politics

Scholars who study journalism, myself included, have found that efforts by journalists to stay neutral often backfire, resulting in exactly the opposite effect they desire.  Journalists, for example, may try to balance “both sides” of a contentious issue, seeking out authoritative sources to give a credible account of each position.  But, in seeking out authoritative people, they simultaneously offer a public platform to the very people who are already powerful.

Along these lines, Describing early coverage of the Vietnam War, Hallin (1986: 25) writes:

…most of the reporting, in the best tradition of objective journalism, ‘just gave the facts.’  But they were not just any facts.  They were official facts, facts about what the president said and what ‘officials here believe.’  The effect of ‘objectivity’ was not to free the news of political influence, but to open wide the channel through which official influence flowed (my emphasis).

More, because journalists need highly-authoritative sources in order to do their job, they need to cultivate relationships with them.  Likewise, authorities need reporters to help them get their stories to the public.

Powerful reporters and powerful people, then, become… friendly.  Reporters may try to avoid saying these that their regular sources wouldn’t want said, partly because they like them and are influenced them, and partly because they need them for the next story and the next.

I thought of this research when Jay Livingston posted this picture, on the Montclair SocioBlog, of Alan Greenspan and David Brooks having lunch together:

Note: The photo was removed at the request of the person who took it. Sorry.

Greenspan is the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Brooks is a decorated journalist.

Source: Hallin, D. (1986) The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted from Family Inequality.

The Congressional Budget Office has a new report on trends in the income distribution. The big news is the 1%’s blitzkrieg assault on equality.*

The headline image will be this one, which shows the changing share of after-tax-and-transfer household income. Every group except the top 1% had a smaller share of income in 2007 than they did in 1979, or just an equal share in the case of the 81st-99th percentile group. That means the gains in the top quintile are all concentrated in the top 1%.

That is very important and a source of outrage for the hundreds of thousands of Facebook users posting, commenting, or “liking” Occupy Wall St. and its related pages.

But it would be misleading to view the chart as showing that incomes fell for the other groups, since it shows shares of the total income. Income growth has been very skewed toward the top, but it is by no means confined to the top 1%. Here is my graph showing the income cutoffs for each quintile, and for the top slices separately. These are the cutoffs in 1979 and 2007 (in inflation-adjusted dollars), with the percentage change in the backgrounded bars.

(Note there is no lower cutoff for the bottom quintile — the price of entry for that group is always $0).

Two thoughts about this.

• Even if there were no 1%, if the graph only included the green bars, there would be plenty of increasing inequality for what might then be called “the 80%” to protest. The 81st-99th folks may be lucky to have the popular anger directed at the grotesque opulence of the sliver above them. (I’m not diminishing the extremity of the gains for the top 1%, but, as Matt Taibbi describes, the object of opposition is not just their income, but their influence.

• If you look at the families and networks of the top 1%, how many of them have relatives, friends, and even co-“workers” who are only in the top 10%? Would a self-respecting 1% family be appalled if their son married someone from a stable 5%-er family?

What I’m wondering is whether the 1% folks are merely a statistical convenience rather than a socially cohesive group (dare I say, class?). That’s an empirical question that national income distributions can’t necessarily answer.

*I should mention that the report is not just another rehash of Census numbers, though. Two adjustments they made seem especially good. First, they used a tricky matching method to combine Current Population Survey numbers (which do better at benefits and low-income households) combined with Internal Revenue Service data (which is better for high-end data). Second, they adjusted for household size and composition, and calculated distributions before and after taxes and transfers, and among different kinds of income. The report is here, a summary is here, and the blog post version is here.

Our financial system is dominated by banks considered too big to fail.  And that is a problem for the rest of us.  As Time magazine explains:

“Too big to fail is opposed by the right and the left, though not apparently by the people drafting legislation,” says Simon Johnson, an MIT professor and the author of a recently published book on the subject, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. “The current financial-reform bills are effectively a wash on the issue.”

The question is how large banks ought to be allowed to become. When large banks run into trouble, regulators are often unwilling to let them fail, as bank failures can wipe out individual depositors. What’s more, banks often fund their operations by borrowing from other banks. The bigger the bank, the more likely it is to put other banks at risk if it fails. Mass bank failures, especially of big banks, means people can’t get loans. And no loans, no economy.

