When I saw this headline this morning, I thought, "What an opportunity! I can write a blog item extending and reinforcing the point about editorial independence that I made yesterday."
Basically, yesterday I had an exchange with a reader that gave me the opportunity to explain the separation between editorial and advertising. I would have mentioned that editorial is just as separate from news, but that wasn’t the subject at hand. Then, lo and behold, the newsroom provides a supreme example of that this morning.
But before I could sit down and write the item, I received this comment (see the second one) from someone else accusing us of "hypocrisy" because the newsroom doesn’t follow our editorial line.
Sheesh. You just can’t win. All right, here’s a primer on how this newspaper works:
News and editorial are as separate as advertising and editorial. When I see a headline I don’t like, I’ve got less ability to do anything about it than you, the reader. You can hoot and holler and write an angry letter. I turn away and tend to my own business, because I’m not supposed to influence, or even try to influence, news decisions.
Am I complaining about that? No. Because just as I don’t try to run their business, they don’t try to run mine.
I really don’t see why some readers have trouble understanding this. Most readers seem to think it would be awful for the news to be reported to fit our editorial position, and our most vehement critics are often those who believe that line is being crossed.
Yet now I have readers criticizing us because we DON’T cross that line, or the other line between us and advertising. Oh, well. I learned long ago that different people want different things from a newspaper.
Any other questions?
Related Posts
Brad,
First off, kudos on your google skills in outing me, although I must admit that the blog you linked to is not mine. I let the wyethwire blog lapse in early 2004, and somebody else is cybersquatting on it now.
The reason I am skeptical of The State’s reporting is that during the whole debate during the Hodges administration (of which I was a part) there were plenty of news articles raising criticisms of the lottery (mainly by looking at Georgia).
To my knowledge, none of those criticisms has ever been followed up on. We still don’t know if the many concerns raised at the time were valid – that it would lead to increased gambling addiction, that it would not bring in as much money as promised, that its revenues would gradually drop off, that more addictive video poker style keno games were just around the corner.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know the answers to these questions, and when I tried to find them on the Lottery homepage, I was hit with so much fluff that I couldn’t find them.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts. You certainly have an opinion on the lottery. Is it backed up by the facts? If you like, you can write it as a column on the opinion page so you don’t have to bother the newsroom with it.
The Lottery should be audited by an outside entity. It would only take a few people, not accountants, but managers or industrial engineers, to compare what they do with what the proponents said the lottery would do. Then the failure and misbehavior should be corrected by the governor and legislature.
As one of those who did write a bit against the lottery (and video poker) and who does not receive a dime from The State or the state, I’d like to weigh in. Here are the Education Lottery Deposits (PDF!) for the first three fiscal years of full operation:
You can get more info at the Budget and Control Board. The State’s position against the lottery was neither partisan nor imagined, but was the result of serious study of other states’ experiences with lotteries. This sort of examination is underway in the other Carolina.
Folks who favor a lottery ignore articles with supporting footnotes like this one simply because they want a lottery, come heck or Katrina-Rita. Lottery boosters are not skeptical of marketing outfits that turn out studies showing that middle income Americans were the most likely group to play the lottery.
Well, duh! There are more middle Americans than poor, two income quintile to one!
Such crapola also usually shows that the higher the income level, the greater the propensity to gamble. Another “duh” because that’s not the problem. The poor (underclass) spend a greater proportion of their income on available gambling, and that is usually the lottery and associated daily games.
During a pit/pot stop midway through a trip on Monday, I had to wait about a half cup to pay for my coffee as one guy bought $104 of Powerball dreams. One look at his car and clothes told me that he had issues with his household finances. I admit that by spending $103 more than I, he increased his odds from 0.0000000068443 to 0.0000007118024, but I still have $103, of which my wife and kids can spend $190.
I’m going to a reunion Saturday in Maryland – a state (in more ways than one) I used to work in. It must the richest, with:
If I get in early enough on Friday, I’m going to a certain liquor store in Jessup, right near the prisons for the kind of great time we conservatives like to have. I’ll just watch these not-well-off folks cash their paychecks for a fee of a couple of points and then invest their cash in spirits and lottery tickets. So much fun, it will bring tears to my eyes. Yup, real tears. Maryland has horseracing, too, and I think they’re adding slots at the racetracks for even more fun.
So when you think of the long-term effects of state-sponsored gambling, lotteries, and the like, think of Maryland. As revenue in one state-sponsored game starts to fall, they just start up another.
