Take nothing away from Barry Bonds. He hit home runs this year with a greater frequency, in proportion to his times at bat, than anyone in the history of baseball. He homered once every 6.5 official times at bat, compared to once every 7.3 at bats for McGwire and once every 9 at bats for Ruth in his best seasons.
While Bonds' incredible performance gave new prominence to slugging averages, Ruth's lifetime dominance in that statistic makes clear that the Babe was still the greatest all-around slugger of them all, regardless of how many home runs others have hit.
MEDIA FRAUD
Media bias is no longer news. Poll after poll has shown that the vast majority of journalists vote for Democrats, even though the country as a whole is pretty evenly split between the two major parties.
By itself, there is nothing wrong with this. It becomes a problem when media bias becomes media fraud. Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting “facts” in news stories is something else.
Three excellent and devastating new books on media fraud have been published this year, naming names and turning over rocks to show what is crawling underneath. These books are Coloring the News by William McGowan, Bias by Bernard Goldberg, and It Ain't Necessarily So by David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter.
In even the best known and most prestigious media outlets—the New York Times and “60 Minutes,” for example—crucial facts have been left out of news stories when those facts would have undermined or destroyed a liberal argument. Conversely, false claims have been widely reported as facts in the media when those claims supported the liberal vision of the world.
A classic media fraud was the 1996 story of a wave of arsons directed against black churches by racists. It made headlines across the country and was featured on network television news. It sparked indignant editorials and angry outbursts from black activists. The President of the United States recalled his own sadness as a child at the burning down of black churches in Arkansas.
In the end, however, the whole thing turned out to be completely false. Those few journalists who bothered to check out the facts found that there were no facts to support this story and that what facts there were completely refuted it. Even a commission appointed by President Clinton reached the same conclusion. Moreover, not a single black church in Arkansas had burned down during Bill Clinton's childhood.
When this front page fraud was finally exposed, the new story was buried as a small item back on page 20 of the New York Times.
William McGowan's Coloring the News offers the best explanation for such journalistic malpractice. Many news organizations have created special editorial office caucuses consisting exclusively of black, Hispanic, feminist, or homosexual journalists, who decide how the news about their respective constituencies will be reported—or whether it will be reported at all.
For example, when a homosexual man was attacked and killed by anti-gay hoodlums, that was huge, front-page news across the country. But when two homosexuals lured a boy next door into their home and then raped and killed him, at about the same time, that was widely ignored, as if it had never happened. Similarly biased treatment has appeared when it came to reporting on corrupt black politicians like D.C. mayor Marion Barry or the dangerous double standards used for women in the military—standards which have already led to death in training and may cost still more lives in actual combat.
The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations's editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
While William McGowan's book seems the most perceptive of these three, all are very valuable and each has its own special emphasis. It Ain't Necessarily So focuses on media irresponsibility when reporting on medical and scientific issues, while Bias focuses more on the actions and the cast of characters at CBS News, where its author worked for many years. But all three of these books provide a real education on media fraud, which is infinitely more important than media bias.
Democratic nations are especially vulnerable to misinformation. The media in a totalitarian country may tell as many lies as it wants to, but that does not affect the decisions made for the country by its dictator or its ruling party, which has access to the truth, even if the masses do not. But, in a country where the masses choose their leaders and influence policies, a fraudulent press can mislead the voters into national disaster.
THE INSULATION OF THE LEFT
Nature lovers marvel at the fact that newly hatched turtles instinctively head for the sea. But that is no more remarkable than the fact that people on the political left instinctively head for occupations in which their ideas do not have to meet the test of facts or results.
While many studies have documented the predominance of the political left in the academic world, the exceptional areas where they do not have such predominance are precisely those areas where you cannot escape from facts and results—the sciences, engineering, mathematics and athletics.
By contrast, no area of academia is more dominated by the left than the humanities, where there are no facts to challenge the fantasies that abound. Leftists head for similar fact-free zones outside of academia.
Philanthropy, for example, is another field in which facts take a back seat to beliefs and emotions. When you are handing out money, you call the tune. It doesn't matter if other people have the facts on their side if you have the big bucks on yours.
When the foundations put their money behind bilingual education or global warming, then all sorts of conferences, organizations and movements will emerge to carry forth their message. Leftists flock to foundations, including those set up with money donated by conservative businessmen.
When these foundations give big bucks to finance bilingual education programs and propaganda, or bankroll “global warming” hysteria, they cannot be forced to confront facts about the counterproductive effects of bilingual education or asked to prove that the globe has warmed by a single degree in 20 years.
