"The Liars Win" when Propaganda is Conflated with News

E. J. Dionne's editorial in The Washington Post today accurately describes what is happening in the media today as propaganda and outright lies are being treated as "news." (hat tip to Steven Bennen for the link) There has long been a tradition in the media (if imperfectly executed) to provide "both sides" to the story. This approach works if both sides act, at least relatively, in good faith. But people with an agenda can take advantage of this approach by promoting lies and propaganda as news. As long as citizens can recognize the difference, the republic stands. However, in recent years, the liars seem to be winning.

The first step, it seems to me, was to fuel people's fears that journalists could not be fair if their personal views leaned in one political direction. This, of course, meant completely denying the professionalism of journalism. So the meme has become "the liberal media"--and in spite of all evidence, the public at large believes that this "liberal" media is bent on promoting only its "side." Yet as many analysts have pointed out, the talk shows on radio, the guests invited to speak on those Sunday shows, the folks interviewed on the major networks are most often conservatives. Just look at how often John McCain, a twice-failed candidate for president, gets a slot on those shows. Mike Huckabee gets his own talk show. Did John Kerry get his own talk show? Or Howard Dean? But if you can convince the public that "the media" is "liberal," then you have convinced the public not to trust journalists' pursuit of truth--and then you can take advantage of that mistrust by promoting your own "truth."

The firestorm over the Journolist (a listserv for journalists) is the latest attempt at totally annihilating trust in journalists. "Journolist scandal proves media bias" screams a headline--and people fall for it without reading any more of the details. Tucker Carlson, a conservative pundit, has been milking this "scandal" for all its worth--but he refuses to release the full e-mails on which he is basing his claims of a liberal conspiracy among the members of that listserv, a listserv that included one of his own conservative reporters (so how conspiratorial could the listserv be?!). Ezra Klein, the creator of Journolist, explains why he created the listserv here: on his blog for The American Prospect. Most of the members on that list lean center-left, but their participation was not conspiratorial but empirical: they needed a place to discuss their ideas and to access experts who might be less willing to answer questions elsewhere. (The thing is, most of the public probably doesn't even know what a listserv is--and how many there are for every subject and interest.) Sure, ideas were raised that others in the listserv shot down--but Tucker Carlson and his ilk don't reveal the shooting down, the consequences of debate. Of course, right-wingers love conspiracy theories (uh huh, and left-wingers do, too, but for some reason, the left-wing doesn't carry the day, does it? Does anyone with any sense REALLY believe the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11? Oh, but how many on the right believe that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States--and that he's a commie pinko?) To further support their view of the leftist conspiracy of Journolist, radicals claim that liberal pundits such as Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann were on the list. Not so, says Klein. But who's listening?

And that's the point, isn't it: to get people to stop listening, to stop thinking. When the majority of the public believes that journalists cannot be trusted, then the power-hungry win. The liars win.

This trend to conflate propaganda with news is evident in the recent Andrew Breitbart/ Shirley Sherrod episode. And here, the purpose was not only to conflate propaganda and legitimate news but to push the idea of the equivalency of white racism and black racism in this country. The NAACP had called on the Tea Party to repudiate racist elements in its ranks. Now, anyone who has listened to Tea Party participants in interviews and who have watched videos know that there are racists in the party. That's not to say that every person involved in the Tea Party is a racist. A radical group is going to attract un-desirable elements. But wouldn't it be best for the country if a group such as this said, "We're in opposition to the government led by a black man, but we're not against a black man being president. Racist literature, signs, and statements are totally out of character in our movement." But instead of doing that, radicals such as Andrew Breitbart go about trying to prove that white racism can't be so bad because there are black racists, too: the stupid (yes! stupid!) argument of equivalency. It's the childish argument that what I'm doing isn't so bad because others--especially those who claim some kind of moral superiority--are doing it, too. Only in this case, Breitbart chose a woman who was communicating exactly the opposite of what he purported that she was communicating. Here was a woman who had experienced racism of the worst sort--the kind that led to a miscarriage of justice. Yet here she was, telling her audience of how she rose above hate and how she believed that they should all work together to create a society where people of all ethnicities could live in better communities. And her audience demonstrated their understanding of her message with "uh huhs" and "alrights" and "amens" and their sympathy with her feelings and experience, likewise.

