Heads Up, American Women

The 56 Speaker of the House of Representatives, a man two heartbeats from the presidency, thinks your primary purpose in life is to be a brood mare.

Fahrenheit 451

Published today, October 19th, in 1953. A powerful, prescient book, often banned, surprise, surprise.

Neil Gaiman has this appreciation: https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/05/31/neil-gaiman-the-view-from-the-cheap-seats-bradbury/?fbclid=IwAR27AVHzZFoJcMpDplXsTVlRN7Y3ywntlAVzYeaTtfj3Hr3FrqbdqM1Vvxc

Journalism’s Fall May Become Democracy’s Fall

For those of you watching the decline of American democracy, let me suggest that downward curve is the companion to a similar decline in one of the pillars of that democracy: our press.

I wrote on this situation about a year ago, but since things have gotten worse, I’m going to take another whack at it.

There’s no single reason this happened, and none of this occurred overnight, or not even since the individual I refer to as The Angry Inch descended on his gold-plated escalator to announce his presidential candidacy in 2015.  There have been long-running trends inside the profession as well as out that have pushed us to this brink.

Yes, you can trot out examples of courageous, ground-breaking journalism since, say, Watergate, but on the whole, the drift has been in the other direction.  In recent months, some of our best writers—Margaret Sullivan, Will Bunch, Dan Froomkin, Christianne Amanpour, Jay Rosen, and Paul Fahri, to name just a few—have been trying to warn about this situation, to little apparent effect on the profession.

Instead, some wave away concern as being beneath them, that putting Americans on-notice to the danger we face somehow would violate their professional obligation to be objective.  Others are apparently getting revved at the prospect of the action and drama that will attend the end of the American experiment.  

Now, complaining about the American press goes back as far as George Washington, but in the last 70 years or so, the right has made it one of their main weapons, part of a broader messaging strategy with the goal of undermining Americans’ confidence in their institutions, create division and resentment, and advance a political strategy that has made autocracy its goal.

The Angry Inch himself rolled it into a nutshell in a conversation with CBS’ Lesley Stahl shortly after the 2016 election.  When he launched into a rant about the media, she asked him why he kept pounding on that, and he replied, “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

By turns bashing the media and alternately maneuvering to shape its coverage, this strategy has worked spectacularly well.

In 1984, then-New-York-Times White House correspondent Steven Weisman, in the New York Times Magazine, documented how Ronald Reagan and his brain trust controlled the press by dictating the rules of engagement and reducing messaging to a line-of-the-day. His piece showed a level of analysis frankly unusual in today’s atmosphere. In particular:

“Mr. Reagan and his aides have understood and exploited what they acknowledge to be the built-in tendency of television to emphasize appearances more than information.”

Fast-forward to the Younger Bush’s administration and its variation that could be called the lie-of-the-day as it sought to shift the blame for its failure to heed a direct CIA warning a few weeks before 9/11 and then seize on that to drum up a long-held goal of the right: a war against Iraq, and perhaps even Iran.  They knew American journalism sees war as an irresistible opportunity, and they used it to great effect.  Even when Bush’s failure came to light, no hue and cry arose.

By 2015, Steve Bannon, borrowing a well-read page from the dictators’ handbook, came along with his “flood-the-zone-with-shit” strategy, spewing out so much material so fast and from so many different directions, the media was overwhelmed, and not necessarily unwillingly.

Combined with the ascent of a huge right-wing communications—or propaganda, if you will—infrastructure, it has changed the face of journalism.

Inside, the rot slowly took hold. Media companies, large and small, are profit-making ventures.  The bottom line has always mattered.  News can be helpful to a company’s image, with a benefit to its profits, but media organizations long ago adopted the position that entertainment generates larger audiences and revenues.  From that perspective, melding the two makes sense.

Take the example of CBS News.  Once referred-to as “the Tiffany Network,” CBS became famous and profitable in large part on the foundation laid by Edward R. Murrow and his “Murrow Boys” during and shortly after World War II, but the network’s founder Bill Paley discovered during the 1950s that game shows made a lot more money with less risk of public controversy (at least until scandals prompted Congress to amend the Communications Act).  News took a back seat, and, more damaging, entertainment values began supplanting straight reporting.

