Is There a Cure for Media Bias?

One hesitates to discuss media bias. So many writers have written so many articles and books about the bias of the American mainstream media that one feels that the prejudice is so deeply ingrained that it no longer responds to criticism.

Still, one soldiers on, because giving up does not feel right. Besides, of the alternative explanations, one is better than the others.

Peter Wehner asks whether the mainstream media is cynically manipulating the news in order to advance the candidates and agenda it prefers? Or do journalists really believe in their heart of hearts that they are purveying facts objectively?

Wehner compares press coverage of the September 11 terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens with coverage of the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

Benghazi was a monumental failure:

The September 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi. We witnessed a massive failure at three different stages. The first is that the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and others asked for additional protection because of their fears of terrorist attacks. Those requests were denied—and Mr. Stevens became the first American ambassador to be murdered in more than 30 years, along with three others. The second failure was not assisting former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty when they were under attack (both were killed). The third failure was that the administration misled the American people about the causes of the attack long after it was clear to many people that their narrative was false.

Wehner then states the obvious:

In the Benghazi story, we have four dead Americans. A lack of security that borders on criminal negligence. No apparent effort was made to save the lives of Messrs. Woods and Doherty, despite their pleas. The Obama administration, including the president, gave false and misleading accounts of what happened despite mounting evidence to the contrary. And the person who was wrongly accused of inciting the attacks by making a crude YouTube video is now in prison. Yet the press has, for the most part, treated this story with ambivalence and reluctance.

If the exact same incidents had occurred in the exact same order, and if it had happened during the watch of a conservative president, it would be a treated as a scandal. An epic one, in fact. The coverage, starting on September 12 and starting with Mr. Friedman’s newspaper, would have been nonstop, ferociously negative, and the pressure put on the president and his administration would have been crushing. Jon Stewart, the moral conscience of an increasing number of journalists, wouldn’t have let this story die. 

He then describes the media-generated hysteria that surrounded the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity:

It’s not that it hasn’t been covered; it’s that the coverage has lacked anything like the intensity and passion that you would have seen had this occurred during the presidency of, say, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. I have the advantage of having worked in the Reagan administration during Iran-contra and the Bush White House during the Patrick Fitzgerald leak investigation—and there is simply no comparison when it comes to how the press treated these stories. The juxtaposition with the Fitzgerald investigation is particularly damning to the media. Journalists were obsessed by that story, which turned out to be much ado about nothing—Mr. Fitzgerald decided early on there were no grounds to prosecute Richard Armitage for the leak of Valerie Plame’s name—and obsessed in particular with destroying the life of the very good man who was the architect of George W. Bush’s two presidential victories (thankfully they failed in their effort to knee-cap Karl Rove).

Wehner observes:

They appear to be completely blind to their biases and double standards. If you gave them sodium pentothal, they would say they were being objective. Self-examination, it turns out, is harder than self-justification. And of course being surrounded with people who share and reinforce your presuppositions and worldview doesn’t help matters.

In some ways I think it would be better if they were perfectly cynical and were consciously slanting the news. Pretending to have integrity is better than not having any at all.

If this is not true they might simply see themselves as propagandists using their power to destroy those who disagree with them.

If neither of these is true, they have been brainwashed to the point where they believe that they are being objective and fair. They really believe that the Valerie Plame scandal was an unmitigated horror while the Benghazi terrorist attack was, in Tom Friedman’s words, a “tragedy.”

Adding it all up I would rather think of them as cynical. At least then they would know that they are being dishonest.

Obama's Man in Cairo

To survive in the Age of Obama you will need to brush up on your irony. You no longer live in a world where your government says ways it means and means what it says.

John Hinderaker uses irony to reveal the gross disparity between what the administration says and what it means when it comes to Obama's friend in Cairo:

Mubarak was our friend, but a bad guy. So he had to go, and Obama denounced him and helped force him out. Morsi is our enemy, and also is a bad guy. So Obama thinks he’s A-OK, and helped Morsi take power. That’s called “smart diplomacy.” You probably wouldn’t understand.

