Photos from Central African Republic

By a young French photojournalist recently killed there. See here.
P.s. They may not all have been taken in CAR, but I think most of them were.

The U.S. election

It's over.

How's that for sophisticated analysis?

By the way, I turned on my computer this morning to see the final results and the Wash. Post, which comes up as my home page, had a headline "a second term." I read some of the accompanying story, which said Obama had passed the 270 electoral vote threshold even though Fla. remains too close to call. I then clicked on the map that went with the piece, the banner (or headline) of which showed Obama with 249 electoral votes, not 270. WaPo hadn't bothered apparently to update the banner on the map. Typical of WaPo's coverage of the returns, which I thought was deficient, to put it very politely.

Update: WaPo has now fixed the map.

How to write a (somewhat misleading) headline

"Lebanon's Sunnis at risk of radicalization," blares this WaPo headline. But the opening graphs of the story have quotes from young Sunnis in the Beirut neighborhood in question saying they are not aligned with any group. But -- wait -- they're flying a black flag "inscribed with the Islamic creed" that is "often associated with the global al-Qaeda franchise." Oooh, the black flag. Cue the headline writers. "At risk of radicalization."  

Greenwald on Raddatz etc.

Here. [h/t] One of his points is that Raddatz's questions revealed her acceptance of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment's assumptions. No big surprise there. There is a set of 'establishment' views and someone who has spent a career covering the Pentagon is likely to have absorbed them. 

This passage, from the end of Greenwald's column, may be worth quoting:

One more note about Raddatz: near the end of the debate, she asked the two Catholic candidates how their religion influences their views on abortion. This was a reasonable question unto itself, but also reflects standard DC assumptions on these issues.
It is often noted that the Catholic Church stridently opposes reproductive rights. But it is almost never noted that the Church just as stridently opposes US militarism and its economic policies that continuously promote corporate cronyism over the poor. Too much emphasis on that latter fact might imperil the bipartisan commitment to those policies, and so discussion of religious belief is typically confined to the safer arena of social issues. That the Church has for decades denounced the US government's military aggression and its subservience to the wealthiest is almost always excluded from establishment journalistic circles, even as its steadfast opposition to abortion and gay rights is endlessly touted.

I'm not sure I'd say that the Catholic Church "opposes U.S. militarism" as stridently as it opposes abortion, but there is no doubt that the Catholic hierarchy (both the Vatican and the U.S. bishops) has been critical of U.S. foreign policy. Readers of a certain age (including your blogger [cough]) may recall, just to take one well-known example, the 1983 bishops' letter on nuclear weapons. The Church also opposed Reagan-era U.S. policies in Latin America, if my memory serves, and as Greenwald's link reminds, Pope John Paul II was a firm opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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Note: Rather than a creating a topic label "Catholic Church," I'm going to use the existing label "Holy See" (which is the name for the Vatican in international law) so as not to increase recklessly the already high number of labels.

Suu Kyi, Pussy Riot, and the corridors of power

Two WaPo reporters recount an event at the Newseum in which Aung San Suu Kyi, fresh from receiving her delayed Congressional Gold Medal, rubbed shoulders with supporters and relatives of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk rocker feminists three of whom are now serving time in a Moscow prison for, in effect, insulting Vladimir Putin.

The WaPo reporters are taken with the notion of strange-seeming allies and with how, sooner or later, "everyone" (their word) comes to Washington, D.C. to make his or her "case."

I admire Suu Kyi (who doesn't?). I'm fine with Pussy Riot. But as someone who was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived much of his life in the city or its environs, I find the smug, self-congratulatory tone of the reporters' article, with its comfy assumption that "everyone" comes to Washington, D.C., to be false and somewhat repellent.

It reminds me of a D.C.-based bank (perhaps no longer in existence) which used to run advertisements, some years ago, referring to itself as "the most important bank in the most important city in the world." Pardon me while I reach for the barf bag.

Washington, D.C. is not the center of the universe. New York City is not the center of the universe. These are delusions held by people who have spent too much time in or around what the WaPo article calls, without really even a hint of irony, the "corridors of power."

