More "Decoding" Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Atrios takes issue with my “decoding” of the VSP community.  I agree with his main point that this problem shouldn’t exist at all and the VSPs should hold “experts” up to a higher standard and make them pay for saying stupid stuff.  But they don’t so what do we do about it?

You could just throw everyone out and not listen to any of these guys because they are full of it.  In my view that would be a shame.  There is a use for expertise.  Experts’ opinions should not be the absolute be all and end all, but people should have an opportunity to listen to someone who reads the Arabic press every morning, has spent years living in the region, devotes their career to these issues and for the most part has been right on important questions like the war in Iraq. 

So, here’s my proposal.  You can have some people in the blogosphere make the decoding easier for everyone.  People who pay attention to this stuff regularly (Like some of the more notable bloggers and their readerships.) could work to come up with a list of good experts on various issues.  This expert list should include people who really know what they are talking about, but don’t get enough attention.  Then, maybe guys like Atrios, with their massive readerships can spend more time linking to these experts and helping raise their profiles.  It’s easy to link to O’Hanlon and say he sucks.  But why not link to Brian Katulis or Steven Simon when they write excellent reports and op-eds on Iraq?

It’s easy to complain that the wrong people are getting air time. But unless you are able to offer the producer an alternative expert who can fill those two minutes they are going to continue to default to what they know.  If we can help build up some new faces, we can get rid of some of the old ones and we can also send a clear message that people need to be held accountable for what they say.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Sounds good to me Ilan. Very good. We need to hear from more people. The web works beautifully because, unlike print and broadcast, it has a built-in inherent BS filter where readers can appraise every statement and agree or disagree, and if the latter then the onus is on them to present the facts. Some "experts" will have trouble with this, like one I won't name who recently took offense at people who disagreed with him/her and didn't come back to a blog. Couldn't take the heat.

Every expert or blogger has the potential to mis-state the facts or offer a faulty opinion, and when this happens there should be a corrective statement, and from this interplay the truth we all seek will emerge.

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake;"--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[Lupin]

I wouldn't mind seeing any right-wing pundit appearance balanced with one by Noah Chomsky, for instance.

[jayackroyd]

Yes, it would be good to have links to real experts. People do frequently link to Juan Cole.

And let's stick with Juan Cole for just a minute. He's clearly more expert on these issues than the people who turn up on television. He is a professor at a major university, comments prolifically in public and knows the issues inside and out, certainly better than O'Hanlon. It simply isn't credible, especially after the flap over his appointment to Yale, that competent news producers and op-ed page editors don't know who he is.

By any reasonable measure, he would be a very serious person. But, and this is atrios' point I'm stealing, he pretty clearly believes that the war was a mistake to wage and has been waged incompetently with little regard for the actual situation in Iraq. And because he holds this position--in particular because he doesn't trumpet the effectiveness of force as the most desireable solution, he is not a Very Serious Person.

The point isn't that there are other experts that who would do a better job of analysis. The point is that producers and op-ed editors aren't interested in those points of view unless, as far as I can tell, they come from active or retired military men who are not named Scott Ritter. The problem is not really Pollack or O'Hanlon themselves. If Pollack recanted tomorrow, said he has been wrong all along and that precipitous withdrawal is the only way out, he wouldn't get shown all over cable news saying so. Just as Cordesman's much more balanced review of his visit didn't get the same play.

The issue is not the experts. The issue is the narrative. The story the producers want is "surge makes progress." What makes Pollack and O'Hanlon contemptible is that they, in my opinon, obviously, know what the narrative is that will get them the attention they desire--"anti-war critics see progress"---and exploit it, even thought it is entirely false. And the producers put them on, even though they have been entirely wrong, because that is the story they want to broadcast.

You're not gonna fix that with a better blogroll at Eschaton.

In addition, just as producers have their ways of working, the blogosphere also has its way of working--and that entails a certain degree of pithiness. Cole is very good at this, but IME real experts usually aren't. If you really know a subject, it is hard to distill its essence for a lay audience. Yesterday's NYT op-ed by the six non-coms did a really spectacular job of doing that. But much more common is either the craptastic bombast from people like Friedman (running on the opposite page) or lengthy, closely reasoned but dense white papers.

[Aziz Poonawalla]

I kind of like the acronym, VSP. Might as well adopt it. The irony is that the VSP was ignored in the runup to the Iraq war because political agendas trumped the value of their advice; now the same thing is happening, since the VSP is largely measured in its critiques and simply not on the same page (as far as any concensus can be described) about total withdrawal from Iraq as the leftist blogger camp is (Atrios, et al). For example, Anthony Cordesman's report this month from Iraq is titled, "The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq". That's hardly a full-throated cry for yanking the troops out now; like most VSP analyses, it is a balanced, measured look at teh pros and cons of the policy in question and provides no clear cut rallying cry.

We don't live in a technocracy; the loudest voices with the simplest messages are the ones who gain a following and have the most influence. So no matter who is in power, the VSP is going to have an uphill battle and face critiques.

