How the White House censors journalists (And a solution)

Turns out that when you read quotes from White House officials, you're only reading quotes that have been pre-approved for publication by the White House. This is some kind of obnoxious:

It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews. 

Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, can be foul-mouthed. But readers would not know it because he deletes the curse words before approving his quotes. Brevity is not a strong suit of David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser. So he tightens up his sentences before giving them the O.K. 

Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney strategist, is fond of disparaging political opponents by quoting authors like Walt Whitman and referring to historical figures like H. R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. But such clever lines later rarely make it past Mr. Stevens. 

Many journalists spoke about the editing only if granted anonymity, an irony that did not escape them. No one said the editing altered the meaning of a quote. The changes were almost always small and seemingly unnecessary, they said.

Now, the story makes clear it's a bipartisan practice. Whatever. It's still bull. And it gives the White House direct control over the content of journalism that appears before the public. That's effectively the power of censorship, even if the processes are essentially informal and don't require the use of an FBI agent to enforce. It's still insidious, and it should be unacceptable in a free society.

But journalists acquiesce because if they don't give White House officials the power to censor their quotes, they don't get quotes at all. And yes, that puts them in a tough place, professionally. So what to do?

The Times' story is a good start, but it's not enough. Every time an official refines a quote before giving permission for it to be used in a story--in every single story that it happens--journalists should state that to their audience. Every single time. Something like:  "I think the president is all kinds of awesome," David Axelrod said, in a quote he pre-approved for publication. 


Would this end this odious practice? Probably not. But it would at least make the process of reporting and gathering a story more transparent to the audience--and the knowledge of how government (or wannabe government) officials operate the levers of power over reporters would be useful for the general public to have. As it stands, I trust Washington-based reporting just a little bit less than I used to.

Dennis Prager's case for God

I think, after today, I'm going to try to stop writing about Dennis Prager. I have conservative friends who deeply respect him, and I admit to being somewhat confused by that: To me, his liberals are always straw man liberals (who always seem to be pulling the country toward Stalinism) and his atheists are always straw man atheists. We won't even talk about his straw woman feminists. There's always an audience for such things, of course, but the people who give credence to Prager are usually thoughtful. I'm obviously missing something.

If Prager has or attempts a moral imagination that lets him consider lives and viewpoints other than his own in non-hyperbolic, non-stereotypical fashion, it is not evident in his writing. And while I admit that my conservative friends might say the same thing about me from time to time, the effect of Prager's style is that it is impossible to really constructively disagree. That means he's mostly irritating, and almost never—in my experience—thought provoking.

His style is on display in an NRO column about why the Higgs Boson discovery is meaningless, particularly if there is no religious belief accompanying it.

One must have a great deal of respect for the atheist who recognizes the consequences of atheism: no meaning, no purpose, no good and evil beyond subjective opinion, and no recognition of the limits of what science can explain.

Prager's case for God boils down to this: Without God there is no meaning, therefore God. 


In other words: He starts from a debatable premise, then makes a conclusion that doesn't necessarily proceed from the premise.

I don't want to be an evangelistic agnostic. If Dennis Prager finds his meaning in the existence of God, well, good for him. I suspected he's joined by the vast majority of Americans, the vast majority of people. And again: Good for them.

But it seems that what Prager is ultimately saying is that my life is meaningless, probably even to me, because I don't infuse it with religious belief. And I reject that idea: Yes, my first years out of the church were a little confusing because I'd relied on that framework for such a long time. Since I left the church, I've gotten married and, with my wife, had a son. I endured a couple of tough years, and somehow didn't throw myself off a bridge. These are not acts of nihilism. I take satisfaction and find meaning in them, but I don't attribute a Larger Meaning to them. That's OK.

I also recognize that Prager and folks who think like him might think I protest too much. That's OK, too.

'The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama': A discussion

The following is a chat transcript with my friend Lex Friedman about Tom Junod's Esquire piece examining how President Obama uses drone warfare—and how his actions might be infringing on American civil liberties.

Lex: So I read that long long piece you linked yesterday.

  About the Lethal Presidency.

  I am above making a joke about how the worse crime by far is the overwrought writing style the author brought to the piece.

 me: Heh. Fair enough.

9:24 AM Lex: I understand the author's argument.

  But I do not agree.

 me: How so?

9:25 AM Lex: I see targeted killings as he (negatively-ish) paints the administration as seeing them: an evolved form of war. Instead of killing soldiers with little stake in the battle, or putting our own soldiers with limited stakes at direct daily risk, you go for the people who are actively involved in plotting against you.

9:26 AM If we grant the president the right to send troops to fight wars—and we do!—then we're trusting him with lots of lives on both sides.

  If this approach means that fewer people die overall, which I think it does, I like it.

9:27 AM me: There are two issues, one narrower but perhaps more important.

 Lex: That said, I probably come down on the wrong answer on this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

9:28 AM me: Three, three issues. American citizenship, Obama's honesty, and blowback.

9:29 AM Lex: I gotta tell you, the American citizenship issue doesn't faze me at all. Plenty of Americans criticize America all day. If anyone, American or not, is inciting or directing violence against Americans, I don't treat those instigators any differently from anyone else inciting same.

9:31 AM me: The first is the biggest: The president has reserved to himself the right to assassinate an American citizen who is not currently engaged in the field of battle. He's furthermore done that without an explanation of the legal standards involved beyond a "trust me" vibe that sets a bad precedent. I don't trust individuals; I trust processes. We don't know what the processs is. And I don't trust Obama's successors, particularly, to have the power that his precedent grants them--at least not without some ability to restrain or review it. There's a saying in the legal profession: "Hard cases make bad law." Well, al-Awlaki's assassination might be making bad law for the rest of us.