The WaPo article quotes a Univ. of California professor who blogs about social movements on how cool it is for Suu Kyi and Pussy Riot to be sharing a stage and a spotlight. But the article is more interested in a faux anthropological-sociological analysis of the difference between being on Washington's A-list, which Suu Kyi is, and the contrasting status of the Pussy Riot people, who have to be driven by someone from Amnesty rather than getting a Secret Service escort.

Does anyone really care about this kind of gossipy trivia? The answer is apparently yes: readers of the WaPo Style section. Year after year, decade after decade, the Style section has specialized in this sort of thing, always guided by the comforting and false assumption that its readers unfolding the paper at breakfast were privileged participants in, or at least privileged onlookers to, the most important happenings in the most important place in the world.

That assumption was never true, but at least in the days when most readers unfolded a hard-copy Washington Post at breakfast it had a certain surface claim to wink-iness. As in: we the people writing and you the people reading this newspaper are (wink) important, we are (wink) in the know, we are (wink) where it's at, we are mere steps from the corridors of power. Now that many people read the paper online and can do it anywhere from Wheeling to Waukesha to Nairobi to Oslo, this kind of insular appeal no longer has even much surface plausibility.

But that hasn't stopped the Style section from continuing to use the same old figures of speech, the same old conceits, patting its (local, if not other) readers on the back for their enormous luck in happening to live where they do.

The reporters who churn out this stuff probably don't even know that the phrase "the corridors of power" was not coined by someone in D.C., not even by an American. It comes from the title of a novel by the British scientist and writer C.P. Snow.

Why has the Obama admin avoided major scandals (so far)?

A piece by Jonathan Alter in The Washington Monthly, deploying political science as well as the author's own experience and insights to speculate on the reasons why the Obama administration has been largely free of scandal. Also included is a quick tour of scandals of past administrations (remember Anne Burford? I didn't think so). One scandal that, on a fast reading of the piece, I didn't see mentioned is the substandard-facilities-at-Walter-Reed story -- but I'm pretty sure that broke under G.W. Bush not Obama, so it doesn't undercut the premise.

P.s. Of course there are those on both left and right who consider some administration policies to be criminal (e.g., use of drones, targeted assassinations) or unconstitutional (or what have you), but that's not what this is about.

The pleasures of the higher journalism include citing oneself

"I celebrate myself and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume."
-- Walt Whitman

In the Feb. 14 issue of Time, Fareed Zakaria is careful to avoid predictions about the future of Egypt, but he suggests that one worrisome possibility is "illiberal democracy," i.e., a freely elected regime that restricts individual rights. The author of a book called The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003; rev. pbk. ed., 2007) happens to be none other than ... Fareed Zakaria.

Who speaks for the Iranian government?

The Iranian newspaper Kayhan, which is under the supervision of the office of the country's Supreme Leader, has called Carla Bruni Sarkozy a prostitute and said she deserves to die (the comments were prompted by Bruni's public intervention in the case of an Iranian woman who was condemned to death by stoning for adultery). But a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry has said, in effect, "cool it." He has attempted to distance the foreign ministry from the newspaper's comments, insisting that critics can be taken to task without the use of insults.

So who speaks for the Iranian government? Kayhan or the spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry? Perhaps they both do. Autocratic regimes don't always speak with one voice. Even some totalitarian regimes don't always speak with one voice. Thus it was misleading for the Daily Telegraph to go with the headline "Iran calls Bruni a prostitute." In fact, "Iran" did no such thing. A newspaper that may represent one element of the regime did. There's a difference.

For links on this episode (brouhaha, whatever) see the Wikipedia entry on Kayhan, under the heading "Controversies."

The Pakistan floods and the media

It has been noted that the flooding in Pakistan has been getting less TV coverage than the Haitian earthquake did. That may be true, but the TV news that I watch (when I watch any), namely the NewsHour, has been covering the flooding quite extensively. Yesterday there was an interview with Holbrooke about it.