Here, again, the purpose is to call into question any sense of fairness and justice on "the other side"--and to use race to do that. The far-right has the media and the government so scared of being accused of unfairness, that they bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of unfairness and thus give credence to lies. Breitbart got what he wanted: a larger audience, a national presence in the media, and more white followers who believe that they are just as discriminated against as blacks in this country--contrary to evidence. Because, guess what, they've been gradually led not to believe in evidence, to conflate propaganda with news.

Without journalists being able to ask hard questions, without people having some trust in the professionalism of journalism, a country's citizens are at the mercy of the powerful. Just look at dictatorships such as Burma, which routinely arrests journalists and passes jail sentences of twenty years on those who speak truth to power. The rodeo clowns win; the man (or woman) in the saddle loses.

More Conflation, Propaganda vs. News, black racism vs. white racism

• "Fox News, the DOJ Pseudo-Scandal, and White Racial Hysteria," Jonathan Chait, at The New Republic
  
  
• And now the back-tracking to find SOMETHING to hang around Shirley Sherrod's neck: "Defining Lynching Down," Adam Serwer, on Jeffrey Lord's claiming that Shirley Sherrod lied when she described Bobby Hall's being beaten to death by Sheriff Screws and his colleagues as a "lynching." Disgusting. Having been called out for lying about Sherrod's hopeful message, the right now is looking for any mud to sling on the woman.

Taking Away the Limelight from Scumbags

Michelle Cottle says it best: "The End of Andrew Breitbart," on The New Republic website. And here's a quote:

Increasingly no one cares about (or recognizes) the difference between marshalling facts to make your argument and just completely making shit up.

Unreconstructed Lying

When the Shirley Sherrod story broke, I was in the middle of attending freshman orientation with my daughter at a state university in Georgia, and so I came in on what seemed to be at the time the tail-end of the story: a tape of Ms. Sherrod's speaking at an NAACP dinner had been edited to suggest that she was a racist; it had been published on Andrew Breitbart's website; after Breitbart and his ilk created a firestorm, administrative officials panicked and fired Ms. Sherrod without researching the truth. It was finally revealed that the tape had been edited to grossly mislead (and that Brietbart had had it in his possession for several weeks before posting it).

I learned that, at first, Breitbart and other far-right bloggers yelled foul over Ms. Sherrod's words, claiming that here was a prime example of an African-American woman in a position of power (USDA's Georgia state director for rural development) who admitted to failing to help a white farmer. It was a nice story to use to claim the equivalency of black racism and white racism in this country, that there was no foundation for criticizing all those white Tea Party people showing up with racist signs. Only that was a lie. Now Breitbart is claiming that he posted the video not because it reveals Ms. Sherrod's racism (racism which the unedited tape clearly refutes) but because it reveals the racism of the NAACP members listening to Ms. Sherrod and clapping at times in her speech when she is describing her previous attitudes. Only that's a lie, too, now that I have listened to the whole damn tape, to five sections that Breitbart has now posted on his website, probably believing that most people won't take the time to listen to it. And as there are only 8 comments on that site (as of 2:00 p.m. today), I think it's safe to say that most of Breitbart's loyal listeners and readers will not view the entire tape and will accept Breitbart's continued unreconstructed lying.

