In Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race last year, Democrat Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker by one percent statewide — but won a majority of votes in only36 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts. That same night, Democratic candidates won 53 percent of all ballots cast for the state Assembly, even as Republicans won a 27-seat majority in that body.
In other words: The 2018 midterms confirmed that the GOP has gerrymandered Wisconsin’s electoral maps so aggressively, it will be essentially impossible for the Democratic Party to gain control of that (purple) state’s legislature until its maps are redrawn.
This point was not lost on the Wisconsin GOP. Immediately following Evers’s victory, Republicans convened a special legislative session to transfer powers from the popularly elected branch of government that Democrats had just won to the undemocratically elected branch that the GOP couldn’t lose.
But there was one way out of this maddening impasse. In 2019 and 2020, Wisconsin would hold Supreme Court elections. And if liberal judges could win both those contests — which would be settled by the good old-fashioned popular vote — then Democrats would ensure their influence over redistricting. And not only that: A liberal State Supreme Court could also roll back the GOP legislature’s power grab, its various voter-suppression efforts, and perhaps even its assault on collective-bargaining rights.
What’s more, liberals were in prime position to win the 2020 Supreme Court election, as it would be held the same day as the state’s presidential primaries — when Democrats are expected to turn out in far larger numbers than Republicans, since their party’s nomination will be hotly contested, while Donald Trump is all but certain to win renomination in a cakewalk.
So, to liberate Wisconsin from anti-democratic rule, all Democrats really had to worry about was winning this year’s Supreme Court election. And in a rare stroke of luck, Wisconsin conservatives managed to rally behind a reactionary judge so extreme, two of the GOP’s most reliable donors — the state’s Chamber of Commerce and Realtors Association — could not bring themselves to support him. Specifically, Judge Brian Hagedorn had written that the NAACP was a “disgrace to America,” and that homosexual intercourse should be a criminal offense because the “idea that homosexual behavior is different than bestiality as a constitutional matter is unjustifiable.” The judge had also recently cofounded a K-8 Christian school in the Milwaukee suburbs that does not allow LGBT teachers, students, or parents on its campus.
His liberal counterpart, Wisconsin Court of Appeals chief justice Lisa Neubauer, had no similar baggage. And she had a commanding advantage in fundraising for most the race. Some conservative groups resigned themselves to her victory weeks before Tuesday’s election.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race that liberals needed to win to have a shot at taking majority control of the court next year appeared headed for a recount, with the conservative candidate declaring victory while holding a narrow lead following Tuesday’s election.
… Conservative Brian Hagedorn, who was Walker’s chief legal counsel for five years, led liberal-backed Lisa Neubauer by 5,911 votes out of 1.2 million cast, based on unofficial results. That is a difference of about 0.49 percentage point, close enough for Neubauer to request a recount but she would have to pay for it.
Hagedorn declared victory early Wednesday morning.
It’s conceivable that a recount could throw the election to Neubauer (so conceivable, Republicans are already laying the groundwork for delegitimizing such a result). But, for the moment, it appears that, while we were all debating a presidential primary that’s still ten months away, many progressives slept through an immensely consequential — and, by most accounts, easily winnable — election against a reactionary bigot in Wisconsin (again).
Said gerrymandering didn’t prevent the Democrats from controlling all of state government after the 2008 election using the redistricting map that supposedly benefited majority Republicans following the 2000 Census. Of course, Democrats are blaming gerrymandering for Hagedorn’s win over Neubauer. Ponder that one for a moment … almost like someone writing for a New York-based publication lecturing Wisconsinites on how they should have voted. (Or a lifestyle magazine.) Kind of political bigotry if you think about it.
Looking for evidence that ink- and pixel-stained wretches are their own worst enemies when it comes to destroying public trust in the media? Consider the continuing turmoil of a week which closed with an MSNBC news editor pressuring a freelance writer on behalf of the Democratic Party just days after media types donned collective frowny faces because an investigation apparently did not find evidence that the president conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.
