Freedom of Tweets

My first assignment in graduate school was as a research assistant to Jack Brehm, who was then developing on his theory of psychological reactance. Reactance is about our response to a loss of personal freedom. According to the theory, we all have a set of what we believe are free behaviors—behaviors we are free to engage in whenever they are situationally appropriate. When one of more of our free behaviors is eliminated or threatened with elimination, we experience an unpleasant motivational state called reactance, the goal of which is to restore the lost or threatened freedom. The amount of reactance we feel depends on such factors as the number and importance of the free behaviors under threat, as well as any other free behaviors that are threatened by implication.

One immediate effect of reactance is that the lost or threatened behavior becomes more attractive. If the behavior is merely threatened, we can reassert our freedom by engaging in it more often. If engaging in the behavior is no longer possible, we may try to restore our freedom indirectly by carrying out similar actions that have the same effect, or that imply that we could exercise the lost freedom if we really wanted to.

A classic example of reactance is our reaction to censorship attempts. Censorship obviously threatens freedom of speech and of the press, and may be seen as an attempt to control our thoughts. Steve Worchel and his colleagues have done studies—this one, for example—showing that telling experimental participants that an article has been censored increases their interest in reading it (compared to other participants for whom the article was not censored). In addition, the participants change their attitudes in favor of the position taken by the author of the censored article, even though they haven't read it. The participants seem to infer that if someone has tried to censor a message, it must be persuasive.

Censorship was in the news this past week when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was accused of accepting bribes and other corrupt behaviors in a series of Twitter messages. Erdogan faces possible loss of power after local elections tomorrow (March 30). It's not clear how true the charges are, but Erdogan's response to them was not very smart. Saying that social media are a menace to society, he announced that the government was shutting down Twitter throughout Turkey.

However, Turkish Twitter users could work around the ban by altering domain name settings. The word spread quickly that, by going to a little extra trouble, they could continue tweeting. As reactance theory predicts, the ban backfired. This chart from the social media analysis firm Brandwatch shows that there was a 38% increase in the hourly numbers of tweets from March 19, the day before the ban, to March 21, the first full day after it.

By March 22, the government was able to close down these workarounds. But it's hard to censor the internet, since there are so many alternative paths a message can take. Another solution was to send tweets through a portal called Tor. The chart below shows an increase in Tor usage as well, from roughly 25,000 connects on March 20 to 40,000 on March 23.

Erdogan has become an object of ridicule in political cartoons such as the one below. (See this article for some other examples.) More importantly, reactance theory predicts the failed censorship attempt will lead more Turks to believe he is guilty of corruption. Unfortunately, I have no data on that.

The Turkish courts have overturned the Twitter ban, but service is still blocked since the government has 30 days to comply. But Erdogan has not learned his lesson. The other day a video appeared on You Tube containing a wiretapped conversation between members of the Turkish government and military discussing the possibility of going to war with Syria. They appear to be planning a “false flag” operation in which they would bomb a Turkish shrine and blame it on Syria, as a pretext for war. (Erdogan claims the tape was “immorally edited.”) On Thursday, the Turkish government banned You Tube as well. I presume this ban will also be thrown out by the courts, but not until after the election.

Consider how many political debates in this country are about real or imagined threats to our freedom. For example, Edward Snowden's disclosures have increased public awareness of the threat to privacy posed by mass surveillance. Loss of privacy could be considered an implied threat to a variety of free behaviors—anything from carrying on an extramarital affair to engaging in political dissent. The time may be right for a revival of interest in reactance theory, with expanded emphasis on implied threats to freedom.

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Talking Back to the Media

This Man is Truly and Finally Hopeless

I've never been quite as angry at President Obama, or regretted as much having voted for him in 2008, as when I saw and read this part of his speech in Brussels yesterday.

Let's skip the introduction, in which he congratulates himself for having opposed our invasion of Iraq, and go directly to the substance of his remarks.

          But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system.

Yes. We presented our case to the United Nations, they said “no,” and we went ahead and invaded anyway. Is this morally superior to not having asked? It is our failure to abide by the terms of the UN charter that makes the invasion of Iraq a clear violation of international law.

