Imagine a News Media That's Customer Focused and Market Driven

Will there be newspapers in 2010? People are beginning to wonder. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds thinks there will be newspapers in 2010, but maybe not on paper.

What must the media do to stay in business? Get back to basics, of course. It must get back to its forte, “actual gathering and reporting of truthful, accurate, hard news.”

But it has got to get out of the union mentality. That makes sense, of course. You can only have unions, with their workplace rules and their “attitude” when there is a rent-seeking opportunity.
Rents are down in the newspaper business. Sorry about that, unions.

Reynolds expects that the new reporters will do it all:

I'd expect a broader range of competency: My reporters would also all be photographers, equipped with digital cameras, and videographers, shooting clips of video that could be placed on the website along with their stories.

See what I mean? Right now, reporters are reporters and photographers are photographers. Reynolds also suggests that the media forget about leaning left. It insults their readers, who do not—lean left. But here is his really revolutionary suggestion:

I'd get readers involved. I'd incorporate readers and bloggers into the reporting, fact-checking, and revision of news stories. I'd be generous about handing out credit, too -- people will do a lot for a little bit of ego gratification. With digital cameras, cameraphones, etc., all over, there's usually somebody on the scene when something happens. I'd take advantage of that. I'd also take advantage of readers with special expertise in particular areas -- in fact, I'd build a roster of those people and use them as color commentators on stories in their areas. If union rules interfered, well...

Exactly. It’s time to forget about union rules and lifetime employment. It’s time to get the community involved, with stringers and part-timers, and photo and video clips from readers.

In the future the news business will be a business like any other service business: customer focused, flexible, market-driven.

It won’t be your father’s Oldsmobile.

The other question is: where will the news media get its advertising revenue?

Study: Whiny Kids Turn into Conservative Adults

It just confirms the suspicion that every liberal has had since childhood. Remember those whiny, insecure kids in elementary school? They all turned into bible-thumping conservative Christian bigots, didn’t they?

Yes, it’s true. Now a researcher has confirmed what many liberals suspected. By following 100 children from Berkeley, California, through their lives they have found a 7% correlation between whininess and conservatism. According to Kurt Kleiner in the Toronto Star:

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality.

...

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

...

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

Oh dear. The truth is out at last!

Needless to say, conservative bloggers like Red America’s Ben Domenech are not amused.

But let us face it, the study just confirms what another study from Berkeley discovered a couple of years ago.

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:



* Fear and aggression

* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

* Uncertainty avoidance

* Need for cognitive closure

* Terror management



"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

No doubt the learned professors are right. Conservatives are prone to a little rigidity on things like the rule of law and the meaning of the constitution. Rather in the way that liberals are rigid about the meaning of Roe v. Wade.

Rather than representing conservatism—or liberalism—as a pathology, we could try a non-pathological world-view, for instance the developmental psychology of Clare Graves. Popularized by his students Don Beck and Christopher Cowan as Spiral Dynamics (see here,
here and
here,
and a site devoted to Clare Graves here), it experiences Bible-believing conservatives as “purposeful blue,” creative businessmen and artists as “adventurous orange,” and touchy-feely liberals as “communitarian green.”

Here is how the Graves system works. You start out an “impulsive red” victim. You rise to blue by accepting Jesus into your life; you rise from blue to orange by deciding that life is a game to be won; and you rise to green caring and sharing when you decide that the life of the ego isn’t that important after all.

However, dear reader, there is a higher, better level, “integrated yellow,” where you and I reside. Yellow looks out on all these lesser levels and colors with lordly understanding and benign tolerance. Unlike those mean-spirited liberal social science professors!

But what I don’t understand is how all this meshes with the Pew Research Center’s recent Are We Happy Yet? poll. In that poll, it turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals, and church-going conservatives happier still. Are they whiny because they are happy, or happy because they are whiny? And conservatives have been happier than liberals since they started the periodic study in 1972. What is the meaning of that?

Clearly more research is needed.

School Choice: What are They Afraid Of?

Libertarian ABC journalist John Stossel is still getting grief for his documentary “Stupid in America,” a critique of the public school monopoly. So he’s taking his liberal critics on one by one.