[SteveB]

You could just throw everyone out and not listen to any of these guys because they are full of it. In my view that would be a shame. There is a use for expertise.

The single most frustrating thing about witnessing this back-and-forth is the way that Michael Cohen, and now you, seem to deliberately misunderstand what the other side is saying.

Who, I'd like to know, is saying "throw everyone out and not listen to any of these guys"? And, if no one is actually saying that, then aren't you presenting us with a straw man?

What I hear is this: Let's look very carefully at any expert's track record - what they said before the Iraq war started and what they have said over the past four and a half years - and, based on this track record and not on their list of academic credentials or their resume, let's decide whether we should believe what they are saying today and whether we should trust their advice about what to do in the future.

Hard to argue with, I know, so it's much easier to simply mirepresent this as "throw everyone out", and proceed from there.

Also, it's absurd to claim that liberal bloggers don't link to experts who provide analysis they consider to be accurate or useful. Perhaps you just haven't been paying attention to these bloggers until the current "debate" started?

And your helpful suggestion that we need to "help build up some new faces" so that news producers have a stable of"alternative experts" to choose from is simply miguided. It reminds me of the argument that we don't see enough African-Americans in positions of power because we just haven't filled up the "pipeline" yet. Good people get put in the pipeline, but they don't come out the other end because they are being actively discriminated against. The comment above by jayackroyd explains quite well how this works with "alternative experts" and the media.

[Tim]

SteveB and jayackroyd are spot on. But the original post is also useful, a bit. We could use more and louder voices to drown out the Friedman-types. After all, Friedman himself is still considered by the typical TV show producer or newspaper editor as the 'acceptable' liberal position. No matter how wrong he is, has been, or will be. Maybe after Friedman has been shamed into obscurity, we can take on the hundreds of neo-cons or their apologists who prefer war to diplomacy.

[bartkid]

>It’s easy to complain that the wrong people are getting air time.

It's not a complaint; it's the truth.

[Dan Kervick]

The over-reliance on experts who are not really experts, or are not as expert as some other experts, is only part of the problem. Hearing more from people who have a deep knowledge of the region of interest might help us avoid bad policies that come about due to inadequate empirical knowledge.

But deep expert knowledge does not automatically get you a good policy, because policies result from the application of political and moral values and preferences to the empirical knowledge of a situation. My main concern about the VSP community, as designated by the primary think tanks and looked to by the media, is that it represents a very narrow spectrum of political opinion in the United States. The media regards only a small band of center-right and center-left positions as safe and respectable, and excludes vast expanses of the US political spectrum from public debate.

As Tim says, "Friedman himself is still considered by the typical TV show producer or newspaper editor as the 'acceptable' liberal position." Forget about Friedman's level of expertise. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Friedman were a renowned scholar of Middle Eastern languages, a trained professional economist and a preeminent Middle East historian. That still probably wouldn't change the fact that Friedman is a defender of neoliberal economic policies and fairly standard, middle-of-the-road views about the nature and purposes of the United States and United States foreign policy.

The main problem is that our national debates are not politically and morally broad enough, and the VSP standards systematically exclude important alternative and dissenting political positions from our national debates - even to the extent of bringing up those positions for refutation. Thus, nobody to the left of Thomas Friedman even gets a hearing! This is part of the explanation for for the group-think and herd mentality afflicting VSP-driven decision making. Inadequate empirical knowledge is only part of the problem.

[bartkid]

>But unless you are able to offer the producer an alternative expert who can fill those two minutes they are going to continue to default to what they know.

How come Democracy Now can have such alternative experts on for 10+ minutes at a time?

Time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.
The VSP won't go away, but they need to be called out at the same time they spout.

[Tim]

Dan Kervick -
I agree with you almost entirely, except the part about extreme rightwing views also not getting fair play. "Invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" will obviously ring some bells. On the left-right spectrum she is around the edge of acceptable right wing commentary, and her insanity still gets airtime and coverage. An hour on Hardball? She is in no way center right, and everything to her left, which includes crazies like Bill Kristol and Tancredo, all are acceptable to display on TV. It's not just some common-wisdom balance of only center-left, center-right. It really is just the moderate left, and far-left position that is excluded.

[Dan Kervick]

Good point Tim. It is close to impossible to find anyone further right than hacks like Coulter, and yet she has a permanent cable news gig. At the same time, serious and measured scholars of the left are invisible.

[Thers]

Uh, cable news producers now load up on right-wing guests to "debate" centrist guests because for over 20 years now right wing maniacs have been screaming about imaginary "liberal bias" in a very abrasive fashion (talk radio, anyone?).

In order to swing the balance the other way it may be necessary to... say "fuck you!" a lot. Or something.

Which is terribly un-civil, I know. But the argument that the civil exchange of ideas actually produces good political results is quite thin. Certainly it doesn't get you on the teevee -- or at least not as well as weaseling does, anyhow. Ooooh, Ken Pollack's on again!

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