Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

The Political Poison of Twitter

Twitter imageYou can doll-up the 140 character/20-word limit as “microblogging.”  But that term hardly does justice to the vacuous sneering this social media form has unleashed into our national discourse. 

Over the years pundits have been fond of identifying the chief villains responsible for creating our seemingly hardened political life.  At least in terms of national politics, a host of problems have been identified that have undermined American democracy. Take your pick:  the short eight-second sound-bite common to television news, the tendency of the press to cover campaigns like horseraces and poker games, too much money in the process abetted by the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the growth of television attack ads that hardly mention the candidates that pay for them, or the decline of the conciliatory impulse as a candidate virtue.

But if I had to pick only one irritant of the American body politic in this election cycle, it would be the cancer of Twitter as a means of making and setting news agendas.  You can doll-up the 140 character/20-word limit as “microblogging.”  But that term hardly does justice to the vacuous sneering and sloganeering this social media form has unleashed into our national discourse.  It may be harmless for private users.  But it has become a bludgeon used by too many campaigns.

Twitter creates two fundamental problems. The first is that it forces a communicator to stand out quickly, usually by texting intellectually dishonest and hyperbolic assertions: features we have gotten to know to well because of the Donald Trump campaign.  Simply speaking, the format makes less likely any kind of thoughtful interactive discourse, often encouraging the rankest kinds of under-qualified claims.  A Twitter account can be like an arsenal of bombs dropped from drones.  Each rhetorical explosive is lobbed at a distance that saves the sender from having to answer a counter-response.  As a means to bypass the media, Twitter is a campaigner’s dream.

Trump Twitter Kelly

Trump Huffington

The second problem is that too many in the press love these text feeds.  If you happen to be a lazy or overworked reporter, you need reach no further than the Twitter feed of the campaign you are covering.  All of the provocative quotes you would like to get from the candidate are there, calculated to be as subtle as a snowball in the face.

Better yet, quotes from Twitter usually come as easy building blocks for a story built around the hackneyed idea that journalism needs to feature conflict.  Charges made on a feed are easily matched up to counter-charges from a competing campaign that is monitoring the competition.  Paste together these shouts into the ether and you have a story without ever having to consider a full stump speech. This process allows the impression that the essential press-politician equation is in tact.  More realistically, the impression is more illusion than reality. A politician can “speak”  to the press without holding a real briefing where follow-up questions might get asked.  And a reporter can go home at a decent hour without the inconvenience of having to show up at a campaign event.

To be sure, this kind of ‘campaign by proxy’ matches the ways we now live. Texting is our distraction and obsession.  So we hardly notice that the press/politician dialogue that has traditionally been an essential part of our democracy has been muted.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

The Dissent Backchannel

Apple Watch
                   The Apple Watch

With this process in place we might never have seen the Edsel, New Coke, the Iraq War, Apple Watch, Brexit, and any of thousands of misadventures.

A recent front page article in the New York Times headlined the news that 51 senior State Department officials signed a memo of dissent complaining that current policies to contain the Syrian civil war were not working.  Most readers of the piece came away with the impression of a State Department in disarray: an agency riddled with complaints that had spilled into the open. But that was not quite the story.  From at least one perspective, the Times buried the real lede.

It turns out that memos of dissent are encouraged by the State Department.  A “Dissent Channel” is a long-established tradition of allowing members of the agency to voice concerns about American policy, which can be expressed without career recriminations. The idea started by Secretary of State William Rogers in the Vietnam era was to feed the policy review process with more input from staff out in the field.

Interestingly, though the memo was leaked, the Obama administration didn’t publicly react as if anything dysfunctional had happened.  The concerns were noted, but the signers were not condemned or disciplined.  There would be no Nixonian threats of tax audits or shortened careers.

We’ve since learned that other agencies, including the CIA, have something similar: teams whose jobs it is to present counter-arguments to planned courses of action.

Of course the press loves to report on bureaucracies at war with themselves.  But an alternative narrative is equally plausible and definitively preferable. As former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in a famous decent on a First Amendment case:   “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”  A marketplace of competing ideas is a noble thing, and can be adapted to almost any organization.  Well articulated dissents should have the effect of saving a nation or an organization from an action that will fail.

Done in the right spirit, a formal channel for registering another view on a momentous course of action can be a good thing.

Decision-makers in both public and private organizations ought to welcome substantive challenges to planned policies.  Done in the right spirit, a formal channel for registering another view on a momentous course of action can be a good thing. Decision-makers can quickly learn just how good or how vulnerable a planned course of action really is.  Think of this as the old question box converted into a more formal mechanism for review of a pending policy.

Of course all sides have to be intellectually secure in their reasons. It has to be understood that the subject under discussion is not a person, but an idea.  This can be a major hurdle if individuals or units have redefined approval of a proposed action as a test of their power or legitimacy.

If this problem of personalization can be avoided a lot of can be gained.  With this dissent mechanism in place we might have never seen the Edsel, “New” Coke, the Iraq War, the Apple Watch, Brexit, and any of thousands of similar misadventures.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

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