A Valuable Essay Requires a Concisely Substantive Point — that Illuminates Something Unknown or Misunderstood — Two Examples from Matthew Yglesias and Jim Newell

© 2014 Peter Free

 

10 September 2014

 

 

Citations

 

Matthew Yglesias, The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert, Washington Monthly (December 2007)

 

Jim Newell, We don’t need another Tim Russert: Stop sainting Washington’s most over-praised, overrated journalist, Salon (10 September 2014)

 

 

Theme — my intertwined point is about truth, truth-seeking, and truth expression

 

 

I selected the above cited essays because they implicitly address two of the key weaknesses of our befuddled times:

 

(i) our repeatedly demonstrated inability to get to pertinent truths

 

and

 

(ii) our equally annoying tendency to think that everyone’s opinion, no matter how ignorant or vapid, is of equal value.

 

 

A key background premise

 

Clearly expressed insight matters in world drowning in bad actions and drivel.

 

Thought that adds something intellectually sound to what we know is important. It moves us beneficially upward, out of the pool of ignorance. This quality is vanishingly rare in our increasingly dimwitted popular culture. The same trend can be seen in some of the sciences, as well.

 

Our culture is personally and societally motivated predominantly by our desire for attention, no matter how irrelevant or deviously acquired. As a result, proportionately few people care about facts and reasoned explanations for the phenomena around us.

 

Discourse today is usually nothing more than a silly back and forth bludgeoning of easily recognized untruths, masquerading as reasoned debate. “I believe” is usually preface to a lie or grandly unprovable assumption.

 

 

Enter the above writers

 

Opinion writers Matthew Yglesias and Jim Newell — in two essays examining television journalist Tim Russert’s grossly inflated legacy as host on NBC News’ Meet the Press — make a case against our slide in narcissistically truth denying relativism.

 

They also show us how to concisely state an intellectually sound perspective in a reasonably persuasive way.

 

Thus, they illustrate the intertwined theme about:

 

(a) the importance of truth and truth seeking (in journalism, as the authors set it out)

 

and

 

(b) the value of getting to those in a concisely and persuasively communicated way (as their two essays do).

 

 

You do not need to know who Tim Russert was to understand the Newell and Yglesias articles

 

That, too, is part of my case about effective communication. You can read both essays without knowing the history that led to them.

 

 

The illustrative case against Tim Russert’s arguable disinterest in hosting a substantive interview

 

A key assumption is what follows is that journalism should be about prioritized truth seeking.

 

Jim Newell makes the point that Meet the Press’ new host, Chuck Todd, should not be compared to former host, Tim Russert. The latter, in spite of his inflated reputation, was actually a poorly focused interviewer, who pretty consistently skipped over subject matter that was relevant, so as to boost his own status as television ruffian:

 

 

Russert’s most common move was to take conflicting statements from an interviewee — no matter how many years apart — read them to the interviewee, and then shame the interviewee for a while about their character before, weirdly and abruptly, smiling and calling for a commercial break.

 

He could never accept that a politician’s views might evolve.

 

Even worse, his body slams typically glossed over more substantial policy questions in favor of the cheaply earned squirm.

 

© 2014 Jim Newell, We don’t need another Tim Russert: Stop sainting Washington’s most over-praised, overrated journalist, Salon (10 September 2014) (extracts)

 

 

In Newell’s view, Tim Russert ignored policy relevant points in favor of irrelevantly beating the crap out of his interviewee.

 

In support of his point about Mr. Russert’s style, Newell pointed to Matthew Yglesias’ also concise essay about Meet the Press from seven years ago:

 

 

[T]he balls Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren’t curveballs, which go someplace useful. They’re sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless.

 

John McCain entered the zone last May, when he . . . repeatedly asserted that the Bush tax cuts had increased the federal government’s revenue.

 

[A] tough but conscientious journalist might have pointed out that this is demonstrably false. Russert, however, reached for a trusty hardball and sent it sailing. McCain, he pointed out, was now supporting extending the very same Bush tax cuts that he had once opposed.

 

The contradiction Russert pointed out was real—but hardly central.

 

The real problem was that McCain’s theory of the relationship between tax rates and revenue wasn’t true.

 

Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert [who was still alive at the time Yglesias wrote this] not to assess the candidate's views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling.

 

[W]hen this sort of toughness and sparring becomes its own reward, the vacuity of the questioning is almost guaranteed.

 

Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience.

 

He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News.

 

© 2007 Matthew Yglesias, The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert, Washington Monthly (December 2007) (extracts) (partially quoted by Jim Newell, We don’t need another Tim Russert: Stop sainting Washington’s most over-praised, overrated journalist, Salon (10 September 2014))

 

In sum, self-centered self-promotion at the expense of truth and an informed electorate.

 

 

The moral? — These essays are persuasive twists about something that still matters

 

Good minds have (at least some) cultural power, when they communicate effectively.

 

The trick, from my perspective, is to do it with intellectual integrity.