Everything that’s wrong with modern journalism
The field of cognitive neuroscience has all but given up trying to distinguish between emotion and reason, but political debate evidently lags far behind the science. Some observers of health care politics, particularly on the left, tend to accuse their opponents of trying to trigger emotional panic points rather than argue dispassionately about the facts. The implication is that the Right doesn’t have any facts, so it looks to exploit voters’ fears. There is something to be said for this argument, but it’s not what proponents would have you believe. In policy debates where the target voter claims an independent identity, the side that’s proposing something usually has a set of normative facts, and the side that’s against something always appeals to that which most powerfully undercuts a fact. Democrats and Republicans both use emotion, but they use it differently, and use it to achieve different goals.
The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.
Sigh.
You know? I…
Sigh.
Sigh.
Encouraging people to “rationally deliberate something and meaningfully contribute to an important public debate” is not an emotional appeal. Indeed, the words “rational” and “deliberate” tend to be more toward the opposite of the word “emotional.”
You know what is an appeal to emotion? Yelling that Barack Hussein Obama is going to strangle your grandmother and then laugh as he throws her in a dumpster. See, that’s an appeal to emotion.
Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?
We have the best press corps money can buy!
Oh sure, as if journalists grow on trees.
I asked the Right, and they say they do SO have facts and are SO TOTALLY NOT looking to exploit voters’ fears. So you lefties are wrong.
See how balanced and objective and hardworking I am?
Signed,
Marc Ambinder
Meanwhile, the complete lack of bellief in a deity or supernatural force is the exact same thing as religion because YOU CAN’T PROVE GOD DOESN’T EXIST HA HA HA LOOOOSER ATHEISTS SUXXX
Marc Armbinder is a doofus.
The implication is that the Right doesn’t have any facts, so it looks to exploit voters’ fears.
The “implication”? “IMPLI-fucking-CATION”?
What, are we fucking HALLUCINATING all the scare stories? Did I imagine that lady earlier who was almost shaking with rage about the goverment controlling her bank account and refusing heart surgery for the elderly and giving “aliens” free medical care?
Liberal elites claim that 1 + 1 = 2, many conservatives believe this is an indoctrination foisted upon us by our socialist education system. Both extremes should compromise and agree that 1 + 1 = 2.75.
When zombie-Aristotle awakes, Marc Ambinder is the first on his shit list. It worries me that a journalist can’t tell the difference between impassioned argument and fear-mongering. Newsflash: The involvement of “feelings” doesn’t make them the same thing. /angry rhetorician
In what respect, Charlie?
Hey, remember when the right used to fling accusations of “postmodernism” at the left as an insult?
Ahh, memories…
Ambinder, come on down
I suppose the whole “universal health care would have meant Stephen Hawking would have been strangled by a government bureaucrat in his crib” thing is just another of those hallcinations “implying” the Right is a bunch of lying shits who are just making crap up to scare people.
Let me try to cheer you up. Marc Assbiter doesn’t exemplify what’s wrong with journalism. That’s because he’s not a fucking journalist. He’s a partisan wanker who maybe calls himself a journalist.
Okay, it didn’t do much for my attitude either but give me points for trying, k?
I assume otherwise responsible adults fretting about standing in lines for toilet paper is also part of the “implication” of fact-free blathering on the Right.
And threatening Nancy Pelosi with poisoning.
And carrying guns to “town hall” meetings.
And issuing lists of “how to disrupt meetings”.
“The Democrats and Obama assume that, inside every voter who isn’t an instinctive partisan, there is a competition of sorts — a calculus, subject to outside influences: If the voter succombs to the fear-emotion, he or she will retreat into a comfortable partisan shell. ”
This is breathtakingly wrong. If the voter succombs (sic) to the fear-emotion, he or she WILL FIGHT EMOTIONALLY AGAINST WHAT MAY BE IN THEIR SELF-INTEREST. What a putz.
Also, his “the left is motivated by solidary incentives” is the kind of faux-clever argument you’d expect from a smart fourth grader, on the order of “your epidermis is showing.” What he’s saying is, the left makes it arguments because it, too, wants to feel a positive emotion. As though that equalizes the emotionality of the left and the right.
Yes, from the people who bring you Megan McArdle: disingenuous, or stupid? You won’t know until the final minutes.
That’s because he’s not a fucking journalist. He’s a partisan wanker who maybe calls himself a journalist.
Your analysis is correct but falls short. There are damned few journalists anywhere in the U.S. We have stenographers, pretty faces, shouters, and bloviators, but how many people actually go out and do research? How many ask questions based on what their analysis tells them rather than based on what will get them face time in prime time?
Off the top of my head I have Matt Taibbi and Sy Hersch. I’m sure there are more but I can’t think of them right now, as I’m the result of generations of breeding to pull a sled across the tundra and the asphalt roof I just left was about 120 fucking degrees.
“The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.”
The emotion of feeling proud that you use facts = The fact that you are an emotional lying asshat.
Wow. That’s not just dumb, that’s Richard Cohen dumb.