Lee –
The Lottery’s books are audited. The legislature knew what it was doing when it started the lottery. Like psoriasis, it’s chronic, it won’t go away. Just be thankful that in the Palmetto State it’s one way for the poor to pay for the education of the kids of the middle class.
All bets on condescension.
We always hear the stories about the poor souls who spend their kids lunch money on the lottery. Poor people do win the lottery also, the numbers don’t discriminate. The guy spending the family food money would have blown it on cigarettes or booze if it wasnt spent on the lottery anyway. So, SC has collected close to 3/4 of a billion dollars, from citizens voluntarily, probably 15% or more from out of staters, and all to good causes. For many of the citizens, this is about the only way they contribute financially to the public till. So I say, Exitus acta probat. The end justifies the means.
Wyeth, that explains something. Wyethwire didn’t read like you. Blog-squatting — now that’s a new concept for me. Maybe you should get a court order, ride out with the sheriff, and take your claim back.
Someone else will have to do a survey of gambling addiction; I don’t have the resources. I suspect that what they’ll find is that it IS a problem, although not as big a problem as with video poker. Video poker was (and is, since it hasn’t fully gone away) physically, neurologically addicting in a way that no other form of gambling is. So the lottery is (probably) better in that respect. But it’s worse in that the sleazeball running the game is the state of South Carolina (you and me), rather than some private operator.
I know we’ve been on a trend for several years now of spending less of our overall revenues on education (although there was a partial restoration of funding this year). We knew that would eventually happen with the lottery because it’s what happened everywhere else. It just usually takes longer, but was accelerated here by a dive in the economy. The reason it happens has to do with mass political psychology: Once people have bought into the idea of gambling supporting education (something it can never do except in the most marginal, fractional sense), they’re sending the signal that they don’t want to pay for it with their taxes anymore, and legislators make spending decisions on that basis.
Finally, if you do have some sort of class resentment, as Dave seems to, and are determined that THOSE PEOPLE (the poor) pay “their share” of the load (as if they don’t pay sales taxes like everybody else), you couldn’t pick a less efficient way to accomplish it. If you want to put a tax on the poor to support schools, do it. Raise sales taxes on groceries or something. That way, every penny can go to the schools, or to whatever else the state needs. This way, only one in three pennies finds its way to the stated purpose. That is, and has always been, insanely wasteful.
and it’s Condescension by a mile!!!
Brad, I wouldn’t agree that I have any class resentment. Especially toward the poor. I would call it do gooder resentment. Do gooders like to cite how this or that is bad for the “poor”. Do gooders also like to justify what they really want for themselves by claiming its for the “children”. One of the worst trends in this nation has been to absolve the “poor” from paying any taxes at all. As a result, we get the negative income tax credit. It doesn’t take a math major to compute that as more and more people are taken off the tax rolls, these tax free voters have a lot of incentive to vote for socialist redistributionist politicians who continue to promote Uncle Sam as the sugar daddy for all the oppressed poor. But that is tax policy. Back to the lottery.
I think the lottery as a funding collector is extremely efficient compared to the rest of government fund collection. No deductions based on whether you own a farm, live in an enterprise zone, etc. You buy a ticket and SC gets its money, the store gets a small commission, and thats it. Pretty efficient collector and fully voluntary.
It is easy to form cyber opinions of people who we don’t personally know and that is fine and understandable. I spend a reasonable amount of my free time directly working to help the real poor. As a pretty active Knight of Columbus, I have built a number of handicap ramps, work annually on the Operation Hope to help the mentally and physically disabled, and a raft of other local projects. So I certainly don’t resent the truly needy of our society. Many others do much more than I ever could to help the needy of society. My philosophy is that the government needs to get out of the welfare business and the private sector would do a much better job of helping those who need help.
How this relates to the primer on the newspaper business will remain a mystery. Have a good day to all.
Yo Bill.
Sounds like you have a vapor barrier issue.
If you can’t solve that, try a dehumidifier.
The lottery isn’t great gambling (58% payout ratio overall) and isn’t a great tax collector (30% to edgykashun).
But there’s no broad base that wants to eliminate it.
I see… prior to the lottery, South Carolina’s poor people only spent their money on food, clothing, and shelter and other
basic necessities. The lottery is responsible for transforming these unfortunate souls into rabid ticket scratchers coated with a patina of grey residue.
Try to imagine for one second between your next sip of your latte grande what it must
feel like to wake up every day completely devoid of all hope because you haven’t
got the means to ever rise above the poverty level. 1 out of a million probably seems like good odds in that case.
