Cable news mood management (15 Oct 2009)

Matt Yglesias noted the other day that no one but pundits watches cable news.

Just like traders have CNBC and Bloomberg on in their offices, political operatives are constantly tuned in to what’s happening on cable news. The result is a really bizarre hothouse scenario in which people are basically watching . . . well . . . nothing, but they’re riveted to it. How things “play” on cable news is considered fairly important even though no persuadable voters are watching it. And cable news’ hyper-agitated style starts to infect everyone’s frame of mind, making it extremely difficult for everyone to forget that the networks have huge incentives to massively and systematically overstate the significance of everything that happens.

You'd think it would be sensible if they all simply stopped watching, since hyper-agitation is in no policymaker's best interest and it leads to superfluous and counterproductive commentary. With not enough organically occurring news to fill 24 hours, the news channels are becoming ongoing emotional barometers instead, but they are tuned only to themselves. They try to make news themselves with a variety of cooked-up debates and pseudoevents and that sort of thing, reporting on the import of their own reports -- nothing new, as Daniel Boorstin's 1961 book The Image demonstrates. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that if you don't watch TV news at all, you are better informed than those who do, even if you are completely ignorant. (At least then you are capable of a genuine response to something that you learn about.) The recursive meta-news that makes up cable news regarding what's being talked and talked about on cable news just seems like information pollution.

Like Kevin Drum, I get virtually all of my news from online versions of newspapers and from blogs. I'm skeptical of TV news generally because I don't like emotional presentations of news or pretentious newsreaders or phony objectivity (as though the choice of presenting a story isn't subjective) or the oversimplification. Most "news" strikes me as attempts to regulate my mood -- build my confidence in the government or the economy or undermine it, bludgeon me with scare tactics ("What item in your closet is slowly poisoning your infant? News at 11") or feed me "human-interest" stories to, as Stewie Griffin might say, "make me smile." Am I just weird in that I want news as neutral and unengaging as possible, that puts me in a state of suspended emotionality? I miss the old Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, this interview at Boing Boing with a health news watchdog, journalist Gary Schwitzer, whose organization gave up on trying to critique TV health stories, offers some perspective.

In the early days of CNN, we had this tremendous, exciting opportunity. The channel could be place to go in-depth with background and be analytical and contextual. But then the management side swung the other way and preferred to be the wire service of the air -- take anything happening anywhere and report it with a quick turnaround.

If cable news simply was a wire service, that would not be so terrible, but when you pit three commercial would-be wire services against one another, we see what happens -- noise.

Dubious economic headlines (17 March 2009)

Barry Ritholtz provides an object lesson in breaking down a financial story that has been framed in an entirely misleading way. On the screen in my building's elevator this morning -- a pretty good distillation of what has been deemed considered newsworthy for regular office workers -- I saw that home starts were up a surprising percent in February, which was being touted as a welcome piece of good news for the housing industry. The further implication was that the rumors of the demise of homebuilding have been greatly exaggerated. This was exactly the sort of thing we'd like to hear -- that the economy is not as bad off as it seems and our "animal spirits" should be perking up right about now. Maybe Obama was right to be sending optimistic signals last week.

Ritholtz takes apart the data though and reveals nothing to be optimistic about:

If we look at the breakdown by unit types, the gains in starts were mainly in multi-family units; single family starts were little changed. And, February was still down nearly 50% from prior year. The past 4 months rank as the worst housing start figures since the data was collected. The past 2 quarters have 6 of the 10 worst seasonally adjusted figures.
This is reflecting the secular shift in trend to renting from buying. Home ownership rate is receding form the 68% level a few years ago — artificially inflated via ultra low rates / abdication of lending standards — back towards to a normalized 64% level.
Peter Boockvar suggests today’s data “is a reflection of where construction money is going.” And, the decline in permits though in this sector means that the building pace in February is unsustainable.

The question to consider here is whether the skewed reporting of economic data is a matter of incompetence or design. (Economist Dean Baker's ongoing exposés of poor economic reporting on his blog are relevant to this question as well.) Often, numbers are framed in a congenially reportable way by trade organizations (think, the National Association of Realtors, whose onetime president wrote the already infamous Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?: The Boom Will Not Bust and Why Property Values Will Continue to Climb Through the End of the Decade - And How to Profit From Them). Reporters and headline writers have little incentive to question this spin, since it comes ready-made and tends to conform to what editors assume readers want to read. And in general, they are trained to defer to expert opinion, in this case, the industry economists who have an interest in shading the statistics. The problem is that pertinent analysis tends to be buried in most reports of economic data, and if it exists at all, it tends to be presented as a battle between competing experts who say the opposite, leaving the slant of the headline as the final arbiter. So economic reporting in nonfinancial papers is ultimately about gauging the zeitgeist and trying to establish and exaggerate confidence or, more rarely, exploit fear. It's a dubious place to go if you want to understand the data itself.

