The Art of Editing

 I miss the grand old magazines; you trusted their editors to give you some perspective. 

I miss The Economist, as it once was and is no longer. I realized they had lost it when they abruptly switched from referring to Jean-Marie LePen as “that thug” to “that wily old paratrooper.” He had become a legitimate contender for the French presidency. So I realized they were subject to influence. Then I started noticing a feminist slant. As a comment online has it, “You’d think that a magazine called The Economist would understand something about economics — but only if you hadn’t read The Economist in the last 15 years or so.”

I miss the old Time magazine, which used to have such editorial style. It used to delightfully break the rules. Everyone knew you sold more copies with a photograph on your cover; for years, Time insisted on being artistic, and having a cover illustration. It made its own rules: it introduced, for example, the "interrobang." I realized they had lost it when an article described the Nazis as rejecting progress; as if that was the problem. This was the opposite of the Nazi concept. They were the “progressives,” the “futurists.” This mischaracterization struck me as deeply sinister. They were apparently trying to identify the Nazis with modern conservatives. 

I miss the old Free Press Weekly; now long gone. I expect few will know what I am talking about. I cannot even find it in any archives online. A publication of the Winnipeg Free Press. It was supposedly a farmers’ paper, but the editorial selection was wonderfully quirky. Crazy things like experiments in ESP; but not sensationalist. Not like the Weekly World News. More like listening to Joe Rogan today.

I miss the old Hit Parader. The title is misleading; it was not just a fan magazine. It was musically literate and excellent on insights into the best in current popular music. The editor, whoever it was, just had great taste.

National Geographic: I used to love it in my youth. Many did. At one point I bought all the back issues on CD. Great photography as well as great, informative articles. Now if I pick up an issue it is all politics, and nothing you couldn’t predict without bothering to read.

I miss the old National Lampoon. It was the product of fine creative minds. I assume, as is usually the case, its success depended on one particular editor, and when he moved on, he could not be replaced.

Alberta Report was once great. But the founder and original editor, Ted Byfield, retired from it, and it did not last much longer. Catholic Insight used to be great, but the editor, Father de Valk, retired, and it quickly withered to an online publication of irregular bland articles.

Harrowsmith was once great. But the original editor lost control in a divorce settlement and it soon spiralled downwards into trite politics.

A similar thing happened online with Arts and Letters Daily. It used to be the place to go for everything new in arts, culture, and ideas. Now it’s not worth bothering with.

Drudge Report is another striking online case: it used to be a place you had to visit regularly in case you missed something. It broke many stories. Then something happened. I don’t know what—supposedly Matt Drudge is still editing it. But I suspect he has secretly retired and delegated editorial decisions. Or maybe he just got lazy.

Conclusion: a great managing editor is a rare and invaluable creative talent. Bad editors tend to cover for lack of judgement or imagination by going political. And for some reason, always leftist politics. If their politics are on the right, they remain unpredictable and interesting.

I think the same thing happens in academics.

Merit and Class

 

Kathy Shaidle

David Brooks’s NYT essay “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?” is stirring much attention. Link was posted here yesterday. This seems to mark an inflection point in the ongoing collapse of the ancien regime. Members of the Second Estate are starting to move over, to acknowledge that the Third Estate has legitimate grievances. They are not just deplorables, bitter clingers, rednecks, racists, unwashed peasants,

However, Brooks does not fully get it. He argues that the problem is the “modern meritocracy,” “that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we [sic] possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.”

To describe this system as a “meritocracy” is to add insult to injury. A system that preserves class privileges generation to generation is the opposite of a meritocracy: it means success is by birth rather than merit.

Arguably, one reason why things do not seem to work as well as they used to, in Canada or in the US, is that we have in recent decades abandoned merit in favour of inherited privilege. Some of this privilege is enforced by “affirmative action,” discrimination on the basis of race or sex rather than merit. But most of it comes from the growing emphasis on, as Brooks says, “academic achievement.”

Academic achievement is not merit, and is not necessarily related to it. Merit means being the best at doing the given job. Free markets tend to do that. Credentialism (“academic achievement”) and such similar regulations and restraints on trade work against that.

Journalism is a case in point. As Brooks points out:

“When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

This parallels a clear decline in the quality of North American journalism, which surely everybody who loves the smell of wet ink can see, and which is reflected in the subscription numbers. And the rising competition that is eating this legacy media’s lunch is, just as in the glory days of journalism, most often card-carrying members of the working class who never attended university, let alone journalism school: Kate MacMillan, Kathy Shaidle, Matt Drudge, “Clyde Do Something,” “the Pleb,” and the like.

