Robert David Sullivan

Truthiness and a summing up of the Obama presidency

I've been remiss in posting here, but busy at my paying job at America magazine. I wrote the cover story in our next print edition (not the one at right, but that's a good one too!), on the "15 Ways President Obama has changed the direction of America." I also have a column on Donald Trump as the "truthiness" candidate. Excerpt: 

The fact-free candidate is now poised to take the Republican presidential nomination, and some see his rise as an indictment of American journalism. But Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post does not accept the premise of a negligent press corps. “One of the most frequent complaints I hear,” he writes, “is that ‘the media doesn’t fact-check Donald Trump enough.” His response: “You are mistaking a lack of changed minds with a lack of fact-checking…. That is not a failure of fact-checking. It is the death of the belief in fact.”

 

The shaming frenzies around smart alecs from Harvard and MIT

One of the biggest stories in Boston this week, which quickly spread to national media, is about a Harvard Business School instructor nagging a Chinese restaurant for being overcharged $4. While not directly about politics, the Case of the Shredded Chicken with Extra Price is a fine illustration of how easy it is to shape and set public opinion in a few hours. It’s also an example of the anti-intellectualism, and hostility toward scientific inquiry, that course through American society.

Boston.com broke the story on Tuesday, publishing emails in which associate professor Ben Edelman complained about being charged $1 more than the website price for each take-out item he ordered from the Sichuan Garden. Edelman wrote at least five emails, getting more verbose and lawyerlike as he went on. (“I have already referred this matter to applicable authorities in order to compel your restaurant to identify all consumers affected…”)

Read my blog (Un)Conventional Wisdom at America magazine for more on politics, demographics and civic life. Recent posts include "Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Perversity of Political Triage" and "How Big Can America Get Before Its Political System Starts to Buckle?"

 

Oddly, I never subscribed to Life magazine

Sometimes I wish I had wasted more than half of my adult life on something fun instead of television and magazines.

If you’ve read my blog, you know about the television. Here are some magazine subscriptions I remember:

The Advocate (the gay newsweekly), Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, American Theatre, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Boston magazine, Christopher Street (a long-gone gay literary magazine), Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Men’s Fitness, Modern Photography (since consumed by Popular Photography), Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, New York magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Psychology Today, Reason (to bone up on libertarianism without having to read Ayn Rand), Rolling Stone, Utne Reader, Vanity Fair, Washington Monthly, the Weekly Standard, Yankee, and Z (“dedicated to resisting injustice”).

There was a magazine about Apple computers in the mix, but I forget the name. There was also Unzipped, a magazine about gay pornography as opposed to a gay pornography magazine. (You can justify any salaciousness by disguising it as sociology.) When I was a teenager just outside of Boston, I also subscribed to the Village Voice, mostly for movie reviews, and that’s the publication that aroused the suspicions of my father about my sexuality, because it kept putting stories about gay rights and AIDS on its front page.

A blogger's hopes for 2014

It’s a new year, but I’m in my old apartment, looking out over an abandoned health club and its weedy parking lot, still waiting for a Starbucks to open nearby and validate my six-year-old bet hunch this would become a thriving neighborhood. There is already something new about 2014: Marty Walsh is now the mayor of Boston, and I share Scot Lehigh’s hope that he’ll end the “big chill” that silenced civic debate under the thin-skinned Tom Menino. (Disclosure: I live 3.2 miles from the city line, so I don’t vote in Boston elections, but Walsh is my mayor to a greater degree than Barack Obama is the president of Puerto Rico.)

As a Boston-area resident, I’m looking forward to the MBTA running trains until 3 a.m. on weekends, and I hope that the late-night service doesn’t become known as the Puke Line. I hope that Walsh doesn’t spend all of the city’s discretionary funds replacing Menino’s name on countless signs all over Boston. (City Hall refuses to give an estimate on how many signs, Hubway stations, and trash bins give thanks to the mayor.) I hope that Boston’s population continues to grow, and the NIMBYists realize that none of the city’s problems — including high housing costs, deteriorating public transit, and empty downtown storefronts  — can be solved by keeping people out.

