1115.org

Pittsburgh: Not a safe landing site for parachuting “journalists.”

You can learn a ton about how the media works by carefully consuming media that deals with subjects with which you have first-hand experience. It’s at times very difficult to tease out the hidden agendas of the media, but when you read a piece that deals with your chosen profession, major in college, or the like, it’s sometimes clear that the author started with his conclusion and went out and cherry-picked whatever it took to back it up.

For years, I made my living managing and promoting nightclubs in San Francisco. A while back, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story entitled “CLUB SCENE GROWS UP - The party isn’t over in S.F. — it has just moved on to smaller, mellower places. Nights of excess in huge venues give way to calmer gatherings in more intimate settings.” The writer, Carolyne Zinko, made numerous factual errors in support of a premise that was simply wrong. She butchered the financial side, ran interviews only with club-goers she found at “smaller, mellower” clubs, and didn’t mention the age disparity between patrons of afterhours dancehalls and lounges. Quite simply, it was an abortion of journalism, exacerbated by its appalling placement on page A1. As I wrote at the time:

…when stories about something as simple and innocuous as the nightclub scene can be mangled this badly, it begs the question: “What’s happening on big, important, complicated issues?”

I think everyone here knows the answer to that question, it’s our bread and butter. One such big, important, complicated issue is trade policy and its effect on life in this country. An exasperated David Sirota points to this Newsweek story by Howard Fineman called “What Pittsburgh Can Teach the Country.” Sirota, an expert on trade policy, nominates Fineman for “Worst Writer In America.” I may not be an expert on trade, but I lived in Pittsburgh for my first 24 years, and I consider myself more than qualified to second that nomination.

The premise of Fineman’s piece is that if Pittsburgh, a downtrodden city, hemorrhaging citizens and money, has a chance at renewal, it is due to the fact that its new 27-year-old accidental mayor is an optimist. This would have filled Fineman’s periodic quota of awful political observation if he hadn’t taken it a step further by extending his prescription to the national level. The result is a fundamental misunderstanding of Pittsburgh’s journey to the precipice, and phantom echo from the last political generation.

My father worked in one of the Homestead steel mills on his summers off from college. My grandfather served mill workers in his shot-and-a-beer bar in Highland Park. By the time I was old enough to understand how the Steelers came by their name, the mills had already started closing. As the factories crumbled, the men who used to work in them drank forties on the corner, sold drugs, ran numbers, and let loose a gallows chuckle every time a mayor or city councilman told them Pittsburgh would be back. Their kids, the ones who couldn’t afford college and a trip out of town, have inherited their fathers’ bar stools, and that laugh is now an extra chromosome in Pittsburgh DNA.

Pittsburgh has had its share of good leadership and bad. There have been visionary mayors who got things done and worthless empty suits who won the chair with back-room deals and spent their terms paying off their debts. One-party rule hasn’t served the city well, but neither has the occasional Republican at the county level. All of this, however, is beside the point. If there was ever a point when local leadership possessed more than marginal control over Pittsburgh’s destiny, that time has long — before me, before even Fineman was a kid — since passed.

For most of its existence, Pittsburgh was a steel town. Thirty years after most of the mills started shutting down their furnaces, the evidence is still there. A ten-minute drive anywhere along the river will reveal the empty shells of the industry that built a nation, including my beloved Heppenstall, though not for much longer. Until the mid-70s, these plants worked three shifts, driving the local (and state, and national) economy. It would have taken an oracle to predict that it would all be gone in less than one generation, and a hypnotist to convince the citizens. It wasn’t a local choice to all-of-a-sudden allow foreign steel to flood the U.S. market. No Pittsburgh mayor ever had the power to force the steelmakers to run clean operations so that other industries wouldn’t avoid the town due to its dirty reputation. The city council never had the authority to mandate job training programs paid for by US, Bethlehem, or Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel.

