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AMERICA'S HORRIBLE OBSESSION WITH "LIVE" TELEVISION REPORTING:
This morning, there was a line of media trucks as far as the eye could see, shown on television reporting from Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, CA. What was happening there? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Now, tonight, something will be happening there. Michael Jackson is going to be interred there. Many people would say that this is not a very important event and is a product of our tabloid celebrity culture. Fine. But to me, those "live" television trucks say something else-- something that would be just as true if they were lined up to cover a more important event.

Let's start with the fact that they were there at 7 in the morning. Nothing was going on at the cemetery at 7 in the morning. Indeed, one of the reporters actually said on the news that the trucks were interfering with parents trying to get their kids to a nearby elementary school on the first day of classes.

So why, exactly, are they out there, at a place where nothing is going to happen for 12 hours, interfering with unfortunate parents who are trying to drop their kids at school? Because the local morning "news" airs at 7 in the morning.

And that's the first thing you need to know about live reporting. Very little of it actually carries an event that is going on live. Not none of it, mind you-- those same morning news shows have been doing completely legitimate live reporting on the fires burning in the Angeles National Forest. But little of it.

Usually, live reports are either from the scene of an event that will happen sometime in the future or an event that has ended but occurred at sometime in the past. The live reporter is standing on a sidewalk in front of a place where nothing is going on (except other reporters also doing their live reports). The same words could be delivered from the studio. Indeed, in some cases, the reporter might be more comfortable and prepared doing it in a studio (think inclement weather, or stories that are more reliant on old-fashioned shoe leather reporting, phone calls, and the like).

And the cynicism inherent in the live reporter delivering the report when nothing is going on is breathtaking. Unless the event is going on during the newscast, you are not getting any benefit from having the reporter on the scene. The live report suggests importance, but if the event were really important, the station would break into regular programming to go to the live reporter while the event is in progress. Ever notice how they rarely do this?

Of course, one could argue that one advantage to at least some live reporting is that it places the reporter closer to people who might have information about the story. Thus, when the local news put their reporters near the courthouse for a story regarding a court proceeding, they theoretically can schmooze with the lawyers and gather additional information. However, in many cases, as I noted, there's nobody on the "scene" except other reporters, and even when there is a theoretical opportunity for access, I am simply not sure how much of this really goes on. I don't get the feeling that these on-scene reporters are doing a lot of actually reporting, as opposed to reading copy with a pretty backdrop.

And that's where the live report originates from the actual scene of something important or newsworthy. In many cases, the live report originates from a completely artificial location. For instance, if there's a story on unsafe food at supermarkets, they go live to outside of a supermarket, even though there isn't any unsafe food on the shelves of that supermarket. We had a local news reporter get electrocuted and seriously hurt during a report from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, when the satellite truck's dish got caught in some powerlines and conducted high voltage electricity into the reporter's body. The thing was, the reporter was doing a report on allegations of mistreatment of bodies in a cemetery in Riverside County, 60 miles east of Hollywood. The station didn't want to spend the money to send the reporter out to the facility actually named, so they sent her to the closest cemetery to the studio, in Hollywood, instead.

It's also important to note that these live reports interfere with people's daily lives. Every time a reporter takes up space on a sidewalk, they are blocking access to pedestrians who need to get somewhere. Every time a reporter sets up for a live shot at night on the evening news, they are shining blinding light which can cause auto accidents. And when hordes of reporters "cover" the same story, they make a neighborhood unliveable, they make it hard for people to get to work and do their business, and they essentially take over an area and make it unpleasant for human habitation until they are through.

All this, for what? Studies show that local news viewers like live reports. I don't doubt that's true. But what I do doubt is whether that is true when the live nature of the reports don't add anything. I am sure, for instance, that viewers love freeway car chases or live fire coverage. I suspect that viewers like the Michael Jackson hoopla as well. But do they really care whether that Riverside cemetery is delivered live or from the studio?

News producers have a responsibility to the public. There's no particular reason why they should be running roughshod over neighborhoods when it isn't necessary to do serious news reporting. For many stories where they just want live pictures, maybe it would be better to use pools where there is one set of cameras and one truck rather than 17. But the insane chase of the "live shot" is bad for our quality of life, and it doesn't serve the democratic values that are the basis of America's tradition of a free press. If some government decided to crack down on this (as long as access is ensured for serious stories where on-scene reporting is necessary), I wouldn't mind a bit.

Labels: free press live reporting local news

posted by Dilan at 2:58 PM

 
THE BIRTHERS AND THE POLITICAL QUESTION DOCTRINE:
It's tempting to say that nobody should even bother to give the "birthers"-- those folks on the right wing who continue to question Barack Obama's eligibility to be President-- the time of day. But in all the discussions of birth certificates and birth announcements and Kenya and non-citizen parents and everything else, one crucial aspect of this issue is repeatedly ignored.