I guess this is why I never got beyond Ec 10

For a university to lay off 250 staff members because its endowment has fallen to $26 billion -- that's billion with a "b" -- seems, somehow, rather insane. Yes, I know about imbalanced budgets and all that, but it still seems a bit nuts. Glancing through this NYT article (hat tip for it to L. Sigelman at The Monkey Cage) leaves a bad taste. Not because of the hot breakfast stuff -- that's trivial nonsense -- but because of the way the NYT writes about these things. Breathlessly and, dare I suggest it, not overly intelligently. As for the stuff about the supposed horror of "being quadded" -- that was being said more than 30 years ago and it was way overblown then. Why don't they yank their reporter out of Cambridge, Mass. and tell her to go cover some interesting stories somewhere else? Perhaps that wouldn't be as much fun as hanging around Mass. Ave. and recycling decades-old clichés, but it would be better for the NYT and its remaining readers.

Cronkite and Vietnam

We've been reminded in recent days of Walter Cronkite's broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, when he declared, after having traveled to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive, that the war was going to end in a stalemate and the U.S. should embark on negotiations.

Kathleen Parker, in an appreciative column about Cronkite, notes that his critics say the Tet Offensive was a defeat for the Viet Cong (the NLF) and that his famous broadcast ushered in an era of supposed media bias. (Actually Parker refers to the North Vietnamese not the NLF, but it was mainly an NLF operation.) In truth, the Tet Offensive was both a defeat and a victory for the NLF: in strictly military terms it was a defeat, but in psychological terms it was a victory. It showed that the NLF, after several years of being subjected to American air power and fighting American ground soldiers, was capable of launching and carrying out a sustained operation against a large number of population centers in the South, and the NLF's penetration of the U.S. embassy in Saigon was a major propaganda coup. Cronkite's reaction was entirely understandable in view of the official American assurances that the war was being won and that the enemy was on the run.

Netanyahu, Obama, and the NYT

The New York Times' treatment of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting was, to put it delicately, less than accurate, according to David Bromwich.

A famous photograph

Remember the picture of a long line of people waiting to try to get onto a helicopter departing from a rooftop as Saigon "fell" in 1975? The Hong Kong-based Dutch photographer who took the picture, Hugh Van Es, recently died. As this BBC piece notes, the photo is sometimes mistakenly thought to depict the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. (In fact, it was another building, not the embassy.)

The bust of Churchill; or, The Lamp of History and the Klieg Lights of Journalism

Judging from Dana Milbank's column in today's Wash Post ("No Colgate Moment, Indeed"), the journalistic consensus on both sides of the pond is that PM Gordon Brown, in his just-concluded visit, got a less-than-very-warm reception from Pres. Obama, compared at least to the precedents set by the Bush-Blair encounters. No joint press conference, no night at Camp David, and -- horrors! -- Obama sent back to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill lent by Blair to Bush and kept by the latter in the Oval Office. Obama and Brown also had a somewhat awkward-sounding exchange about the possibility of playing tennis sometime. (The world economy is melting down, and they're chatting about tennis. I know, a cheap shot.)

So, does any of this matter? Not really. Obama may not be an Anglophile, but I wouldn't be surprised if he knows at least a bit more about British history than Bush (that wouldn't be hard). Obama and Brown may not have the warmest rapport, but, again, so what? Bush and Blair, after all, had too close a rapport: they are forever linked in the public mind with the invasion of Iraq, which was not their finest hour, to put it mildly.

And as for returning the bust of Churchill: this is not, heaven knows, about Churchill. The bust was a loan to Bush from Blair. No wonder Obama is not eager to keep it around.

"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past," Churchill famously remarked in the House of Commons (November 12, 1940). On the other hand, journalism, often called the first draft of history, turns its indiscriminate flood lights on the present, bathing everything in a garish glow and producing mountains of ephemera, through which some future historians -- can anyone possibly envy them? -- will have to wade. Give us a break: let the bust of Churchill alone, and focus on something more consequential than whether the president and the prime minister use the same brand of toothpaste.

(Early) New Year's Resolutions (1): Subscribe to an old-fashioned, hard-copy newspaper

I used to get the daily Washington Post, but I haven't subscribed to it for a long time, because: 1) I get my news in other ways; and 2) I kept thinking I was about to leave the area. Reason (1) still holds, but (2) hasn't occurred (i.e., I'm still here), so come 2009 I may very well start subscribing again.