What Ms. Sherrod does in her speech is put one of her past actions in context. First, she tells the crowd about her father being murdered by a white man and the family never receiving justice. Anyone who knows anything about the African-American experience, especially in the South, will know that it was not unusual for a white man to murder a black man and not suffer any legal consequences. In addition, Ms. Sherrod describes a time when a bunch of white men showed up at her home and burned a cross on the front yard. Her mother--then a widow--was home alone with the baby boy born just weeks after his father's murder--and a couple of other children. The family was in danger, but several neighbors--all African-American men--showed up with their shotguns. They didn't fire a shot, and they allowed the white men to leave, but their show of unity prevented further violence. This background puts everything else into context.

Ms. Sherrod describes how she had wanted to leave the South, with its terrible memories, but that she finally decided to stay to help create change, and so, long before her tenure as a government official with the USDA, she worked for a non-profit to help farmers. But she said that when she "made that commitment [to stay in the South and to create change], [she] was making it to black people, and to black people only...But you know," she went on to say, "God will show you things and he'll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people." [Here the silence is broken by affirmative responses: "all right, all right."] And that's her preface to the story of when her attitude changed. In the edited tape, these words are missing--Ms. Sherrod's indicating to her listeners that she was to change her mind about helping "her own" alone. The audience did not clap when she said that her first intentions were to help black people alone. There were no "amens" there. So Ms. Sherrod tells the story that most people have heard totally out of context, of how a white farmer came to Ms. Sherrod for help and how when he had spent a great deal of time showing he was superior to her, she wasn't inclined to help him as much as she should have, so she referred him to a white lawyer because she figured he could get help from "his own." When the white farmer came back to her and told her that the lawyer had not helped him, she realized that she had been wrong. Sherrod then helped the white farmer get what he needed, and she goes on to say some really inspiring words:

I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate.... I've come to realize that we have to work together. And it's sad that we don't have a room full of whites and blacks here tonight 'cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Toni Morrison says, 'Race exists, but it doesn't matter.' We have to work just as hard. I know it's, you know, that the vision is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive, you know, our children won't have the communities that they need to stay in, to live in and have a good life if we can't figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people--we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.

After viewing this entire tape, it's clear to me that the folks in that room were receptive to Ms. Sherrod's message. They weren't applauding her racism; they were applauding her altruistic ideals to overcome racism and to make the world a better place. As Ms. Sherrod says, the problem is poverty; the problem is the haves and have-nots; the problem is that those in power want to keep power, and they keep that power by dividing us. In posting the edited video and in continuing to spew lies, Andrew Breitbart and others like him are counting on perpetuating those divisions.

[After writing that last sentence, I came across this video of Anderson Cooper's interview with Ms. Sherrod. Breitbart himself might not be racist, but he is using racism to make a political point (albeit, unfairly, and with lies), and he certainly doesn't care one iota about who gets hurt. His cynical manipulations, however, are no better than racism. And he needs to be called out on this!]

More Here:

• "Some Find Irony in Shirley Sherrod's USDA Incident," by Krissah Thompson, Washington Post, 23 July 2010.
  
  
• "Amen Canard," by William Saletan, Slate, 23 July 2010.

Pet Peeves I: The Teaching of Writing

For about twenty-five years, I taught writing at the university/college level. I was a good teacher, consistently receiving positive evaluations from my students as well as from colleagues who visited my classes and evaluated my teaching. To prepare for that teaching, I took graduate classes in rhetoric and composition and taught a total of eight freshman composition classes in graduate school. Later, I learned from experienced colleagues, in the inevitable exchange of ideas with office mates, in workshops and in reading research. And I learned from my students. One of the most important things I learned as a teacher was not to underestimate my students. I treated them as practicing writers, and they became practicing writers. Oh, there were certainly failures--but the successes far outnumbered the failures.