Off the top of my head I have Matt Taibbi and Sy Hersch.
Don’t forget Greg “had to leave the country to actually do reporting” Palast.
Ambinder is arguing that because people making rational arguments feel emotions (not being robots), they are making emotional appeals. It’s that fucking dumb. Broder would love this even-handedness.
And another thing….
The field of cognitive neuroscience has all but given up trying to distinguish between emotion and reason
Oh really? Assbiter probably read something like this excerpt from a Steven Quartz opinion piece in Trends in Cognitive Science.
and gets his conclusion completely fucking wrong.
As a Cognitive Neuroscience dilettante, it amuses me and pisses me off when dickwads like Assbiter try to insinuate credentials they don’t have.
It pisses me off for obvious reasons but it amuses me because the attempts invariably blow up in their faces.
Pere – Yeah.
The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.
Shorter Marc Ambinder: Libruls are smug elitiests who think they’re better than people who make up shit.
Actually the problem is Mr. Marc isn’t partisan. He’s one of these guys who bends over backwards to be impartial – and thus ends up supporting the status quo. Which is just as bad.
Hey libs–
We’re still winning this!
Oh fer fuck’s ssake. He even pulls out the ridiculous on the face of it rightwing talking point comparing the present bullshit to the Social Security theft attempt.
Marc Ambinder, steno for hire.
My real beef with Ambinder is that he takes a (dare I say it?) elitist attitude that he’s one of the Wise Men of the world who judiciously discards ideological convictions in favor of a more reasoned approach that says both sides are always bad equally now and forever.
In reality, Ambinder is a classic establishmentarian who supports the status quo as though it were God’s truth. He’s every bit as ideological as left or right wingers but he refuses to admit it to himself.
Not for nothing, but to sample from what is essentially a column and then say it’s indicative of all “modern journalism” — by which I assume you mean regular news writing — is disingenuous.
In policy debates where the target voter claims an independent identity, the side that’s proposing something usually has a set of normative facts, and the side that’s against something always appeals to that which most powerfully undercuts a fact.
Let’s apply this principle to the erstwhile debate, such as it was, to go to war in Iraq:
The side that was “proposing something” (i.e., going to war) had a set of “normative facts” supporting their view (Saddam had WMDs, was behind 9/11, etc.).
The side that was “against something” appealed to “that which most powerfully undercuts a fact.” In this case, it was pointing out that none of the “normative facts” were actually facts.
Now, which side tried “to trigger emotional panic”?
(Hint: mushroom clouds)
Why the fuck is the Secret Service allowing a protester to have a gun across the street from where the President of the United States is speaking?
They were “monitoring” him? How nice. So at the next little event, he’ll have a couple dozen friends packing as well. Gonna “monitor” all of them, too?
And to point out the obvious: if this had happened at an appearance by President Bush? Arrested in seconds, beaten at the jail-house, and facing a long prison sentence.
http://www.wmur.com/news/20356764/detail.html
to sample from what is essentially a column and then say it’s indicative of all “modern journalism” — by which I assume you mean regular news writing — is disingenuous
No, the problem is “modern journalism” runs the political gamut from the scaremongering of Glenn Bleccch to the noxious fencesitting of Marc Ambinder. Mr. Marc is actually the “left”, as far as American media is concerned; the only ones further out are folks like Rachel Maddow, but hey, she’s a chick so she’s allowed to be crazy.
As you know, you go to press with the journalists you have—not the journalists you might want or wish to have at a later time.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/08/11/2026745.aspx
Off the top of my head I have Matt Taibbi and Sy Hersch. I’m sure there are more but I can’t think of them right now,
Barton Gellman
before the corporations owned all the media outlets we did.
More on the man with the gun… William Kostric is a married man in his mid 30S who works in sales. He says he moved here to New Hampshire from Arizona about a year ago, because it’s a “live free or die” state — and he thought Arizona was becoming too restrictive with its gun laws.
He’s passing out a bookmark that says, “Join the Second Amendment Revolution, the most exciting pro-liberty movement in over 200 years.”
He’s a Ron Paul supporter, who opposes just about everything Obama, including health care reform.
A Ron Paulista… who had to leave Arizona because it was too liberal. Oy.
Why am I SO not surprised?
It strikes me that Marc Assbiter is repeating – with gussied up verbiage – the stock reichtard defense to many things, namely “But Clinton did it too.” The other day on All Things Considered (NPR afternoon news program for the furriners amonsgt ya) they had on a woman who had teabagged an Austin Tx. town hall.
She went through the usual litany of unsupported (indeed, unsupportable) assertions and she uniterntionally made it quite clear that there is no middle ground; anything but the status quo is unacceptable.
The host presented a question about the tone of the protests, does she think that hurts their cause? Her immediate, very defensive response was, predictably, “Its no worse than what the liberals did to Bush!”
Marc Assbiter just said the same thing in many more words and much less directly. All in all though, it’s the same rationalization.
The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.
That is the dumbest thing I’ve read all day, and goddammit troofie was posting. A debater doesn’t appeal to emotion by appealing to reason, even if the logical, reasonable people actually enjoy being logical and reasonable.