Journalism is a highly-skilled occupation: perhaps the most highly skilled. Language is itself mankind’s most sophisticated invention, underlying and comprehending everything else we have accomplished. A journalist must be master of it: able to write both well and fast, on any topic, on demand. Moreover, he must know how to become an instant expert on any topic.

Being able to do it well is the acid test. On the whole, more members of the “working class” can than members of the professional class. This is a strong indication that the professional class collectively is not more intelligent than the working class. The magnificent organization of the recent “Freedom Convoy” to Ottawa, all done on the fly, is another.

Our growing demand over recent decades for formal academic credentials has worked to weed out the people who can do journalism well. It weeds out the best and brightest, no doubt, in other fields too. 

It works against merit in a number of ways. 

First, one’s family must have a good bit of money, and be prepared to invest it in you, for you to be able to stay out of the workforce for four, six, or nine years gathering some academic credential. This would be true even if higher education were free. This favours established wealth over ability.

Second, higher education is of course not free. Brooks notes that the journalists at the top newspapers come not just from universities, but from the top 29 most elite universities. He cites the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, Duke, and the University of Chicago. These are all private universities, with astronomical tuition—tuition growing ever higher, vastly faster than the rate of inflation. Your parents must be wealthy to afford you this entry ticket—even leaving aside the common “legacy” preferences. The rich thus stay rich, and the poor, poor.

Third, even if higher education were free, and students could earn money while attending, the skills required to succeed in a classroom are usually different from the skills needed to succeed in a given job. And this is true not just in the trades. As a sometime teacher of language, I am acutely aware that a classroom is about the worst place possible to teach someone to speak a language. The best place, obviously, is out in the street, where one has a chance at actual conversation. A classroom is designed for lectures. As a sometime teacher of writing, I am acutely aware that writing is the same. It cannot be taught by rote and rule, because once any rule is commonly followed, breaking it is desirable: it makes the reading more interesting. Moreover, since writing is the hardest brain exercise available to mankind, doing anything else but sitting down and starting to write is less effective at learning the craft than the craft itself.

Good students, overly devoted to rote and rule, are almost automatically going to be bad writers, and bad journalists. They will be bad, or not particularly good, at any number of other things. They are inclined, to speak bluntly, to be drudges.

Fourth, as any intelligent teacher must realize, or any intelligent person prepared to think about it, in a classroom, some students are always left behind. Because students will always vary in their abilities, and in their prior knowledge, a teacher must pitch the lesson to some, and ignore the needs of others. A classroom ends up working best for those of average intelligence and ability. The less intelligent or less well prepared get left behind, and either fail out, or keep moving up the queue without ever learning the material—because the class has moved on before they have had time to grasp it. The more intelligent are left bored and with nothing to do—the time spent in class actually hinders their learning and holds them back. They learn to be lazy, or begin to rebel. As often as not, they too fail out, or drop out.

While there is much public sympathy and concern for less intelligent or less prepared students, and programs to supposedly help them, there is virtually nothing for the most intelligent—if anything, they are resented. Worse, if teachers or administrators, exercising their exquisite social conscience, insist on pitching the lesson or curriculum lower to make sure the slow students get it, necessarily, more students towards the top of the spectrum get left behind.

Therefore, beyond a certain point, a little above average intelligence, academic achievement weeds out not just the lower end of the intellectual spectrum, but the higher end, and produces mediocrity.

Journalism used to be an opportunity for those brightest students who could not tolerate high school, or were too poor to get to college. That is now lost, and journalism is in crisis as a result. So too with a number of other occupations, that are just not getting done what they once could do. Teaching is another example. I am sure readers know others, based on their own professional experience.

Fifth, our public schools are actually designed, since the beginning of the 20th century, to turn out factory workers. They are designed to produce conformity and submission, not to educate as such, and certainly not for leadership or initiative. Those who succeed in this system will be good soldiers, but too easily led. 

The original plan was that expensive private schools would teach leadership, keeping the ruling elite in power. This was bad enough; but, over time, the same philosophy has seeped into the private schools, through the ed schools and legal requirements for private schools to hire only “qualified” teachers, so that now everybody is trained for obedient conformity.