          We did not claim or annex Iraq's territory.

True, but . . .

          We did not grab its resources for our own gain.

This is false. One of the first things we did was insist that Iraq's oil, which previously belonged to the Iraqi people, be privatized and the drilling rights sold to American and international oil companies. Of course, energy corporations were not the only ones to profit from the war. Millions of dollars went to weapons manufacturers and politically connected contractors such as Halliburton. Among those who didn't benefit were the American people. According to the Pentagon, 4487 soldiers lost their lives in Iraq, and tens of thousands more suffered life-changing injuries. The American people are also left with more than $3 trillion in debt.

I think we can now say without fear of contradiction that control of Iraqi oil was the primary reason the Bush administration went to war in Iraq. If you have not yet seen Rachel Maddow's March 13 documentary, Why We Did It, you should watch it.

   
          Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people . . .

About a million fewer of them than when the war started.

          . . . in a fully sovereign Iraqi state that can make decisions about its own future.

We also left them with a totally devastated infrastructure, contaminated by depleted uranium which will leave future generations of Iraqis to suffer from cancer and birth defects. We unleashed sectarian violence which continues to kill Iraqis almost every day. Whether the future of Iraq will include democratic elections remains to be seen. Their current President Nouri al-Malaki, running for a third term, seems to be systematically eliminating his competition from the upcoming elections.

How many people died and how much property was destroyed during the annexation of Crimea? And speaking of people determining their own future, we are told that 83% of Crimeans voted in the March 16 referendum, and 97% of those who voted chose annexation by Russia. Even if those figures are not entirely accurate, or are tainted in some way by the presence of Russian troops in the country, no one is seriously denying that annexation by Russia was the overwhelming preference of the Crimean people.

I saw a former American diplomat (whose name I unfortunately don't recall) interviewed on television by Chris Hayes. When he parroted the administration's claim that the annexation of Crimea violates international law, Hayes asked him the obvious question about American hypocrisy, given our past history in Iraq and other places. His answer was, basically, “Yes, but two wrongs don't make a right.” Wouldn't it have been refreshing had Obama said something similar, something like this?

We were wrong to invade Iraq, and in doing so, we contributed to the breakdown of international law which made the takeover of Crimea seem more permissible. But our foreign policy will change. We will not engage in illegal wars during the remainder of my presidency.

Our course, if he had said that, he would have to (among other things) end his illegal drone strikes in at least four countries.

The most interesting question that remains to be answered about Barack Obama is this: Is his dramatic conservative shift in attitudes the inevitable result of time spent in the office of the presidency, or did he actively deceive the American people about his intentions during his two political campaigns?

Update (3/29/14):

I now believe the diplomat I referred to was Michael McFaul, former Ambassador to Russia. He has written an op-ed that mentions the difficult he had defending international law in Russia when they always asked, "What about Iraq?"

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A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Talking Back to the Media

Talking Back to the Media

Last week, NTU, the Ukranian state television, broadcast a ceremony in Moscow in which Russian and Crimean leaders signed a treaty marking Crimea's annexation by Russia—presumably a newsworthy event in Kiev. Later that day, five members of Ukraine's Svoboda political party, led by Member of Parliament Igor Miroshenichenko (the man with the pony tail), broke into the office of NTU president Aleksandr Panteleymonov and demanded his resignation. They recorded the event on video.

The following partial translation is rated PG-17, so if you're not feeling mature, you may wish to skip the italicized paragraphs.

Miroshenichenko: “Write your resignation! Sit down! I told you, sit down!”

            They drag him across the room, punch him in the face, and sit him down.

Miroshenichenko: “Here is a paper, pen, write the resignation now quickly, you animal. . . You Russian piece of shit. Write your resignation now. You bloody Muscovite, do it!”

Panteleymonov: “I am not a Muscovite, I am a Ukrainian.”

They hit him again.

Miroshenichenko: “You are Ukranian? You are a piece of shit, not a Ukrainian. You fucking dirtbag. You are a traitor!”

Miroshenichenko is deputy head of the Ukranian government's committee on freedom of speech. Apparently, he wanted to make it clear that there was none.