Fiction and opinion are likewise dominated by the political left. If you can tell a good yarn, whether in a book or a motion picture, the only test you face is whether people will buy the book or go see the movie.
On TV talk shows, what matters is whether you can talk the talk that keeps people tuned in. You may scare the daylights out of them about fictitious dangers in apples or beef without a speck of evidence that you know what you are talking about. But, so long as it sounds good, that's all that matters.
Any engineer, businessmen or athletic coach who knew no more about what he was doing than the talking heads on TV or foundation officials have to know would be heading for disaster in no time. When your bridge collapses or your business goes bankrupt or your team gets beaten again and again, you are history.
Nowhere are half-baked ideas more safe from facts than in government. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assumes that statistical “imbalances” in a company's workforce show discrimination, the only test of that assumption is whether federal judges share it.
If the EEOC and the courts share this same assumption, then employers are out of luck—perhaps to the tune of millions of dollars—if their workforce does not fit the prevailing preconceptions. Even if in fact the accused employer couldn't care less about the complexion, the nationality or the bedroom habits of his employees, that doesn't matter. What matters is what those with power choose to believe.
It doesn't matter whether factual studies show that “whole language” and “whole math” methods of teaching lead to lower test scores in these subjects. What matters is whether those with the money and the power in the Department of Education happen to like these notions—or are willing to cater to the teachers' unions that like them.
One of the reasons why government absorbs so much money and takes on ever-increasing powers is that it is home to so many people whose beliefs could not withstand the draconian tests of science, the marketplace or a sc
oreboard. What we the taxpayers are ultimately paying for is their insulation from reality, as they pursue the heady pleasures of power.
As if that were not enough, the left promotes the idea that there is something wiser and nobler about having decisions made by third parties who pay no price for being wrong. That is called “public service” and it will undoubtedly be hyped in college commencement speeches this year—as it is every year—despite scandalous revelations in Washington or decades of economic failure and monumental human tragedies in left-wing governments around the world.
W. GLENN CAMPBELL (1924–2001)
He could be generous, he could be irascible, but he could never be anything other than Glenn Campbell. During his long career, and from his retirement in 1989 until his recent death on November 24th, no one else was ever described as being “like Glenn Campbell.” He was an original.
It would be an understatement to call Glenn Campbell controversial and a virtual impossibility to keep track of all his battles, including those with more than one administration of Stanford University, on whose campus his Hoover Institution was and is located.
There was a Hoover Institution before Glenn Campbell became its director in 1960, but it was he who added world-class scholars to its huge library and massive archives, making it a think tank that would eventually be ranked number one among the think tanks of the world by the distinguished British magazine The Economist.
He also brought in the millions of dollars that supported their research and caused the institution to grow in size and in stature. But his achievement went even beyond that.
In an era when academic thinking was almost exclusively on the political left, the Hoover Institution became a refuge for top scholars who were out of step with that orientation, and who were therefore persona non grata at colleges and universities for which they were academically qualified but politically blackballed.
While the media almost invariably referred to the Hoover Institution as “conservative” or “right-wing,” a survey of its scholars during the 1980s found that there were slightly more Democrats than Republicans. In the surrounding Stanford University faculty—as with faculties at most universities—there were whole departments without a single Republican, at a time when the country was almost evenly split between the two parties.
Glenn Campbell liked to say that the Stanford faculty was leaning so far to the left that the upright scholars at the Hoover Institution seemed to be leaning far to the right.
While the Hoover scholars included such icons of free market economics as Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary Becker—all Nobel Prize winners—they also included Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow, whose orientation was very different. These were all academically-based scholars who were affiliated with the Hoover Institution under one arrangement or another, spending varying amounts of time there. Other leading scholars were exclusively affiliated with the Hoover Institution and permanently in residence.
These included Peter Duignan and Lewis Gann, whose monumental histories of Africa were internationally recognized for their scholarship, but who were never on the faculties of any university. Given the benefits of being at the Hoover Institution—someone described it as having a MacArthur Foundation fellowship all the time—it was probably no great loss to them. But it was a huge loss to innumerable college and university students who would never hear anything that challenged the “politically correct” version of African history.
Other scholars in residence included the distinguished British historian Robert Conquest, whose monumental book, Harvest of Sorrow, spelled out the horrors of the man-made famine in the Ukraine which took millions of lives in the 1930s. While this famine was denied, not only by the Soviet government and its fellow travelers in the West, and downplayed or widely ignored by much of the intelligentsia, when the official Soviet files were finally opened under Gorbachev, it turned out that even more people had died than Conquest had estimated.