The lottery is a voluntary tax with a
well-defined benefit. Unlike property
taxes, which are one step short of a
gun barrel poking in your back.
. The reason it happens has to do with mass political psychology: Once people have bought into the idea of
War on Drugs
War on Terror
Homeland Security
Democracy in Iraq
Steve –
You wrote: Try to imagine for one second between your next sip of your latte grande what it must feel like to wake up every day completely devoid of all hope because you haven’t got the means to ever rise above the poverty level.
There’s a difference between having no money and being in poverty, the latter often a state of mind that reflects for some membership in the underclass. The lottery is but one diversion that’s state-sponsored. As a diversion, it keeps us and the politicos from attacking the old “root causes.” We know how to avoid getting into poverty:
But we’re not making enough progress in getting folks in poverty out. It’s a matter of attitude, expectations, incentives, morality, and all those things that are really hard to change. I know that governments can do little, it takes one-on-one effort.
A lottery is simply bad policy from this perspective because folks figure that the “good state” wouldn’t run something that’s bad for irresponsible folks. The irresponsible folks focus their energy on quick fixes – the lottery – instead of the slow and steady fixes that responsible folks take, things like paying attention in school, getting job training, getting to work on time, etc.
You confuse something basic: “hope” is not a matter of means, but of attitude, knowledge, and self-confidence. How one instills those attributes in those without them remains pretty much a mystery, but one that churches would seem better equipped to work on.
I wrote and worked against the lottery, arguing that it’s a bad idea. The voters approved it, so I’ve got no complaints and won’t even do the “I told you so” too loudly because I recognize that folks will manage to find other poisons to keep them from improving their situation.
And I don’t drink latte – I’m an espresso guy, but rarely have more than one per day.
Bill – Huh?
Mike,
To refresh your short-term memory,your buddy Brad wrote about “mass political psychology”being used to lull the electorate into lottery-funded education.I was merely pointing out some of the more blatant and unfortunately successful forms of this psychology(War on Terror).
So now,please regale us with another of your long-winded diatribes from your bottomless pit of hostility.
Mike C
I know the lottery’s books are audited. If you read my post again you will see that I said a managerial and industrial engineering audit, the way good projects are audited in the real world to see it they deliver the promised payback and are, in real life, as they were sold to those who approved the creation of those enterprises.
The lottery was never about more money for poor students. Cleaning up the management of the colleges and the operation of state government would lower tuition and taxes far more than the meager contributions from the gambling industry.
The lottery was about the state replacing the video poker industry as the gambling monopoly in South Carolina.
Bill –
How is the War on Terror the result of mass political psychology? Was 9/11/2001 a figment?
Is a concern for Homeland Security also a result of mass political psychology?
Is it that you regard any support for Democracy in Iraq as a result of mass political psychology?
Disregarding the World’s New Rules: America’s Disingenuous War on Terror
by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com
In significant ways, the post-9/11 world is unlike any before it. In previous epochs, when empires that made all the rules and made all others play by them were defeated, their powers of domination were merely transferred to a successor. Today, however, there exists no potential usurper that could possibly replace America’s hold on empire. This reality has instead led to a sidelong reshaping of the very structure of the rules of international, and indeed, intranational relations. Thus the age of asymmetric threats, suitcase bombs, computer hacking, bacterial warfare, and terrorism in general. These are not the kind of threats that America has prepared for militarily. And, since the US economy since Eisenhower has been enhanced by a military-industrial complex geared to producing goods for massive conventional warfare, these are not the kind of threats that the economy has prepared for, either.
Purposefully Stalled Reform
Indeed, the military is in need of reform, and the top brass know it. 9/11 was a boon for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: in the days leading up to it, he had been prepared to announce a humiliating failure in his attempts to reform the military. The reason? He had come up against strong institutionalized pressure to retain bases, troop sizes, and contracts, even when they were clearly counterproductive and indulgent, because congressmen are by the nature of their business forced to lobby for their districts’ corporations. When it comes down to it, the entrenched mid-level legislators have as formidable a hold on power as do a Bush or a Rumsfeld.
Despite the current plague of knee-jerk patriotism, the kind that precludes any decrease in defense spending as being anti-American, radical changes in the defense structure – much more radical than Rumsfeld’s boldest initiatives – are imperative for dealing with the new and reshaped structure of the rules. Yet threats that require finesse, diplomacy, human intelligence, and subtlety in dealing with them are not part of the American way. Whoever would have once advocated speaking softly has long been bludgeoned by the wielder of the big stick.
