As a childhood fan of the Peanuts comic strip, I enjoyed the running gag of Snoopy always beginning his novels with the line “It was a dark and stormy night.” It was only much later that I learned that this was a actual opening sentence of an 1830 novel Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

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As a result of the financial pressures that all papers face, my local newspaper, the Plain Dealer has adopted the cost-saving strategy of cutting back on national and international coverage and op-eds, focusing more on local news and sports. The paper is now a lot thinner with the sports section now the largest, and sports news often dominates even the front page.

Is this a bad thing? Some time ago I would have said yes, especially since I rarely read anything in the sports section beyond the first page. It would have signified the further dumbing down of news. But now I am not sure. The coverage of local news seems to have got better and more interesting, and many people do care passionately about sports and can’t seem to get enough of it, so the paper is now perhaps finding a niche. The paper’s regular stable of local and syndicated op-ed columnists is unbelievably vapid so the reduction assigned to them is not something I mourn. In fact, I hardly ever read them, unless they publish the occasional new voice.
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As someone who grew up in Sri Lanka, a country that has a strong newspaper-reading ethos, I feel a sense of regret at what seems to be an irreversible decline in the fortunes of daily newspapers. Growing up, my family subscribed to two morning newspapers and two evening newspapers each weekday, and three papers on Sundays, if you can imagine that. Wherever I have lived I have had a daily subscription to the local paper.

For almost all my life, I used to have a rigid routine in the mornings. I would start the day by getting a cup of coffer and reading the newspaper for national and world news. If for some reason the paper was not delivered, I felt disoriented without my fix of news the first thing in the morning.
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Most people would have heard by now of the Daily Show-Jim Cramer face-off, but I want to comment on it anyway.

It all started when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli tried to fan outrage against Obama’s plan to rescue some homeowners from their current situation. Santelli went on the floor of the stock exchange and riled up the traders there by implying that their money was being used to bail out reckless homebuyers.

Stewart made fun of this cheap populism by running clip after clip of CNBC reporters touting the virtues of one company after another just before those companies went belly up. Several of those clips featured Jim Cramer, who has a daily show on the CNBC network.
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The internet has had one major positive effect and that is that it has reduced the power of the establishment media to control the public discourse. It used to be the case that once you had achieved a position of authority in the media, you could say pretty much what you wanted and, as long as it conformed to the desired narrative of the pro-war/pro-business one party system, you could not be challenged. This enabled the discussion on important topics to be limited to within a very narrow spectrum of views, so that whatever view prevailed within that spectrum, the underlying status quo remained untouched.

It used to be the case that those informed people who read something in the paper or heard on the news that they knew was wrong had very few options, other than (say) writing a letter to the editor, which the paper had the option of refusing and which had only a marginal effect anyway.

Take for example this anecdote from Noam Chomsky’s book Understanding Power (2002) about a column George Will wrote in 1982 (thanks to Jonathan Schwarz).

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.

Mind you, in 1982, Chomsky was already a very eminent and well-known figure, both as a linguist and political analyst who was, outside the United States, one of the most famous and admired intellectuals. It will probably surprise many Americans that in the rest of the world Noam Chomsky is a household name in intellectual circles whose writings are regularly published in mainstream newspapers and magazines. And yet even that was not enough clout to enable him correct a direct falsehood by Will. That was the end of that.

Now fast-forward to 2009. Zachary Roth at Talking Points Memo tells the story in which the still-deceptive Will writes a column on February 15 in which he denies global warming, and as evidence says “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

The Arctic Climate Research Center immediately issued a contradiction on its website, saying:

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

This denial was picked up by bloggers who gave the ACRC statement wide publicity. Many bloggers wrote to the editor of the WP asking for a retraction. Will and the editor of the WP editorial page, the awful Fred Hiatt, went into their traditional mode of operation when their narrative is contradicted, which is to either stonewall and ignore the critics, or stick to their guns and act as if they are immune from error and that no one should dare challenge their oracular wisdom. After all, that policy worked so well back in 1982 when even the efforts of people like Chomsky to point out their errors could be thwarted.

But the world has changed. The blogs kept hammering at the story, and the WP and Will got blasted with thousands of people writing to the paper and their website and to their new ombudsman demanding that the paper issue a correction. The paper’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander initially replied saying that he had questioned the editorial page editors about this and they had said they had checked the facts in Will’s column and were satisfied that they were valid. But this bland self-serving assertion drew an even greater negative response.

The ombudsman then investigated the matter personally and wrote a column on March 1, 2009 in which he tried to find reasons to excuse their famous columnist but had to conclude that Will and the WP editors had at best been very sloppy in their checking of the facts. He said, “Opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they aren’t free to distort them.”

Will this new experience of prompt and widespread public reaction make people like Will more cautious about making ungrounded assertions? Unlikely. People like Will have got so used to being venerated as sages that he will find it hard to change his attitude that what he says cannot be challenged. But the editors who are responsible for vetting his writings might now exercise more diligence and that is a good thing.

Welcome to the world of the internet, George Will and Fred Hiatt. You cannot get away with distortions that easily anymore.

POST SCRIPT: Great card trick by Ricky Jay

I love magic tricks. They are the best evidence against the claims of charlatans who say they have paranormal powers. (Thanks to Crooks and Liars.)

A week before his inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of conservative columnist George Will (aka “the man who confuses pomposity with profundity”). Also in attendance were conservative and neo-conservative columnists Bill Kristol (aka, “the man who is almost always wrong”), David Brooks (aka, “the man who can be depended upon to say the most obvious things in the most banal way”), and Charles Krauthammer (aka, “the man who loves torture”).

This caused a stir in the pundit world. A few liberals worried whether Obama would be swayed by this group and abandon his policies and suddenly declare that more tax cuts for the rich, more torture, and more wars was the way to go. Conservatives worried that ‘their’ pundits would be charmed and won over by Obama and put away their knives and become lapdogs.

The very next day, Obama put these alarmed pundits mind at ease by meeting with a group of supposedly ‘liberal’ columnists (Andrew Sullivan, Roland Martin, Rachel Maddow, the Gene Robinson, the Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Jerry Seib, Ron Brownstein, DeWayne Wickham and E.J. Dionne Jr.)
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Today marks the fourth anniversary of this blog and as is my custom I want to reflect on the nature of blogging and, briefly, my own blog.

When I began, I never thought that I would write so much. I have written over a thousand posts and a million words. I also did not anticipate the form that it would eventually take, which was a cross between op-ed type essays and long form articles that I broke up into multi-part series with each episode an op-ed sized chunk. One such series of posts formed the basis of a book The Case of God v. Darwin: Evolution, Religion, and the Establishment Clause that will be published later this year and some others will form the basis of future books and articles.
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