Miller: Hi, you need to give me some of your wheat which I will use to make flour so the baker can make bread. This will keep us all from starving. I also need you to lend me your oxen to turn the mill.
Farmer: What for free?
Miller: Fine. I have some silver, you can have it for the wheat. We can't eat wheat, we need to mill it and the baker needs to bake it. If we don't work together we will starve, even you. Also, what about your oxen?
Farmer: Silver! You are a fool to think that I would ever take silver. You should give me gold. Gold I tell you!
Miller: Ugh, fine. Here is some gold.
Farmer: Gold? If you are willing to give me gold then I am obviously worth platinum. You will give me platinum.
Miller: HERE! Platinum! We can't keep going on like this, people are starving. Here is all the town's platinum.
Farmer: Diamonds are what I want now. All the diamonds in the land.
Miller: I would give you diamonds but I don't have any and the townsfolk will kill me if I take theirs and give it to you.
Farmer: This is a terrible bargain, I cannot believe I am selling you the wheat for mere platinum. It is an affront to me and all I stand for.
Miller: Finally. Now lend me your oxen to help me turn the mill so we can make the flour.
Farmer: Get off my property before I shoot you.
Miller: Townsfolk, I have gotten the flour. I have struck a wonderful bargain. This is a great day and our town will not starve, now come help me turn the mill.
Townsfolk: Yaay!... I guess... um.
This is basically how the debt ceiling negotiations have gone by.
Another perspective if you like The Lord of the Rings: http://crookedtimber.org/2011/08/01/debt-default-dialog-lotr-style/
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Schools and Science
One class of things that has always bothered me is separation of church and State issues. Here in Texas, as in several other southern states, there has always been a fairly nasty tug-o-war between those who are looking to con-fuse[1] their religious beliefs and their role in government and those who believe that such a thing is wrong an illegal. Of course these sorts of things take place at the national level as well as in every state. Religion, however, carries more weight in some places than others.
Take for example a bill that was recently introduced in the Texas House; a bill to ban discrimination against creationists. Now, one should remember that Texas is a very conservative state. The government here really doesn't do very much especially when it comes to government regulation. Which is what this is, government regulation of who can be hired and fired at colleges and universities. There are few environmental regulations. There is little in the way of regulation of the electricity market. There is no law banning discrimination on the basis of marital status or sexual orientation. Yet someone thinks that they can pass pro-creationist regulation.
This is par for the course among conservative politicians. They routinely lambast environmental, commercial, banking and civil rights laws as things the government has no business being involved in. Then claim that government regulation is bad period then in the next breath decide that the things they don't like should be banned.
I was very tempted to get into the whole theocracy thing here, but I will save that for another post.
There are some other interesting things that have been happening in Texas with regards to schools. Texas recently re-evaluated their textbooks standards and there was a lot of interesting debate. There is the usual racket of trying to teach that the standard models for evolution are weak as a way of letting creationism get a foot in the door. That is usually where it ends, but in Texas, the issue has gone beyond that. In Texas there is the Institute for Creation Research which aims to give out science degrees in creationism. Of course the certification board denied the request.
Seriously though, what does the certification board know about teaching and stuff. That was the message from the state legislature when they said that non-profits don't have to get certifications in order to give out degrees. This now lets any non-profit in Texas hand out diplomas, all as a specific response to the ICR.
Generally the drive to make science appear weak comes down to trying to make an argument for religion. Science has been so effective at discrediting religious texts that the religious folk want to do some fighting back. The problem is that they don't really understand or care about the arguments because that is not their goal. Their goal is to further religion regardless of the arguments.
Now, don't go thinking that any ole time religion is good enough for Texas Schools. The folks on the school board think that there might be too much of that nasty Muslim propaganda in our text books and maybe we should get rid of that.
Science and religion are not the only enemies in the textbooks, there is also history and politics. After all, if you have a nice opportunity to get rid of all those unsightly facts in your text books, why stop at evolution. McCarthy, Reagan, Nixon and Gingrich are about due for a good whitewash. Taxation, entitlements and economics are also hugely influential on the US political scene so it is no surprise that Reagonomics are to be lauded and Social Security is to be questioned. I could spend all day collecting links from Paul Krugman's blog about how the history and evolution of macroeconomics has been steered in an ever more conservative direction despite the facts, but I have other things to do.
