Doggedly flunking Psych 101

Memo to deans of journalism schools:

Please add to your curriculum freshman courses in Psychology, Philosophy, and Literature.

This is from an otherwise refreshingly critical article by Newsweek's Evan Thomas:

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

I realize that they just can't help themselves.  Journalists often feel they can't write an entirely negative article, even when there's nothing positive to say, which there isn't when you're writing, as Thomas is, about Bush's handling of Katrina's aftermath.  They are trained to believe that there are always two sides to every story so that they don't just accept as gospel whatever a source tells them.

That there are often 5 or more sides to a story and that all 5 can be wrong or---even more frustrating---all 5 can be right is another problem that has the same effect on the way they construct their stories.  If almost anything you write can and will be contradicted, the prudent approach is to build the contradictions right into the story as you go.

So whenever you write the sky is blue, you automatically follow it up with "Critics of the President (or Supporters of the President) point out that on rainy days the sky is gray, at night it is black, and on Mars it is kind of reddish."

And journalists working Inside the Beltway flatter and fawn by habit because they are often writing about friends, friends of friends, friends of their bosses, and people they hope will invite them to parties or offer them high-paying jobs when they get sick of living with their noses pressed up against the windows of the houses and offices of the rich and powerful and famous.

And they flatter and fawn because they are dependent for stories upon sources who are often petty, small-minded, vindictive, egomaniacal, and as vain as Snow White's Step-mother the Evil Queen before her mirror, and if you don't flatter and fawn they will stop taking your calls, give scoops to your rivals, and devote their energies to finding other ways of punishing you and ruining your life and career.

But, please.

"His doggedness is often admirable?"

When?

When he doggedly pursues a course of failure and death in Iraq?

When he doggedly refuses to read memos that might tell him that terrorists planning on using hijacked airliners for kamikazee attacks on tall buildings like the World Trade Center are in the country and hard at work on their mission?

When he doggedly ignores Karl Rove's smear campaigns against political opponents?

When he doggedly persists in cutting taxes for his rich friends and relations and financial backers while the Federal budget implodes and deficits balloon and then, to protect those tax cuts, doggedly supports cutting benefits and programs for the middle class and the poor?

When he doggedly enjoys his vacation while a bereaved mother of a fallen soldier bakes in the Texas sun outside his toy ranch or when he doggedly attempts to finish it out while a Category 5 hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast?

But suppose that like a stopped clock that's right twice a day Bush's doggedness is every now and then a good thing.

A temperamental tic is not a virtue.

There are times when getting angry is the right thing to do, but a person who is always angry makes life miserable for himself and everybody around him.

There are times when self-doubt can save you from making horrible mistakes, but a person who always doubts himself is as helpless in a crisis as a person who never doubts himself is dangerous in moments when self-doubt is called for, even if confidence is otherwise a virtue.

He who hesitates is lost, but he who never hestitates is impulsive, reckless, childish, volatile, imprudent, self-centered, foolhardy, and at the end of the day dead, in jail, riding in an ambulance, or watching the other team walk off the field with the trophy.

Doggedness is a virtue when giving up is the wrong course of action.  Doggedness that is not a virtue but only another word for stubbornness, lack of imagination, mulishness, and a foolish and unsupported overconfidence may be a useful quality in a police detective or a research scientist or in rescue workers determined to reach a little girl trapped at the bottom of a well, provided such doggedness is tempered by other less self-blinding qualities or actual virtues.

Doggedness in a President who is determined to win a just and winnable war or who has set out to rescue a drowning city is admirable, but beside the fact that Bush is doggedly doing neither---he is doggedly refusing to face up to his mistakes in both Iraq and New Orleans---the kind of doggedness Evan Thomas is describing is not a virtue in a President.

Thomas chooses his words to paint a negative picture of the political realities a President has to deal with daily.  The distracting chatter he has Bush doggedly ignoring includes advice from aides and experts, lawyers and scientists, foreign leaders, Congressmen, Senators, Governors, and his father.

The caterwauling of the Media Elites---which has been for the most part flattering and complimentary and supportive of him and therefore easy to doggedly ignore or seem to ignore while doggedly eating it up with a spoon---includes bad news and just criticism resulting from decisions he's made and needs to reconsider and it includes information he apparently isn't getting from his aides, like the fact that the levees in New Orleans would not hold in a big storm.

And the Washington political buzz machine, by which Thomas means the Conventional Wisdom, cocktail party gossip, and self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing "If I Were President" bloviating of pundits, legislators, bureaucrats, careerists, and the many and various hangers-on who fill out the population of official Washington, also includes reports from pollsters, the latest writings from the very best journalists, historians, political scientists, and other experts, and plain, common sensical descriptions derived from daily observation of how the world is working---in other words it includes the news of what the American people are doing and thinking and putting up with and what they are mad as hell about and what they would like to see done about it.