That MSNBC editor, Dafna Linzer, called journalist Yashar Ali to try and convince him to delay or kill a small story that would slightly inconvenience the Democratic Party over its presidential primary debate plans. According to Ali, “the head of all political coverage for NBC News and MSNBC” had not been “calling to advocate for her network, she was calling to advocate the DNC’s position.”
“She wanted me to wait so they could call state party leaders,” wrote Ali. It was, he noted, “unethical”—and way off base, since he wasn’t writing for any outfit that she represented.
“What he ran up against here was just a tendril of the media-PR-political complex,” commentedWashington Post media critic Erik Wemple on the to-do. That is, it was a brief glimpse into some unpleasant behind-the-scenes workings.
Relative to events of the previous weekend, Yashar Ali’s tale of being pressured by Linzer was a minor kerfuffle. But it came in the same week in which Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded his high-media-profile investigation into charges that Donald Trump and company conspired with the Russian government to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The full report has yet to be released, but a summary by Attorney General William Barr quotes Mueller to the effect that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
“Barr’s announcement was a thunderclap to mainstream news outlets and the cadre of mostly liberal-leaning commentators who have spent months emphasizing the possible-collusion narrative in opinion columns and cable TV panel discussions,” wroteWashington Post media reporter Paul Farhi.
Thunderclap is right. Way too many reporters bet heavily on what they assumed would be the administration-ending outcome of the report. It turned out to be a bad gamble.
“If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward” with doubts about the collusion story, wrote Matt Taibbi, a rare insider critic of the media’s herd mentality, after Barr released his summary. “#Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.”
But unless there’s something earth-shattering in the report that Barr is very unwisely eliding, it’s just not going to have the impact that so many Trump critics—and too many media types—had hoped and anticipated. “The release of the findings was a significant political victory for Mr. Trump and lifted a cloud that has hung over his presidency since before he took the oath of office,” Mark Mazzetti and Katie Benner of The New York Timesconcluded.
That doesn’t help journalists with the public, half of whom already thought the investigation was a witch hunt, according to a March 2019 Suffolk University/USA Todaypoll, and a majority of whom “have lost trust in the news media in recent years,” according to the Knight Foundation.
Despite the screams of (mostly conservative) critics, the partisan affiliations of so many journalists are unlikely to be the big problem by itself. Boomer mythologizing about Walter Cronkite and a supposed golden age of journalism aside, the era of “objective” news coverage was something between a historical aberration and complete nonsense. Most news organs of the past, as of the present, had partisan preferences. But they were expected to be open about their affiliations, and to at least try to get the story right. And they were supposed to have some basic understanding of and connection to the people they were covering—at least within the United States.
By contrast, most Americans now think that reporters are sloppy about writing stories before learning all the facts, and that they even get paid by sources, according to Columbia Journalism Review.
Just as bad, 58 percent of the U.S. adults surveyed “feel the news media do not understand people like them,” Pew Research finds—a number that rises to 73 percent among Republicans. Even worse, “the news media is the enemy of the American people,” 29 percent of Americans say, echoing the president who so many people think was the victorious subject of a recently concluded and unsuccessful witch hunt.
A big part of the problem is that “the national media really does work in a bubble,” insistedPolitico’s Jack Shafer after the 2016 election. “And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political.” The result, he said, is an industry-wide groupthink that represents the views and priorities of the few cities where national journalistic jobs are located. It’s a groupthink that almost certainly means that many Americans are alien and “misunderstood” by bubble-dwelling journalists who take each other’s sloppy thinking for granted.
So when journalists start favoring outcomes–like salvation in a special counsel’s report or special consideration for political apparatchiks—over just covering stories, they tend to overwhelmingly favor the same faction. And that comes off as especially obvious to the large segment of the population that lives at a distance from them geographically, culturally, and ideologically.
Benefiting from these missteps are the politicians who journalists are supposed to be scrutinizing and holding to account. Democrats either get a pass or else are understandably believed to get such a pass by a public that sees them as part of the same team. Republicans get to cast shade on what is easily portrayed as an excitable pack of opposition campaign workers.