Personally, I hope I have a better-than-average 2014. (My apologies to half of you.) My only new year’s resolution to find someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve so I can go a full 365 days before breaking it.

For all my readers, I hope that each one of you gets the chance to experience schadenfreude in 2014. (You might have to take turns.)

And for everyone who follows me on this blog, Facebook, Twitter, or any other kind of asocial media, my resolution is not to post anything that you’ll regret sharing with others. No hoaxes, no stories that are too good to be true, and no dubious quotations. If it’s not confirmed by someone whose full-time job is reporting news within a few minutes of surfacing on Facebook, I don’t believe it. (And I wanted to believe that Kim Jung-un executed his uncle by feeding him to wild dogs.) I promise to take to heart Luke O’Neil’s “The Year We Broke the Internet,” in which he writes, “This conflation of newsiness with news, share-worthiness with importance, has wreaked havoc on the media’s skepticism immune systems.”

Happy 2014, and remember to get your flu shots, everyone.

Too creative to succeed

As I approach a landmark birthday with little money and a lack of entrée to the highest social circles of my profession, I can tell myself that I'm just too darn creative to make it big. That's what Jessica Olien's essay in Slate implies:

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.  

That sounds right to me, but you'll have to get me pretty drunk before I'll give any examples.

Coincidentally, my last post for America magazine is about satisficing in politics, which is one letter off but pretty close to what Olien is writing about: the tendency of people to pick the first "good enough" option that's presented to them. The subtle difference is that it means that people who are already in a position of power can sometimes implement creative ideas. But it's not necessarily the best way to reach the top.

Photo: underappreciated television genius Ernie Kovacs

 

Dear new city dwellers: What do you want and how can we make money giving it to you?

Jack Shafer writes for Reuters about the decline of alternative newspapers (like the Boston Phoenix, where I once worked) and makes a connection to the death of retail in big cities:

Mostly gone, too, is record-company advertising. Before that business was disrupted, the labels would give record stores — remember them? — big bags of “co-op” money to advertise the new releases, and even reissues! Video stores — remember them? — were big advertisers, too. Amazon has helped to clean out whole categories of retailing that once advertised in alt-weeklies, such as electronics, books, music and cameras. Big-box stores have displaced many of the indie retailers that long provided advertising backbone. And while Hollywood still places ads, it’s nothing compared to the heyday. [...]

These retail shifts have made it harder for publishers to distribute their weeklies. Before Tower Records went under, a paper could drop thousands of copies a week at the store’s many locations, and the stacks would disappear in a day or two. The video stores that once distributed them? Gone. Borders Books? Gone.

This is part of a so-far-unsolvable problem. We know that urban life is becoming fashionable again, and cities like Boston can't build apartments fast enough to meet demand. But so many appealing aspects of living in a big city are becoming extinct, such as retail stores where people can browse, hang out while waiting to meet friends, and just kill time. Movie theaters are becoming sparse and expensive, diners are being replaced by more upscale eateries that can cover downtown rents, and both the police and neighborhood groups are ready to shut down any bar that gets too popular. Alternative journalism, which boosted urban arts and commerce as much as it made money off them, is another victim of a glossed-out city.

Shy journalists and alternative newspapers (continued)

Thanks to Boston magazine's Peter Vigneron for mentioning me in his piece on the end of the Boston Phoenix (see my earlier post). Vigneron wonders whether some of us are too quick to write off new media:

There has already been a great deal of hand-wringing today, and I think much of it is warranted. Boston is poorer without the Phoenix, no doubt, even gloss-ified and short on writers and editors. But this is mourning for the Phoenix of 1972, or 1982, or even 2002: the Phoenix has not been the only smart, subversive kid on the block for a decade, at least. Earlier today, a journalist named Robert D. Sullivan wrote that with the Phoenix, an “alternative route to journalism disappears,” and strictly speaking he is right, but he misses the story for the news: in 2013, there are only alternative routes to journalism, and some of them are great, for journalists and for readers, and some of them are not. I’m sorry to see the Phoenix go, but its demise is one among many, and it’s been leaving us for a long time. I just have no idea, for Boston, what comes next.

