Limbaugh Speaks Through Racing Fans' Jeers

I heard a recent clip from Rush Limbaugh’s broadcast, in which he commented upon Michelle Obama and Jill Biden serving as Grand Marshals at a NASCAR event over the weekend. Evidently, a portion of the crowd responded quite negatively to them. Limbaugh took it upon himself to explain that reaction from a crowd that was, in his words, insulted by the first lady’s presence there. Most any viewpoint that I hear Limbaugh express raises questions as to how, throughout decades in broadcasting, the man has managed to insulate himself so completely from anything that resembles evolution of thought or self-awareness.

A quick glance at other mentions of this incident on news sites and blogs indicates that many people are focusing on Limbaugh’s use of the word “uppity,” and the evident racial element to that kind of terminology. And while that is worth examining, I don’t like to put too much emphasis on the semantics of people’s stupid commentary. I’m willing to give Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt on things like that, and accept that he was using the word in a colloquial sense to refer to arrogance and haughtiness. Perhaps Limbaugh is simply unaware of the racial history of the term stemming from its original use by blacks in describing other blacks who seemed too invested in moving upward in a white-dominated society.

It’s a bit presumptuous to claim that Limbaugh’s use of the word denotes racism, though it very well may, but I think it’s perfectly fair to conclude from it that either Limbaugh doesn’t pay any attention to the issue of racial sensitivity or he hasn’t realized at any point in his long career in radio that words have consequences.

Still, language is kind of an esoteric way to criticize commentary that is so much more easily cut down by pointing out self-delusion and rational flaws. What Limbaugh offered, apparently as the principal reason why the crowd saw fit to give Mrs. Obama such a disrespectful reception was this:

“The first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers on four hours earlier than her husband who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that that’s a little bit of a waste.”

Now, his further comments suggest that he means “waste” in a purely fiscal, “those are my tax dollars” kind of way. I hope to God that that is indeed what he means, because if he thinks the people in attendance at an event where dozens of cars drive in a circle for five hundred miles are concerned about fuel conservation, he’s far more insane than I ever gave him credit for.

So, supposing that the source of the outcry is little more than the spending of public money, let’s look at this rationally. A jet like a Boeing 757 gets about three miles to the gallon, and the latest figures that I was able to find for the price of jet fuel place it at $3.20 per gallon. There’s about a thousand miles between Washington D.C. and Miami, so if that’s the trip we’re talking about, the first lady’s plane expended roughly 1067 dollars’ worth of fuel in getting there. If we ask for an equal share of that from just 150 million Americans – substantially less than half of the present population – then each of them is made to contribute just over two ten-thousandths of a cent to the trip. Of course, what Limbaugh seems to deem unforgivable is Michelle Obama going to the same place as her husband, except earlier. So we can double the per capita figure to about four-and-a-half ten-thousands of a cent. Is that personal loss what each of the members of the crowd was jeering at?

I recognize that the criticism of Mrs. Obama’s use of public funds extends far beyond one trip to Miami. I understand that the crowd wasn’t making so direct a connection between the first lady’s travel arrangements and their decision to give her such a cold reception. But my point here is to ask, does Rush Limbaugh understand that?

I think it was tasteless across the board for the crowd to boo Mrs. Obama, especially seeing as she was there to promote a charitable organization that serves our military veterans. But I don’t ascribe a single point of view, much less one so narrow in scope, to everyone who joined in on that chorus. I imagine that some people think she spends too lavishly given the state of the nation’s economy, but also that some were jeering at her as nothing more than a proxy for her husband’s political career. I also believe that some portion of the noise was probably coming from racists who just plain don’t like the uppity black woman taking center stage at their event.

I do not believe, however, that it’s possible to attribute Rush Limbaugh’s personal views to an entire crowd of people at a massive sporting event. Yet I think Limbaugh himself does just that in explaining just what it is that “the NASCAR people understand.” And by so doing, I think Limbaugh tends to shield his own very personal, unfair verbal assaults behind the imagined worldview of a group that probably possesses much more nuance in its collective thinking than is convenient for him.

I hope that some of the members of that crowd realize that the real insult against them is this kind of black-and-white thinking, which holds that there are only two ways of thinking about anything – the wrong way, and the Limbaugh way.

The Simplest Explanation is Often the Tesh One

During a recent, lengthy conversation with my brother Brian, he brought up the John Tesh radio show so that we could badmouth the host’s daily contributions to the lives of his listeners. I don’t think all that badly of John Tesh, but the sentiment that my brother and I seem to share is that he takes a rather unquestioning attitude towards the information that he cites on his program, and tends to dispense, as if it is gospel, advice that needs to be context-dependent at best. Then again, sometimes it’s probably just wrong altogether.

