Eric Alterman | The Nation

My Think Again column is called “Why Were Pundits All In on ‘All In’?” and it’s here. My Nation column is called “Don’t Stop Believin’. It’s about the MSM coverage of the election and it’s here.

Alter-reviews: The Altercation Gift-giving guide, part I.

There’s a lot of great stuff this season, so I’m getting started early. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volumes I’m surprised not to have read more of this ambitious three-volume history of New York Jews. Its editorial pedigree is appropriate—not many would argue with the choice of Deborah Dash More as the series editor--and the historians recruited for each volumes strike one as appropriate to each topic. I attended a session of the American Jewish Historical Society conference last Spring in which each explained their ambitions and methods and have been looking forward to sitting down and spending some time with it ever since. (And I will, I swear, but not until it’s too late to recommend it in time for the holidays.) I even tried to design one of my courses around it—but that idea got the kibosh above my paygrade.

Vol. I. is called Haven of Liberty. It’s by Howard Rock and takes us from the landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 up through the end of the Civil War (during which time, by the way, the only anti-Jewish piece of legislation was ever passed in this country.) Given the history of the way Jews were, and could expected to be treated in Europe and the Middle East it’s an amazing story; a fact that gets lost in the fact that the stories that followed it are, in significant respects, even more amazing

Volume II, Emerging Metropolis, was written by Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, pickus up where Rock leaves off and shows us how New York became the Jewish city we know and (if we are halfway decent people) we love as it takes us through the period of the great immigration.

Volume III, Jews in Gotham, by Jeffrey S.Gurock, chronicles the 20th century neighborhood life of New York Jews. Each volume also includes a “visual essay” by art historian Diana Linden which seek to illuminate Jewish culture through portraits, art, and architecture.

You can buy each volume individually or in an aggressively priced box-set which would, you know, make a nice gift. More here.

I am really enjoying all the fun stuff that comes with the deluxe version of the long-lost Stones documentary “Charlie is My Darling.” Shot in Ireland just weeks after the release of (I Can t Get No) Satisfaction, it’s a combination of wonderful behinds the scenes stuff—where the Stones sing the Beatles—and terrific live performances. The Super Deluxe Box Set (no, that’s really what it’s called) includes both DVD and Blu-ray discs (for some reason) plus a director s cut and producer s cut, and all the interviews, a couple of awesome audio CDs, one of which is the film s soundtrack album and the other a compilation of 13 live recordings the band made during the 1965 UK tour. There’s also a 10 inch vinyl record of the live material and a replica poster heralding the September 4, 1965 date they played in Belfast, one of over 200 Limited Edition numbered and enlarged cells randomly inserted from the film. I also really like the 42 page hardcover book heavy on photos, many of which are newly available, and color photos taken by Marc Sharatt, the Stones tour photographer. Finally we get reprints of vintage newspaper and magazine articles from the UK and Irish press covering the show and essays by David Fricke and Glen Hansard. More here.

I’ll admit I was pretty nervous on Election Day. Sure, I care about the country and all but I was most worried about having to wake up every morning and read or listen to some pompous pundit tell me what a wise brave man Mitt Romney (or Paul Ryan, or God forbid, John Bolton…) and then have to point out, for the millionth time, that this was not the case. In fact it was dangerous even to imagine such a thing….

So how did I manage to get through the day, you ask?

Well, thanks to the good folks at Columbia Legacy, Election Day coincided with the release of a bunch of box sets that could not help but put you in a good mood while you waited (though drinking helped too). Among them:

LOUIS ARMSTRONG – The Complete Columbia/Okeh & RCA Victor Recordings 1925-1933 10 CD box set features the Hot Five and Hot Seven sides of 1925 through 1928 on ten CD with liner notes by Ricky Riccardi, archivist at the Louis Armstrong House & Museum and author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Late Years (Pantheon, 2011). These have all been released before, twice in box set form regarding the Hot 5s and Hot 7s, but this is state of art, insofar as sound quality of eight-year-old recordings go.

DUKE ELLINGTON – The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection 1951-1958 9 CD box set. Rather like the Grateful Dead (and unlike say, the Rolling Stones) it’s impossible to pick just one period as Ellington’s best. Personally, I favor the Blanton/Webster years, but I could be talked into the mid-fifties as well. This is the beginning of the LP era, and working with Billy Strayhorn, to say nothing of Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Clark Terry, Ray Nance, Harry Carney and Rosemary Clooney among so many others, Ellington extended the possibilities of American classical music wihout ever losing sight of the importance of the adage that it would mean a thing if it lacked “that swing.” This nine-CD box set includes an essay by the excellent Loren Schoenberg who is Artistic Director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and we’re grateful for that too. And given the price, well, if you are lacking a significant number of these releases, I’d say now’s the time.

BESSIE SMITH – The Complete Columbia Recordings 10 CD box set. This catalogue was recorded between 1923 and 1933, and includes over 160-plus master takes, with an essay by Ken Romanowski. They were originally released as five double CDs following the enormous success of the Robert Johnson CDs, and if that’s where the blues began, then this is where the blues began again. Overall, this is music to win elections by. More here.

Also, Shout! Factory has a 5-DVD/1 CD Box Set of Mel Brooks stuff that collects all kinds of things that are not Mel Brooks movies. It’s got a 60 page booklet and it’s got photos, program notes, and essays by Leonard Maltin, Gene Wilder, Bruce Jay Friedman and Robert Brustein. It’s called The Incredible Mel Brooks: An Irresistible Collection Of Unhinged Comedy and it’s got stuff like:

• "Mel Brooks And Dick Cavett Together Again"

• "I Thought I Was Taller: A Short History Of Mel Brooks"

• "An Audience With...Mel Brooks"

• "Excavating The 2000 Year Old Man"

• "Mel And His Movies, a New Five-Part Look Back"

• Vintage appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Dick Cavett Show

• Episodes of Get Smart, When Things Were Rotten and Mad About You

• "In The Beginning: The Caesar Years"

• Short Films, Tributes, Rarities and Much More

• New Introductions by Mel

• CD With Long-Lost Comedy Bits and Songs From Mel’s Movies

Lotta stuff there for a cold night (with a lot to drink…) More here.

As for yours truly, I think I’m going to Kansas City…

Now here’s Reed:

Stars in Our Eyes

by Reed Richardson

Ever since the dawn of our Republic, America has a held a strange, somewhat conflicted fascination with its military leaders. Given that our new nation was forged from a principled rejection of empire building and the excesses of standing armies, it’s not without irony that, after gaining independence we turned around and unanimously elected our foremost general, a professional soldier, as the first national executive. (And let’s be honest, we’d have little hope for the long-term democratic prospects of a country that followed a similar political arc today.)

