Peter Y. Sussman

Originally posted on Huffington Post on May 4, 2009.

Huffington Post is a noble and necessary experiment in citizen journalism — and indeed in journalism itself — and I have been pleased to be a contributor, however infrequent. But like all path-breaking experiments, it can be led astray by its very success, and I wonder if it is now in danger of being blinded by the dazzle of one of its own innovations.

Citizen journalists at Huffington Post recently received an email crowing, understandably, that “More than 2,500 of you helped make our tea party coverage the biggest distributive reporting success since the election.” As evidence of that success, the email noted that Huffington Post‘s citizen journalism “caught the eye of the blogosphere, on both conservatives and progressives [sic]. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was among those watching your reports, broadcasting your photographs live on her show last Friday.”

Attention garnered is certainly one measure of success, but is that the best measure of journalism excellence? Is the volume of the reporting an adequate gauge of good journalism?

To get more specific: Should we not also ask whether the high-wattage attention focused on a series of fringe protests dreamed up by some p.r. wizard with an ideological agenda by itself distorted the importance of those protests?

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing, and many of the errors of the mainstream media — even on issues far more important than a blonde beauty’s latest drunk-driving arrest — follow a similarly dangerous trajectory. That is,

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing …

the unrelenting attention of “pack journalists” gives a credibility and importance to an event that it did not merit. (The reverse is also true: The paucity of attention paid to a topic marginalizes that topic and can help push it down to the bottom of the national agenda.)

The spin may vary from one news organization to another — one cable channel to another — but the attention itself may be what most people remember though it can be every bit as misleading as the crazed rant of a verbal bully posing as a journalist. (“Of course it’s important; it was the top story on the 6 o’clock network news.”) It is a symptom of the perversity of the human mind
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On Friday, May 1, 2009, the following was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, under the headline “Formulas for Dysfunction: On the Effects of Direct Democracy.” At the time, I suppose, it was technically an OpEd, not a blog post, but my republishing it in this space magically transforms it into a blog post. That’s just one of the wonders of redefinition possible online.

Of course, feeling the need to define its category before posting it under the heading “Previous Blogs” also betrays the mild discomfort of a longtime print journalist dipping his toes into the blogosphere.

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For decades the voters of California have been freezing their peeves of the moment into constitutional permanence. Now the state’s voters are asked to solve the ensuing budgetary mess by once again creating a rigid, permanent constitutional fix for a transient fiscal crisis. Before Proposition 1A becomes yet another failed experiment in the politics of outrage, we should examine the dynamic that has brought us to our current fiscal impasse.

Among the primary culprits in restricting our ability to respond to extraordinary economic pressures are three constitutional mandates approved by the voters long ago that have placed legislators in a straitjacket as they try to resolve the pressure of extraordinary spending burdens and plummeting revenues brought on by the current depression.

The three measures most directly tying legislators’ hands are Proposition 13, which permanently distorts our tax base; the three-strikes initiative, which promotes unsustainable growth in our expensive prison system; and the two-thirds budget vote requirement that restricts legislators’ ability to respond to the other two pressures. Let’s review them briefly:

Proposition 13, a 1978 measure that was billed as the “homeowners’ tax revolt,” has ironically shifted more of the tax burden from businesses to homeowners. Its rigid formula for property assessment and taxation capped property taxes by an arbitrary numerical formula; starved many local services such as fire departments, police, schools and libraries; and generally tied revenue allocation into such knots that legislators and local officials had to raid other kitties to fund functions once financed by property taxes.

It also set a two-thirds vote requirement for legislative and local tax increases. Over the years, it has perpetuated – and even worsened – inequities among neighboring property owners and helped fuel a sense of

It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

the irrational burdens of taxation.

The three-strikes mandate, passed by voters in 1994, took many criminal sanctions out of the hands of judges and other professionals and subjected the nuanced art of sentencing to – once again – rigid arithmetic formulas that fail to reflect the gravity of the crime, the degree of individual culpability or the possibility of human change or rehabilitation. As a result, California has become one of the global capitals of lifetime incarceration, resulting in an ever-more-bloated prison system of increasingly geriatric (hence inordinately expensive), unthreatening prisoners.

The two-thirds budget vote mandate (with origins in Proposition 1 in 1933, during the mother of all depressions), combined with a polarized political system, has forced legislators to achieve virtual unanimity to resolve complicated budget problems. Politics and

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