The dominance of dumbness

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Joe Weber

Anti-intellectualism has a long history in American culture

A friend set me to thinking about the long and unsavory history of anti-intellectualism in American life. This strand of our culture didn’t begin with Trumpism, of course, though the anti-science and anti-elites chords the former president strikes so powerfully are exceptional examples of it. Indeed, it’s not by accident that Donald Trump in 2016 singled out the group he had most affection for, saying: “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Nor has this phenomenon been exclusively a province of the right, which boasts of many ignorant folks but also the likes of the brilliant (if often distasteful) William F. Buckley. In fact, a most intriguing commentary on the phenomenon came in 2001 from conservative economist Thomas Sowell in “The Quest for Cosmic Justice,” where he wrote:

“From its colonial beginnings, American society was a ‘decapitated’ society—largely lacking the top-most social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic, and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe … The rise of American society to pre-eminence, as an economic, political, and military power, was thus the triumph of the common man, and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.”

As a trip through Wikipedia reveals, there is much support for Sowell’s view. A minister in 1843 wrote about frontier Indiana (one of our most undereducated states): “We always preferred an ignorant, bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness.”

Such views have long infused our politics, sometimes with well-schooled leaders who either demagogued on this stream of thought or just warmed to it. Consider the 1912 thoughts of Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his doctorate from Johns Hopkins, said: “What I fear is a government of experts. God forbid that, in a democratic country, we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job?”

American historian, author, and Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter (1916 – 1970) poses for a portrait, New York, 1970. Two of his most important works are ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’ (1963) and ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1964). (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images)

A thorough discussion of this trend came in 1963 from Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter. In “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” he argued that anti-intellectualism was how the middle-class showed its feelings for political elites. As that group developed political power, he contended, it held up the ideal candidate for office as the self-made man, not a well-educated man born to wealth.

More recently, in 1980, author Isaac Asimov observed: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”

Since then, many folks have dusted off this theme. Journalist and author Susan Jacoby in her 2008 book, “The Age of American Unreason,” bemoaned what she called the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the modern era. According to The New York Times, she blamed it on television, video games and the Internet, saying they created a “culture of distraction” that has shortened attention spans and left people with “less time and desire” for “two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation.”

Certainly, the forces Jacoby pointed to exacerbate the cult of ignorance we are awash in. Still, history shows that it’s nothing new. The new media that preoccupy us now may just be building on that well-rooted base. One has only to look at the success of Fox News to see how deep that base is.

We might take heart, however, that there’s an ebb and flow at work. At various times in our history, we have swung from respecting (and electing) smart people to choosing ignoramuses. How else to explain descents such as that from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson (in just 20 years) and from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (in no time at all)?

It’s troubling, nonetheless, that politicians such as Ron DeSantis feel a need to play down or deride their elite-education credentials to try to harness votes from the masses that are less-schooled than they. After using Yale as a steppingstone to Harvard Law School and then entering politics, he soon realized that such credentials were “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” as The New York Times reported. As he has sought to remake higher education in Florida, DeSantis has also said he would eliminate the federal Department of Education, among other agencies.

For his part, Trump has bragged — when it suited his purposes — about attending an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania, even as he failed to mention that he had transferred there after two years at the less tony Fordham University, as The Daily Pennsylvanian reported. In fact, he claimed to have graduated first in his class in 1968 at the university’s Wharton School, though the school newspaper’s investigation of this did not bear that claim out. Indeed, he did not even make dean’s list that year.

He also has often derided intellectuals and pursuits such as reading. He told a reporter for The Washington Post in 2016 that he has never had to read very much because he can reach right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense.’ ” Moreover, Trump told the Post that he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Despite the choice of Joseph Biden in 2020, we seem now still to be perilously in a period when the pendulum remains far from valuing education in our leaders or elsewhere. Indeed, it’s troubling how few Americans today put a premium on schooling, a trend concomitant with the rise of book-banning nationwide. Our next election will be revealing about many things (not least of which are understandable concerns about the current president’s age), but it may also mark either a departure from the pendulum’s swing or its confirmation.

