4 - The Michigan Daily - Friday, September 23, 2005
OPINION
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JASON Z. PESICK
Editor in Chief
SUHAEL MOMIN
SAM SINGER
Editorial Page Editors
ALISON GO
Managing Editor
EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890
420 MAYNARD STREET
ANN ARBOR, MI 48109
tothedaily@michigandaily.com
NOTABLE
QUOTABLE
'' Right now, it's
a wait and see
and hope for
the best."
- Army Corps of Engineers spokesman
Mitch Frazier, on the potential of Hurricane
Rita to overwhelm New Orleans' damaged
levees, as quoted yesterday by CNN.com.
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[SHE AVR~AGE L IF E CONSISTOF FOURebAI E LEMEN4TS
FOD R s LE ywtya
From masses to multitudes
ZACK DENFELD -BIT CRITIC
et's be honest:
For the most
part college
newspapers (and I have
read many across this
nation) are shadows
of their former selves
- and, sadly, The Michi-
gan Daily is one of the
better papers.
Although I don't
want to romanticize an earlier era, when I look
at archives of college newspapers from 10 to 40
years ago, I see journalists taking chances, arts
and entertainment writers seeking out interest-
ing releases and events - not just the freebies
they receive from major labels or the obvious
independents - and a general interest in doing
more than regurgitating press releases.
Actually, the only thing that has gotten
better over the years, as far as I can tell, is
the sports writing. A big part of this decline
in quality is due to university papers see-
ing themselves as feeder programs for "real"
press jobs. In preparing to become yes-men
for streamlined local and national corporate
outlets, college journalists have lost the fine
art of muckraking, and arts editors are happy
to assign for review the same albums that are
reviewed in 80 other places that week so their
writers can get "clips" to intern at "alternative"
weeklies. On the other hand, sports writers,
finally taken seriously because they actually
increase a newspaper's readership, have gotten
better and better.
The horrible state of mainstream media,
with its lack of funding for independent
investigative journalism, editorial boards suc-
cumbing to ad revenue concerns and celebri-
ty-birthday-fills-any-newshole mentality has
leeched into college newspapers.
The fine line that separates any whack-job
with a bldg, and a journalist, is credibility.
Luckily, the editors of the Daily have started
to address this problem. The Michigan Daily
finally has blogs.
Since journalists, college or otherwise,
have little to no credibility in most citizens'
and consumers' minds, why not just open the
floodgates? There is a lot more nonsense to
sift through with blogs, but it moves the audi-
ence from the "masses" to the "multitudes."
That is, there is not a mindless lump of mold-
able brains, but rhizomal networks of diverse
interested parties who both produce and con-
sume information.
Don't get me wrong - there is still a need
for college newspapers. I love the sound they
make, the ink-stained hands and the daily
impossibility of reading an article and drink-
ing coffee at a small table.
I just wish it was filled with other content.
So in addition to checking out the new Daily
blog and becoming a pundit/journalist/fact-
checker/whack-job for our information com-
munity, I recommend these other fine local
sources as well:
Annarborisoverrated.com continues to ride
its snarky one-trick pony to hilarity.
Arborblogs.com, which streams all types of
blogs from the A2 area. The threads aren't as
deep as other blogs, but the front page seems
to update every 30 seconds. Recommended
for sheer breadth.
ArborUpdate.com, focusing on community
news, with insightful threads and active par-
ticipation. The curating of topics by the mem-
bers keeps it more focused than other sites.
astrogibs.com/coolcities/, "The weblog of
the city of Ann Arbor's Mayor's Cool Cities
Task Force." (Go here to figure out how not
to do a blog.)
And those are just the As. Happy informa-
tion hunting.
Denfeld can be reached at
zcd@umich.edu.
0
0
Bush, facts and the War on Competence
JESSE SINGALSTEMH I DilE
eorge W. Bush
has built a
presidency out
of his predilection for
stories. He's fond of
simple, opposing pairs:
us, them; good, evil;
patriot, terrorist. His
ability to relate these
pairs to the public in
the forms of appealing,
emotionally-charged narratives has been his
trademark. Unfortunately, his reliance on these
narratives is also proving to be his downfall.
Stories are nice, but the world operates
according to facts. Facts are messy, greasy
things. They stick to the fingers and kill peo-
ple and completely defy the simple narratives
we find palatable. Facts, in short, are not fun,
which is why narratives, rather than facts, are
the stuff of campaigns, conventions and elec-
tions. A mastery of storytelling requires only
some archetypes, a plot and a meaningful con-
clusion. Whether its Mario rescuing the prin-
cess, David defeating Goliath or traditionalists
putting an end to godless, hedonistic secu-
larism, such stories are much more likely to
inspire than are dry, nameless facts.
Any good leader, however, will have a
firm grasp on facts. And this sort of mastery
requires study, analysis, discipline and def-
erence to all manner of greasy, bespectacled
wonks. One would have hoped that Bush
would have switched from narrative mode to
fact mode after his election (and then re-elec-
tion), but this, sadly, was not the case, and we
are now bearing the full brunt of his recalci-
trance in the face of facts.
