Monthly Archives: June 2005

by | 6 June 2005 · 8:04 pm

An Economist’s Take on Jared Diamond’s Collapse

Alaska-based econoblogger Ben Muse cites fellow economist Partha Dasgupta’s review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse in the London Review of Books. Seems Diamond fails to understand the relationship between pricing and scarcity in modern economies. Of course, if the government controls pricing, then it effectively slaughters that bellwether.

Forests loom large in Diamond’s case studies. As deforestation was the proximate cause of the Easter Islanders’ demise, he offers an extended, contrasting account of the way a deforested Japan succeeded, in the early 18th century, in averting total disaster by regenerating its forests. Now consider another island: England. Deforestation here began under the Romans, and by Elizabethan times the price of timber had begun to rise ominously. In the mid-18th century what people saw across the landscape in England wasn’t trees, but stone rows separating agricultural fields. The noted economic historian Brinley Thomas argued that it was because timber had become so scarce that a lengthy search began among inventors and tinkerers for an effective coal-based energy source. By Thomas’s reckoning, the defining moment of the Industrial Revolution should be located in 1784, when Henry Cort’s process for manufacturing iron was first successfully deployed. His analysis would suggest that England became the centre of the Industrial Revolution not because it had abundant energy but because it was running out of energy. France, in contrast, didn’t need to find a substitute energy source: it was covered in forests and therefore lost out. I’m not able to judge the plausibility of Thomas’s thesis – there would appear to be almost as many views about the origins, timing and location of the Industrial Revolution (granting there was one) as there are economic historians – but the point remains that scarcities lead individuals and societies to search for ways out, which often means discovering alternatives. Diamond is dismissive of the possibility of our finding such alternatives in the future because, as he would have it, we are about to come up against natural bottlenecks…

via Regions of Mind

Here’s a link to an interview with Diamond about that same book.

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by | 5 June 2005 · 9:51 pm

J-School as Seminary, Reporters as Missionaries

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who blogs on PressThink, offers an interesting essay, Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion, about journalism school as a seminary of sorts that churns out idealistic do-gooders who pretty much all share the same faith without realizing they belong to a minority faith that often differs radically from the faiths of their readers. (Also see Rosen’s earlier essay entitled Journalism Is Itself a Religion.)

I’m going to show you a passage where I think the religion of the newsroom appears in everyday life. It comes from a piece called The Useless Credential, which ran at testycopyeditors.org. The author, Darryl McGrath, graduated from the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1986, the year I joined the faculty at NYU. She writes:

I would tell the dean that this business does not know what to do with career reporters, the people in their 40s who realized years ago they were never going to make it to the New York Times or win a Pulitzer, but nevertheless loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden. (Yes, I’m still that idealistic.) We are the journalists who never wanted to move into the higher-paying jobs, like editing and management or newsroom Internet technology, because we absolutely loved being reporters. But as we got older, we realized that very few newspapers wanted to pay a salary that would allow us to continue doing what we do best: report. The journalism school did little to prepare me for this reality.

Which is a good point. Notice how McGrath said she still believed in the religion, despite salaries so pitiful they suggest employers do not. She said she “loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden.” That’s the lord’s prayer in the mainline church of journalism right there. And I think it’s dead on too when she adds: “I’m still that idealistic.”

Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden were taught to McGrath not as political acts in themselves–which they are–and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform–which they are–but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

This kind of instruction is guaranteed to leave future journalists baffled by the culture wars, and in fact the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents. Well, jeez louise, so did the progressives of the 1920s! As far as the religion knows, none of this is happening. And J-schools–by passing the faith along but making little room for non-believers–are part of the problem.

In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers–and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism–is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

More so now that we know about W. Mark Felt. If Deep Throat was not Hal Holbrook but the number two guy at the FBI, was he Woodward’s source, or was Woodward really his agent? Now look at Epstein’s conclusion: “agencies of government itself…” were mainly responsible for getting the truth out about Watergate. Suppose he’s right, more or less. Admitting it would crash a big portion of the religion.

Missionaries, anthropologists, aid workers, peacekeepers, and other such outside agents also frequently end up being used in power plays by rival leaders in their target communities.