An American Abroad

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Joe Weber

For a couple weeks, I’ve been visiting a small town in southern Germany, Filderstadt Bonlanden, a short drive from Stuttgart. With its hilly and winding narrow roads, red-roofed village homes and larger buildings that date back several centuries, it’s idyllic.

It’s a perfect place, it seems, for Donna and me to usher into the world our eighth grandchild, born in a hospital nearby on July 24. This angelic child is the third for our son, who will be based here for a couple years. We’re lucky to be here to lend a hand until nearly summer’s end

But, because it is so pleasant here, it’s also disconcerting, and much of that has to do with the news from home. As a regular reader of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Atlantic, CNN and local news outlets from Colorado, I’ve been delighting in German village life while being fed a steady of diet of mayhem and tumult from home and elsewhere. The diet sharply contrasts with the pleasant day-to-day reality in this bucolic stretch of Europe.

Just today, for instance, I read about the U.S.’s dismal record in health problems among American women, a piece headlined “The Tragedy of Being a New Mom in America.” A bit earlier, I read of the rising death rate among the homeless in Colorado via “Deaths of people who are homeless in Denver surge 50% since last year.” And, of course, the news about Trump’s legal woes and the peculiar ostrich-like attitude among his supporters has flowed nonstop. For one example, see “Trump’s 2024 Campaign Seeks to Make Voters the Ultimate Jury.”

And, if I look a bit further, there’s the constantly refreshed news about the seemingly intractable gun violence at home. There’s also antisemitism, drawing attention anew because of the death penalty sought in Pittsburgh, an occasion for a trying debate with an anti-death penalty friend. Also making fresh headlines: climate change continues to ravage much of the world, getting plenty of attention among U.S. news outlets.

Die Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Bonlanden

Jarringly different from the delights of this charming area, parts of which date back to the 12^th century, all this news is very depressing. Outside of our bubble here, is this the sort of world – and is the U.S. the sort of country – our grandchildren should inherit? G-d willing, they will live to see and surpass the year 2100 (hard as that is to imagine) when they’ll be just a few years older than we are now. What will America look like then? The rest of the world?

Recently, we visited an American family that has been in orderly, clean and perhaps suffocatingly well-regulated Germany for about five years. As they look at developments at home, they are working hard to extend their tour here still more, at least until their young boys go off to college in the United States and perhaps longer.

Given the unceasing political turmoil, increase in gun violence, rises in homelessness and other problems at home, it’s easy to see why. And somehow following the never-ending cascade of troubling news from home while in this lovely cocoon here makes it all worse. The cultural clash is painful.

When I first taught in China a bit more than a decade ago, reading the news from the U.S. was curiously heartening. The candor in American news seemed so much better than censorship and, despite the problems then, I could believe that problems have solutions. I recall telling students in Beijing that I found the “Occupy Wall Street” movement invigorating because young people could freely speak their minds. Of course, all that was pre-Trump, and one could have confidence in some leaders at least.

Now, however, it’s hard to escape a feeling that my homeland is hurtling toward a future that is nothing my grandchildren should ever experience.

Here in Germany, the perspective I have on American news is troubling. Some of the challenges are global, of course, and even this pleasantness isn’t immune (consider the sweltering heat in Italy, not so far away). But, sadly, much of it reflects distinctly American dysfunction — Trump is far from the only would-be authoritarian in the world (dare I call him “fascist” in this much-reformed national home of Nazism?).

But the support he commands in the face of his astonishing legal woes may reflect a level of ignorance particular now to the U.S., a herd-mentality not dissimilar to the national madness that beset Germany less than a century ago. And guns, of course, are especially problematic in the States. Even as homelessness afflicts many countries, I’ve seen none of the tents here that are ubiquitous in Denver.

