Lies, Damned Lies, and the Romney-Ryan Speeches

I tuned into the Republican convention last Wednesday evening hoping to catch Paul Ryan's acceptance speech. Newt and Callista Gingrich were at the podium. After taking a few stupid swipes at Obama -- I don't even remember the particulars, given that I was pretty well stunned by what came next -- they brought up welfare reform. Callista praised the bipartisan welfare reform that was enacted by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1996. Newt followed her by slamming President Obama for "gutting" -- a violent imagery that has been widely adopted by Republicans in the current campaign -- the work requirements that were a central part of the 1996 welfare reform.

I was unprepared for this. So unprepared, in fact, that I was overcome by a sense of shock. My automatic brain kicked in, and before I knew it I had turned the TV off.

The gutting-of-the-work-requirement canard had so widely and for so long been fact checked and declared to be false that I could not imagine that a former Speaker of the US House of Representative would repeat it before a prime time nationwide TV audience. I guess I must have sub-consciously said to myself, "Man, this guy must think the country is really stupid." And that outrage must have made me reach for my remote -- reflexively, like someone snaping their fingers away from an unexpectedly hot stove top.

As I write this, I can recall in my mind's eye the faces of Callista and Newt, looking straight at the camera ... and lying. (And "lying" implies knowingly telling something untrue, I should add. These are political people; they read the papers; they weighed every word they were going to say on that podium.) I still can feel a chill, of the kind one feels when one looks directly at someone and knows that the other person is lying to them.

And yet, in a way, this ugly episode also shows how quick people are to forgive these politicians. I remembered later that I had known full well what a scumbag New Gingrich was. I had blogged about his scuzzy character before. And still, by the time I saw him last Wednesday on TV, I had forgotten all about it!

Meanwhile, Callista and Newt are not alone. Just as a fish rots from the head down, it is Romney and Ryan who are setting the pace in the lying department. Here are two dissections of their acceptance speeches in Tampa. Romney's performance was something to behold. He spoke as if he was constantly fighting back tears, pained to his core by what Obama was doing to America. But I have been following the current election campaign somewhat closely and I could see Romney piling on the lies one after the other. And he even got the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone just right. After a lifetime of making sales pitch after sales pitch, the master prestidigitator was making the sales pitch of his life. The point was to get the votes of the undecided and women voters, many of whom still think well of Obama. To accomplish this, it was crucial to apply the light touch. The tone was all important. The substance was not important at all.

Callista and Newt send a chill up my spine even now when I conjure up their faces in my mind's eye. But Romney and Ryan are better at faking sincerity. They can tell their lies with with a terrific sense of passion. They are smart and well informed chaps. They know that they are lying when they are lying. But they are able to grit their teeth and just get on with it. They have an incredibly deep sense of contempt for the intelligence and informed-ness of the good folks in flyover country, who do not read The New York Times. And they know that -- thanks to their overwhelming advantage in Super PAC funding -- they are about to start an avalanche of lies on TV screens all across the battleground states that will render the press naysayers comprehensively defenestrated. As I have written before, the tsk-tsk-ing from the media fact checkers will simply not matter in this plutocratic age when money will buy you a permit to lie. Michael Cooper in today's The New York Times seems to have sensed this:

The growing number of misrepresentations appear to reflect a calculation in both parties that shame is overrated, and that no independent arbiters command the stature or the platform to hold the campaigns to account in the increasingly polarized and balkanized media firmament. Any unmasking of the lies or distortions, the thinking goes, rarely seeps into the public consciousness.

(The reference to "both parties" comes from this: "The Obama campaign, for its part, ran a deceptive ad saying that Mitt Romney had “backed a bill that outlaws all abortion, even in case of rape and incest,” although he currently supports exceptions in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk." Ideally, the Obama ad should have clarified that Romney has flip-flopped to a new current position. But it is true that Romney has in the past opposed "all abortion, period" and has said, to Mike Huckabee, that he supports a constitutional ammendment, no less, stating that life begins at conception. See this video for the controversial ad and commentary from The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.)

