Inaccurate Polling

I've kept thinking about a piece I read last week in The Hill, It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling. The author, W Joseph Campbell, is not the better-known Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the academic quack who promoted myth and folklore. Whether W Joseph even rises to the level of quackery, I'm not sure. His thumbnail says he is a professor emeritus of communication at American University. Here's his argument:

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

. . . [T]he phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal. Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

This starts with the assumption that polls are intended to be predictive. If that were the case, it seems to me that there would be a concerted effort among the pollsters' customers -- legacy media -- to increase their predictive accuracy, especially if their performance in the last two presidential election cycles was as disastrous as Prof Campbell says it was.

I think a better starting point is to recognize what Rush Limbaugh understood throughout his career, that polls are intended to manipulate the news, not report it. As he said on September 10, 2012,

The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you, and they want to suppress your vote.

On January 19, 2018, he said,

I don’t trust the polls that are published anymore. As wrong as they were about the general election, as wrong as they were about the special elections that happened last year, the polls are nothing more than a tool for making public opinion. The polls are not taken to reflect public opinion at all. The primary purpose of polls is to depress and dispirit Republican voters by making them feel constantly like they’re in the minority.

The purpose of polls is to reinforce among Republican voters that there’s no hope, that no matter what it might look like, Republican voters are a very tiny minority of the thinking in this country.

He generally explained that the pollsters do this by consistently oversampling self-identified Democrats and undersampling Republicans with various justifications, and their results then reinforce the opinions they prefer -- which are often what their customers, the legacy media outlets, prefer.

In the wake of the 2020 election, the Pew Research Institute did a detailed study on the possible effects of oversampling Democrats in polling, almost certainly in implicit response to Limbaugh's allegations. It looked at potential polling outcomes with an oversampling of Democrats versus a more realistic sampling and found little difference:

The adjustment from the tilted version (a 12-point Biden advantage with a 10-point Democratic advantage in party affiliation among nonvoters) to the balanced version (a 4.4-point Biden advantage with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans among nonvoters), makes very little difference in the balance of opinion on issue questions. Across a set of 48 opinion questions and 198 answer categories, most answer categories changed less than 0.5%. The average change associated with the adjustment was less than 1 percentage point, and approximately twice that for the margin between alternative answers (e.g., favor minus oppose). The maximum change observed across the 48 questions was 3 points for a particular answer and 5 points for the margin between alternative answers.

One 3-point difference was on presidential job approval, a measure very strongly associated with the vote. In the balanced version, 39 percent approved of Trump’s job performance, while 58 percent disapproved. In the tilted version, 36 percent approved of Trump’s performance and 60 percent disapproved. Two other items also showed a 3-point difference on one of the response options.

But 3 points nationally is still a 3% error, not negligible at all, and this omits the bigger problem in recent presidential elections, where they've hinged not on the national popular vote, but on the outcomes in swing states and their effect on the Electoral College vote. What if we were to revise Biden's numbers in current polls down by 3 points? One thing that now seems to be happening is that polls that have proven highly inaccurate in the recent past, like Quinnipiac, are feeding outlier results into the Real Clear Politics average. This must certainly be deliberate, and RCP is enabling this effect.

Thus we're seeing what I think are troubling indicators of the national mood, like the emrgence of conspiracy theories surrounding relatively minor events like the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge, or a real uptick in self-immolation protests, contrasting with happy-face statistics like an RCP national polling average showing Trump ahead by only 0.3 points. Real things are happening that aren't being reported.

Frankly, this can't be right. Part of the mainstream obliviousness is Prof Campbell's assumption that the pollsters' customers want accuracy. He quotes David A. Graham's Atlantic piece:

Graham’s essay anticipated the “snapshot-in-time” defense favored by pollsters, writing: “If their snapshots are so far off, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother?” He noted that “the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens [in elections]. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed.”

But I think Limbaugh was much more insightful, the customers want to shape the news, not report it. Prof Campbell completely misses that point.

Reflections On Uncle Bosey

It's taken me a couple of days to absorb fully the implications of Joe's Uncle Bosey remarks, which he gave twice on Wednesday, April 17. Here's the transcipt of the key remarks in the second version that he gave in Pittsburgh, which are also covered in the YouTube clip above:

And my uncle — they called him Un- — Ambrose — instead of “Brosie,” they called him “Bosie.” My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones.