Seen from afar, nowadays, America tragically seems like a place one wants to stay away from, at least until and unless it can resolve its problems. For one, Trump will fade over time (whether he’s elected again or not), but Trumpism has taken root in the GOP and amid much of the public (carrying on traditions that hearken back to American Nazism, the John Birch Society and the rest of the once-fringe ultraright). And, barring a miraculous change in politics, gun violence seems likely only to worsen, along with homelessness. Climate change seems likely to stir deadly weather, even in my beloved Colorado mountains, which are highly vulnerable to fire.

The bottom line in this slice of semirural European delight: it’s hard to be optimistic about home. Taking a breather from the news from the States could help my attitude, of course. But the reality remains and, alarmist as the media can seem, they do seem to be getting far too many things right in this most disturbing summer.

Sobering but Unsurprising

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Joe Weber

A friend who worked in both newspapers and magazines recently shared a piece from The Philadelphia Inquirer whose headline a few years ago would have been shocking. It was titled “At Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, the last newsstand stopped selling newspapers.” Subhed: The explanation, sadly, is old news. Nearly no one was buying them.”

The piece, a mix of elegy and business reporting, offered a sobering slap in the face to nearly anyone of a certain age, an age when trains were filled with folks turning pages and studying the news of the day. Not so much anymore, it seems. Newspaper sales “had grown beyond bleak” at the station, the manager of the stand said. ”We weren’t making any money off newspapers.”

The piece explained how the Age of Smartphones has rendered the print product nearly obsolete, quaint perhaps. It suggested that the pandemic worsened the newspaper industry’s existential struggle with the digital world. And it discussed how newsstands themselves are vanishing, much as coin-operated news boxes are.

“Each year an estimated four million passengers pass through the station’s soaring concourse, making it Amtrak’s third busiest hub,” the Inquirer reported. “Meanwhile, in recent times, the stand rarely sold more than a dozen daily papers each day … Then there’s rising prices, delivery costs, and time and energy spent bundling up returns.”

Tillman Crane photo, source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

The piece included a photo of another newsstand in the center of the concourse, a memorable shot that for a time even hung in the National Art Museum of China. In its haunting emptiness and ghostly lighting, that photo to me is reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting. Even as it is foregrounded with stacks of newspapers waiting to be snapped up by news-hungry travelers, the shot seems a bit funereal, foreshadowing the fate of print decades after photographer Tillman Crane aimed his camera at the stand in 1989.

This is not news, of course. Almost since my first days in the news business, back in the summer of 1974, industry changes have been extraordinary, with many of them seeming like campaigns in a war against obsolescence. My first job, in the noisy back shop of a New Jersey daily with hot-type lead Linotype machines behind me, was as a proofreader. Three colleagues and I would comb sheets of typescript for typos that we circled and dispensed to the editors in the busy newsroom. Copy moved between us and that newsroom on an overhead conveyor belt on sheets of rough paper.

That job was obsoleted soon by computers on which reporters and editors did their own proofing. And the compositors, who operated the linotypes, soon enough lost their jobs, as systems bypassed those noisy, dirty and dangerous machines.

By the time I made it into the newsroom – first as a copyboy and then as a reporter – IBM Selectrics were giving way to fancy typewriter-like systems that allowed us to more efficiently type copy to be scanned and ultimately printed. Then, in the blink of an eye, we moved to computer terminals and the newsroom became far quieter.

Still more changes awaited us during my six years at the paper, then called The Home News. We scrapped a traditional layout in favor of a trendy modular design. The old classic look went the way of the afternoon edition of the paper (which I had delivered as a kid not many years before). TV obsoleted that edition.

Source: Society of Professional Journalists

Later, after grad school in 1980-81, I saw a similar makeover at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, where I spent another six years. At both papers, modernization seemed essential if we were to hang onto readers and we hung out hats on cosmetic changes.

Still later, when I began my 22-year stint at BusinessWeek, my editors put the magazine through several similar technological and esthetic changes. New looks to “the book” and new machines to move the information more efficiently between reporters and editors were a regular thing. We had to stay au courant and we did so relentlessly, making oodles of money for McGraw-Hill in the process – until, suddenly, we didn’t anymore.