Yesterday, I just happened to hear a bit of the John Tesh broadcast, and really got my dander up over his latest explanation of some academic study. To his credit, I’m sure that a lot of the fault lies with the researchers who are putting out this material in the first place, but again, it is Tesh’s unquestioning attitude in broadcasting the stuff that turns irresponsible reasoning from an academic footnote into a corruption of popular knowledge.

In this case, Tesh thought himself to be informing his audience that cultural and artistic activities improve people’s health. According to surveys of study participants in Norway, he says, those who reported going to museums on a regular basis or either participating in or watching things like ballet tended to be significantly healthier overall than people who didn’t take part in those activities.

And then, setting aside any possible questions as to the meaning of the data, Tesh asks what he apparently thinks is the only natural question: how does this work? He promptly answers his own question, apparently restating the opinions of the original researchers. Not knowing where to find the original reporting, I can’t say with certainty that that’s the case, but coverage of the story in the UK Daily Telegraph back in May made the same statements about a unidirectional, causal relationship between cultural activity and physical outcome, so that suggests that such statements are repetition of the claims of the researchers. Whatever their original language, Tesh puts it simply and stupidly: cultural activities engage us mentally, and that helps us to be able to deal with stress and keeps us healthier.

It is absolutely shocking to me that professional academics and paid researchers still sometimes use the most obvious kind of faulty reasoning and confuse correlation with causality. Observing that healthy people go to museums absolutely does not mean that going to museums makes people healthy. In fact, assuming that that’s the case strikes me as amazingly unimaginative and intellectually lazy. I recognize that one needs a hypothesis in order to make scientific progress, but in general I’d say that good advice for researchers would be unless you have a damn good scientific explanation for how two phenomena are linked, don’t guess. As near as I can tell, everyone who’s communicating the story of this culture-health connection, from the Nordic researchers to the staff of the Telegraph to John Tesh, is taking it for granted in exactly the same way. Do none of them consider that there might be other factors at play?

It’s not difficult to identify alternative explanations. Of course, any of them would need additional data in order to have sufficient support, just as the claim that cultural activities cause good health needs additional data as to exactly what the mechanism of that cause is. Without access to a university research staff or other such resources, I can only guess, but I’d be quite willing to bet that if you did a study of people’s social class as compared with their cultural engagement, you’d find that wealthier people participated in more activities.

Take the three data sets together, and you’ve got a picture of more affluent people who are healthier than poor people and go to museums more often. I don’t know what John Tesh or the Daily Telegraph would say, but I have a fairly clear sense of which of those is the more significant variable in determining the other two. And yet I still wouldn’t say that being rich makes you healthier, because that’s a stupid thing to say. What I would say is that being wealthy gives you greater access to a wide range of food options, and allows you to pay for health-enhancing luxuries like gym memberships and spa vacations, while still having enough left over to go to the opera. So being wealthy makes it easier to make both healthier and more culturally refined lifestyle choices. But unless someone gives me a thoroughly refined scientific explanation of newly discovered physical mechanisms, I’m fairly certain that the only things that have a direct impact on health are the things that interact with your body’s functioning, such as what you eat and how often you exercise.

Since the British newspapers covered this study, Britain’s National Health Service took it up and posted a thorough, reasonable discussion of it on their website, including the prominent image caption at the top of the page, “It’s hard to tell if culture affects health, or vice versa.” It also adds tremendously to my sense of frustration at this sort of study by pointing out that surveys of participants wasn’t only used to determine their level of cultural participation; the surveys were actually the gauges of participant health. Their actual health, as determined by medical indicators, remains completely unknown.

In the NHS’s conclusion, it reiterates that the direction of causality is difficult to determine, and adds:

For example, just as participating in cultural activities might cause people to report better physical and mental health, it is just as plausible that people who feel healthier were more likely to engage in cultural activities.

No kidding. All a person should have to do to come up with this alternative explanation for the data is to think for just one minute about their own experience. Surely even John Tesh has felt down in the dumps at one or two points in his life. I’d be surprised if he reported that he was especially well-traveled among his local cultural institutions during those periods.

For that matter, the curve for this study would be absolutely shattered by interviewing just a few people who are genuinely sick. The researchers did adjust for things like chronic disease, but presumably not for recent, persistent disease. If, say, you’ve gotten the flu in each season of this year and have been laid up in bed for weeks at a time, of course you’re not going to the symphony. But if the poll was worded with sufficient vagueness, anyone who was reviewing the data blind would just see that participant x reported being in somewhat poor health and was highly unlikely to go to the cinema, theater, or gallery. Such a researcher might easily conclude that participant x’s cultural disinterest was contributing negatively to his health, if that researcher didn’t think very hard about the different ways to interpret what he was reading.

