Locus Medius

Inflammatory Headline

CNN had a totally inflammatory headline on their site today:

Sex offenders sue for playground access

It obviously caught my eye.

But then I clicked into the article, and it's about sex offenders suing over an allegedly overzealous city ordinance in Indianapolis that "bars them from venturing within 1,000 feet of parks, pools and playgrounds when children are present". They are arguing that this bars them from many public streets, from voting, from attending church and otherwise over-restricts their movements.

Now, I have no sympathy for the sex offenders on this point, but I find the headline to be irresponsibly inflammatory. These people are clearly not suing so that they can get onto playgrounds with children.

It's especially a problem because the sex offenders are being represented by the ACLU and will get tarred by the inflammatory nature of the headline. Additionally, it's interesting because the article itself is not inflammatory in the same way that the headline is. Clearly, some headline editor got carried away.

Great Medical Care Masking True Intensity of Iraq War

I think one of the factors that gets missed in discussions of the Iraq War is the extent to which improved medical care is masking the full extent of U.S. casualties. This article from CNN points out that the survival rate of soldiers arriving at field hospitals is twice the rate in Vietnam. They do not give enough data to figure out what that means for overall casualty rates, but it is certain that death rates in Iraq are much lower than they would be with the medical care that was state of the art during Vietnam.

I've read previous articles that described some of the advances that have been made. While trauma care has improved, the major advances are in reducing the time before a wounded soldier reaches a medical facility and, even more importantly, advanced medic training for our troops. Apparently, every soldier and marine now gets almost as much first aid training as a combat medic received in Vietnam. Combat medic training has similarly advanced since Vietnam. At every step of the way, starting with their buddy giving them first aid all the way up to advanced trauma care at a combat surgical hospital, our guys are getting better medical care than ever. And that's great.

But we need to remember that saving more wounded solders' lives makes the war look less intense, without making the war actually be less intense.

The Power of Satire

Proving that you can get away with saying things satirically that would be difficult to say in a serious manner, Stephen Colbert really lit into President Bush as host of the White House Correspondent's dinner on Saturday.

I couldn't get the C-Span clip to work on my computer (you have to set up Real Player as your default player, and I didn't feel like doing that). I found this shorter clip at one of the video sites. Don't bother watching after Colbert switches to his audition tape (after about 7 minutes, 30 seconds on the shorter clip), because its not really funny from there on.

According to various reports, Bush was thoroughly unamused by Colbert. Doesn't surprise me. Ideologues can accept satirical criticism just as gracefully as they accept serious criticism (which can be succinctly described as "not at all").

Some choice moments from the video below:

Media — Complete Abdication of Responsibility

Note: For those clicking in to this article from Scientific American, I accidentally linked the trackback incorrectly. The post it was supposed to link to is here.

How come John Stewart is the only member of the "media establishment" to point out the fallacy of Bush's claim that the wiretapping will help to "connect the dots".

Stewart pointed out in his show the other day that we had all of the data we needed to anticipate 9/11 ("dots"), the problem was analyzing the data ("connecting the dots").

He illustrated this with a graphic that showed four dots in a line representing things we knew, labeled something like "Al Qaeda determined to attack within the U.S.", "Al Qaeda known to be planning to use planes as weapons", "FBI was aware of suspicious individuals taking flight lessons" and "World Trade Center had previously been targeted". He then pointed out (sarcastically) that the problem was that "we obviously need more dots", at which point the graphic was filled in with hundreds of randomly placed dots — obscuring the four important ones.

This is what the wiretapping provides, more dots. So don't let Bush tell you that his wiretapping allows the intelligence services to "connect the dots". If anything, having more dots makes it harder to connect them, not easier. I'm not saying that more dots cannot be helpful, I'm just tired of being lied to and having the media roll over and meekly repeat the lie.

NPR's On the Media had a funny quote from the Daily Show over the weekend. They were talking about this same topic — media abdication of responsibility — and quoted a Daily Show skit where the correspondent pointed out that "my job as a journalist is to spend half my time quoting one side and half my time quoting the other side ... that's called being unbiased". [this is as well as I can remember it, but I think its pretty close to exactly what the line was]

Unfortunately, I think that many journalists actually believe that. Political reporting has turned into "he said, she said", while the partisan pundits feed talking points to their adherents en masse. So the political discourse and reporting has been reduced to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore trading jabs and preaching to their respective zombies, while journalists do little more than repeat what each one said.

Meanwhile, John Stewart is the only one out there pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes. If only his show was not slanted to the Sissy side. It is unfortunate because it means that the Nutjobs on the right can dismiss it out of hand — ignoring some real insight into what's going on.

Update: I found a link to the video on Comedy Central's website of that night's episode. Its pretty funny. To me it illustrates the extent to which the Daily Show provides real analysis and commentary, hidden within its humorous segments.

Leaks, the Media and Government Misconduct

Don't let the Nutjobs obfuscate the subject.

The wiretap leak is not similar to the Valerie Plame leak.

Valerie Plame's identity was leaked to punish/discredit a political adversary.

The wiretap information was leaked (presumably) because the leaker believed the program was illegal.

In the Valerie Plame case, neither the leaker nor the reporter should have any legal protection. There is no compelling public interest in allowing politicians to leak classified information to punish their adversaries with impunity. I do not buy the theory that the media would not be able to do its job if it did not protect all confidential sources. Sources should have no reason to expect confidentiality in such cases and media should not grant such confidentiality.

In the case of the wiretap information, I believe there potentially is a compelling public interest in protecting the leaker. Government should not be allowed to classify evidence of its own misconduct. In fact, such classifications are currently illegal. Government employees should be immune from prosecution if they leak information regarding government misconduct. I would fully support putting off criminal proceedings (including forcing reporters to testify) until the courts rule on the legality of the wiretapping. If the wiretapping is found to be illegal, then all criminal proceedings should be dropped.