Diderot effects (2 March 2009)

The Atlantic's new business site (which it annoyingly calls a "channel") recently posted an interesting but fairly cryptic article by anthropologist Grant McCracken, looking at potential shifts in consumer behavior in the downturn. He outlines several possibilities in relation to a concept he doesn't really explain here, the "Diderot effect." Diderot, an 18th-century intellectual, wrote an essay about being given a fancy dressing gown, which made everything else he owned feel shabby to him. Thus, he explains in the essay, he needed to replace the rest of his stuff to maintain consistency among his belongings at the new level of their perceived status. The assumption is that we instinctively strive for that uniformity in our possessions -- that we want to communicate a coherent portrait of our cultural capital by having a collection of things whose meaning is readily legible to others and that don't embody too many internal contradictions. Pushing it further, we may pursue this consistency to convey a coherent sense of our identity to ourselves -- we don't know who we really are until we see ourselves reflected back to ourselves in a cogent group of possessions.

I'm a bit skeptical about this internal urge to consistency; it's possible that this tendency is encouraged by advertising and marketing efforts to promote what a coherent set of belongings should be, promulgating associations between objects to establish a society-wide understanding of what makes for the standard-issue set at various status levels. In other words, mass media advertising and the content it supports encourage the establishment of "lifestyles," the logical extension of what Diderot was writing about as a personal idiosyncrasy.

The coalescence of lifestyles may have the laudatory effect of elevating what makes for a subsistence level of consumption in our collective understanding -- it couples irrefutable necessities like food and shelter together with more nebulous goods -- education, media -- that allow people a minimal sense of social belonging. But while this minimum standard has improved in absolute terms over the days of starvation wages, recently it hasn't improved in relative terms. Income inequality has increased; barriers to social mobility have hardened. That suggests, in turn, that the distinctive goods that we use to make those class barriers known have become more visible and more inaccessible, notwithstanding the supposed democratization of luxury. That widely touted pre-crash trend demonstrated how an improvement in "real" standards can nevertheless leave social class in place. Democratized luxuries are just evident knock-offs, declassé goods that mark the inferiority of their owners to those higher in the hierarchy. The hypocritical cant about "democracy" that's evoked is a perfect example of ideological inversion -- Orwellian Newspeak.

But what happens now, with the recession leveling off all consumption? If consumption was the proimary way of policing class borders, does the fact that there will be less of it imply that those barriers have become more permeable? That more of us can pass as a member of a higher status group through clever and thrifty purchases? Will some other manner of social display more widely available come to signify status?

McCracken's post doesn't exactly deal with that question, but it gets at the microfoundations of status consumption. He offers several different possibilities for what will happen to consumption in the wake of the recession. First, everyone could scale back, leaving the existing hierarchy in place, only a lower level. Then with recovery, it will merely ramp back up. Alternatively, certain items of distinction will become more valuable and more cherished, and sacrifices will be made to hold on to the ability to purchase these specific exceptions.So rather than social class being signaled by a collection of goods, it will temporarily come to be signaled by one expensive good.

But is it possible that the new, scaled-back levels will prove "sticky"? McCracken writes,

Displeasure, as we move to a lower level of consumption, might for some consumers eventually lose its sting and turn to comfort too. Or not. The question is whether we might habituate to a lower level of spending. I think this can only happen if some of the deeper cultural drivers of the consumer culture fall silent. These would include competitive spending. (This is largely dead among some Millenials.) It would also include the wish to stay in fashion or in touch with the curve. (Here too some young consumers are turning their backs on fashion, especially the branded, mainstream variety.) There are positive forces: the wish to go green, to "save the planet," this has been the great staple of elementary school education and it is now on the verge of being installed in our culture as orthodoxy. (This is no doubt as it should be.) This is where we really have to do our anthropology: what are the cultural drivers that might intervene here and lock consumption habits into place.

I'm pretty skeptical that there are any such cultural drivers -- capitalism relies too much on competition for its dynamism for anything to override those sorts of pressures.

Following up (16 Feb 2009)

Catching up in my RSS reader, I've come across a few things that would have been nice to mention in previous posts. So I'll mention them now, and make this sort of thing a regular feature. (Please let me know if this is worthwhile or not.)