As the Net ramped up in the aughts – and especially after one of the big tech ad busts — we tried to adjust by serving up information many times daily – not just weekly anymore. We built an ambitious Internet news operation, along with the reporting by magazine folks. It was all very pricey and all, in hindsight, rather desperate – as desperate as the efforts of those compositors at The Home News to preserve their jobs against the march of technology.

McGraw-Hill, weary of losing money on BW, sold it for a song to Bloomberg in 2009. And today, Bloomberg Businessweek still offers a print product. But, just as Forbes, Fortune, Time and Newsweek have declined in importance, BBW seems less consequential. I’m not sure it’s even sold on newsstands anymore, though it is available by subscription.

With the power of Bloomberg News behind it, the magazine should be a dynamo. But it feels to me as if its glory days are behind it, at least in its magazine form. Indeed, Poynter last year reported that BBW’s print circulation had dropped from nearly one million in 2012 to 316,000 at the end of 2021. Perhaps the $399 a year cost for an all-access subscription has something to do with that. Perhaps it’s just that the proliferation of information on the Net has made all but a few news-outlet brands almost irrelevant.

Newspapers, of course, have been dying fast. And even as innovative online news operations all across the country arise to try to fill the gaps, the changes in the industry seem overwhelming, obsoleting many operations and depriving people of sorely needed news. Even as brands such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are doing okay (despite recent layoffs at the WaPo), local news has taken it most on the chin.

My old paper, The Home News, was folded into something called the Home News Tribune, a Gannett product available through my central jersey. The paper survives, at least, unlike the Rocky Mountain News, which bit the dust in early 2009 (Ironically at around the same time I gave notice at BW as I moved to become an academic).

For all my time in it, change has been the lot of the news industry. The arc rose and fell for the business and the drive to stay ahead of the reaper was a troubling one as that arc turned downward. Today, it’s sad to see the end of sales of newspapers at that Philly newsstand as the trend draws toward its logical conclusion.

Of course, some digital news outlets continue to thrive. The Inquirer serves readers electronically, as do so many other outlets, including Bloomberg. They all innovate relentlessly, as they must. But will they stay ahead of the reaper? As they used to say in TV, stay tuned.

Ups and Downs in Business Journalism

Posted on August 7, 2019 by Joe Weber

Two very different stories that slipped into my feeds this morning shed telling, if unsettling, light on the state of business journalism. Indeed, the tales of Suzanne McGee, an author and longtime Wall Street Journal reporter now working retail in a Banana Republic store, and Julia Angwin, a fired and rehired editor at an online startup, are curious statements on the health and challenges of our field today.

McGee, 57, had a distinguished career at the Journal for 14 years. She toiled in her native Canada, London and New York for the paper, bringing to bear her prior experience working for an English-language newspaper in Japan. After the trauma of 9/11, when she was working near Ground Zero, she left the Journal to become a corporate writer for an investment management and research firm. In time, she left there, freelanced for various big-name publications and then wrote a notable book about the 2008-09 financial crisis, “Chasing Goldman Sachs.”

So why is she now folding clothes and helping customers, even occasionally sweeping the floor, at a retail outlet in a shopping mall in Providence, Rhode Island?

The answer is likely quite complicated. Why does anyone slip from a great height professionally to wind up pinching pennies, to working for what likely is minimum wage or not far from it? Lots of reasons, both professional and personal, could enter in.

But McGee shared some thoughts with Providence Journal columnist Mark Patinkin. He shared them in an intriguing piece that sketches out this distinguished reporter’s troubling career trajectory. It doesn’t answer every question, but does help us understand a few elements.

First, there’s the professional part – McGee was doing okay freelancing, especially after she moved out of New York to lower-cost Rhode Island. But then a regular $4,500-a-month gig with The Guardian ended in about 2016, when the paper trimmed ties to independent contractors (though she still did some work for the paper afterward, with a byline as recent as August 2017). The loss of that steady paycheck put a dent in her finances, a dent big enough that she avoided even opening a credit card when she was pitched one at the Banana Republic outlet where she now works.