George Washington, it turns out, was a fortuitous choice. His first two terms further cemented the Constitutional ideal of a plebian presidency and beat back the “royalist” leanings of other Founders, like John Adams, who favored a more aristocratic interpretation of the office. But it’s notable that, by 1828, the nation had essentially worked its way through the roster of potential presidents directly connected to the Revolution and, at that point, we vigorously returned to electing men who had achieved high military rank. In a still highly regionalized, provincial nation, battlefield exploits, as recounted primarily in the media, provided a rare platform from which a candidate could build nationwide support. And so, starting with Major General Andrew Jackson’s election and lasting until General Zachary Taylor’s victory 20 years later, four out of six elections were won by former generals and one—that of James K. Polk—by a former militia colonel.

When they weren’t dying in office, though, these former soldiers proved to be rather hit-or-miss as presidents. Perhaps soured on their track record, the public handed presidential defeats to high-profile generals—Winfield Scott and George McClellan, respectively—in 1852 and 1864. Civil War hero Ulysses Grant, who was lucky enough to run against perhaps the worst U.S. president in history—Andrew Johnson—in 1868, ended up serving eight years, but is generally regarded as barely an improvement over his predecessor. It then, might say something, that in the 136 years hence, only one former general—Dwight Eisenhower—has won the White House, though many—George Custer, Douglas MacArthur, William Westmoreland, Curtis LeMay, Alexander Haig, Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell—have had or have been rumored to have had national political ambitions.

This past summer, General David Petraeus’s name was not so subtly added to that list. Sure, this latest rumor was thanks to a blind item on Drudge Report, but there’s been a latent Draft Petraeus for President movement around since 2009. Though the Drudge item was rank speculation, the Beltway media, as it is want to do, expended a lot of energy eagerly dismissing the rumor, which, of course, only fuels the notion within the public that there might be some truth to it. Generals don’t make the cover of Newsweek three separate times, after all, without the media thinking they matter in the national conversation. And since his first tour of duty in Iraq in 2003—as commander of the 101st Airborne Division—Petraeus has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the press, which, up until last week, had essentially anointed him the most brilliant, hyper-competent, and humble soldier of his generation.

As such, the revelation that he had an extramarital affair with his official biographer and his subsequently abrupt resignation as CIA Director holds important lessons on several fronts. For the media, Petraeus’s downfall once again revealed a groupthink culture that is easily charmed and credulous to a fault as long as it gets its emails returned. Indeed, the gnashing of the teeth and rending of the garments by the Beltway media this past week, as curated by FAIR, bordered on religious fervor: “brainy ascetic,” “water walker,” “iconic figure,” “a magician,” “he made us all feel special.” Some in the press were so devout in their belief that they just couldn’t let Petraeus go—Roger Cohen’s mash note of a column begs the general to “get back to work” while lauding the general’s personal demeanor, physique, intellect, and resumé. Curiously, it spends precious little time defending his actual accomplishments, at the CIA or elsewhere.

And that is the tell. Much like the rude awakening conservatives experienced on Election Day, the media was “shellshocked” by Petraeus’s behavior because they, too, had bought into a myth and a narrative rather than try to understand the cold, messy reality of the man. His appeal to the press is easily understandable, though. His supposedly apolitical viewpoint (he reportedly gave up voting for president in 2002), his legendary focus on results, his willingness to forge relationships with presidential administrations from both parties: all of these are the hallmark traits of that long-beloved-by-the-media, but non-existent Washington species— the centrist. That he would succumb to something so pedestrian and venal as a sex scandal was a tragedy in the media’s eyes, in part, because his failure struck a blow against the press corps own institutional worldview.

As is often the case, though, the warning signs have been around for years. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman offers up this mea culpa about buying into the “cult of Petraeus” for years. Defense correspondent Michael Hastings takes an in-depth look underneath Petraeus’s well-constructed veneer and, though I feel like he takes it a bit too far, finds a striving, ambitious, “bullshit artist.” Agree or not, these cynical viewpoints, up until two weeks ago, would have been given not a single molecule of oxygen in the mainstream media’s atmosphere.

For what it’s worth, I too noted more than two years ago that Petraeus—during an incident strangely forgotten this past week—was capable of displaying shockingly poor judgment and an inappropriate willingness to step “outside his lane” and into the political arena. At the time, I questioned his decision-making as “worrisome” and “incredibly naïve.” But now, I confess, I think I was only half-right. Worrisome? Yes. But naïve? No. There was something else at work here. Just like his willingness to boldly airdrop his assessment of the Iraq war into the middle of the 2004 presidential campaign, just like his unilateral decision to pay off Sunni tribesman, just like his penchant for rosy, Blackhawk-borne VIP tours of Iraq, just like his savvy maneuvering to justify a “surge” in Afghanistan, and, yes, just like his willingness to conduct an illicit personal affair, Petraeus has time and again demonstrated a tremendous capacity for self-satisfying arrogance.

Still, there is no doubt that our modern officer corps is the best trained and educated in not only the world, but in our own country’s history. That today’s four-star general is just as likely to have an Ivy League PhD as a Ranger tab says something about the military’s emphasis on bringing more than just materiel to bear on the battlefield. So, to bemoan arrogance amongst the U.S. military’s flag officers becomes a lot like complaining about the weight of offensive linemen in the NFL. Without it, they probably wouldn’t be where they are in the first place. But what’s supposed to keep that arrogance in check, however, are things like civilian oversight and media scrutiny.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached a unprecedented imbalance in terms of the esteem the public holds these pillars of our society. According to a Gallup poll from this past summer, the public has three times more confidence in our Armed Forces than it does the media. The presidency and Supreme Court are trusted by barely more than one in three, and confidence level in Congress is mired in the teens. And it’s not just on the topic of trust, but on familiarity that we find this growing civil-military gap. Two generations ago, three out of four members in Congress were veterans; in this past Congress, the ratio was down to one in five. In the recent presidential election, neither party had a veteran on the ticket—the first time that’s happened since 1932.

The effect of all this has been to slowly but surely cede more and more of our political discourse to the military. A media increasingly fearful of treading on the military’s esteemed image naturally becomes more susceptible to uncritically parroting a general’s viewpoint as to what’s “best for the troops.” By the same token, politicians and civilian appointees who don’t fully embrace their Constitutional authority allow themselves to be more easily co-opted by a military that doesn’t share the burden of governing. (The fact that presidential candidate Obama clearly gained more politically from this noted 2008 campaign photo op than did his future subordinate Petraeus speaks volumes.)

