Dann Todd's 'Dain Bramage'^**

The Grey Lady Falls

There has been more than a modest amount of hub-bub...bub...regarding the recent Morgan Stanley divestiture of New York Times stock shares. Michael Malone shares some of his thoughts about the demise of the Grey Lady in this article.

What made the Times' decision not to pursue this strategy particularly stupid was that it was, after all, 'America's newspaper of record', a role in which it justly reveled. But you can't hold that title while pandering to the political and cultural views of readers on the Upper West Side. And you can't claim "all the news that's fit to print" when you neglect to notice that an American soldier in Iraq just won the Medal of Honor. In the old days, if the Times didn't cover it, it didn't happen. That insulation is long gone: if the Times doesn't cover it, the blogosphere will -- and millions of readers will starting wondering about the judgment and biases of the New York Times.

Other news outlets ....NPR....PBS....FoxNews.... do a respectable job of segregating news from opinion. While there is always a bit of crosstalk between news reporting and opinion writers, news/media consumers are generally smart enough to figure out when personal biases are affecting news coverage. The NYTimes squandered a great reputation to increase readership among a certain segment of the population. A surefire recipe to persuade the rest of the country that it probably isn't worth the effort to find out if anything you might have to worthwhile to say.

by Dann 

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Bad Advertising From NPR

I like NPR....National Public Radio....quite a bit. Their news reporting is great. Entertainment programming from jazz to Garrison Keillor to What-do-you-know to The Story and including several others is top notch as well. Although their opinion programming isn't really to my taste.

But I dread their fund drives.

And not because you get that constant 15 minutes an hour worth of haranguing out of every hour.

I dread their fund drives for the subtle jabs that they take at the free market from time to time. Just this afternoon I was listening to the request for funding and was thinking about calling in when one of the hosts made a statement that unlike commercial radio stations, NPR isn't subject to the whims of shareholders.

How ignorant can one person get.

Shareholders are after profit. For a radio station to make a profit, it has to attract listeners. The more listeners it has, the more confiscatory the advertising rates it can charge to advertisers. The higher the rates, the more profit. The more profit, the happier the shareholders.

So listeners to commercial radio stations are more likely to get what they want as a result of the profit motive.

Public radio operates under the exact same principle. The only difference is that they remove the advertising middle-man from the equation. With public radio, the listeners ARE the shareholders.

Public radio survives on donations. The more listeners they have, the larger their support base when it comes time for their fund raising drive. If public radio fails to provide the programming that their listeners desire, then they will not be able to stay in business due to a lack of donations.

NPR fills an under served niche in radio broadcasting. You can get some of it via commercial radio, but not all of it. And certainly not all on one station.

Maybe they might persuade more people to contribute if they would drop the faux leftist/anti-capitalist attitude.

by Dann 

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Be Not Reluctant

The Spectator magazine of the UK recently hosted a debate. The question put to the panel was "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values."

You can download the podcast here.

You can read a review of the event here.

Just a bit of a spoiler space for those that would prefer to listen without the benefit of my sterling commentary.

The side in support of the motion began with a recitation of the merits of "western values". The merits of those values was a constant theme throughout the evening. Speakers compared our openly self-critical responses to the awful incidents at Abu Ghraib with the acceptance of such barbarism in traditionally Muslim countries.

The side in opposition focused on the historical fact that the value of social introspection and self criticism were first known in the Middle East. Several early Middle Eastern philosophers were cited as examples of non-Western bases for such values. Hammurabi was invoked as the creator of the first system of laws.

The latter brought instantly to my mind the fact that Hammurabi isn't running the Middle East these days. A thought that was echoed during the Question and Answer portion when a gentleman made the point that we ought to be comparing the current state of "Western Values" with those currently in vogue in capitals throughout the Middle East.

Eventually, the debate came to focus on the words "assert" and "Western" in the question.

The word "assert" was questioned as the opponents thought that any truly superior set of values should not need to be spread at gun point. No mention was given of the instance where an inferior set of values is being spread at gun point; such as is the case with the Muslim extremists that believe they are homicide bombing themselves to heaven and thereby helping to create a global theocracy operating under Sharia law.

"Western" was questioned because the west has not always been as tolerant, open, and self questioning as we are today. We went some pretty bloody times before the Enlightenment occurred. And we went through some further bloody times defending and extending those values for ever larger portions of our populations.

Those opposed to the motion made a very persuasive case that "Western" is a poor description for the values we hold most dear. The phrase "liberal democratic values" was floated as a substitute.

The most appalling moment of the evening came when one of the opponents made the argument that Nazi Germany under Hitler was an expression of "Western Values". Those more familiar with Internet jargon will recognize that moment as being a "Godwin".

I found the arguments for the motion to be far more persuasive as they were rooted in the comparison between the modern day West and other competitive value sets. And while I agree that any reasonable sense of history should inspire caution when we seek to extend "Western values" in the world, I found the opposition's general prevarication and relativism to be a weak basis for their argument.

Perhaps a better question for the panel would have been "We should not be reluctant to defend the merits of liberal democracy."

The discussion was mostly cordial, informed, and intelligent. I recommend it to all of my 5.2 loyal listeners...and the 1.47 of you that grind your teeth after reading this stuff.

by Dann 

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