Outsourced to Brad DeLong?
I really enjoy how all my liberal anf left ‘fringe’ analyses and policies are dismissed as crazy fringe left hyperbole, devoid of the sober assessments of my betters in the establishment, until something on the order of 5 – 20 years have passed when the establishment feels safe to treat my formerly dismissed-as-insane views as the common sense view, without any apologies whatsoever.
So when the establismentarians see right wing public figures – in addition to teabaggers on corners – screaming that the Democrat health plans will kill poor Sarah Palin’s retarded baby — they see a reasonable group of people having a School of Athens discussion of the role of government in health care.
When I and others say, correctly, that Republican national leaders (and many Democratic co-hawks) are quite openly and consciously lying us into a war against and occupation of Iraq, they perceive a mass of screaming hippie radicals hanging upside down from trees and flinging shit at innocent, banker-dressed passersby.
Funny how that works. Screaming righties, and they hear democratic deliberation; sane, and correct, and proven analysy from lefties, and they see screeching rabid gibbons.
And to point out the obvious: if this had happened at an appearance by President Bush? Arrested in seconds, beaten at the jail-house, and facing a long prison sentence.
And it would be roundly applauded and cheered by the half-wits from the Teatoddler brigade .
Put down that money pipe Mark.
How about a zero tolerance policy when it comes to protesters having guns in the vicinity of the President?
Is that too much to ask for?
No reasonable American would disagree.
Why is the extreme right wing being catered to, even on THIS?
Marc Assbinder is the quintessential “Sensible Liberal” who brought us the destruction of welfare in favor of “workfare”, the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, the Kosovo War, the 13 years of Iraq sanctions, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the use of torture. Whee.
Is he seriously saying that the right and left are equivalents because the left feels smug when it has a reasonable discussion and the right feels smug when it shouts down congresspeople? WTF. You do know that in societies with government healthcare there are homes for people like this?
Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?
Geez, that’s harsh. I’ve only been an investigative reporter for, like five hours, three and a half of which I was having dinner.
Okay, I’ve got a brilliant piece about Michael Jackson’s autopsy in the works, and not to give too much away, but I’m going to show how both conservatives and liberals are child molesting plastic surgery addicts.
The field of cognitive neuroscience has all but given up trying to distinguish between emotion and reason
Bullshit. CN reaserchers may not bench-press 180 without beaking a sweat, but they’re decidedly NOT pussies when it comes to a major scientific challenge. It may well turn out to be a false dichotomy in the realm of neurology, but even a bright child knows that science doesn’t EVER issue ultimate verdicts. The tell is “all but given up” – much like science had “all but given up” a unitary model for physics prior to Maxwell, Rutherford & Einstein – if by “all but given up” you mean “is working its ass off to find a solution” … feh.
The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.
More bullshit. The blatantly false analogy of an emotion that results from using reason with a position flying in the face of reason that’s based purely on emotion would make a first-year Philosophy student howl with laughter.
This may wear journalism-drag, but don’t be fooled – IT’S A TRAP!
No. It’s worse than that. He says it’s about
He doesn’t simply create a false equivalence about smugness, oh no! It’s all about “belief.” There’s no such thing as a fact in Marc’s world. Those of us on the left haven’t actually rationally deliberated something, you see — we just BELIEVE we have. It’s all about beliefs, and of course we can’t judge one set of beliefs to be superior to another because they’re beliefs.
A three-and-a-half-hour dinner? What’re you, French?
Oh my. I mean, I knew the real crazies, like young-earth-creationist crazies, are openly contemptuous of facts and reason. And I knew a lot of general right-wing types see facts as things to twist around like in a third-grade class debate. But this guy’s not even supposed to be a right-winger, and he’s basically saying that fact-based analysis is no different than screaming panic.
Either that or it’s just a particularly putrid piece of sophist wankery. Someone trying to be “different” and “intellectual” without bothering with the whole “thinking” part. Which is at least internally consistent, I suppose.
…but political debate evidently lags far behind the science.
Now that comment should go up for understatement of the year! Winner winner chicken dinner!
Why do I get the distinct feeling that when Assbinder said “the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate”, he was actually feeling it himself?
(Even though, as has been ably pointed out above, he has not rationally deliberated anything, nor meaningfully contributed to so much as an informal Kaffeeklatsch?)
The field of cognitive neuroscience has all but given up trying to distinguish between emotion and reason
Bullshit.
Any ad executive worth his salary can describe to the minutest detail in terms of ad sales and revenue generation the difference between emotion and reason.
What a fucking moron.
“Cognitive Neuroscience” reminds me of the sarcastic quip about Homo Sapiens presumably meaning Wise Man…except we all know what a ‘sap’ is.
Making Logical Debate impossible by crashing it with buffoons erudite in the tactics of doing so would be more apt.
Amanda Marcotte answered all the questions I might have had about her astuteness years ago. The title of her piece included in this collection is a dead giveaway
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/perception-alteration.html
Well paid assholes with opinions versus poorly paid assholes with opinions.