This Week: Connecting the Dots in the Media

"Quote" of the Week

March 3: Bad News. Good News. Bad News

March 15: "Everything Is Out of Sight"

March 16: "A Nationwide Torrent of State Cuts to Medicaid"

March 16, 17: "Public Defender Programs... Dysfunctional, Underfinanced and ‘In Crisis'"

Now Let's Connect the Dots

Greetings,

I've been doing so many lengthy pieces lately I thought it would be a good idea to spend a few issues catching up on some of the "little things" that catch my attention in the daily flow of news. They're fun, and often quite revealing.

This week I offer a collection of seemingly-unrelated things, which really are related, as I hope I make clear in the final article where we connect the dots. I have a few more short pieces in the queue after that.

Thank you to all of you who wrote with feedback about that last issue on Propaganda and Cargill. Must have hit a nerve with that one! I appreciate your thoughts!

Finally, welcome, welcome, welcome to all the new subscribers this week. I look forward to your feedback, too.

Happy Spring, all of you in the Northern Hemisphere!

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week

Avoiding the Perception of The Obvious

I have been talking about National Public Radio a lot lately, so I hope it doesn't seem like I'm picking on NPR to call on them again to supply this issue's "Quote" of the Week. This "quote" comes from the Weekend Edition Saturday show of February 13th. The headline (or whatever they call them in the radio business—I'm taking this from a written transcript) read, "Obama Administration Shifts Its Tactics On Iran"

After quoting a Reagan-era neoconservative CIA guy and another analyst from the libertarian CATO Institute, NPR reporter Jackie Northam talked to Geneive Abdo, an "Iran Analyst" at the sort-of middle-of-the-road Century Foundation. Northam then cited Abdo as follows:

"Abdo says if the U.S. decides to help the opposition in Iran, it has to be careful to avoid any perception of outside interference."

Remarkable. Since "helping the opposition in Iran" is obviously "interference" (It is obvious, is it not?), then what does it mean to "avoid any perception" of doing so? And why would U.S. "interference" need to be secret?

It wasn't that long ago (late 2008) that the Democrat-controlled Congress "agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran," to the tune of $400 million, according to reporter Seymour Hersh. Has President Obama canceled this secret destabilization program? No word from NPR, nor from any other U.S. media, on whether that "shift of tactics" has taken place.

March 3: Bad News. Good News. Bad News

I was listening at work to Minnesota Public Radio on March 3rd and I heard the host promote an upcoming NPR series on income taxes. Her comment (which I must paraphrase as transcripts of these things are not available) was,

"Well, income taxes are due in about six weeks. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are many deductions that you can claim that will reduce your taxes."

This was immediately followed—with no apparent sense of irony—by a story on the wonderful work that "pothole patching street crews" are doing in St. Paul. The irony here, of course, is that pothole patching crews are funded by taxes.

So the message conveyed here goes something like this:

1. Contributing to the public good—i.e. taxes—is the "bad news."

2. This "bad news" is tempered by the "good news" of getting out of contributing one's fair share.

3. This alleged good news inevitably will reduce the capacity to produce in the future more of the real "good news" such as the public works that the station featured on this day.

Thus does yet another news reporter unconsciously promote an ideological position, this one the familiar anti-tax, anti-government ideology that connects so many events in the daily news lately. Had this five-minute sequence been presented differently, many listeners—maybe the MPR anchor herself—might have made a different distinction between good news and bad news, and perhaps could have helped listeners to question a bit of the prevailing ideology in regard to taxation and the common welfare.

There have been other news items this month that are made more meaningful by connecting them using this same ideological thread. The rest of this issue of Nygaard Notes is a collection of a few of those news items.

March 15: "Everything Is Out of Sight"

The Monday March 15th New York Times had a front-page article headlined "Repair Costs Daunting as Water Lines Crumble." I'll just quote from the article a little bit, and you'll get the idea.

The Times reported that a water department manager was on the scene "near the fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood" in Washington DC because "a cold snap had ruptured a major pipe" and "a growing crowd started asking angry questions. Pipes were breaking across town, and fire hydrants weren't working, they complained."

"Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data."

"State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly."

"For decades, these systems—some built around the time of the Civil War—have been ignored by politicians and residents... And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies."

"In Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Sacramento [and Washington] proposed rate increases have been scaled back or canceled after virulent ratepayer dissent."

"‘We're relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we've spent ignoring them,' said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.'s National Drinking Water Advisory Council. ‘There's a lot of evidence that people are getting sick, but because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.'"

Now recall the Times headline: "Costs are Daunting." Not: "Country Going to Hell in Handbasket"

March 16: "A Nationwide Torrent of State Cuts to Medicaid"

In the next day's NY Times (March 16th), also on the front page, was an article headlined "As Medicaid Payments Shrink, Patients and Doctors Drop Out." The focus was on the city of Flint, Michigan, birthplace of General Motors. Again, a few excerpts should do the trick:

"It has not taken long for communities like Flint to feel the downstream effects of a nationwide torrent of state cuts to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled. With states squeezing payments to providers even as the economy fuels explosive growth in enrollment, patients are finding it increasingly difficult to locate doctors and dentists who will accept their coverage. Inevitably, many defer care or wind up in hospital emergency rooms, which are required to take anyone in an urgent condition."