That’s why the government decided to bail out most of the nation’s largest banks at the height of the financial crisis. And here’s where the problem potentially gets worse. Once bankers understand that the government will bail out their firms when their loans or other financial bets go bad, they are likely to take riskier and riskier bets. That, of course, leads to more potential bank failures — and more taxpayer-funded bailouts.

Not only have attempts at reform largely failed, government regulators have often tried to paper over financial problems by encouraging our dominant banks to swallow smaller, less stable ones, thereby worsening the problem.

So, who are our ”too big to fail” banks and how did they get so big?  Here is a time line that charts the process and highlights the winners.

Of course there are answers to this “too big to fail” problem.  One is turning our banks into public utilities.  Here is Yves Smith talking about this solution:

Enjoy our collection of Halloween posts from years past:

Race and Ethnicity

• Dressing your dog up like a racial caricature (pictured).
• Othering of undocumented immigrants with an “alien” costume.
• A collection of racist Halloween costumes.
• Asian hair for Halloween.

Gender

• Men dressing up as fat women, hilarious and disgusting!
• Gender and asymmetry: “beer man and “beer girl.”
• Anna Rexia, the costume (also in plus size!).
• Halloween and the trivializing of women in men’s occupations.
• Girls: mean or queen.
• The difference between boy and girl costumes.
• Women dressing up like girls dressing up like women.
• Even our skeletons have sex.
• In sexy costumes for women and girls: when sexy overtakes all reason, sexy scholar, Harem girl, and the sexy body bag costume.  Compare to sexy Halloween costumes for men and this vintage Halloween-inspired ad that urges women to be bewitching instead of half-naked.

The intersection of Race, Class, and Gender

• Halloween hall of shame: the fat lap dancer costume.
• An overview of raced, gendered, and heteronormative costumes.

Halloween and Politics

• Lynching Palin.
• Obama mask marketed as a “terrorist” costume.
• Marking sex offenders on Halloween.

And, for no conceivable reason…

• Max Weber Jack o’Lantern.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In his book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, Doug McAdam discussed the combination of social and political factors that facilitated the emergence, and significant successes of, the Civil Rights Movement. One of his arguments is that discussions of the movement often overlook the way that non-violent civil rights protesters were able to strategically use violent responses by white supremacists as a resource. While in some cases violent responses were unexpected, most of the time activists understood that they were likely to be met by violence. In fact, McAdam argues, many activists counted on that public brutality. Images such as Sheriff Bull Connor’s officers turning fire hoses and police dogs on non-violent protesters galvanized public opinion in support of the civil rights movement and produced the political pressure necessary to push an often-reluctant federal government to intervene. Thus, McAdam argues that public use of violence by state authorities against protesters can provide essential tools for social movements: a visible, concrete sign of repression, evidence of the vulnerability of citizens in the face of a brutal, intransigent state, and dramatic images that draw media and public attention.

I thought of McAdam’s book when Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link from Five Thirty Eight about how police actions affected media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests. The article was written on October 7th, so it doesn’t include the impacts of the most recent clashes with police, particularly the Oakland PD’s tear gassing of OWS protesters a couple of nights ago. But already, a noteworthy pattern was emerging. Nate Silver looked at OWS coverage in a database of about 4,000 U.S. news sources. He found that media coverage was basically nonexistent until NYPD pepper sprayed some protesters. Coverage shot up again after NYPD arrested a few hundred protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1st and after more incidents on Oct. 5th:

As Silver points out, we can’t discern any clear causality here; perhaps media coverage would have gone up over time anyway. But coverage of OWS doesn’t show a smooth, slowly-increasing trend; coverage jumped after each of these instances of violence, and after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, remained much higher than it had been before. At the very least, it appears that violence by the police drew media attention, providing an opening for the concerns of OWS protesters — and the persistence and growth of OWS protests around the country — to be defined as legitimate news stories in their own right.

UPDATE: For more on the persistence of the OWS movement and protesters’ tactical and organizational skill, check out Steven Vallas’s post at Organizations, Occupations and Work.

[Full Cite: Doug McAdam. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.]

