DART for grade inflation: Charles Jaco, KTVI, St. Louis, MO When you’re interviewing a senatorial candidate who says, as Todd Akin did in August, that women’s bodies “have ways to try to shut that whole thing down” and prevent pregnancies in cases of “legitimate rape,” you might want to deviate from your interview script and ask what that’s about. But Charles Jaco’s brain apparently shut that whole thing down, and he followed up with a question about the economy. Yet in hindsight, he thought his interview rated a “B+.” That must be some kind of bell curve.
LAUREL for good reporter’s instincts: James Carter IV Who knows how the presidential election might have gone if James Carter, grandson of Jimmy, hadn’t been curious about YouTube snippets of a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton—the event at which the candidate dismissed Obama supporters as the “47 percent” of the nation who are “dependent upon the government, who believe that they are victims.” Playing a hunch, Carter and veteran reporter David Corn tracked down the source and the full video, which became a big scoop for Mother Jones.
DART for overly hasty identifications: ABC News Handy tip for ABC News: Make sure you’ve got the right guy! In a hastily assembled profile of James Holmes, accused of a July shooting spree in a Colorado movie theater that killed 12, ABC’s Brian Ross announced that he was a member of the Tea Party. Surely there’s only one James Holmes in Colorado, right? Oops. (And the Newtown, CT, shootings in December provided a horrific reminder about the need to doublecheck before going public with IDs.)
Well done, "The Editors." If Jaco has not shown the way, at least he has shown the NOT way.
What we need to do in 2013 is pile on with different ways of learning, for journalists, for students, for academics.
We might go into mild acceleration in January by minute study of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Antifragile." I approve of this book, so far. We might also ask how rapidly colleges in New York state are adapting to this text.
Given that high schools are mostly in a dizzy mess in the study of Philosophy--students laugh openly about IB Theory of Knowledge--we might see if they could adapt to ZAMM--one of my best reads of 2012--and Taleb.
There are ways of orienting to Jaco disorientation, but we would rather avoid that if possible. One is fierce assimilation of Mark Ashcraft's "Cognition." That is the subject, after all. The other is meditation. The text that I much prefer is "The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images," one of the most successful combinations of text and images over the past few years.
Even two or three entries a day should help keep the onset of Jaco DTs away.
Otherwise, Jaco, man, why not just remove your brain and operate on batteries?
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Wed 26 Dec 2012 at 02:24 PM
LAUREL: To anyone who's continuing to hound Columbia U's increasingly embarrassing fool Glen Hubbard.
See here:
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_nyt_unseals_a_private-equi.php#comment-66195
and latest news here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/glenn-hubbard-leading-academic-and-mitt-romney-advisor-took-1200-an-hour-to-be-countrywides-expert-witness-20121220
"Anyone who's seen the movie Inside Job will recall the stupendously angering scene in which Hubbard pissily snaps at his interviewer for asking about his outside relationships with the financial services industry...
Anyway, when asked if he did consulting work for big banks, Hubbard refused to answer. And when asked if he just didn't remember who was writing checks to him when he wasn't overseeing the education of American youth, he fumed.
"This isn't a deposition, sir," he hissed. "I was polite enough to give you time, foolishly I now see. Give it your best shot."
Again, there's just nothing like karma. If your answer to a perfectly sensible question is going to be, "Screw you, this isn't a deposition," exactly how long do you think it'll be before you end up actually getting deposed? And forced to answer, under oath, just how much your opinions cost?
A couple of years, as it turns out."
Hilarity.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 26 Dec 2012 at 03:50 PM
Columbia is not unlike Harvard in having a lot of administrative problems, Thimbles.
Perhaps when the holiday partying is over for a while, the Columbia U. administration will consider the case of "torture guy:"
The Guardian: "The truth about Zero Dark Thirty: this torture fantasy degrades us all."
ClaytonBurns 25 Dec 2012, 4:12AM
OK. We have sorted out a few people here. But what about the mixed up “torture professor” at Columbia U?
smg16@columbia.edu
11:59 AM (2 hours ago)
Professor Gottlieb,
Do you stand behind your letter? It is relatively old in the cycle of this story. Still, “Yet nowhere does he refute the facts at hand: that intelligence gleaned from harsh interrogations played a key role in finding Bin Laden” does not seem to be a fair statement because it overstates what Bigelow is now adamant in saying she intended.
I also think that you have been seduced by language. By ending with “such extreme measures during extraordinary times,” you provide an easy answer and so blur analysis.
I am willing to share with you my analysis of the notably ambiguous–and incoherent–NYT Film Review.
Clayton Burns PhD Vancouver.
To the Editor: (NYT)
Frank Bruni’s discomfort with images of torture in the new film “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is certainly understandable. [...]
Mr. Bruni says the film fails to “reflect many experts’ belief that torture is unnecessary, yielding as much bad information as good.”
Yet nowhere does he refute the facts at hand: that intelligence gleaned from harsh interrogations played a key role in finding Bin Laden. [...]
STUART GOTTLIEB
New York, Dec. 10, 2012
Stuart M Gottlieb
1:31 PM (1 hour ago)
to me
My letter is not behind any cycle — these same senators have been peddling this same nonsense for years (i.e., that torture never gleans accurate info). The fact that you and the NY Times choose to parrot this nonsense because it fits a politically correct sensibility is not my issue. Even Dennis Blair and Leon Panetta have openly admitted as much.
As I wrote — I do not condone torture. But I do like to expose truth.
Ciao.
#3 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Wed 26 Dec 2012 at 05:09 PM