Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
…where all TV talk-show guests, and perhaps hosts as well, were replaced by Walter Williams. What a world that would be.
UPDATE: It appears from the comments that not everyone recognizes the name of the distinguished economist, essayist and media commentator Walter E. Williams.
This evening I was wandering roung the National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square, as it was open late (I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of which museums and art galleries keep late hours on which day of the week in London). Among other small exhibitions I found a selection of caricatures from Vanity Fair in the late nineteenth century.
There was a very fine picture by Baron Melchiorre Delfico, the man who created the Vanity Fair style in caricatures, of Baron de Reuter, founder of Reuter’s news agency, now known Thomson Reuters. The man clearly had a very impressive pair of mutton-chop whiskers. What was particularly interesting, however, is the comment that the editor had added in that long-ago issue of the magazine (December 14, 1872, since you ask).
As foreign news is now managed it is not too much to say that he who has the command of telegrams has the command of public opinion on foreign affairs.
First telegrams, then telephones, satellite phones, even e-mails. That is how journalists have viewed their own position in the world for some time now. It is not easy to accept that the Vanity Fair editor’s comment no longer applies.
Sugar producers also make out like Beltway bandits, receiving the difference between the world price of sugar, which is now $12 per pound, and the guaranteed price of about $21 per pound.
–WSJ
(Let’s see how long they take to correct it.)
Laura Washington is a journalism teacher at DePaul University and wrote this article in September of 2007, that I was pointed to by a link at Brillianter. Before doing a mini fisking on this, just a few words about technique.
It is easy to see why newspaper articles and articles in many online publications and magazines are poorly researched and hard to understand. When you have a teacher of journalism writing about something she clearly knows nothing about and provides no evidence to support her opinions, what does she expect her students to do?
The United States (and many other countries, such as Britain) faces an energy crisis of its own making. Due to a variety of bone-headed “deregulation” schemes, there is now no financial incentive for companies to build new large, baseload generating plants (nuclear, coal, hydro) and there are massive dis-incentives in the form of zealous greens and myopic regulators that will fight them every step of the way should they attempt to solve this problem.
While these facts are on the ground and manifestly self-evident (no new nuclear plants have been built in decades, not counting the TVA re-powering one site) and new baseload coal plants are extremely few and far between, journalists have been touting the “re-emergence” of nuclear power based on almost no hard evidence. As soon as these articles came out, I immediately pointed out the immense difficulties in building one of these plants, which range from the fact that there are 1) no financial incentives large enough to offset the massive risks 2) these estimates are “pie in the sky” and not backed up by cases of building in the USA 3) the history of these sorts of projects, on the other hand, is well documented and grim. This type of “reporting” is typical when reporters have only the barest knowledge of the facts at hand; as such they “humanize” the story and take uninformed or biased opinions verbatim without challenging the facts.
The Wall Street Journal had an article in their May 12, 2008 issue titled “New Wave of Nuclear Power Plants Faces High Costs”. Per the article:
“A new generation of nuclear power plants is on the drawing boards in the U.S., but the projected cost is causing some sticker shock: $5 billion to $12 billion a plant, double to quadruple earlier estimates.”