Bush is far more concerned with his nar-
ratives - and with images that refer back to
them - than he is' with facts. And this obses-
sion with narratives has precluded him and
his administration from achieving anything
approaching competency. Every step of the
way, they've failed to account for the facts on
the ground. They didn't anticipate that Iraq, a
multiethnic state cobbled together by the Brit-
ish, would experience explosive levels of sec-
tarian and anti-American violence in the wake
of the power vacuum following Saddam's
removal; they feel that global warming, which
may or may not have helped to fuel Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita (which, as I write, has reached
Category 5 status and is poised to demolish a
swath of the Gulf Coast), needs more study
before definitive action; they didn't anticipate
that the situation in New Orleans would be
so dismal, that federal assistance would be
required quickly. It seems that the sheer mass
of all that this administration doesn't know or
didn't anticipate could fill the Superdome to
the bursting point.
What accounts for so much failure? A
stubborn belief in long-obviated narratives.
Bush believes that good and evil are simple
things, and that good will triumph. Therefore,
what's going on in Iraq is positive - good is
fighting evil and will eventually prevail, as
it always does. It's unnecessary to study the
ethnic complexities inherent to Iraq, or to
reevaluate military strategy and troop levels,
because facts are not important, not compel-
ling; narratives are.
Nothing illustrated Bush's disconnected-
ness better than his reaction to Katrina: In
an astounding string of insensitive faux pas,
he recalled, with a smile, his days of revelry
in Houston; he calmed an anxious nation by
assuring us all that Trent Lott would, indeed,
be able to rebuild his house in Mississippi;
most incredibly, he complimented former Fed-
eral Emergency Management Agency head
and Arabian horse enthusiast Michael Brown,
telling him he was "doing a heck of a job."
Because he viewed himself as a righteous force
of good that was now on the march to save the
people of New Orleans, there was little rea-
son to fret. The facts, and many a soggy New
Orleanian, begged to differ, but were never
given the chance.
As Newsweek reported, according to several
anonymous aides "the reality ... did not real-
ly sink in until Thursday night." And so the
president who holds such disdain for facts was
shielded from them. It's remarkable, really:
The first levee broke the morning of Monday,
Aug. 29 - certainly from this point on it was
clear that the situation was serious, and it took
Bush two and a half days to realize this.
Bush fears facts for the same reason propo-
nents of intelligent design fear theories based
in science: They threaten his stories. The idea
of good versus evil would become a lot more
complicated - and might indeed implode -
were Bush ever to coolly analyze the facts and
come to the conclusion that maybe, in thelong
run, it would have made more tactical sense to
leave Saddam, an evil man, in power. But prac-
ticality is not his strong suit, not when he feels
that he is an actor in an epic play between forc-
es representing absolutist principles. Bush's
vocabulary consists entirely of words that
don't exist in the real world, and the sooner he
realizes this, the better off we'll be.
Singal can be reached at
jsingal@umich.edu.
0
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Columnist doesn't deserve
her seat in the Big House
TO THE DAILY:
I understand that the column Knee-jerking
continues... (09/22/2005) was intended to be a
piece questioning the national security efforts
to deter terrorism, but the beginning of the
article was the only part that caught my atten-
tion. Sowmya Krishnamurthy was upset that
she couldn't get into the Big House because
her "handbag was too large." She described
herself as "someone with a general disinterest
in all things athletic," and then, goes onto say
that her seat for her FIRST football game was
male student in front of me ask what a safe-
ty was! Come on. Tell your sports writers to
write a story about how you should have to
pass a general football IQ test to sit in the
first 20 rows instead of complaining about
the lack of noise. (It also doesn't help that
the other 90 percent of the stadium is near
comatose, meaning they won't stand up and
cheer anytime soon.) So Sowmya, next time,
instead of going to the Big House with your
big purse full of crap, leave it at home and
use your hands for clapping and cheering,
not holding handbags.
Steve Scarpetta
LSA senior
servatives at the University lacked opinions
of their own, as they blatantly stole their
idea from the Human Rights Campaign's
National Coming Out Day. Not only does
this hint at a lack of conservative creativity,
it also demonstrates how conservatives are
more concerned with their "pride," instead
of poverty, Hurricane Katrina and the war
in Iraq.
Sure, the conservatives were "reacting
against what they said is a liberal campus
environment that is hostile to conserva-
tives," even though they are "out" in the
presidency, Congress and the judicial sys-
tem. In fact, they control the entire political
system.
Editorial Board Members: Amy Anspach, Amanda Burns, Whitney Dibo,
Jesse Forester, Mara Gay, Jared Goldberg, Eric Jackson, Brian Kelly, Theresa Kennelly,
Rajiv Prabhakar, Matt Rose, David Russell, Dan Skowronski, Brian Slade, Lauren
I