I didn't get a chance to respond before the thread closed, but thanks very much for the story you shared.

I wish it *did* surprise me; I've seen too much of it myself to be surprised. It did depress me a little further, though the personal stakes for me are/were inevitably less than for you.

FWIW, and with some small measure of redemption, in the projects you've heard me mention before we collected examples like this for pedagogial purposes; the journos we were training had to identify all the things that were wrong with those pieces, based on what they had learned ... they got it, and usually didn't repeat the errors (okay, after some reinforcement) in their own news stories. So the errors did indirectly go to some good use.

As usual, you raise an important point of the kind that's generally lost in the din ... much appreciated.

The comment (William Timberman's?) about the Irish made me think about all those Noraid jars you used to see in Irish pubs in the US, which all inevitably ended up in the IRA's hands.

The World Bank (and Yale) had a project a while back about the political economy of civil war and persistent conflict. The starting point for it was a large-n statistical study that tested different variables' influence on the persistence of war (which were followed up later by case studies). None were monocausal; some factors contributed robustly, others not so much. Some of them were what you'd expect, others not.

One of the surprises had to do with 'diaspora' communities ... the larger the diaspora, the more likely the war was to persist. One of the conclusions came back to that Noraid jar (or its correlaries); the diaspora communities inevitably sent money back to the combatant parties, which kept things going long after exhaustion of resources would have driven them to the negotiating table.

That first post was the most reasonable thing I've seen you say in here. The second one, to me? Well ...

I never said it was all about us; in other places I've pointed out that this is a blind spot in how we assess events overseas, over-emphasizing the weight of US interests of policy or actions when we think about others' interests or utterances. Of course, that doesn't mean that our actions don't matter at all.

But in the case of what I posted before ... the question was, why did the US brief (and not the Israelis) on Syria's alleged reactor, esp when (via Haaretz) the Israelis had asked them not to, in order to avoid embarassing Syria during the recent diplomatic dance.

Whether or not this has to do with the Israelis, or with any of the things I labelled 'speculation', it can't exactly NOT be about the US, since US actions (the factual basis not speculation about motives) are the subject, right?

Damn ... and I was just starting to think straight again after someone said something about "her loins activated" a couple hours ago ...

No, I second that e-motion.

I went over there to look for myself. It wasn't pretty. In addition to the inevitable charges of filthy racism, we now have "I know you romans like to spill the blood of the true followers of christ, but ...".

We definitely don't need any of that over here.

Thanks for that. I stand by my original point but, that said, this was fascinating, and I learned a lot from the links. Thanks again.

because it assumes a stable center against which various viewpoints can be measured.

From this, I thought Paul was talking about the Balance 'doctrine', in which multiple 'sides' are presented ... can't determine 'sides' without reference to a (possibly theoretical) center.

The fairness 'doctrine' I understand to be what FMD wrote, that a party would have to be given a chance to respond ... and that the piece should be written in such a way that it *could* be responded to (counter-example, 'when did you stop beating your wife').

"Fairness" and "Balance" are codified as journalism 'standards', too, along with accuracy, use of background, use of quotes, etc. "Balance" seems to be falling out of favor amongst journo trainers I have talked to, either for the reason Paul gives or because there are too many 'sides' and giving them all equal space puts too much of a burden on news judgment (sounds liek a cop-out to me, but whatever).

Ha -- no, it wasn't, but a lot of the spine-tingling 'commentary' I read over there would make Sugarman's 'we're blessed but you aren't' look practically reasonable and well-thought-out. Go see for yourself, but only if you're suffering from low blood pressure.

A few years ago, the World Bank did a study about patterns of media ownership and their relationship to various social outcomes. A summary was also included in their annual world development outlook, I think in 2001, which focused on institutions(chapter on the media).

The study looked at patterns of private ownership (and separately, state ownership) and found a great deal of concentration in most national media. Statistical tests found a high degree of correlation with various negative social outcomes, corruption, lack of transparency, etc, and no correlation with any positive outcomes. They went on to do further tests of theories about what mechanisms would have produced that result.

The key variable was concentration, not corporate ownership. Which, I think, strongly supports your point. I can point to a lot of ills in (especially print) media that lie at the feet of public listing ... stock prices drive business decisions which put an inordinate weight on news judgments. But these are swamped by the negative effects of concentration.

I'd let Amy Irving operate any part of me she wanted to. But not everyone knows that.

Except, I guess they do now. Sh*t.