Dear Boston Globe...

Published today in the Boston Globe:

I was among the young Christians who traveled to Park Street Church last month to hear Jim Wallis’s call for social justice (”A New Generation Awakens,” March 12), and I can testify that a generational shift is indeed underway within American Christianity.

In fact, the Boston Faith + Justice Network, which also hosted an event with Mr. Wallis in Boston, is bringing together evangelical and mainline Christians to alleviate global poverty. Through Bible studies, we see our consumer habits in light of Scripture’s concern for the poor. As we awake to the global impact of our lifestyle, we are working for shifts in corporate and public policy to more justly steward and share our resources.

Still, many of my secular neighbors and friends consider “progressive evangelicals” mythical, even oxymoronic. Christian faith has been, and continues to be, a powerful force for social and economic justice.

Rachel Anderson
Director
Boston Faith + Justice Network

Dan Payne’s analysis of the Presidential race in today’s Boston Globe illustrates why he was a bad fit for the Deval Patrick campaign, which he left soon before Deval blew the lid off the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primaries. Payne repeatedly cites, while also chastising himself for citing, poll numbers without any serious analysis of the correlation between pre-election polling and final results.

To analogize between a political campaign and a military one, tactics like endorsements and advertising are like long-range bombing: all they do is “soften up” the populace and provide the potential for votes. But warplanes and artillery do not capture territory: for that you need “boots on the ground,” which in the electoral context means real people making phone calls and canvassing door-to-door to convert general support into real votes.

Political analysts like Dan Payne are biased towards covering the “air war” because it’s sexy and easy to see. But a more accurate way to interpret poll data is to weight them by the presence of ground troops. Sudden shifts in popular numbers are unlikely to show up in real votes without a large and well-organized volunteer base to realize those gains. (The analysis is somewhat different when the numbers are static, in which case the leader will win, all else being equal). As I’d written earlier, Obama pulled the organizational structure out of Massachusetts, and Deval Patrick’s supporters just couldn’t cover the ground fast enough to capitalize on the sudden shift in public sentiment.

White homeowners afraid of a black family moving into their neighborhoods often encourage the would-be seller to pull the home off the market. “I’m not racist,” they explain, “but other people are. And all of our home prices will suffer.”

These homeowners are perpetuating bigotry, and so are voters who won’t cast their ballots for a woman or African-American because of “electability.”

Stop wondering whether America is “ready” for a non-white or non-male person to be President. Wonder if YOU are ready. Then cast your vote for the best candidate.

Physicists understand that observation can change the thing being studied. Perhaps observer effect partially explains the pollsters’ poor predictions (”Stunned by N.H., pollsters regroup to seek answers,” Jan 10). Maybe the very act of publishing the polls changed the vote. If voters were truly undecided to the last minute, as many appeared to be, they’d want to prolong the race by voting for the underdog — which, according to the polls, was Obama in Iowa and Clinton in New Hampshire.

On the other hand, cognitive scientists also believe that humans have a natural bias to see patterns where none exist — which, in the case of pollsters, pundits, and journalists, leads to the need to find a story to “explain” statistics, whether polls or vote results. We’re also biased towards dramatic, human stories: it’s a lot more interesting to attribute Clinton’s victory to the “choked up” episode than a complex mix of more prosaic factors like operational effectiveness.

But then, with the exception of Mitt Romney, well-oiled machines are rarely photogenic.

Published in the Boston Globe on 12 Jan 2008.

Stephen Colbert practices satire, but I suspect his dalliance with Maureen Dowd in today’s guest op-ed piece is only sarcastically ironic. Indeed, his subtitle, “I am an op-ed columnist (and so can you!)” points out the essential problem of op-ed writing: anyone can do it, and someone somewhere in the blogosphere is faster, wittier, and just plain fresher than the usual op-ed suspects.

I don’t care if you’re talking about Maureen Dowd or Jeff Jacoby: as shrill, biased, and repetitive as they are, the blogosphere does it better. In a time when newspapers are bleeding cash, why should they even bother to compete with the unwashed masses on their own turf? Newspapers should be crying “Hallelujah” that You, Too, Can Be An Op-Ed Writer so they can finally put resources back into investigative reporting and that old-fashioned journalism stuff.

Most of my colleagues at Berkman were ecstatic that the Times finally opened up “Times Select” to everyone, free of charge, but one upshot of setting all this information free was that Ms. Dowd has reappeared at the top of the “Most Emailed” charts. I was happier not knowing that the supposedly enlightened readers of the Times really were partisan flag-wavers after all. And not even all that intellectually enterprising: really, what is Frank Rich saying that the Daily Kos didn’t beat to death a few days earlier?

It’s bad enough that daily comic strips like Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore run two weeks behind the political times. Reading them is like watching the Daily Show on a malfunctioning Tivo, except that the jokes are even staler than the news. But Globe columnists like Jeff Jacoby turn irrelevance into an art form. A good week after the MoveOn “General Betray Us” debacle, Jacoby finally got his outrage machine cranking.

Another op-ed in today’s Globe took newspapers to task for trying to compete in the blogosphere: “Speeding up the metabolic rate of news consumption, and giving it the glib gloss of the blogosphere, will do nothing to solve [newspapers’] essential crisis. If anything, it will diminish the intellectual patience and empathy upon which honest brokers of news depend.” Steve Almond writes as if this were something new for newspapers. But today’s column by Jacoby demonstrates how kneejerk, regurgitated ideas have become standard fare on the op-ed pages.

Jacoby shows that ample turnaround time is not sufficient to ensure relevant reporting and deep analysis. The real problem is his prurient interest in the flash and noise of politics rather than the real substance. It’s maddening enough when Trudeau and Tinsley run gags that are both hackneyed and out-of-date. But as Jon Stewart would point out, the Globe, and its paid columnists, should do better than aim to match the aspirations of comedians.

Dear Boston Globe:

I voted for it (like there was a choice), but Red and Rover is gone, and good riddance. Inauthentic fan letters notwithstanding, the strip is nothing more than a marketing ploy, fine-tuned to hit two notes (baby boomers and their children) in cynically calibrated harmony.

The strip is set in the 1950s, featuring tin can phones, afternoons watching “Leave it to Beaver,” and nary a Negro in sight. Yes, this is America idyll, back when boys were boys, girls were named Mary Lou, and people who owned cats were obviously queer. Do we really need to feed Baby Boomers more pre-adolescent fantasies that, yes, they grew up in a utopia and went on to become the Best Generation Ever?

But let’s put aside content for a moment here and talk about the comics business itself. Brian Basset is already author of yet another demographic smart bomb, “Adam,” a paean to caffeinated X’er parenting in the culturally-inert exurbs that runs daily in the Globe. So if for no other reason than fairness to other comic artists trying to catch a break, let’s not let this marginally competent comic artist take up two slots when he’s hardly demonstrated his worthiness as the author of one.