In the eyes of Trump’s inner circle, “the report is a gift that vindicates Trump, undercuts Democratic investigations, and repudiates critical news coverage,” reportsThe Atlantic. Going forward, any reporter who gives the president a hard time “will be hit with 30-second spots of all their ridiculous claims about collusion,” a Republican source told the magazine.
It may work.
“Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population,” worries Taibbi.
Which is too bad, because there’s plenty to report about Trump on matters of policy and personal conduct. Some of what he does is good, and much of what he does is bad—which can be said of many politicians, to be honest. There’s plenty of hard work for the news media to do in gathering, analyzing, and presenting information instead of hoping that an investigation will magically annul an election, or that every scribbler will be on-side in favoring the “right” political faction.
“Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them,” Shafer concluded in his 2017 piece.
We’ll see. Because in favoring political games over covering the news, too many journalists have badly blown their reputations along with a lot of stories.
If journalists abandoning real work in favor of political shenanigans only cost some their professional reputations, you could just break out the popcorn and watch the show. But journalists, when we do our jobs right, serve an important role by keeping people informed and scrutinizing the powerful. When we drag our own credibility into public view and shoot it in the head, that deprives the public of an important service while also empowering bottom-dwellers who should be subject to constant observation.
In continued pursuit of bringing to light obscure media, what do these two things (besides the obvious) have in common?
Obviously they both starred Burt Reynolds, after Reynolds had left “Gunsmoke” …
… but before “Deliverance,” “White Lightning” and “Smokey and the Bandit.” Each was an ABC-TV police series that lasted just one season (1966 for “Hawk” and 1970 for “Dan August”), though each was repeated on a different network — 1973 and 1975 on CBS in August’s case, and 1976 in Hawk’s case — to take advantage of Reynolds’ movie popularity.
Each had a cool jazz theme. “Hawk” was created by Kenyon Hopkins, who previously worked on another New York-based series …
… while “Dan August” had Dave Grusin:
GetTV carried both series after Reynolds’ death last year. Of “Hawk,” get (get it?) this:
Who do you think of when you think of Burt Reynolds?
Is it the macho star of groundbreaking 1970s classics like Deliverance? How about the winking bad boy of Smokey and the Bandit? The Oscar-nominated silver fox of Boogie Nights? The director of Sharky’s Machine and other gritty action thrillers? All are good answers, but what about Burt Reynolds the Native American character actor?
If you’re drawing a blank on that portion of the recently deceased icon’s resume, you’re probably not alone. But Reynolds, who has Cherokee ancestry on his father’s side, was cast as “Indian” or “half-breed” characters on TV and film throughout the first decade of his career. Beginning in 1962, the then-26-year-old played a half-Comanche blacksmith on CBS’ long-running Gunsmoke. After three years in Dodge City, Reynolds moved on to NBC’s Branded, where he guest starred as a young brave. Next he was the title character in Navajo Joe, a cartoonishly violent Spaghetti Western that was supposed to propel him to Clint Eastwood-style superstardom. (Spoiler Alert: it didn’t.)
Navajo Joe still enjoys a cult following today, despite the fact that Reynolds’ wig makes him look like the fifth Beatle. But his work in the 1960s should perhaps be best-remembered for Hawk, an innovative 1966 crime drama that brought the actor his first solo starring role on TV.
Filmed on the streets of New York City (and at the East Harlem studio where The Godfather movies were shot), this short-lived ABC series told the story of Detective Lieutenant John Hawk, a full-blooded Iroquois Indian working for the District Attorney’s office. Over 17 hour-long episodes, Hawk spun noir-ish tales of a disappearing city where newsstand owners still doubled as informants and cops still wore fedoras. But it was a New York in transition, infiltrated by drugs and on the verge of economic and social collapse, and the frank storytelling reflected that.