Patinkin reported that McGee still gets offers to freelance. But the pay is pathetic, $125 or less for pieces on subjects such as where the markets are headed – this for a savvy, experienced journalist with lots of insights to share. Three decades ago, McGee broke into journalism with a piece for a Canadian paper that paid $200 for it back then. Clearly, the numbers aren’t going in the right direction and Patinkin noted that McGee’s career path in part reflects tough times in journalism.

Then, there’s the personal part. McGee was extraordinarily lucky on 9/11. She was due at a conference that morning in 2001 atop the north tower of the World Trade Center. But by happenstance she got there an hour late, arriving just when the second plane hit. After the horrors of being at the focus of that disaster, however, the migraines she was prone to worsened. All that, it seems, led her into PR, to freelancing and ultimately to Providence.

McGee told Patinkin she’s not done with writing. Indeed, it’s ironic that a piece she did in July for the Wall Street Journal focused on a well-heeled and successful Morgan Stanley money manager. Moreover, she has another book in the works and she and a friend are looking into starting a business writing personal histories for families. A friend of mine in Omaha works in a similar business, Legacy Preservation, so that line may have potential for her.

In the meantime, folding clothes seems like a low-stress way to keep the bills paid. And she told him that her story is about both renewal through change and the dignity of making ends meet.

On another front, there’s Julia Angwin’s peculiar tale. Angwin was a hard-charger at Propublica and The Wall Street Journal, where she helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize. Armed with a B.A. in math from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Columbia, Angwin had left those news outlets to help create a news start-up, The Markup, that would cover technology with investigative and data-driven journalistic techniques. Last April, she was fired after differing with the executive director, a cofounder of the site, over the cofounder’s suggestion that the site advocate against tech (the cofounder, Sue Gardner, disputed that, according to The New York Times, citing leadership issues on Angwin’s part. Gardner also wound up leaving).

But now, Angwin is back at The Markup. She has several distinguished journalists by her side, including most of those who quit with her. And they expect to launch the site by year-end. It is backed by a host of nonprofits, principally the Craig Newmark Philanthropies, but also the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and others. They all chipped in about $23 million to get the site going.

The Times account leaves a lot unanswered. The paper reported that Angwin and six of the seven staffers who quit in support of her are all back and were paid while they were out. Indeed, they had continued to work on pieces the site will produce, meeting roughly once a week in Angwin’s living room in Harlem.

So had they really been fired? Were they made whole after returning? What was the fracas all about anyway?

The $23 million that the backers anted up could buy a lot of good journalism for a quite a while. One of the tales that would be fascinating to hear is just what came off the rails at The Markup in the spring and what put it back on track. That may take an outside journalist’s work to tell.

Still, it’s encouraging that even as much of mainstream journalism struggles – driving some folks to work in shopping malls – opportunities continue to arise in other areas. These areas are not dependent on advertising, the loss of which to online outfits such as Facebook and Google has been killing news organizations nationwide. Such startups, tumultuous as they may be, likely will offer a better future for business journalists alongside of or as substitutes in time for today’s big publishing names.

Cojones at Standard & Poor’s

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Joe Weber

You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Standard & Poor’s. It took cojones to stand up to the Treasury Department and give an honest assessment of U.S. debt and the problems of dysfunctional government. The downgrade to AA+ doesn’t make up for the misses the outfit was guilty of in the financial crisis and doesn’t atone for its seemingly willing blindness to the fool’s paradise we were living in. But its clear-eyed view of the shadows on our horizon now is worth a bundle.

The big question, though, is whether it will make a difference. The U.S. will not default, no matter how keen the GOP pols are to use threats such as that. Investors know that and they won’t flee Treasury securities. Where would they go anyway? Investors have known the same things S&P has known for months and still the yields on Treasurys are at historic lows. Putting money into the government bonds is safer than any bank, and that won’t change anytime soon, as even our tut-tutting creditors in China know.

