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Targeting specifics

Thursday, September 9, 2010

JOURNALISTS – INDEED COMMUNICATORS of all stripes - benefit from specificity.

We all know this essential stock-in-trade of both the reporter who enlivens some overview dispatch by citing a single individual’s emblematic story, and the politician who embroiders a stump speech with the cameo appearance of a voter with a helpful message who’s been met along the campaign trail. (It can be overused, nay arrantly abused, of course. We should remember “Joe the Plumber” was an extrapolation of this approach.) 

It’s not too great a stretch to say that policy-makers benefit similarly by close-targeting … most of all when they identify sharply-defined areas for special attention within some broad sweeps of, say, government funding ... and inevitably major shifts in government funding.

 

Such selectivity brings the helpful bonus, too, of enabling policy-expounders ( - those politicians again, with their constant need for the cameo) to ramp up their salesmanship all that more expertly.

So it was that the press observed a new Barack Obama this week, with something gratifyingly tangible to promote now, in his energetic pitching (in Wisconsin, pictured above left) of new transportation projects as a literally concrete way to create fresh jobs across huge swathes of the nation. And then came more specifics, with his roll-out (in Ohio) of detailed tax-breaks for job-creating small businesses. It came along with a determined refusal to extend the expiring Bush-era tax-breaks for those two percent of our population who enjoy incomes of over $200,000 a year (and who are not really noted for their job-creating capacity, despite their supporters’ - usually Republican politicians’ - perpetual protestations).

The new economic specifics will, at a minimum, provide grist for much tightly-focused if clamorous argument, to be reported in detail - we can hope - as everyone hurtles toward November’s election.
  

 

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A CLUTCH OF FURTHER specifics to note this week …

THOUGH UNDER-REPORTED, as ever, those non-governmental organizations that strive to do what governments can’t, or won’t, had a crucial message for us all on Monday. Armed with a new report from the Save the Children charity, they highlighted the unacceptable outrage of four million needless deaths of children that occurred over the past decade worldwide. And all because medical aid effort has lacked the necessary specificity.

What has happened, the charities are arguing, is that aid programs in the developing world - usually government-determined - have operated too broadly, failing to focus on the absolutely neediest cases. The end result is that child-mortality figures may have gone down sometimes (and the governments may therefore look good, until you inquire more closely) but the improvement has actually favored the better-off segments of the population. We’re speaking very relatively of course – none of the countries involved are exactly rich. But the poorest of the poor remain badly served, indeed they end up worse off.

In Rwanda, for instance, there’s been a decrease in child mortality among better-off families, but at the same time the rate of children dying among the country’s poorest families has seriously risen. And in India - one of the world's fastest growing economies - the poorest children are now up to three times more likely to die than the richest sector’s children.

I just thought you might have missed this. Four million children dead, through governmental lack of focus. Such news is almost unbearable in its simple particularity.



VERY CAREFULLY SELECTIVE is how we can label the US Attorney General’s language this week. Eric Holder has a professional legal background, of course, and we can only applaud the lawyerly specificity of his word-choices in saying crisply: “Idiotic and dangerous”. He was talking of course about the Reverend Terry Jones’ plan to ceremonially burn copies of The Koran as some "commemoration" of 9/11 this weekend in Gainesville, Florida.

Sitting as I do in the city with the heaviest losses on that September day nine years ago – and the bemused focus for recent controversy over the planned Islamic center near the site – I feel the need now to get specific about numbers.

An estimated 59 Muslims died that day. (Or sixty, if you count the unborn child - which Rev Jones might - of a 7-months pregnant passenger aboard the American Airlines plane that was crashed into the North Tower of our World Trade Center.) They would therefore constitute 2.1% of the official death toll, which has stood at 2,752.

In the US population as a whole, Muslims make up less than 2%.

It’s at least arguable that Muslims are disproportionately represented among 9/11’s victims.

 

At the least, they and their faith deserve more respect, in this nation that proclaims itself a home for freedom of religion.



A LEADER NOTORIOUS FOR “IMPRECISION” is how some (more delicate) critics see Britain’s ex-premier Tony Blair.

Many more critics believe he’s notorious, indeed criminally guilty in his responsibility, for much, much worse offences. But it was his lack of accuracy (despite his being another lawyer, too) that caught some eyes, mine included, with the publication of his memoir “A Journey”.

Blair, for all his errors - and especially his calamitous commitment to the Iraq war -  will still in my book deserve credit for helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland. And that includes establishing the truth about the Bloody Sunday (no small matter for me, as THE MEDIA BEAT’s readers know well) by beginning the long, exhaustive investigation into that military massacre.

But this painstaking master of the Northern Ireland situation (as he claimed to be in an Irish television appearance - pictured above right) writes in his book that he “ordered an inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings in 1972, when British troops had opened fire in Belfast”.

Wrong place, Mr Blair. It actually (and rather famously, you’d think) happened in Derry, Northern Ireland’s second city.

If you’re going to be specific, you might as well get it right.

 

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