABC's dime, charged only with ensuring that our viewers be well informed about important issues. For the better part of those 42 years, this arrangement worked to our mutual benefit and satisfaction. At the same time, I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress.
Once, 30 or 40 years ago, the target audience for network news was made up of everyone with a television, and the most common criticism lodged against us was that we were tempted to operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis.
This, however, was in the days before deregulation, when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth, and its mandate that broadcasters operate in "the public interest, convenience and necessity" was enough to give each licensee pause.
Network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs. News divisions occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones. The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know.
With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today's marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them.
Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.
Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors.
Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers.
Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks' foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance.
Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions.
You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over.
No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.
The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see.
Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care."
Even Fox News's product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.
Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers' unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.
What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks' greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage.
Oddly enough, there is a looming demographic reality that could help steer television news back toward its original purpose. There are tens of millions of baby boomers in their 40's and 50's and entering their 60's who have far more spending power than their 18-to-34-year-old counterparts. Television news may be debasing itself before the wrong demographic.
If the network news divisions cannot be convinced that their future depends on attracting all demographic groups, then perhaps, at least, they can be persuaded to aim for the largest single demographic with the most disposable income — one that may actually have an appetite for serious news. That would seem like a no-brainer. It's regrettable, perhaps, that only money and the inclination to spend it will ultimately determine the face of television news, but, as a distinguished colleague of mine used to say: "That's the way it is."
Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of The Discovery Network.
Frank Rich is on book leave.
Monday, January 23, 2006
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Clinton vs. Rice? Now, that's the ticket!
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Clinton vs. Rice? Now, that's the ticket!Clinton vs. Rice? Now, that's the ticket!
First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Rice left Washington last week for Liberia. They were flying to attend the inauguration of the first female president in all of Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
When the First Lady was asked by CNN when she thought this country would elect a woman, she answered that she thought it would happen fairly soon, perhaps in the next two presidential elections. The reporter then asked who she thought would be a good candidate for the job. Bush said she would want the woman to be a Republican and that she thought Rice would be just fine, even though Rice has said that she has no interest in running.
Things have changed so much in our nation since the civil rights era that there was no talk of Rice's ethnicity. All Bush said after acknowledging the secretary's stated lack of interest was, "I'd love to see her run. She's terrific."
I don't know if the First Lady was voicing an opinion that has a strong standing in the Republican Party, since many of its members have learned to wear high collars that keep their red necks from view. But we cannot be sure of anything at this moment, especially since one of the most remarkable developments in the 20th century was Lyndon Johnson evolving from a segregationist into the nation's most revolutionary President in the arena of civil rights since Abraham Lincoln.
If a strong call for Rice begins to build, those elephants who are more politicians than they are suspicious of black people in power might just leave their hoods in the closet for good and start an unprecedented campaign for the White House. They might then live up to their history of being "the party of Abraham Lincoln," which seemed even more ironic during Richard Nixon's presidency when the "Southern strategy" meant opening the arms of the party to Southern rednecks disenchanted by the destruction of segregation by the Democrats.
Colin Powell might have been the first black American President if he had run against Bill Clinton because big guns would have backed him and he was, at that time, a man who would have given Clinton far stronger competition than Bob Dole did. But things would be rough for Rice if she were to run.
Because she is an elephant and because she will have been in the Bush administration through two terms, her "authenticity" will be called into question. Because she is neither a hard- nor a soft-core leftist, Rice is considered a "race traitor," a problem special to black people who do not adhere to an agenda from the Black Power era of the late 1960s.
That is the kind of single-mindedness that keeps black Americans out of big-time politics. That is because the "leadership" always seems to be calling for a reservation modeled on Leisure World, not high-quality public education, safer communities and a chance to compete.
Whatever Rice is and whatever she represents, she has the right to be what she wants and has no obligation to repeat the clichés of the civil rights establishment, which have become little more than predictable clouds of hot air. If she and Hillary Clinton were to square off in 2008, that campaign would be one of the most exciting in our time. Let's hope we see it.
Originally published on January 15, 2006
First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Rice left Washington last week for Liberia. They were flying to attend the inauguration of the first female president in all of Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
When the First Lady was asked by CNN when she thought this country would elect a woman, she answered that she thought it would happen fairly soon, perhaps in the next two presidential elections. The reporter then asked who she thought would be a good candidate for the job. Bush said she would want the woman to be a Republican and that she thought Rice would be just fine, even though Rice has said that she has no interest in running.
Things have changed so much in our nation since the civil rights era that there was no talk of Rice's ethnicity. All Bush said after acknowledging the secretary's stated lack of interest was, "I'd love to see her run. She's terrific."
I don't know if the First Lady was voicing an opinion that has a strong standing in the Republican Party, since many of its members have learned to wear high collars that keep their red necks from view. But we cannot be sure of anything at this moment, especially since one of the most remarkable developments in the 20th century was Lyndon Johnson evolving from a segregationist into the nation's most revolutionary President in the arena of civil rights since Abraham Lincoln.
If a strong call for Rice begins to build, those elephants who are more politicians than they are suspicious of black people in power might just leave their hoods in the closet for good and start an unprecedented campaign for the White House. They might then live up to their history of being "the party of Abraham Lincoln," which seemed even more ironic during Richard Nixon's presidency when the "Southern strategy" meant opening the arms of the party to Southern rednecks disenchanted by the destruction of segregation by the Democrats.
Colin Powell might have been the first black American President if he had run against Bill Clinton because big guns would have backed him and he was, at that time, a man who would have given Clinton far stronger competition than Bob Dole did. But things would be rough for Rice if she were to run.
Because she is an elephant and because she will have been in the Bush administration through two terms, her "authenticity" will be called into question. Because she is neither a hard- nor a soft-core leftist, Rice is considered a "race traitor," a problem special to black people who do not adhere to an agenda from the Black Power era of the late 1960s.
That is the kind of single-mindedness that keeps black Americans out of big-time politics. That is because the "leadership" always seems to be calling for a reservation modeled on Leisure World, not high-quality public education, safer communities and a chance to compete.
Whatever Rice is and whatever she represents, she has the right to be what she wants and has no obligation to repeat the clichés of the civil rights establishment, which have become little more than predictable clouds of hot air. If she and Hillary Clinton were to square off in 2008, that campaign would be one of the most exciting in our time. Let's hope we see it.
Originally published on January 15, 2006
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