Excellent Development at CNBC

Anyone who follows CNBC knows that the “Kudlow & Cramer” show recently became “Kudlow & Company.” This is great news on a couple of levels. First, it frees Larry Kudlow to go his own thoughtful, optimistic, free-market way, no longer hamstrung by Jim Cramer‘s discordant style and liberal politics. Having these two men co-host a show seems in hindsight to have been a waste of both of their talents, and particularly of Kudlow’s. The show was good before, but Larry’s new solo act has quickly distinguished itself as by far the best daily politics-and-economics show on TV.

Second, it is great news because it shows that CNBC management, which has given the impression of being unimaginative and politically doctrinaire, may be responsive to reality after all. (These are the same people who canceled the unique WSJ editors’ show and ran a dime-a-dozen liberal talking-head show in its place.) It looks as though either CNBC woke up to the fact that its hottest property is a socially conservative free-market economist, or someone high up at GE got fed up with CNBC’s tacitly statist, anti-business editorial policy and insisted that Kudlow be given his own show. Either way it’s progress.

Misleading Headline

I expect this kind of thing from Reuters, the NYT, sometimes the AP. But Drudge? The headline seems to suggest that U.S. troops tried to murder a released journalist-hostage in Iraq. The cited AP story has a more accurate headline: “U.S. Fires on Car Carrying Freed Hostage”. Even better would have been the full story: After week of car bombings, U.S. troops mistakenly fire on unidentified vehicle carrying freed hostage as it approaches checkpoint at night. Not as much drama in that one, just the truth.

Drudge is usually pretty good about avoiding MSM-style tendentiousness, but in this case I think he overdid the evenhanded spin. If he has a systematic flaw it’s his tendency, after a string of stories that favor one side in a controversy, to emphasize stories that favor the other side. Sometimes he sensationalizes events out of all proportion to their significance.

UPDATE: I agree with the commenters who suggest that we do not yet know enough about this incident to assume that it was inappropriate for U.S. troops to shoot at the car. It may be that they did exactly the right thing under the circumstances. Obviously there will be an investigation, and just as obviously some media people (I don’t mean Drudge) are going to try to use this unfortunate event as a weapon against the U.S. regardless of what actually happened.

Modern Geopolitical Reality

The able Bernard Kerik is out but underperformin’ Norman Mineta stays. It doesn’t take much insight to realize that it should have been the other way around. What’s going on?

These outcomes seem to be a function of appearances — Kerik’s household employee may have been an illegal immigrant; Mineta is a prominent Asian-American Democrat — rather than substance. Yet here, as in other areas of public life (cf., our abortive initial assault on Falluja), decisions based on appearances can have real consequences.

What drives the destructive public emphasis on politically-correct appearances is, largely, the mainstream press, which, as Robert Kaplan argues, derives much power from its ability to frame questions and hence issues. It also has an elitist, legalistic, statist and appeasement-oriented international power agenda that’s at odds with much of America’s public policy, if not some of its fundamental values.

The medieval age was tyrannized by a demand for spiritual perfectionism, making it hard to accomplish anything practical. Truth, Erasmus cautioned, had to be concealed under a cloak of piety; Machiavelli wondered whether any government could remain useful if it actually practiced the morality it preached. . . Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval authorities would have been familiar. Investigative journalists may often perform laudatory service, but they have also become the grand inquisitors of the age, shattering reputations built up over a lifetime with the exposure of just a few sordid details. . .

One corollary of all this is that people like Bernard Kerik, who was probably an excellent choice to head Homeland Security (for some background on his success in another security bureaucracy, see this article about his reform of the NYC prison system), get derailed for reasons having nothing to with whether they can do the job. Another corollary is that cautious mediocrities like Norman Mineta (Supreme Court Justice David Souter is another good example) become politically valuable far beyond their deserts, simply because they habitually avoided saying, writing or doing anything for which the press might later take them to task if things didn’t work out.

I think Kaplan is too pessimistic, because he ignores the beneficial role played by the new media (including himself, in his highly successful role as an independent journalist and analyst whose work is widely read on the Internet) in serving as a check on old media. His diagnosis of the problem is thus part of the cure. Increasing numbers of citizens get their information from nontraditional sources and are becoming alert to MSM tendentiousness.

However, his discussion of the behavior of the old (“mainstream”) media is spot on. The MSM are powerful players in modern geopolitics, and pursue an agenda that is often hostile to that of open societies with totalitarian enemies. Western public officials, particularly American ones, have been slow to figure this out. It is extremely important that they learn better to use the MSM to advance their own agenda, and to counter the agendas advanced by the MSM themselves, and by media-savvy totalitarians for whom press manipulation is now a basic military tactic.

Educated Fools

Glenn Reynolds links to this Reason Online discussion in which journalists and mainly-libertarian intellectual types discuss whom they’re voting for and why.

Some of these people, including Reynolds himself, seem mature and reasonable. But quite a few of the others come across as frivolous, apathetic, foolish or all of the above. Michael Shermer thinks it’s important that Kerry is a bicyclist. Richard Epstein doesn’t remember for whom he voted in 2000, thinks the major parties are essentially identical and won’t vote for either of them in 2004. And the guy from The Independent Institute doesn’t want to soil his hands by voting. (Somehow his attitude doesn’t surprise me — see here and here for some background on an exchange I had with another guy from The Independent Institute.)

So, with some notable exceptions, these extremely bright people, many of whom spend a lot of time giving the rest of us advice on how to make decisions about public affairs, are a bunch of idiots in their personal voting behavior. Yeah, I know: most individuals’ votes are not decisive, voters are rationally ignorant, the major parties are effectively a cartel, etc. These objections are narrowly true but miss the big picture. Voting should be treated as a civic sacrament, because on the margin our system can live or die depending on how carefully the voters vote, and they are more likely to take voting seriously if intellectuals don’t denigrate it as an activity. This is especially true now, when the main issue of the day is of overwhelming importance and the major-party candidates have profoundly different approaches to that issue.

One shouldn’t over-intellectualize this stuff, but I think it’s valuable to look at what people think is important enough to spend their own time on. If ordinary people in places like Afghanistan appreciate how important elections are, both symbolically and practically, even when none of the candidates is perfect, why do so many smart people here miss the point?

Maybe we should skip elections altogether, and appoint leaders randomly (with strictly limited terms, of course) from the telephone book. That might work better than decisionmaking by what Thomas Sowell called “articulated rationality” — the main decisionmaking method used by the people interviewed in the Reason forum. Certainly they sound impressive, but do they make better decisions than does the typical voter? Experience, and now disclosure, suggest not.

Something That I Learned From Reading Blogs

Not only are there many extremely intelligent ordinary people out there, but a lot of famous, mainstream journalists and commentators get by mainly on their rhetorical skill and lack both analytical ability and common sense.

UPDATE: Mitch raised the hair issue in the comments, and I realized that I didn’t mean to restrict what I wrote to mainstream-media people. Andrew Sullivan (not to pick on him but he’s an obvious example) fits the pattern, despite not being a MSM person and not having important hair. He writes beautifully but his analysis of matters economic (deficits bad!) and geopolitical (we’re losing!) is somewhat less acute than is his rhetoric. Some people simply write better than they think. We should always examine arguments carefully, no matter who made them or how satisfying they sound.