What is a "journalist"?

Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote yesterday: "Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world. Bloggers don't know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square -- without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous."

On the one hand, this is all too typical. The constant meme of the Left (including much of the mainstream media) is that anyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid and uninformed. This meme becomes less and less tenable as information becomes more and more available. For instance, as anyone reading this surely knows, many of the leading blogs are written by people who are lawyers or law professors (www.powerlineblog.com, www.hughhewitt.com, www.instapundit.com, etc.) This information is readily available on the websites themselves. But let's ignore the silliness of Coleman's rant and focus on the question he raises about who is better "credentialed" to analyze news.

Think about it. What "credentials" does the average newspaper writer have? A B.A. in journalism. What credentials do lawyers have? At the very least, a B.A. or B.S. followed by a J.D. (Some of us, like me, also have Ph.D's, but that's another story.) Do journalists have any CLE they're obligated to take every year? I've never heard about that. But lawyers are obligated to take continuing legal education classes every year to keep their licenses. Do journalists have special training and experience in judging evidence? Maybe so, but obviously lawyers have more training and more experience, plus lawyers have normative rules (the Federal Rules of Evidence, state rules of evidence) that govern what counts as relevant evidence, what makes a witness competent, what types of questions (leading, argumentative, etc.) are beyond the pale, why hearsay is problematic, why character evidence is problematic, why expert witnesses have to be qualified in their particular subject matters, why documents have to be authenticated to be used at trial, why original writings (not copies!) are the best evidence, etc.

More importantly, lawyers understand the adversarial process, and understand that truth emerges (hopefully) when opposing counsel cross-examines and impeaches a plaintiff's witnesses.

Consider what would have happened if the National Guard memo story foisted upon the public by Rather and Mapes had occurred in the context of a civil case in federal court. They would have been produced in discovery. A reasonably competent litigator would have subpoenaed Bill Burkett for a deposition under oath. He would have tracked down the Killian family, General Staudt, etc., and deposed them. He would have hired a handwriting expert and a forensic document specialist to opine that they were forgeries. He would have deposed CBS' expert and probably moved to preclude his testimony through a Daubert motion. Very possibly, if it were determined that the documents were forgeries, a motion for sanctions against CBS would follow. BUT ALL OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED BEFORE THE DOCUMENTS EVER CAME NEAR A JURY! The difference with "journalism" is that they go to the jury before their evidence has been tested at all.

More on this another time.

Why Are Democrats Losing?

The post-mortem of this election will be all about how terrible a candidate John Kerry was and how brilliant Machiavellian Karl Rove was. It will all be about process for the simple reason that the MSM and the Dems can't face the simple truth that they lose because they are now and have too frequently been WRONG about the issues that matter to thinking Americans. Consider:

1. Democratic position on race A: if we bus schoolchildren so that different races have to go to school together it will foster racial harmony. WRONG.
2. Democratic position on race B: if we create a system of affirmative action race preferences for college admissions it will foster racial harmony. WRONG.
3. Democratic position on abortion: if we permit legal abortion it will cut down on the number of children born to unwed mothers. WRONG.
4. Democratic position on taxes A: confiscatory marginal tax rates have no effect on productivity or economic growth. WRONG.
5. Democratic position on taxes B: cutting marginal tax rates will not stimulate growth. WRONG.
6. Democratic position on deficits: deficits "crowd out" private borrowing and cause high interest rates. WRONG.
7. Democratic position on communism: just another form of viable social system. WRONG... communism everywhere has created a soul-killing and murderous kleptocracy.
8. Alger Hiss was innocent. WRONG.
9. If we pull out of Vietnam there won't be a bloodbath. WRONG.
10. If we push forward with Star Wars the Russians will get mad and bad things will happen. WRONG.
11. Ronald Reagan was stupid. WRONG.
12. George Bush is stupid. WRONG.
13. Bill Clinton didn't sleep with that woman. WRONG.
14. The memos were not forged. WRONG.

I could go on and on.

Thoughts/questions about Kerry and Vietnam

The reason Bush's National Guard story attracts interest from the mainstream media (when the story itself is so obviously banal -- how many young men had somewhat checkered experiences in the Guard in the early 1970s when the war in Vietnam was winding down?) is purely a function of how big a deal Kerry made of his service in Vietnam. If the Democrats were running someone with no military experience, they wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that Bush had served in the National Guard, had been on active duty for nearly two years learning to fly a fighter jet, had served without any questions whatsoever a minimum of four years in the Guard, more than fulfilling his "points" in each of those first four years, etc. But they have chosen Kerry, and the only part of his biography that is at all appealing to the majority of Americans is his Vietnam combat experience, so they accentuate it. But what is the logic of that?

1. Kerry saw some combat in Vietnam.
2. Kerry's combat experience qualifies him for the Presidency.

This is a syllogism that is missing the middle term. The only middle term that makes this logical is: "Combat experience qualifies someone -- anyone? -- for the Presidency."

Oh, really? How so? What is the ontological status of the experience of combat as opposed to, say, the experience of having been a heart surgeon (Frist), the experience of having been a movie star or union president or governor (Reagan), or, frankly, the experience of having flown fighter jets (Bush)? Does it make Kerry a deeper thinker? (No evidence.) Does it make Kerry a better husband or father? (No evidence either way.) Did it make him more selfless? (No evidence.) Has it given him better judgment? (No evidence.)

Put differently, what is the predictive value of the proposition "Kerry is a combat veteran, therefore..." what? What does that tell us about how he would act as President? Anything at all?

And when did the Democratic Party discover the ontological importance of combat experience, since it spent the last decade supporting a certified draft dodger in Bill Clinton?

The reality is that there are probably around 25 million American men who were approximately the right generation to have served in Vietnam, i.e., born between 1937 (27 at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident) and 1952 (18 at the time the draft was stopped). Of those, only about 2.5 million were in Vietnam. Of those, probably less than 10% saw any real combat since the ratio of support personnel to line troops in Vietnam was more than 10-to-1. (My brother-in-law, for instance, was a telephone technician during his 12 month tour of duty in Vietnam.) Is it really the Democratic Party's position that only that small sliver of the adult population can possibly be qualified to be President? And, of course, doesn't that mean they will have to change their views on having Hillary run in 2008?

Just some thoughts.

What needs to happen now.

To bloggers out there who have been covering the Rathergate scandal, hello, and thanks! Here's the meme I'd like to see someone send out into the echo chamber... WHY, GIVEN RECENT EVENTS, SHOULD ANYONE AT CBS BE PERMITTED TO SERVE AS A MODERATOR IN THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES? I think James Baker should leak that the President will only agree to a third debate if CBS is excluded from participating in any of the debates as moderators, and only if Brit Hume is selected as one of the moderators instead.

Test Post

This is a test post. I'm doing it in Times New Roman in the hope that CBS will pick up the story.