It is not, as Brooks blithely assumes, the educated elite that “invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers.” Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were college dropouts. Orville and Wilbur Wright were bicycle mechanics. Albert Einstein was a patent clerk. New inventions and new ideas are more likely to come outside than inside the established academic institutions. Academic institutions are innately conservative—not necessarily or always a bad thing; they are supposed to be there to preserve and to pass on established wisdom. A task at which they are now failing.

I’m not sure Brooks quite understands why “it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class.” They see Trump, a rich entrepreneur, as their champion. This confuses the professional elite. Based on their Marxist ideology, the working class should see such a “rich capitalist” as the enemy, keeping them down. While the socialist professional elite should be seen as the allies of the working class. Even if they would not be caught dead in their vicinity

But, while Trump may not have started from the bottom, the thing about entrepreneurship is that it is indeed a pure meritocracy. 

It is not any lack of merit that is keeping the working class down.

Journalism Dies in Darkness

 

It seems indisputable by now that the modern left has gone insane. It has been insane for a long time, really, in a low-key, narcissist way. But narcissists, called out, can sometimes become outright psychotic: disconnected from reality in an obvious way.

In his latest column, my leftward pal Xerxes writes “the US media [has at last] acknowledged that they have ethical responsibilities.” Yet what he cites as indicating this is the breakdown in US media of journalistic ethics. War is peace; ignorance is strength.

Specifically, he lauds six US networks for cutting off their president on-air in mid-sentence.

The first job of a journalist, self-evidently, is to report, not to suppress, the news. The US president addressing the nation is self-evidently important news in the US. If he speaks immediately after a contested election, they could hardly be more newsworthy. His remarks are false or inflammatory? That makes it more newsworthy still. You are encouraging journalistic malpractice: “journalists” suppressing news. This is morally equivalent to doctors poisoning their patients, policemen running shakedown rackets, or teachers actively preventing learning.

He more grudgingly lauds two other networks for showing Trump’s full speech, then following it with members of their own staff contradicting his claims. This is an unambiguous violation of the journalistic obligation of fairness: “journalists must present facts with impartiality and neutrality” (Wikipedia entry on journalistic ethics). Proper procedure is to get quotes from both sides of the argument--not to take sides. Nor would it have been difficult for an honest network to have gotten an immediate response to the president’s statement from some Democratic spokesman. If the journal wishes to express an opinion, this is done in a clearly-marked editorial or opinion segment. To simply declare a source’s statement false in the process of supposedly reporting straight news constitutes fraud. 

Sadly, this abandonment of journalistic ethics is becoming the norm. As a result, journalism in general is in dire straits. “Old media” is not dying simply because of the technological competition from new media. New media sources like Vox or Vice too have been losing readership and viewership, so long as they employ professional journalists and the same ethical standards; established brands cannot transition their existing news operations to the new platforms. They cannot compete with the new “citizen journalists” because they are no longer trusted. Surveys show this as well.

So Much for Canada's International Crredibility

Seems I'm not the only one who was shocked by recent CBC coverage of the Epoch Times.

I was delighted, by the w3ay, to find the Epoch Times's special edition in my mailbox.

I figure it's a collectable now.

The New Broadsheets

I am currently reading a lot of Canadian history. It reminds me of how much newspapering and journalism has changed, in my own lifetime. How much it has declined.

In the old days, right up to the generation just before my own, newspapering was a working class occupation. Nobody in the newsroom had a degree of any kind. Peter Gzowski did, a B.A., and was thought of as a real egghead as a result.

This was a very good arrangement for several reasons. Probably most importantly, it meant that journalizing was by its nature anti-establishment. You got the unofficial view, a contrast from the view you got from the government, the schools, the professions, the academy. Which is the reason for having a fourth estate.

Second, people got into newspapering, and rose in the trade, because they wrote well. This is not something that can be taught. And because they had an interesting, unconventional turn of mind—that’s what news is, the interesting and the unexpected. Again, this is not something that can be taught.

Third, under this system, journalism was an outlet for very bright working class kids, who otherwise have nowhere to go and no chance to make good.

Contemporary journalism, as in “the mainstream media” or “the legacy media” has lost its way and is no longer worth watching or reading, because none of this is any longer the case. Back in about the 1960s, newspapermen decided to join the establishment, and become a “profession.” This just does not work. If they are just going to parrot the establishment view, there is no longer any reason to read a newspaper or to watch the news. Worse, by requiring j-school instead of sinking or swimming on the job, we have ended up with a lot of journalists who have no ability to write and no nose for news. And we have priced the job beyond the means of those bright working class kids.

