The New York Post

June 20, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I love the New York Post. I don’t actually read it; but I see the front page every day. Regardless of the actual content, the message of the subtext could often be summarized in the following headline:

THIS IS NOT A REAL NEWSPAPER.
We’re in it for kicks.

Here’s yesterdays front page.



The story was that Israel was trying to boost its sagging tourism. Apparently the Israelis thought that potential tourists —younger male tourists — were staying away not because of questions of politics and safety but because the Israel “brand” lacked sex. So they made a deal with Maxim, the lad mag, to sponsor a party honoring Israeli women soldiers. They used this photo of Miss Israel 2004 on the invitation.

The Post usually supports Israel, but when it comes to politics on one side and a bikini and a smutty pun on the other, it’s no contest. (“Piece” seems somewhat dated to my ear, but I don’t spend much time listening to informal talk among the target demographic. And how many Post readers will get the pun on brouhaha?)

There’s a culture and class connection here that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s a combination of patriotism, prurience, and puritanism, and the Post, like much of the rest of Murdoch’s media empire, thrives on it. Most of Murdoch’s other outlets take themselves more seriously, though when the boys at Fox News slapped on that “Fair and Balanced” slogan, they surely must have had their tongue deep in their cheek and all fingers crossed.

The Murdoch media love sex, especially when it allows the pointing of fingers at other people’s sexuality. I’m sure they’re kicking themselves for failing to come up with “To Catch a Predator,” NBC’s champion in the “moral righteousness cum voyeurism” category, while Fox and the others must content themselves with Britney, Paris, and the rest. (For an interesting take on “Predator,” see Corey Colyer’s recent blog entry. ) Typically with these publications, you get babes in bikinis on one page and on the next a sex scandal news item that clearly shows the border between the good guys’ cheerful sexuality and that bad guys’ evil sexuality.

The simplistic moral approach also applies to politics. It’s us against them, and we’re the good guys. Again, the Post, with its lack of pretension to being a real newspaper, provides the best example. Here it is in March 2003, when in the U.N., France and Germany were opposing US resolutions authorizing the invasion of Iraq.


(In case you can’t see it in the photo, the weasel heads have been superimposed on the representatives from France and Germany.)

The Post covers politics the way it covers sports, with the Bush administration as the home team. The main difference is that the Post sports reporters try to get information besides what’s put out by the Yankee front office, and they will actually criticize the Yankee players and management when the team is not doing well. (Currently, the Yankees in MLB are sort of like the US in Iraq — spending a ton of money and not having a lot of victories to show for it, in fact just barely above having a losing record.)

For the New York Post, every day is a moral struggle. Every day, on various fronts, good confronts evil. The forces of selfless virtue, loyalty, common sense, and pride confront the forces of self-interest, danger, sneakiness, corruption, elitism, and immorality. The good guys don’t win every battle, but they can pat themselves on the back for trying. And whatever happens, they can usually find comfort in a picture of a beautiful woman who’s not wearing very much at all.

Rich Girls II

June 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

More on that Gallup poll in the previous post about Paris, Lindsay, Nicole, and Britney. Around the time I was looking at these poll results, a friend wrote about her daughter’s thirteenth birthday party. “After a year of getting to know these [13-year-old] girls, I've really started to care about them and like them. I think they are good at heart. Some of them come from extremely wealthy families and are spoiled rotten, so it took me a while to find the love for some of them.”

I was reminded of the movie “Thirteen,” in which a girl of modest means is corrupted by a wealthier classmate. Poor girl looks up to “cool,” rich girl; rich girl seduces poor girl into drugs, shoplifting, sex with boys. It’s a cliche, but at least it’s a low-budget, indie version of the cliche.

Like other cliches, it confirms a widely held view, in this case that having a lot of money is dangerous, especially because it can lead girls away from conventional middle-class ways.

(Are there similar tales about boys? I can’t think of any. Rich boys in American stories can be cruel — they can also be helpful — but they seldom corrupt the ordinary boy’s morals as is so common in the fallen-woman stories.)

Ms. Hilton and the others are considerably older than thirteen, but the money-vs.-morals theory retains its attractiveness even when we think about these twentysomethings. Gallup offered four choices for people to explain what caused the problems of these celebs.

“Having too much money at a young age”
“The pressures of fame at a young age”
“Negative influences of the Hollywood culture”
“Parents doing a poor job raising them”

Here are the results:
Too Much Money is the clear winner.

I don’t know the systematic evidence on child-rearing and what might cause girls to have problems. But Gallup respondents didn’t know either. Besides, even if we know that something is true in a general sense, it is impossible to know if it applied in any individual case. So what we’re looking at here is not solid reality; it’s people’s beliefs about reality, specifically about the effects of money.