The whole essay is worth reading, along with the comments.

via Instapundit

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by | 4 June 2005 · 7:14 pm

Ernest Hemingway, Lousy Reporter

One other symbol in Spain was Ernest Hemingway, by far the most famous of the English-language writers there during the war, an influential figurehead in the fight against Fascism–“How could this fight be lost now, with Hemingway on our side.” Hemingway had already worked on one propaganda film, Spain in Flames, and had agreed to help with another, The Spanish Earth, when he accepted an offer from the North American Newspaper Alliance [NANA] to report the war. He arrived in Spain for his first visit in March 1937, and altogether made four trips. He travelled widely, usually with Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Matthews, and Sefton Delmer, saw a lot of the fighting, and got to know many of the Republican leaders and supporters. Yet his performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad. On a technical level, his descriptions of battle and bombardments are monotonous; his emphasis on his own close location to the action smacks of boastfulness; his accounts of blood, wounds, and severed legs are typical of his desire to shock; and his reporting of conversations is so totally Hemingway in style as to make the reader doubt their authenticity. NANA had to ask him to confine his work to human-interest features and, when that failed, to report only developments of vital importance. As his biographer, Carlos Baker, puts it, “His eye for telling details and individual traits was not nearly so sharp as that of Dos Passos, nor did he commonly rise to the meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness which characterised the best work of Matthews and Delmer.”

True, Hemingway grew up politically in Spain and believed it was the place to stop Fascism, before Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts could precipitate a second world war. But he was unjustifiably optimistic about the Republicans’ chances of doing this. One of his principal informants was Mikhail Koltzov–the Pravda and Izvestia correspondent who quarrelled with Louis Fischer over an accurate but pessimistic dispatch Fischer had written–and this might explain the views Hemingway expressed to reporters in New York in June 1938. Franco was short of troops, Hemingway said, and handicapped by friction among the foreign elements in his army; the Republicans were well organised and their chances of winning were good. Actually, at that moment the Republicans were only six months away from defeat. But these criticisms are the least serious of Hemingway’s shortcomings as a war correspondent. The most important concerns his total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of “untrustworthy elements” on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this….

In the end, Hemingway did write it all, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but from a war correspondent the reader has the right to expect all the news the correspondent knows at the time, not as interpolations in a work of romantic fiction published when the war is over. The truth was that Hemingway, for all his compassion for the Spaniards, for all his commitment to the Republican cause, used the war to gain a new lease on his life as a writer. As Baker says, “Refusing to waste the best of his materials in his newspaper dispatches … he had gathered and salted away a body of experience and information which he described to [his editor Maxwell] Perkins as ‘absolutely invaluable’.” For a novelist, this was understandable. For a war correspondent, it was unforgivable.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 230-232

Okay, the price for this second excerpt from the chapter on the Spanish Civil War is a total embargo on excerpts from several chapters on the two world wars.

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by | 3 June 2005 · 9:23 pm

Reporting Both Sides from Spain, 1936-39

Ideological partisanship during the Spanish Civil War was every bit as blindly irresponsible as it is today with regard to the war in Iraq.

The main target for the [pro-Franco] Catholic press was Herbert Matthews. His newspaper, the New York Times, was determined to cover the war with impartiality and had formulated a plan to achieve this: it would print the news from both sides and would give both equal prominence, equal length, and equal treatment. This scheme, fine in theory, was a disaster and pleased no one. To begin with, the Times’ correspondent with the Franco forces was William P. Carney, a Catholic, who felt strongly about Republican excesses against the clergy, and who was simply not in Matthews’ class as a correspondent. Giving his stories equal length with Matthews’ often meant overplaying a bad story and cutting a good one. Next, the Times’ “bullpen,” its group of senior editors who read the news as it comes in and decide how much of it will be printed and where it will appear in the paper, was dominated at that time by Catholics who were known to reflect a Catholic viewpoint when assessing the news, with results ranging from playing down stories about birth control to playing up stories expressing alarm over Communism. And, third, the Catholic opposition to Matthews was much more active in pressing its campaign against him than his admirers were in supporting him.