1. A few days ago I wrote about the Amish in response to a Kevin Kelly post about their relationship to technology. This Boston Globe piece by Jonah Lehrer from January (Andrew Hearst's link reminded me of it) about overstimulation in the city seems relevant to the exploration of technological withdrawal (in both senses of the word). Lehrer reports on research that has found that the overstimulation we face in urban environments hampers our mental functioning.

After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

Just as the urban envornment dulling, nature is an essential refresher for our minds. Apparently, the mind needs trees. I personally find this sort of hard to accept -- I felt half-alive until I moved to New York City, and the thought of going camping seems like living death. Lehrer notes that "the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the 'concentration of social interactions' that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists." But it seems that the city is a machine not merely or innovation but for creating impulsive individualists, the anti-Amish.

Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

Does innovation in practice, in capitalist society, simply mean the production of impulsiveness? Is there another way to incite innovation without the capitalist structure of mandated competition? Is that need for innovation what produces cities? These seem to be the questions the Amish present to us, and it boils down to this: Should society reject unfettered innovation in an effort to preserve a certain harmony among a given community? Or is it better to promote a maximum amount of innovation, even if it has deleterious consequences for the community? A general thrust of Marxist theory is that technology will improve to the point where it will rescue authentic individuality from the depredations of class struggle. It's one of the chief attractions of his philosophy, this ideal of finding individual integrity at the heart of community. As Kolakowski describes it in Main Current of Marxism, Marx believed that "The abolition of dependence on alienated forces will restore to man his social nature, i.e. the individual will accept the community as his own interiorized nature. But the community, consciously present in each of its members, is not intended to be a merging of personality in an anonymous, homogenous whole." But that sounds a little like the Amish, when they are idealized by outsiders. But rather than the faith in technology to galvanize proletarian struggle and achieve an individuality never before realized, the idealized Amish glamorize the rejection of technology altogether as a way of escaping alienation and preserving an individualism not yet lost. Both seem like fantasy projections of the alienated soul trapped in the egoism of capitalist subjectivity.

2. In the NYT, media analyst David Carr wrote about the same insane CNBC clip with Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb that I mentioned in this post. Carr notes that in the recession, "Being a financial news anchor must seem like owning an ice cream parlor where spinach is the only flavor on the menu." This is because tehy are not in the business of reporting news but of conveying hope and good feelings.

The news media in this country are often accused of being contrary and pessimistic, but rarely is that the case. Amid carnage, economic or otherwise, reporters are trained to look for “glimmers of hope,” “signs that the worst is behind us” and “miraculous tales of survival,” especially those that involve a baby — or in this case, a 401(k) — somehow making it through a hurricane, tornado or mudslide.

This makes it pointless to try to keep oneself informed by watching commercial TV, which has long since figured out that it is profitable only to entertain audiences, not inform them. Pessimism doesn't help a show's sponsors.
What strikes me as insane is the cynicism. Carr talks to all these business jounralists who all note how awful the cheerleading coverage of the stock market is, yet nothing has changed. And TV stock pickers just seem to act as though what they are doing is performance art:

To engage their audience, business journalists need to act like things are changing all the time. As it turned out, what didn’t change much was the fundamental lessons: have a diversified portfolio, don’t buy more house than you can afford, don’t take on more debt than you can support, or trade on the margin.
But that’s not what we want to hear from the experts. “You aren’t doing your job right if you don’t have an in-box full of hate mail,” said one financial columnist who didn’t want to be identified. In this market, who does?

Maybe audiences should not need to be engaged about finance; their "skin in the game" is encouragement enough. In fact, if the news outlet is trying to engage you, you have to be skeptical about the bias in the information you are getting; they are trying to reach spectators, not participants. That is why the WSJ seems so dubious these days. I knew it had changed irredeemably when A-Rod's picture was on the front page the other day.

3. I wrote some theses about Hipster Runoff a week or so ago. This seems insufficient. So I'm planning to start a side project offering some exegesis of Carles's ruminations, in the same spirit as Marmaduke explained. I hope to get the first few entries up some time this week.

Idiot interviewers (11 Feb 2009)

On the DVD of Žižek! the 2005 documentary about the Slovenian philosopher, there's a great clip of his appearance on NiteBeat, an American news program. Žižek, who's apparently in the midst of a misbegotten book tour, gamely tries to make Lacanian theory accessible while Barry Nolan, the proudly clueless host, makes him into a hilarious side-show -- look at this funny guy with the accent! He's all intellectual! He thinks about stuff -- how amusing! Nolan actually calls him "Denis Leary but from Slovenia." The wrap up makes it obvious that he has had Žižek on the show not because of his ideas but because the show wants to bill itself as the kind of show that has people like Žižek on it.