Finally, on the subject of lies, I saw Dinesh D'Souza's documentary, "2016: Obama's America" this afternoon -- in my local multiplex! More about this atrocity at a later date.

Romney's Dog Whistle

Thomas Edsall has a terrific piece today in The New York Times's Campaign Stops blog. Edsall's blog post took me by surprise. He argues that Romney and Ryan are employing a strategy that carefully combines their ads on the seemingly unrelated issues of welfare and Medicare to deliver a racially divisive message intended to rile up white voters to vote against Obama.

I have blogged about Romney-Ryan's lies on welfare and Medicare. The lie that Obama is gutting the work requirement in welfare is quite clearly intended to be racially polarizing. After all, in a tough economy with eight percent unemployment, people who are fortunate enough to have jobs won't generally blame those receiving government assistance as being lazy moochers. So, Romney's attack is probably not aimed at Obama's re-distribution from the rich, in general, to the poor, in general. The only 'benefit' that I can see from Romney-Ryan's welfare attacks on Obama is to get poorer whites to cast aside their doubts about the guy from Bain Capital -- with accounts in Switzerland, the Bahmas, and the Cayman Islands -- and fight 'Obama's racial agenda.'

Now Edsall is arguing that Romney-Ryan's Medicare attacks serve the same racially polarizing purpose. As Edsall writes:

Medicare recipients are overwhelmingly white, at 77 percent; 10 percent of recipients are black; and 8 percent Hispanic, with the rest described as coming from other races and ethnicities.

So, even though not a single Medicare benefit has been cut by Obamacare; even though new benefits, such as a significant filling of the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D, have been added; and even though the Medicare trustees have said that Obamacare extends the financial viability of Medicare, Romney and Ryan have unleashed a barrage of lies to scare Medicare beneficiaries about Obamacare. Romney and Ryan have seen the large proportion of whites among those currently in Medicare and cynically detected an opportunity. As Edsall explains, unable to make a substantive anti-Obama case to senior citizens, Romney and Ryan are trying, using carefully suggestive ads, to gently coax Medicare recipients, who are mostly white, into seeing Obamacare as a race war being waged against them.

Romney, apparently, has lost confidence in his initial assessment that, the Obama economy being as bad as it is, hammering on unemployment would be enough to get him to the White House. So he is now moving on the welfare and Medicare fronts. He does not have to win on those issues; he only needs to make some headway at the margins, in battle ground states such as Florida.

Romney understands that the Republican party has gained a big advantage among poorer whites, in spite of the pro-poor redistributive policies of the Democrats, by exploting racially charged rhetoric in election campaigns. (Why poor whites would favor Republicans even though that party has consistently fought Democrats' measures to help the poor has been a puzzle for political scientists since at least the publication of Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas? The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that poor whites have been persuaded to vote against their self interest by means of racially divisive attacks that claim that Democrats' policies take from whites to give to blacks.)

Meanwhile, as I have argued before, media fact checking by Politifact and various other organizations has not slowed down the Romney onslaught one bit. Romney and his superPACS will keep flooding the TV screens in battleground states with their lies and the media's fact checking will look increasingly like a cruel joke. This kind of fact checking effectively restrains the poorly-funded liar, without putting any real restraints on the well-funded liar.

Update, August 28, 2012: David Firestone draws attention to an interview with Mitt Romney in which he defends his attacks on Obama's welfare policies and says that Obama granted the welfare waivers to “shore up his base.” This is a classic liar's strategy: tell racially cynical lies over and over to gin up hatred among a section of the electorate, brazen it out when challenged, and, finally, assign your own ugly motives to your opponent.

Plutocracy and Lying in Election Campaigns

Lately, I have blogged quite a bit about plutocracy in today's America. But looking at Mitt Romney's saturation lying about (a) President Obama sending welfare checks to people without requiring them to work, and (b) President Obama slashing Medicare benefits, I now think I may have underestimated the pernicious effects of plutocracy, especially when the plutocrats overwhelmingly favor one side over the other in an electoral battle.