In short, the Hoover Institution was not only a refuge for scholars who refused to march in ideological lockstep with the fashions of the times, it was a refuge for ideas that were largely banished from academia and the media, but which could not be obliterated so long as they had a base from which inconvenient facts and analyses could be developed and published in books, articles, monographs and op-ed columns.
It was Glenn Campbell's contribution to America to preserve a genuine diversity that so many academics talked about but refused to permit on their campuses. That will be his enduring monument.
PART VII
RANDOM THOUGHTS
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Ad for a ski resort: “If swimming is so healthful, why are whales so fat?”
Scientists are now putting jellyfish genes in monkeys. I don't know what they are trying to produce, but they could end up producing academic administrators.
The first big Washington scandal of the 20th century was the Teapot Dome scandal of 1921, which led three members of the Harding administration to commit suicide. Today, they would just consult their lawyers and spinmeisters, and then start making the rounds of the talk shows in order to confuse the issues.
We call too many people “sick” who are in fact sickening. And we call too many young criminals “troubled youths,” when in fact they are trouble to other people, while enjoying themselves.
If Yogi Berra actually said all the things that have been attributed to him, when did he ever have any time left to play baseball?
In a democracy, why should one group of citizens carry more weight than a similar number of other citizens, just because they are willing to take to the streets and block traffic?
Someone said that human beings are the only creatures that blush—and the only ones that need to.
It is bad enough that so many of our public schools offer nothing to challenge smart students. What adds insult to injury is that, when these students become bored and restless, this boredom is given the fancy name “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” and the students are drugged with Ritalin.
There are too many mush heads around these days for the law to continue to require unanimous jury verdicts.
Because of the neglect of history in our educational system, most people have no idea how many of the great American fortunes were created by people who were born and raised in worse poverty than the average welfare-recipient today.
The problem with trying to restore every group to its own historic “homeland” is that so many parts of the earth have been homelands to different groups at different periods of history. New Orleans, for example, has belonged to four different nations that we know about, not counting how often it may have changed hands before Europeans arrived in the hemisphere and began keeping written records.
The media continue to take seriously, and provide free publicity for, people who call themselves “consumer advocates” or “environmentalists,” even though there are no qualifications required for these roles. All it takes are a big mouth, a big ego, a disdain for inconvenient facts and an ignorance of economics.
It is amazing how many of the horrors of the 20th century were a result of charismatic quacks misleading millions of people to their own doom. What is even more amazing is that, after a century that saw the likes of Hitler, Lenin and Mao, we still see no need to distrust charisma as a basis for choosing leaders, either in politics or in numerous organizations and movements.
When Japan sells us enough cars to buy Rockefeller Center, that is just another even exchange. But accounting rules call it an international trade “deficit” because the cars crossed international borders, while Rockefeller Center stayed put. Yet the media, politicians and the intelligentsia spread alarms because they pay more attention to the word than to the reality.
It used to be said that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. Today, we admire those who curse the candle—because it is not perfect, not free, not whatever the complainers want it to be.
When it co
mes to the future of this country, what is scarier than any bad policies or bad leaders is the sheep-like willingness of so many Americans to repeat slogans, follow demagogues and even allow their own children to be dosed with Ritalin or sent to serve food to bums in the name of “community service,” without questioning the right of other people to do these things.
Beware of people who discuss foreign policy in terms of “relieving international tensions.” You can always relieve tensions by surrendering. We have done it on issue after issue.
The average black family has been in America longer than the average white family. Why then should blacks be hyphenated as African-Americans when they are more centuries removed from Africa than most Europeans are from Europe? Does anyone speak of European-Americans? How long should a hyphen persist?
Taxpayers have a right to complain about the runaway cost of the welfare state, but its worst damage has been done by promoting counterproductive lifestyles and creating a whole class of hustlers who know how to game the system, as well as an army of loudmouths who know how to intimidate politicians into giving them more of the same.
Why is it that people who are against the cigarette companies for selling a product with the potential to kill raise no similar objections to those who make equipment for sky-diving, white-water rafting, mountain climbing and other activities that also involve people risking their lives for the sake of the enjoyment they get?
Why is it that some people who are opposed to the government's giving money to faith-based organizations are also in favor of the government's providing money for “mental health,” when much of what shrinks do is based on faith, rather than on empirical evidence?
Controversial Essays Page 23