And so it is with a sinking heart when I hear from students that their college writing teachers are telling them to write paragraphs with 7 sentences (or 11 or 10) in each paragraph, and to write essays with five paragraphs that develop three points. I tutor these confused students, who think the form is the rule rather than a (suspect-at-the-college-level) teaching tool.  The college instructor who tells her students that every paragraph should have so many sentences, no less and no more, is condescending to those students. She is assuming that adults cannot understand that writing is a messy process that involves discovery and experimentation. She is so concerned about whether or not that student is going to pass the state writing test that she has abdicated her role as a teacher, someone with experience in the craft who passes on to students the best of what she has learned.

Of course, I understand the frustrations the writing teacher encounters, especially at open enrollment colleges such as the one where I now tutor part-time. Because of the poor economy, colleges are filling classes to the maximum and beyond; full-time writing instructors teach at least five classes.  Students in those classes are variously prepared for those classes: some learned English as a second language, others don't quite meet the expectations of the proponents of academic English after twelve years of secondary education, and others are returning to writing after years in the work force where they weren't required to write academically. The easy way for the writing instructor to tame the unruly is to demand adherence to rules, no matter how arbitrary those rules might be in the apprenticeship of real writing:

• An essay is composed of five paragraphs: an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Each body paragraph has a topic sentence that states the focus of that paragraph. 
• Each body paragraph should have ____# sentences (7 sentences, 11 sentences, 12 sentences--number depends upon the teacher).
• Never begin a sentence with "because."
• Never begin a sentence with "and" or "but."
  
• Never use the second person ("you") in an essay.
  
• Never use the first-person ("I") in an essay.
  
• Never write sentence fragments.

The conscientious student, especially, takes these rules to heart. And so [woot! woot! here I am breaking a "rule" that is not a rule!] that is why today I had a student who was worried about which way was the "right" way to write an essay. The teacher in her first learning support class told her that she should have three points in every essay and that those three points should be developed in five paragraphs. The teacher in her second learning support class told her that it was okay to have two points in an essay and that if those points needed to be developed in six paragraphs, that was okay, too. "Which is right?" she asked me. That is also why I tutor students who have the most wonderful experiences that relate to the topic they are trying to develop but are frustrated because their instructor told them never to use first-person in their writing. And students who have a great, approachable "tone" in their writing but have been told by their writing teacher never to use the second person. [Woot! woot! the previous sentence is a sentence fragment AND begins with a coordinating conjunction!]

I was recently asked by a writing instructor how many sentences I suggest students include in paragraphs that they write for the state writing exam. I tried to give a nuanced answer, but it was clear that this instructor thought his students too stupid for nuance. "At this level [the freshman level of English composition]," the teacher said, "students need a number."

Take a number. That's education today. And that's my number one pet peeve.

Returning

I've moved many times in my adult life, but those moves have doubled back on themselves so that I often feel as if I'm in some kind of reincarnation cycle, that I'm being sent back to a place I've been before in order to work something out or rectify some grievance or succeed in some task I've failed before. But the cycle is just shy of the mark in a couple of ways, perhaps the most important way being that my returns have yet to result in any clarification or illumination. I've returned to Texas twice in my adult life, after living in other states of the union, but not exactly to the same locale. In 1983, my husband and I left our birth state of Texas to live in Louisiana for four years; then we returned to Texas, to Bryan/College Station, where we lived and worked for six years. Then we left for Minnesota, where we lived for 2 1/2 years before heading to Columbus, Georgia (and a town nearby) for a seven-year stint before returning to Texas once again, to Belton, a small town an hour's drive north of Austin. Staying there for 3 1/2 years, we were lured back to Georgia by expectations that ultimately didn't materialize, and here we've been--except now my husband has taken a job in Louisiana, just north of New Orleans. Shall I follow? Will we have lived twice in every state in which we've made a home in our adult lives? I don't know yet. I really like the town where I'm living now, and my husband is hesitant to cut the cord, too. We remain in a kind of limbo before our next geographical reincarnation.