I don't know what's next, it might be great, but different types of personalities thrive in different environments. The people attracted to journalism in, say, 1988, are not the same people who would choose to enter the profession in 2013.

Boston Phoenix closes, alternative route to journalism disappears

Devastating news for the Boston journalism scene, as the 47-year-old alternative weekly closes up shop:

The Boston Phoenix, which only six months ago reinvented itself from a tabloid-sized weekly newspaper known for its gritty coverage of politics and the arts into a glossy magazine, will be closing immediately, while its sister publications in Providence and Portland will remain open, according to a statement from the company.

The Phoenix is how I got started as a journalist (after a short-but-terrifying stint as a reporter in central Mass.). My experience cannot be duplicated today.

I was hired (for money, not an unpaid internship) writing listings for the Phoenix's "Summer Preview" back when it was a two-part, mammoth issue with hundreds of pages of information on concerts, museums, amusement parks, films, flea markets, and everything else going on in New England. Because I was accurate and tried to make these blurbs as fun as possible (calling a nut museum a "crack house," stuff like that), my supervising editor gave me a permanent job writing weekly arts listings.

Today, that listings job would be nothing more than data entry for a website, almost surely done from a laptop in my living room. But at the Phoenix, I got to know writers and editors, and I soon felt confident enough to put myself forward as a writer, starting with brief interviews (comedian Pat Paulsen was one of my first) and then long essays on politics and pop culture.

Eventually, I became the Phoenix's supplements editor (back when advertising from bookstores, ski resorts, and the like made it possible to put a literary section and other extra goodies in almost every issue of the paper). Already a pioneer in covering gay-and-lesbian issues, the Phoenix added a monthly supplement called One in Ten that focused on LGBT issues, and being its first editor is one of my proudest achievements.

Later I wrote regular theater reviews for the Phoenix, being given the opportunity because I had become an all-utility player for the paper. Writing one review a week, and working under a patient and extremely helpful editor (theater critic Carolyn Clay), I was able to learn about the Boston theater scene and develop a style of criticism. Again, I don't think I'd be able to do that today; local arts coverage been gutted, and I'd be competing with theater majors for jobs churning out five "reviews" a day for some website based in New York.

I'm sad for myself about the Phoenix's closing, but I feel terrible for all of the people who might have followed in my footsteps. It's already hard to believe, but there was once a way to start a journalism career without shoveling free copy into the maw of the Huffington Post.

Post updated here.

 

Too many dicks on the airwaves

If I wrote that the president (or, worse, the Republican speaker of the House) was a "dick," it would be evidence of the lack of standards among bloggers. But Mark Halperin's use of the term to describe Barack Obama on live TV is being treated as only a smidgen over the line of acceptability — even though its sentiment is typical of broadcast punditry.   

I can understand why Halperin did it. It's got to be tough coming up with new political analysis every day when you're not allowed to talk about policy (too boring) and the horse race dynamics change so little. Other than flipping back and forth between saying that the president is a genius and that he's a stumblebum, you have to talk about "boomlets" for people who are never, ever going to occupy the White House. (Sorry, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, but Rick Perry is not going to win the GOP nomination after sponsoring a Christians-only prayerfest that implicitly kisses off Catholics as well as Jews and secular libertarians.)

James Fallows has it right:

The real problem is the dickishness of our mainstream political analysis, especially from the "savviest" practitioners. Back during my days as media critic, I argued in Breaking the News and a related Atlantic cover story that the laziest and ultimately most destructive form of political coverage came when journalists seemed to imagine that they were theater critics or figure-skating judges. The what of public affairs didn't interest them. All they cared about was the how.

I may be Massachusetts-centric, but my sense is there was a tipping point with the Bush-Dukakis presidential race of 1988 (and the demise of Gary Hart earlier that year). After that, I noticed a heightened contempt among political journalists for "losers." It came to be an article of faith that any candidate who couldn't master the atmospherics of a campaign — e.g., using flags as effectively as Bush did or answering "What would you do if your wife was raped and murdered?" in a dramatically satisfying way — couldn't possibly be effective at governing. So why bother to even mention his or her policy views?