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that coverage of the economy went up in October:

Overall economic coverage accounted for 22% of the newshole from October 3-9, up from 14% the week before (when it was No. 2).

(The word “newshole” refers to the limited space/time devoted to news in a day.)

Coverage of the protests is rising too, suggesting that Occupy Wall Street can take at least part of the credit:

The protests [themselves]… constituted the largest single thread in that coverage, making up about one-third of the economic storyline. That amounted to roughly 7% of the overall newshole, or nearly four times the amount of protest coverage from the week before.

So, is Occupy Wall Street also changing the discourse?

Jeremiah sent a link to data collected by Think Progress that suggests it is.  They counted the number of times MSNBC, CNN, and Fox used the terms “unemployed,”  “unemployment,” and “debt” during the last week in July, before the protests began.  They found that news coverage emphasized the debt (and the need to cut spending to reduce it) much, much more than the fact that there were large numbers of unemployed people (who would be helped by spending).

During the week of October 10-16, though, the language was different.  News coverage talked about the protests themselves, and the problem of jobs for the unemployed. The specter of the debt is now taking a back seat to the suffering of individuals.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

If your survey doesn’t find what you want it to find . . .

. . . say that it did.

Doug Schoen is a pollster who wants the Democrats to distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protesters.   (Schoen is Mayor Bloomberg’s pollster.  He has also worked for Bill Clinton.)  In the Wall Street Journal,  he reported on a survey done by a researcher at his firm.  She interviewed 200 of the protesters in Zucotti Park.

Here is Schoen’s overall take:

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

I suppose it’s nitpicking to point out that the survey did not ask about SES or education.  Even if it had, breaking the 200 respondents down into these categories would give numbers too small for comparison.

More to the point, that “large majority” opposed to free-market capitalism is 4% — eight of the people interviewed.  Another eight said they wanted “radical redistribution of wealth.”  So at most, 16 people, 8%, mentioned these goals.  (The full results of the survey are available here.)

What would you like to see the Occupy Wall Street movement achieve? {Open Ended}

35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
4% Radical redistribution of wealth
5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
7% Direct Democracy
9% Engage & mobilize Progressives
9% Promote a national conversation
11% Break the two-party duopoly
4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system
4% Single payer health care
4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately
8% Not sure

Schoen’s distortion reminded me of this photo that I took on Saturday (it was our semi-annual Sociology New York Walk, and Zucotti Park was our first stop).

The big poster in the foreground, the one that captures your attention, is radical militance — the waif from the “Les Mis” poster turned revolutionary.  But the specific points on the sign at the right are conventional liberal policies — the policies of the current Administration.

There are other ways to misinterpret survey results.  Here is Schoen in the WSJ:

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.

Here is the actual question:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Government has a moral responsibility to guarantee healthcare, college education, and a secure retirement for all.

“No matter the cost” is not in the question.  As careful survey researchers know, even slight changes in wording can affect responses.  And including or omitting “no matter the cost” is hardly a slight change.

As evidence for the extreme radicalism of the protestors, Schoen says,

By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans,

Schoen doesn’t bother to mention that this isn’t much different from what you’d find outside Zucotti Park.  Recent polls by Pew and Gallup find support for increased taxes on the wealthy ($250,000 or more) at 67%.  (Given the small sample size of the Zucotti poll, 67% may be within the margin of error.)  Gallup also finds the majorities of two-thirds or more think that banks, large corporations, and lobbyists have too much power.

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. . . . .Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before.

That means that half the protesters were never politically active until Occupy Wall Street inspired them.

Reading Schoen, you get the impression that these are hard-core activists, old hands at political demonstrations, with Phil Ochs on their iPods and a well-thumbed copy of “The Manifesto” in their pockets.  In fact, the protesters were mostly young people with not much political experience who wanted to work within the system (i.e., with the Democratic party) to achieve fairly conventional goals, like keeping the financial industry from driving the economy into a ditch again.

And according to a recent Time survey, more than half of America views them favorably.

In this video the always-fantastic Jay Smooth, of Ill Doctrine, spends just over four minutes offering his perspective on the Occupy Wall Street movement.  He likes it. And, he says, more importantly, the media coverage and treatment of the protests is telling us a lot about who’s in bed with who, politically speaking.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.