John Hawk was tightly wound, judgmental, and distant to the point of insensitivity – a necessity, he says in an early episode, of the job. What Hawk was not, however, was stereotypically “Indian” in his physical appearance, dress, or demeanor.
“When they asked me about Hawk and said he was an Indian, I immediately thought of a fellow with a feather in his hair running around New York, and I wouldn’t do it,” Reynolds told The Chicago Tribune in November of 1966. “I wanted to play this Indian my way – after all those years of watching TV Indians getting undignified treatment.”
Hawk pulls no punches in its depiction of discrimination. From off-handed jokes to hateful epithets, Hawk’s outsider status informs both Reynolds’ portrayal and the show’s ongoing narrative. And that’s not surprising considering the series was created by Emmy and Peabody Award-winner Allan Sloane, a writer known for socially conscious scripts stretching back to the days of network radio. New York Times critic Jack Gould wrote in 1963 that Sloane “wielded one of the most sensitive pens in television,” and his commitment to informing while entertaining makes Hawk stand out in an era when cop shows were often simple morality plays. One standout episode revolves around a witness with autism, with a surprisingly nuanced depiction of a condition that’s still misunderstood half a century later.
Ironically, Reynolds’ portrayal of a “minority” lead in the racially charged mid-1960s disguises the fact that Hawkalso features an African-American series regular – Wayne Grice as Hawk’s partner Dan Carter – which was a rarity in 1966 (and, sadly, still is today). Like Law & Order a generation later, Hawk fields an all-star team of New York actors: Broadway veterans; familiar faces from daytime soaps; and young actors on the verge of breaking out. The pilot features an unforgettable performance by Gene Hackman as a serial killer motivated by religious fanaticism. Other memorable guest stars include Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Billy Dee Williams, Scott Glenn, Kim Hunter,Diane Baker, and soon-to-be Dark Shadows star John Karlen.
Outside of nostalgia, there are a handful of reasons classic TV dramas resonate for contemporary viewers: writing, directing, acting, and music. Hawk is solid in all regards. The writing team featured playwrights, authors, and short story scribes, including Emmy winner Ellen Violett (Go Ask Alice) and Oscar nominee Don Mankiewicz, the son of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and nephew of All About Eve director Joseph Mankiewicz. Directors included Paul Henreid, who had a long career behind the camera after iconic roles in Casablanca and Now, Voyager. And all the action is driven by a percussive jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins, Shorty Rogers, and Nelson Riddle. (Riddle’s episode features a rousing fistfight that seemed choreographed with the knowledge he would be scoring it.)
Why Hawk didn’t last longer is hard to say. It was a thematically complex show, progressive in storytelling but conservative in its main character. It’s delightfully dark, and not just because most of the episodes take place at night. And it also had stiff completion Thursdays at 10 pm in Dean Martin’s hugely popular variety show on NBC. But Reynolds blamed a different culprit: the theatrically released films counter-programmed by CBS.
“It’s absolutely impossible for a show that costs $150,000 to go up against a movie that costs $3 million,” he told The Chicago Tribune.
Ironically, Reynolds would soon be starring in big budget feature films, and would go on to direct a few of them. His first directorial assignment: the final episode of Hawk.
Hawk was definitely tightly wound. He also took quite a beating in some episodes.
(Notice how much they liked harpsichords.)
The nighttime setting was interesting. (In the pilot Hawk pulls down the shades in his apartment on his way to bed as the sun rises.) Also interesting to note is that by episode two, Hawk and other characters are lighting up every five minutes or so. (Probably due to their sponsor, Camel cigarettes.)
Both Hawk and August were working in their hometowns. The latter was a more interesting setting (“Santa Luisa,” which was supposed to represent Santa Barbara, though filming was in Oxnard) because August kept running into, and sometimes arresting, people from his youth.
Hawk was based only on the creator’s imagination. Dan August was based on a TV movie, “The House on Greenapple Road,” from the novel of the same name:
After a decade on television, Reynolds had sought movie stardom in action-packed Spaghetti Westerns, but what worked for Clint Eastwood in the “Man with No Name” trilogy didn’t bring Burt the same fistful of film roles. So the 34-year-old went back to the primetime grind, guest starring on shows like Love, American Style. And he waited for his next big break.