Why? Because the newspaper industry is in trouble -- witness the bankruptcy filing today of Tribune Co. -- and I don't want newspapers to go out of existence. Call me sentimental, I don't care. If every consumer decision were made on the basis of pure rational calculation, society would be worse for it. So strike a blow against homo economicus, wherever you live, and if you don't get a real, hard-copy, old-fashioned newspaper delivered to your door every day, consider starting. It's too late to save a lot of newspapers, but some of them should survive -- and survive in real, tangible form, as things you can pick up and read without having to turn on the computer and look at the screen.

The editor with the action-packed rolodex

HC, who reads the New York Times for me (just kidding), draws my attention to this article about the launch of the new Tina Brown web thing, The Daily Beast (the name's from Evelyn Waugh, naturally).

The article mentions her "gilded e-Rolodex." For some reason I immediately thought of the 1950s radio figure Johnny Dollar, "America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator," the "man with the action-packed expense account." (No, I hadn't been born yet in the early '50s when Johnny Dollar was really in his heyday -- I'm not quite that old -- but I've heard the show on old-time radio revival hours.)

Anyway, Johnny Dollar had an action-packed expense account; Tina Brown has an action-packed rolodex. I already do not read Huffington, Daily Kos, TPM, Sullivan, Yglesias, Douthat, etc. Now I can add The Daily Beast to the list of hip sites that I do not read.

Hoarding and panicking

Watching coverage of the financial crisis some hours ago, I heard one or two commentators say that people are "hoarding cash." The verb "to hoard" has a somewhat old-fashioned ring to my ears, conjuring up images of misers in Victorian novels mooning over their gold and silver. Presumably what it means in this context is that people are withdrawing cash from their banks and storing it (or secreting it) in their homes. If this is indeed occurring, it suggests that "panic" (from the Greek panikos: of sudden fear, as supposedly inspired by the god Pan [to quote my dictionary]) may be the right word to apply to the current situation. (Alternatively, "people are hoarding cash" could just be a dramatic way of saying "people are not spending as freely as they ordinarily do.")

On a somewhat although not totally unrelated note, the PBS news program 'Worldfocus' made its debut in this area today. The idea -- a half-hour program drawing on the reporting of various news organizations -- is a sound one, though I thought the first show's execution and content were uneven. It did include a good report on the impact of rising food prices on the poor (and the not-so-poor) in Kenya.

Of umbrage and 'press lords'

Jonathan Alter's recent Newsweek column "All Umbrage All the Time" has some perceptive things to say about the impact of blogs in an election year, though I don't buy his implication that any blogger is the equal of a Newsweek columnist in the proverbial marketplace of opinion. We're not all 'press lords' now: some are still more equal than others.

Webster's to the rescue

A spokesman for the Obama campaign has denounced the cover of the current New Yorker, showing Barack Obama dressed in the garb of an observant Muslim and his wife carrying an assault rifle, and the two of them doing a "fist bump" in the Oval Office, as "tasteless and offensive."

From the BBC story: "Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the cartoon, saying: 'The New Yorker may think [sic]... that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create, but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.'"

Contra Mr. Burton, the New Yorker does not think it is satire; it is objectively a satire, which a standard dictionary (Webster's New World College Dictionary, 3rd edition) defines as (among other things) "the use of ridicule, sarcasm, irony, etc. to expose, attack, or deride vices, follies, etc." Whether it is tasteless or requires too much interpretation to be altogether effective can be debated, but to suggest that it is not a satire, that the New Yorker merely "thinks" it's a satire, is absurd. It is clearly sarcastic and therefore it is "the use of...sarcasm to expose...follies." In other words, it is satire.

P.s. Michael Eric Dyson (Georgetown Univ.) and Eric Bates (Rolling Stone) discussed the cartoon with Gwen Ifill on the PBS NewsHour tonight. Its website will have the transcript.

The Enderlin affair

The Weekly Standard is not one of my usual browsing stops, but this piece by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet about the long-running journalistic and legal controversy in France surrounding an iconic image from the second intifida is worth a glance if you're interested in journalism, France, and/or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Caution: she has a definite point of view, and without having read anything else on this case I'm not in a position to endorse what she says.