Murrow argued furiously with Paley about this.  He understood the power of illustration, in word or image, but in his mind, it always had to come in service to the story.  Even when his “boys” complained, as television supplanted radio, that they were being reduced to “writing captions for pictures,” Murrow found a way to tell the story, as his 1954 broadcast on Joe McCarthy demonstrated.

But as the sands continued shifting, Murrow took his complaints public in an October 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, where he delivered this famous remark:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

Whether Murrow meant that to be a warning or an expression of resignation, I don’t know.  The speech infuriated Paley.  Three years later, Murrow was gone from CBS.  Twenty years later, the matter was settled.

During those 20 years, CBS still led the networks in its news broadcasts.  Walter Cronkite, who’d once turned down a Murrow job offer, took the anchor’s chair for the evening news broadcast and eventually rose to become “the most trusted man in America.”  When Cronkite retired, Dan Rather, who’d built a reputation on baiting Richard Nixon, took over.  He got off to a shaky start, and then CBS hired Van Gordon Sauter, a right-winger who was on the same wavelength as the Reaganites about appearances over information and who put the network more firmly on a course to produce what became known as “infotainment.”

Sauter, who would later take the helm at FOX, and who occasionally still rails about “the liberal media,” wanted “moments,” emotional connections, more than information.  He cared less about the words in the broadcast, more about the accompanying pictures, which he knew would stay with the audience longer and stronger.  He would philosophize, saying things like, “Form without substance.  Style without meaning.”  Peter Boyer, in his book, “Who Killed CBS?” wrote that nobody ever seemed to know quite what Sauter meant, but “it sounded deep.”

Muse on that for a second.  The leadership at one of the most highly regarded newsgathering organizations in the world got bamboozled by a fog of words that “sounded deep.”

As Boyer wrote, “The new CBS news wasn’t interested in bending political (sort of) but in wringing emotion, any emotion, from viewers.  [Sauter’s] vision became firmly implanted in the instincts of the people who were running the new CBS News. Among the ‘ins’ of the new order, there was often heard (to the point that it became cliché) the chorus “Borrring!”—the ultimate put-down of a story or correspondent that didn’t meet the new standards.”

Let’s key on that notion of “borrring” for a moment.

Last month, Mark Leibovich published a memory of the late politician Bill Richardson in The Atlantic.  He particularly noted how much fun he had in Richardson’s company and then wrote: 

“I’ll admit that the notion of a pol who loves the game seems quite at odds with the tenor of politics today.  People now routinely toss out phrases like our democracy is at stake and existential threat to America, and it’s not necessarily overheated.  Fun?  Not so much. 

“But thinking about Richardson makes me nostalgic for campaigns and election nights that did not feel so much like political Russian roulette.  Presidency or prison?  Suspend the Constitution or preserve it?  Let’s face it: Death threats, mug shots, insurrections, and white supremacists are supreme buzzkills.”

So, don’t bother with existential threats like climate change or a detailed “Red Caesar” plan to end American democracy that’s been circulating on the right.  No fun in that.

There’s an inverse effect at work, here, as well.  It’s generally agreed American journalists, particularly those who work in what I call The Amtrak-Corridor Media, are frustrated with Joe Biden.  He doesn’t preside over a freak show of an administration; doesn’t post blathering, disjointed, social media messages at all hours; doesn’t pose, puff, or posture.  He does not entertain.  He just does his work, and by all objective accounts, he has performed very well despite having narrow majorities in Congress (none in the House this year).  But the press instead has made his age their running story, suggesting at every possible moment he’s not up to the job.  All he needs to do is stumble over a word or a stair, and boom! Headline!  Furrowed brows accompanying “questions” about his physical and/or mental health.

Within a day of Mr. Leibovich publishing his Atlantic story, Molly Jong-Fast had a piece in Vanity Fair that focused on this and raised the spectre of the media’s frustrated reaction to Biden handing The Angry Inch a sizeable political advantage:

“. . . one problem with Biden’s “boring” plan heading into 2024 is the news media.  Not only is the media more interested in covering Trumpworld than Bidenworld, but it seems like journalists are somewhat resentful toward the current administration for its disinterest in playing ball these past few years.  Remember, Trumpworld was filled with blockbuster leaks and White House feuds, leading to increased subscriptions and sky-high ratings—the “Trump bump,” as it was called.”

So, it may come to pass that our democracy will wither and die because the Fourth Estate was insufficiently amused.