9:33 AM 
2. Obama's honesty: The administration has reported that civilians aren't really killed in these attacks. Part of the way it arrives at that conclusion is by deciding that any "military-aged male" in the vicinity of a targeted bad guy is ipso facto a bad guy. Maybe, but maybe not. That underlying assumption reduces my trust in the president.

 Lex: Even that argument doesn't faze me. Whether Obama makes it a policy/precedent or not, the next better or worse guy could have done the same. There was no precedent for preemptive strikes until W made it. My point being, president precedent doesn't mean much to me, because any new president can set it.

9:35 AM me: 3. Blowback: The use of drones is narrower and more targeted than sending armies to conquer foreign lands. But if your family is on the receiving end of a bomb, it's not going to feel narrower. It only takes a few pissed-off individuals to make an attack of some kind, and I fear that the parameters of the drone war have grown so expansive that the benefits of "narrowly" targeting individuals have been somewhat diminished. That's my weakest argument, because there ARE bad guys out there, but it remains a concern.

9:36 AM Regarding precedent: You're right, to an extent, but also not: Precedent does matter: Even the George W. Bush felt compelled to couch his actions by citing instances from World War II and the Civil War.

9:37 AM And here's the thing: I wouldn't have trusted George W. Bush with these powers. I didn't. So I'm hard-pressed for a logical reason (other than my faith in the good-guyness of Obama) to trust this president with them either. In fairness, I don't think I can.

9:38 AM Lex: I didn't trust W sending the forces of which he was commander in chief into battle.

9:39 AM I'm opposed to all state-sponsored killing, really. I oppose the death penalty, I oppose war, I don't like any of it. The idea that we can kill people, as a nation, frightens and disgusts me all the time. But I recognize that in the current world order, it's not going away any time soon / ever.

  And if the options are the Old Way and the New Way, I prefer the New Way.

  Even if the New Way merely puts a dent in the Old Way.

9:42 AM me: Hey: I'm a lapsed Mennonite. My instincts are still toward pacifism, but I also recognize that's not the way the world works. Maybe what Obama is doing is the best we can realistically hope for. And for that matter, I'll even concede that the Bush Administration—while it gleefully grabbed for a chance to strengthen presidential prerogatives—also had a deep fear of inadvertently allowing another 9/11. The incentives are aligned toward security, not civil liberties. But I don't want to surrender the civil liberties without a fight.

9:43 AM Lex: I naively support civil liberties for good people, and not for people who want to kill good people.

  I say "naively" because someone has to decide which are the good people.

  I think it's a guarantee no president will ever order a drone strike against a friend of mine.

 me: Right. We do civil liberties for everybody, in part, so that good people can feel free to exercise their goodness.

9:44 AM And in most cases, there's a defined process for denying the bad guys of their liberties. When it's skipped or fudged, that's when I get nervous.

Latest podcast: Robert Draper

Ben and I chatted with Robert Draper for the latest podcast, on his newest book about the House of Representatives. It's a good read, and a good discussion. Take a listen here.

Netflix Queue: 'Goon'

Not a bad flick. Not a masterpiece, but it's the kind of thing I can see 17-year-old guys gathering in basements to watch for the next couple of decades:



I'm not really a hockey fan, and it's hard to watch this movie without thinking of guys who have sacrificed their health--and maybe even their lives--to this kind of way of living. But 'Goon' does (or almost does) one really interesting thing: It asks us to consider the options available to people who simply aren't that gifted. For Sean William Scott's Doug Glatt, the option is to fight. And that's about it. We're allowed to see him use that option as a kind of triumph for the little guy. But it's hinted to us--through Liev Schreiber's character--that what comes after isn't so pretty. But mostly we're meant to have a good time, so those themes are touched upon lightly. Like I said: Not a great movie. But not the worst, either, if you're prepared to stomach some extreme profanity and a little ultraviolence.

How books—even cookbooks—make our worlds bigger.

I felt a sense of loss this morning, reading in the New York Times that the western wildfires had destroyed the Flying W Ranch in Colorado.

Why the loss? I'd never personally visited the ranch. As a child, my mom had the "Cow Country Gourmet" cookbook—essentially a compilations of recipes from the Flying W Ranch. It seems to me that she used it regularly, though my memory might be faulty on that front.

But I remember staring at the cover from time to time: What kind of world did it come from, that one could have a sit-down dress-up dinner under the open sky? Next to cattle? In front of a teepee?

 I've never personally opened the cookbook to make a recipe from it. Yet that cover, which got a little bedraggled over the years, burned itself into my mind's eye. It made the Flying W Ranch—or some fantasy version of it, at least—a part of my childhood. I am sad to see it go.

Netflix Queue: 'Wing Chun'

Yes, we've been watching a lot of Chinese movies lately. Here's one of my favorites on Netflix: It's got young Michelle Yeoh, young Donnie Chen—in the only movie that I've seen of his in which I find him halfway charming—and orchestrating it all: Woo-ping Yuen, the man who choreographed the stunts in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the "Matrix" films, and "Kill Bill." This early-1990s pic doesn't have the production values of those films—listen to the cheesey soundtrack music above—but the fight choreography is inventive. Don't expect anything epic or narratively complex: This is a light comic piece in the tradition of "The Legend of the Drunken Master." It's a trifle, but a fun, well-made trifle.