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More On Tenure

May 26, 2021 By

The lead story in the New York Times on Sunday, May 22, was titled “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications.” The first paragraph read:

All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.

Further into the story was this paragraph referring to South Korea:

Universities below the elite level, especially outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks — the number of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to 500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have offered scholarships and even iPhones.

And several paragraphs later: “Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge.”

In my most recent blog entry on May 21, titled “Tenure Kerfuffle,” I ended it by indicating that in the post-internet era the concept of tenure was outrageous. The Times story provides another reason why tenure is going to have to go away.

According to the Times story: “South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 — less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world.”

So, let’s assume that the United States is not going to have a 44.44 percent drop in 18-year-olds in ten years like South Korea did, but it might have, say, a 25 percent drop.

If I were president of a non-Ivy League, non-elite (top 30) university, I’d start planning now for how my university was going to deal with, a potential 25 percent drop in the 18-year-old population and therefore a potential 25 percent drop in enrollment. What areas of expenses would I look at to reduce in order to adjust to a potential drop of at least 25 percent in tuition revenue?

After looking at cutting administrative and other non-teaching expenses, eventually, I’d look at teaching expenses, and I’d have to ask myself, “In these times of declining population, do I want to obligate my university to a life-long contract to a 35-year-old teacher who I can’t fire unless he /she/they molests children or murders someone?”

There are many reasons for colleges and universities to reexamine tenure. The drop in the U.S. and the worldwide birth rate is just another pressure point, especially for universities that enroll a high percentage of international students, such as the University of Rocester and The New School (where I recently retired from teaching) which both have over 30 percent international students, who tend to pay higher tuition than U.S. students.

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Tenure Kerfuffle

May 21, 2021 By

The well-respected University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism hired Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist, as a tenured professor, but then reneged on the deal.

Hannah-Jones was the driving force behind the Times’ series “The 1619 Project,” which examined the history of slavery and its impact on America.  It won a Pulitzer Prize.

Susan King, dean of the Hussman School of Journalism said Hannah-Jones was supposed to join the school as a tenured professor,  “But now it appears that her role as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism will not be tenured, at least for now.  Instead, her position will be a fixed-term Professor of the Practice with the option of being eligible for tenure within five years.”

King also said that she was told that the UNC-CH Board of Trustees was hesitant to give tenure to “someone outside of academia.”  King further commented that she was disappointed in the decision and worried about how this might affect the school.

Apparently, as a routine matter, the appointment went to a committee at the university’s Board of Trustees that approves tenure decisions.  Several non-academic practicing journalists had been previously approved by the committee for tenure, so the denial of Hannah-Jones was suspect of being racist.

Several conservative publications objected to Hannah-Jones being given tenure.  For example, as Tom Jones writes in the “Poynter Report:” the conservative National Review had this headline: “University of North Carolina Disgraces Itself with Latest Faculty Hire.”  It used the word “propaganda” to describe the “1619 Project.”  The Carolina Partnership for Reform wrote, “This lady is an activist reporter — not a teacher.”

Journalists and academics around the country have trashed the decision as clearly racist and influenced by the conservative (white supremacist) media.  Another win by the extremist right.

One of the things that this tenure kerfuffle brings to mind is the whole concept of tenure.  Tenure is outmoded and inhibits innovation.  Tenure is just like seniority in unions; it rewards doggedness, not performance. 

With the advent of the internet, rapidly changing technology and advancing science the courses that are taught in colleges and universities are constantly changing and being updated.  What does a university do with a tenured professor of philosophy who teaches a course on Ludwig Wittgenstein that has an average of 11 students (or less) in a class? 

Denying Hannah-Jones tenure is outrageous.  So is the concept of tenure.

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Sorry, Amazon

May 16, 2021 By

Sorry, Amazon. I was 100% wrong in my last blog about censoring Amy Klobuchar’s book Antitrust.

Today, Sunday, May 16, Antitrust is available on Amazon. I bought it.

My good friend Jesse Kornbluth pointed out my error in screaming “censorship,” and I have to thank him for that because I don’t want to fall into the easy trap of being a conspiracy theorist.

What Jesse explained to me is that it isn’t Amazon that is making editorial decisions and not putting books up for sale, but that it is usually the publishers who delay getting all the proper information to Amazon on a timely basis.

I remember last summer when my textbook, Media Selling, 5th Edition, was published by Wiley Blackwell. I was notified by the publisher that the book was officially published in July. I remember going to Amazon that day to see if it was posted. The notification was that it would be available in September, which when I read it, disappointed me.

I often accuse people of playing the blame game, and now, with chagrin, I find myself playing it — unfairly, of course, as the blame game usually is.

I apologize, Amazon, for accusing you of censorship. I should have realized that all of the decisions about listing hundreds of thousands of books each year is fully automated. Decisions are made by AI, not human editors.

However, AI isn’t any fun. The blame game and crazy conspiracy theories are much more fun, especially when they confirm our biases.

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Amazon Censorship

May 15, 2021 By

Today, May 15, 2021, I went through my routine of selectively reading the Saturday New York Times. As I usually do, I looked at the Best Sellers list in the Book Review section, and I was pleased to see that one of my favorite books I have read in the last year, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, was #2 on the non-fiction list.

