It's About The Math. It Has Always Been About The Math

I've been engaging in a very popular blogger sport recently: slamming the MSM. They make a very inviting target and no blogger can really go wrong with this approach. Outside of a notable few like Seymour Hirsch, Paul Krugman, Ron Suskind, Amy Goodman, Matt Taibbi the MSM is a joke. Christ, in 2003 the New Yorker was pretty full-out for war with the exceptions of Hirsch, Herzberg, Mayer and Surowiecki. Still, I felt this morning like I needed a reality check. Am I making cheap shots? Am I going after low-hanging fruit in the manner of a Bush/Retard joke? Or is the greater point, the total corruption and enslavement of the fourth estate, still super-valid?

We know that Fox is nothing more that the Republican party's tele-screen. Wolf Blitzer, Suzanne Malveaux and Candy Crowley are completely bought and paid for, as are Adam Nagourney, Joe Klein, Elisabeth Bumiller, Elizabeth Kolbert, Linda Gradstein, the WaPo Yids and so on. Judith Miller is beyond bought. She's an exemplar of pure evil. But what's happening with the rest? Why do they do us this way? What's up with them? It is so corrupt out there that a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker reflexively jumps to attention on such issues as immigration and Barack Obama, presenting the pure Mr Charlie version of things albeit with one or two little elitist lagniappes.

I believe a number of factors are responsible for this state of nature: careerism, cowardice and a self-reinforcing MSM culture which prises power above all things. George Bush is President? He must be right. Throughout the 20th century the New York cityside journalists had as big a blind spot with regard to the Mafia as Beltway insiders do about politicians. That attitude in the NYC press has waned with Sicilian power in NYC crime. Until some Russian, Colombian, or Domenican-American novelist writes the epic Gangster 2.0 story, nobody's too jazzed up about the remainder of the carting, freight-forwarding, road-paving and strip-club biz in NYC, NJ or CT, Tony Soprano notwithstanding. In Washington they are balls-out in the bubble and it's Bush-and-War-all-the-way. I have a distant cousin upon whose story one of the side characters in Shattered Glass was based. He is one of the most left-wing kids I've ever met, yet he can't suck Republican dick enough in his reporting and think-pieces. Why should he feel differently? There's neither professional incentive nor personal incentive among his peers. So, contrary as his personal politics are, for him, Condoleeza Rice is like a smarter, kinder Joan Of Arc.

I don't approve of this, but I understand. I understand because I operate within a cohort which is every bit a self-reinforcing bubble as the Beltway Kids cohort is. We quants have as many articles of faith as the Beltway Insiders do. We have our own language. We don't get why Joe Public doesn't understand the true greatness of Barry Bonds and Lorena Ochoa [She's better than Tiger Woods is, relatively speaking] in terms of winning "units", let's say, per plate appearance or hole. We don't understand why techinical market analysis still holds so much sway when it has been demolished by 100s of scholarly studies and there's yet to be one scholarly study the other way. We don't understand why the peasants think Michael Jordan "raised his game in the playoffs," when he was about 1-point-per-game worse in the playoffs than he was in the regular season. How do the lames not see that when it's so obvious with publicly-available information and 8th grade math?

So, I accept that Washington insiders see the same naivete in bloggers, poll workers, Code Pink, etc. How can we not bow before Henry Kissinger, given his importance and power? How indeed?

There's a recipe for cognitive dissonance, no? As I wrote above, I don't approve but I do understand. Still, I don't approve for reasons other than my left-wing politics. The MSM is flat-out wrong about everything. The heuristic device? Take a subject you know really, really well and read how that subject is treated in The Tissue Of Lies. How many mistakes will you find? Hundreds. So, if they're not getting stamp-collecting or metallurgy right, what makes you think they're getting politics right? Ultimately, though, what separates the bubbles of the MSM and the quanitative players has to do with measurement. We are always measuring everything and if a factor ain't there at a statistically-significant level, it's ain't there. It's all about the math. How do you model the problem? Is your model reliable? But, most importantly, is it valid? The MSM measures nothing. No opinons offered are ever reviewed for accuracy. They are in a state of permanent present. So, it's easy to just write "the surge is a success" if that's the received wisdom of the moment. Nobody's ever going to check any of what they write for accuracy after all, right?

Wrong. The bloggers are doing it 24/7. And that's why "internet" or "blogger" is such an insult among the MSM. In our little gambling and finance world, "conventional player" is a meaner thing to call someone than "cocksucker" is. I would expect "conventional" to be a badge of honor among the MSM.

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