A Fundamental Disconnect
The disastrous invasion of Iraq is just further proof of Washington’s willful ignorance in this regard. For no matter how “smart” the bombs, or how flawless the technology used, this war was still the territorial invasion and conquest of a country – publicly justified by recourse to the traditional rhetoric of Modernity – of the political structure of states, the rights of their citizens, and all the other values of the Enlightenment.
The American and British governments’ case for war in Iraq disingenuously linked Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the al Qaeda network in general. As everyone knew even before the war, there never were any such links. The motivating factors behind Saddam’s belligerence and that of the terrorists were fundamentally different. Ironically, Saddam was always much closer to the Western mindset – he wanted to protect his state from internal fragmentation and outside attack, as does the West, and he repeatedly took recourse to nationalism in exhorting his citizens to defend the motherland, just as we do. It’s not difficult, therefore, to see how Saddam was once our friend; his rhetoric was basically Western, as was Iraq’s participation in the global economy before 1980. Saddam Hussein reflected, in the form of the traditional enemy, just the distorted figure of the West, the realized failure of its stated values.
As for the terrorists, they aimed at something completely different – to strike a symbolic blow at the heart of the Western-shaped global world order. Yet if Saddam represented the style, they, ironically, represent the substance of the West, using the tools of globalization against the system itself, in support of a completely different rhetoric. It is a bizarre reversal of reality that has ominous implications for the future.
Inapplicable Revenge
What is the real relation between 9/11 and Iraq, then? The former was a shock, a moral defeat, a symbolic challenge. The latter was the misguided and anachronistic response to it, from an America that has clearly failed to adapt to the new reality. Of course, the base and banal material interests alluded to above have a lot to do with explaining why the war occurred. However, on another level, the war itself could not have gone forward in the absence of a tragic misunderstanding: a sufficient number of people needed to be deceived into believing that the old rules (territorial war between states, the ascendancy of a specific political system, etc.) still held sway rather than the actual, new rules (the rules of terrorism, as seen in 9/11).
Up until now, the Western world has seen a reshaping of the structure of the rules in various cases, but never through human agency. All the major catastrophes that brought earlier civilizations to their knees – earthquakes, volcanoes, plagues, and the like – had their causes in mysterious natural forces. While these events still take place, there is no longer attached to them this ineffable causal factor, one that early cultures often used to justify religion. In the age of positivism and Modernity, we have lost this response to mysterious phenomena of this sort, and indeed that relation to the natural world.
Maybe terrorism is restoring this ancient relation. After all, we are mystified in the same way; we are baffled by “irrational” terrorist violence (but not at the clean, “smart,” modern way that America bombs foreign countries). But terrorism doesn’t have to make sense, just exist.
9/11 Reassessed: Derrida on the Historical Applications of Terrorism
Perhaps the most valuable contribution that French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made to our understanding of the post-9/11 world bears relation to this. Derrida poses an interesting question: do the seminal events of 9/11 mark the beginning of the war on terror – as is so often asserted – or rather, the end of something else?
Vassar College philosophy professor Giovanna Borradori interviewed Derrida after the attacks. She transmits his views on the historical application of 9/11 as such:
“…if we look at 9/11 from the standpoint of its continuity with the Cold War, it is easy to see that the hijackers who turned against the United States had been trained by the United States during the era of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan… possibly, said Derrida, 9/11 could be interpreted as the implosive finale of the Cold War, killed by its own convolutions and contradictions.”
Unsurprisingly, the US government is not eager to explore this lineage, as to do so would necessitate a richly deserved criminal investigation into the historical interventionist policies that brought about such a disaster, and which brought Third World hatred of America to a breaking point. Of course, a great many writers have explored this topic already, refusing to bow to governmental pressure and denial of the facts. But this will never deliver the justice it should, because events are moving too fast – and especially because the US government is pushing them so hard. One clear motive for the Iraq invasion becomes, in this sense, attempting to cover up embarrassing investigations by the disastrous creation of new interventions. These in turn yield their own embarrassing investigations, destined however to remain unfinished by the perpetual creation of new interventions. The process could go on to infinity, were American power infinite. Yet it is not. Eventually, the reckoning will come.