Still, the grand game of “chicken” will continue in D.C. for the rest of the year, at least, and the downgrade could make a difference in how the game is played. The Gang of 12 – the bipartisan panel that is supposed to decide our financial fate – will have S&P’s jaundiced judgment to bear in mind as they go through their ideological faceoff. As they try to resolve problems that should have been dealt with in recent weeks, the prospect of a continued low rating, or even a further downgrade, could focus their minds on the consequences of fiscal mismanagement and dithering. Their debate, too, could keep a dead hand on the markets.

Politics, and the prospects of ousting a President, will weigh heavily on those folks, no doubt. The temptation to deny President Obama a victory – a financial resolution that would serve the country well – will be just about irresistible for half the panel. Maybe S&P’s independent judgment will prove to be a bracing slap of cold water, a reminder that the bloodsport that politics has become does have real consequences outside the Beltway. Voters could make judgments about mismanagement similar to that S&P folks made and simply throw all the bums out.

But it is too easy to cast this drama as simply a matter of gaining political advantage. This is much more than just naked opportunism. This fight is over the real and yawning ideological gulf between the parties. It is all about the longstanding argument over the size and role of government that has colored every election since at least the Reagan days. The Californian shook up prevailing wisdom in D.C. and made people believe government was the problem, not the solution – a view that is echoed decades later by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor and, of course, the Tea Party movement.

The “two different worldviews” that divide Washington are too far apart for anything more than an armistice, Cantor suggested in a Wall Street Journal piece today. The Virginia Republican argued that expanding the welfare state and redistributing income are the central plays in the Democratic playbook. “The assumption … is that there is some kind of perpetual engine of economic prosperity in America that is going to just continue,” Cantor said. “And therefore they are able to take from those who create and give to those who don’t. We just have a fundamentally different view.”

Beyond that is the Keynesian-supply-sider divide. Keynesians such as New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman say Obama and Washington aren’t doing enough to use government money to stimulate the lackluster economy. By contrast, the GOP leaders invoke economist Arthur Laffer’s dictum – the Laffer Curve – to argue that tax cuts would be far more effective than government spending, especially when so much of the government money is borrowed. Variations of this debate are as old as the Great Depression and economists still are split on whether the government pulled us out that 1930s slump or prolonged it with government programs.

These are serious disputes, and unresolved economic questions. It comes to a matter of faith, of whether you worship at the Church of Laffer or the Congregation of Krugman. And, lately, it comes to a matter of who has the power to either turn on the government spigot or choke it off and, in theory, let the economy heal itself. Problem is, with a 9.1% unemployment rate, an outrageous amount of debt and the never-ending political campaign that Washington has become, the power centers and the course are anything but clear.

That’s partly why we should tip our hat to S&P. The outfit, the economic engine of my former longtime employer, McGraw-Hill Cos., didn’t bow to what had to have been enormous pressure from Washington in coming to its judgment. We can only imagine the debates that raged at company headquarters: Will this downgrade lead to higher interest costs for all Americans? What are the consequences when the economy is so weak? And what of the unlikely possibility that vengeful government regulators could make life tougher for S&P and McGraw-Hill, especially at a time when McGraw-Hill is facing pressure to reorganize or sell itself?

In fact, it’s a remarkable thing about our system that Washington can’t dictate terms to S&P. One can’t imagine that kind of independence in some other major global economies. Wall Street and Washington intersect at crucial points but neither can dictate to the other. That’s a priceless strength of our system and it would have been a sorry statement if S&P had caved to Treasury.

It is fascinating, of course, to see these warring economic visions collide. But this is no classroom exercise, no parlor game. The entertainment value is far outweighed by the size of the stakes. What Washington does will affect the livelihoods of millions, the legacy our kids inherit, and the role of the U.S. in the world. It doesn’t get much more serious than that. It will take smart and independent people to help the pols to chart the way.

Making business journalism sexy (almost)

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Joe Weber

Looking for ways to make business journalism come alive for students? How about creating scavenger hunts for juicy tidbits in corporate government filings? What about mock press conferences that play PR and journalism students against one another? Then there are some sure bets – awarding $50 gift cards to local bars for mock stock-portfolio performances and showing students how to find the homes and salaries of university officials and other professors – including yourself — on the Net.