Let's hypothesize a situation where a presidential candidate who is not eligible for the office nonetheless runs for the office. What happens then?

Well, first, the parties would have the power to declare him or her ineligible. Each party has the right to determine whether candidates are eligible to run. This includes such things as ballot access requirements and requirements that the candidate be a member of the party. Presumably, the party would be able to determine eligibility for the office as well.

Second, the primary voters would have the power to decline to vote for the candidate on the ground that the candidate is ineligible. Surely, the candidate's opponents would raise the ineligibility issue.

Third, the delegates at the party nominating convention have the power to refuse to nominate the candidate on the ground that the candidate is ineligible.

Fourth, the general election voters can decline to vote for the candidate on the grounds of ineligibility. Again, the opposing candidate will surely raise the issue.

Fifth, the electors in the electoral college can refuse to vote for the candidate on the same grounds.

Sixth, the Congress, which has the constitutional power to count the electoral votes, can refuse to certify the election result on the grounds of ineligibility.

Now, if 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 all decide the candidate is eligible for the office, the "birthers" nonetheless feel the courts have the power-- and should exercise it-- to invalidate the election.

The law has a doctrine called the "political question" doctrine. It is hard to explain, but it basically means that certain decisions are committed by the Constitution to the "political branches" (the legislature and/or President) to decide, and courts can't intervene in them. One example is whether a use of military force violates the war powers clause because Congress didn't authorize it. You can't litigate this-- it is up to Congress to protect its constitutional prerogatives. Another example is the filibuster-- it's up to the Senate to determine if it believes it is unconstitutional. A third example is a President's decision to withdraw from a treaty-- again, it is up to Congress to protect its prerogatives if the President's action is improper.

The constitutional qualifications of the President are clearly a political question. Specifically, Congress and the electoral college have the specific constitutional authority to determine this issue. Beyond that, as noted above, there are a bunch of informal checks that have evolved to stop an ineligible candidate from being elected.

But if an ineligible candidate is elected, you can't have nine unelected judges stepping in and invalidating it. This is what the political question doctrine does-- it protects the judiciary against crises involving its legitimacy by allowing it to stay out of thorny political disputes. It doesn't always work and judges do sometimes find themselves in these disputes, but in this situation it is clearly applicable.

So the "birthers" are barking up the wrong tree. The American public, the electoral college, and the Congress all decided that President Obama is eligible. Their decision is final and nonreviewable.

Labels: birthers political question Obama Presidency

posted by Dilan at 12:24 PM

 
FIGHTING THE LAST WAR:
There's been a lot of discussion on Afghanistan lately, with various commentators taking the position that (1) we should get out (George Will), (2) we should define our mission narrowly so that it can be achievable (Matt Yglesias), (3) we must "win" at all costs, even if we don't know what that means (Danielle Pletka), or any number of other arguments.

What I think of when I think of Afghanistan, however, is the old cliche about fighting the last war. I suspect that both the left and the right are doing it, and that's the reason we are stuck there without any good metrics or sense of what we are supposed to be accomplishing.

For the right, Afghanistan is a proxy for arguments about Iraq. Essentially, conservatives very much know that their foreign policy is going to be judged based on their mistakes in Iraq, and that their reputations have taken a pretty big hit. Thus, it is of great importance to them to shift the subject from the Iraq War to the advisability of the "surge", which many liberals opposed (more because they didn't trust the Bush Administration and thought it was a proxy for staying in Iraq forever, rather than because they thought the strategy itself was so terrible).

Accordingly, they want to "surge" in Afghanistan, to again demonstrate the strategic brilliance of George W. Bush and the conservative movement in taking the fight to the terrorists.

For the left, Afghanistan is also a proxy for arguments about Iraq, but in a different way. Obama dug himself in a hole by arguing that Iraq was a bad war and that we make a mistake pulling troops out of the Afghanistan effort to prepare for the Iraq War, when Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan and had no connections to Iraq. All this was, of course, true. But that was 2002. Just because it was a good idea to continue fighting a war in Afghanistan in 2002 doesn't mean that it makes much sense to be in there in 2009, especially since Al Qaeda moved to Pakistan in the interim anyway. Liberals are using Afghanistan to show that they aren't a bunch of left-wing peaceniks, but they should be able to articulate why it made sense to be in Afghanistan in 2002 and doesn't now (just like they should have been able to articulate why it did not make sense to invade Iraq and did make sense to invade Afghanistan).

Meanwhile, exactly what benefit do we derive from continued occupation of Afghanistan? Sure, we are keeping the Taliban out of power, and I can see the humanitarian and feminist benefits of that (though it is worth noting that the Karzai government hasn't been so kind to women's rights either), but I have the old-fashioned view that the US military isn't some humanitarian outfit, especially when there are real threats out there. I just have the abiding conviction that we seem to be in there because both conservatives and liberals want to refight the last war-- meanwhile, the current one continues to result in needless loss of life and a continuing and needless drain of American resources.