I also checked out the Editor’s Choices, as I usually do, and noticed that Amy Klobuchar’s ANTITRUST: Taking on Monopoly Power From the Gilded Age to the Digital Age was one of the nine book listed. I had meant to buy the book when it was published in late April, so I opened my Amazon account, clicked on books in the drop-down menu and typed in “antitrust amy klobuchar.”

The results: five summaries and reviews of Antitrust, but no original book. One result was titled A Fascinating Review of Antitrust By Amy Klobuchar: A Staggeringly Detailed History of Current Fights Against Monopolies in America. Kindle price: $4. You can guess from the title and the price that this was probably not a rigourous support of the book.

Why would Amazon not sell the original book? There can only be one answer: censorship. Amazon obviously didn’t like a well-researched book about antitrust (the New York Times review of Antitrust noted that there were 200 pages of footnotes).

Not only does not selling Antitrust reek of censorship, being unethical and stifling freedom of expression but it also seems just petty. Amazon should be better than that.

One of Amazon’s 14 core operating principles is “customer obsession,” and is probably the principle most people are familiar with. What message is Amazon sending to its customers by not selling a book by a respected United States Senator? Does Amazon think its book customers are not smart enough to realize Antitrust is being censored, ignored?

In Brad Stone’s new book about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Amazon Unbound, Stone quotes Bezos as saying that it has been mistakes that have, to a large part, driven Amazon’s success. Even though this idea smells a lot like false humility, not selling Klobuchar’s Antitrust is one mistake that is not going to lead to success among Amazon’s discerning book buyers.

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Media Curmudgeon Hiatus

April 15, 2021 By

My last Media Curmudgeon post was on January 17, of this year, just before I came down with COVID-19 on January 29.

I was hospitalized for five weeks beginning January 31, came home to recuperate on March 3, and have had a slow but steady recovery.

I intend to start writing Media Curmudgeon again later this summer; however, in July Google is discontinuing Feedburner, the service I use to manage subscriptions.

Therefore, if you’d like to receive via email Media Curmudgeon when I start posting again, please send me an email. Write something like, “count me in,” and I will set up a new subscription service and include your email address.

Thanks.

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“News of the World”

January 17, 2021 By

Last night Julia and I paid $19.99 on Amazon Primes to watch Tom Hanks in the movie “News of the World” that NBC-owned Universal originally opened in theaters across the country. We enjoyed the movie, especially the performances of Mr. Everyman, Tom Hanks, and the newcomer, young Helena Zengel. Watching it triggered some thinking about the half-title of this blog, “media.”

In ” News of the World” Hanks deftly plays a character named Captain Jefferson Kidd, who in 1870 travels the Texas Hill Country reading stories from newspapers to a largely illiterate crowd for a contribution of 10 cents — i.e. a subscription revenue model.

The movie opens with a scene in which Captain Kidd reads a story about a coal mine disaster, which intrigues his audience. In a later session in another, a larger town, Kidd reads a story about the recently passed and controversial (in Texas) 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

In reflecting on the movie I realized that whether intended or not, “News of the World” was a metaphor for the dilemma the media faces currently. Hanks’ Captain Jefferson Kidd is an 1870 media — a channel distributing news, a message (content ) to a receiver (an audience). Classic communication theory.

As an aggregator and distributor of content to an audience, Kidd must figure out a way to monetize (not an 1870 word) his efforts. The revenue model he chooses is a subscription model — pay upfront whether you listen to or, more importantly, whether you agree with the message or not. The model works well when he reads stories about disasters because, as 1980s research on TV news content showed, people like to hear about disasters somewhere else so they feel better (“Things may be bad here, but not as bad as there.”)

Captain Kidd learns the danger of the subscription model when he reads about the 13th Amendment. The last scene in the movie (spoiler alert) shows Kidd reading an entertaining story about a man who was buried alive, but comes back to life, and gives a raucous, rousing, revealing last line. He has learned that the news of the world has to be entertaining.

In 1870 the advertising revenue model had not been invented yet. But is the advertising model a better than subscriptions for monetizing news distribution? In the1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s I thought so. I thought that by depending on advertising that the media was able to keep free of government interference and go down the Walter Cronkite middle. Keep the news balanced, and most of all entertaining. Advertisers wanted to avoid controversial content. They wanted a bland content environment so their ads could stand out.

The pressure that Hanks’ Captain Kidd faced from subscribers to hear only stories that amused them has been carried forward in the media today, regardless whether the pressure comes from subscribers or advertisers. Probably the pressure to increase advertising revenue is greater because the rewards are higher. Advertising revenues scale higher because the ceiling can be higher.

In the 1960s through the 1980s, the primary goal of many media outlets was to serve their communities first, and make a profit second. Especially family owned newspapers and network-owned TV and radio stations tended to follow this community-first, “we” model.

It all changed when the FCC trashed the Fairness Doctrine and conservative talk-show hosts and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News decided on a profit-first, individualist, “me” revenue model. Then this me-first, profit-first, give-me-what_I-want approach model was accelerated by social media — Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube. Truth and decency be damned, full speed ahead with lies and misinformation, led by the criminal-in-chief, because that’s what made the most money.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube finally did the decent thing and shut down Trump’s dangerous, sedition mongering, but not until a mob of crazies had stormed the Capitol. The riot at the Capitol was the fault of social media and, of course, the insane criminal in the White House.