A negative feature of plutocracy is that, in a battle for the votes of the unengaged sections of the electorate, the side that has a cash advantage can easily grab a larger share of the finite space for campaign commercials on prime-time TV. Therefore, plutocracy makes it impossible for the contest to be decided solely on the fundamental merits of the contending candidates, their records, and their policy proposals -- on a level playing field, so to speak.

This case against plutocracy is, I take it, pretty obvious and uncontroversial.

But today I would like to take the argument further. I would like to argue that plutocracy damages democracy by encouraging falsehood.

Consider a fight between two candidates, one favored and the other loathed by the rich. For no particular reason, let's call them Mitt and Barack, respectively. Imagine that each candidate is at a fork in the road, contemplating whether or not to be truthful in their TV ads. There are pluses and minuses, pros and cons to lying.

The question is: How do Mitt and Barack's incentives -- to tell lies in their TV ads -- change if Mitt, the plutocrats' darling, raises more money than Barack, thereby increasing his cash advantage?

If you tell lies in your campaign commercials, you may face a backlash from your opponent, who may run ads of his own exposing your false claims, and from the media, who may give your ad a "four Pinocchios" or "pants on fire" rating.

However, the intensity and column inches of criticism devoted by the media to a campaign ad depends on the falseness of its content and not on how much money was raised by the person who "approved the message." Therefore, although both Mitt and Barack would face equal press hostility for a given level of mendacity in their campaign ads, Mitt would be in a much better position because he would be able to overwhelm and drown out the media criticism by blanketing the airwaves with his ads.

Therefore, if Mitt extends his financial lead over Barack, Mitt's incentive to lie will increase. The cost of lying decreases when a candidate gains a bigger share of the finite TV space. It's easier to get away with lies when one can blanket the airwaves.

The incentives are reversed for Barack. If Mitt rakes in more cash and extends his money lead over Barack, any false claims by Barack would face a more fearsome backlash from Mitt, not just because Mitt now has a louder megaphone, but because, reliant more than ever on falsehood, he would want to establish moral equivalency: "Don't blame me for lying," Mitt would want to say. "The other guy is doing it too."

Moreover, Barack would have fewer resources to drown out any criticism coming from the media of any lies in his ads. This is another reason why Barack will stick more closely to the truth as Mitt extends his financial lead over Barack.

Indeed, the media's fact-checking of campaign ads may play a surprising and unintended role. It may weaken the financially weaker candidate's ability to lie (because he can't drown out media criticism) without affecting the financially stronger candidate (who can). In a battle of lies, it may be better if both sides are able to lie equally easily. In a plutocracy, it might be better if the media stop fact checking campaign adds and just let everybody rip.

To summarize, when campaign war chests become more unequal, you can expect the plutocrats' favorite to rely more on lies and you can expect the plutocrats' pariah to increasingly stick to the truth. However, the latter's greater reliance on truth will matter less and less to the overall story as he suffers a relative disappearance from the finite TV ad space. So, overall, as plutocracy intensifies, the truth will lose its ability to influence elections.

Healthcare Policy Debate in the U.S. Election Campaign

Paul Ryan's mendacity on his policy priorities continues. When asked why he retained Obama's cuts to Medicare in his proposed budget, he said, as Peter Landers and Colleen McCain Nelson report today in The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog, "It was already in the baseline. We would never have done it in the first place." meaning that the Medicare cuts in Obamacare were taken by Ryan as a fait accompli, something that could not be changed. And yet, "Mr. Ryan assumed in his budget that the Obama law’s subsidies for lower-income people to buy health coverage would be repealed." In other words, Obamacare is immutable when it helps Ryan evade responsibility for his budget, but can be picked and chosen from otherwise!

