When Journalists Blow It.

I mostly, really like NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His reporting is solid, he really cares about human rights and well-being, and generally his politics align with my own. But today he wrote a column called When Liberals Blew It that dives into a very difficult subject and threatens to reopen some (still unhealed) wounds in the America outside of fascism.

"Causation is difficult to tease from correlation."

Well, he's right about that. Causation is what scholars such as historians primarily concern themselves with. Journalists report facts in a timely, objective fashion and columnists try to give some context and meaning to events, but it takes a lot of time and research to get to the bottom of causation. When your life and livelihood are dedicated to following along with the tide of events you simply do not have the time to really understand the lines of causation. I am sure a serious commentator like Kristof tries very hard to fill in the blank spaces by researching scholarly work when he is able. I will return to this issue after presenting some of the information in his column.

'Blowing it' refers to the backlash faced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report, on a subject he was actually a recognized scholarly expert in, in March, 1965 as part of the Johnson administration's Great Society program. Yes, it is always remembered as the statement on the breakdown of the African-American family but it was part of a real effort by the federal government to improve people's lives. Remember that? A time when government actually tried to address social problems? I know it sounds hard to believe in our age of rampant corruption and distrust, but it really did happen. The report is remembered as a moralizing, racist denunciation of the African-American community, blaming their poverty on absent fathers.

I want to make this less than a book-length post so I will stay away from Moynihan's actual findings. But here's the bait and switch, Kristof titled the column "When Liberals Blew It" but his first line is that fifty years ago "Democrats made a historic mistake." Democrat does not equal liberal, it doesn't now, it didn't then. As the fascist right is always pointing out, the Democratic party (in the south) had fewer votes for the Civil Rights Act than the GOP. The Southern Democrats supported segregation and Jim Crow, etc. There are liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats and so on. The political parties in America are coalitions, not uniform ideological robots. This is especially true in the Democratic party, as any history textbook will tell you. The New Deal coalition that kept reform going for a generation after FDR's death was made up of northern workers, African-Americans, conservative southerners, and academics to name a few. They did not all get along.

The second problem is that Kristof only cites one critic that could be called a liberal, Floyd McKissick, who Kristof says was a prominent civil rights activist. I know this is only a column for the NEW YORK TIMES and not some piddly academic journal where you have to cite all evidence, but come on there had to be one more point of view you could cite. It is not convincing to say "Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist" and leave it hang. This sounds a little like the twitterati of today who read an inflammatory headline and jump into action.

Then thirdly, Kristof writes:

The taboo on careful research on family structure and poverty was broken by William Julius Wilson, an eminent black sociologist. He has praised Moynihan’s report as “a prophetic document,” for evidence is now overwhelming that family structure matters a great deal for low-income children of any color.

 This statement caught my eye as a little fishy. Especially after reading through some of the comments that Kristof completely misrepresented Wilson's scholarship. And sure enough, if you click on Moynihan's name you are treated to the man's obituary in the Times, which states:

Though savaged by many liberal academics at the time, it is now generally regarded as "an important and prophetic document," in the words of Prof. William Julius Wilson of Harvard.

Kristof does link to a primary source for Prof. Wilson's quotation, but falls short on the context. His exact words were:

"Moynihan’s study of the relationship between poverty and family structure, famously known as the Moynihan Report, is, as I noted in a recent article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, an important and prophetic document.  It is important because it continues to be a reference for studies on the black family and the plight of low-skilled black males.  It was prophetic because Moynihan’s predictions about the fragmentation of the African American Family and its connection to inner-city poverty were largely borne out, and since 1990, social scientists and civil rights leaders have echoed his concerns about black make[sic] joblessness and the need for social policies that would address their skills deficits and change behavioral responses that emanate from severe employment constraints." (emphasis mine)

This is lazy journalism bias of the kind (Senator) Al Franken took to task in his book
Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them along with the getting there first bias that it seems Kristof was trying to accomplish. The lazy bias is "why look at the original source or do your own analysis when you can simply look at what someone else wrote yesterday." Or in the case of the Moynihan quotation, twelve years ago.

So, to Mr. Kristof, I appreciate what you were trying to do with this column but there are some real mistakes. In future columns maybe we can actually get to the substance of the Moynihan report, what we have done about poverty, why this was not actually the reason or spot that Liberals blew it and so on.