Kevin Drum - August, 2009

Today Adam Liptak gives us yet another reason to lament the financial meltdown in the newspaper industry.  In the past, it was most often newspapers that filed lawsuits demanding access to information that had been placed off limits for one reason or another.  But as their finances dwindle they can't afford to file these kinds of suits as often, and other types of publishers don't want to:

Consider the aftermath of a recent settlement in a lawsuit against Amtrak....As part of the settlement, the parties asked Judge Lawrence F. Stengel of Federal District Court in Philadelphia not only to vacate eight of his decisions in the case but also to “direct LexisNexis and Westlaw to remove the decisions” from “their respective legal research services/databases.”

The judge agreed, and the database companies complied.

“In the infrequent event that we are ordered by the court to remove a decision from Westlaw,” explained John Shaughnessy, a spokesman for the service, which is owned by ThomsonReuters, “we will comply with the order, deleting the text of the decision but keeping the title of the case and its docket number. We also publish the court’s order to remove so there’s a clear record of the action.”

In cases like this, newspapers have traditionally refused to cooperate.  What's more, they filed suits to keep this kind of information public not just out of concern for their business, but because their owners were genuinely obsessed with First Amendment rights.  Newer businesses, conversely, tend to either have reason to cooperate with the government, or else think of these suits strictly from a perspective of whether they're economically worth it.  We've still got the ACLU, of course, but they can't pick up all the slack.  In the great power struggle between government secrecy and the public's right to know, the demise of the newspaper industry is a victory for the bad guys.

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Paul Krugman muses about why news outlets tend to cover the politics and horserace aspects of things like healthcare far more than they cover the policy substance:

The WaPo ombudsman hits on a pet peeve of mine from way back: reporting that focuses on how policy proposals are supposedly playing, rather than what’s actually in them. Back in 2004 I looked at TV reports on health care plans, and found not a single segment actually explaining the candidates’ plans. This time the WaPo ombud looks at his own paper’s reporting, and it’s not much better.

Why does this happen? I suspect several reasons.

1. It’s easier to research horse-race stuff....2. It’s easier to write horse-race stuff....3. It’s safer to cover the race.

I suspect there at least two other reasons as well.  First, news operations, by definition, report news.  And horserace stuff changes all the time.  There's always something new to report.

But that's not so for the policy stuff.  You can write a big piece comparing the various healthcare proposals out there, and once you've done it, you're done.  You're not going to run another piece a week later covering the exact same ground.  You need to find a new angle.  But policy doesn't change all that much, and there are only just so many fresh angles on this stuff.  So if you're dedicated to reporting on new stuff, you're going to have a tough time writing lots of policy primers.

Second, let's face it: most people fall asleep when they come across stuff like this.  Even here in the blogosphere most readers have only a limited appetite for wonkery, and as Krugman mentions, trying to make this stuff interesting is next to impossible.  "I’ve spent years trying to learn the craft," he says, "and it still often comes out way too dry."  And that's despite the fact that he has the advantage of writing for the most educated, politically engaged audience you can imagine.

This is only going to get worse.  I don't think mainstream news outlets have ever been all that good at explaining policy, but they've probably gotten worse over the years as attention spans have shortened and the media environment has gotten ever louder and more ubiquitous.  You really can't explain healthcare reform in two minutes, but fewer and fewer people are willing to sit around for much longer than that.

The fault, in other words, lies not in the media, but in ourselves.  The mainstream media may have written ten times as much about the townhalls as they did about the actual substance of the healthcare proposals on the table, but the blogosphere only did a little better.  Even here in wonkland, the outrage of the day is a much more tempting blog topic than reimbursement rates for Medicare.

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From the LA Times:

The Obama administration is racing to demonstrate visible headway in the faltering war in Afghanistan, convinced it has only until next summer to slow a hemorrhage in U.S. support and win more time for the military and diplomatic strategy it hopes can rescue the 8-year-old effort.