These were among the ideas savvy veteran instructors offered at the Business Journalism Professors Seminar last week at Arizona State University. The program, offered by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, brought together as fellows 15 profs from such universities as Columbia, Kansas State, Duquesne and Troy, as well as a couple schools in Beijing, the Central University of Finance & Economics and the University of International Business and Economics. I was privileged to be among those talented folks for the week.

We bandied about ideas for getting 20-year-olds (as well as fellow faculty and deans) excited about business journalism in the first place. The main answer was, of course, jobs. If they’d like good careers in journalism that pay well, offer lots of room to grow and that can be as challenging at age 45 as at 20, there really are few spots in the field to match. These days, with so much contraction in the field, business and economic coverage is one of the few bright spots, with opportunity rich at places such as Reuters, Bloomberg News, Dow Jones and the many Net places popping up.

The key, of course, is to persuade kids crazy for sports and entertainment that biz-econ coverage can be fun. The challenge is that many of them likely have never picked up the Wall Street Journal or done more than pass over the local rag’s biz page. The best counsel, offered by folks such as UNC Prof. Chris Roush, Ohio University’s Mark W. Tatge, Washington & Lee’s Pamela K. Luecke and Reynolds Center president Andrew Leckey, was to make the classes engaging, involve students through smart classroom techniques and thus build a following. Some folks, such as the University of Kansas’ James K. Gentry, even suggest sneaking economics and (shudder) math in by building in novel exercises with balance sheets and income statements.

Once you have the kids, these folks offered some cool ideas for keeping their interest:

— discuss stories on people the students can relate to, such as the recent Time cover on Mark Zuckerberg or the May 2003 piece in Fortune on Sheryl Crow and Steve Jobs, and make sure to flash them on the screen (at the risk of offending the more conservative kids, I might add the seminude photo BW ran of Richard Branson in 1998)

— scavenger hunts. Find nuggets of intriguing stuff in 10Ks or quarterly filings by local companies or familiar outfits such as Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Buffalo Wild Wings, Hot Topic, The Buckle, Kellogg, etc., and craft a quiz of 20 or so questions to which the students must find the answers

— run contests in class to see who can guess a forthcoming unemployment rate, corporate quarterly EPS figure or inflation rate

— compare a local CEO’s pay with that of university professors, presidents or coaches, using proxy statements and Guidestar filings to find figures

— conduct field trips to local brokerage firm offices, businesses or, if possible, Fed facilities

— have student invest in mock stock portfolios and present a valuable prize at the end, such as a gift certificate or a subscription to The Economist (a bar gift card might be a bit more exciting to undergrads, I’d wager)

— follow economists’ blogs, such as Marginal Revolution and Economists Do It With Models, and get discussions going about opposing viewpoints

— turn students onto sites such as businessjournalism.org, Talking Biz News, and the College Business Journalism Consortium

— have students interview regular working people about their lives on the job

— discuss ethical problems that concern business reporters, using transgressors such as R. Foster Winans as examples. Other topics for ethical discussions might include questions about taking a thank-you bouquet of flowers from a CEO or traveling on company-paid trips, as well dating sources or questions about who pays for lunch

— discuss business journalism celebs, such as Lou Dobbs and Dan Dorfman

— discuss scandals such as the Chiquita International scandal (Cincinnati Enquirer paid $10 m and fired a reporter after he used stolen voicemails)

— use films such as “The Insider,” “Wall Street,” and “Social Network” to discuss business issues

— use short clips from various films to foster discussions of how businesses operate. Good example: “The Corporation”

— team up with PR instructors to stage a mock news conference competition pitting company execs in a crisis against journalism students. Great opportunity for both sides to strut their stuff.