I heard a report on WNYC that said a poll of Americans had revealed that a majority of those surveyed thought the riot at the Capitol was caused by, number-one social media and, number-two, by Trump.

I’ve spent my adult life selling advertising in the media, getting a master’s degree in media, teaching about the media and writing five editions of a textbook about selling advertising in the media. After hearing about the poll reported on WNYC, I thought of a joke my father used to tell.

We lived in Chicago in the early 1930s, and my father had a friend who was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Apparently, the reporter had written a story my father liked, and my father said to the reporter, “That was a great story, I’m sure your mother is very proud of you.” The reporter replied, “Never tell my mother I work for the Chicago Tribune! She’s very liberal and thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.”

I’ve never been ashamed before about devoting my life to the media and to selling advertising, but I’ve changed my mind. Don’t tell anyone I’m in the media, tell them I play piano in a whorehouse.

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Nicer Ads

December 31, 2020 By

On December 24, Tiffany Hsu wrote a story in The New York Times titled “A Century After Phony Flu Ads, Companies Hype Dubious Covid Cures” that reported on fraudulent Covid-19-cure advertising.

Hsu writes:

With a pandemic raging, a spate of ads promised dubious remedies in the form of lozenges, tonics, unguents, blood-builders and an antiseptic shield to be used while kissing.

That was in 1918, during the influenza outbreak that eventually claimed an estimated 50 million lives, including 675,000 in the United States.

More than a century later, not much has changed. Ads promoting unproven miracle cures — including intravenous drips, ozone therapy and immunity-boosting music — have targeted people trying to avoid the coronavirus pandemic.

But there is a major difference between the 1918 quackery and the current spate of false advertising. As Hsu writes:

In recent years, a surge of digital advertising has led to more space for ads on more platforms, and the ability to switch them out within seconds. But as print publications, broadcast television and other traditional media outlets tightened their advertising protocols, online advertisers began relying on automated auctions rather than human gatekeepers for placement.

The key difference is the Internet — digital ads bought in auctions on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter where algorithms make decisions on ad claims and are, thus, “untouched by human hands” or unseen by human, discerning eyes

When I was at CBS in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ralph Daniels was the head of the broadcast standards group. Every ad that ran on the CBS Television Network and the CBS TV and radio stations had to be OKayed by the standards group, which at one time had up to 50 people working in it. The standards group looked at competitive claims of being “better” than competitors and for any false claims in advertising. The goal was to protect consumers against false and misleading advertising.

I also remember when I was General Manager of NBC-owned WMAQ-AM in Chicago (now WSCR), that we had a continuity person who applied NBC’s standards to any commercials that ran on the station. Our continuity person turned down a commercial from a well-known, major publisher for a mystery novel. When I asked why, the continuity person said “the commercial was too scary.” It had a young woman alone in a room hearing footsteps in a hall outside the room slowly getting louder and louder as the unknown stalker got nearer and nearer.

This decision seemed a little extreme at the time, but I knew better than to argue with the NBC broadcast standards and legal departments, whose goal was to bend over backwards to make sure the massive audiences to all of NBC’s broadcast properties were not deceived, offended or too frightened.

When the algorithms of Google, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms took over from humans to make decisions about appropriateness of ads, and when auctions took over from salespeople accepting and scheduling ads, advertising deception and mendacity exploded.

When 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dorm room in 2004, he didn’t like advertising. But as the social network grew, he realized that to support Facebook’s growth, he had to accept ads. Therefore he eventually followed Google’s lead and set up an algorithm-controlled auction system to sell and place ads.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Zuckerberg watched ad-sanitized TV and listened to FCC-regulated radio where he didn’t hear George Carlin’s seven dirty words. I’m guessing he never heard false, misleading advertising, so he probably naively thought it didn’t exist. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Even as late as 2016, he thought that it was “crazy” that a foreign country would try to influence a U.S. election with misleading ads on Facebook. Of course he thought that. He’d never seen or heard dishonest ads because ABC, CBS or NBC or their stations didn’t run them. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Also, in 1996 Congress passed the Communication Decency Act that in Section 230 reads: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”  In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech in the form of user-generated content are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.

Of course the unintended consequence of Section 230, which was meant to protect free speech, has been to open the floodgates of lies, misinformation and quackery, and has led, in part, to the increase in polarization and to the train-wreck of he-who-cannot-be named.

The noble profession of advertising and the gallant media that passed advertising on to trusting consumers has been tarnished by oversaturated ad scheduling, lying and outrageous quackery.

I want Ralph Daniels back. I want someone with standards of decency, truth and facts who will tastefully curate the ads I see. I want the news anchor I watch to be the most trusted person in America. I want to watch sports and never see an automotive commercial.

Why the hell are Volkswagen, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Honda, Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot advertising when Tesla, which has a market value more than all of those companies combined, doesn’t advertise at all? . The biggest automotive ad spender in 2019 was General Motors, which spent almost $3 billion. Tesla spent $0. Does this mean that the more car companies advertise, the higher Tesla’s market value goes up?