Everyone likes to talk a good talk about how important education is to the US. Every president, governor and congress critter can talk about a commitment to education all day, but what does it matter if the low level officials who run the day to day stuff are more concerned with the religious and political gains they can make through the education system. How can we allow people who are so anti-intellectual and anti-science be in charge of our curricula. This daily show clip about this stuff is a bit enlightening.
The elephant in the room is, of course, the 1st amendment and how this is so obviously an effort to support religion in a government institution. Not to mention how it violates the retraining order about how Religion must stay 500 yards from science at all times.(about 5:15 in). I'm sure they will re-write that pretty soon though.
[1] I have liked this usage of the word ever since reading the Baroque Cycle series by Neil Stephenson. A long dry series of books that somehow managed to be interesting rather than tedious.
Take for example a bill that was recently introduced in the Texas House; a bill to ban discrimination against creationists. Now, one should remember that Texas is a very conservative state. The government here really doesn't do very much especially when it comes to government regulation. Which is what this is, government regulation of who can be hired and fired at colleges and universities. There are few environmental regulations. There is little in the way of regulation of the electricity market. There is no law banning discrimination on the basis of marital status or sexual orientation. Yet someone thinks that they can pass pro-creationist regulation.
This is par for the course among conservative politicians. They routinely lambast environmental, commercial, banking and civil rights laws as things the government has no business being involved in. Then claim that government regulation is bad period then in the next breath decide that the things they don't like should be banned.
I was very tempted to get into the whole theocracy thing here, but I will save that for another post.
There are some other interesting things that have been happening in Texas with regards to schools. Texas recently re-evaluated their textbooks standards and there was a lot of interesting debate. There is the usual racket of trying to teach that the standard models for evolution are weak as a way of letting creationism get a foot in the door. That is usually where it ends, but in Texas, the issue has gone beyond that. In Texas there is the Institute for Creation Research which aims to give out science degrees in creationism. Of course the certification board denied the request.
Seriously though, what does the certification board know about teaching and stuff. That was the message from the state legislature when they said that non-profits don't have to get certifications in order to give out degrees. This now lets any non-profit in Texas hand out diplomas, all as a specific response to the ICR.
Generally the drive to make science appear weak comes down to trying to make an argument for religion. Science has been so effective at discrediting religious texts that the religious folk want to do some fighting back. The problem is that they don't really understand or care about the arguments because that is not their goal. Their goal is to further religion regardless of the arguments.
Now, don't go thinking that any ole time religion is good enough for Texas Schools. The folks on the school board think that there might be too much of that nasty Muslim propaganda in our text books and maybe we should get rid of that.
Science and religion are not the only enemies in the textbooks, there is also history and politics. After all, if you have a nice opportunity to get rid of all those unsightly facts in your text books, why stop at evolution. McCarthy, Reagan, Nixon and Gingrich are about due for a good whitewash. Taxation, entitlements and economics are also hugely influential on the US political scene so it is no surprise that Reagonomics are to be lauded and Social Security is to be questioned. I could spend all day collecting links from Paul Krugman's blog about how the history and evolution of macroeconomics has been steered in an ever more conservative direction despite the facts, but I have other things to do.
Everyone likes to talk a good talk about how important education is to the US. Every president, governor and congress critter can talk about a commitment to education all day, but what does it matter if the low level officials who run the day to day stuff are more concerned with the religious and political gains they can make through the education system. How can we allow people who are so anti-intellectual and anti-science be in charge of our curricula. This daily show clip about this stuff is a bit enlightening.
The elephant in the room is, of course, the 1st amendment and how this is so obviously an effort to support religion in a government institution. Not to mention how it violates the retraining order about how Religion must stay 500 yards from science at all times.(about 5:15 in). I'm sure they will re-write that pretty soon though.