Those beliefs seem to be rooted in a relentless belief that only middle-class morality will work. It’s a Goldilocks view of socio-economic status. We believe that poverty is not good for kids, but we also see dangers in great wealth. The middle-income range is just right.

I wonder if people in other societies take a similar view, especially in societies with less of an egalitarian ethos and with some trace of aristocratic tradition. The British may not be pleased with the behavior of the younger generations of the royal family, but I don’t think they attribute the shortcomings to an overabundance of money. It’s also possible that within an upper class, drunkenness and adventurous sexuality are not seen as inherently bad. Fidelity and sobriety are middle-class virtues, not nearly so exalted at the outer reaches of the social distribution.

There also seems to be some ambivalence here about middle-class aspirations. We would all like to have more money, though not too much more. (Ask people what the “right” income would be, the income that would allow them to live comfortably, and you’ll usually get a number that’s about 25% higher than what they’re currently making.) Historically, the American pattern of upward mobility is that parents want their own children to have it better than they did. Parents want to be able to buy stuff for their kids. They don’t want their kids to be at all deprived. Yet, there seems to be a nagging fear that giving kids these advantages might also spoil them.

We project that fear upward. I’m not going to give my kid enough to spoil him, not on my income and not even if I were making 25% more than I do now. But the Hiltons, and even those people who make twice what I make — they’re the ones who risk spoiling their kids.

The irony, of course, is that this analysis is relative to one’s own income, and at all levels throughout the broad spectrum that think of themselves as middle class, people may be applying the same moral-economic formula. Someone who makes half as much as you do may see you as one of those rich people who spoil their kids.

Girls (But Not Boys) Behaving Badly

June 16, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

George Bush’s favorability ratings keep sinking. In the latest polls (Quinnipiac, NBC/WSJ), only 28-29% of the people come down on the plus side. But wait. Gallup has found other public figures whose numbers are even lower.


Paris Hilton, of course, was the big winner in the girls-gone-bad sweepstakes. Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, even Britney Spears were more highly thought of, with sympathy ratings soaring upwards of 15%.

Note that Gallup asked only about young women. Gallup was only following the media, and the media would claim that they are only following the public’s interest. True, when it comes to stories about troubles people bring on themselves, the public seems to take much more delight in stories about women than about men. When Paris Hilton was jailed, and especially when she broke into tears on being re-jailed, the tabloid media reported with a self-righteous glee in her suffering.

Surely there must be male celebrities who have sinned— Russell Crowe throwing a telephone into the face of a hotel desk clerk, Mel Gibson spewing drunken anti-Semitic remarks at the cop who pulled him over, Robert Downey, Jr.’s recurrent drug problems, etc. Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in “The Simple Life” set their own glam sensibilities against that of the heartland, but the show was self-mocking and generally not critical of middle America. Borat, by contrast, took some pretty serious swipes at middle America and used some underhanded (though legal) tricks in doing so.

But these men have not been surrounded with the sustained fascination we have given Paris, Lindsay, and the others, nor do the public and media seem to have the same sadistic longing to see them suffer legal or other consequences.

The media framed the Paris Hilton story as the rich girl trying to avoid justice and finally getting what she deserved. The media didn’t report much on what the usual sentence would be for a first-offense driver’s license violation. Probably not jail time. But for the media and public, this case wasn’t really about driving with a suspended license, just as the Clinton impeachment wasn’t really about lying to a grand jury. It was about sex. Paris Hilton’s real crime in the court of tabloid opinion was flaunting her sexuality. And the same may be true of the others.

It doesn’t matter that in many cases, it’s the tabloid media and public that are mostly responsible for making public what had been private — the voyeuristic photos, the theft and distribution of a private video. The media and public strip the clothes off these female celebs and then punish them for indecent exposure.

These stories aren’t news. They’re morality tales, and they show that moral standards are still different for women and men.

Attitudes and Familiarity

June 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston


In the previous post, I said that professors who have the most negative attitudes towards Evangelicals probably are those who have the least contact with them. I don't have any data on that specific issue, but studies on other topics generally confirm the idea that familiarity breeds content. Or if not content, at least a decrease in antipathy.

The graph shows some data from a survey that asked, among other things, if immigrants were a burden on the US.
The people who had little contact with immigrants were more than twice as likely to say that immigrants were a burden.

I live in New York. Buy food in a grocery store, take a cab, buy a newspaper, eat in a restaurant, check into a hotel or hospital — just about anything you do will bring you into contact with immigrants. I doubt that many New Yorkers see immigrants as a threat to the Republic.

The same principle holds for attitudes on issues that surround homosexuality—  should they be allowed to teach in schools, should they be able to marry.

The same is true of homosexuality.

People with no gay friends or relatives are more than twice as likely to favor allowing schools to fire gay teachers. People who do have gay friends or relatives are more than twice as likely to favor allowing gays to marry.