More on JournoList

In the previous post ("Where Left-Leaning Pundits and Bloggers Compare Notes"), we linked to and excerpted from Michael Calderone's Politico article, "JournoList: Inside the Echo Chamber". One of the critics of JournoList who Calderone quoted in that article was the centrist Democrat blogger Mickey Kaus. Kaus wrote about Calderone's article on his Kausfiles blog yesterday ("The Uninvited"). From Kaus's blog post:

Brad DeLong objects to the hed--"Inside the echo chamber"--on Michael Calderone's piece discussing the underknown leftish email cabal organized by Ezra Klein:

It's not an echo chamber. I have never seen a less echo chamber-like space in my life. The headline is simply wrong.

Fair enough. But I think the headline-writers' worry was that an "echo chamber" is what the outside world tends to get from members of JournoList once they've vigorously hashed out their disagreements in secret. "Inside the Echo Factory" would be a headline more accurately reflecting that concern. It's noisy in a factory but the product is often standardized.

[...]

We non-elite writers¹ learn something just from watching the sausage get made.  One thing we learn is it's just sausage. Ezra Klein has taken a lot of what could be highly informative back and forth on the World Wide Web and privatized it, much as rich people in gated communities reclaim green space from the public sphere and wall it off behind guards and fences. It's not an egalitarian or democratic impulse.

P.S.: Here's DeLong's preferred description of JournoList:

[I]t is the people whom Ezra thinks are smart enough, committed enough to discussion and learning and education, and good-hearted enough to be worth emailing regularly--and the rest of us free-ride on the virtual space that is Ezra's network. [E.A.]

False modesty? Check. Suck up to the organizer? Check. Underlying, self-satisfied exclusionary impulse? Check. ... 

¹Kaus is engaging in a little of his own false modesty here, I think, given that his blog is published online on Slate, which is owned by the Washington Post -- not the typical set-up of a Pajamahadeen.

"Hall of Fame Dork" Wins 3rd NFL MVP Award

The Colts' Peyton Manning (pictured above) won his third NFL MVP award. Believe it or not, back in 2005, Slate's Robert Weintraub compared Manning invidiously to the Falcons' Michael Vick ("Michael Vick: no passing fancy"). Below are a few excerpts from Weintraub's essay.

Vick's credentials hardly need enumerating here—he's probably the most exciting player in all of pro sports. What separates him from even the best running backs is his acceleration when he sees a fissure in the defense. Watch when he eludes the rush and decides to take off—there is a split second of hesitation, as Vick computes pursuit angles, then whoooossshhhhh, and defenders are pawing helplessly at his jet wash.

The elephant in the room, of course, is race. Trent Dilfer leads his team to the Super Bowl by "managing the game" (code for not screwing up worse than his opponent). Vick wins by playing "PlayStation football" (code for coasting on his natural athletic ability) and gets derided for not being Peyton Manning.

I'll pause to note that Weintraub's generalization here is inaccurate. There are, and have been, pocket-passer African American quarterbacks -- Doug Williams¹, for example, the Redskins quarterback who was the MVP of Super Bowl XXII, was a pocket passer. Similarly, there have been white quarterbacks known for their athletic ability as well as their passing ability (e.g., Steve Young). Back to Weintraub's essay:

Manning works hard to foster the image that he works hard. Good luck finding a story that doesn't mention Peyton's love affair with game film. No one is better versed in defensive wrinkles, no one exploits matchups with such aplomb, no one sees the field so clearly. At the line of scrimmage, Manning looks like a man with Tourette's syndrome—arms akimbo, patting his guards on the keister, pointing at every defender, bouncing around to every teammate to make sure they are on the same page. He's essentially the first Hall of Fame dork.

Manning reminds me of that old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live, the Master Thespian ("Acting!!"). Manning spends a lot of time Quarterbacking!! He wants you to forget that his path to the Pro Bowl was greatly eased by natural athletic ability (check out the gene pool he swims in). It's the same 99th-percentile athleticism that Vick possesses, just expressed in a different way. Manning makes it seem like every quarterback could throw the perfect deep ball if they only studied harder and gesticulated more wildly.