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We should take advantage of this moment, then, to recognize that Petraeus’s fall from grace has exposed the greater risk we now face thanks to our polity’s collective decision to lean heavily upon the military for not just our national defense but our overall foreign policy. What does this look like? Robert Wright, writing a bracingly honest, critical assessment, explains the alarming direction Petraeus’s CIA was and still is heading:

When, in the fall of 2011, David Petraeus moved from commanding the Afghanistan war effort to commanding the CIA, it was a disturbingly natural transition. I say "natural" because the CIA conducts drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is involved in other military operations there, so Petraeus, in his new role, was continuing to fight the Afghanistan war. I say "disturbingly" because this overlap of Pentagon and CIA missions is the result of a creeping militarization of the CIA that may be undermining America's national security.

This is the true lesson we should learn from David Petraeus—that for our democracy to imbue our all-too-human military leaders with the mantle of invincibility and air of infallibility is unfair to both them and us. We, as a nation, can no more afford to be blinded by stars on epaulets today than we could afford to be bound by the British yoke 236 years ago. Perhaps there’s a reason why no generals bother to run for president anymore; in a country that increasingly echoes the military’s messaging and emulates its policy prescriptions, they needn’t bother.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The Mail:

Henry St. Maurice

Stevens Point, Wisc.

Am I the only one who noticed a resemblance between Rove on Fox and Robert Shaw's Lonergan character in The Sting? Someone who thought he had a game fixed was beaten by someone who had outfoxed him.

Frank Moraes

Santa Rosa, Calif.

Hi-

Really good column this week.

I just read Andrew Gelman's "Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State." So it may be informing my thinking more than is reasonable. The main thing I got from the book is that the poor vote for the Democrats and this is even more true in the red states than the blue states.

This has me thinking that the stunning success of the Republicans at making inequality skyrocket, has made these economic demographics very bad for them. As the rich get richer mostly at the expense of everyone else, the pool of poor people grows.

I write about it in a bit of detail here, mostly by complaining about Matt Taibbi:

Somewhere recently, I saw the numbers for the people who did NOT vote.

They were something like Obama winning 60%-30%. If Democrats could get the poor to vote in large numbers, Utah might turn blue.

Well, Mississippi anyway.

Jeremy Scahill writes, a paramilitary CIA is David Petraeus's legacy.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

Greetings Altercators, Reed here. Eric’s off this week, but here’s his latest Nation column: “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Thirteen Days…and Fifty Years,” which revisits some of the common myths of the incident that readers of his book “When Presidents Lie” will no doubt recognize.

As for me, the past few days in New Jersey weren’t without some drama as well, but I was definitely one of the lucky ones. Many more of us in the Garden State, where following the devastation from Sandy we might temporarily rename ourselves the Generator, Sump Pump and Chainsaw State, didn’t fare so well. Fortunately, we now have a president that actually gives a damn about things like disaster recovery and a governor whose facility for wielding pomposity and self-righteousness like a cudgel might finally have found a worthwhile cause to fight for. And not for nothing, but if the latter’s effusive praise of the former effectively acts as a political shiv to Mitt Romney’s plans after next Tuesday, well then I guess the old saying about every cloud having a silver lining really is true. To be sure, other less-than-pure theories abound about the reasons behind Christie’s very sudden appreciation for Obama’s competence. But in terms of ridiculously wild speculation, I submit that none will surpass The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who believes that, this being Jersey, maybe subconsciously, this all comes back to Bruce.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Election
by Reed Richardson

I don’t profess to know, on my own, what path our country will have chosen come next Wednesday. But as a journalist, I take some comfort in the fact that not knowing something is a professional necessity. The attempt to fill that gap is what propels you forward every day, drives your curiosity, and—in my case recently—keeps you up at night.

By the same token, however a healthy press corps does not begin each day from the stance that it knows nothing. Journalism, more so than perhaps any other pursuit, involves the steady accretion of knowledge, adding to today what one knew yesterday. It’s a never-ending process, in other words. So it is not surprising that one of the common occupational hazards among the media is when it projects precisely this same mindset onto its coverage. And nowhere is this proclivity for process-obsessed journalism more prone to occur than in the context of a political campaign, which steadily marches toward an inevitable, clear-cut conclusion.

The press’s fascination with political scorekeeping is an understandable failure then. It’s not always easy, after all, to churn out something new, day after day, about a candidate’s positions or policies—unless, ahem, they constantly change. But where a candidate stands versus their opponent is an angle that is always sitting there, waiting to be picked up, pored over, and pushed out.

During the Republican primaries, this horserace coverage dominated, with nearly two out of ever three stories focused on “strategy,” as this Pew survey shows. And since shifting to the general election mode this spring, talk of “Who’s-up? Who’s-down?” has only been magnified by the Washington press corps. Each tracking poll update or new swing state survey gets treated as divine revelation, worthy of Tweeting out to the world and parsing for hints of imagined qualitative narratives like “momentum” and “confidence.”

The sad truth is, though, the news value of these incessant horserace snapshots is dubious at best when Election Day is still months or even weeks away. Most of what these polls capture is, in fact, merely noise rather than real signals of changes in voter attitudes. Indeed, over the course of the past six months, voter sentiment has remained quite stable, shifting only occasionally but then regressing back to roughly the same mean it started at in May. There’s a big downside to all this breathless and mostly worthless poll watching, however, it crowds out more substantive comparisons of actual policy differences between candidates in favor of content that is of little informational value to voters.

What’s more, this reliance upon poll data for filling the newshole can exacerbate the press’s worst instincts. Seeking a story with broad, national appeal, the press myopically treats the race for the presidency as a single contest rather a series of 51 separate ones. In the quest to break a new news angle, the media likewise can’t resist the temptation to emphasize strange outlier polls that probably merit the least amount of attention. For example, who can forget Drudge’s infamous “GALLUP SHOCK” post in 2008, that sent the Beltway media chasing its tail for a week talking of a McCain comeback that didn’t exist. Or how about this past week’s Rasmussen poll of Ohio that spawned its predictable share of “Romney Takes Lead in Ohio” stories, even though this was that poll was the first out of the last 27 polls in that state that found Obama trailing. (And that’s not even taking into account Rasmussen’s GOP-leaning “house effect” of one to two percentage points.)

All this presents yet another crucial point—for all its practice, the press really isn’t very good at horserace coverage. On the whole, the establishment media still suffers from rudimentary, linear thinking, often lacks the statistical expertise to truly grasp the numbers behind the polling science, and has been severely outstripped when it comes to understanding how political campaigns persuade and influence voters. As Sasha Issenberg, Slate& columnist and author of “The Victory Lab,” explains in this New York Times post, which really worth reading in its entirety:

But the reality about horse-race journalism is far more embarrassing to the press and ought to be just as disappointing to the readers who consume our reporting. The truth is that we aren’t even that good at covering the horse race. If the 2012 campaign has been any indication, journalists remain unable to keep up with the machinations of modern campaigns, and things are likely only to get worse.