Labels: Afghanistan Iraq liberals conservatives last war

posted by Dilan at 3:00 PM

 
HEALTH CARE AND THE PROBLEM WITH WONKS:
The current state of the health care debate has been analyzed from any number of perspectives. One thing that hasn't been commented on enough, however, is what the difficulties that Obama's health care plan is facing can tell us about the weaknesses in wonkish solutions to policy problems.

First, let's define our terms. When I speak of wonks, I speak of the type of people who turn aspirations into concrete proposals. For instance, people may be demanding action on global warming. The wonks turn that desire for action into something that could be sold to the public, and could be the basis for legislation. Note that wonks don't necessarily write actual legislative text-- rather they are the class of strategists, commentators, and political and policy advisors who come up with the outlines rather than the details.

Wonks often upset ideologues, because wonks are often the people who say that an idea can't sell in its pure form, watering it down in ways that are designed to increase public popularity and the chances of passage of a policy proposal. Wonks exist on both sides of the aisle-- for instance, on the Republican side, it was wonks who repackaged conservatives' desires to dismantle Social Security as the George W. Bush personal accounts / privitization proposal. They specifically took actions to attempt to make the proposal more palatable to the public, such as ensuring that current benefits to current retirees would not be touched.

As you can see, what wonks propose doesn't always make the proposal saleable, and therein lies the tale....

In the case of health care, the initial goal was universal coverage. There were a couple of reasons why this was so important to liberals. First, most liberals believe that decent health care is a right of every person in a wealthy, advanced country. This is how they do it in the European countries that many liberals admire. People shouldn't be dying or suffering debilitating illnesses and medical conditions because they aren't wealthy. Many forms of inequality can be tolerated when it comes to mere money or material possessions, but medical treatment should be available to all when they need it.

Second, and related, liberals believe that government-provided health care has instrumental economic benefits. The most important of these is middle-class security. This is the point that conservative Democrat Mickey Kaus, who has long been a vociferous supporter of universal health care, repeatedly makes. Health insurance, for middle-class Americans, is as important as Social Security. It provides them with the assurance that they will not face financial ruin in the case of a medical emergency or a serious illness or condition. Just as Social Security protected Americans from poverty caused by old age, universal health care protects Americans from poverty caused by a medical condition or illness. Another instrumental benefit of universal health care is to remove a competitive disadvantage that is imposed on American businesses, who have to pay for their employees' health care to keep their workers healthy whereas businessess in other countries do not have to face this cost. A third instrumental benefit is that health insurance that is provided by the government and which does not depend on one's job allows workers to be more mobile, which is an important benefit in a dynamic economy. Workers can leave one job for another, or to start a small business, knowing that they won't lose their health insurance. A society where there is no universal health care and where health insurance is tied to one's job is a society where people feel they must stay in their current job no matter what to keep their health care. That becomes a less efficient society.

So those are the basic outlines of the liberal case for universal health care. The obvious models for how to achieve it are to create a National Health Service (which is what the UK does, and which is provided for Veterans and for active duty servicemembers in the US through government programs) which employs doctors and builds hospitals and clinics to treat every American, or to create a governmental, public insurance company (which is what Canada does,and which is provided for all senior citizens in the US through Medicare) which pays private hospitals and doctors for care.

The problem that wonks faced is that these models are thought to be unenactable in the US. They are easily demonized as "socialized medicine" and they impinge on the vested interests of too many players in the current system-- doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies, as well as the politicians who fund their campaigns with contributions from those sectors. They are also seen as requiring new taxes and spending, which many political insiders have come to believe cannot be enacted unless disguised.

So the wonks felt they had to design a proposal that bought off some of the stakeholders and disguised the taxes and spending. This is how we got to the "mandate, subsidies, and regulation" approach that is at the heart of the Democrats' current health reform efforts. The "mandate" is a requirement that everyone buys health insurance. It is essentially a tax, but it is disguised as a regulation, and the money raised goes directly to health insurance companies rather than to the government. The subsidies, along with the mandate, buy off health insurance companies by providing them with millions of new paying customers. And the regulations are what is extracted in return-- promises to cover everyone, not to cancel policies or impose pre-existing condition exclusions, and to allow for community rating so that people such as small business owners who buy on the individual market do not pay exorbitant premiums.

So what, then, is the problem with what the wonks did? Well, there are two.