Svoboda logo

When Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the Ukranian coup, supported by the US, includes “neofascist extremists,” he was talking about Svoboda. Svoboda, which means “freedom,” is Ukraine's fourth largest political party. They received 10% of the vote in the 2010 election and held 37 seats in Parliament. They, along with two other less far right-wing parties, make up the ruling coalition following the coup. They hold five key positions in the new government, including the Deputy Prime Minister, Oleh Tyahnybok, the Minister of Defense and the Prosecutor General. Svoboda is a party of Ukranian nationalists. They are described as anti-Russian, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and neo-Nazis due to their historic ties to Ukranians who supported Hitler during World War II. Mr. Tyahnybok, the party's leader, recently claimed that "organized Jewry" dominated the Ukranian media and government.

Svoboda's attack on NTU was condemned by Amnesty International. However, it has received little attention from the corporate media in this country. One exception is an article in the Washington Post under the headline, “Ukraine nationalist antics seen as gift to Russia,” in which the incident was treated as a public relations problem for the new government. In general, there are few references to Svoboda in the US press. They were mentioned briefly as leaders of some of the more violent street demonstrations prior to the coup. After the new government took charge, the only mainstream source to raise serious alarm about them was Post columnist Eugene Robinson. Progressive commentator Robert Parry has referred to the corporate media's actions as “whiting out the brownshirts.”

Next time you get angry at Comcast or Verizon, you may want to recall the example of our Ukranian allies.

Dog Whistle Politics

(W)e have got a tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working. And just generations of men not even thinking about work or learning the value of work, and so there's a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

                                                                                       Rep. Paul Ryan (D-IL)

The 2012 Republican candidate for Vice President made this comment Wednesday (March 12) on Morning in America, a radio talk show hosted by Reagan administration Secretary of Education and compulsive gambler Bill Bennett. He followed it up the next day at the Conservative Political Action Committee convention with a denunciation of the school lunch program.

You don't need a secret decoder ring to interpret the message in Ryan's latest remarks. Later that day, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) released this statement:

Ryan's comments about “inner city” poverty are a thinly veiled racial attack and cannot be tolerated. When Mr. Ryan says “inner city,” when he says “culture,” these are simply code words for what he really means: “Black.”

Ryan defended himself by saying, “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me.”

Two weeks ago, I posted some candid remarks by the late Republican campaign manager Lee Atwater, a primary advocate of the “Southern strategy.” Atwater pointed out that, in the 1950s, it was considered acceptable for politicians to appeal openly to the racial fears of White voters. However, by 1981, it was necessary to use more “abstract” language, such as favoring “states' rights” or “cutting taxes.”

Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has a new book, Dog Whistle Politics, about the history and current relevance of race-baiting in political campaigns. (I haven't read it yet; I have it on order.) He uses the metaphor of the dog whistle since it is inaudible to the human ear, but reliably influences the dog's behavior. Dog whistle political appeals seem on the surface not to be about race, but they are understood as racial by White voters. The fact that these statements refer to something else gives the politician plausible deniability when he or she is accused of racism. Here is Dr. Haney Lopez discussing his book on Democracy Now.

In recent years, the Republican Party's domestic political message has become almost synonymous with symbolic racism. It is intended to persuade White Americans that social welfare programs primarily benefit urban Blacks and other minorities, and that the overrepresentation of Blacks among the poor is due to lack of motivation to work. Government is portrayed as stealing their hard-earned tax dollars and giving them to lazy poor people. But the people influenced by this message are actually voting contrary to their economic self-interest, since, when elected, Republicans pass policies that primarily benefit the wealthy. These government policies have been the primary cause of the large increase in inequality that has occurred over the past 30 years.

Ryan's remarks imply that poverty is largely an urban phenomenon, but that is not the case. These data from the U. S. census show that the poverty rate is higher in rural areas—not coincidentally, the Republican base.

It is also not the case that a disproportionate amount of tax money goes to minority recipients. The Congressional Budget Office reports that while African-Americans make up 12% of the population and 22% of the poor, they only receive 14% of government benefits. Non-Hispanic Whites, on the other hand, are 49% of the poor and receive 69% of government benefits.