Other things are confusing, too. Did Obama know that Morsi was about to claim dictatorial powers when he made Morsi the “hero” of the Israel-Gaza cease fire? If so, did he mind? If Obama didn’t know–which seems more likely–does he now think that Morsi double-crossed him by capitalizing on his faux diplomatic mission to proclaim himself a dictator? Or is that one more thing that is A-OK with Obama? If Obama doesn’t like the fact that Morsi has cut “Arab Spring” democracy off at the knees, does he intend to do anything about it? Or, when bad things happen, is it “smart diplomacy” to do nothing and pretend you don’t mind?

Investor’s Business Daily also compares administration statements about the last year’s Arab Spring with this year’s Morsi coup:

Just don't expect White House press secretary Jay Carney to announce that the Egyptian people's "grievances have reached a boiling point, and they have to be addressed," as his predecessor Robert Gibbs did when Mubarak was on the ropes.

And don't hold your breath for Clinton — or whoever her successor is at the State Department — to call for "an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy" in which "the people just keep staying in power and become less and less responsive," as she said two years ago during street demos against Mubarak.

It took 24 hours for Morsi to take advantage of the prestige Obama and his secretary of state handed him. Now he's using America's stamp of approval to oppress his own people.

We can choose between thinking that the administration speaks with forked tongue or that it favors an Islamist regime in Cairo.

Is Therapy Dying Out?

Call me prescient.

When I began this blog four and a half years ago I named it “Had Enough Therapy?”

It didn’t make me a lot of friends in the therapy world.

Yet I could see around me that traditional psychotherapy, the kind that peddled insight and understanding had outlived its usefulness. If, indeed, it ever had any.

Patients no longer wanted it. Insurance companies were refusing to pay for it.

It had lost out in free market competition. Patients preferred medication and cognitive-behavioral treatments.

They had also discovered that four hours a week on the treadmill will improve your mood while four hours on the couch would disprove it. Come to think of it, the choice was obvious.

Psychotherapy was losing customers because it did not provide what it was supposed to provide. When a product does not offer value, consumers they look elsewhere.  

So said I in a post four years ago.

By now the therapy profession has caught up. Within limits, of course. It doesn’t really understand why it no longer attracts patients, but it knows that the party is over.

Lori Gottlieb sums it up today in a long article in the New York Times Magazine.

In her words:

What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?” According to the author, 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they did 11 years earlier; since the 1990s, managed care has increasingly limited visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment; and in 2005 alone, pharmaceutical companies spent $4.2 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising and $7.2 billion on promotion to physicians, nearly twice what they spent on research and development.

According to the A.P.A., therapists had to start paying attention to what the marketplace demanded or we risked our livelihoods. It wasn’t long before I learned that an entirely new specialized industry had cropped up: branding consultants for therapists.

So far so good.

Therapists lost out because they have no sense of reality. They are all about image and feeling. Seeing their business crash they have decided that the profession needs to be rebranded. That is, it needs an image make-over.

Since Gottlieb is not a very clear thinker, she spends much of her article explaining that she, as a trained therapist, is not just rebranding herself. She has begun to offer an entirely different service: she has started working as a life coach.

When they know what they are doing, coaches are not doing therapy. They are helping people to solve real problems and real dilemmas in the real world.

When Gottlieb consults with Casey Truffo, a former therapist become branding consultant, she hears this:

“Nobody wants to buy therapy anymore,” Truffo told me. “They want to buy a solution to a problem.” This is something Truffo discovered in her own former private practice of 18 years, during which she saw a shift from people who were unhappy and wanted to understand themselves better to people who would come in “because they wanted someone else or something else to change,” she said. “I’d see fewer and fewer people coming in and saying, ‘I want to change.’ ”

People no longer want the ephemeral change that comes from self-understanding.

Of course, no one asks whether change is change for the better or the worst. 

Gottlieb wants to show us that her six years of graduate training were not for nothing, so she follows the time-honored therapeutically-correct path and blames everyone but herself and her training for the problem.

Why has the marketplace cast such a negative judgment on therapy?

