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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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From: LindyBill	3/9/2005 1:39:11 PM
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The Journalism Bubble By Mike Rappaport therightcoast.blogspot.com In the Wall Street Journal today, Bret Stephens discusses several issues where journalists got it wrong recently. The cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades -- the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining American crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany -- would find most contemporary journalism useless. [Journalists missed these stories.] The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight. . . The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts from insignificant ones. As for the media, it shouldn't be too difficult to do better. Look for countervailing data. Broaden your list of sources. Beware of exoticizing your subject. This sounds great, but the problem is that when a large number of journalists all believe one thing, a journalist who asserts the opposite will be criticized. He may ultimately be vindicated, but that may be many years down the road. It is much like a stock market bubble. Some people knew that the internet stocks were overvalued in the late 1990s, but they did not sell, because they knew stock prices would remain high for a while, and they would look stupid and unsuccessful. There was little benefit to being too far ahead of others. Supreme Chaos By Mike Rappaport That's the title of a piece in the Wall Street Journal today written by Robert Nagel, who is visiting at the University of San Diego this semester. It is a devestating critique of the Supreme Court's recent death penalty edict. Here is an excerpt: Virtually every . . . aspect of Roper is . . . now routine: the happy insistence that the meaning of the Constitution “evolves”; the confident assertion that the nature of this evolution is ultimately a matter for the Court’s “own independent judgment”; the reliance on elite opinion as expressed in social science research or international treaties; the distrust of popular decisionmaking institutions like juries; the departure from prior rulings (in this case a decision rendered only 15 years earlier); the blithe willingness to settle under the mantle of legal principle such questions as “the age of maturity” – questions that are inherently unprincipled matters of degree; and the nationalization of issues once left to the states, along with the judicialization of policy decisions once thought to be legislative. All this is normal practice. It is the deeply confused and unsettling process that now substitutes for what at one time was conceived of as a set of fundamental, enduring principles that express the sovereign will of the people.

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