The study also analyzed reports of satisfaction with life, anxiety, and depression, and found that particular activities, depending on the gender of the participant, were correlated to differing levels of each. I take it that the essential conclusion from this part of the research is “Doing stuff makes you feel better.” You don’t say! And yet here also, to claim a unidirectional relationship is to draw an illogical, indefensible, and irresponsible conclusion, because feeling better makes you do stuff, too.

It’s the irresponsibility of this kind of reporting that really drives me crazy and prompts me to write 1,500 word rants on the topic. And that is also why I focus my umbrage on John Tesh, because it’s his sort of highly digested, exceptionally simplistic, and frequently repeated iterations of this kind of terrible academic research that are especially poisonous. One-dimensional interpretations of correlation between behaviors and conditions send a clear message of blame to people experiencing the less favorable conditions.

I imagine John Tesh rhetorically asking his audience “worried about your health?” and then cheerfully explaining to them that “if you think the problem is that you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford anything but empty calories at the grocery store, you’re wrong! It turns out that you, listener, just fucked up by not attending enough literature readings.”

Sadly, I’m sure that John Tesh genuinely feels as though he’s helping out his audience by telling them about the little aspects of their day-to-day lives that can contribute to their lasting health. But the thing is that for those of them who really have to struggle with these issues, he’s just making it worse. Considering that that Nordic research group included anxiety as a factor in its calculations, you’d think that someone would have given some thought to the likely future effect of believing that your health is tied to the number of lectures you attend this year. If people of distinctly low socioeconomic class listen to Tesh on this one and come to believe that frequent participation in cultural activities is key to their physical and mental health, the actual effect may turn out to be the opposite of what Tesh intends. I say that based on experience; I know what severe anxiety can come of trying to be culturally engaged while knowing all along that you cannot actually afford it.

If this possible ill effect was the consequence of just some one-off comment from John Tesh, I could give him a pass, but from what I’ve heard of his show, this is part and parcel of his daily broadcast. The list of recent topics on his website at this moment includes “Loneliness is bad for your health,” and “Volunteering boosts your health.” Bullshit claims, both. There is almost no conceivable way that in either of those cases the two factors being linked aren’t just simultaneous effects of other causes. Yet somehow Tesh doesn’t know that. Tragically, the researchers who produced the original claims may not. And certainly, much of Tesh’s listenership doesn’t realize that, and will take the voice on the radio at its word.

And what will come of these claims? Well, sure, certain frequent volunteers will feel more confident that their next check-up is going to go just fine. But also, some people who don’t have the time to volunteer because they’re working three jobs and still can’t afford health insurance will have found a new source of stress, anxiety, and depression, while some of those who have the best health care money can buy will attribute its effects to that Thanksgiving they spent working at the soup kitchen downtown. And at the same time, John Tesh is telling his sick and lonely listeners that if they’re worried about their health they’d better make sure they aren’t lonely, and if they’re worried about their loneliness, they damn well should be because it’s going to keep them in poor health. That information is rather less than helpful unless you’re neither lonely nor afflicted.

But the simpler the explanations of everyone’s problems, the better it is for everyone who doesn’t suffer them.

Beyond Statistics and Statements

Last night, I was listening to a news and talk radio program that I'd never heard before. It began with a segment detailing the persistently negative news regarding the United States job market. I was struck by the piece’s reporting style, not because it was unusual, but precisely because I took it to be commonplace. I have often found news coverage in the popular media to be formulaic, and given what a horrible state that media has been in for most of my life, the fact that every segment seems to be a parody of the last severely limits the chances of meaningful progress and innovation. Plugging the days variables into an established and tired equation for how to present information to the public does very little to advance that public’s understanding of the facts or the issues.

One of the problems that I have with news regarding the various economic indicators is that, though the public is selectively given reason to be apprehensive about the economy, they are also encouraged to perceive the problem as merely a set of mathematical figures. This is never truer than when the stock market faces a downturn – an event that has no clear connection to real world consequences in the minds of the average American. But even when we are given the numbers for job creation, such as the number zero associated with the month of August, the information is presented as just some vagary of current history, not as what it truly is: people’s lives and futures. There is a constant back-and-forth in the media narrative of the economy, and it gives the impression that when jobs are being created the situation is good, and when they are being cut the situation is bad. It turns the perception of the economy into a comparison of averages, divorced from the nuance of there being victims and beneficiaries in every climate, as well as lingering effects on many people of difficulties that the numbers may suggest have passed.

Obviously, the public knows that people are deeply affected when jobs are lost, when salaries are cut, and so on. Still, when the measure of that effect is purely numeric, it is easy for the public to lose sight of those effects. If you don’t have personal experience with the associated hardships, and if you don’t think very hard about it, you might allow yourself the indulgence of assuming that the difficulties faced by individuals have been, by and large, short lived.