But the one state to which we have yet to return to live--though we have vacationed there several times--is Minnesota. When will I return to live there, I wonder, as I sequester myself from the heat wave that is washing across Georgia. Today, the temperature in Ely, Minnesota, rose to 73 degrees Fahrenheit. Here where I am in Georgia, the temperature hit the mid-nineties and is predicted to hover near 100 degrees tomorrow. Perhaps because I haven't returned to live in Minnesota as I have in Texas, Georgia, and (perhaps) Louisiana, Minnesota still has the lure of a young love never consummated. It remains in memory not just as a "what was" but as a "what could have been," a "could have been" more poignant because of the opportunities that were opening up to me there just as I was packing to leave.

If the history of my doubling back stops in south Louisiana, perhaps the northwoods of Minnesota will be there for me just past my last breath. Perhaps I will be reincarnated in some other form, as Heart-flower (Pale Pink Corydalis), clinging tenaciously on a rocky outcrop above the Kawishiwi River; or maybe as a loon (more likely) calling wildly on Lark Lake. Or maybe I'll just be content with this last request: scatter my ashes on some quiet lake in northern Minnesota, my last return, my final resting place.

BP, Bad Bosses, and the Rest of Us

As oil and gas continue to gush out of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and as the CEO of BP Group has made one public relations gaffe after another, I have been thinking of how people end up in management positions for which they are experientially or temperamentally unprepared or ill-suited. Tony Hayward seems to have risen steadily through the ranks, from his blue collar background to his appointment as CEO of BP Group. Along the way, did Hayward reveal any of the hubris and public relations cluelessness that he has displayed so well since the oil rig explosion? Or is he so embedded in a culture in which disdain of "ordinary" people is a given that his behavior was not interpreted as unusual or contemptible as the public would assess his later words and actions to be? More talented and smarter people than I concluded long ago that money and power corrupt. Too little of either, and one is crushed, diminished, hopeless--too much, and one becomes superior, assuming that one is better than others, blessed not because of caprice or luck or circumstance but because of some entitlement that gives one permission to discount the worth of others.

Like many managers promoted to levels for which they are, nevertheless, ill-suited or unprepared, Tony Hayward seems to have known the right people and said the right things in the past. Hayward's stepping into the role of CEO followed an earlier tragedy, the explosion of BP's oil refinery plant in Texas City in 2005, in which 15 workers were killed and 170 others were injured. An investigation of BP's safety record revealed serious problems, and OSHA imposed a huge fine on the company. The CEO at the time, Lord John Browne (the man who had been impressed by Hayward and who had promoted him to the position as his executive assistant in 1990), retired early and Hayward took his place. Before that final promotion, Hayward said these words at a townhall meeting in Houston: "We have a leadership style that is probably too directive and doesn't listen sufficiently well. The top of the organization doesn't listen hard enough to what the bottom of the organization is saying." He told his audience that "we need to be part and parcel of the society in which we operate."

Has BP's safety record improved since Hayward spoke those words and since he became the public face of BP? Has the top of the organization listened to the bottom? The record certainly suggests not, as information has emerged indicating that employees raised many concerns about safety even months before the explosion. And in his testimony before Congress, Hayward repeatedly claimed that he was not aware of decisions made concerning Deepwater Horizon, so he must not have been following his own advice to "listen...to what the bottom of the organization is saying." His own words and actions--saying he wanted to get his life back, suggesting that the oil spill would be minimal, and attending a tony yacht race while shrimpers and fishermen in the Gulf were losing their livelihoods--suggest that he also was not "part and parcel of the society in which [BP] operates."

How often have workers heard such high-minded promises from management, only to be disappointed by the lack of consequent action? Not only are organizations difficult to change. Something happens to many people when they reach the top of their professions, are promoted to positions where they have power over other people, or achieve their dreams of wealth. There are exceptions, but too often people begin to believe that they deserve their rewards more than any other, that luck, caprice, or circumstances had little to do with their achievements. Or if they think that luck and circumstances had too great a hand in their success, they do everything they can to conceal that fact, their lack of confidence in their own worth translating into bullying behavior. (See the research reported in "The Making of Toxic Boss" for a discussion of how the combination of power and incompetence leads to abusive behavior in the workplace.)