We also heard helpful suggestions from employers, particularly Jodi Schneider of Bloomberg News and Ilana Lowery of the Phoenix Business Journal, along with handy ideas from Leckey and Reynolds executive director Linda Austin, a former business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. My biggest takeaway: run some mock job interviews with students and teach them to send handwritten thank-you notes.

And we were treated to some smart presentations by journalists Diana B. Henriques of the New York Times about the art of investigative work (look for her new Madoff book), the University of Nevada’s Alan Deutschman about the peculiar psychologies of CEOs (narcissists and psychopaths are not uncommon), the University of Missouri’s Randall Smith’s view of the future for business journalists (it’s raining everywhere but less on business areas). We got some fresh takes on computer-aided reporting, too, by Steve Doig of the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as well as on social media by the Reynolds Center’s Robin J. Phillips.

For anyone interested in journalism, especially biz journalism, it was a great week. As I take the lessons from ASU to heart, my students will be better off. My thanks to the folks there.

Economic Slowdown: Ideology at Work

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Joe Weber

To the Obama-haters at the Wall Street Journal, the stubborn economic slowdown reflects business’ fear of looming tax hikes. The Administration-friendly folks at the New York Times, by contrast, blame the lackluster economy on political stalemate in Washington. Meantime, over at Bloomberg Businessweek, they tell us it’s all a matter of us having our cake and eating it, too — loving both the Bush-era low taxes and Obama-era high spending and failing to choose between the two.

The inability of our economy to surge back consistently from the Great Recession has become a Rorschach test for pundits. They look at the ugly blot and discern a pattern, one that – not surprisingly – reflects their biases. Love small government and Bush-era tax cuts? Obama’s overreaching is to blame for our woes. Never met a problem that more money from Washington couldn’t solve? It’s the shortfall in such largesse that is making that blot so skinny. And if they can’t make up their minds, they blame both Bush-era “wisdom and folly” – whatever that fence-straddling phrase means.

For my money, the reality is more a matter of the Depression-era notion of pushing on a string. Our policymakers can’t find the levers that will kickstart the economy, that will ignite the animal spirits of our business leaders, and that will drive down the pathologically high unemployment rate. Nothing seems to work, though the folks at the Fed aim to keep pushing whatever buttons they can. Their newest tack, revealed on Aug. 10: buying up more Treasury debt to keep interest rates low.

In the end, the problem may be that the hole we put ourselves into in the Great Recession is just depressingly deep. It took years to dig. And it could take years, sadly, for us to find our way out. To take just one measure, U.S. employment plunged by more than six percent in the recession that began in 2007, the steepest fall of any of the 11 recessions we’ve suffered through since World War II. To take another measure, these downturns lasted from six to 16 months, and our latest slide – believed to have ended in 2009, though the National Bureau of Economic Research has yet to date it – will almost certainly prove to be longer than any of them. (For policy wonks, the Minneapolis Fed puts all these comparisons into perspective here.)

If history proves anything, however, it’s that economies do claw their way back. Sometimes, they do so with the help of Washington. Sometimes, they move on despite government meddling, however well-intentioned. Even today, economists don’t agree on whether D.C. pulled us out of the Depression or prolonged it – making that bout of global misery our first and biggest political and economic Rorschach test.

It’s no comfort to people who have been out of work for months or even years at this point. It’s also small comfort to investors or people considering whether to deploy capital, especially since they are still sussing out Washington’s new regulatory reach. And, if this downturn proves at all similar to earlier ones, whole industries will emerge reshaped as a result of it (think Detroit), not to mention companies (think GM). We will come out of this as a far different economy with areas like Internet-related industries taking a dominant place over the manufacturing icons of the past. (How is it that people still have enough money for iPads?)

Following every twist and turn in this uneven recovery is enough to generate serious palpitations. For players in the capital markets – or anyone, for that matter — it’s healthier to set aside the dire headlines of the moment and keep your eyes on the horizon, however distant it seems. Bet on a long slow ride up, with lots of dips. Keynes famously said that in the long run, we are all dead. But at the moment, the promise of the long run is the only thing we have to hang onto.

The Big Picture

Category Archives: New York Times