First, therapeutically correct self-awareness encourages patients to withdraw from their lives, the better to transform them into new stories.

It’s better to live your life than to narrate it.

Second, the therapy that Gottlieb spend years learning offers patients little more than a warm bath of empathy.

Since therapy is now a woman’s profession, it teaches aspiring therapists, both male and female, how best to mother their patients.

Many years ago young women therapists claimed they could offer something that male therapists could not: that experience of being mothered with empathy.

It was inevitable that clients would wake up to the fact that you do not need six years of graduate training to learn how to mother or to empathize.

Once patients decided that they would rather solve their problems than share the pain, they decamped from the offices of these mother therapists.

If are now seeking out coaches who will help them to solve their problems, we should applaud, not whine.

Unfortunately, Gottlieb and her team of consultants seem to prefer whining about the current state of affairs.

Significantly, Gottlieb’s fails to acknowledge the importance of cognitive and behavioral therapy.

Since cognitive treatment is notably more effective than empathy baths and emotional insights patients increasingly prefer it.

In much of Gottlieb’s drawn out article she shares her feelings about changing from therapy to coaching. She does not understand that sharing feelings is not very interesting or very useful activity.

Finally, she blames the world because it is not interested in something that she spent six years learning.

In her words:

It’s precisely this double bind in which many of my colleagues and I feel caught. If we give modern consumers the efficiency and convenience they want, we also have to silence our nagging sense that we may be pandering to our patients rather than helping them. Will we do therapy in 140 characters or less, or will we stick to our beliefs but get a second job to put food on the table? It’s one thing to be more than a blank slate and even to focus on finding solutions, but will we throw away so many doctrines of our training that we cease being therapists entirely? The more we continue in this direction of fast-food therapy — something that feels good but isn’t as good for you; something palatable without a lot of substance — the more tempted many of us will be to indulge.

After explaining that her coaching practice has produce more beneficial results than her therapy work Gottlieb begins to flagellate herself for “pandering.”

Inadvertently, Gottlieb tells you all you need to know about why no one wants to do therapy any more. For all of their graduate training therapists cannot even think straight; they are stuck in a world of image and feeling. They whine about reality and fail to develop clear concepts.

Why would anyone pay for such an intellectually inferior product?

Is Breast Cancer Overdiagnosed?

Yikes is the word. Writing at Jezebel Laura Beck has found just the right word to describe the latest research on the value of mammograms.

Americans believe in mammograms. They believe in preventative testing. They believe that the sooner you catch an incipient tumor the better the chances for effective treatment.

Americans believe so strongly in mammograms that President Obama made a campaign issue out of the Republican proposal to defund Planned Parenthood. He claimed that Republicans would thereby deprive countless women of their access to mammograms.

Of course, Planned Parenthood does not perform mammograms, but why let reality get in the way of a good story line.

Anyway, most of what we think we know about mammograms turns out to be questionable.

Allow Laura Beck to summarize the new research:

Roughly one third of tumors found in routine mammography screenings are "unlikely to result in illness, according to a new study that says 30 years of the breast cancer exams have resulted in the overdiagnosis of 1.3 million American women."

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, claims that the increase in breast cancer survival rates over the last few decades is because of improved therapies and not screenings, and not because of the widespread use of mammograms. In fact, the widespread mammogram usage resulted in overdiagnosis of breast cancer in roughly 70,000 women a year. Which is a problem as being diagnosed with breast cancer is a big fucking deal — think about the cost, anxiety, radiation exposure, false positives, and overtreatment. Yikes.

"Our study raises serious questions about the value of screening mammography," wrote Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine. "It clarifies that the benefit of mortality reduction is probably smaller, and the harm of overdiagnosis probably larger, than has been previously recognized."

Breast cancer screening are often unnecessary. In many cases they cause harm. 

1,300,000 women have been overdiagnosed because the tumors discovered by mammograms will probably not become illness.

And then, Beck adds, think of how much this overdiagnosis costs in emotional well-being and in aggressive cancer treatment.

As for the idea that screening has helped increase the survival rate of breast cancer victims, Dr. Welsh asserted that the improved results derive from improved treatments, not from early detection.