The Real Threat: Derrida on Terrorism’s Territorial and Non-Territorial Aspects
Derrida’s second point refers obliquely to the change to the structure of the rules we noted above. Again perceiving 9/11 in its historical relation to the Cold War, he posits that as a spectacular, specifically territorial event, it marks the finale of the territory-based wars of the past. This is not to say, of course, that similar attacks will not still occur; we have recently seen symbolic attacks on Jewish and British physical objects in Istanbul, for example. Yet this is not the worst danger of terrorism for Derrida – rather, it is the non-territorial variety, that which makes it truly global and truly sinister. He states:
“…September 11 is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination. One day it might be said: ‘September 11’ – those were the (‘good’) old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous!
…(however) nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it knows it, and that’s what’s scary.”
The US government knows it too, but admitting as much would not reassure the people. Therefore it must substitute the old enemy, and the old war – a specific villain (Saddam) in a fixed place (Iraq) – for the inescapable reality that the rules have been changed. Without an Iraq War thrown into the mix, and without the media whipped up into a subsequent frenzy, the government would have had to publicly confront the unpleasant reality of the new world disorder on two fronts: first, an historical one (the disastrous results of a policy of massive global intervention); and second, the philosophical one (the reality that the “war on terror” is a farce due to terrorism’s very non-territorial and globalized nature).
Of course, neither would have reassured the public. Yet the people have a right to know – now more than ever. It is the US government’s fundamental dishonesty and willful ignorance of the facts that are harmful to the world’s health.
The reason why we’re having trouble following our buddy Bill is that he’s having trouble following the actual conversation going on.
I didn’t say that "mass political psychology" was used to "lull the electorate into lottery-funded education."
I used the term to describe what happens AFTER people have ALREADY been taken in by the lie that public education can be funded by a lottery. From that point on, they rationalize not supporting schools with their taxes because "everyone knows" that the lottery is supposed take care of that. Picking up on this widespread delusion, elected representatives don’t dare turn to taxpayers to fund the schools.
This sort of thing has happened in state after state that has adopted an "education lottery." For instance, it became impossible to pass a school bond referendum in some states after they started their own numbers rackets, because voters had come to believe that the lottery would pay for school capital costs — even though lottery proceeds were inadequate to that task.
Note this passage from one
of many editorials we ran in 2000 explaining quite clearly why approving the lottery referendum made no sense:
Bill –
You might consider using links instead of entire articles. I and others will read them.
You can put them in like this: http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=244
Or like this. (Note that I used your article)
I’d suggest that you avoid citing anything that cites or is written by Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, a process through which Derrida claimed to have discovered that all texts contain inherent contradictions that fatally compromise their ability to communicate meaning. The upshot was that the entire Western philosophical and literary tradition rested on an enormous fallacy. Fundamental concepts like logic and truth were illusions. Derrida himself wrote more than 50 books attempting to prove that nothing could be said. Early on his work was derided by philosophers but taken up by literary critics. When Derrida was awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge in 1992, twenty of the world’s leading philosophers sent a letter of protest that included this line: “Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.”
As to the rest of the article you post, it contains a few interesting points, but is wrong on the big issues. When the author writes that “threats that require finesse, diplomacy, human intelligence, and subtlety in dealing with them are not part of the American way,” he overlooks things like the Proliferation Security Initiativethe US-organized band of almost twenty nations (including France!) that’s interdicting WMD on the high seas.
As for why we went into Iraq, the first comment in this post contains brief excerpts from and links to Bush speeches on why we went into Iraq. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that folks sometimes put words into Bush’s mouth, but I have.
Bill –
You might consider using links instead of entire articles. I and others will read them.
You can put them in like this: http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=244
Or like this. (Note that I used your article)
I’d suggest that you avoid citing anything that cites or is written by Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, a process through which Derrida claimed to have discovered that all texts contain inherent contradictions that fatally compromise their ability to communicate meaning. The upshot was that the entire Western philosophical and literary tradition rested on an enormous fallacy. Fundamental concepts like logic and truth were illusions. Derrida himself wrote more than 50 books attempting to prove that nothing could be said. Early on his work was derided by philosophers but taken up by literary critics. When Derrida was awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge in 1992, twenty of the world’s leading philosophers sent a letter of protest that included this line: “Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.”
As to the rest of the article you post, it contains a few interesting points, but is wrong on the big issues. When the author writes that “threats that require finesse, diplomacy, human intelligence, and subtlety in dealing with them are not part of the American way,” he overlooks things like the Proliferation Security Initiativethe US-organized band of almost twenty nations (including France!) that’s interdicting WMD on the high seas.
As for why we went into Iraq, the first comment in this post contains brief excerpts from and links to Bush speeches on that subject. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that folks sometimes put words into Bush’s mouth, but I sure have.