It may be that 2020 was the craziest year in American history: An insane, incompetent, incoherent president, who the Senate wouldn’t convict of obvious crimes; a shattering pandemic; Black-lives-matter protests that set off social- and racial-justice movements; and advertising as worthless wallpaper.

I’ve been writing this past fall about the need for the return of decency to our politics and national conversation. I now realize that the call for decency must also go out to two intertwined industries that I have devoted my life to — advertising and media.

Can’t we just be nice to each other. Can’t we have more commercials like Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” or this DocMorris one.

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Tom Buchanan Makes America Great Again

December 30, 2020 By

The following was written by my dear friend, Paul Talbot, at my request. Enjoy!

One of my longstanding rituals is reading The Great Gatsby every year.

Naturally, our moods and our preoccupations season the flavor of our reading.  In the case of Gatsby, various passages, characters and even sentences have drawn more attention than others over the years.

On my annual pilgrimage back to “that slender riotous island” in the autumn of 2020, it struck me that Tom Buchanan would be an ardent Trump supporter. 

If not an archetype, he fits the bill in enough ways to make this a sure bet.  Tom Buchanan’s arrogance, ostentation, infidelity and racism, his boorish and brackish behaviors don’t simply mirror Trump.  They drape Tom with the essentials for an admiration of Trump that can‘t help but come home to roost at the East Egg ballot box.

I didn’t find this observation particularly deep.   As insights go, it probably could have been made by many of the high school students who read Gatsby.

But what struck me about placing Tom Buchanan in the Trump camp was the impetus for this.  Only two possibilities come to mind.  One is that the novel so perfectly evokes our American ethos that the Tom Buchanan character is as timeless as it is repugnant.

The other is that the poison of Trump seeped through my defenses and tainted my enjoyment of the novel.

It probably doesn’t matter.  Either way The Great Gatsby endures. 

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Response to “Twins Research and Benford’s Law”

November 24, 2020 By

Below is a response by my son, Chris Warner, to my blog post about twins research, Benford’s Law and confirmation bias.

We are who we are, and each individual has a personality they are born with, even twins. Their nature is the realm of psychology. The concept that “we” are bigger than “me” relates self to other.

It takes at least two to get along. This is the realm of sociology. government, politics, the economy, etc., and are social issues. The lone wolf is a myth. It turns out that wolf packs have social hierarchies. Short of killing bad people, the worst form of punishment in our penal system is solitary confinement.

Demonizing social constructs is a profitable mental disorder. Hopefully, the focus can be shifted to emphasize that social is natural and good. The battleground of individual freedoms vs. common good is a tenuous balance. Both exist in each of us, as a running dialogue with the devil of greedy self-interest on one shoulder and the better angel of our nature whispering on the other shoulder, competing for our attention. 

Sadly, the inexorable march toward social democracy that Steven Pinker [author of The Better Angels of Our Nature] documents, takes generations. It’s hard for early adopters to wait for stragglers. The incessant noise distorts the air and brain waves deliberately to scramble the signal.

Fake news is popular with masses. The boring drone of science, technology, engineering and mathematics eloquently state the obvious of who, what, when, where and how. The arts and creativity unlock the “secrets” of why, take a lot of effort to search, mine and filter, but often don’t pay the bills.

Although futile, the arts are rewarding, worthwhile and important to try. Although nobody with the possible exception of the Dalai Llama, Mother Teresa, etc. gets it all the time, and some don’t ever get it, love and kindness are the answer.

Many are born with wounds. It has been documented that abuse can be passed down genetically through several generations. As evolutionary psychology has demonstrated, homo economicus is an adolescent mindset because the art of the deal has a winner and a loser. The survivors of descent with modification by virtue of reciprocal altruism are those that can practice win-win cooperative exchange, which ensures the other wins too.

Except for life and death, living is not binary, but a spectrum. We are blessed with choice, so I try daily to choose happiness. It is hard work, and worthy. I continue to imagine that one world is enough for all of us.

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$750

October 3, 2020 By

“$750 in 2016 and 2017,” is what flashed into mind when I saw Trump, wearing the biggest mask I’ve ever seen, get into the helicopter that took him to Walter Reed Medical Center to treat his COVID-19 infection.

How much did that helicopter ride cost the American taxpayers? How much is his medical team of at least ten people at one of the best hospitals in the world costing the American taxpayers?

How much did the White House super-spreading reception last Saturday, September 26, for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett cost the American taxpayers?

All of the above cost in multiples of 100 times more than the $750 Trump paid in Federal Income Taxes in 2016 and 2017, and as a taxpayer I’m outraged.

But isn’t it crass, heartless and dehumanizing to look at the monetary implications of the President’s illness, even when the hypercritical NY Times’s Editorial Board writes, “Get Well, Mr. President.”

Yes, putting Trump’s illness in monetary terms is crass, heartless and dehumanizing. But it’s exactly how Trump approaches the job of being President — from a monetary, transactional perspective, and not from a perspective of what is best for taxpayers, but what is monetarily best for him.

Many people who are familiar with Trump’s personal and business background believe that he ran for President as a marketing ploy to help him get out of a bad financial crunch. The NY Times reporting on his tax returns, which it finally got a hold of, show Trump is a terrible businessman, an abject failure as a real estate developer. What saved him was the celebrity he got from “The Apprentice.” He licensed his name to businesses, and then became the Kim Kardashian of politics.