[...]


Imagine that the Kansas Board of Education ran the NFL, and offenses never evolved past the single wing. Quarterbacks still took direct snaps and ran the ball on virtually every play. In this alternate universe, Vick would be the state-of-the-art QB, Manning the one dissected at length for his unusual approach to winning. Or, let's just dispense with allegory, like Falcons coach Jim Mora recently did: "When are we going to start talking about when Peyton Manning is going to start doing what Mike Vick does?"

Weintraub wrote that in November of 2005. Flash forward to today, and Peyton Manning has his third MVP, and Michael Vick is in the pokey for convictions relating to his dog fighting ring.

¹Williams was quoted in a recent New York Times article, "Race Fades as a Way to Define a Passer". Excerpt:

More than the performance or fate of any single individual, the most glaring development has been the dissolution of the notion that Vick and Young were in the process of ushering in a radically altered era of the rangy, running quarterback. It would appear that we have seen the N.F.L.’s future and it fairly resembles the past — quarterbacks, hopefully of all colors and creeds, dropping back and throwing spirals downfield.

“If you come up here with the running mentality, it’s going to be tough to survive because the defenses are too complicated and fast,” Doug Williams said by telephone from the Tampa Bay front office, where the formerBuccaneers and Redskins quarterback and the first African-American to start (and win) the Super Bowl serves as a personnel executive. “You’ve got to be able to throw the ball downfield. At the same time, a quarterback has got to be agile and make plays, not depend on playmakers all the time. They have to be elusive. Drew Brees is the epitome of the guy who is not a runner but who is elusive.”

McCain's Base

In the 2000 Republican presidential primary, Senator McCain and his campaign staffers used to joke that "the press is our base". McCain had long had favorable relations with the press, particularly when he bucked his party on various issues, and that continued during his insurgent primary campaign against then-Governor George W. Bush. McCain enjoyed some favorable press during this year's Republican primary as well, but once the general election campaign between McCain and Senator Obama began, McCain's press 'base' largely deserted him. The Pew Research Center study released last week provides some evidence of this (see: "Canvasing Campaign Media: An Analysis of Time, Tone and Topics"; the histogram above comes from this study). According to the Pew study,

In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three-to-one [...]

The Pew Research Center study summary report asks whether media bias has played a role in this negative coverage,

One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise?

Maybe not, says Pew:

The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions.

Many conservatives have long complained that since most journalists tend to be Democrats, the mainstream media is inherently biased against conservatives (although they are sometimes more tolerant of liberal Republicans). This week the Washington Post Company's online magazine Slate was open enough to publish a piece detailing who its staff members and contributors were supporting in the upcoming presidential election. The results won't do anything to assuage conservative complaints of media bias: 55 Slate staff members and contributors are supporting Obama, versus 1 (Deputy Managing Editor and Copy Chief Rachel Larimore, who hopefully doesn't have to eat lunch by herself) supporting McCain (you can read their explanations of their votes here, "How we're voting: Obama wins Slate in a landslide").

"America's Smartest Banker"

I meant to comment on this Slate article by Daniel Gross when it was first published, but didn't get a chance. Here's the link: "America's Smartest Banker: The nation's financial industry is cratering, so how come Hudson City Bank is thriving?". Gross's answer:

Hudson City banks the old-fashioned way: It takes deposits and makes mortgages to people who buy homes in which they plan to live. And then it hangs on to them. No subprime, no securitization. Hudson City's bankers are steady daters in a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am era. "We don't have Wall Street bundle up the mortgages and sell them to someone in Norway," [Hudson City CEO Ronald] Hermance says. "We're going to live with those loans." As a result, Hudson City maintains higher standards.

My question about this article is whether Hudson City really is unique in this regard. My bank, NVE Bank (which, after 121 years, has expanded to all of 12 branches throughout Bergen County's Northern Valley) also eschewed securitization, and seems to be weathering the credit crunch fine (here's the bank's latest Statement of Condition).

Another local bank that seems to be doing alright is Pascack Community Bank, which is almost finished building a new branch in Hackensack. I turns out Pascack is publicly-traded (OTCBB: PCCB.OB)