And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.

The schoolmarms in the media promptly fact-checked this, and I'm not going to spend time repeating the historical version. But several features of the Pittsburgh episode in particular popped out to me. The first is the dutiful politeness of the facial expressions on the union members who stood behind him. This reminded me of a report from another stop he made in Pittsburgh that day:

Biden stopped at a gas station this week to order food in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Upon entering, few flocked to interact with him. Most patrons stood by, did not hold out their hands, and watched the president walk past.

Biden tried to speak with a girl when he entered the station, but after receiving little interaction, he slowly marched on while cameras followed and onlookers pressed themselves up against the wall. Biden posed for a few photos before he walked to the door.

Everyone is being polite -- this is the leader of the free world, after all. Everyone's anxious to get this over with. But now, it seems that even pre-teen girls are wary of him.

The second big takeaway is his delivery. Initially, I was going to approach this from the perspective of The King's Speech, in which the speech therapist Lionel Logue discovers that George VI, plagued with a stammer that's persisted since childhood, can do things like sing or shout cusswords without stammering. At first, I thought that Joe had delivered the Uncle Bosey story without -- or at least, with less of -- the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism with which he delivers more scripted remarks.

But reviewing the segment above, I began to recognize several things. The first is that these aren't spontaneous remarks, this is the second time he's told this story that day. In fact, he's clerly glancing down at notes while he's talking about his uncle and the cannibals, and apparently his big point, which is repeated in both the transcripts of the Uncle Bosey story, is that Bosey's heroism stands in contrast to Trump's calling American war dead “suckers” and “losers.”

Well, that got lost in the shuffle when it turned out that Uncle Bosey wasn't eaten by cannibals after all. This is not "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" level oratory, even if someone wrote it out for him. But the second problem is that, although there's somewhat less slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism in his remarks than there was, for instance in Friday's speech to the electrical workers:

You — by the way, go on out and ask people who know you — that you’re acquainted with who aren’t in the business at all, “What’s it take to be an electrician?” You say, “Oh, well, you just say (inaudible). You get a little bit of training.” Four to five years of training to become an electrician. You’re the best in the world. That’s why it’s the (inaudible). (Applause.)

the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism is still there, teleprompter or no.

We're back to Nate Silver's recommendation from last February that I linked again the other day, that Joe get out and do unscripted, improvisational encounters. The problem is that they're all scripted. Someone thought the Uncle Bosey story would look like a spontaneous personal aside, but it was clearly written for him on notes that he looked down to read as he spoke, and he stumbled through the same remarks twice -- and scripted as they were, they were nevertheless dumb remarks that drew all the attention from the intended point.

When the opportunity arises for truly unscripted encounters, as might have happened in the Wawa and Sheetz stores in Pennsylvania this past week, he just shuffles glumly through them. It might be that he comes off as unapproachable, but I almost wonder if, as apparently happens frequently with the pre-teen girls he approaches himself, he comes off as someone people don't want to be approached by, either.

And this brings me back to something I've mentioned before, the features we frequently see in his speech, scripted or spontaneous, include slurring and hypercorrection, which are featues of speech that an experienced police officer would immediately recognize as indicating intoxication. This is borne out in the Pittsburgh clip at the top this post as well -- for much of the segment, his facial fwatures are flaccid, numb, and unexpressive, which I was taught many years ago is how the term s***faced is derived. For that matter, his tone often trails off into maudlin-confidential and barely audible.

His remarks at Scranton the other day, when he breought up Uncle Bosey the first time, included a number of other debunked stories, including

We had just finished spring football practice at the University of Delaware. And I had been named as the likely starting safety that year and — next year.

But the one that I think has the least credibility of all, no matter how many times he tells it, is this one:

I’m the only Scrantonian and the only Irishman you’ve ever met that’s never had a drink in his life because too many people have too many drinks in their life, in my opinion.

This man is plastered, pretty much all day, every day. The big mystery is why nobody has called him on it. I suspect that people who know him even a little bit, from Obama on down, have known this for decades and are keeping quiet.

This Is Rare -- Why Are We Seeing More Of It?

According to Wikipedia,

The Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam saw the persecution of the country's majority religion under the administration of Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. Several Buddhist monks, including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức, immolated themselves in protest.