Trump has no humanity, no empathy, no greater purpose than to rob taxpayers. He has no class, no honesty, and no decency, and, up until his perb walk to the hospital-bound helicopter, no mask.

If I were the Secretary of the Treasury, I would send a bill to Trump for every mask he now has to wear for $750.

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Labor Day 2020

September 7, 2020 By

The afternoon I am writing this is Labor Day, 2020, which was established as a Federal Holiday in 1894 to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United States.

The concept of a national holiday honoring labor was initiated by two labor unions, the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. In the United States the percentage of the labor force that belonged to unions peaked at 35 percent in 1954 and peaked in the total number of of union members at 21 million in 1979.

In 2019 (the most recent numbers I could find) union membership had declined precipitously to 10.3 percent and 14.6 million. Union membership in the private sector was 6.2 percent and in the public sector was 33.6 percent.

Not only has union membership plummeted in the last 40 years but also the embrace of blue-collar workers by the Democrats has also declined. Michael Sandel, Harvard professor and political philosopher, brilliantly identifies this deterioration in an op-ed piece in The New York Times on September 2, titled “Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice.” Sandel writes that “By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base.”

Sandel writes that in 2016 “two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.” As you might expect, the people who Hillary Clinton’s referred to as “deplorables” didn’t vote for her and led to Trump’s win. The “technocratic liberalism” that infected the Democratic Party led, in part, to this disastrous outcome.

Sandel points out that Joe Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate in 36 years without a degree in an Ivy League university, which might enable Biden to “connect more readily with the blue-collar workers the Democratic Party has struggles to attract in recent years. More important, this aspect of his candidacy should prompt us to reconsider the meritocratic political project that has come to define contemporary liberalism, Sandel suggests.

At the heart of this project are two ideas: First, in a global, technological age, higher education is the key to upward mobility, material success and social esteem. Second, if everyone has an equal chance to rise, those who land on top deserve the rewards their talents bring.

This way of thinking is so familiar that it seems to define the American dream. But it has come to dominate our politics only in recent decades. And despite its inspiring promise of success based on merit, it has a dark side.

Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.

Sandel writes that the rhetoric of getting ahead because of getting a college degree has been echoed across the political spectrum — “from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton — and what they are really saying is “If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault.”

It is important to remember that most Americans — nearly two-thirds — do not have a four-year college degree. By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees.

Sandel further writes that what he calls “credentialism” is “the last acceptable prejudice.” And he also indicates that “elites are unembarrassed by this prejudice.”

Even Congress is packed with credentialism. Over the last five years , Congress has become more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class. But, you might ask, “Isn’t government by well-educated university graduates is a good thing?” Sandel asks, “Aren’t highly credentialed leaders best equipped to give us sound public policies and reasoned political discourse?”

Then Sandel answers his question with, “Not necessarily.”

Governing well requires not only technocratic expertise but also civic virtue — an ability to deliberate about the common good and to identify with citizens from all walks of life. But history suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment and the ability to win admission to elite universities. The notion that “the best and the brightest” are better at governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.

Google, which has the reputation for being among, if not, the best at hiring people of any company in the world, found that success at Google, contrary to what it initially thought, has no correlation to where someone went to college, or, surprisingly, even if they went to college at all. How well an engineer wrote code or how well a salesperson sold or how well a manager managed wasn’t based on a college diploma.

Nevertheless, credentialism is still a common prejudice among both wealthy liberals and conservatives. And even though you’d never guess it from his typically incoherent rambling, President Trump is an Ivy Leaguer (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania).

If the rhetoric of rising and the reign of technocratic merit have led us astray, how might we recast the terms of moral and political aspiration? We should focus less on arming people for a meritocratic race and more on making life better for those who lack a diploma but who make important contributions to our society — through the work they do, the families they raise and the communities they serve. This requires renewing the dignity of work and putting it at the center of our politics.

On this Labor Day, 2020, as a country, we need to think about how we can renew the dignity of work and honor and reward fairly those who do the labor that keeps us safe, clean and fed.

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I’m Worried

September 1, 2020 By

As the protests around the country get more violent, I’m worried that the Trump strategy of stoking hate and rage and blaming Democratic mayors, governors and Biden might take hold with some voters in Midwestern swing states.

What Trump and his right-wing, Republican strategists are doing is taking venomous pages from Hitler and Goebbels’ Nazi playbook of sowing chaos and inciting violence on a minority community (the Nazis on Jews, Trump on Blacks) in order to gain power. This fascist, authoritarian playbook of using violence to grab power is as old as history. Just read the Old Testament or the Koran.

Trump is desperate. He knows he’s losing. Why else would he lie about voting by mail being dangerous? Why else would he try to deflect attention away from his incompetent, stupid response to the pandemic and his and the Republican’s embracing of big business and heartless ignoring of small businesses and blue-collar workers to focus on the bogus — law and order?

To claim he is the law-and-order president when he has broken practically every law and certainly every norm of honesty and decency is as outrageous as his falsely claiming that no president, except for perhaps Lincoln, has done more for Black people.

Trump’s gargantuan and constant lies and norm-breaking behavior make the title of Matt Taibbi’s book, Insane Clown President, seem understatedly naive and quaint. It’s like calling the murderous Joker a clown. A clown makes you laugh, the Joker was fueled by rage and kills people.