There were certainly things that Pittsburgh’s leaders could have done better, but the city’s die was cast in Congress and the Oval Office by those who valued trade and open global markets over western New York/Pennsylvania’s steel, South Carolina’s textiles, or Detroit’s cars, and more importantly the workers who produced these goods. I’d love to have the argument over this value judgement. But the playing field in the trade debate has never been level. Free trade, from the earliest experiments, through NAFTA, CAFTA, and smaller bilateral agreements, has always been sold as a sure thing. If we allow foreign access to our markets, we’ll be able to sell to their people, and everything gets cheaper, and everybody wins. When faced with those possessing limited skills, retraining was the panacea. Workers too old for retraining were promised financial assistance. Ever try turning a 40-year-old manual laborer with a G.E.D into a “knowledge worker?” How about trying to support a 57-year-old until retirement only to watch his/her pension vaporize in a Gordon Gekko-style takeover? The rising tide simply doesn’t lift all boats, and what we’re left with is a race to the bottom. And the politicians who sold us the win-win always manage to welsh on the promises made to those who see their rafts overrun with water. Nowhere is this more stark than in Pittsburgh. How Fineman managed to write a column on the city without including this is a perfect example of just how skewed the trade debate really is.

Regardless of where you stand on trade/globalization, it’s irrelevant in the face of Fineman’s proposed fix for Pittsburgh, and its buy-one-get-one-free application to the whole nation. Optimism, as a political buzzword, has been around since the beginning of time. But today’s class of stenographers seem tattooed by Ronald Reagan’s use of it in 1980. During most of the Clinton years, when the majority of the country was optimistic, it apparently wasn’t important to have a sunny leader. But as the tech crash started dragging the market down during the 2000 election, it became important again that the next President was an optimist. And George W. Bush is nothing if not that. Some of course argue that Bush is really a cynic posing as an optimist, and they’re most likely right. But in public, Bush is the ultimate optimist, his professed faith so strong that his confidence in the rightness of his own decisions can endure a literally unlimited supply of bad news. Bush’s rosy outlook isn’t transferable at the moment, with his approval ratings in the twenties and national “wrong track” numbers hovering around 80%.

Yet Fineman says the way forward requires optimism. Luke Ravenstahl could be the second coming of the Gipper himself and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Taking office after the wrenching death from cancer of long-time city councilman Bob O’Connor, Ravenstahl has to some extent brought Pittsburgh together. But that’s just window dressing in a shrinking, aging city struggling just to maintain the current sad state of affairs, all with its budget under state receivership. It’s unclear to me, and Fineman doesn’t bother to explain, how a positive attitude is supposed to help, or is even warranted in Pittsburgh. It’s not my intent to denigrate the power of positive thinking. Sometimes, say for those with serious diseases, having faith in one’s future is important and possibly beneficial. But no one chooses a doctor based on his demeanor. Where choice is allowed, experience, certification, training, and other similar factors are all that matters. All things being equal, I’d rather have a gravely serious surgeon than the opposite.

The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter who is running Pittsburgh or Allegheny County or even the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Trade agreements are the exclusive province of the federal government. And while optimism might have been marginally important in bringing the country out of the “malaise” of the 70s, it didn’t do a damn thing to stop, or even slow, the decline of the regions of the country affected by globalization. Thirty years later, it’s completely useless. But what else can we expect from big media political reporters, the ones who traffic in what Donald Rumsfeld liked to call “known unknowns.” It’s easy to travel around and play at being an Everyday American while having special access to candidates that few will ever experience. This close-up spectating has produced a bumper crop of Important Journalism over the years, from Michael Dukakis in a tank to Al Gore’s sighs and earth-tone suits. To augment their shallow observations on the candidates’ appearance, they dig all the way down to faux-pop psychology, divining intent and emotion from subtle word choices, vocal inflection, and facial expression. And all it takes is a quick look at their analysis of Bush in 2000 versus the Bush administration 2001-present to see that they suck at it. Hard.

Which is probably why Fineman takes the opportunity of a trip to his long-forgotten hometown to take a look around and prescribe a banal — and oh yeah, wrong — dose of optimism for Pittsburgh. And because he doesn’t write for a local paper, but a national newsmagazine, he turns it into a “local story writ large” column, and calls it a day, in time to hit a few cocktail parties with people who couldn’t find Pittsburgh on a map.

It took a while for most of this country to arrive at the conclusion that it takes more than supposed good intentions and intangible share-a-beer qualities to run this country. “Experience” (real or perceived) seems to be the quality in demand ahead of the 2008 election; Hillary and Rudy aren’t in the lead on the strength of their personality. But the political media have decided that it’s bad for business to assess the merits and relevancy of the candidates’ proposals and history, while putting them on the couch from afar and assigning top priority to nebulous qualities is fair game. Maybe they think it’s harder for some blogger to fact check their work if they stick with those “known unknowns.” Think again, Howie.