Yes, he says, you can skew survey results to show that public schools do better than private schools. The National School Boards Association

claims "America's public schools outperform private schools when variables ... are controlled."

OK. Except that the study they used showed that private schools outperformed public schools.

When studying education performance, it is far more accurate to compare schools using random assignment -- using kids assigned schools by lottery so that those attending public and private schools come from the same population. Eight such random-assignment studies have been done. All eight find that private school students did better.

But the problem is that the bribed apologists for the government education monopoly just don’t get it. They say that

"Public schools were created to provide a 'public good': education for all, regardless of a family's ability to pay ... By contrast, under a voucher system that gives public dollars to completely unmonitored private schools, there is no such right to expect or demand accountability for student performance or how tax dollars are spent." They don't get it. Competition brings accountability. Private schools may be "unmonitored" by bureaucrats, but... [p]arents' desire for a good education for their children is a much more powerful check on schools than any politician's law or union rule.

The problem is to persuade the American people of this truth. Because while the American people are confident that they can be the best judge of their childrens’ education they are not sure about other people.

Anyway, why do these folk protest so much?

If public schools are good, they have nothing to fear from school choice. Students and parents will choose them.

Of course, on the other hand if public schools are overgrown government monopolies that don’t deliver good service, then that’s different. Then the public schools advocates are right to be afraid.

Chavez Will End in Tears

What are we going to do about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin America, appeals to the left to understand how everything Chavez does goes against everything they believe.

He’s spending money on an arms buildup, he’s creating a huge militia that answers to him and not to the armed forces. He sells his oil to the US and profits from the refining of his high-sulfur oil.

And in Venezuela, poverty has gone up on his watch.

Vargas is wrong, of course. The left doesn’t care what Chavez does and whether he goes against everything they believe. What counts for the left is that Chavez is against the US. With the end of the cold war we can see that during the cold war the international left was not so much on the side of the Soviet Union as against the United States. Today, with the Soviet Union gone, the left sides with anyone willing to cock a snook at the US.

Is Chavez a fascist dictator? Who cares? At least he is trying to make trouble for the United States.

That is what it means to be on the left. It means that you are against the United States of America.

So what should we do about Chavez? Probably not very much. Hugo Chavez is going to end up ruining Venezuela, and a couple of other South American nations as well. Maybe he’ll have a cozy little war with one of his neighbors. But he will leave behind poverty and despair.

And that is a tragedy. Vargas writes that

There are between 30,000 and 50,000 Cuban advisors in Venezuela, helping with everything from building up the intelligence system to lending “social” services in the government-funded “missions.”

I wonder what the Cubans in Venezuela will do after Fidel shakes off this mortal coil.

NYT and WaPo Vote Against "Manliness"

Anyone for Manliness? No thanks, old chap, say the book reviewers at The New York Times and The Washington Post in their review of Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. Writes Walter Kirn in the NYT Book Review:

Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men."

And in the Washington Post Ruth Marcus sneers

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think -- it's just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I'm sure we could work it out -- Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it's overemployed -- nowhere more than in this administration.

You can understand the problem. Professor Mansfield argues that manliness is “confidence in the face of risk.” The whole point of the liberal project is to create a world without risk, a world in which you would not need people with the quality of dealing with riskiness. So we’ve got to put a stop to this right away.

But if you go to the reviews on Amazon, the shock and outrage isn’t quite as thick. Here’s a self-described “free-thinking, liberal, confident female” who agrees with Mansfield.

I absolutely agree with Mansfield's opinion that being a man is about having "confidence in risky situations".
...

However, when a man is not courageous or confident, he simply cannot feel like a man, and loses self-respect -- which has a disastrous effect on his life, in his raltionships with women in particular, but also in relation to men; and that negatively affects his overall functioning in society.
...

I also agree with Mansfiled's assertion that a man cannot be a gentleman until he is a man first.

Yes. Well, that is not the sort of thing that a president of Harvard is allowed to say in public. And evidently, just to be on the safe side, it is not something you would want to write in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Is it permissible to suggest that the world needs the complementary masculine and feminine attributes of manliness and womanliness? We need people who can take calculated risks and not lose their heads. And we need people who focus on nurturing and caring. Both skills are needed in the central task of life, getting fledglings off the nest.