...."We need a fundamental new approach," said one officer, a senior advisor to Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly appointed top commander in Afghanistan....Officers in Afghanistan consider much of the effort of the last eight years wasted, with too few troops deployed, many in the wrong regions and given the wrong orders.

And how are we going to know if this fundamental new approach is working? Metrics!

Both the House and Senate versions of the pending 2010 defense spending bill include metrics and reporting requirements for the administration. Obama's strategy is "still a work in progress," said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who co-sponsored an amendment in the legislation setting conditions on aid to Pakistan.

In the absence of strict guidelines from the administration, Menendez said in an interview, "we are definitely moving to a set of metrics that can give us benchmarks as to how we are proceeding" and whether Obama's strategy "is pursuing our national security interests."

The White House hopes to preempt Congress with its own metrics. The document currently being fine-tuned, called the Strategic Implementation Plan, will include separate "indicators" of progress under nine broad "objectives" to be measured quarterly, according to an administration official involved in the process. Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S. performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts.

I've got nothing against metrics, but 50 sounds like about 45 too many.  Internally, they can have a thousand metrics if they need them — and they probably do — but for public consumption four or five key things are enough to tell us whether things are turning around.  I'd much rather have that than a long laundry list that leaves the military with enough scope to conclude just about anything it feels like concluding.

In any case, September 24 is when we get to hear about our new Afghanistan strategy.  In Iraq, we took advantage of a few indigenous movements and then dumped a ton of soldiers into Baghdad, working on the assumption that Baghdad was so crucial that if it could be stabilized the rest of the country would follow.  In Afghanistan, we don't really have anything local to take advantage of, and Kabul doesn't have anywhere near the importance that Baghdad does in Iraq (and besides, it's practically the only place in Afghanistan that isn't a problem).  So our experience in Iraq really won't help us much — which means this new strategy is pretty much starting from scratch.  I can't wait to see it.

POSTSCRIPT: Plus, as Matt says, I'd like to know what the plan is if the metrics look bad a year from now.  Will we withdraw?  Create new metrics?  Fire the old commanders and put new ones in again?  Or what?

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Is there any reason for optimism on healthcare reform?  In a weird sort of way there is.

Think about this: It turns out that heathcare reform is so fundamentally popular that the only way Republicans have been able to have any impact at all on the debate is via a campaign of demagoguery so egregious and brazen that Huey Long himself probably would have hesitated a moment or two before jumping in.  For the first six months of the year nothing else had made a dent, so finally they had to resort to a full month of silly season frenzy about death panels and secret White House enemies lists and "healthcare racism" and benefits for illegal immigrants.  The only thing missing was sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

It's been a helluva show.  But here's the weird fact: despite all this, public support for healthcare reform has declined only modestly.  In fact, less than you'd expect even without the August freak show we've just gone through.  Generally speaking, people still approve of Obama, still approve of his healthcare plan, still prefer Democrats to Republicans on the issue, and still support giving people the choice of being covered by either a public or a private plan. Fox News and FreedomWorks have managed to spin their audiences into a hysterical lather about fascism and socialism and pulling the plug on grandma, but in the end the shrieking crowds who showed up at the townhalls were tiny in number.

So that's the optimistic view: the Fox/FreedomWorks crowd has created some great political theater, but underneath it all not a lot has changed.  If Democrats can just take a deep breath after the trauma of being yelled at all summer, they'll realize that the loons at their townhalls represented about one percent of their constituency; that the public still wants reform and will reward success; that the plans currently on the table are already pretty modest affairs; and then they'll stick together as a caucus and vote for them.  And that will be that.

Unfortunately, that's also the reason for pessimism: can Democrats still think straight about all this?  When Chuck Grassley announces dolefully that maybe healthcare needs to be rethought now that the people have spoken, he says it like he really means it.  And even some Dems fall for it.  So success depends on the Democratic caucus seeing through the "heartland uprising" charade and showing some backbone.  The odds might not be so great on that.

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