From this perspective, all the “new media” are really doing is restoring journalism as it always was: a non-establishment, ordinary-citizen voice.

It seems to me no coincidence that the very best Canadian political blogs, Kathy Shaidle’s Five Feet of Fury and Kate McMillan’s Small Dead Animals, are both put out by working-class women. I am not working class by any definition I can think of, but that is certainly what I want to read. There is no reason to read what you already know.

Jeff Bezos Buys the Washington Post

Budgies love it.

Jeff Bezos has just bought the Washington Post for $250 million.

One wonders why.

Newspapers in North America have been losing value hand over fist over the past twenty years; and there is really no sign of that turning around.

One obvious possibility is status and influence. For someone nouveau riche like Bezos, private ownership of the fabled Washington Post might get him into a lot of cocktail parties and a lot of private tete-a-tetes with politicians. If the Post lacks general circulation, it is still read carefully by the political and bureaucratic elite in Washington, and will probably continue to be. It is their house organ. This sort of thing has become a well-trodden path in the UK: buy a prestigious but financially troubled London daily, get a peerage.

It is also possible that Bezos wants a hobby. He is obviously in love with print, or he would not have come up with Amazon. At the current selling price, he doesn't really need to make money with it if it interests him.

There is little likelihood he's buying it to promote his own political ideas, as Sun Myung Moon did with the Washington Times. Bezos seems to be a liberal; the Post is already liberal; Washington already has a conservative daily.

But it is also possible that Bezos knows some things about the future of technology that the rest of the big money guys do not. Bezos is nothing if not a forward-thinker. I think he may see a new paradigm for newspapers. I understand that, when first approached about buying the Post, Bezos was not interested. Then he came back a few months later and said he was. Sounds to me as though he was doing some thinking in the meantime, and has come up with some ideas.

It wouldn't take that much. Currently, newspapers cannot compete on the World Wide Web, because people can get their news free, and outside linking means brand no longer matters. But there are ways of going electronic, and going to the Internet, without being on the World Wide Web. Bezos knows this well, because a lot of his business is based on one of them: the ebook platform. 

Citizen Bezos

Notably, newspapers and magazines are becoming tablet apps. These can be free, or by subscription, but still walled off from the rest of the web. And they can still be instantly updated, in order to compete with other online sources for immediacy. The cachet of the brand can theoretically attract readers; heck, a lot of people make a point of checking in at Drudge every day, even though the attraction is only his particular selection of links. And the readers can attract advertisers.

Apple and Rupert Murdoch failed at this with The Daily; but Bezos may see a better business model. The Daily had no brand cachet or reputation to build on—or rather, Murdoch's reputation for yellow journalism may have been a net minus. It seems on the face of it a dumb idea to try to build the reputation of the outlet online in order to convince people to pay for it, but expect them to pay for it before you've done this. This is putting the cart before the horse.

The Washington Post is at the opposite end of the spectrum in this regard.

The Daily was paid subscription; Bezos is on record saying he does not believe people can be made to pay for news online. Even if they can, the way this is done is the opposite of Murdoch's approach. First you offer a package free, establish value, and then sell added services on the strength of this. Bezos knows how to do this well.

But it is not just as question of what Bezos might do. If a lot of newspapers decide to pull off the web and go to apps, if this turns out to be a viable model, the links will dry up for the online aggregators, reducing, possibly even ending, that source of competition.

If so, Bezos will be left sitting on a very good brand in the middle of a brave new world.

Professional Journalism

Heading West.

A question inspired by Candy Crowley's mismanagement of the second US Presidential debate: why has journalism grown so bad, and so corrupt? What caused this?

For many years, I had the strong sense that newspapers and newsmagazines in general had tumbled far downhill since my youth. But I could not be sure. It might have had to do with the more jaded eyes of age. But now, with the Internet, there can be no doubt: the amateurs in the blogosphere do far better than the professionals.

And that last word may tell the whole story. I think it was a terrible error to turn journalism, during my own lifetime, into a “profession.” Journalists just a little older than I tended to have only a high school education, if that—they got into journalism because they could do it, because they could write, and tell a story interestingly. Now they get into the profession not because they can write, but because they have taken the required courses. The same awful process has also, over about the same time period, destroyed the teaching profession.