The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century sparked similar acts between 1963 and 1971, most of which occurred in Asia and the United States in conjunction with protests opposing the Vietnam War. Researchers counted almost 1000 self-immolations covered by The New York Times and The Times.

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, an anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

Wikipedia has a separate entry containing a list of "political" self-immolations beginning in 1948. The vast majority of these took place outside the US, and indeed mostly in India, Southeast Asia, and China. In the West, they were often protests against Communist regimes. But the overall pattern of the list confirms my impression that most in the US took place in the 1960s and 1970s in protest of the Viet Nam War.

Four people, Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, amd Celene Jankowski, set themaelves on fire in the US on 1965, presumably following the Vietnamese examples. Then, after a year, two people, Florence Beaumont and Erik Thoen, set themselves on fire in 1967, followed by one, Ronald Brazee, in 1968. In 1969, Bruce Mayrock set himself on fire, not in protest of the Viet Nam War, but in protest of genocide against Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War.

In 1970, two people in the US self-immolated in protest of the Viet Nam War, Robert Rex Vice and George Winne Jr., both in the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings. Things were then quiet for more than a decade until 1986, when Orland Payne McCafferty set himself on fire to protest Reagan's policies. In 1987, Antoine Thurel set himself in fire in Boston to protest conditions in Haiti. In 1988, Mehrdad Imen set himself on fire in New York to protest human rights abuses in Iran.

In 1993, Binh Gia Pham set himself on fire in Boston to protest persecution of Buddhists in Viet Nam. In 1996, Kathleen Chang, going under the name Kathy Change, set herself on fire in Philadelphia to protest conditions in general. In 2011, Thomas James Ball set himself on fire outside a New Hampshire courthouse to protest family court injustice. In 2014, Thu Hoang set himself on fire, apparently to protest a Chinese oil rig. A few days later, Charles R Moore set himself on fire in Texas to protest racism in the town where he grew up.

In 2016, Charles Ingram self-immolated to protest corruption in the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2018, David Buckel set himself on fire to protest fossil fuels; Chloe Sagal self-immolated to protest homelessness and mental health issues; John Watts set himself on fire to protest corruption at the Department of Veterans Affairs; Nicholas McCrary set himself on fire to protest involuntary celibacy. Four people in 2018 matches the highest number in 1965.

In 2019, Amav Gupta, from India, set himself on fire outside the White House for unknown reasons. In 2020, Linda J. Zhang self-immolated to protest climate change. In 2022, Wynn Bruce (no relation) set himself on fire outside the Supreme Court to protest climate change. In 2023, Chet Bohrer, a non-student, self-immolated on the UC Berkeley campus to protest bullying in Utah.

And now we have two incidents in the sort of quick succession that we haven't seen since 1970; on February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and just yesterday, Maxwell Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside the New York courthouse in which the Trump trial is being held. His specific reasons appear to involve conspiracy theories that aren't necessarily related to Trump.

So in the US, the self-immolation phenomenon began in the Viet Nam War era, a time of great social change, followed after 1970 by a 16-year interval of no self-immolation protests at all; one a year in the late 1980s, then a couple in the mid 1990s -- and then another 15-year interval ending in 2011, with incidents beginning to ramp up again since then.

Azzarello's motives were unclear. According to the New York Post,

The self-described “investigative researcher” traveled to New York City in recent days from Florida without his family knowing and had been protesting in front of the courthouse where he bashed political leaders from both sides of the aisle.

“This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” Azzarello wrote in part of a rambling manifesto on the Substack page.

. . . Azzarello was previously arrested three times across several days in the Sunshine State that included charges of disturbing the peace and damage to property last August.

Following his third arrest, Florida cops noted he was suicidal and listed him as unemployed, per police reports.

On one hand, the Azzarello episode and the uptick of those preceding it for the past decade can be attributed to growing issues of homelessness and untreated mental health problems. On the other, we're looking at conditions of social change that are bringing about phenomena that we haven't seen since the 1960s and early 1970s -- except that counterculture fringe figures seized the limelight then, like Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver -- but their mainstream political allies, like Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and George McGovern, proved feckless. There are no equivalent counterculture figures now, while one political agent of change, Donald Trump, is proving highly effective.

These developments are at least driving me to think we're in conditions like the 1960s and early 1970s, but I'm not ready to say much more than that at the moment.