By the way, the $716 billion cuts to Medicare in Obamacare that Romney and Ryan are cynically exploiting to snooker voters in Florida and elsewhere were obtained by squeezing the providers of medical care -- doctors and hospitals -- and not by reducing benefits. A lot of that spending squeeze was focused on Medicare Advantage, a misconceived George Bush program that allowed retirees to leave Medicare for private health insurance plans at the government's expense. The hope was that the entry of private insurance would reduce the cost of healthcare for the elderly. Unfortunately, study after study found that Medicare Advantage spent a lot more than regular Medicare without delivering better health outcomes. This was why it made sense to cut the flow of Medicare money to the private insurers in Medicare Advantage.

And these are the cuts that Paul Ryan once included in his budget but is now running away from.

While the Romney-Ryan attacks on the $716 billion "cuts" in Obamacare have received saturation coverage -- with little or no reminder that Medicare benefits have been kept intact -- there has been almost no coverage of the massive cuts to Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor that is run jointly by the federal and state governments, in Paul Ryan's famous budget. Why is this so? Why does Medicare get all the attention and Medicaid none? Today, David Wessel highlights Ryan's Medicaid cuts in his blog post but, alas, not in his column -- on the same general topic -- in The Wall Street Journal. The poor have a pitifully faint voice in corporate media today, and absolutely none in Murdochistan.

Finally, Wessel's column in the WSJ has a chart on government spending, as a share of GDP that can be seen without a subscription. Note the massive increase in government spending during the George Bush years and the smart decline under the Democrats, Clinton and Obama.

Try finding any praise for Obama from "fiscal hawks" on this count. You won't see it. Anywhere.

But once in a while, when the gate keepers are not looking, the truth has a way of sneaking in, as in Wessel's chart.

Update, August 20, 2012. Paul Krugman makes the point in my opening paragraph in his New York Times column today: "Mr. Ryan includes the $716 billion in Medicare savings that are part of Obamacare, even though he wants to scrap everything else in that act."

Update, August 18, 2012. Tomorrow's New York Times carries a long-ish editorial making a sober and strong case against Romney-Ryan's desperate lies on Medicare.

Italy's Universities: An Escapee's Account

I have just read the Preface of A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity by Luigi Zingales. Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and the David G. Booth Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, writes that, disgusted by the nepotism and cronyism in the academic sector in his native Italy, he moved to the United States, only to find alarming signs of the same diseases spreading within American capitalism.

While I look forward to reading Zingales' proposals for encouraging meritocratic competition in American capitalism, I thought I would reproduce here his striking description of the stifling of talent in the culture of Italy's academia:

I am an immigrant to the United States. I came here in 1988 from Italy because I was trying to escape a system that was fundamentally unfair. Italy invented the term nepotism and perfected the concept of cronyism, and it still lives by both. You are promoted based on whom you know, not what you know. Americans were recently exposed to the corruption of the Italian system by Silvio Berlusconi, the tycoon-turned-politician who ran the country for nearly two decades. While Berlusconi represented an extreme, even by Italian standards, he was not an accident but the product of a degenerate system. I emigrated to the United States because I realized that it offered me an inestimably brighter future than my native country. And when I got to America in 1988, I wasn't disappointed; I experienced for the first time the inebriating feeling that any goal was within my reach. I had finally arrived in a country where the limits to my dreams were set only by my abilities, not by the people I knew.

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, whether you're a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat or somewhere in between, I would gently suggest that you have no idea what it's like to live in a country where there is virtually no meritocracy and competition is considered a sin. Even emergency-room doctors in Italy are promoted on the basis of political affiliation instead of ability. Young people, rather than being told to study, are urged to "carry the bag" (fare il portaborse) for powerful people, in the hope of getting back some favors. Mothers push their daughters into the arms of the rich and powerful, seeing it as the only avenue of social promotion. The talent selection process is so broken that you easily find very smart people employed in very menial jobs and very mediocre people in powerful positions. Until 1990, companies in Italy could openly and legally collude to defraud their customers; they still collude today, but they are less open about it. The best way to get rich is to be politically connected and receive a government contract.