He concludes that women who are at higher risk for breast cancer should receive mammograms but that the test is not necessarily appropriate for everyone.

Naturally, the research is controversial. Beck adds the opinion of a physician who believes that Welsh’s research is bunk.

Singapore: Less Emotional, More Prosperous

A new Gallup poll has just discovered that Singapore is the least emotional nation on the planet. Gallup also determined that the Philippines is the most emotional country in the world.

Naturally, the Gallup pollsters consider that the people of Singapore are missing out on the good things in life. They might be rich but they are not, according to Gallup, really enjoying their wealth.

The Guardian reports:

"If you measure Singapore by the traditional indicators, they look like one of the best-run countries in the world," Gallup's Jon Clifton was quoted as saying in a Bloomberg report on the survey. "But if you look at everything that makes life worth living, they're not doing so well."

If you live in a therapy bubble, you might actually believe that your emotional state defines your happiness. You might even believe that a life filled with emotional storm and stress is a good life. And you might believe that living in one of the freest, most prosperous nations on earth is bad for your emotional well-being.

Of course, Singapore has the highest per capita GDP in theworld. Depending on how you calculate it, it is between $50,000 and $60,000. The per capita GDP of the Philippines was closer to $2,300.

Where would you like to live?

Of course, Singapore has both good and bad. It does not rate very high on the free expression or free assembly scales. Yet, when it comes to other measures of freedom it surpasses even America.

Wikipedia explains:

The Singaporean economy is known as one of the freest,^[58] most innovative,^[59] most competitive,^[60] and most business-friendly.^[61] The 2011 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Singapore as the second freest economy in the world, behind Hong Kong. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, Singapore is consistently ranked as one of the least corrupt countries in the world, along with New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries.

Is Gallup correct to see a direct correlation between emotionality and happiness? Of course, not. People in the Philippines are wallowing in emotion, but they are also the most depressed in their region.

According to the Guardian:

In the Philippines – which ranked as the world's most emotional society, followed by El Salvador and Bahrain – analysts were quick to point out that being emotional doesn't necessarily equate with being happy. One reporter at GMA News stressed that the nation ranked 103rd out of 155 countries in the 2012 World Happiness Report – and that its 95 million inhabitants are said to be the most depressed in all of south-east Asia.

You would think that the conclusions would be obvious. Apparently, this is not the case.

To summarize: if you have to choose between a culture where people are relatively unemotional and a culture where people are relatively emotional, then the choice is clear: the first is associated with prosperity; the second is associated with depression.

If you want to achieve economic growth and prosperity, you need less, not more therapy.

In a dysfunctional culture people are more emotional because they do not understand what is going on and have little power to change things.

In a functional culture people do not need to emote all the time. They employ their rational faculties to solve problems because the problems are solvable. If the problems are not solvable, then they will fall back on plan B-- they will become slaves to their emotions.

But why does the Gallup organization persist in itss absurd idea when the evidence shows that the most emotional nation is also the most depressed?

Hillary's Much-Praised Diplomatic Failure

Fresh from his victory in Gaza, Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi quickly moved to consolidate his power.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, coming off a heady week of high-stakes diplomacy that thrust his government onto the international stage, pushed to consolidate his power at home with a set of decrees aimed at sidelining a judiciary that has been one of the last institutions challenging the Islamist government.

The declarations, which appeared to stun the Obama administration, brought into the open a long-simmering confrontation between Mr. Morsi's Islamist government and a judiciary that is populated with many secular-leaning judges appointed by the former regime of Hosni Mubarak.

U.S. officials on Thursday said there was no indication that Mr. Morsi was going to make this move when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Cairo Wednesday, and the administration widely praised the Egyptian president for brokering the cease-fire between the militant group Hamas and Israel that also involved the U.S. and a host of regional powers. The agreement ended more than a week of Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and repeated bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli military.

Since Obama administration policy has wanted to enhance the power and prestige of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt, one does not quite understand why it is surprised. Who did it think it was dealing with?