Joe Is Being Forced To Campaign

I was scratching my head about four vignettes featuring Joe over the past few days and trying to put them in the context of the conventional wisdom from Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics:

There’s little doubt at this point that President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved. In late January of this year, former President Donald Trump led Biden in national head-to-head polls by as many as 4.3 points. As of today, Trump’s lead sits at just two-tenths of a percentage point. Why might we be seeing this?

One answer I might give is that several outlier polls came in over the past couple of weeks that had the effect of skewing the Real Clear Politics average in Biden's favor, which I think was the intent, and Trende for whatever reason is buying into this. In fact, in the first sentence of the quote above, he's comparing apples and oranges -- Trump led Biden in individual polls by "as many as 4.3 points" but he new leads the RCP average by just two tenths. That's basically a meaningless statement.

But what's happening in the real world? Two months ago I linked to an essay by Nate Silver, It's time for the White House to put up or shut up, in which he prescribed a strategy for Biden to improve his prospects for November.

Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

. . . The White House has worked with Biden for a long time and they know his performance varies based on the setting, who he’s taking questions from, and his fatigue level. So what do they do? Well, they do their best to lop off the bottom part of the graph by making excuses for Biden to avoid these IPAs or never scheduling them in the first place.

. . . [As a result of this strategy,] when we see Biden’s public appearances, we’re only getting a truncated sample. And the results still aren't very good.

The analogy is to an NBA player who’s aging and losing his shot. If he only takes wide-open jumpers, his shooting percentage may remain tolerable — but you can observe the decline in his skills from the lack of shooting volume.

Silver's actual prescription was that Joe should do more sit-down interviews with serious journalists. Well, the closest we came this week was "don't move on Haifa".

This comes during an interview with Reshad Hudson from Nexstar Media, where President Biden mistakenly referred to the Israeli city of Haifa as Rafah, a city in Gaza.

He then added, "And I made it clear to Israelis – don’t move on Haifa." The intended reference was to Rafah, a city located in the southern Gaza Strip, bordering Egypt and also a major crossing point.

The problem Silver can't escape is that Biden simply doesn't do well with IPAs, and in fact, he seldom has, ever. But the Haifa episode was just the start. Tuesday also brought the hotel bathroom ramble:

. . . And I was in one of those 8-by-10 bathrooms — you know they have a shower, a toilet, and a sink. And I got a towel on me and shaving cream, and I hear, “Bam, bam, bam,” at my door really loudly. And I wonder, “What the hell is that?”

And I walked to the door and opened it up and standing there was the former governor of the state of Delaware, Elbert N. Carvel, a big guy, about six-five. Talked at you like this. (Pronounced in an accent.) (Laughter.) And the state representative who got defeated four years earlier as a Democratic state rep — who was retired — and one of the — from the family that had more so — more senators appointed than any other family in American history, the — the Tunnells — and a former retired Justice and the — and the state chairman.

And they said — and I’m standing in a towel with shaving cream on my face. (Laughter.) And with that, they looked at me and said — they come in and said, “We’re — we’re coming — we just had dinner. We want to talk to you.”

And I walked in, and I said, “Okay, gentlemen.” And I ran to the bathroom thinking I could put something on. (Laughter.) All I could do is take off the shaving cream. I had on a towel. I walked out — two headboards nailed to one side of the wall, the desk to the other side.

And I’m st- — they’re — he’s sitting on the end of the bed. And I’m sitting down, and they said, “Joe, we just had dinner, and we think you should run for the Senate.”

And then there was the visit to the Wawa store where he couldn't figure out how to close the takeout box:

Biden just stopped by to visit another gas station. He was greeted by 0 supporters.

This is the 2nd time in 24 hours.pic.twitter.com/Jjzq4skqVP

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 18, 2024

This calls to mind a campaign event from back in 1992, George H W Bush's supermarket scanner moment:

A supermarket scanner moment is a political gaffe in which a politician is portrayed as out-of-touch with everyday affairs. The term derives from a 1992 New York Times report that characterized sitting U.S. President George H. W. Bush as being amazed by commonplace supermarket barcode scanner technology at a grocers' convention. Political commentators widely spread the story, portraying Bush as unfamiliar with daily American life. Though other major media outlets soon refuted the report as a mischaracterization, the popular memory of Bush's reported amazement at a supermarket scanner remains one of the most enduring American political myths.