I'm going to put aside for now the fact that this Administration is driven by poll numbers in a way and to an intense degree that no other Administration has ever been, that the Bush Leaguers' self-proclaimed indifference to polls is a lie---it's just that they don't react to polls, they set out to manipulate them ahead of time.

At a certain point, a President has to stop listening to advice, ignore criticism, damn the consequences at the voting booths, and do what he knows to be right.  Sometimes he can't know.  He can only feel it and then he has to go with his gut.

But a President who doesn't listen to advice, who never heeds criticism, who doesn't give a damn what the American people think, want, or need, who never knows what it is right because he never bothers to do the hard intellectual work required to know and who goes with his gut because he has nothing else to go with, who would go with his gut even if he did know because he is stubborn, vain, egotistical, and self-absorbed, that President is a dogged menace.

So, all you deans of journalism school---and the deans of all the finest schools of journalism read the Lance Mannion Chronicle of Higher Education daily---a simple requirement that all journalism majors take courses in Psychology, Philosophy, and Literature would help them see the difference between a person who is dogged in a particular situation because in that situation doggedness is called for and a person who is dogged because that is how his genes, parents, personal experience, vanities, and God collaborated to put him together.

Problem with my recommendation is that I'm sure someone like Evan Thomas took all those courses and earned excellent grades in them too.  Thomas has written a biography of Bobby Kennedy that is psychologically insightful and persuasive.

But all that he learned in his liberal arts classes has often failed Thomas when he's written about Bush in the past and, as assistant managing editor at Newsweek, he hasn't been able to impress it upon the reporters and editors who work with him.

And when you go back to that paragraph and re-read the bits about the buzz machine and the caterwauling of the media elites the irony of it would be laughable if it wasn't so dishearteningly familiar.

Because that paragraph is a perfect expression of the buzz and the caterwauling.  It is a retailing of the Conventional Wisdom, a quick summary of the story the Media Elites have been telling since 1992.

The subject of that paragraph is not George Bush.  It is Bill Clinton.

Thomas is recapping allusively the Media Elite's ur-myth of the Clinton years.  The myth of Lawyer Bill, the smarty pants policy wonk and intellectual show-off, who talked all his decisions to death, who over-thought everything, who refused to make a decision because he was enamored of the decision-making process and his own brainy part in it, who could debate what is is; the myth of Slick Willy the shady-dealing back-country pol who never went with his gut, who didn't make a move without consulting the polls, who needed a media advisor to tell him where to go on vacation.  Clinton the scoundrel who needed to be replaced by an honest, down to earth, man of the people who knew his own mind and went with his gut.

George Bush's doggedness is often admirable in Evan Thomas's world because it's usually discussed not as Bush's virtue but Bill Clinton's failure.

(I found the link to Thomas' article at Steve Gilliard's News Blog.  Steve and Jen continue to blog Katrina with admirable doggedness.)

_______________________________________________

Related:  John at Pre$$titutes links to stories by the Washington Post and USA Today that also include reflexive genuflecting before the Media-created image of George Bush the decisive leader and great communicator while criticizing him for being neither decisive nor great at communicating in the wake of Katrina.

Update because I couldn't find the link when I wrote the post:  Couple of other things Evan Thomas hasn't been able to impress upon his colleagues at Newsweek, besides basic lessons in Psychology---have more than one source for a story and people in this White House lie with every breath.  Josh Marshall reported that the Washington Post and Newsweek swallowed this whopper hook, line, and sinker from somebody in the Bush Administration determined that the blame game finishes with local officials taking all of the heat, that Louisiana Governor Blanco hadn't yet declared a State of Emergency days after Katrina hit when in fact she had declared one on August 26, the Friday before.   Following up:  Atrios discovers that editors at the Post probably knew they were lied to and don't much care.

Comments

[coturnix]

Yup.

[The Viscount LaCarte]

Great post Lance. You really nailed it. The stupid things the press says about this stupid president and his stupid decisions and his stupid "indecisions" is really really stupid.

I want to say right here and now, I thought he totally sucked after 9/11. The Viscountess and I watched the speech and thought, "We're screwed! This guy couldn't manage a goldfish in a bowl." I thought I heard him say, "But Mr. Cheney! You said all I'd have to do is play golf with my friends from the oil business, learn to read the words written by Mr. Rove and his nice friends, have tea with that sissy Mr. Blair and go on vacation once and a while. You didn't say anything about a CRISIS!"

It made me sick to have read about what a "great leader" he was. How he was pulling the nation together in her time of need. What a load of bloody bollocks! We pulled ourselves together and he and his friends have done everything they can since then to rip us apart at the seams. A Gumby doll sitting behind the desk in the Oval office would have made a better president...

You and your readers might find this article very interesting. I know I did.

Al

[Kevin Wolf]

It's disheartening the number of articles I've seen pulling this lame comparison between Bush's performances on 9/11 (great!) and when Katrina hit (bad!). It's more of the ol' Conventional Wisdom that really needs to be dumped ASAP.