[…]

Over the last decade, almost entirely out of view, campaigns have modernized their techniques in such a way that nearly every member of the political press now lacks the specialized expertise to interpret what’s going on. Campaign professionals have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding what moves votes. It’s as if restaurant critics remained oblivious to a generation’s worth of new chefs’ tools and techniques and persisted in describing every dish that came out of the kitchen as either “grilled” or “broiled.”

Issenberg goes on to argue that deep-rooted analytical coverage of campaign strategy and processdoeshave an important role to play in our democracy, as it unveils the coalitions and levers that a political candidate relies upon to win. The press, he argues, remains unequipped if not downright hostile to embracing the techniques necessary to fulfill this mission. And savvy campaigns work to exploit this knowledge gap.

For instance, much has been made in the press these past few weeks about how the GOP has closed the ground game gap. RNC officials are eager to trot out impressive stats about “voter contacts” as a way to display confidence and counter any talk of Obama momentum. Even a recent Pew poll reinforced this idea that Romney has essentially erased any turnout edge held by Obama’s vast field office advantage.

But as Issenberg explains in this insightful Slate article, counting “voter contacts” is a crude, and rather vague metric at best. It, notably, doesn’t reveal much about what the contact is trying to accomplish or who is being targeted. His in-depth reporting here not only demonstrates that the Obama campaign is nearly a generation ahead of the Republicans in its voter persuasion efforts, it deftly reveals how even reporters at prominent publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times can be so thoroughly out of their depth that they writing erroneous, fawning stories like this and this.

Of course, tallying up who’s winning and who’s losing becomes a much more legitimate and compelling story once Election Day approaches, particularly since more than one out of three will have already cast their ballot before next Tuesday. And yet, now that the real news value of who’s winning the race for the presidency has finally arrived, the conventional wisdom from within much of the Beltway media—who for months have tracked and studied the polls—amounts to little more than “nobody knows.”

That the press corps and pundits’ predictive powers have abandoned them at precisely the moment they’d be most valuable to their audience is not only ironic, it’s symbolic of the overall disconnect between the press and the public. What good was all that accumulating and broadcasting of hundreds of polling data points, one might ask, if not to give us a better sense of the state or the race at this climactic moment? But this journalistic timidity, again, is rooted more in a hidebound commitment to remaining neutral than anything else. Within objective journalism, there’s just no professional upside to presenting evidence that supports the case that one candidate is winning, even if there are analytical tools readily available that might show this.

For instance, an engaged voter who seeks out several of the statistical polling aggregators that now exist online might learn that rather than a “toss up,” Obama’s chances of reelection right now actually run anywhere from roughly 80 percent all the way up to (!) 99 percent. Or that, based on an extremely high confidence level of regression analysis, the president’s estimated Electoral Vote tally based on state polling stretches from a solid 281 votes all the way to a blowout level of 332 votes. That both conservative and mainstream media outlets have reacted to these statistical models with some the same vicious and heretical disdain that the Papacy unleashed on Galileo is perhaps not a shock, as these tools upend their authority and democratize what was once its sole purview. If access to candidates—who stubbornly stick to stump speech talking points—and campaign insiders—whose veracity should never be questioned as long as they’re speaking off the record—don’t qualify as the best resources from which to accurately assess the outcome of an election than what, really, is the media adding to the discourse most of the time?

That is the fundamental, and increasingly uncomfortable, dilemma that confronts the Washington press corps as this long campaign winds to a close. But this isn’t something the media seems ready or willing to hear—that the fear of being perceived as choosing sides only ensures that the public will keep turning elsewhere to find evidence of the truth. No matter what happens next Tuesday—whether it’s all the polling data or all the campaign spin to the contrary that ultimately is proven right—the press, by failing to be candid and intellectually honest about this presidential race, will have lost the battle either way.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The Mail:

Bill Henderson

Gibson, B.C., Canada

Hi Reed,

Just read your excellent climate silence post in The Nation and thought that you might be interested in an admitted climate alarmist trying to make the case that climate change is an emergency.

What I'm offering is a selection of science articles and commentary on what is a heretical subject because “it is the economy stupid,” especially in these very uncertain global economic times, and this makes climate change action after at least two decades of procrastination very inconvenient indeed— so inconvenient that climate silence reigns.

Since I wrote in July there has been a record Arctic ice cap melt—best article: Arctic Sea Ice: What, Why and What Next' by Ramez Naam, at the Scientific American website. In late August, two new global carbon budget science papers came out basically saying staying under 2 degrees C is now economically impossible: “Development of emissions pathways meeting a range of long-term temperature targets” [PDF] and the latest Anderson-Bows “A New Paradigm for Climate Change” as well as Bill McKibben's Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” based on this very important but mostly completely ignored global carbon budget science.

In one sentence: 'Why isn't climate-change-as-emergency the main debate given the overwhelming science?' Because it's very, very inconvenient. But climate isn't going away; it's just a matter of time.

Thanks again for your strong voice and best of luck,

—Bill

My new Think Again column is called “Considering CNN’s Choice to Hire Piers Morgan.”

My new Nation column is “All the (Political) World's a Stage.”

I was not in Ohio this week, but I do live in the greatest city in the world where we don’t even worry about people voting for Mitt Romney—thank you very much—and in my city, you can leave a class on the theology and philosophy of Abraham Joshua Heschel, taught by my friend Rabbi Shai Held, a founder of Mechon Hadar, watch some debating in a bar, then drop by the Hammerstein Ballroom, where, in celebration of the musical career of Steve Van Zandt receiving the "Big Man of the Year" Award from littlekidsrock.org, you can see Darlene Love, singing "Among the Believers,” Tom Morello, doing an incredible “Sun City,” Elvis Costello's singing "This Time Baby's Gone For Good," Gary U.S. Bonds, “Standing in the Line of Fire,” Southside Johnny singing “She's Got Me Where She Wants Me,” Dion and Ruben Blades doing “Bitter Fruit,” and, oh yeah, Bruce and Steve doing “Until the Good is Gone,” Bruce, Steve and Southside doing an incredibly moving (if you’re me, anyway,) “It's Been a Long Time” and everybody together doing “I Don’t Want to Go Home.” Can you even imagine?

Bruce gave a nice speech about Steve, and they each accused each other of peeing on the toilet seat.  But Bruce also said: “"Steve is the part of my brain that always wants it louder, harder more raucous, more, more please, a little more than that. Steve is my first audience when I write or I create something. I'm always thinking, 'What's Steve gonna think?' I may not always take his advice, but I'm always wondering what his opinion is. And whether Steve was alongside of me in the band or whether he wasn't, that part of our friendship always endured.'"