Black unemployment can best be understood as a result of lack of opportunity, specifically, the disappearance of industrial jobs from urban centers, and well-documented hiring discrimination against African-Americans. The Republican "culture of poverty" message is an obvious attempt to blame the victim. (See my earlier post on this important social-psychological concept.)  

Ryan's response to criticism of his “Blacks are lazy” comments illustrates the role of plausible deniability in dog whistle politics. On the one hand, given Ryan's prominence in the Republican Party, it is totally implausible that his remarks were thoughtless or unintentional. The Southern strategy is Campaigning 101 for Republican candidates. Yet the corporate media accept his denials without skepticism. In fact, they almost never call out Republicans for race-baiting. Could it be because Ryan's budget proposals, which call for cutting social spending and reducing taxes on the rich, coincide with the policy preferences of the small number of wealthy owners and managers of the corporate media?

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A Racist Who Loved the Blues

And Then There Were Five, Part 1

Blaming the Victim

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 2

Before continuing, please read Part 1 of this post.

What are the reasons for the rise of the nones? The media often propose some variation of a political backlash model, suggesting that organized religion has alienated young people with its stance on a cluster of issues related to sexuality and the family—divorce, contraception, abortion, gay rights, and the status of women. And in fact, the nones hold more liberal views on all of these issues. For example, 72% of them believe that abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances, while 53% of the population hold that view, and 73% support same-sex marriages, compared to only 48% of the population. However, these attitudes could be a result rather than a cause of their secularism, or they could all be caused by other social conditions.

Cross-cultural research on the sociology of religion has emphasized two predictors of religiosity, poverty and lack of education. The Existential Security Framework proposes that objective measures of security, such as material wealth, good health and a government-provided safety net, encourage secularity. When people lack these forms of security and can't do much about it, they turn to superstition as a way of asking for help.  Comparing countries, there is a strong positive relationship between poverty and religiosity. Non-believers are concentrated in European countries such as Sweden (64%), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). On the other hand, fewer than 1% of people from Sub-Saharan Africa are non-believers. However, the United States is one of the richer countries that bucks this trend. In addition, this model may be better at explaining the worldwide decline in religiosity than changes here in the United States, since real wages in this country have been stagnant for the past 30 years.

If poverty is religion's friend, its worst enemy is probably education, especially insofar as it encourages scientific literacy and critical thinking. Data from Canada indicate that, holding other variables constant, each additional year of schooling results in a 4% increase in the likelihood that a person reports no religious affiliation. Braun attempted to find out which was the best predictor of secularism, education or economic security. He assembled 149 objective measures from some or all of the world's 193 countries. He grouped them into clusters of related measures with the help of factor analysis. He then used multiple regression to determine which measures were most strongly related to survey questions about the importance of God and religion in one's life.

He found that education was the strongest predictor of lack of religiosity, and that economic security had no additional effect when education was held constant. It's important to note that multiple regression is just an advanced form of correlational analysis. These data do not mean education is the cause of secularism, economic security or any of the other variables in the analysis. It merely indicates that education accounts for more of the variability in religiosity than any of the other measures that were available. 

Once again, the United States is an outlier in that we are more religious than our average level of educational attainment would predict, and the positive relationship between years of schooling and non-belief is weaker than in other countries. My own hypothesis, unsupported by data, is that political interference in the public schools prevents American teachers from referring to religion in any but the most favorable terms. Even at the college level, attempts to discuss critical thinking sometimes lead to complaints to administrators from religious students. (It's possible to lecture on critical thinking without mentioning religion, but students usually recognize that critical thinking is pretty much the opposite of religious faith and this invariably comes up in discussions.)

Whatever the reason for the shift, if the nones continue to increase, it is likely to benefit the Democratic Party in national elections. Here are the exit poll data from 2012, broken down by religion.

However, before you members of the Jackass Party break out the champagne, two words of caution:

• The nones make up 20% of the adult population but only 12% of the voters. One of the challenges for Democrats will be to mobilize this group.
• The 2012 presidential race probably overstates the effect of religion on voting, since Barack Obama was one of the candidates. Not only are religious people more likely to be conservative, they are also significantly higher in racial prejudice.