[1] I have liked this usage of the word ever since reading the Baroque Cycle series by Neil Stephenson. A long dry series of books that somehow managed to be interesting rather than tedious.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
GNOME and the Terrible Microwave
GNOME, for those that have not used it, is one of the 2 predominant desktop environments for Linux. It is currently moving to version 3 which is supposed to bring with it a much needed modernization of the desktop. It is also currently embroiled in a fight with Canonical, the company that makes Ubuntu Linux over various process issues. There is, however, an older issue regarding the direction that the GNOME team is taking with regard to usability. Sometimes I feel that they are trying to turn GNOME into the microwave which they have at my office.
See, in the office where I work, we have this microwave oven. At first glance it seems like any other microwave, but then you try to use it. If you are trying to set the timer to one minute, it works well, just hit the 1 button and off it goes. If you are trying to set the timer to 2 minutes, it is just as good. If you are trying to set the timer to 3, 4, 5 or even 6 minutes you are golden. However, if you are so bold as to try and cook something for seven minutes... well that's just foolish, it will never work. Pushing the 7 button doesn't do anything. If you happen to notice you can't set the timer for 45 seconds either, because when you hit the 4 button, it starts cooking for 4 minutes. There is an add 30 seconds button which lets you tune the timer a bit, but there is no remove 30 seconds and no way to tune at smaller increments. There is no button you can push that takes it out of overly-convenient mode that I or anyone else can find. Did I mention I am a software engineer and work with several other very smart software engineers? I would not be surprised if there was some way making it let you put a specific time in, but the option is so obfuscated it might as well not even exist.
Now this works well for most people and most situations. However, there are times, more frequent than you might think, where someone needs to cook something for 15 minutes. Or where 1 minute is too short and 1:30 is too long. Yes you can babysit it and stop it at 1:15, but why should you have to? All the parts are there, they just have to give you a way to use them.
Which is pretty much my complaint about the direction they are taking with the GNOME desktop. All the parts are there but they won't let me use them. I have a couple of examples from recent changes that were considered controversial. The decision to remove minimize and maximize buttons from the window header and the decision to remove restart and power off options from the UI.
First the minimize/maximize issue. I would probably not be affected very much by this change since I do not use them very much. I used to use some of the fancier features that the GNOME window manager used back before this current elimination of options push. They used to have options to vertically and horizontally maximize your window. But noooo... People like Jeff Waugh say we can make the problems that the options are supposed to solve "disappear" and "make the choice meaningless." The only thing I saw disappear was the ability to easily vertically or horizontally maximize my windows. The need remained, but the option was gone. The ironic thing is that these options are making a comeback. After years of the Windows(tm) window manager being considered poor and featureless they added vertical maximization and "docking" to either half of the screen. Now they are adding these features to the NEW version of the GNOME window manager.
At the same time they are taking away other UI elements that are some of the most standard UI elements that have existed for most of, if not all of, the history of the WIMP interface. Here you can see what it looks like.
It doesn't look bad. In fact you can see this on some dialog windows in Windows(tm) programs. Generally dialogs that are designed to force a user to make a choice. But some people still like to use minimize and maximize buttons. I have read and heard them complain about this change. Defenders will note that you can still minimize and maximize by other means. It seems that people don't realize this. I have seen several YouTube videos of people previewing GNOME3 and they say they miss the option and seem unaware of alternate means of minimizing and maximizing. So we are back to the option being so obfuscated it might as well not exist. There are all kinds of usability reasons why the alternate methods are bad, but I won't get into that now.
The other recent kerfuffle is the removal of the "power off" and "restart" menu items from the menu where they live (that menu is another thing I don't like, but one thing at a time). You see, they had a bug. The bug said, that the suspend menu item did the same thing as the power menu item. So rather than make the suspend and power items work as they are supposed to, they removed the power button and just made suspend your only option. How this makes sense I do not know. Also, without obvious reason they removed the restart option. The idea is that A) laptops can run suspended forever (because everyone uses laptops and they are always plugged in) and B) If you need to reset then the system will prompt you (because all resets are due to software updates and never for other reasons that the system doesn't know about).
WAIT! You can get the power off option by opening the menu and then holding down the ALT key, which will make the "power off" option replace the suspend option. Problem solved!