Steve laid out his hopes/plan for the survival of the music that helps the rest of us survive:

"If the old infrastructure is gone, we build a new one. If we, the few of us left, that grew up surrounded by greatness, don't build a new infrastructure, then those who have no standards will."

Steven's point-by-point plan includes establishing a radio format that supports new music and plays "the greatest music ever made" to set higher standards ("we got that done"); reestablishing a performance circuit for live performance of rock and roll (efforts underway "in spite of the occasional non-believer pulling the plug now and then"); providing a curriculum for music education via the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation; and providing musical instruments for the next generation via Little Kids Rock (saving them from becoming "computer nerds and investment bankers"). Steven thanked everyone for supporting Little Kids Rock founder David Wish's "crazy dream" and "endorsing his most sacred belief... that every kid on earth who wants one should have a guitar.”

Of course it helps to be rich. The evening, including the auction, raised $800,000. And speaking of which, there’s another chance to empty your wallet to see Bruce in this great city of ours, at the Beacon, with Max, Jon Stewart, et al for the Bob Woodruff Foundation sponsored by the New York Comedy Festival “Stand Up for Heroes,” on November 8. 

Alter-reviews

I got two wonderful music collections recently that are thematically connected and extremely nicely annotated. Country Funk 1969-1975. As it says in the explanatory notes, “What in the hell is Country Funk you ask? The answer is a complicated one, in part due to the fact that Country Funk is an inherently defiant genre, escaping all efforts at easy categorization. The style encompasses the elation of gospel with the sexual thrust of the blues, country hoedown harmony with inner city grit. It is alternately playful and melancholic, slow jammin', and booty shakin'. It is both studio slick and barroom raw. And while these all may seem unlikely combinations at first glance, upon close listen, it all makes sweet sense. Country Funk 1969-1975 is a melting pot concoction of the music of Dale Hawkins, John Randolph Marr, Cherokee, Johnny Adams, Mac Davis, Bob Darin, Jim Ford, Gray Fox, Link Wray, Bobby Charles, Tony Joe White, Dennis The Fox, Larry Jon Wilson, Bobbie Gentry, Gritz and Johnny Jenkins.” Jenkins, by the way, is backed up by the Allman Brothers. I love this record.

I’m also loving how much detail on the cuts is provided in the genuinely surprising “Loving on the Flip Side” collection. It could have been written by the main characters of either Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude or Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, both of whom, coincidentally, are obsessed with seventies soul and funk. (The members of Parliament/Fundadelic make appearances in both books, weirdly).  This genre is called "sweet funk," and while the liner notes appeal to your head, the music works on the rest of you, including the part that likes to dance.

I am also looking forward to spending some time with the recent releases of Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Early Cases Collection on Bluray. It’s got the entire first six series— 45 shows in all—that appeared on the BBC. David Suchet plays Poirot, and the stories are set in the 1930s. Very promising.

On the other end of the universe we have Shout! Factory’s release of All In The Family: The Complete Series, which is a 28-DVD of you (I imagine) know what.  It’s all 213 episodes as they originally appeared with a 40-page collectible book with essays, a new interview with Norman Lear, a documentary called Those Were The Days: The Birth Of All In The Family, another documentary called The Television Revolution Begins: All In The Family Is On The Air, the series pilot, "Justice For All," the second pilot "Those Were The Days," and the spin-off pilot episodes of Gloria, Archie Bunker’s Place, and 704 Hauser. Goodness.

Also fun, but in a different kind of way is the new release of Peter Gunn: The Complete Series. It’s one of the first detective series (from 1958, I believe) and it’s really cool, with lots of jazz, including Henry Mancini’s great theme, and lots of A-list directors, before they were that (including Robert Altman). It’s got all the elements that made the fifties great, especially the cars, the cigarettes and the ladies—114 episodes, plus, with a music CD too.

And finally, I can’t believe there’s anything left for Shout! Factory’s second Ernie Kovacs Collection after the last one, but here’s Volume 2, which is three CDs, a nice booklet, 8 more episodes from Kovacs’ national morning show, 18 bonus sketches featuring many of his most beloved characters, 3 complete episodes of his oddball game show, Take A Good Look, “A Pony For Chris,” the rare TV Pilot for Medicine Man costarring Buster Keaton, The Lively Arts featuring the only existing filmed solo interview with Ernie Kovacs, and the 2011 American Cinematheque Panel. Order it directly from ShoutFactory.com and you get a bonus DVD containing seven episodes of Kovacs’ game show Take A Good Look, all unseen since their original broadcast.

Finally, this is the 50th anniversary of James Bond (and not coincidentally, the Cuban Missile Crisis). I’m among the many who’s seen all the films, so I really enjoyed watching the EPIX network film, Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007, which focuses on the various fighting and scheming and suing between Albert R. Broccoli, Harry Saltzman and Ian Fleming that brought them to fruition and made billions for studios and who knows how much for the lawyers. And if you want the soundtrack (and who wouldn’t?), there’s a new 2-disc anniversary compilation featuring 50 tracks from all 22 films on Capital, which includes the great Shirley Bassey and Duran Duran tracks you might know, but also Louis Armstrong, Tom Jones, Gladys Knight, etc you might not. Plus a second cd of instrumentals. It’s called “Best of Bond: 50th Anniversary.”  Warning: they didn’t get Adele’s Skyfall theme.

Now here’s Reed.

Climate Change: To Function in a Post-Truth Political Environment, the Press Needs a Post-Objectivity Mindset 

By Reed Richardson

There are two powerful lessons that the media should be learning from the moderation of these presidential and vice-presidential debates so far. For a press corps that fewer and fewer people claim to trust, the first of these debate lessons is quite encouraging—that is, the public actually notices and appreciates when journalists, you know, do their job. But the other takeaway from these debates is much more nuanced and complicated, as it challenges the very foundation of how the press sees itself and its duty to the public.

Over the past three weeks we’ve seen two radically different interpretations of the press’s role in debate moderation, but the subsequent results from these divergent paths both reinforce this same notion. Jim Lehrer’s detached, incurious pose at the first debate drew widespread criticism (including from yours truly) for the way it enabled both candidates to run roughshod over him, each other, and, not least of all for one aspirant for the White House, the truth. Whereas the more engaged, assertive journalistic approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Candy Crowley in their respective moderator turns—though far from perfect—has unquestionably produced more lively policy discussion and worthwhile context for voters, earning the pair praise from both peers and the public.  

That the debate moderation has become such a prominent storyline wasn’t to be expected. So, why are we seeing such visceral reactions—first negative, then positive—to what is often thought of as a banal, thankless and mostly invisible role for the media? Are we witnessing an epiphany of sorts, where both the press and the public are beginning to grasp the vital need for a more aggressive journalism in this new, post-truth environment, one where many political candidates maintain a tenuous relationship with reality, at best, and where facts frequently drown in a cash-fueled torrent of dishonest rhetoric?

