Compare & Contrast

I picked up the May 10th issue of The Nation. (Hey, that makes it sound like I can go out and pick up a copy of a magazine whenever I want instead of being stuck on this hill and having to read the online version in the computer lab. Sweet.) It struck me that as much as progressives complain about FOXNews and talk radio's fact-free right-wing pseudo-journalism, the left is not exactly free from it's own jingoism. Let's take two articles as an example of the difference between good journalism and bad. The first is Neocon Man by Eyal Press. The second, The National Insecurity State by Stephen Holmes.
       Neither article is straight journalism. Neocon Man is a profile, Insecurity State is a book review. The difference in format illustrates the difference in quality: Neocon uses it's unusual format to make points journalists can't usually make; Insecurity reduces it's form to a MeetUp talking points memo.
       The fact that it is a book review does not justify Insecurity's flaws; Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and others have made book reviews sing. I cringe when book reviewers feel their only responsibility is to summarize. Holmes can certainly summarize:

Mann [the author of Rise of the Vulcans] refers to Wolfowitz as "the leading conservative foreign policy thinker of his generation." But with the country reeling [after 9/11], his immediate reflex was to strike a Churchillian pose, revealing his psychological, or perhaps ideological, fixations. As Richard Clarke reveals in his scathing memoir, Against All Enemies, Wolfowitz showed himself wholly unable to bring a new threat into focus.

       This nod to Clarke is the only time Holmes mentions any book or source other than the one being reviewed.< br>       Holmes uses the words "Mann refers" repeatedly, often substituting "Mann shows." He never bothers to tell us if Mann is right or wrong about anything. He doesn't tell us if Mann's book is important or unimportant, either. The book simply is, and Holmes has nothing more to do than explain calmly that "the principal architects of the current calamity, in Mann's account [another synonym, for variety], are Cheney and Rumsfeld, with Wolfowitz playing a strong supporting role." Then he calmly spends most of the remainder of the article talking about Wolfowitz.
       Holmes does not say that the book talks a great deal about Wolfowitz, but considering his summarization fixation I think it is a fair assumption. It is always possible of course that Holmes merely has an unrequited crush on the Undersecretary of Defense. But we cannot tell because it is not Holmes job to explain why the parts of the book he summarizes are the important parts. Nor is it his job to explain why Mann may have spent so much time talking about Wolfowitz. A good book review puts the book in context; with Holmes, we get the feeling that we are sacrificing so much of the bulk of the book, such as why Wolfowitz is so important, without gaining any perspective in return. This is especially jarring in a review that talks so much about the big picture:

[T]he basic reality cannot be hidden. A tiny group of individuals, with eccentric ideas and reflexes, has recklessly compounded the country's security nightmare, launching a costly and destabilizing military adventure on publicly unexamined assumptions. ... We knew it already, of course, but it is nevertheless unnerving to read that fateful decisions, perhaps affecting the course of world history, are profoundly influenced by palace intrigue and deadline-driven haste in selecting party loyalists to occupy public offices.

       Holmes enjoys explaining the big picture to us, but it's a pixelized image: without the details of Mann's book, the edges are all fuzzy.

       If Holmes leaves us short of details, Press provides enough minutiae to drown a small farm animal. He begins by telling us that Mr. Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. And, knowing that we have no idea who Daniel Pipes is, explains:

The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station for an interview. Over the next twelve months, Pipes would appear on 110 television and 450 radio shows. His op-eds graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times The New York Post signed him up as a columnist.

       Eyal Press' profile is in-depth the way the television advertisements want you to think of it: he provides a plethora of facts–often trivial–with just a little editorial bias, and all of that clearly labeled. Pipes, it seems, was a student at Harvard in the late sixties. The height of the Vietnam War was a difficult time to be a budding conservative college student, but Pipes wasn't much of an outcast. "He was a bright guy ... We got along real well. I don't recall him being political at all." That's one of his old professors, Richard Bulliet, now at Columbia. Press has done some heavy digging.
       Pipes didn't turn out to be as apolitical as Professor Bulliet thought. In 1982 he became part of the policy planning staff at the State Department, quite possibly through his father, Richard Pipes, who ran the Soviet Affairs Desk in Reagan's NSC. Regardless, he also published a second book while in Washington, on the same subject as his first: Islamic fundamentalism.
       After leaving State, Pipes spent the late '80s and most of the '90s as a wonk, writing essays for The National Interest and Commentary. He became director of the think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute and later founded The Middle East Forum, a think tank dedicated to "promoting American interests" in the region.
       Ah, but I just complained about summary in reviews. Context, then:

Pipe's biggest impact has not come from analyzing foreign affairs. ... Two years ago Pipes launched Campus Watch, an organization whose stated purpose is to expose the ... political bias of the field of Middle Eastern studies. The group's first act was to post McCarthy-style "dossiers" on the Internet singling out eight professors critical of American ... policies. When more than a hundred scholars contacted Campus Watch to request that they be added to the list in a gesture of solidarity, Pipes obliged, labeling them "apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam."

       "McCarthy-style dossiers"? There's that clearly labeled editorial content. But Press does something too many progressive wonks don't: he has listened to what Pipes has to say. This man would be easy to dismiss. In addition to McCarthy-style lists of professors, he has written about "American academics [who] so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes" and, in the late 90's, wrote "West European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."
       This apparently casual racism would make it easy to dismiss Pipes. But Press has done something difficult, especially for those of use understandably sick of Bill O'Rilley. He has seriously considered Pipe's arguments:

Shortly before pipes launched Campus Watch, Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand appeared. The academic establishment, argued Kramer in his more scholarly version of the argument Pipes would soon popularize, had been asleep throughout the 1980s and '90s, producing not a single "serious" study on Osama bin Laden while lavishing attention on so-called Muslim moderates.

I consider the Bruce Willis/Denzel Washington movie The Siege to be a serious study. But never mind about that.

There is some truth to [Pipes accusations]. Books like John Esposito's The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, published in 1992, advanced the then-fashionable view that the danger of Islamic terrorism was overblown. "I think a lot of us were slow to appreciate the real depth of radicalism on the Islamic fringe," acknowledges William Quandt, a professor at the University of Virginia and former fellow at the Brookings Institution.

I have to admire Quandt's ability to question his own conclusions: rational thinking requires self-examination, and self-examination requires knowing that there are things we don't know. In other words, rational people admit they might be wrong. And (now it's time for that snappy last line, to show how witty I am) if we can't apply that standard to ourselves, how can we ask Bill O'Riley to live by it?