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The Revolt of the Nones, Part 1

Poverty Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 1

A couple of years ago, a neighbor and I chatted about the weather while walking our dogs. The topic of climate change came up. He said he agreed with his minister, who had told him that global warming was nonsense. After I began to tick off some of the evidence, he reversed direction and said he welcomed extreme climate change, since it would bring about the “end times.” He and his co-religionists would ascend to heaven, where it is presumably air conditioned. Of course, this is just an anecdote, and it could be misleading, but in this case it's not. I thought about it when I read some recent surveys reporting the rise of the “nones.”

The General Social Survey (GSS) is pretty much the gold standard in American survey research. Not only is the sample representative, but they have a response rate of 70% and 83% of their interviews are conducted in person. The interviews average 90 minutes apiece and respondents are paid $20. Since 1972, the GSS has been asking: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” The percentage answering no religion has gone from 5% in 1972 to 20% in 2012 (the most recent survey). Here's the trend line. 

Since 1990, those preferring no religion have been increasing by .6% per year. These data are consistent with the results of other national surveys.

So the priests are losing ground to the nones. Does this mean the nones are discarding their old habits? Not exactly. Rather than individuals changing their attitudes, we're seeing a demographic transition, as older, more religious people die and are replaced by younger, less religious folks. Here's the 2012 data sliced by age. In the 18-30 age group, also known as the “Millennials,” more people are choosing the secular option than either Protestant or Catholic.

Here the attitudes of these same 18-30-year-olds regarding the existence of “God” are compared to older folks.

What are the reasons for the rise of the nones? Please see Part 2.

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The Revolt of the Nones, Part 2

Poverty Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

In Denial

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan was on All In with Chris Hayes last night (March 11) for a discussion of the Julia Boonstra television ad. The political ad, which was financed by the Koch Brothers' PAC, Americans for Prosperity, is running in Michigan in an early attempt to discredit Democratic Senatorial candidate Gary Peters. In it, Ms. Boonstra, a cancer patient, claims that her health insurance was cancelled due to the Affordable Care Act, that she can't afford the alternative policy offered to her, and that she is afraid she will die as a result. The ad was awarded three Pinocchios by the Washington Post after it was discovered that the alternative policy actually would save her $1200 a year. Her response was, “I personally do not believe that,” and that it “can't be true.”

This ad is part of a larger campaign in which Republican organizations trot out Obamacare “victims” to tell stories that are almost always misleading. Journalists eventually debunk these stories, but many more people hear the lie on television than read the truth in a newspaper, and even those who are told that the story is false often refuse to believe it.

Brendan Nyhan has been doing research for several years which shows that attempts to correct misinformation fail when they oppose people's deeply entrenched political ideologies. In fact, they can backfire and produce a boomerang effect—attitude change in the direction opposite to that intended by the speaker. Dr. Nyhan's latest study, released just last week, was an attempt to dispel the myth popular among conservatives that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination (MMR) causes autism. Here's some background on the controversy from Aaron Carroll.

In the study, a nationally representative sample of 1759 young parents were randomly assigned to receive one of four pro-vaccine messages or a control message, delivered via the internet. The pro-vaccine messages, all taken from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website, were:

1. Autism correction—written scientific evidence debunking the vaccination-autism link.
2. Disease risks—written descriptions of symptoms and risks associated with measles, mumps and rubella.
3. Disease narrative—a dramatic narrative in which a mother tells how her baby almost died from the measles.
4. Disease images—photographs of children suffering from symptoms of the three diseases.

The control group received an article about the costs and benefits of bird feeding. Nyhan measured the belief that the MMR causes autism, the belief that the MMR has serious side effects, and whether the participants intended to have their next child vaccinated, both before exposure to one of the messages and again about two weeks later.

The results were disappointing. Compared to the control group, the autism correction message significantly reduced the belief that the MMR causes autism. That was the only intended effect. The other three significant results were all boomerang effects. The disease narrative increased the belief that the MMR has serious side effects. The disease images increased the belief that the MMR causes autism. And finally, the autism correction resulted in parents reporting that they would be less likely to vaccinate future children. This latter effect was strongest for those parents who initially believed that the vaccine causes autism.