There is a basic principle here that is too often overlooked. Whenever you introduce standards to any area, you are eliminating two things: the bottom, the substandard, but also the top, the exceptionally good. That is the essence of professionalism: standardization—in other words, conformity. It is fine in areas in which simple competence is sufficient for all or most purposes--technical areas. But in areas, like writing or teaching,that require some element of creativity in order to work at all, it is going to damage, and ultimately destroy, the field.

The single obvious reason why the US dominates the contemporary world, culturally, technologically, and politically, is because of its tradition of nonconformity—aka “rugged individualism'” if you like. Those who found the local society too constraining in its demands could always escape to the frontier; and the doctrines of individual liberty on which the country was founded reduced the demands of conformity in the first place. There was also always the sense that this was the “New World,” which need not ever be constrained by the habits of the old.

The same secret led to the strength of Britain. On top of a strong innate social tolerance for, indeed glorification of, eccentricity, robustly expressed by John Stuart Mill, Britons needing breathing room could always take to the sea, and long had the ready option of shipping out to the Empire. There is nothing like the expatriate existence for freeing oneself from social pressures.

Sailing Before the Wind: The Jeanie Johnston.

This alone ensures that professionalization will be a disaster in most instances. On top of this, the creation of a profession creates a group consciousness, and a sense of common interests. This is not good. As Adam Smith observed, you cannot expect a group of people in the same trade gathered together, even for recreation, not to immediately turn to ways to conspire against the public interest for their own benefit. That is what a profession does, perfectly—a thing we would hold illegal in the corporate world. Now journalists all come up through the same schools, have many friends on rival papers, and attend the same parties, on top of their inevitable time together in the newsroom. They are a clique. Membership in the clique comes to be based not on ability, but on reliable commitment to the interests of the clique.

Fortunately, just when everything seemed to be going Stalinist, the innate rebellious genius of the Anglosphere created a new frontier: cyberspace. We have the bloggers, now, and the online educators, shaming and exposing the cliques and recovering the option of excellence. It is no accident this all first came from California, the last post on the Westward march; and, in the case of the WWW, from a Briton who had opted to live abroad.

No Country for Young Men

It smelled funny immediately when not one of the 2,201 reports worldwide on the recent Manitoba bus beheading mentioned the perpetrator's race. After all, they immediately speculated as to the race of the victim--”apparently aboriginal.” They were also prepared to say that the perpetrator was in his forties, about six feet tall, had short hair, and weighed about 200 pounds. Obviously, over the several hours he was surrounded in the bus with the severed head, someone got a decent look at him.

They still do not mention the perpetrator's (I do not say “suspect”; to do so in this case would be and is logically absurd) race. But his name is Vince Weiguang Li—in Chinese, oddly enough, that would be Vince Foreign Prairie Plum. And, given his face in the now-published photos, were I to see it in a bus, I would immediately assume he was ethnically East Asian. Still no comment from the press, though.

Isn't that strange? Had the perpetrator been “Caucasian-looking,” do you suppose this would not have been reported? Random check—the first unrelated Canadian crime story I find on Google News: “Stabbed Good Samaritan in Stable Condition”

See paragraph 8:

“Witnesses described the man with the knife as Caucasian, approximately 20 years old, five-feet-seven to five-feet-10 inches tall, wearing a white hoodie, jeans and a ball cap.”

Interestingly, in this latter case, it is the ethnicity of the victim that is not reported.

My guess is that he, too, was Caucasian, and not Samaritan.

It appears that the victim of the bus beheading, judging by his name—Tim McLean--was not aboriginal at all, but... Caucasian. Has this fact been pointed out in subsequent news stories? No. His ethnicity is now apparently unmentionable.

What we have here, put bluntly, is systemic racism. The journalistic rule seems to be: if a victim is Caucasian, you do not mention this. If he might be of any other race, you say so. If a criminal is Caucasian, you say so. If he might be of any other race, you do not mention this.

The net effect is necessarily to spread hatred and contempt towards Caucasians: for in the press, the distinct impression is being systematically given that criminals are always Caucasians, and victims are not.

Perhaps related: nothing ever gets perceived as a “hate crime” if the criminal is non-Caucasian and the victim Caucasian. “Hate crimes” by definition apparently can only be crimes committed by Caucasians against non-Caucasians.

Was the bus beheading a hate crime? Quite possibly; the truth is, one can almost never tell, and it should not be relevant. But one thing seems to me pretty sure: if the victim has been Chinese, and the perpetrator Caucasian, it would have been reported as such.

And such reporting may be in part responsible for the death of young Timothy McLean.