Note: I do not endorse the sentiment below when it comes to actual dance floors, but it's highly appropriate for the male-dominated field of political journalism.

 

Another theory on why Bill Keller thinks Twitter is icky

Last week I speculated that New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has a bias against social networking because the executive editor of the New York Times is too busy fending off people trying to kiss his ass to spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook.

I Hate the New York Times has another theory behind Keller's rant, which is that the Gray Lady simply hates all forms of fun enjoyed by normal people, such as cursing and going to flea markets. Of course, this strengthens rather than competes with my theory of of Dumontesque elitism.

...for every bizarre activity [New York Times writers] praise, there is another relatively harmless pastime they disparage.  Why?  Maybe it’s too lowbrow.  Maybe it’s because the fans of said pastime are presumed to be illiterate proles who don’t understand the consequences of their actions.  Or maybe it’s for the opposite reason — the pastime is question has gotten too popular with the hip, trend-chasing urbanites whom the writers fondly imagine comprise their core readership.  There must be something dangerous about it.

Horrible murder reminds me why I prefer scripted shows to reality TV

It's fun to gossip about people we don't know. They could be movie stars, politicians, victims of freak accidents, or reality-TV characters (who become celebrities by being famous).

I like to gossip about fictional TV characters.

There's no way to be tasteless or irresponsible or just batshit crazy when speculating about the heroes and villains on The Good Wife or Justified. I don't feel like an ass for snarking about the bedroom habits of characters on 30 Rock or hoping that someone on Breaking Bad is tortured and killed. They're not victims of sensationalistic journalism, and it's impossible to smear them.

Plus, everyone who watches a TV series (or sees a play, reads a novel, etc.) is on the same page: We know what the author wants us to know about a character and no more. We all have access to all the truth that exists. We're free to imagine more, but we can't get self-righteous and claim certainty that Breaking Bad's Walter White had lousy parents or that Community's Abed is a secret anti-colonialist Kenyan.

But a lot of people think it's a waste of time to offer opinions about fictional characters. They'd rather offer opinions about real people they don't know.

Kerfuffle on "white flight" from Democratic Party is premature

Some good pundits are getting way too worked up about the chart below, from Lee Drutman and Progressive Fix. It shows that most states have experienced recent declines in Democratic Party affiliation in proportion to its white population. In other words, the whiter the state, the steeper the drop:

The generally level-headed Matt Yglesias takes this very seriously:

I used to hold to the view that the growing non-white share of the electorate would, over time, tip elections to Democrats. I now think the system will remain near equilibrium and what we’ll instead see is white voters growing more Republican as Democrats are more and more seen as the party of non-whites.

Jonathan Chait thinks that Yglesias is overlooking the Democratic bent of today's younger voters, but Jamelle Bouie cautions that "Chait is probably underestimating the extent to which a large number of whites will become more conservative as the nonwhite population grows."

I may be missing something here, but this seems to be a lot of weight to put on Gallup polling data that do not necessarily reflect how people will actually vote in 2012. Moreover, the data does not show Democratic Party affiliation but change in Democratic Party affiliation over two years. I'm not saying that having an African-American president has had zero effect on white voters' perception of the Democratic Party, but I think the economy is the main factor here. White voters' support for Democrats went up when the economy cratered under a Republican president, and it went down when the economy did not seem to get much better under a Democratic president. This is a pretty unsurprising trend, and it's premature to think that the past two years represents some kind of long-term realignment.

So what accounts for the racial differences in attitudes toward the Democratic Party during Obama's first two years? My guess is that nonwhite voters (especially African-Americans) are simply loyal to the Democratic Party in good times and bad. Over the past half-century, African-Americans have voted overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential candidates in just about any economic climate (and not only when an African-American has headed the ticket). Given that the Democrats continue to be seen as stronger on civil rights and urban policy, I'm not shocked that the party has not slid in popularity among nonwhites.

It doesn't follow that polling changes among white voters over a brief period of economic crisis represents some massive change in the political landscape. If the country enjoys peace and prosperity but Democrats continue to lose ground among white voters, then I'll be worried.