That is an absolutely terrible solution. First of all, no one is ever going to discover that bit of functionality. When was they last time you held down ALT keys when using a menu to see if it changed? When should you have to do that? Never. More precisely, never ever. Plus it still doesn't fix the lack of a restart button.
Now, it is certainly possible to get carried away and overdo it. And too many options can be a problem. But just eliminating the choice doesn't make the problem go away. You need a UI that is, as Albert Einstein put it "as simple as possible, but no simpler."
There is a bigger issue at stake here. Linux users are generally more technical in nature. Tweaking their computers to get it to work just right is far more popular than it is among the general public. The GNOME team wants to start appealing to the general public more, but they will not succeed by alienating their current user base. They are not Apple or Microsoft. They do not have huge marketing departments that can spend millions of dollars on advertising and making their product a part of pop culture. The only way they will popularize Linux and GNOME is by having the current techie users convince their friends to use it. Take away that which appeals to the current techies and you have lost your only form of advocacy and advertisement. You will lose users rather than gain them.
See, in the office where I work, we have this microwave oven. At first glance it seems like any other microwave, but then you try to use it. If you are trying to set the timer to one minute, it works well, just hit the 1 button and off it goes. If you are trying to set the timer to 2 minutes, it is just as good. If you are trying to set the timer to 3, 4, 5 or even 6 minutes you are golden. However, if you are so bold as to try and cook something for seven minutes... well that's just foolish, it will never work. Pushing the 7 button doesn't do anything. If you happen to notice you can't set the timer for 45 seconds either, because when you hit the 4 button, it starts cooking for 4 minutes. There is an add 30 seconds button which lets you tune the timer a bit, but there is no remove 30 seconds and no way to tune at smaller increments. There is no button you can push that takes it out of overly-convenient mode that I or anyone else can find. Did I mention I am a software engineer and work with several other very smart software engineers? I would not be surprised if there was some way making it let you put a specific time in, but the option is so obfuscated it might as well not even exist.
Now this works well for most people and most situations. However, there are times, more frequent than you might think, where someone needs to cook something for 15 minutes. Or where 1 minute is too short and 1:30 is too long. Yes you can babysit it and stop it at 1:15, but why should you have to? All the parts are there, they just have to give you a way to use them.
Which is pretty much my complaint about the direction they are taking with the GNOME desktop. All the parts are there but they won't let me use them. I have a couple of examples from recent changes that were considered controversial. The decision to remove minimize and maximize buttons from the window header and the decision to remove restart and power off options from the UI.
First the minimize/maximize issue. I would probably not be affected very much by this change since I do not use them very much. I used to use some of the fancier features that the GNOME window manager used back before this current elimination of options push. They used to have options to vertically and horizontally maximize your window. But noooo... People like Jeff Waugh say we can make the problems that the options are supposed to solve "disappear" and "make the choice meaningless." The only thing I saw disappear was the ability to easily vertically or horizontally maximize my windows. The need remained, but the option was gone. The ironic thing is that these options are making a comeback. After years of the Windows(tm) window manager being considered poor and featureless they added vertical maximization and "docking" to either half of the screen. Now they are adding these features to the NEW version of the GNOME window manager.
At the same time they are taking away other UI elements that are some of the most standard UI elements that have existed for most of, if not all of, the history of the WIMP interface. Here you can see what it looks like.
It doesn't look bad. In fact you can see this on some dialog windows in Windows(tm) programs. Generally dialogs that are designed to force a user to make a choice. But some people still like to use minimize and maximize buttons. I have read and heard them complain about this change. Defenders will note that you can still minimize and maximize by other means. It seems that people don't realize this. I have seen several YouTube videos of people previewing GNOME3 and they say they miss the option and seem unaware of alternate means of minimizing and maximizing. So we are back to the option being so obfuscated it might as well not exist. There are all kinds of usability reasons why the alternate methods are bad, but I won't get into that now.
The other recent kerfuffle is the removal of the "power off" and "restart" menu items from the menu where they live (that menu is another thing I don't like, but one thing at a time). You see, they had a bug. The bug said, that the suspend menu item did the same thing as the power menu item. So rather than make the suspend and power items work as they are supposed to, they removed the power button and just made suspend your only option. How this makes sense I do not know. Also, without obvious reason they removed the restart option. The idea is that A) laptops can run suspended forever (because everyone uses laptops and they are always plugged in) and B) If you need to reset then the system will prompt you (because all resets are due to software updates and never for other reasons that the system doesn't know about).