Of course, the media does not exclusively present economic news as a set of statistics. That is precisely what I noticed in the radio segment I heard last night. The formula they follow seems to be aimed at counterbalancing the almost esoteric quality of large-scale assessments of economic indicators. They do this by introducing interviewees who are suffering the consequences of those more impersonal trends and figures. In last night’s case, they spoke to a woman who had been laid off from her job, which provided half of the income for a family of five, who were now not able to make their bills without relying on savings. Bits of that family’s story were interspersed with quotations from experts and excerpts from economic reports, in the same fashion that personal stories are always built into news stories of broader significance.

At the end of the piece, they tied the broader and narrower narratives together with a final thought that displayed shortsightedness and deeply flawed copywriting. They play a quotation from the woman, explaining that she felt that she was facing much greater competition in the current job market than she would have under more normal economic circumstances. The reporter took the reins for the last word, adding to her commentary that in her family’s current situation, that competition is one that she cannot afford to lose. That, I think, is remarkably irresponsible phrasing. It reflects the entire problem of constructing news reports according to this formula, a problem which is far from obvious, but which I think can be quite serious.

Who is it that can’t afford to lose the competition for jobs, according to the reporter? The woman he was interviewing? What about the people with whom she is competing? Saying that she specifically cannot lose that competition suggests that other people can, that she is unique, and that the problem being presented is her problem, not society’s. It is a very subtle outgrowth of the terribly common mentality of blaming the victim, in that that kind of phrasing seems to imply that the overall situation remains a fair competition, and that it is up to the families that are struggling the most to see to it that they win in a competition with people who can better absorb the setback.

The problem with presenting stories like that of the economy as a series of statistics and figures is that it prevents the story from being humanized. Leveraging in reference to one or two people experiencing the associated hardship succeeds at humanizing the problem for one or two people. It does not give the story a genuine sense of urgency for those who are not directly affected. Rather than presenting the public with one story about a series of economic indicators and their effect on entire segments of the American population, this sort of journalism presents two separate news stories in one piece: one bit of reporting about a set of vaguely significant calculations, and one human interest story about the brave struggles of a specific family in a specific region.

These stories need to be connected in a way that is meaningful to people who are not exactly like the ones being profiled in the human interest segment. The impulse to balance a detached perspective on the facts with a normative presentation of their effects and consequences is a good impulse, but its execution is lacking. The news media knows how to present both cold, dispassionate facts and charming personal narratives. It also knows how to speculate wildly on topics such as politics. But what it generally does not seem to have a talent for is the crucial application of reason to situations that warrant more than observation and ideological guesswork. That is what it would take to show economic facts in a light that shines evenly upon everyone who stands to be affected by it. Reporters should sometimes be willing to conclude from the esoteric facts what is happening in society as a whole. Facts speak for themselves, and so do individuals, but the collective experience has no voice. A good reporter should do the work of saying on air what has not been said for them. But there’s no formula for that, and so I have little expectation of hearing such a report any time soon.

Ad Libs

I heard an absurd radio advertisement today. "Manure," it began, "It's not a pretty word, but that's what some fertilizers are made of." Good start, that. It's not indicative of a very rigorously thought-out ad campaign that the first volley of attack on the competition is that a word associated with them simply doesn't have a euphonious sound. The announcer went on to talk down about manure-based fertilizers for a few seconds, but what really caught my ear was the effort at selling the product being advertised. The copy proudly pointed out that apart from its being "high energy," the alternative to manure is preferable because it is organic.

Amidst the fervent effort to greenwash products, have we actually forgotten what the term "organic" means? What could the livestock possibly be eating to make their excrement anything other than organic? It is stupefying to think that advertising agencies may actually expect consumers to leap at the sound of appealing language without thinking for two seconds about the meaning behind it. Worse still is the thought that they may be right. That suggests that the job of modern advertisers must be wonderfully easy. Either that or the industry is seriously lacking in truly effective, genuine creativity.

In many cases, advertisement seems to consist of little more than a professional game of mad libs:

[Competitor or general class of product] doesn't want you to know that it's [scary sounding but innocuous adjective]. But [our product] is better because it is/has [familiar but meaningless buzzword].

I hope for a breaking point on both sides. Consumers need to be more discerning, so as to not be taken in by the most obvious, unoriginal branding, which is rooted in nothing more than an attempt to repeat and bastardize the simplest terminology of current social awareness. But not everybody is that simple-minded, and this sort of advertising can only have a rather limited effect. Just painting something with the bland colors of glaringly obvious trends does not sell a product on its actual merits. For the sake of their products and for the sake of basic self-respect, advertisers need to hold themselves to a higher standard than this.