And then there was Joe's Uncle Bosie, who was eaten by cannibals:

Was President Joe Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals? That appears to be what he suggested − twice − this week when he said the remains of his uncle, a military veteran who died during World War II in a plane crash off the New Guinea coast, were not recovered.

Biden's telling differed from an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which says Biden's uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, and two other men "failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash."

. . . "And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be − there were a lot of cannibals − for real − in that part of New Guinea," Biden continued.

Cearly the White House is responding to a perceived problem, which must certainly be Joe's continued poor standing in the polls. And they're clearly following some version of Nate Silver's advice: get him into more unscripted "improvisational public appearances", sit-down interviews, gas station visits, chats with union workers, and so forth. I think Silver was being optimistic when he made that recommendation back in February; he thought Joe could do well in some, less well in others, and it was the White House's job to limit his overall appearances but pick the ones where he could play to his strengths.

So far, this isn't working. Joe without a script is likely to be a disaster, but even Joe with a script shows him slurring, dyslexic, and fighting the teleprompter. Silver admits Joe has good days and bad days, but the problem is that putting him on the campaign trail with multiple weekly events is tiring him out, and it's going to increase the number of bad days and bad IPAs. But this is precisely the situation his campaign was able to avoid in 2020: they had him scripted from the basement. Apparently the thinking this year is they can't do this, they have to get him out, active, and interacting, and it's turning out to be one supermarket scanner moment after another.

Who Is Katherine Maher?

I've long had an interest in the sociology of what C Wright Mills called the power elite, modified by Ferdinand Lundberg's view that a somewhat smaller cabal of powerful families and their retainers actually controls the planet.

Over the past week or so, we've seen a new star rise in what must be that constellation, Katherine Maher, named at age 41 to be CEO of National Public Radio this past January with no journalistic experience, although she has a lengthy resume in foreign policy and non-profit circles. Uri Berliner had little to say about her directly in the critical essay that led to his resignation, except to say,

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

But this is an example of what I accused Berliner of yesterday, obliviousness. Katherine Maher has never been "a leader in tech", so let's start by taking a look at her real backgound. Via Wikipedia,

Maher grew up in Wilton, Connecticut, and attended Wilton High School. After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that developed her interest in the Middle East. Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d'études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia.

In 2005, Maher received a bachelor's degree from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

Maher originally intended to be an academic and work for human rights and international development organizations.

Two key markers are conspicuously missing here -- she went to a public high school, not a prestigious private prep school, and she didn't go to an Ivy-level university. I did a web search on NYU, and I found a number of opinions along this line:

Things may have changed, but when I was growing up here/applying to college, NYU had a reputation for being the school that wealthy parents with more dollars than sense sent their kids to because they HAD to come to school here. You know that USC scandal? That's how NYU was perceived, all the way. Wealthy parents who had money to blow spending $60k a year on their kids to come here "take advantage of the city", i.e. partying hard and enjoying life downtown, with few repercussions because their parents were millionaires anyway. It was known much more for its glamorous/wealthy students rather than its intellectual rigor; but I'm 32 so maybe that all has changed in the intervening years.

In other words, it kinda sounds to me as if NYU is to New York as USC is to LA, and I say that as someone who has taught and studied at USC. But what about Ms Maher's susequent career? Back to Wikipedia:

After internships at the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group, in 2004 and 2005, respectively, Maher began working at HSBC in London, Germany, and Canada as part of their international manager development program.

So OK, it looks like she was being fast-tracked into the kind of foreign policy positions she'd studied for in the Arabic program in Cairo and in Lebanon and Tunisia. In fact, I would almost say she was being groomed for some sort of deep-state intelligence-related work in that area -- but then, no more spooking, she's doing banking. And then banking doesn't work out. Things quickly turn gaseous:

In 2007, Maher returned to New York City, where from 2007 to 2010, she worked at UNICEF as an innovation and communication officer. She worked to promote the use of technology to improve people's lives. She traveled extensively to work on issues related to maternal health, HIV/AIDS prevention, and youth participation in technology. One of her first projects at UNICEF involved testing MediaWiki extensions related to accessibility in Ethiopia. Another project received USAid Development 2.0 Challenge grant funding to work on the use of mobile phones to monitor nutrition in children in Malawi.