The only protesters against this system came from the radical Left, which was less interested in changing the system than in replacing it with a socialist one. In a country full of privileges based on birth, the Left, instead of fighting for equality of starting points, fought to eliminate all selection mechanisms, viewing them as discriminatory against the have-nots. One consequence of this was that universities were not selective in admissions. Regardless of your grades, you could get into any college you wanted, forcing all colleges toward lower standards. The unintended consequence of this egalitarianism was that it produced an undifferentiated mass of mostly ignorant graduates. Companies seeking workers resorted to hiring on the basis of the only system that works in the absence of credible sorting: personal connections.

While in college in Italy, I developed an interest in economics and hoped to study it at the graduate level and to become an academic. For the average college graduate in the United States, such a goal might require practicing for the GREs and analyzing various rankings to figure out what the best graduate programs were. Not in Italy. Many people, including my father, told me that if I wanted to have a university career, I had to pay my dues to some local professor—to carry his bag—which meant essentially working for free not only on his academic projects but also on his consulting ones. I decided instead to apply to universities in the United States. But even that plan did not seem promising, because I was unable to secure a letter of recommendation from the most famous professor at my college. When I had asked him to supervise my undergraduate thesis, he had declined, saying that he lacked the time—despite my excellent grades, and despite the fact that he had found the time to supervise a classmate of mine, who had the support of an influential person. When I later approached this professor for a recommendation, his secretary told me that he wrote letters only for the people he had advised. Thus, I was out of luck. I studied extra hard for the admissions tests, however, and I made it into MIT. In spite of my less than positive experience, I considered returning to Italy upon receiving my PhD from MIT. At the very time the University of Chicago was hiring me, an Italian professor asked me to withdraw my application from national competition for Associate Professor in Italy. I knew it was a long shot, but if I made it in Chicago as an assistant could I at least try to compete for a position as an associate in Italy? The worst that could happen to me was that my application would be discarded, right? No. I was told that they would write a terrible report on me that would stay on my record forever. The real reason—I suspect—was that in spite of my young age I had a better record than the local candidate who had paid his dues (after all, my father was right). They did not want me in the race, so they resorted to not-so-veiled threats.

I realized Italy was not for me. After six years, I received tenure at the University of Chicago. In Italy, the process would have taken more than twice as long. I was able to build a career without needing to trade on family connections—or, worse, flattering people just because they had seniority. I owe more than my success to this country: I owe my life. I would not have survived the humiliations and frustrations of the Italian system.

I had no idea that this was what Italy was like.

For what shall it profit a man ...

Thomas Edsall picks up the story of Sheldon Adelson, a major donor to the election campaigns of Mitt Romney and other Republicans. In addition to the issues that I have blogged about before, Edsall points out that Mormonism, the religion Mitt Romney follows, has a stated position against gambling, which is the source of Adelson's lucre.

And this is as good a place as any to recall that Sheldon Adelson had financially supported Newt Gingrich against Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries. In particular, Adelson paid for "When Mitt Romney Came to Town," an anti-Romney film.

Update, August 17, 2012: An editorial in The New York Times laments Paul Ryan's genuflection at the court of Sheldon Adelson, and provides a good summary of the various investigations into Adelson's gambling empire. Forget Democrats and their supporters, I am surprised that Republicans have so far been so quiet and unquestioning about their candidate's wooing of a guy like Adelson.

Doesn't Anandabazar Patrika do any fact checking any more?

Although India has a reasonably free press, I remain disenchanted with the quality of journalism in India. Most reports are superficial descriptions of newsy events, supplemented by transcriptions of pronouncements by this or that minister or bureaucrat. There's minimal or non-existent in-depth field or street reporting that illuminates for Indian readers the deeper layers of the reality of life in India. Every report reads like something dashed off in response to an editor's demands by someone in a rush to catch the early bus home. It is rare to read something that bears the stamp of a journalist who desperately wants to tell the story and passionately believes in and takes pride in his or her work.

This post, however, is about something more basic: simple fact checking.