Meanwhile, prolific producer Quinn Martin (The Untouchables, The Fugitive, The F.B.I.) was expanding his empire into made-for-TV movies. His first starred Christopher George as Lt. Dan August, a homicide detective in the fictional Southern California city of Santa Luisa. Based on the novel of the same name, House onGreenapple Road was a ratings success, and ABC ordered a spin-off series for the fall of 1970 to be called Dan August.
But there was a problem. Christopher George didn’t want to be Dan August.
“Chris wanted to do (the sci-fi series) The Immortal instead,” his widow Lynda Day George remembered in the 2008 book Quinn Martin, Producer: A Behind-the-Scenes History of QM Productions and Its Founder. “Chris and Burt Reynolds were good friends and Chris kept saying to Quinn, ‘Look! You’ve gotta get Burt.’”
George – who had recently wrapped the military action series The Rat Patrol – went so far as to screen tapes of Reynolds’s 1966 cop show Hawk for Martin. But the producer was unmoved, and briefly attempted to negotiate a compromise with Paramount (producers of The Immortal) wherein George would star in both shows. Eventually he relented, and Burt Reynolds became the new Dan August.
With a younger actor in the title role, Dan August went through some changes on its journey from Greenapple Road. Norman Fell (age 46) was cast as Dan’s partner Sgt. Charlie Wilentz, replacing 54-year-old Keenan Wynn. Richard Anderson took on the role of chief-of-police George Untermeyer, played in the telefilm by Barry Sullivan (14 years Anderson’s senior). Returning from the pilot were Ned Romero as Sgt. Joe Rivera and Ena Hartman as investigative assistant Katie Grant.
By the time Dan August debuted on September 23, it had evolved from a middle-aged police procedural to a kinetic action series with stories ripped from the headlines. As a plainclothes detective barely out of his 20s, August advocates for younger characters and gives voice to their concerns – a sea change for the older-skewing primetime cop show format. While Dan August is no Mod Squad, and Reynolds’ straight-laced hero was hardly counterculture, there was a clear effort to tailor stories to viewers who today might be described as “woke.”
In one episode, Dan detoxes a teen junkie. In another, he visits a gay bar (one of the first depictions of such an establishment in primetime, according to the book Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics). He quells a campus uprising, saves a hippie from being set-up for murder (by the man!), advocates for low-paid migrant workers, helps a young priest in love with a woman, and prevents a black activist from taking a phony rap. With its socially conscious narrative and ethnically diverse cast (including an African-American woman as a member of his team), Dan August has an unusual degree of contemporary resonance. But for Quinn Martin, the controversial content was a surprise – and not necessarily a welcome one.
“Quinn said to me, “Are we doing propaganda here?’” producer Anthony Spinner said in Quinn Martin: Producer. “I said, ‘Yeah, because I’m tired of diamond heists and kidnapped girls and all that stuff. How many times can you do that?”
While Martin may have been skittish about the “relevant dramas,” he was surprisingly comfortable with his name-above-the-title star risking serious injury by doing his own stunts. Reynolds’ go-for-broke stunt work can be almost disconcerting. It’s him in literally every shot – fighting, falling, jumping off moving cars, flying in helicopters, and running through burning houses – and that realism adds a different dimension to the standard QM Productions formula.
“It was very important to Burt that Dan August succeed,” series director Ralph Senensky remembered. “This was his fourth series. If Burt didn’t make it this time, where did he go next?”
While Reynolds’ groundbreaking Hawk should have lasted longer, Dan August improves upon the earlier show’s greatest flaw: relentless intensity. Unlike the winking antihero of Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, the Burt Reynolds of this era was serious as a heart attack. And while he smiles more in one episode of Dan August than in the entirety of Hawk, the latter series benefits from what Hawk lacked: an ensemble that humanizes Reynolds.