The first problem is that the wonks' approach dragged health care off message. You may have heard Obama drone on and on about bending the cost curve, and I have certainly seen more than a few liberal as well as conservative writers articulate that the health care crisis is that costs are so high. This is, of course, not the crisis at all, at least not in the way that liberals initially conceived it. Sure, health care costs are a major, mid- to long-term problem. Medicare costs are shooting up faster than inflation, and as more expensive treatments continue to be developed, there are serious rationing issues that are materializing.

But the problem that health care reform was meant to solve is not that costs are too high, but that millions of Americans lack health insurance. You know, health care is a right, middle class security, dynamic economy and competitiveness, etc. If the proposal that was on the table was single payer or an NHS, it wouldn't have been dragged off message. But because the proposal did not straightforwardly provide insurance for every American, it was easy for it to be dragged off message.

Why is this? Well, let's think about this. The structure of the mandate/subsidies/regulation proposal is built on the individual mandate, under which all Americans are required to buy their own health insurance. The problem with this is this structure doesn't create an entitlement, it creates an obligation. If someone were proposing that a state enact a mandatory auto insurance law, it would be very hard to sell it as a matter of security, i.e., that under the proposal every state resident would be able to feel secure as he or she moved from car to car that he or she would have auto insurance. Do you see why?

Now this doesn't mean that such mandatory auto insurance laws are a bad idea. They aren't. It simply shows you that if you want to talk about middle-class security and health care as a right, a proposal to simply force everyone to buy a health insurance policy does not further that message.

Of course, proponents of the mandate/subsidies/regulation approach would say this isn't fair-- that the subsidies will provide the requisite security. And maybe they will. But this is a hard sell to the public. Without getting into wonky details, it's very hard to convince someone that the subsidy will really be sufficient to buy them a health insurance policy. And the subsidies are also very much subject to the vicissitudes of politics-- it's much easier politically to cut a subsidy or tighten an eligibility requirement for one than it would be to eliminate Medicare, for instance. And I suspect the public understands this. What is being presented to them is a certain requirement that they buy their own health insurance, and a speculative possibility that the government might cover the cost. Is it any wonder that it is tough to sell this program as providing cradle-to-grave medical security or a right to health care that can never be taken away.

This is why the messaging shift to cost control is no accident. Because while mandate / subsidies / regulation doesn't provide health security in a convincing way, it might very well control costs to some extent by bringing the medical profession and insurance industry under stricter regulation. The problem is, the public doesn't care about health care costs. Indeed, as Kaus points out, there's no reason to think that the public, if presented honestly with the choice between spending more money on health care and controlling costs, wouldn't want to spend more money on health care.

Thus, by creating a plan that was designed to buy off stakeholders and neutralize political attacks, the wonks destroyed the central message, indeed, the moral imperative for health care reform. People who might man the barricades for actual guaranteed health coverage for every American (even if provided through the private sector) have little interest in fighting for a requirement that everyone buy their own insurance, coupled with some iffy subsidies and regulations.

This isn't all that the wonks have wrought, however. The premise of the wonks' work is that single payer or NHS can't pass. Indeed, not even something along the lines of buying everyone a private-sector policy can pass (too much taxation!). But what happens if what the wonks propose can't pass either? Or if it can pass but only in a form so watered down (with reduced subsidies, more ineffective regulations, and no public option) that it will not constitute a positive reform? (I do not need to tell you that this result is a distinct possibility given the state of the health care debate at the present time.)

It seems to me that the argument for wonkish watering down of aspirations and proposals is precisely that the wonks' version can pass. Indeed, this is especially true when the watering down process inserts potentially unpopular measures, such as individual mandates and Medicare cuts. If it can't pass, why do it?

Indeed, there are several benefits to the left in rejecting wonkish approaches to health care if they cannot pass. For one thing, the wonks have moved the Overton Window (the scope of acceptable, "non-extreme" political discourse) to the right. Now, the "left" proposal on health care is mandate / subsidies / regulation. (For point of reference, before the current health care debate, this proposal was more associated with three Republicans, John Chafee (who proposed it in 1994), Mitt Romney (who enacted a version of it in Massachusetts), and Arnold Shwarzenegger (who proposed it in California).) There are many plans that liberals like better than this one. If we are going to have to wait to the next health care crisis to enact a reform, shouldn't we be able to start from a point farther left than this?

Second, the left is now associated with many of the problems in both the messaging and substance of the plan. There's no reason liberals should want themselves associated with the aspiration of cutting health care costs, nor with the concrete policy proposals of individual mandates or Medicare cuts. Rather, liberals want to be associated with the clean messaging of health care for all.

None of this is to condemn wonks in toto. Wonks are necessary to move from aspiration to policy. But the wonks should work in the service of the aspiration, and what they come up with should never replace or supplant it. That mistake has been made in the health care debate, and if liberals don't realize it and correct it, it could be with us for a long time.

Labels: health care wonks individual mandate

posted by Dilan at 10:13 AM