Anyway, Nolan seems like a genius of sympathetic listening compared with the tools on CNBC in this scarily similar clip (via Talking Points Memo), in which it takes five patronizing talking heads to willfully ignore and fail to understand guests Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, whom the producers can't resist belittling with nicknames. (Paul Krugman compared it to a classic Monty Python sketch in which Marx, Mao and Lenin are asked questions about soccer.) The entire clip makes it clear that CNBC, and by extension, its audience, wants nothing more than to trivialize analysis of the banking system's larger problems while taking credit for being hip to the fad the network believes that Roubini and Taleb represent. It's truly pathetic. Obviously, the in-studio interviewers think that recessions are caused by bad luck or something and just automatically right themselves without any intervention at all; thus the prudent thing to do is to get the right guru to tell you what indicators to look for to time one's jump back into the markets. Roubini and Taleb are mostly silent, sitting helplessly while the hosts yammer on nonsensically like House Republicans during the stimulus debate. This is what has become of the discourse of the public sphere; many -- including people who follow the financial world professionally -- watch this sort of drivel and consider themselves informed, or cynically accept it as what the other viewers want to hear, as a barometer of what conventional wisdom is. This idiocy then guides policy. It make obvious the social catastrophe that ensues when commercially viable discourse becomes the only discourse we hear.

Made-up Marx (16 Jan 2009)

Megan McArdle is right; this alleged quotation from Marx's Capital supposedly "making the rounds on Wall Street" --

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

-- definitely is not Marx. It sounds more like a half-informed graduate student summarizing what he thinks Marx might have said about the current recession, and besides, "taking the communist road" sounds more like Maoist lingo. (If it really was from Capital, you'd more likely see a tedious reference to how much wool could be spun from so many spindles and so forth.)

Not that nothing in Capital is relevant to the current situation. Marx does have a few sketchy pronouncements about the credit system and about potential effective demand problems -- the need to discipline the ways in which the working class reproduces its labor power and get them to soak up some of the surplus and so on. I think the passage I quoted in this post, from the chapter on money in volume one, has some application, for instance.

But the idea that Marx suggested that the state would lead a country down the path to socialism is absurd; generally the state is regarded as being completely captured by the capitalist classes to do its bidding. Or else capitalists have ceded political power to the state so that it can divide the working class's wrath between Business and Government. Or else the state operates as a competing power base in a triangulated struggle over the shape of social relations. Etc., etc. But the general gist of Marx's theory is that a revolution is necessary to smash the state and eventually do away with it.

Whoever made this statement up and attributed it to Marx probably wanted to use Marx as a kind of boogeyman, who is supposed to automatically discredit any idea that he can be associated with. The gambit here is to discredit the Fed and Treasury's efforts to ameliorate the financial crisis and make sure nationalization remains a dirty word, as Yglesias talks about here.

Vive Tanta (1 Dec 2008)

A few weeks ago, Nicholas Carr wrote a post about the end of the blogosphere as an independent, open field in which new writers can bypass the need for vetting by corporate media and rise in popularity through sheer merit.

While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

He's probably right about that, but we should be grateful the old blogosphere was around long enough for Tanta at Calculated Risk to find a wide audience. She was absolutely one of the most lucid and engaging writers on the housing bubble and the mortgage industry, without whom even fewer people would have much of an idea of what happened to our economy in recent years. Tanta, whose name was Doris Dungey, died over the weekend, and will be sorely missed.

Financial fictions (7 June 2008)

This comes from the three-part WSJ series on the last days of Bear Stearns:

At least six efforts to raise billions of dollars -- including selling a stake to leveraged-buyout titan Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. -- fizzled as either Bear Stearns or the suitors turned skittish. And repeated warnings from experienced traders, including 59-year Bear Stearns veteran Alan "Ace" Greenberg, to unload mortgages went unheeded.
Top executives resisted, in part, because they were concerned the moves would upset the delicate calculus of appearances and perceptions that is as important on Wall Street as dollars and cents. If Bear Stearns betrayed weakness, they worried, skittish customers would pull their money out of the firm, and other financial institutions would refuse to trade with it.