Based on the long history of our nation’s press, it pays to be skeptical. However, this open, ongoing discussion about how much or how little debate moderation we want or deserve has inarguably touched a collective nerve. In addition to being candidate showcases, these candidate forums have also become, in effect, a high-profile microcosm of a larger debate about the proper role of the press in our democracy.

Indeed, it’s easy to find parallels. Take, for instance, the rules that the Commission on Presidential Debates developed to govern the debates. Completely hidden from the public (until leaked this past Monday) and full of ridiculously stifling demands on all parties, the CPD’s memorandum of understanding exemplifies a mindset whereby the powerful view the press as little more than a necessary evil, a party to which they graciously grant access merely to give the debates a sheen of public accountability. And in fact, the memo’s dedicated lack of transparency, prescriptions for feckless evenhandedness, and not-so-subtle insistence upon trading access for deference are all uncannily familiar. In many ways, they represent the same timid, cloistered approach to objectivity that the Washington press corps imposes on itself every day.

But, as Jay Rosen notes in this Guardian essay—published before Tuesday’s town hall—in a live, one-off televised event like a presidential debate, the only real limitations a moderator faces involve what we define as in the public interest. So, he or she actually has much more flexibility than what is begrudgingly afforded by the CPD and candidates:

In reality, the rules don't describe what happens because the real limits are audience expectations, which bear down on everyone in the hall with greater force than any timekeeper. Do we expect power to reveal itself without an interlocutor? If more and more of us do, pressure will build for the Vanishing Moderator. But we aren't there yet. Lack of consensus reigns.

Well, if one were to apply the old journalism adage “three makes a trend,” then maybe a consensus is, in fact, already emerging. In the first debate, Lehrer clearly chose to honor the letter of the debate rules—as a “Vanishing Moderator,” as Rosen calls it—and thus gave 67 million TV viewers a good glimpse of journalism’s old-school conventional wisdom about maintaining objectivity. But in doing so, it became clear to many of those watching that Lehrer was prioritizing the interests of the powerful—the men onstage and the commission—over the viewers, and the result was as an unsatisfying, if not embarrassing, display of a toothless press corps.

In contrast, Raddatz and Crowley seemed to recognize in the last two debates that the moderator’s real authority was vested in the people watching, not in the candidates or the commission. Accordingly, they instead chose to honor the spirit of the debate and, thus, took a more active role in it, asking more challenging follow-ups or refining awkwardly phrased questions to provide more context to the those whom they were really there to serve—the voters.

That this rather common-sense journalistic strategy to moderation we saw in the past two debates has been viewed as either courageous or controversial speaks to the lowly depths that the traditional media has sunk. And let’s be honest. Lehrer’s sorry, ineffectual effort provided a ready-made excuse for trying a more engaged stance. Nevertheless, one shouldn’t fully underestimate the pressure to also “get out of the way” that Raddatz and Crowley no doubt had to shrug off going into the debate, knowing full well that to interrupt a candidate or—heaven forfend!—fact-check one of them in real time was to open themselves up to guaranteed charges of bias.

But a professional press corps too cowed to step into the fray or unwilling to admit when it’s made a mistake is doomed to increasingly marginalize itself in an world where it can no longer monopolize information or ideas. Or as NYU professor Clay Shirky puts it in this insightful, must-read essay on the Poynter website (which is adapted from a larger discussion of digital ethics he will deliver at a Paley Center for Media symposium next week):

For the last two generations of journalism, the emphasis has been on the question of consensus; the question of who constituted a relevant actor was largely solved by scarcity. It was easy to find mainstream voices, and hard to find marginal or heterodox ones. With that scarcity undone, all such consensus would be destroyed, unless journalists start telling the audience which voices aren’t worth listening to as well.

A world where all utterances are putatively available makes “he said, she said” journalism an increasingly irresponsible form, less a way of balancing reasonable debate and more a way of evading the responsibility for informing the public. Seeking truth and reporting it is becoming less about finding consensus, which there is simply less of in the world, and more about publicly sorting the relevant actors from the irrelevant ones.

Presidential debates represent one of the last true redoubts of the “scarcity” Shirky speaks of, since moderating these quadrennial events remains a rarefied task only afforded to a select few members of the media. (This debate structure is long overdue for an overhaul, I would add, but I digress.) Yet, even in this high-profile campaign crucible, where the “relevant actors” are clearly defined, we saw that a journalist who adheres to a hands-off, neutral approach facilitates little more than campaign talking points at best. Or, in the worst case, it emboldens politicians who are willing to misrepresent reality, undermining the public’s right to know the truth.

Admittedly, not everyone sees it this way. Among conservatives, Lehrer’s feeble performance was pitch perfect, letting the candidates speak without concern for being corrected by anyone other than their opponent. On the other hand, they saw the more empowered role taken by Raddatz and Crowley as shamelessly playing favorites and had the likes of Karl Rove, among others, pining for Lehrer’s return. Now, there’s no excusing Obama’s dreadful performance in the first debate, but it’s striking that within the ranks of the right wing, there’s a direct correlation between an assertive, active journalist moderating a debate and conservative displeasure with its outcome.

Over at Fox News, this same phenomenon was letting a thousand excuses bloom after the second Obama-Romney debate, which polls uniformly say the president won. Almost unanimously, the network’s voices started to cavil and whine that Crowley, by calling out Romney for believing a right-wing myth that the president had waited two weeks to call the attack on the Benghazi consulate an “act of terror,” clearly overstepped her proper role at the debate.

By doing so, Crowley had “joined Team Obama” cried one Fox News columnist, who breezed past the fact that she had also agreed with Romney on another point about the Libya attack immediately after that exchange. Or that the whole thing was “folly” on Crowley’s part, as another Fox News columnist wrote, since she later admitted Romney was right—except he wasn’t and she did no such thing. Then there was the laughable column co-bylined by Judith “aluminum tubes” Miller and Douglas “Obama should drop out” Schoen. Aside from saying that a “potted plant” would have been a better moderator (sorry Jim), the pair notably griped that Crowley’s mild fact-check so disrupted Romney that it completely flipped the debate in Obama’s favor. This was despite their claim that Romney had won the “first half” and only faltered after having been confronted by Crowley in the seventieth minute of a 100-minute debate. From this, we’ve learned that bad arithmetic affects right-wing candidates and columnists alike, apparently.