WAIT! You can get the power off option by opening the menu and then holding down the ALT key, which will make the "power off" option replace the suspend option. Problem solved!
That is an absolutely terrible solution. First of all, no one is ever going to discover that bit of functionality. When was they last time you held down ALT keys when using a menu to see if it changed? When should you have to do that? Never. More precisely, never ever. Plus it still doesn't fix the lack of a restart button.
Now, it is certainly possible to get carried away and overdo it. And too many options can be a problem. But just eliminating the choice doesn't make the problem go away. You need a UI that is, as Albert Einstein put it "as simple as possible, but no simpler."
There is a bigger issue at stake here. Linux users are generally more technical in nature. Tweaking their computers to get it to work just right is far more popular than it is among the general public. The GNOME team wants to start appealing to the general public more, but they will not succeed by alienating their current user base. They are not Apple or Microsoft. They do not have huge marketing departments that can spend millions of dollars on advertising and making their product a part of pop culture. The only way they will popularize Linux and GNOME is by having the current techie users convince their friends to use it. Take away that which appeals to the current techies and you have lost your only form of advocacy and advertisement. You will lose users rather than gain them.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Why I'm Down on NPR
First of all, this has nothing to do with the whole James O'Keefe thing.
I used to really like NPR. I listed to it and found it informative and clear and I listened frequently to get my news. I also got some entertainment from shows like "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "Prairie Home Companion". However I have been seeing a decline in their reporting. Maybe it is because I get information from other sources now that don't match up, or that I am paying more attention, but they just don't seem to try as hard.
Take for example an interview with Intel CEO Otellini a couple days ago on "All Things Considered". He was recently appointed to the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and NPR decided to interview him about job creation. The result was very disappointing on multiple fronts. His recommendations boiled down to 1) Education, 2) Work visas for foreign graduates and 3) A tax holiday for companies.
To start off with One the one hand this is the guy that Obama is putting on the Jobs Council and these are his ideas? Education is all well and good, but one might wonder if this will really help as much as one would like when it comes to improving the employment picture. In fact Paul Krugman does wonder and he doesn't think it will. But even so, an educated populace is a goal in and of itself and I am all for it. The more troubling aspects are his visas for foreign graduates and tax holiday ideas. In principle, I have no problems with an immigrant getting work visas and living in the US. They pay taxes, they help the economy about as much as a native citizen. However, this does nothing to lower joblessness. If you give a job to a foreign worker, even if they become a citizen, that does not lower the number of jobless individuals in the country. A better solution, from a fixing-the-joblessness-problem standpoint would be to get more US citizens into college so that they have the skills you are looking for. I also think that this shows a bit of myopia. Maybe the semiconductor industry has trouble finding qualified people in the US, but I don't think that is true at large, even for most technical fields.
And then there is the tax holiday for building factories. The tax holiday is something that he seemed really passionate about. I believe it is something that he personally wants and would be good for Intel which should not be confused with "good for the country". He says that the tax holiday is "free." Exactly how is it free? Maybe he thinks that no factories are being built. Well not a lot are being built but you are forgoing taxes on those that are. More importantly, taxes are not the only reason that capital investment isn't being made. Take for instance this chart of problems small businesses have.
Taxes really doesn't account for all that much. About 20%. Not to mention that taxes have gone down in the last 20 years but people the needle hasn't moved on taxes being a problem. I think that most of those 20% of people are going to say taxes are their biggest problem because they don't like taxes.
He also wants to deregulate factories. Big surprise. What we end up with is a guy who is shilling for his industry on the President's Job Council. He wants foreign workers (who generally have less work mobility because their visas become endangered if they try to change jobs), less regulation and a tax holiday for when he builds his factories. None of that really has anything to do with jobs, but it has a lot to do with being good for Intel.