Anyone paying attention knows that Bush's "leadership" on 9/11 was non-existent. As we all wondered what had happened and what to do, Bush flew around in his plane wondering what had happened and what to do. If it weren't for the plane I don't own, I could have done the same damn thing.

[Lance]

AL, Kevin,

Bush's "performance" after 9/11 is the exact right word. This is a good example of is what Bob Somerby is talking about when he rails against the self-disappearing Media. They don't see themselves as having any part in the stories they write about. Bush the strong leader after 9/11 was a Media creation, a (possibly) necessary bit of wish fulfillment. We needed a great President, we didn't have one, so we made one up using parts from the guy we did have on hand.

The difference between then and now was that Bush got a chance to rehearse for the performance off-camera in the few days after 9/11 because Rudy Giuliani was on TV doing the job a real President should have been doing. This time the mayor of the stricken city didn't step up and Bush has been caught on camera learning his lines.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

Re: "performance" - hence my new moniker for for him: President Sideshow.

I spoke to a friend this week who is, by her own definition, apathetic toward politics, but she tends to follow the "big stories." She's solidly liberal, but doesn't know or care enough about politics to self-identify as one, and in the message vacuum the Dems have left, there's little encouragement for her to do so. (She wasn't sure who to vote for the last election; I had to beg her to vote for Kerry.) The point is, she's not one to be on the lookout for or especially sensitive to bias in the media, and yet she told me the other night, "I can't stand to read the papers anymore or watch the news because they have no idea what they're talking about. They are far too favorable toward the president even when he makes obvious mistakes, and they get things wrong all the time. On stories where there should be two sides, like political stuff, I can only find one side - the president's - and on stories where there shouldn't be two sides, like intelligent design in science classes, they insist on making both sides equal. It's so bad now, I can't stand to read the news."

All I can say is that I was floored to hear this particular person making that particular comment. It really means nothing less than the press having lost the entirety of their credibility with the average American.

[harry near indy]

lance, college students could also read literature to understand psychology -- three examples: shakespeare, dostoyevsky, conrad.

[Lance]

harry,

definitely, and that's a near perfect list. I would just add Dickens and Anthony Trollope.

[catherine]

Actually, journalism students were taught (back in my day) that they should only report, not make observations or editorialize in any way. I didn't even go to a fancy school. What are they teaching?

[Agi T. Prop]

Newsweek = Newspeak

I guess I'm pretty cynical towards the media in general. But that article was feel-good "Dear Leader" Bushie propaganda at its best.

[daveminnj]

when you have two people of good will, each will,
in the course of a disagreement, acknowledge the good will and fine qualities of the other. this is both to grease the wheels of negotiation and to help insure good relations at later times.
the bushies,however, are not people of good will. their good qualities are non-existent, and to pretend otherwise is self-delusion.
we are in the presence of mean-minded zealots-the public good is not served by the msm's attempts to mask this.

[The Heretik]

The list of great books of literature one could learn psychology from are as infinite as the human imagination. Shall we consider the long and the short of it? Ours is an age of short attention spans. So consider the short story. Some such pithy psychological masters would have to include Poe, de Maupassant, and Hawthorne. If you want a telling insight and commentary on the sheep that are the media, consider The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

So many more masters and mistresses of the maze of the mind are out there in a book store if you are willing to look.

The current age places a false premium on knowledge based in "facts," whereas the true wisdom of understanding the mind has always been found in story and in its telling.

[Greg]

While the media have apparently turned from their fawning behavior to acting more as jackals, they have not really relinquished their previous subservience to anyone willing to talk to them, especially from within the halls of power, so it's turning out to be a big ask to expect anything consistently worthwhile to come out in any major media organ. Nevertheless, I think the paragraph you quoted represents a different failure - a failure of language skills, rather than in understanding. The third sentence should read "His doggedness is often admired," in which case it would say something true, if widely understood already. I blame the editor as much as the journalist.

[Exiled in NJ]

I have friends in the field of journalism who moved from a very liberal part of an Eastern city to DC and went to work there....the first or second year they sent me a Christmas card which showed them posing with Lynn & Dick Cheyney...on the back was written "Dick is not such a bad fella." Now I have not really seen that much change in their attitudes, but here is an almost perfect example of access. By the way, in the photo big Dick looks like an alligator, the one we wish would take his hand and his clock with it.

[The Heretik]

Access is the currency with which the more whorish media receive payment. The Bush Crawford "off the record" BBQ in Crawford is but the latest and worst example.

[Lance]

Greg,

You're right. If the sentence read "his doggedness is often admired" it would be inarguable. But Thomas is a good writer and he's an editor himself and I tend to believe that he wrote what he meant to write. He also wrote some articles during the Presidential campaign last year that made me think that Thomas himself admires Bush or things about him. Keep in mind, I admire Evan Thomas and highly recommend his bio of Bobby Kennedy.