"Surveys show the share of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients [in Flint] is declining. Waits for an appointment at the city's federally subsidized health clinic, where most patients have Medicaid, have lengthened to four months from six weeks in 2008."

Again, note the headline in the Times: "Medicaid Payments Shrink." That's like going deer hunting, and then saying that the deer you are eating "died." It wasn't roadkill, now, was it? "Shrink" is a passive verb, indicating that something just "happened." Actually, as the article says, Medicaid isn't "shrinking," it's being cut. And it's being cut by people whose authority to do so comes from our votes.

March 16, 17: "Public Defender Programs... Dysfunctional, Underfinanced and ‘In Crisis'"

Elsewhere in that same day's Times—page 18, in fact—was found this headline: "Are Lawyers For the Poor Inadequate?" The article began by saying that "A class-action suit to be argued next week in New York's highest court has become a test of a national strategy by civil liberties groups to challenge what they say are failed public defender programs in many states.

"Because an estimated 80 percent of felony defendants in large states are too poor to hire their own lawyers, and because the case is being watched around the nation, the case has the potential to alter the shape of the criminal justice system.

"Filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the lawsuit is a broad challenge to a patchwork system that has been described by decades of studies and commissions as dysfunctional, underfinanced and ‘in crisis,' with often poorly trained and poorly supervised lawyers handling huge caseloads. It says indigent clients have been failed by their appointed lawyers all around the state."

"... the civil liberties lawyers argue that a broad review is necessary because the arrangement has not addressed systemic failings that unconstitutionally leave tens of thousands of defendants without meaningful representation in every part of the state."

"In recent years, there have been cases similar to the New York one in states like Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana and Washington, with settlements, lower court decisions and inconsistent rulings. The Michigan Supreme Court is to hear a challenge to its public defender program next month."

Hmmm... "failed public defender programs." A case with the "potential to alter the shape of the criminal justice system," being "watched around the nation." What was this doing on page 18?

There's a local addendum to this story: Last month the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor released a report on "The Public Defender System," which began by saying

"Public defender workloads are too high, resulting in public defenders spending limited time with clients, difficulties preparing cases, and scheduling problems that hinder the efficient operation of criminal courts. Staff reductions in 2008 are the most immediate cause..."

This report was not covered in the Minneapolis newspaper.

"Strained Nearly to the Point of Breaking Down"

On the next day, March 17th, a related story ran on the front page of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. Headlined "Justice Warns of Crisis in Courts," the story began by telling us that "Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson said Tuesday that the state's justice system is strained nearly to the point of breaking down."

"Facing nearly $15 million in proposed budget cuts, Magnuson envisions more backlogs and delays, more drug court closings, public- counter closings and ‘delaying justice to Minnesota citizens.'"

"Magnuson's two years on the bench have been marked by a constant fight for money. As the head of the state's judiciary, he led an extraordinary effort to push back against cuts proposed by the man who appointed him—Gov. Tim Pawlenty."

Good headline. And on the front page, too, where it belongs. Yet, despite the fact that Mr. Pawlenty is famous for pledging "No New Taxes," there was nothing in this article to help readers connect this "delayed justice" to the anti-tax ideology that in turn would connect this front-page story to the many uncovered stories that reveal the patterns of decay that are the predictable result of that ideology.

Now Let's Connect the Dots

I have often spoken in these pages about one of the difficulties facing proponents of public programs that focus on prevention and safety, such as public health programs and infrastructure maintenance programs. The problem is a simple one: When such programs are successful... nothing happens! That is, people do not get sick, pipes do not break, and innocent people do not go to prison. That because adequate, ongoing investment in public health, public safety, and effective infrastructure can, and usually does, keep bad things from happening.

The converse is also true: A lack of investment in the common welfare means that things—unhappy things—probably will happen. But they won't happen all at once, so the connections between long-standing failures and increasingly-common problems are often difficult to see. Or are they?

As we have just seen with a number of common problems in the news just this month, the only thing that's lacking is for journalists to point out—as I am doing right now—that 1) They are indeed connected and 2) The connections have to do with policy choices. When these connections are highlighted, readers will often be able to see how these choices are put in place and/ or allowed to become powerful by the elevation of certain ideas over others in the popular culture. The process of elevating certain ideas over others is what I call Propaganda.

This issue of Nygaard Notes has been all about pointing out individual news stories that, when placed side by side, begin to indicate a pattern. That pattern is a pattern of failure to connect things in a way that allows readers to think about those connections. And to think about not only the connections between the news stories, but also about the connections between the stories and the larger world. In the examples offered here, what we can begin to see is the impact that policy decisions have on daily life. Ideas that may sound like "good news" in the abstract—recall the Public Radio host saying that paying less in taxes is "good news"—may begin to take on a different meaning when we connect these reductions in taxes with the losses that result from such reductions.

The media's failure to connect the little things that make up the daily news—a broken pipe here, a kid with no lawyer there—is a big reason why so many people ignore the media. When provided with no anchors that can give meaning to the events reported in the daily news, those daily events become a blur of factoids that interest few. There's a connection between the media's failure to connect the dots and the ongoing erosion of our democratic processes, and that connection should be of interest to us all.