MediaWiki extensions related to accessibility in Ethiopia? What on earth is that? And this must be from her own resume -- hire me as a key member of your team, I worked on MediaWiki extensions related to accessibility in Ethiopia! Not only that, but I worked on the use of mobile phones to monitor nutrition in children in Malawi!

For several more years, there was more gaseousness, for instance consulting

on technology for international development and democratization, working on ICT for accountability and governance with a focus on the role of mobile phones and other technologies in facilitating civil society and institutional reform, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.

Then she worked at widely disparate jobs for a year or two at a time.

From 2013 to 2014, Maher was advocacy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Access Now. . . . Maher was chief communications officer of the Wikimedia Foundation from April 2014 to March 2016. . . . Maher became interim executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in March 2016 following the resignation of executive director Lila Tretiko. . . . In 2019, Maher became CEO of Wikimedia. She proposed potentially paying contributors to help address gaps in diversity. Maher stepped down from her positions as CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on April 15, 2021.

Then there's a three-year gap. At least back in the day, HR departments didn't like to see gaps like that on a resume; they could be covering up for, say, a stretch in prison, or maybe rehab. Whatever the explanation here, when she left Wikimedia, nobody seems to have wanted to hire her for useful work. Instead, after the three-year lacuna, it was back to non-profits:

From 2022 to 2023, Maher was a member of the US State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an expert panel established in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to advise US officials. As of 2023, she chairs the board of directors of the Signal Foundation. She is also the board chair of nonprofit organization, Adventure Scientists as of January 2023. In October that year, Web Summit appointed Maher as its new chief executive, to replace Paddy Cosgrave.

Wait a moment. Web Summit named her CEO in October of 2023, but she became CEO of NPR in March 2024? Sounds like something didn't work out bigly at Web Summit. I asked the web what Web Summit does and got this answer:

Web Summit’s mission has been to create software that enables meaningful connections between the CEOs, founders, investors, media, politicians and cultural figureheads who are reshaping the world.

In other words, it puts out gas, which seems to be the one thing Ms Maher has wide experience in doing. The overall impression I have is that her career has mostly involved trying one or another field and moving on to another without accomplishing much in any. But why does she keep moving from CEO position to CEO position? So far, I can get ony a partial answer. Wikipedia says her mother is Ceci Maher,

an American executive and politician. She currently serves as a member of the Connecticut State Senate, representing District 26, which encompasses Darien, New Canaan, Redding, Ridgefield, Stamford, Weston, Westport and Wilton, for the Democratic Party.

So there seems to be upscale Connecticut money in the family background, although Ceci became a member of the state senate very late in the day, elected only in 2022. Ceci's husband, Katherine's father, was Gordon Roberts Maher, a Goldman Sachs banking executive. His obituary says,

Gordon Roberts Maher, a retired vice president of commodities operations, and spiritual Parisian, died October 5, 2020 in Norwalk, CT of complications from alcoholism.

Gordon, known as Rob, or less frequently but more cherished to him, Gordo, Maher was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, growing up in Wilton, CT for a time. . . The family then decamped to St. Germain du Pres, France as a result of their father’s work at IBM where family lore contends he may or may not have been a postwar spy.

It sounds like there's generational wealth in the family, plus a likely intelligence involvement, which probably is how Katherine got fast-tracked into the Arab Studies program until she quickly didn't work out, went into banking -- likely via her father's influence -- until she didn't work out there, and then went into non-profits, where she doesn't seem to be working out all that well.

As far as I can see, the task of the power elite here has been to find someplace to park her. I doubt if it was ever expected that she'd accomplish much at NPR, and the consensus for now is that nothing will change there, whether she can hold onto her job or not. But given her track record, I don't expect her to last long, whether it's her tweets that do her in or something else.

NPR Suspended Uri Berliner? Is That All?

According to the New York Post,

NPR suspended Uri Berliner, the senior editor who published a bombshell essay a week ago that claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America’s trust” by reporting the news with a left-wing bias.

NPR media writer David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that Berliner was sidelined for five days without pay beginning last Friday. Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the letter from NPR brass, said the company told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement for NPR journalists.

NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.