On August 1, 2012, my hometown Bengali newspaper, Anandabazar Patrika, published an editorial-page essay by Sunil Gangopadhyay, a legendary poet and writer of novels, short stories, and travelogue, whom I much admire. The essay begins with a recent incident in Guwahati, in eastern India, in which a teenage girl was sexually assaulted in a busy street by several men. A videographer had recorded the entire assault and had posted the video on YouTube. Not unexpectedly people began raising questions about the videographer's responsibility: should he not have thrown his camera at the attackers and tried to rescue the girl? After this preface, Sunilbabu's essay goes on to further explore the issue of conscience at one's work. At one point he brings up the story of a famous photograph by the photojournalist Kevin Carter:

আমেরিকার বিখ্যাত ফোটোগ্রাফার কেভিন কার্টার গিয়েছিলেন সুদান। এই দুর্ভাগা দেশটায় যে কত কাল ধরে দুর্ভিক্ষের মতন অবস্থা আর আত্ম-হানাহানি চলছে তার ঠিক নেই, প্রতি বছরই এর জন্য বহু মানুষ মরে।

মাঠের মধ্যে পড়ে আছে একটি কঙ্কালসার শিশু। অনাহারে, অবহেলায় সে প্রায় মুমূর্ষু। আকাশে উড়ছে অনেক শকুন। শকুনরা সাধারণত মৃত প্রাণীদের মাংস খায়, এই শকুনগুলো কি ছেলেটির মৃত্যু পর্যন্ত অপেক্ষা করবে ধৈর্য ধরে, না কি নেমে আসবে আগেই? অদূরে একটা ঝোপের মধ্যে ক্যামেরা বাগিয়ে অপেক্ষা করছেন কেভিন কার্টার। অনেক সময় কোনও বিরল দৃশ্য ক্যামেরাবন্দি করার জন্য ফোটোগ্রাফারদের অপেক্ষা করতে হয় ঘণ্টার পর ঘণ্টা, এমনকী দিনের পর দিন।

বেশ কয়েক ঘণ্টা পরে আকাশ থেকে নেমে এল কয়েকটা শকুন, গুটি গুটি পায়ে তারা এগোল শিশুটির দিকে। সে তখনও বেঁচে আছে।

শকুনরা এক জীবন্ত শিশুর মাংস খুবলে খুবলে খাচ্ছে, এ রকম ছবি আগে কে দেখেছে? এই অসাধারণ কৃতিত্বের জন্য কেভিন পান পুলিৎজার পুরস্কার। তবু বহু মানুষের প্রশ্নের বাণ বিদ্ধ করেছে তাঁকে। তিনি কি শুধুই এক জন ফোটোগ্রাফার? এক জন বিবেকসম্পন্ন মানুষ নন? ছবি তোলার বদলে ছেলেটিকে তুলে, কিছুটা স্নেহ, কিছুটা সেবা, কিছু খাদ্য ও ওষুধের ব্যবস্থা করলে সে হয়তো বেঁচে যেত। মানবিকতা সেটাই দাবি করে। সম্ভবত সেই সব প্রশ্নে ক্ষতবিক্ষত হয়েই কেভিন আত্মহত্যা করেন এক বছর পর।

Here's my rough translation from Bengali:

Kevin Carter, a famous American photographer, had gone to Sudan. This luckless country had suffered from famine-like conditions and civil war for a long time, with many people dying every year.

A skeletal child lay in a field. He was close to death from hunger and neglect. Vultures were circling the sky. Although vultures typically feast on the dead, would these vultures wait for the boy to die, or would they move in for the kill before he died? In a nearby bush Kevin Carter waited with his camera at the ready. In many cases, photographers have to wait for hours, even days, to capture a rare event.

After several hours a few vultures descended from the sky and quietly advanced towards the child. He was still breathing.

Vultures feeding on a living child, who has seen such a photograph before? For this extraordinary achievement Kevin Carter received the Pulitzer prize. And yet he was troubled by the many accusatory questions that people asked. Is he merely a photographer? Is he not a human being with a conscience? Instead of taking pictures, if he had rescued the child, treated him with affection, provided some food and medicines, the boy may have lived. Humanity demands that. Possibly wracked by such nagging questions Kevin took his own life a year later.