Ordinarily we should not make too much of studies that demonstrate no significant change. After all, the CDC messages could have been ineffective for a variety of reasons not immediately apparent to a reader of the study. It's also possible that different messages or combinations of messages might have worked. However, these were statistically significant backfire effects, and they should probably be taken seriously. The tendency of beliefs to persist or grow stronger even when the evidence for them is shown to be false is known as belief perseverance. The widely-accepted explanation for perseverance effects is self-persuasion. When people hear a message they disagree with, they counterargue with it. In the process, they expose themselves to their own counterarguments and persuade themselves to change their attitudes in the opposite direction from the message.

In the short run, at least, social scientists are becoming known in the media for delivering a depressing message: Factual information is ineffective in changing people's ideologically-motivated attitudes. So far, we have been unable to propose effective strategies for breaking through the barriers imposed by politically-inspired misinformation.

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Death By Anecdote, Part 1

The Open and Closed Mind

Motivated Reasoning

A Racist Who Loved the Blues

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

                                                                                           Lee Atwater (1981)

This quote comes from an anonymous interview given by Republican campaign manager Lee Atwater, then a member of the Reagan administration, to a political scientist in 1981.  (You can find the entire interview here.) It describes the Republicans' Southern strategy, in which they used race-baiting to successfully persuade Southern Whites to vote against their economic self-interest and realigned political party membership in the South. It was originated by operatives for Richard Nixon, but Atwater was the best known practitioner of this strategy, which still strongly influences American politics.

Atwater became a rising star in 1980 by defeating a South Carolina Democratic Congressman in part by using fake telephone surveys that falsely implied that the Congressman was an NAACP member. He was known for his ruthless use of “dirty tricks,” including false rumors about his opponents' mental health or alleged criminal connections. He reached the height of his fame as manager of George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, where he approved the infamous Willie Horton ad, that played on White fears of Black criminals. Following the election, he became chairman of the Republican National Committee. He died of brain cancer in 1991 at the age of 40. After learning that he had terminal cancer, he claimed to have experienced a religious conversion and apologized for some of his behavior.

Atwater, a South Carolina native, was an accomplished rock guitarist and fan of the blues. His album, Red Hot and Blue, with B. B. King and several Memphis musicians, won a Grammy in 1991. Atwater always denied he was a racist, citing his personal relationships with blues artists as evidence. His biography raises interesting questions. Can you deliberately pursue policies that are harmful to African-Americans by using campaign tactics that appeal to White racism and still credibly claim that you are not a racist? In other words, can you repeatedly engage in racist behavior without developing racist attitudes? You would expect that Atwater would have experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance. If Atwater is to be believed—and given all the lies he told, there is no reason he should be—he must have been a master at compartmentalizing the different parts of his life.

All of this has come back to our attention because Atwater arranged a concert in Washington on January 21, 1989, the day after Bush's inauguration, featuring a number of blues and R&B artists. Among those I know to have participated were William Bell, Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, Steve Cropper, Willie Dixon, Dr. John, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Eddie Floyd, Delbert McClinton, Sam Moore, Billy Preston, Percy Sledge, Koko Taylor, Carla Thomas, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Louis Walker and Ron Wood. 

The concert seems to have aroused considerable cognitive dissonance in the performers at least, but the consensus seemed to be that you don't turn down an opportunity to play for the President, no matter how much you dislike his politics. Willie Dixon engaged in some low-key subversion by wearing a “Jesse Jackson for President” button as he performed.

The concert, long believed to have been lost, has been rediscovered. According to an article in last Friday's New York Times, excerpts from the concert, A Celebration of Blues and Soul, will be shown on PBS sometime in March. A search of the WQED (Pittsburgh) website turned up no match. The entire concert is to be released on DVD on May 6. Both programs are said to have been almost completely stripped of their political context. If I get any further information about when the PBS program will air, I'll update this post.

This article is cross-posted from my jazz and blues blog, The Blues and the Abstract Truth.  

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Lasting Fame

Old-Fashioned Racism