by CKR
I sometimes feel overwhelmed at all the things I might write about, particularly those in the news: those that I feel I can add to from my special knowledge, those that seem to demand some talkback, those that portend some hope or are interesting new things about the world, and those that need correction. It’s the last group that seems to have burgeoned lately.
We can start with Charles Krauthammer’s estimate of the time the Iranians need to produce a nuclear weapon. Or the ever-popular EMP effect, now used to hype the danger of the Iranians’ getting a single nuke. Or the Mexican army massing on the Texas border, ready to invade. Or the Caliphate, the Caliphate!
Intelligent design and denial of global warming are chronic, although intelligent design seems to have taken a temporary hit in Dover, Pennsylvania.
References linking Munich and appeasement continue, showing up first in the LA Times and now reprinted in the NY Times. If the first one to mention Hitler in an argument loses, does that apply to Munich too? If not, why not?
Unfortunately, there will probably be more next week. Pat Roberts this morning raised the ever-popular possibility that al-Qaeda might pick up a nuke from Russia. Where does all this stuff come from?
My colleague PHK found one source of the stuff in the blogosphere. What accounts for the MSM’s recycling of nonsense?
Many reporters will admit that they didn’t do well in science subjects. But they might be expected to remember that a story has come up before, and do some research to see what was said. They might do that research even if they don’t recall a particular topic. They’ve also been taught to seek out all sides of a story.
In science, some things are wrong and others are right. It takes a certain set of operations to produce a deliverable nuclear weapon. Each operation takes a certain amount of time. Some can be done concurrently with others. This cannot easily be changed by political desire. Nor does repeating things make them true in science. The human brain, however, as it becomes accustomed to hearing something, is more inclined to believe it.
Lowell Wood says EMP is a real danger, Philip Coyle says it isn’t. More research might be required. In the case that Nick Schwellenbach chose, Frank Gaffney wrote a column. The rules for columnists are different from those for journalists, although I would think that factual accuracy should be a part of their requirements. This would go for Krauthammer too.
Outside of science, things get more complicated, but we have common sense (I like to think). Some people may want to impose a Caliphate from Spain to Indonesia (this is not firmly established, but let’s go with it), as well as the United States. What are their chances of that? How many armies would it take? What would it take to cause the United States to vote itself into a Caliphate? Or perhaps a greater Mexican military presence along the border is the result of the United States’s requests to Mexico to control illegal border traffic. Duh.
Trying to be even-handed has been much overdone in the media. During the Dover trial, reporters seem to have learned something about evolution and intelligent design: that one is science and the other isn’t and therefore they do not need to be given equal time. We’ll see if that sticks in six months or a year, when the next assault on science comes from the right.
In the meantime, we have Deborah Howell of the Washington Post. I hate to criticize the Washington Post, which has welcomed the blogosphere while the Gray Lady has been unwilling to sully her skirts in that nasty underworld. Last week, Howell pasted Jack Abramoff’s bribery onto Democrats as well as Republicans in a classic example of false even-handedness. Left Blogistan erupted. Howell has, sort of, corrected her last week’s column. Brad DeLong gives a better example of what a journalist might have done.
A political adage says that you have to respond quickly to accusations or false information or they will be believed, as in the Swift Boaters’ smearing of John Kerry.
If you overwhelm with accusations or false information, the opposition has to spend all its time responding and has no time to do anything positive. Doesn’t matter that the accusations have been refuted time and again or that they are patently absurd. Why does the MSM aid and abet?
But the Howell uproar may be showing us that the left isn’t taking it any more. Or at least Left Blogistan. Perhaps Democratic politicians can learn from this.