The blog is back from haitus. First, of note this week is a piece on tort reform in the Economist. This is one issue on which the Republicans are, in sum, right. On one hand there are the practical issues, in particular the staggering growth of health care costs, fueled in part by malpractice litigation. On the other hand, it is unclear that the purported aims of civil lawsuits (punishment and deterance) are reached by tort law. For a progressive movement eager (quite rightly) to point out that capital punishment does not serve its aim, overlooking the question whether anything comparable to criminal prosecution is achieved or not is unfortunate. The Democrats would do well to take up the cause of tort reform - unlike other populist stances (trade protectionism, say, or expanding Social Security/Medicaid), protecting large lawsuits makes Democrats seem more self-serving, given their reliance on trial lawyers for political donations. Furthermore, coopting the issue could give them a hand in shaping the form it takes, much like the example of welfare reform. The Republicans may be right on the principal of tort reform, but are not necessarily the ones to be trusted to insure that the problems tort law seeks to redress (unscrupulous corporate practices, environmental damage, medical malpractice) continue to be tackled.
Second, last week I came across (through Romenesko) a discussion on the civil war in Dem. Rep. of Congo. In it, Philip Gourevitch discusses why Africa is under-reported in the news.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think African wars are treated differently from wars in other parts of the world because of their apparent intractability — and, and here we may have the, the whiff of racism — well, we can’t solve those problems.
PHILIP GOUREVITCH: I really don’t think it’s necessarily exactly racism. I think that it has to do with a kind of political imagination. In other words Africa doesn’t threaten us. It doesn’t involve us. And the terrible thing is that the brutality of Africa is particularly graphic often because the arms are relatively small arms. ….So the failure is — if you don’t cover a story like this steadily, then there’s no way to describe it except by saying, you know, the words that you get when you look at the press coverage of the Congo war — a bewildering flock of incomprehensible forces with virtually indistinguishable claims. Well that’s almost like telling a reader — do not try to absorb this. …..Africa is not a priority. It’s not a priority for the government; it’s not a priority for the business community; it’s not an economic priority; and it’s not a press priority.
Interestingly, Gourevitch doesn’t simply condemn the media on this count, and is realistic in his assessment that lack of general knowledge about the political players is a hard stumbling block to overcome. But whatever other difficulties we face, Gourevitch is spot on in his assessment that a kind of political imagination keeps us from understanding, hence caring about, Africa. I can’t help but think of recent talk that liberals want to form a left counterpart to conservative cable news shows. Domestic politics is important of course, but I’d much rather have a news network that actually gave analysis to its televisual reporting. If a news channel could help us understand the civil wars in central Africa with the clarity we understand the Israeli-Palestinian strife or Germany’s elections, I think it would be doing a great service and ultimately would probably be a better weapon against any O’Reilly factor.
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