Norman Fell, best known today for Three’s Company, is hilariously deadpan as Dan’s neurotic, hypochondriac partner. (There’s even an episode with John Ritter, six years before Jack Tripper would meet Mr. Roper.) And Richard Anderson, unforgettable as mentor Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, is surprisingly effective here as Dan’s boss and primary antagonist. Like all Quinn Martin shows, Dan August benefits from an incredible group of guests, including some before they were stars such as Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams (nine years before they would face off as Han Solo and Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back) as well as Martin Sheen and Gary Busey. There were still other guests who were established actors from classic Hollywood like Mickey Rooney, Ricardo Montalban, and Vera Miles. The series also boasts a memorable theme song – one of the oddest in the Quinn Martin oeuvre – from composer Dave Grusin.
Though Reynolds was nominated for a Golden Globe for his work on Dan August, the series was not renewed for a second season. But the story doesn’t end there. According to production manager Howard Alston, the show’s editors assembled an outtakes reel demonstrating how charming and funny Reynolds could be when he didn’t think the cameras were rolling.
“Burt took that gag reel, he went on these talk shows, and he changed his whole career around,” Alston remembered. “He had this whole personality change in front of the camera as a result. He became a motion-picture actor on the basis of that gag reel!”
It may have happened after the show was cancelled, but Dan August was Burt Reynolds’ big break after all.
Reynolds had other police roles, some serious …
… others not so much:
Of the two we focus on here, August probably gets the nod because of the more interesting setting. August was a football star in high school (Reynolds was a running back at Florida State, where one of his teammates was quarterback Lee Corso), but needed a scholarship funded by a local rich guy (who — spoiler alert! — meets his end during one episode) to go to college. Then he comes back home where he gets to arrest, among others, a high school teammate in the den of murder (August is a homicide detective and has plenty to keep him busy), adultery (from the episodes I’ve seen it seems at least one couple per episode is playing around on each other) and various other sins that is August’s hometown.
The common flaw in each is what should be a TV trope by now — police lieutenants as investigators (not just Hawk and August, but Frank Ballinger of “M Squad,” San Francisco’s Frank Bullitt and Mike Stone, Columbo, Kojak, Jim Brannigan, Lon McQ, John McClane, etc.) instead of administrators patrolling from their desk. Santa Luisa (which is named for a real mountain range that runs between Monterey and San Luis Obispo, so points for verisimilitude) is apparently large enough for a homicide unit within its police department (with at least two sergeants in addition to August), but not big enough for a chief of detectives, because August reports directly to the police chief.
The series could have been broader if, like “Hawk,” August was not specifically a homicide detective. It strains credulity to have a three-person homicide bureau in a town with at least one homicide each week. But no one ever accused Quinn Martin of realism. (In one episode August ducks a court order to release a defendant by going for a drive with said defendant, turning off his police radio, and somehow he avoids being fired. That scene does have a nice aside between August’s two sergeants speculating on what their next jobs will be.) Broadening August’s work could have broadened story ideas beyond the ways to kill the victim(s) this week.
But that’s second-guessing and nitpicking. Both series were and are entertaining to watch, if nothing else as period pieces. Fell, who had played cops before (including Detective Meyer Meyer — yes, that was his name — in “87th Precinct” and brownnosing Captain Baker in “Bullitt”) may have been the inspiration for one of the great TV detectives, Lennie Briscoe in “Law & Order” for deadpan wit. Anderson was also great as a police chief that was simultaneously political, mostly supportive of his homicide lieutenant, yet questioning of his homicide lieutenant’s work.
Journalists across the country work hard every day to gather and report the news for their communities. Unfortunately, the highly polarized political climate has put the safety of journalists at risk. The News Media Alliance applauds Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) for bicameral introduction the Journalist Protection Act, which would give federal prosecutors the power to prosecute those who attack or intimidate journalists while they are attempting to do their jobs. We hope that with the bill’s enactment, journalists will be safer on the job and can focus on informing the public and enhancing the public discourse, which are critical to a functioning democracy.