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 25 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, the consensus of these experts was that Donald Trump is a malicious narcissist, the same personality disorder that Hitler and Stalin had, and is a sociopath to boot. A sociopath is someone who is incapable of empathy, which Trump has demonstrated over and over.

Trump’s sociopathy is reinforced by another expert, Donald Trump’s cousin, Mary Trump, in her New York Times best-selling, scary book, Too Much and Never Enough. In the book Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, details how Donald became such a narcissistic, greedy mob-like criminal. In the book she gives the name of the man Donald paid to take his GRE exams that allowed him to transfer from Fordham to the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He cheated. And cheating is habitual. He cheated to get into Wharton, he cheats at golf, he cheats on his wife, he cheats on his taxes (why else would he insist on hiding them), he cheats on norms and laws. He even cheats on following the rules of Twitter.

I’m worried that somehow this insane, lying, criminal, authoritarian populist cheater will be reelected. As Barack Obama said in his speech at the Democratic convention, goodbye democracy.

A very dear friend of mine told me several months ago that I was too hard on Trump in a blog I wrote. I now fear I wasn’t hard enough. So, I say to Donald Trump: “Fuck you! Strong letter follows.”

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The Letter

July 21, 2020 By

When I first read about “The Letter,” I thought of the 1967 hit by the Box Tops.  The chorus goes like this:

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a-goin’ home
My baby just a-wrote me a letter

But in 2020 “The Letter” refers to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in the July issue of Harpers Magazinethat was signed by 153 artists, writers and intellectuals.  The letter repudiates the cancel culture and calls for:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is becoming more constricted.  While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance for opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.  We uphold the values of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

The letter ends by stating, in part:

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.  We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.  As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.  We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

Among the 153 people who signed the letter were five columnists from The New York Times: three liberals (Roger Cohen, Michelle Goldberg and Jennifer Senior) and two conservatives (David Brooks and Bari Weiss).  Interestingly, a week after the letter was published signatory Bari Weiss resigned from the Times in a fiery letter that accused the Times’s editorial decisions to be driven by a woke, cancel culture designed to appeal to a narrow slice of its readers, as determined by Twitter.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times.  But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.  As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.  Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.  I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history.  Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

The Times ran letters that both supported Weiss and that did not support her.  However, the two letters, the one Weiss signed and the one she wrote, bring up an interesting question:  Has the switch from an advertising-driven business model to a subscription-driven business model changed the editorial/opinion decisions of the Times?

Many journalism historians and theorists have written that the switch in newspapers’ business model from dependency on government, church or political party revenue to a dependency on advertising revenue made most newspapers less partisan and more objective.  Thus, the principle of journalistic objectivity was primarily an economic decision, not a journalistic one.  This principle of objectivity – news down the middle – was adopted by radio news and later by television news.  In local television station news and in network news, this down-the-middle approach reigned supreme, and by being non-partisan Walter Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America.”  Not pissing off either side of the political spectrum was profitable.

The notion that dependency on advertising made news producers and publishers freer and less partisan may have had some credibility when applied to the political spectrum, but not to those on the economic spectrum.  The New York Times was founded on the value proposition of appealing to the business class, to the upper-middle and upper class as defined by economics.  The Times was consistent in its approach to appealing to an economically high-end audience (which also means an educated audience). 

In contrast Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post’s appeal is to working class readers.  There is a story, probably apocryphal, that at a social event Murdoch asked the CEO of Bloomingdale’s why the tony department store didn’t advertise in the NY Post.  The Bloomingdale’s executive’s apparent answer was, “Because your readers are our shoplifters.”

This elitist (and probably racist) viewpoint tends to permeate advertising-revenue driven publications that produce content that appeals to consumers who have money and who advertisers want to reach.  But where is the content bias of publications that have a subscription-driven model?  Does money talk?  Does subscriber bias replace advertiser bias?

These questions bring us back to The Letter, to the concept that there should be a free exchange of ideas and opinions, and that these ideas and opinions should compete freely in a marketplace of ideas so citizens can decide for themselves. 

Just as the principle of objectivity was driven by economics, I think the principle of giving a respectful voice to different sides of an argument will win out eventually because of, once again, economics.  By respectful, I mean that any position must respect the rules of debate and not be an ad hominin, personal attack but should attack only ideas and the other side’s arguments, assumptions and logic.

Therefore, no one asked me to sign The Letter, but I enthusiastically support it.

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a-goin’ home
My baby just a-wrote me a letter

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The Sound and Fury Surrounding Facebook

July 8, 2020 By

A week ago last Friday, I began writing a blog post about the pressure on Facebook from politicians, employees, advertisers and some users to change their algorithms to do a better job of limiting hate speech, racist language and violence-inducing posts.  I stopped writing because I said to myself, “Self, you’d better wait and see how the story develops and if more advertisers join the boycott and if the boycott forces Mark Zuckerberg to change his hands-off policy of not factchecking Trump or other politicians or censoring hate speech, racist language or violence-inducing posts.”

The New York Times, in both news and opinion, the Washington Post, and publications and online newsletters such as Media Post, Digital News, The Information, Stratechery and POLITICO among many others have reported on the Facebook censorship and boycott issues.  I have followed the controversy and tried to keep up in order to make sense of it.  And over the 4th of July weekend, I finally realized, to quote Macbeth, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, who’s the idiot?