But wait, this post is about NPR. So what does all this have to do with NPR? Well, it mostly has to do with the fact that he was not challenged on any of his comments. Not on their veracity and not on how they seem to be exclusively things that would be good for Intel. This more a PR moment for Mr. Intel Guy than it was journalism.
And I have seen (well heard) problematic things before on NPR. Frequently on "Marketplace." One example I remember had to do with the examination of Obama's economic stimulus package. The "analysis" was a scripted debate between a couple of reporters and centered around how big and huge the stimulus package was and whether the package was too big and huge and maybe it was useful, maybe not. This matched up pretty well with the dialog that you would see every night on TV news. You would have your conservative guy saying "Oh my God! Thats big and horrible!" and you would have your liberal saying that it was pretty good but not perfect and good luck drawing any conclusions. Of course this was not the actual conversation being had between economists. You had your conservative economist saying "Government intervention won't help period and increasing the debt is bad" and you had your Keynesian economist saying
You could also see problems during the '08 presidential campaign coverage. Lots of equivocating between positions and events. Not a lot of calling people out on being dishonest except when they could say the other side was being dishonest too.
Its just sad.
This is not what I expect from journalists. I expect them to go out and debunk lies and show reasoned arguments with proof. Even and especially when it contradicts what people are saying. This is the same problem you see with other TV news, only not quite as bad... yet.
So like I said, this has nothing to do with the recent James O'Keefe video.... Well maybe it does in a way. James O'Keefe published a video making an NPR exec seem like he was pro Muslim Brotherhood and a raging liberal who would dare to look down on the Tea Party. Now, no one should ever take anything James O'Keefe does seriously. Everything he does is a lie. But the problem is deeper than that. He just gave people what they wanted, which was something to beat the NPR guys with. By people, I mean conservatives. They have been after NPR for 30 years or more and maybe that is where the issue lies. If you have noticed anything about the situations I outlined here where NPR did bad, they all had a theme. They all either supported conservatives and their ideas or they undermined liberal ones. I think they actively hurt themselves in order to try and make the conservatives like them and that is part of why they have started to be so bad. Ironically, if they weren't so busy being overly generous to the Right, people might know how dishonest O'Keefe is.
This is also why I am down on NPR. Without this sort of poor information out there, it would be much more difficult to make the conservative view seem reasonable. You even have Michele Norris in the interview with Otellini suggesting that the government can't create jobs without any prompting. In all fairness she may have been trying to get Otellini to say something, but it seemed out of place and like she was carrying water for the conservative point of view.
When you have that happening then the fate of NPR seems a bit moot. Who cares if they get defunded if they are making the same mistakes that other media outlets are and are skewing their reporting to try and get on the good side of the people who are trying to kill them.
I used to really like NPR. I listed to it and found it informative and clear and I listened frequently to get my news. I also got some entertainment from shows like "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "Prairie Home Companion". However I have been seeing a decline in their reporting. Maybe it is because I get information from other sources now that don't match up, or that I am paying more attention, but they just don't seem to try as hard.
Take for example an interview with Intel CEO Otellini a couple days ago on "All Things Considered". He was recently appointed to the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and NPR decided to interview him about job creation. The result was very disappointing on multiple fronts. His recommendations boiled down to 1) Education, 2) Work visas for foreign graduates and 3) A tax holiday for companies.
To start off with One the one hand this is the guy that Obama is putting on the Jobs Council and these are his ideas? Education is all well and good, but one might wonder if this will really help as much as one would like when it comes to improving the employment picture. In fact Paul Krugman does wonder and he doesn't think it will. But even so, an educated populace is a goal in and of itself and I am all for it. The more troubling aspects are his visas for foreign graduates and tax holiday ideas. In principle, I have no problems with an immigrant getting work visas and living in the US. They pay taxes, they help the economy about as much as a native citizen. However, this does nothing to lower joblessness. If you give a job to a foreign worker, even if they become a citizen, that does not lower the number of jobless individuals in the country. A better solution, from a fixing-the-joblessness-problem standpoint would be to get more US citizens into college so that they have the skills you are looking for. I also think that this shows a bit of myopia. Maybe the semiconductor industry has trouble finding qualified people in the US, but I don't think that is true at large, even for most technical fields.