Is there time to correct this, the will, and, if so, what’s to be done?  Taking the questions in reverse order:

What’s to be done is actually pretty clear, and it’s not really that complicated, but it requires a great sea change in the media.  A lot of seasoned journalists have offered variations on a common theme:

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour said journalists should “be truthful, not neutral.”  “Objectivity,” as practiced by too many journalists, means not providing context, evaluating what you’re told, or rendering informed judgment, to the possible extent that truth can be buried.

NYU’s Jay Rosen has spoken of the need to focus on “not the odds, but the stakes,” which, though he was referring to coverage of the 2024 elections, also applies more broadly.

Both of these are ways of describing the axiom I learned early in my journalism career: to tell my readers what happened and why it should matter to them.

Margaret Sullivan, in her column in The Guardian a few weeks back, described the media as “fearful” and “defensive” and “mired in the washed-up practices of an earlier era.”  She urged her profession to “Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.”

Dan Froomkin, on his Press Watch blog, came up with a similar list: news media should set the agenda, provide context, understand history, explain the threat, call out the lies (“misinformation” in the current vernacular), and realize holding onto the old norms doesn’t work any longer.

In short, journalists need to do the Constitutionally protected job we need them to do.

The “will” part is daunting.  People have asked, over and over again, whether the media has “learned” from 2016, when its repeated pounding on Hillary Clinton, particularly over “her emails,” helped usher in the interregnum of 2017-2021.

Available evidence is they “learned,” but not the lesson we need.  First, for example, recall that, after months of “her emails” stories on its front page, the New York Times ran the exoneration story on A16, a clear sign that one of the most prominent media outlets in the world refused to acknowledge the other side of a story about a manufactured scandal it covered so relentlessly.  Second, our media learned the freak show sells.  They learned false equivalence and unfiltered repetition of talking points fed to them is easier and faster than digging and measuring.  They have chosen, generally, to take an aloof posture rather than risking being criticized as alarmist, just when sounding the alarm is called-for.

Harkening back to Mr. Weisman’s 1984 piece, he concludes with prescience:

“Yet, Mr. Reagan’s success raises important concerns. The future application of his techniques may add to the already formidable powers of a President, both as Chief Executive and as candidate for re-election. Moreover, it could lead to a decline in the press’s effectiveness as the stubborn, sometimes cantankerous monitor of the Presidency. Such a development could blunt one of the traditional checks and balances that have given flexibility and strength to the American political system.”

Like climate change, the undermining of our press, and that of our democracy itself, has been a low, slow, relentless process, and it’s now reached a crisis point.  Swift action to prevent a calamity is necessary, but that runs against an enormous wall of institutional inertia.

Color me skeptical.

Later,

Edmund Teller Told the Oil Industry They Were Threatening the Planet . . . in 1959

He was justifiably notorious on several counts, including his betrayal of Robert Oppenheimer, but he called this one right: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming?fbclid=IwAR3AvHeQaVNf5ZWfHhYXaDaRR_BXVRuhGfQZe4B2Wmhut4RnvJ7RgeFg-Z8

Later,

In Case You Need Them, Two Points on the Lies Circulating Attacking Biden after Hamas Struck

1. The $6B did not go to Iran, and it wasn’t taxpayers’ money. It was from oil sales, and it’s still locked up in a bank in Qatar.

2. America’s support for Ukraine did not leave Israel without the means to defend itself, as Hamas is going to find out. Per a longstanding MoU, we send about $3.8B in military assistance to Israel annually. Moreover, you can have the biggest damned military on the planet and still get hit w/a sneak attack. 9/11, for example.

Additionally, I can’t help shake the feeling this is not “just” an attack, that there’s something larger going on, here. I mean, the Rs were on this in nanoseconds. Anyone with more expertise than I have, feel free to weigh in.

FOX Hasn’t Stopped at Poisoning Our Politics and Culture; It Has Hastened the Destruction of Our Planet

Depressing, but important, read from the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, one of the few Amtrak-Corridor journalists worth reading. Belief in, and response to, climate change is – no real surprise – hugely divided among the left and the right. And, in particular:

“Those who most trust right-wing sources such as Fox News or other outlets are less likely to correctly identify the trigger for climate change or that the change is occurring.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/04/new-measure-political-cultural-gap-climate-change/?utm_campaign=wp_bump&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_bump