How the New York Times’ plan worked out in practice can best be assessed by … examples….

In March of 1937, a large Franco force had struck towards Guadalajara, north of Madrid, but was stopped well short of its objective. Matthews went there and found that the attacking troops had been Italian. They had been routed and had left behind prisoners, rifles, machine guns, and some disabled tanks. Matthews talked to the prisoners (he knew Italian), examined the arms, and watched the dead Italians being buried. Back in Madrid, he filed his story, an important one because it contained the first positive evidence that Mussolini had sent not only arms and advisers but also an expeditionary force–a fact, at that time, of great political and emotional significance. To emphasise this point, Matthews wrote that the attacking troops “were Italian and nothing but Italian.” In New York, on the instructions of the assistant managing editor, Raymond McCaw, wherever the word “Italian” appeared in Matthews’ copy it was struck out and the word “insurgent”–one used to describe the Franco troops–was substituted. This was done even to the extent of making the quoted phrase read “they were Insurgent and nothing but Insurgent,” thus completely distorting Matthews’ point. To make matters worse, McCaw sent a cable to Matthews saying that the only papers to emphasise the Italian point had been those in Moscow and pointing out that, as far as the New York Times was concerned, “we cannot print obvious propaganda for either side even under bylines.”…

Small wonder that the editor at the New York Times responsible for the “Letters” column complained, “No matter who writes the dispatch [from Spain] the other side will accuse him of broadcasting propaganda or downright lying. In all my ten or twelve years’ experience with letters to the editor, I have never encountered a situation in which so much absolutely rabid partisanship was manifested. It is partisanship that cannot be reasoned with and which, consequently, gets nowhere.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 215-217

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Filed under publishing, Spain, war

by | 2 June 2005 · 8:14 pm

The Tong Master, or Les Barbares au Gril

The invaluable Simon World excerpts a well-done post entitled The Tong Master (or Les Barbares au Gril). Not just for Aussies. Cheeseheads may also identify. Here’s a morsel.

Five men, lots of sausages. Jonesy was the Fork-pronger; he had the fork that pronged the tough hides of the Bavarian bratwursts and he showed lots of promise. Stabbing away eagerly, leaving perfect little vampire holes up and down the casing.

P.J. was shaking his head; he said “I reckon they cook better if you don’t poke them”. There was a long silence, you could have heard a chipolata drop; this new-comer was a rabble-rouser, bringing in his crazy ideas from outside. He didn’t understand the hierarchy; first the “Tong-Master”, Then the “Sausage-Layer”, then the “Fork-Pronger” –and everyone below was just a watcher.

Maybe eventually they’ll move up the ladder, but for now – don’t rock the Weber.

Dianne popped her head in; hmmm, smells good, she said. She was trying to jostle into the circle; we closed ranks, pulling our heads down and our shoulders in, mumbling yeah yeah yeah, but making no room for her. She was keen, going round to the far side of the barbecue, heading for the only available space…. “THE GAP” in the circle where all the smoke and ashes blew. Nobody could survive “THE GAP”; Dianne was going to try.

She stood there stubbornly, smoke blinding her eyes, ashes filling her nostrils, sausage fat spattering all over her arms and face. Until she couldn’t take it anymore, she gave up, backed off.

Kevin waited till she was gone and sipped his beer. We sipped our beer; yeah.

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by | 2 June 2005 · 5:29 pm

Waugh Reporting from Abyssinia, 1935-36

Nothing that the correspondents imagined about covering the [second Italian] war in Abyssinia could match the hilarious reality. When Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s irreverent novel of Fleet Street and the hectic pursuit of hot news in “Ishmaelia” by the newly appointed war correspondent William Boot, was published in 1938, it was hailed as a “brilliant parody” of his experiences in Abyssinia. What only the war correspondents present at the time knew was that Scoop was actually a piece of straight reportage, thinly disguised as a novel to protect the author from libel actions….