Immediately upon reading this tragic passage, I opened up a new tab in my browser and Googled "Kevin Carter." It took me barely a few minutes to find a whole bunch of factual problems with the essay's discussion of Kevin Carter and that famous photograph.

He was South African, not American. The photograph was not of several vultures feeding on a still-breathing boy -- see his obituary in The New York Times. It was of a solitary vulture apparently stalking a hunched-over skeletal girl.

It is not even clear whether the girl died that day. Here's a quote from Carter's obituary in The New York Times:

The reaction to the picture was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors' note on the fate of the girl. Mr. Carter said she resumed her trek to the feeding center. He chased away the vulture. ...

Afterward, he told an interviewer in April, he sat under a tree for a long time, "smoking cigarettes and crying."

There is no indication that Carter took his own life out of remorse for his behavior on that fateful day in the Sudan. He had spent his whole life photographing in crisis after crisis, war zone after war zone. According to the web site of a documentary on him, "He was the first to photograph public execution by way of "necklacing": setting fire to a gasoline-filled tire around a person's neck." And, returning to the New York Times obituary, here's another shocker: "A few days after his Pulitzer was announced in April [1994], Mr. Carter was nearby when one of his closest friends and professional companions, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township."

Any of these events -- or the cumulative burden of these and other events -- could have pushed Kevin Carter over the edge. The Wikipedia entry on Kevin Carter has this quote from Carter's suicide note:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners ... I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky."

That same Wikipedia entry also provides an alternative account -- by Joao Silva, a Potuguese photojournalist -- on the circumstances surrounding the famous photograph.

According to Silva, Carter and Silva travelled to Sudan with the United Nations aboard Operation Lifeline Sudan and landed in Southern Sudan on March 11, 1993. The UN told them that they would take off again in 30 minutes (the time necessary to distribute food), so they ran around looking to take shots. The UN started to distribute corn and the women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. Silva went looking for guerrilla fighters, while Carter strayed no more than a few dozen feet from the plane.

Again according to Silva, Carter was quite shocked as it was the first time that he had seen a famine situation and so he took many shots of the children suffering from famine. Silva also started to take photos of children on the ground as if crying, which were not published. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane, so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away.

Two Spanish photographers who were in the same area at that time, José María Luis Arenzana and Luis Davilla, without knowing the photograph of Kevin Carter, took a picture in a similar situation. As recounted on several occasions, it was a feeding center, and the vultures came from a manure pit waste:

"We took him and Pepe Arenzana to Ayod, where most of the time were in a feeding center where locals go. At one end of the enclosure, was a dump where waste and was pulling people to defecate. As these children are so weak and malnourished they are going head giving the impression that they are dead. As part of the fauna there are vultures go for these remains. So if you grab a telephoto crush the child's perspective in the foreground and background and it seems that the vultures will eat it, but that's an absolute hoax, perhaps the animal is 20 meters."

In short, according to this alternative account, the girl in the picture was hungry and skeletal, but in no danger from the vulture. The parents of the children at the feeding camp had briefly put their toddlers down to get food from the United Nations plane. The vulture was 20 meters away and was drawn by waste, not the children. And in any case, Carter chased the bird away.

It is abundantly clear that Sunil Gangopadhyay never even saw the photograph he was writing about and never bothered to do the slightest bit of research about Kevin Carter. He probably heard an embroidered account from someone and felt confident enough to use it, unverified, in his column. His irresponsibility and laziness may have been compounded by his fame. The editor at Anandabazar Patrika in charge of Sunilbabu's column probably could not even think of wielding the red pencil on anything penned by the great man. If the same account had come in from an unknown, some fact checking may well have happened. But in a demoralized culture nobody talks back to the Big Man.

I believe the Anandabazar Patrika owes its readers an apology for its lousy or non-existent fact checking, inexcusable in the Internet age. And Sunil Gangopadhyay owes his readers and all admirers of Kevin Carter an apology for besmirching Carter's name.