And then there is the tax holiday for building factories. The tax holiday is something that he seemed really passionate about. I believe it is something that he personally wants and would be good for Intel which should not be confused with "good for the country". He says that the tax holiday is "free." Exactly how is it free? Maybe he thinks that no factories are being built. Well not a lot are being built but you are forgoing taxes on those that are. More importantly, taxes are not the only reason that capital investment isn't being made. Take for instance this chart of problems small businesses have.
Taxes really doesn't account for all that much. About 20%. Not to mention that taxes have gone down in the last 20 years but people the needle hasn't moved on taxes being a problem. I think that most of those 20% of people are going to say taxes are their biggest problem because they don't like taxes.
He also wants to deregulate factories. Big surprise. What we end up with is a guy who is shilling for his industry on the President's Job Council. He wants foreign workers (who generally have less work mobility because their visas become endangered if they try to change jobs), less regulation and a tax holiday for when he builds his factories. None of that really has anything to do with jobs, but it has a lot to do with being good for Intel.
But wait, this post is about NPR. So what does all this have to do with NPR? Well, it mostly has to do with the fact that he was not challenged on any of his comments. Not on their veracity and not on how they seem to be exclusively things that would be good for Intel. This more a PR moment for Mr. Intel Guy than it was journalism.
And I have seen (well heard) problematic things before on NPR. Frequently on "Marketplace." One example I remember had to do with the examination of Obama's economic stimulus package. The "analysis" was a scripted debate between a couple of reporters and centered around how big and huge the stimulus package was and whether the package was too big and huge and maybe it was useful, maybe not. This matched up pretty well with the dialog that you would see every night on TV news. You would have your conservative guy saying "Oh my God! Thats big and horrible!" and you would have your liberal saying that it was pretty good but not perfect and good luck drawing any conclusions. Of course this was not the actual conversation being had between economists. You had your conservative economist saying "Government intervention won't help period and increasing the debt is bad" and you had your Keynesian economist saying
We have seen this movie before in the Great Depression and this is the right thing to do. This is actually much too small since we are trying to fill a 2 trillion dollar hole with $800 million. Less when you take out the tax breaks which we know don't help and it is practically nothing when you realize that state governments are cutting as much as the Federal Government is spending so we need to make this a whole lot bigger.Now without even taking the merits of the arguments into account, it is important to note that this argument, the important and useful argument, was completely absent in the NPR story.
You could also see problems during the '08 presidential campaign coverage. Lots of equivocating between positions and events. Not a lot of calling people out on being dishonest except when they could say the other side was being dishonest too.
Its just sad.
This is not what I expect from journalists. I expect them to go out and debunk lies and show reasoned arguments with proof. Even and especially when it contradicts what people are saying. This is the same problem you see with other TV news, only not quite as bad... yet.
So like I said, this has nothing to do with the recent James O'Keefe video.... Well maybe it does in a way. James O'Keefe published a video making an NPR exec seem like he was pro Muslim Brotherhood and a raging liberal who would dare to look down on the Tea Party. Now, no one should ever take anything James O'Keefe does seriously. Everything he does is a lie. But the problem is deeper than that. He just gave people what they wanted, which was something to beat the NPR guys with. By people, I mean conservatives. They have been after NPR for 30 years or more and maybe that is where the issue lies. If you have noticed anything about the situations I outlined here where NPR did bad, they all had a theme. They all either supported conservatives and their ideas or they undermined liberal ones. I think they actively hurt themselves in order to try and make the conservatives like them and that is part of why they have started to be so bad. Ironically, if they weren't so busy being overly generous to the Right, people might know how dishonest O'Keefe is.
This is also why I am down on NPR. Without this sort of poor information out there, it would be much more difficult to make the conservative view seem reasonable. You even have Michele Norris in the interview with Otellini suggesting that the government can't create jobs without any prompting. In all fairness she may have been trying to get Otellini to say something, but it seemed out of place and like she was carrying water for the conservative point of view.
When you have that happening then the fate of NPR seems a bit moot. Who cares if they get defunded if they are making the same mistakes that other media outlets are and are skewing their reporting to try and get on the good side of the people who are trying to kill them.
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