This strikes me as remarkably lenient treatment. Corporate policies across the board prohibit employees from contacting the press without authorization from whatever department is responsible for press relations. For much of my career, I was involved in policy writing, and I still more or less carry in my head boilerplate for a wide range of policies. Here is something typical from King County, WA:

• King County staff should not communicate with the press about county business without prior authorization.
• If you are contacted by reporters, let them know you may not be the best person to represent the county on this issue and they should check with your department’s Public Information Officer.
• Media contact can range from a neighborhood blog to CNN. Your department’s Public Information Officer is here to help in these situations.

In the past, I usually included additional language in a proposed policy along the line of "employees who violate these guidelines are subject to discipline, up to and including termination." But once, I put this in a draft, and the vice president who reviewed it said there really wasn't a need to say this; employees simply need to be told this is the policy. In other cases, corporate policy-writing guidelines simply state that policies are to be expressed in positive terms, for instance, "Employees refer all contacts with the press to the Public Affairs Department". The King County policy seems to lean in this positive direction.

I knew a guy who was so proud of what his IT department had done to make working with his company easier that he very naively contacted a local TV station to tell them they should do a story on it. The TV station -- it probably didn't help that the company was an advertiser -- simply called the company PR department to ask if this had been authorized. My friend was walked out the door within the hour. That's how seriously corporations take contacting the press without authorization.

So what did Uri Berliner do? Early this month, he forwarded a manuscript to a web site, The Free Press, with the title I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

This strikes me as little different from an engineer at Boeing, say, while still employed by the company, sending something like this to the New York Times:

A quality spirit no longer exists at Boeing, and now predictably, our planes are crashing, door panels are blowing out in flight, and we don't care about the flying public.

This wouldn't be a problem for a schlock outfit, but for Boeing, a company with a world reputation, it's devastating for its products and its business model.

Like my friend from IT, he'd be out the door before lunch, and with more reason. In fact, let's give our hypothetical Boeing engineer credit for being rational and having situational awareness: he's got to be aware that he'll be fired for doing this. So this would likely be in a last-straw, had-it-up-to-here situation where he's flipping them off as he's headed out the door -- and since they're firing him, he's going to get unemployment. Likely as well, he's also figured it's time to try something new past aeronautical engineering, and he's already set up for a new career.

I just don't think this is Uri Berliner. But let's look at his relationship with NPR a little more closely. Here's how Berliner characterized himself in the Free Press piece:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

Which is to say he's also self-absorbed and entitled -- and oblivious. When I worked in IT, I had a pretty good feeling for the job market, and I knew that if I got fired, which I sometimes did, it wouldn't be too hard to land another job, which is a big reason I went into IT in the first place. But what's the job market in legacy media newsrooms? Here's CNN this past January:

The news industry is enduring a brutal start to the new year, with outlets large and small across the country hemorrhaging reporting staff as legacy business models that kept much of the industry afloat for decades collapse in plain sight.

The rapid contraction, coming even as the presidential election cycle heats up and public attention and revenues historically mount, has been on full display this month, with the first few weeks of 2024 ushering in a spate of painful layoffs at news organizations from coast-to-coast.

The Los Angeles Times slashed its newsroom by more than 20% earlier this week; TIME cut dozens of staffers; and Business Insider said it would trim its workforce by 8%. Meanwhile, hundreds of staffers at Condé Nast, Forbes, The New York Daily News, and others staged historic walkouts to protest planned cuts at the outlets.

So if Uri gets fired, the chances of him finding a new job in the industry are pretty bleak. So what was on his mind when he sent his piece to The Free Press? It's hard to say. He had to have been aware he was violating company policy -- the vice president who reviewed my policy draft said we take that, and the penalties, for granted when we publish policies. My guess is that he knew, as a longtime NPR emnployee, that there wouldn't be much of an actual penalty; in his case, five-day vacation.

So what was he trying to accomplish? He hardly changed any minds at NPR.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

He hardly moved the needle with the public at large -- in his essay at the link, he said,

Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find . . . the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

Well, duh. But what's puzzling is that Berliner's differences with NPR's staff and their editorial policies are, as far as I can tell, miniscule. His disclaimer at the start about being raised by a lesbian peace activist mother makes this plain. So what problem is he trying to solve? Jeffrey Blehar at the National Review asks the same set of questions:

The subtext of the piece, however, was clear: “Now that I’ve aired our dirty laundry, I dare you to fire me before I eventually resign.” This was, for all its eloquence, functionally a career-terminating act. The various official responses from NPR, including a defensive rebuttal from NPR’s standards & practices editor and a five-day suspension without pay for “freelancing without permission,” indicate clearly that he is now persona non grata. To be fair, Berliner either certainly expected this or should have. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy aptly asks, “How many jobs are there where you could write a big essay about your beef with your workplace and keep your job?”