As for the overview of Hillary Clinton’s much-praised diplomatic failure, David Goldman offers the best analysis:

Hamas fires 275 rockets at Israel and is rewarded with de facto acceptance as a legitimate negotiating partner in the Middle East peace process, as well as with a relaxation of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast. Israel is prevented from exacting a price for Hamas’ actions sufficient to deter future attacks or degrade Hamas’ capabilities. In one stroke, the Obama administration has overturned thirty years of American policy, which rejected negotiations with Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Secretary of State Clinton, to be sure, did not negotiate directly with Hamas, but rather with Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi, who supported Hamas unequivocally and encouraged its attacks on Israel. Morsi is the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian chapter. It is astonishing that American officials and the world media have hailed Morsi simply because he first sicced his dog on his neighbor, and then called the dog off.

As readers of this blog know, Goldman has been among the best guides to current events in the Middle East. Again, I am happy to recommend his analysis. It’s well worth a read.

The Proper Show of Gratitude

Today we Americans will join together as one people to consume the remains of our ancestral totem animal: the turkey.

Yes, I know, you thought that the great American totem was the bald eagle… but, have you ever tried to eat a roasted bald eagle?

At Thanksgiving we express our gratitude for a bountiful harvest. We are especially grateful for the bounty that God gave us… on credit. As long as God, that is, the Fed keeps the credit flowing we are going to be just fine.

We Americans are a grateful lot. We love Thanksgiving, perhaps above all holidays.

Thus, this is a good time to ask how well we show gratitude in our everyday lives.

As the old saying goes, once is not enough. Saying thank-you one day a year does not make you an individual of sterling character. It means that you like a good party.

To build character you need to learn to say thank-you often, sincerely, under the appropriate circumstances. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done.

Sue Shellenbarger explained yesterday that American business is suffering from a gratitude deficit. Everyone knows, in the abstract that good management requires frequent expressions of gratitude. 

And yet, we are far more likely to say thank-you to friends, family and neighbors than we are toward the people we work with.

Shellenbarger writes:

The workplace ranks dead last among the places people express gratitude, from homes and neighborhoods to places of worship. Only 10% of adults say thanks to a colleague every day, and just 7% express gratitude daily to a boss, according to a survey this year of 2,007 people for the John Templeton Foundation of West Conshohocken, Pa., a nonprofit organization that sponsors research on creativity, gratitude, freedom and other topics.

Everyone knows that frequent injections of gratitude, especially from the person in charge create a better office culture.

But when you ask why it is expressed so infrequently, the answer seems to be that people do not know how to do it. They fear getting it wrong.

In Shellenbarger’s words:

Some bosses are afraid employees will take advantage of them if they heap on the gratitude. Other managers believe in thank-yous but are nervous about appearing awkward or insincere—or embarrassing the employee they wish to praise.

In truth, getting gratitude right is far more difficult than you think. Saying it the right way to the right person at the right time with the right feeling is a very difficult task.

The best way to understand the problem is to follow Shellenbarger as she outlines the wrong ways to express gratitude.

Relying on consultant Bob Nelson, Shellenbarger outlines the wrong ways to express gratitude.

First, if a manager expresses gratitude in a rote exercise offered to the staff at a designated time, regardless of whether anyone has done anything to deserve it, his expression will sound insincere. 

Second, if a manager offers gratitude promiscuously, it will lose its meaning. When a manager who has never allowed the words thank-you pass his lips reads an article one day and decides to offer effusive expressions of gratitude to everyone all the time, regardless of whether it was deserved, his words will ring hollow.

Third, if a manager qualifies his gratitude by saying that your work was riddled with mistakes he is taking back what he is giving.

Fourth, if the expression is too little too late, it becomes less significant. If the manager waits too long before saying thank-you it will appear to be an afterthought, thus, insincere.

Fifth, if the manager is using thank-you to manipulate an employee, his gratitude is self-interested. If he has an ulterior motive to expressing gratitude-- like trying to induce the person to work late-- than his gratitude is insincere.

Those are the wrong ways to express gratitude. Unfortunately, no one ever learns how to get it right without getting it wrong a few times.