It's an uncontroversial point, but I'm still shocked whenever I contemplate how the world of finance runs on carefully constructed, necessary fictions. When I ignored the business world, I always assumed it was build on bottom-line numbers and empirically deduced decisions -- I thought it was far more technocratic than it actually is, and I totally overlooked such socio-psychological phenomena as the entrepreneurial "animal spirits" that Keynes posits, and the significance of inflation expectations, and consumer confidence, all of which can be ideologically sustained and manipulated. It makes me think there must ultimately be some renumerative use for the skills I learned as a literature graduate student, where we were taught precisely how to analyze carefully constructed fictions to reveal their carefully concealed presuppositions as well as their lacunae. It seems like the delicate calculus of appearances and perceptions requires a mastery of rhetorical skills required for building a believable picture of reality as well as a mastery of the tenets of risk management.

But the necessary fictions lead to problems like what Dean Baker details here.

Since the vast majority of economists failed to recognize two huge financial bubbles, the collapse of which had enormous consequences for the economy, it is reasonable to conclude that there is some inherent problem with the nature of the consensus within the economics profession. Either these economists hold views about the world that prevent them from seeing financial bubbles, or the sociology of the profession is such that they are unable to express independent opinions.

Perhaps economists are institutionally discouraged from promulgating opinions that might compromise the business built on fragile hopes.

A fifth column at the Wall Street Journal (23 April 2008)

I was surprised to discover that Thomas Frank, the Baffler founder and author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and One Market Under God and other left-leaning cultural critiques, would be writing a regular column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. I learned about it when he wrote about the Obama "bitter" crisis for the paper on Monday. His new gig is especially striking considering that he has derided the page so thoroughly in the past, making it a go-to source for conservative nonsense when he wants to make a point about some typical piece of disingenuous right-wing rhetoric. Now he'll be sidled along next to it -- if only he could know what else was on the page and debunk it as it appears. And you figure the perch was something Frank really couldn't turn down; it's too prominent, too tempting a place from which to polemicize. He can serve as a fifth column, preparing the way for the hoped-for takeover of business culture by sensible minds -- people who see the futility of creating asset bubbles and the evil of suppressing unions and wages, who are willing to denounce the marketing racket and question the imperatives of consumer-driven growth at all costs, and so on.

But you have to wonder, What is Murdoch, et. al., up to here? It's a move that seems akin to the NYT's printing Bill Kristol's risible columns, which are fulsome fodder for liberal tut-tutting and so make a certain sense of the NYT's presumed readership. But Frank is no hack, like Kristol; Frank's columns are not so easy to laugh off, nor are they rote recitations of the current state of the ideology he is supposed to represent. The WSJ used to have Alexander Cockburn write a token lefty column for its editorial page back in the 1980s, as Kathy G notes. But unlike Kathy, I don't believe that the editors at the WSJ "see the writing on the wall, and they know they can't ignore liberals anymore." This does not strike me as an attempt to give credence to or acknowledge liberal readers, but maybe I underestimate the attraction Frank might have for people who otherwise wouldn't bother with WSJ. Maybe it will drive some traffic their way on the Web, as his Monday column was probably more widely linked than the customary tripe. But maybe the editors recognized a kindred spirit, not in ideology by in rhetorical technique. Far too often, liberal polemic is earnest, self-righteous, humorlessly urging some borderline condescending concern on readers for those who can't speak for themselves. Frank is not that kind of writer; like kindred spirit Barbara Ehrenreich, he seems to delight instead in sarcasm and the kind of haughty diction that frequently enlivens Marxist critiques while eschewing the sort of punning triviality or jargon-laden turgidity that sometimes undermines more-contemporary leftist discourse. Here's a typical sample, from Monday :

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here's a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton's own sins, when these are our standards? Didn't he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

Note the ironic rhetorical questions, the juxtaposition of played-out words like "funky" with colorful, near ostentatious ones like "mellifluous." Not to mention the absolutely perfect put down of the lazy media coverage of Clinton's campaign stage management. It's sardonic, unapologetically smart and allusive, and it verges on downright mean-spiritedness, and that's what links it to the WSJ's customary editorial voice, which is often sharpened with contempt. Frank, too, often seems nearly contemptuous, which is a great asset -- it conveys confidence in left-wing ideas that you don't always see, and suggests strongly (just like Economist "leaders" frequently do) that you'd be stupid to disagree. Some misinterpret this rhetorical strategy as elitist, but it strikes me as just a refusal to wheedle.

Still I don't think regular WSJ editorial page readers will be dismayed by Frank's columns, but perhaps they'll recognize the tone and delight in its flamboyance.