SteelyKid was a little bit fussy yesterday, and would only be quiet when carried in the “airplane” position. There are a limited number of ways to pass the time when doing this, so I had the tv on, and while channel-surfing past MSNBC, caught something saying that Obama would be giving his first news conference. That sounded somewhat interesting, so I watched it. <\/p>\n
The news conference itself was pretty unremarkable, but the immediate aftermath provided an excellent example of why the only tv news I watch is on Comedy Central. It’s not just the mind-boggling self-importance that Timothy Burke writes about<\/a>— they actually manage to achieve negative information transfer, making people less<\/strong> informed through their commentary.<\/p>\n Yesterday’s demonstration of this had to do with the final question of the news conference, helpfully transcribed by CNN<\/a>:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Question:<\/b> Mr. President-elect, do you still intend to seek income tax increases for upper-income Americans? And if so, should these Americans expect to pay higher taxes in 2009?<\/p>\n Obama:<\/b> The — my tax plan represented a net tax cut. It provided for substantial middle-class tax cuts; 95 percent of working Americans would receive them.<\/p>\n It also provided for cuts in capital gains for small businesses, additional tax credits. All of it is designed for job growth.<\/p>\n My priority is going to be, how do we grow the economy? How do we create more jobs?<\/p>\n I think that the plan that we’ve put forward is the right one, but, obviously, over the next several weeks and months, we’re going to be continuing to take a look at the data and see what’s taking place in the economy as a whole.<\/p>\n But, understand, the goal of my plan is to provide tax relief to families that are struggling, but also to boost the capacity of the economy to grow from the bottom up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It’s kind of a silly question, but I thought he dealt with it perfectly well.<\/p>\n The news conference ends, and they cut back to Chris Matthews and some woman whose name I don’t recall. Who, after giving a summary of the news conference that was almost as long as the news conference itself (which, you recall, just happened<\/strong>), proceed to talk about how “he didn’t really answer the question,” and how interesting it is that he appears to be walking back his campaign promise regarding taxes.<\/p>\n This is an example of what I mean. Anybody paying attention to Matthews and whoever would actually be less<\/strong> informed at the end of the day than if they just watched the press conference video, or read the transcript on the Internet.<\/p>\n I mean, in what way is that not an answer to the question? He re-frames the question about his tax plan to be more favorable, then says, “I think that the plan that we’ve put forward is the right one, but, obviously, over the next several weeks and months, we’re going to be continuing to take a look at the data and see what’s taking place in the economy as a whole.” That translates to “I’m going forward with the plan I proposed, unless something happens to make me think something else would be better.” That’s as direct an answer as you can expect, and it’s the right answer to give.<\/p>\n It’s not ducking the question, and it’s not waffling about the plan he campaigned on. And yet, Matthews and whoever were off on what promised to be a long discussion of the meaning of something that didn’t actually happen<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I don’t know how long that ended up lasting, or what they said, though. I changed the channel to, if I recall correctly, a re-run of an 80’s cop show. Because I knew I could count on that not to make me any dumber than I already am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SteelyKid was a little bit fussy yesterday, and would only be quiet when carried in the “airplane” position. There are a limited number of ways to pass the time when doing this, so I had the tv on, and while channel-surfing past MSNBC, caught something saying that Obama would be giving his first news conference.… Continue reading Negative Information Transfer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n