The core of the great western project is the socialization of men to the team instead of the gang. It is this achievement, getting men to work in productive, profitable teams instead of destructive gangs, that has raised the west to world-historical domination. As Lee Harris wrote in Civilization and its Enemies, the war on terror is a conflict between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

To beat the trickery of reckless, ruthless men and their gang you need a team of trustworthy men trained and confident in the face of risk.

That is something that our liberal friends just do not understand. That is why they have been in a consistent funk over the war on terror, forever talking about exit strategies. That is why they want to take risk out of the workplace, replacing the employment at will contract with worker protections, tenure, benefits, and regulation. That is why environmentalists want to impose the “precautionary principle” on economic actions. They don’t want to be exposed to any risk.

Unfortunately the world don’t work that way.

Stupid Left Tricks

Which is worse? To have journalists jump down your throat every time you say something foolish? Or is it to have journalists politely ignore your stupidity?

Whenever TV evangelist Pat Robertson says something foolish, it gets on the nightly TV news, and we understand from the reporter’s tone of voice that this time preacher Pat has really demonstrated that he has got a screw loose.

But when a lefty does something stupid, we don’t get the same reaction.

For the last week French students have been rioting because the government wants to take a small step away from the policy of lifetime employment. The government wants to allow employers to fire employees under 26 during their first two years of employment without giving a reason. In the Anglo-Saxon countries this is called employment at will. But the French students are livid at losing the protections that they have not yet obtained. And so, writes Mathieu von Rohr in Der Spiegel “It's youth against the establishment.” But socialists are on the side of the students.

Ségolène Royal, the left wing's likely presidential contender, announced that employers in her départements would no longer receive government funding if they signed what she called "cheap contracts."

OK. A century ago you could still have argued that without protection the workers would be shockingly exploited by the bosses. But not now. We now have 200 years of capitalism and we know that the workers, especially well-educated students at the university, are not helpless. And we know that a rigid labor market, such as the one in France, is a labor market that doesn’t create jobs. Rigidity leads to stagnation; flexibility leads to prosperity.

If French students have not learned this, then someone has been hiding the truth from them.

Then there’s the stupidity going on in South America, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez playing the cacique and distributing low-cost heating oil to left-wing groups all over the Americas. According to Jorge Rueda from the Associated Press “Venezuela agreed Monday to sell fuel oil under preferential terms to an El Salvador association created by a group of leftist mayors.” This is similar to a program he has set up to send low-cost heating oil to the poor in the United States. And while he was at it Chavez lashed out at free trade, using

Monday's signing occasion to criticize U.S.-backed free trade agreements such as the one El Salvador joined March 1.

"They're making deals with the devil, the devil himself," Chavez said.

It’s a pity that when lefties say things like that nobody in the media responds in with lofty scorn. Because we know, as well as we know anything, that the road to prosperity is paved with free trade, low taxes, secure property rights, and an absolute minimum of special subsidies.

At least Pat Robertson gets to hear it when he says something stupid.

The Vision of Hope for Iraq

On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, blogger Mohammed of Iraq the Model relives his experience.

First of all there is the experience of living under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Life stopped and time stopped when Saddam ruled Iraq, actually that totalitarian regime was moving backwards and dragging us with it and nothing could stop the deterioration that began the moment Saddam came to power.

Then the Americans invaded and suddenly Iraqi and American were face to face.

Now the two strangers had to work together to accomplish a goal Iraqis knew almost nothing about; they knew that America wanted to topple Saddam and secure the oil fields but that's all they knew while America was thinking of a huge transformation for the entire Middle East with Iraq being the key to that transformation.

It’s a humbling thing to think how the Iraqi people were suddenly to become the guinea pigs for the US plan for the Middle East, the plan to rip up the old order and try to plant something else in its place.

Will it all work and will Iraq come through its present sufferings?

We will not be defeated and orphans of the dark past will get what they deserve and our sacrifices and the sacrifices of those who stand with us shall not go in vain, our sacrifices will pave an easier road for those want to follow us when they decide it's time for them to change.

Mohammed is a brave young man, and we must hope that he and his generation will live to plant a society of hope and freedom in the suffering Land Between the Two Rivers.