Not Mark Zuckerberg, whose stock in Facebook on Tuesday, July 7, made him worth $85.4 billion, which put him #3 on the list of wealthiest Americans, behind Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, just ahead of Warren Buffet.

Zuckerberg has resisted changing Facebook’s no-censorship policy using a freedom-of-speech argument, and has said that Facebook does not want to be arbiters of the truth.  He has made some cosmetic changes after being pressured by #StopHateforProfit, a group formed by the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense.  The #StopHatyeForProfit group asked corporations to suspend their advertising on Facebook (and its Instagram subsidiary) for the month of July, and about 500 large national advertisers have announced they have pulled their advertising for July.

Zuckerberg’s response has been, “they’ll be back,” which is probably correct, although it was announced on Tuesday, June 7, that Zuckerberg and Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, would hold a virtual meeting with major advertisers to hear their concerns.

What is all this sound and fury about?

For the last half of this past spring semester, I taught my two graduate courses on Zoom.  All of my 38 students were isolated at home in America or India or Brazil or Russia.  In order to keep my students occupied and engaged in learning, when The New School semester ended, I offered a free, no-credit, six-week course, not associated with The New School, to my current and several former students. 

I had 21 students sign up for the course titled Competitive Strategies and Game Theory.  The required text was Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s classic book, Co-opetition.  Chapter 7: Tactics discusses the use of tactics in competitive strategy.  The authors write that the goal of tactics in the game of business is to change perceptions – perceptions of competitors, customers, suppliers and complementors.  The idea is that you don’t have to change your business model, change your overall business strategy or change your pricing, you just have to change perceptions.

In the Facebook boycott controversy, the #StopHateForProfit pressure group is trying to change the public’s perception of Facebook.  National advertisers such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, Verizon and Starbucks are pulling their adverting for July, and are trying to make themselves look good by making statements, according to The New York Times, such as, “Facebook has not done enough to address” hate speech and disinformation (Denny’s).  Or “Facebook’s failure to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform” and saying that “this inaction fuels racism and violence and also has the potential to threaten our democracy and the integrity of our elections.” (Levi Strauss & Company).  Or “At Pfizer, our Equity Value is core to who we are as a company, and all forms of hate speech go against that value.” 

Zuckerberg’s reaction?

BBC News reported that Zuckerberg’s response to the boycott was, “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”  He added, “We’re not going to change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue.”  The comments were made to Facebook staff at a private meeting.  Zuckerberg’s tactic was to create the perception among employees and investors that Facebook is just fine, and not affected by the boycott, which is undoubtedly the case.

Investors must agree with Zuckerberg, because since he made that statement on July 1, Facebook’s stock has risen from $237.55 to $240.86 on July 7.

So, does the sound and fury of all of these dueling perception-fixing tactics really signify nothing?  And if so, who is the idiot?  It’s not Zuckerberg or Facebook.  The situation is a win-win for Facebook, #StopHateForProfit, large national advertisers and investors.  Facebook looks good to free-speech advocates and doesn’t take down hate speech or violence inducing posts.  #StopHateForProfit looks good because they can claim they led an advertising boycott movement.  Large national advertisers get to sound oh, so self-righteous and goodie two shoes in addition to saving money. Investors make money as the stock go up.  None of them are idiots; they are all winners.

So, who is the idiot?  I think it is the news media that dutifully report on all of the perception-distorting tactics without context and as though the sound and fury signified reality.  The news media rarely covers the biggest loser in these perception wars.

The biggest loser is decency.  Facebook users will continue to be engaged by dopamine-producing posts that contain lies, hate speech, racist slurs and that encourage violence, and national advertisers’ ads will appear next to this trash.  The advertisers can shout their highfaluting values, but they want to sell toilet paper and cell phone data plans to everyone, no matter their political leanings, so they will be back.

Hello hate speech.  Goodbye decency.

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I Watched “Casablanca” and Was Shocked, Shocked.

June 13, 2020 By

When HBO Max deputed on May 27, I subscribed immediately, primarily because several of my favorite old movies such as “Casablanca” and “Gone With Wind” were being offered. I hadn’t seen either movie in over 20 years, and I thought I that while being stuck in my house in New York I would be able to catch up.

Old people like me (I’m 88) tend to get nostalgic in their dotage and go back to their favorite music, especially music they danced to in their junior and senior proms, and return to movies they loved in those same years. In that halcyon time I listened to Frankie Laine, Billy Eckstine and my favorite, Louis Armstrong. I had dozens of Louie’s songs on 78″ wax records.

My favorite movie in those years was “Casablanca,” which I first saw when I was 10 years old. And in my in teenage years I loved it because it was so romantic — ” A kiss is still a kiss…” I fell madly in love with Ingrid Bergman — she replaced Kathryn Grayson as my ideal woman, and, of course, I was Rick Blain — a mysterious man who women found irresistible.

In 1994 I had been at the University of Missouri for six years, so I had earned a sabbatical — a semester off with full pay. I spent my sabbatical doing research on how to write a screenplay and wrote a script that was a sequel about Rick in 1968 operating a disco in Paris and running into Ilsa and Victor and their two children. I wrote it because I wanted to know what happened to Rick and Ilsa and what kind of lives they led without each other.