Of course, I get that a conservative’s rejoinder to all this is to revert back to their standard trope that all the press is liberally biased. That it’s no coincidence the Democrats did better in the two debates where the moderator took a more active role and that in the case where he or she wasn’t tipping the scales in favor of the left, Romney excelled. That, however, is simply the same old ploy the right has long used to batter the media’s sense of objectivity into a mindset that routinely mistakes treating opposing viewpoints equally with treating them fairly. But when one political party has so embraced ideologically driven narratives formed in an alternative reality, a press corps that acquiesces to merely facilitate context-free “he said, she said” dialogue, whether on the front page or on a debate stage, will fail miserably.

This new, post-truth political world in which we exist today is fundamentally different than just a generation ago. And this radical transformation hasn’t left the media climate unaffected either, as Shirky notes. As such, the press can no longer afford to gainsay these changes and cling to a model that merely seeks to “get out of the way.” Beyond influencing whom this country will choose as the next president on November 6th, let’s hope we also take away from these presidential debates another lasting idea. That the media must adapt to a more open and unflinchingly assertive role, lest it and our democracy run the risk of becoming just as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The Mail:

Asher Fried

New York NY

Reed:

Great analysis of the destructive effect of the filibuster. Oddly, in both debates, and even in the TV battles among the talking heads, the Democrats consistently fail to counter the argument that Obama controlled Congress for two years and failed to achieve his legislative agenda. Jennifer Granholm wrote a great timeline showing that Obama had a weak filibuster-proof majority for a very short time. It has long since been forgotten that Al Franken was kept from taking his Senate seat during the stimulus package debate, requiring Obama to be overly solicitous to the two biddies from Maine. No doubt the fear of a filibuster was a factor in Obama’s crafting a stimulus package that could reach his desk for signature. The Republicans thwarted Democratic legislation and appointments with the filibuster or threat thereof for the two-year period that Obama had that “elusive” majority. Oddly, Obama and Biden could have responded to their debate foes by listing all the legislation blocked and refuting that allegation. But why didn’t they?

Do you think that Obama anticipates the likelihood of resort by his party to the filibuster to keep a President Romney and his majority in Congress from dismantling the New Deal, Obamacare, and financial regulation?

A great letter to the NY Times recently expressed the fear of the writer that if Obama were to be reelected, he could not achieve his goals; but if Romney were to be elected, he could achieve his. The Senate Democrats may soon lead a minority, which could, by filibuster, protect the majority of Americans from the legislative onslaught championed by the servants of the 1%.

Tom Crisp

New York NY via Columbus NE

There are other undemocratic practices that should make us wonder about our system.

I think the way congressional districts are defined ought to be under close, close scrutiny.

Then there is the very fact of the apportioning of seats to the Senate, where the desired effect of making sure less populous states are not overwhelmed by more populous has reached a fairly indefensible point. That his powerful body is so UN representative is unfortunate: 2 senators from North Dakota (pop under 700,000) and 2 from Florida (pop over 19,000,000) .

The factor this plays in the Electoral College is starker. North Dakota has 3 votes, each representing roughly 234K citizens. Florida has 29, each representing about 665K citizens. In other words, a North Dakotan Electoral College vote is worth roughly 2.8 times as much as a Floridian electoral vote. Again, the system was meant to help prevent effectively letting populous states ride roughshod over rural ones. But we may have reached a point where the unfairness has tipped far to the other direction.

My new Think Again column is called: How Conservatives Treat Media Bias (Hint: Confusingly)

My Nation column is called “Shut Up About the Jews Already...” I don’t exactly plan to do that myself, since I’m writing a book about these very same Jews, but in the narrow sense that I mean it, I do mean it.

A time out for Music and Good Causes:

On October 16, Steve Van Zandt will be honored with the “Big Man of The Year Award,” given annually to honor the legacy of the late, great Clarence Clemons at the Little Kids Rock’s 10^th anniversary Right to Rock Celebration, sponsored by the House of Marley and 1Love. They say they are expecting Elvis Costello, Dion, Tom Morello, Darlene Love, Southside Johnny, Kris Allen, Rubén Blades, Gary US Bonds, Michael Des Barres, Michael Johns, Jesse Malin, Jake Clemons, NYC Hit Squad (and who knows who else, ahem), to show up and play. The funds help Little Kids Rock bring the gift of music education to disadvantaged youth across the US. The event will be held on Tuesday, October 16 at the Manhattan Center’s Grand Ballroom and will run from 6:30pm until the music stops. For more information, go to littlekidsrock.org/tickets or call 973-746-8248.

Last week, I mentioned the Stand Up for Heroes benefit, for the Bob Woodruff Foundation raising funds for injured service members, veterans and their families, I forgot to mention that the event is being sponsored by the New York Comedy Festival, which has a whole list of other, funny-but-Bruceless events here. It’s on Nov. 8 at the Beacon and Jon Stewart, Max Weinberg, Ricki Gervais, etc. and last year’s show was terrific.

Finally, once again, if you were as disappointed as everyone else was with that pathetic performance of the presidnent’s the other night, I think I can guarantee that for “Jazz for Obama” at Symphony Space on October 9 (read all about it, here) will leave you in a much better mood. These guys don’t disappoint.

Alter-reviews

I’ve long admired the liberal, democratic political philosopher Alan Ryan as a kind of model public-minded scholar. I was on the money in my admiration, but wrong on the model part. Ryan is apparently beyond human and hence, not a model for the rest of us mere mortals.

I say this because I recently received On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present in two volumes from Princeton University Press. The book spans, I kid you not, three thousand years, from the origins of political philosophy to the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in the first book and from Hobbes to the present in the second. All together it’s 1152 pages and I really do intend to read every one of them, though I can’t tell you exactly when.

Ryan’s articles over the past forty years on the likes of Locke, Tocqueville, Mill, Dewey, Russell, Popper, Berlin and Rawls, have also been collected in another scary/impressive tome under the title, The Making of Modern Liberalism, also from Princeton, it’s a mere one volume and only 736 pages but if you’re interested in what Ryan’s interested in, you’ve surely read much of it already.

Also on the list of books to read when you’ve really got a great deal of time on your hands to think big thoughts is the collected four volumes by Anthony Kenny, under the title A New History of Western Philosophy, published by Oxford. It’s made up of four previous volumes of Kenny's History of Western Philosophy and tells the story of philosophy—the same one Ryan’s telling, as it happens, chronologically, focusing on knowledge and understanding; science; metaphysics; mind and soul; the nature and content of morality; political philosophy; and God. It cuts off, however, in 1975, so you may have to pick up the Ryan as well, even if you prefer Kenny’s approach.

There’s been some bad news about the Beach Boys in the past week. Various outlets have reported that Mike Love fired Brian Wilson, Al Jardine and David Marks from the current 50^th reunion tour. That’s not exactly true. Love owns the Beach Boy trademark and he booked a follow-up tour for his own (insipid, lame, rip-off) version of the band during the reunion tour. So yes, he’s a bad guy, but not bad enough to “fire” Brian, et al.