Over the years, most of us have encountered these "Mini-Me's" of management. Anyone who Googles "bad habits of bosses" will find numerous articles that list behavior he or she will recognize:

• The boss who gives staff an assignment that is "high priority" and that must be completed immediately--and then reverses his demands. The staff spend hours on the assignment, only to be told that the work isn't important, after all. Priorities change overnight, sometimes within the hours of a single workday. Or reports that the boss insisted were high priority are completed, handed in, and disappear into a black hole. The boss does not provide feedback, fails to follow through with the recommendations, and then acts as if the report never existed.
  
  
• The boss who constantly criticizes and rarely, if ever, praises. In 2002, National Public Radio's Workplace Correspondent David Molpus used a recent academic study on bad bosses to solicit stories from his listeners. One listener described two laboratories where he had worked. In one, the workers were proud of their work, competed in working overtime, and stayed with the company a long time. The boss of this laboratory listened to her employees, praised them publicly, and when one of them made a mistake, worked with the employee to rectify the error. At a second laboratory, however, the boss rarely ventured outside her office, was impatient when employees reported problems, never praised employees, and publicly criticized those who committed errors. At that place of employment, the turnover rate "was staggering."
  
  
• The boss who blames others for every error, mistake, or roadblock. People on the make are particularly prone to being abusive in this way. They are frantic to be seen by those above them as always competent, prepared, perfect, so they deflect any problems away from themselves. They are quick to blame mistakes and errors on others, even when the problems are part of the everyday experience of the job, unavoidable and eventually solvable. This abusive behavior can even become psychotic, for the person who fails to admit his own mistakes--or who refuses to accept that less-than-perfect outcomes may be the result of circumstances or multiple rather than individual error--may be so compelled to deflect blame from himself that he begins to view his employees as "enemies," as people determined to undermine his authority. He may direct blame for all problems--real or imagined--to one employee who becomes the scapegoat for the boss. Other employees may notice this behavior, but because they fear for their own jobs and because they feel they don't have the power to change the office dynamics, they can't help but be relieved that someone else is there to buffer them from their abusive boss.

These and other habits of bad bosses show up again and again in articles on management. Although in the long run bad management is bad business, bad bosses often have long tenures because senior management may only care for the bottom line. If the bad boss looks good on paper (often the result of the good work of cowed yet competent workers), the bad boss remains, no matter how many talented employees leave in response to bad management.

So what recourse do employees have? Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and author of No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving one that Isn't, says that "[i]n normal organizational life, for people who have less power, the best thing is to get out. If you can't do that," he advises,"try to avoid contact with the person as much as possible." As a final recourse, he suggests that "[y]ou can learn not to care." [See Sutton's "Why I Wrote the No Asshole Rule," Harvard Business Review, March 16, 2007; also, "Prof has advice for tackling workplace jerks," at msnbc.com.]

In an economy where over 14 million people are currently unemployed and job competition is fierce, leaving a bad boss is not an option for many people. Also, avoiding the bad boss is useful advice only for those who do not answer directly to management. The best option might be learning not to care, especially if you're a cynic to begin with--but that's a poor option for those to whom other employees report, unless you're an asshole yourself. And there's the rub: evidently, assholeness is contagious. "Jerk poisoning," Professor Sutton says, "is a contagious disease. It's something you get and give to others."

Of course, we don't know how BP CEO Tony Hayward treats employees who answer directly to him, but his public behavior certainly reminds us that poor management skills can have devastating consequences, to individuals, to the organization, and even beyond. In this terrible economy, organizations need to re-assess their management techniques and do as Robert Sutton suggests, that companies "screen for jerks as they hire and purge the bullies already in their ranks because, in almost all cases, they cost more than they contribute."