But this doesn't answer the question of what Berliner, a 68-year-old senior editor in a shrinking industry, was planning to do if he was fired. Maybe retire -- who knows? Blehar thinks he objected to the hiring of Katherine Maher as the new NPR CEO, but let's face it, what else did he expect? Legacy media is legacy media, he made a full career in it and knew every one of the rules for survival -- and he did in fact survive for an entire career.

I think I would put it to pure narcissism, the feeling he was entitled to his 15 minutes of fame by making a big show of faux integrity.

More From Dershowitz On Israel vs Iran

Alan Dershoweitz has a new essay on Substack that is a condensed version of yesterday's YouTube post linked above. He makes several points that I think clarify the legal and moral background for potential reprisals by Israel against Iran. First, as I more or less intuited from the start, Iran's drone and missile attack on Israel over the weekewnd was an act of war, defined in Wiktionary as "An action that would justify the initiation of hostilities against the perpetrator; an action that by its nature comprises a cessation of peace." Dershowitz says,

As a matter of law and morality, Israel is entitled to respond to this act of war by overwhelming, even disproportionate, force against Iranian military targets.

Iran declared war on Israel by sending more than 300 bombs in Israel’s direction, aimed at civilian as well as military targets in Jerusalem and other locations. As a matter of law and morality, Israel is entitled to respond to this act of war by overwhelming, even disproportionate, force against Iranian military targets.

In the YouTube presentation, he goes into the question of proportionality, which he raises above, at greater length, arguing that there is no moral requirement that the Israeli response be in some way "proportionate" to the Iranian act of war. Dershowitz is, as far as I can determine, a not fully observant Jew, and he makes no reference to specific moral guidance on proportionality. But this sent me to the Roman Catholic definition of just war doctrine in CCC 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

The specific initial damage in this case, inflicted by the Iranian proxy Hamas in an invasion of Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, was over 1000 civilian deaths, often accompanied by torture and rape, and the seizure of hundreds of hostages, many of which haven't been released and appear to have been tortured, raped, and killed in captivity. Every indication is that given the opportunity, Hamas would repeat this act, and demonstrators on Hamas's behalf frequently repeat the motto "death to Israel", which in light of historical records like the Holocaust appears to be a statement of ultimate intent.

Israel's ultimate aim in response, at least as interpreted by Dershowitz, should be an elimination of this threat to Israel and the community of nations:

Even if Israel were to respond moderately, Iran would continue to wage war against Israel. As long as the Mullahs run Iran, the Mideast will remain in turmoil from Iranian aggression, either direct or through its terrorist surrogates.

A new Holocaust would certainly be lasting, grave, and certain damage to Israel and the community of nations. Even piecemeal attacks like October 7, intended to kill over a thousand Jewish civilians, are unacceptable especially insofar as they're intended as partial steps toward the overall goal. Dershowitz sees only one practical solution to the problem:

Accordingly, the ultimate goal of any Israeli retaliation should be regime change. The means can include destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which would considerably weaken the regime. . . . if the majority of Iranians support regime change, it is simply a matter of time before it occurs. This is unlikely to occur if the regime develops a nuclear arsenal which can shield it from outside pressures.

But this brings up the question of whether there are serious prospects for success. Dershowitz makes no specific argument in this direction, and this may be a weakness in his position -- we may agree, as I did at the start of the Russo-Ukraine war, that it's desirable to evict Russia from Ukraine's legal boundaries, but as experience has shown, this isn't proving practical given the level of resources the US and NATO are able to comnmit to do this.

Dershowitz himself acknowledges that he doesn't know what specific measures Israel plans for its retaliation; considering how close he is to both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Herzog, this may not be entirely ingenuous, but there can be no question that feckless macho gestures like Iran's drone attack over the weekend would be insuficient to achieve any serious goal. But it's also clear that Israel would not deliberately inflict damage on civilians simply for the sake of killing civilians.

All we can be fairly certain about is that President Biden is not on board with any of Dershowitz's arguments, which strikes me as yet another indication of his overall deep moral confusion.