If you want to relive the actual genius that made all this worth caring about then you’ve got plenty of opportunities. The easiest one is a new two-cd collection of 50 hits and songs that might have been hits, which is about as many songs as Brian and the band played at their great (second) show at the Beacon. It’s called (funnily enough) “Greatest Hits: 50 Big Ones” and goes all the way to to the excellent “That’s Why God Made The Radio” and a new single version of “Isn’t It Time.” The box also has an expanded booklet with liner notes by the renowned former Cornell Daily Sun arts editor and Don Rickles homey, David Wild, along with a few postcards.

More exciting to those of us who have been buying these various collections over the years are the twelve newly remastered studio albums, featuring mono and stereo mixes. They are: Surfin’ U.S.A.; Surfer Girl; Little Deuce Coupe;Shut Down, Volume 2; All Summer Long; The Beach Boys Today!; Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!); BeachBoys Party!; Pet Sounds; Smiley Smile; Sunflower (stereo mix only); and Surf’s Up (stereo mix only).

Also kinda interesting is a nicely packaged 25^th anniversary issue of R.E.M’s Document, together with a1987 concert from the band’s “Work” tour. Excellent audio, excellent performance, nice box….Not a bad album, either, though not one of their absolute best.

Now here’s Reed:

Biggest Loser of the Debate? Journalism
by Reed Richardson
If what happened at the debate in Denver reflected the “gold standard” of debate moderation, then it’s clear our establishment media is in dire need of a Keynesian revolution. Even if Jim Lehrer’s services didn’t cost the Commission on Presidential Debates one red cent, they still didn’t get their money’s worth. For 90 minutes, I struggled to understand what role Lehrer was trying to play in the proceedings; his detached, ineffectual behavior all that more strange since, just the day before he had this to say about debate moderation to the Washington Post:

“The greatest fear of a moderator is that he or she will miss something,” [Lehrer] said Tuesday as final technical adjustments were being made before Wednesday’s event at the University of Denver. “If the candidate says it, and you let it go by, you have a hard time getting them back to clarify or explain. The fear of it is what makes me prepare as hard as I do.”

Now, compare that bold pre-game pronouncement to the almost pathologically passive, glorified timekeeper pose Lehrer struck—and still failed at mightily(!)—at the debate, perhaps best exemplified by this toothless exchange with Romney:

LEHRER: All right.

ROMNEY: Jim, let me just come back on that -- on that point, which is these...

LEHRER: Just for the -- just for record...

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: ... the small businesses we’re talking about...

LEHRER: Excuse me. Excuse me. Just so everybody understands, we’re way over our first 15 minutes.

ROMNEY: It’s fun, isn’t it?

LEHRER: It’s OK, it’s great. No problem. Well, you all don’t have -- you don’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem, because we’re still on the economy. We’re going to come back to taxes. I want move on to the deficit and a lot of other things, too. OK, but go ahead, sir.

ROMNEY: You bet…

This certainly isn’t journalism, much less debate moderation; it’s more akin to a deferential talk show host trying to navigate into commercial break. And that verbal tic you see above—“all right”—was a phrase that Lehrer used no less than 17 times, often taking up a spot where an engaged journalist would actually try to, oh I don’t know, actually ask a follow-up question.

Lehrer, on the other hand, seemed content with simply cueing up broad topics or “pods”—in what is surely an awful term we can forever lay to rest—and then letting the candidates unspool long passages of well-rehearsed talking points back and forth. (Or in the case of Obama, sometimes not so well-rehearsed talking points.) As a result, the audience was left with little factual context to judge which arguments are grounded in truth and which are simply a well-woven tapestry of campaign trail concoctions.

But Lehrer not only failed in the basic task of managing the debate, he failed in the more important task of acting as the public’s proxy. By my count, Lehrer only asked three direct questions of the candidates in the first 35 minutes, and all of them were of the same stilted structure: “What’s the difference between you and your opponent on… jobs…taxes…the deficit?”

Simply put, Wednesday's debate was a microcosm of the failures of journalism’s objectivity model. By employing safe, but woefully weak ways of engaging discussion, Lehrer allowed both candidates safe passage into framing each topic any which they wanted. All night long, his journalistic cop outs all but assured the audience got a heavy dose of “he said, he said” rhetoric and plenty of dishonest answers like, “I want to take that $716 billion [the President] cut and put it back into Medicare.” This kind of neutered approach may have satisfied the press’s long-held obsession with maintaining political neutrality and avoiding claims of bias, but the fundamental lack of curiosity underpinning it failed to force candidates onto unfamiliar or challenging intellectual terrain.

Indeed, Lehrer’s goal at the debate seemed to be to highlight the idea that the two candidates for president have fundamental disagreements on policy, a point so blindingly obvious that it needs no explication. Yet, halfway through the debate, there was Lehrer, taking a detour from the discourse to deliberately spell out his theme: “Can we—can the two of you agree that the voters have a choice—a clear choice between the two...of you on Medicare?” Both candidates, of course, answered, “Absolutely.” But Lehrer never displayed any interest in doing the journalistic legwork necessary to push past these presentations of partisan plans to probe into the particulars. Pity.

Granted, a debate is just that. And any moderator, even if he or she is a truly engaged journalist, can only do so much in terms of calling out candidates for inaccuracy and holding up their worldviews for scrutiny. During those 90 minutes, the onus finally falls on the two main participants and so it’s the president who will ultimately bear the responsibility for whatever consequences arise from his unwillingness to directly counterpunch against the flurry of Romney’s inaccurate claims.

But let it not go unnoted that Lehrer’s structural channeling of how the right-wing frames most economic discussions did Obama no favors. When a substantial portion of the debate centers on how and how much to cut the deficit—the one issue on which Romney has consistently led the president all year—while it completely ignores other vast, critical expanses of domestic policy, like income inequality, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, and immigration, then that makes it that much more difficult to engage voters who haven’t already bought into conservative dogma.

Fortunately, the political press corps has a chance to redeem itself. In the days following, the rest of the media can start to do what Lehrer abjectly failed to do in the moment—parse the substance of all of Wednesday's rhetoric and overlay it against the facts and reality. This analysis won’t change who “won” the performance element of the debate—that’s Romney’s trophy for good—but in the long run the public will still be better served knowing the truth, even if after the fact. And this experience might serve as a warning shot across the bow of the rest of this election’s debate moderators as well as the Washington press corps as a whole. That is, if you’ve been chosen for your auspicious position specifically because of your journalistic skills, you damned well ought to lose that job if you don’t conduct some journalism while you’re doing it.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.