In May of 1999 when I was working for AOL, my boss, Myer Berlow’s, wife set me up on a blind date with a woman, Julia Bradford, who had recently been divorced. Myer’s wife, Deborah, told me that Julia was a school teacher who lived on the Upper East Side and was much younger than I was. Deborah also told me that Julia was concerned about our age difference but was willing to go out with me because it was “good dating experience.” On our first date, I took her to Palm Too where my cartoon was still on the wall from when I had been General Manager of WNBC-AM in 1977-79. Naturally, I wanted to try to impress Julia with my tattered, faded fame.

I immediately liked Julia, and we had a far-ranging, lively conversation as we got to know each other better. At one point in the conversation, I asked Julia when her birthday was. “January 22, 1949,” she unhesitatingly told me. Trying to calculate the age difference, I wrote my birthday down — February 23, 1932. I’ve never been good at math, but I managed to scribble a subtraction — 17 years. I was desperate to think of something that would minimize the age difference because I really liked this intelligent, honest woman. I stared at the dates, and suddenly the perfect argument came to me. “Do you realize that we are exactly the same age apart as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were in “Casablanca.”

Bingo! I overcame the age objection. On our fourth date we watched “Casablanca” together, and on our fifth date I asked Julia to marry me. We got married the following January. Guess where we went on our honeymoon? Paris, of course. We’ve had a marvellous marriage for 21 years, and I probably have my knowledge of “Casablanca” at least partially to thank for it.

Therefore, on May 27, when I subscribed to HBO Max, I watched “Casablanca” for the umpteenth time. But here’s what I saw in 2020.

The protagonist, Rick Blaine, was a cafe and casino owner who, when Major Strasser asks him his nationality, replies “drunkard.” Rick runs a crooked gambling casino where he and his croupier can fix the winning numbers on the roulette wheel. Rick also uses his crooked casino to let a totally (self-identified) corrupt official, Captain Renault, win at roulette and also bribes Renault with free drinks. Furthermore, Rick has a checkered past. Near the beginning of the film, when Renault says, “I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the Senator’s wife? I’d like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.” Rick replies, “It’s a combination of all three.” So maybe Rick’s a murderer?

In the classic ending of the film, Rick says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” A friendship with a corrupt police chief, who in Harvey Weinstein style, uses his power to demand (and get) sexual favors from women. In today’s #MeToo environment making Captain Renault’s behavior acceptable is anathema.

Rick shows he a “romanticist” by letting a young husband win enough money to bribe Renault by dishonestly fixing two spins of the roulette wheel so the husband’s bride doesn’t have to sleep with Renault to get exit visas. In a previous scene the bride has come to Rick to get his advice about sleeping with Renault, Rick’s callous response is, “Go back to Bavaria,” which is like having the same attitude as Hollywood executives had in enabling Harvey Weinstein — don’t get involved. That scene would not be included in a film today.

The movie’s depiction of Sam is a 1942 stereotype of a grinning, happy-to-be subservient, musically talented black supplicant who calls Rick “Mister Richard.” After Sam plays “As Time Goes By,” and he says to Rick, “We’ll get drunk, we’ll go fishin’,” it just reinforces negative stereotypes of black men in 1942 — lazy drunks. Also, when Rick sells Rick’s Cafe to Signore Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet), they negotiate Sam’s compensation, and even though Rick gets a good deal for Sam, there’s no getting around the fact that they are buying and selling a black man who has no agency.

And, mentioning agency, what about Ilsa? Today, what do we think about a woman who says, “I don’t know what’s right any longer. You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us.” Because of the Production Code (the Breen Office) in effect in 1942, the scene in which Ilsa, who can’t resist her overpowering feelings, goes to Rick’s office to get the Letters of Transit. The scene is purposely ambiguous as to whether or not Ilsa sleeps with Rick. I think the clear implication is that she does. If so, what do we think about Rick ratting her out to Victor in the final, iconic airport scene in which Rick says to Victor, Ilsa’s husband, “You said you knew about me and Ilsa.” Victor says, “yes.” Rick says, ” But you didn’t know she was at my place last night when you were. She came there for the Letters of Transit. Isn’t that true, Ilsa?” Ilsa replies, “Yes.” Rick continues, “She tried everything to get them and nothing worked. She did her best to convince me that she was still in love with me. But that was all over long ago. For your sake she pretended it wasn’t, and I let her pretend. Victor says, “I understand.” What are the chances today of a boyfriend ratting out a wife’s unfaithfulness to a husband and the husband saying, “I understand.”

In the current climate of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, “Casablanca” could not be made today. No studio would accept the script.

Watching the movie 78 years after it was made, my sensitivities and identity have changed radically, and I see “Casablanca” in a new perspective and evaluate it differently. Does this mean that: 1) HBO Max should take down “Casablanca” like it did “Gone With the Wind” and 2) with all of its flaws should we still love a movie and its war-time message of the inherent altruism (“we” versus “me”) of the human spirit and the nobility of sacrifice in wartime?

No to #1 and yes to #2. With all of its flaws, we need the gooey romanticism of “As Time Goes By,” and we absolutely need to know that “We’ll always have Paris.”

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