Unfortunately, the patronage of even the Emperor [Haile Selassie] himself was of no help in getting any real news. As [Daily Express correspondent O. D.] Gallagher noted, “a reporter who cannot speak the language of the country he is working in can never get at the facts because he is completely at the mercy of either his interpreter or the official handouts. Not one correspondent in Addis spoke Amharic except a Lithuanian, who was general assistant to Jim Mills of Associated Press. The rest of us had to rely on what our Abyssinian interpreters told us in their poor English or on official handouts.”

The interpreters/assistants/personal spies, as they were variously called, were cashing in on their ability to speak English and on the strength of their salesmanship. Waugh secretly employed an Abyssinian called Wazir Ali Bey, until, so he said, he found that Ali Bey was also secretly employed by nearly every other correspondent in the capital. It was no use for a correspondent to decide to dispense with an assistant and set out to find news for himself. For one thing, there was the language problem, and, still more important, the Emperor refused to allow the correspondents to leave Addis Ababa, claiming, probably with reason, that, since his tribesmen could not distinguish between an Italian and any other European, he could not be responsible for their safety. He also no doubt suspected that some of the correspondents might well be spies….

The clampdown on news from the Italian army coincided with the flush of invented stories from Addis Ababa. Since an invented story, unhampered by facts, makes more exciting reading than a heavily censored account of a minor engagement, newspapers plumped for the stories from Addis Ababa, and thus created a false impression of what was happening in Abyssinia.

Towns formerly held by the Italians were reported captured. Casualty figures were grossly exaggerated. [Herbert] Matthews has said he tried to tell the New York Times that lurid accounts from Addis Ababa should be treated with the utmost caution, but no one in New York appeared to pay any attention to this warning. What Matthews was up against, of course, was that the truth, that the Abyssinians stood no chance against the Italians’ mechanised army, was unpalatable; sympathy suspended the reader’s critical judgement, and he preferred optimistic but fake reports from Abyssinia to more factual reports from correspondents with the Italian army. Editors were not slow to sense this. “The commands of Fleet Street became more and more fantastically inappropriate to the situation,” Evelyn Waugh wrote. And as Wazir Ali Bey, the most active of the interpreter-assistants in Addis Ababa, retailed reports of more and more clashes in which the Italians suffered heavy casualties, “Wazir Ali Bey’s news service formed an ever-increasing part of the morning reading of French, English and American newspaper publics.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 187, 189, 193-194

Compare Inside the Information Bubble during the Ethiopian Famine, an excerpt from Robert Kaplan’s Surrender or Starve (Vintage, 2003).

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by | 1 June 2005 · 7:56 pm

Sumo’s Futagoyama Beya Leader Dies

I know that very few of my readers have any interest in sumo, but this is a major story in Japan. The leader of the top stable of sumo wrestlers has died, and the story in the Japan Times explains a lot about the lineage that I was hazy about.

Sumo elder Futagoyama, a former ozeki and the father of former grand champions Takanohana and Wakanohana, died of mouth cancer at a Tokyo hospital Monday, his family said. He was 55.

Futagoyama, whose real name is Mitsuru Hanada [and whose sons first fought under the names Wakahanada and Takahanada], had been receiving treatment at a hospital in Tokyo since the fall of 2003 for a type of cancer that afflicts the region between the tongue and gums at the base of the mouth.

A native of Aomori Prefecture and younger brother of former yokozuna Wakanohana [a childhood favorite of mine], Futagoyama made his debut in professional sumo in July 1965 and earned promotion to the elite makuuchi division as an 18-year-old.

Nicknamed “Prince of Sumo,” Futagoyama quickly made his mark in the top flight as Takanohana and was promoted to ozeki, one below sumo’s highest rank of yokozuna, in the fall of 1972. He remained an ozeki for 50 tournaments until he retired in January 1981, the longest stint ever in the sport’s second-highest rank, and won two tournaments in the top division — both in 1975.

So, the recently retired brothers Wakanohana and Takanohana are the sons of the original Wakanohana, whose younger brother, retired ozeki Takanohana, ended up as their stablemaster. And now the recently retired Wakanohana’s younger brother Takanohana (not my favorite) assumes control of sumo’s leading Futagoyama [‘Twin (lit. ‘two child’) Mountain’] Beya.

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