What is the Journalist Protection Act? Something called The Independent reported Thursday:
Today Rep. Eric Swalwell (CA-15), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) reintroduced the Journalist Protection Act to make a federal crime of certain attacks on those reporting the news. This reintroduction is happening during Sunshine Week, when the importance of access to information is recognized. A free press is critical in helping to shine light on our government and illuminate the challenges facing our country.
The Journalist Protection Act makes it a federal crime to intentionally cause bodily injury to a journalist affecting interstate or foreign commerce in the course of reporting or in a manner designed to intimidate him or her from newsgathering for a media organization. It represents a clear statement that assaults against people engaged in reporting is unacceptable, and helps ensure law enforcement is able to punish those who interfere with newsgathering.
Both before and since taking office, President Trump has blatantly stoked a climate of extreme hostility toward the press. He has called the press “the enemy of the American people,” and described mainstream media outlets as “a stain on America.” He once tweeted a GIF video of himself body-slamming a person with the CNN logo superimposed on that person’s face, and retweeted a cartoon of a “Trump Train” running over a person with a CNN logo on its head.
Such antagonistic rhetoric encourages others to think, regardless of their views, that violence against journalists is acceptable. Last April, the international organization Reporters Without Borders dropped the United States’ ranking in its annual World Press Freedom Index by two points, to number 45 overall, citing President Trump’s bashing of the media.
“From tweeting #FakeNews to proclaiming his contempt for the media during campaign rallies, the President has created a hostile environment for members of the press,” said Swalwell. “A healthy democracy depends on a free press unencumbered by threats of violence. We must protect journalists in every corner of our country if they are attacked physically while doing their job, and send a strong, clear message that such violence will not be tolerated. That is what my bill, the Journalist Protection Act, would do.”
In March 2017, OC Weekly journalists said they were assaulted by demonstrators at a Make America Great Again rally in Huntington Beach, CA. The following August, a reporter was punched in the face for filming anti-racism counter-protestors in Charlottesville, VA. At a rally hosted by the President in El Paso, TX just last month, a man in a Make America Great Again hat attacked a BBC reporter and yelled expletives directed at “the media.”
“The values celebrated during Sunshine Week – accountability through transparency, access to public information, and freedom of the press – are under attack like never before,” said Blumenthal. “Under this administration, reporters face a near-constant barrage of verbal threats, casting the media as enemies of the American people and possible targets of violence. This bill makes clear that engaging in any kind of violence against members of the media will simply not be tolerated.”
“Over 200 years ago, our Founding Fathers had the foresight to recognize the importance of a free press to a fledgling democracy,” said Menendez. “Now, more than ever, their importance can’t be overstated. Despite the dangerous rhetoric coming from the Trump Administration, and yet another disturbing attack on a journalist covering a MAGA rally, the press is not the enemy of the people. A free, and independent press—a strong Fourth Estate—is essential to the American people and our democracy, ensuring an informed public and holding those in power accountable. We cannot condone any physical attacks on journalists or members of the media.”
The bill is supported by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and by News Media for Open Government, a broad coalition of news media and journalism organizations working to ensure that laws, policies and practices preserve and protect freedom of the press, open government and the free flow of information in our democratic society.
“American journalists are facing assaults, threats, intimidation and even murder simply for fulfilling their First Amendment duties by reporting the news,” said Bernie Lunzer, president of The NewsGuild, a division of the CWA. “The Journalist Protection Act strengthens the free press that’s essential to our democracy.”
“Now more than ever, our industry needs the Journalist Protection Act to ensure both our members and their equipment have an extra layer of defense from attacks,” said Charlie Braico, president of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, also a CWA division. “It’s also another way of saying in these turbulent times that yes, the First Amendment matters – and it’s worth protecting.”
“A journalist should not have to worry about threats of harassment or physical attacks solely for doing their jobs and informing the public,” said Melissa Wasser, Coalition Director for News Media for Open Government. “Forty-eight journalists faced physical attacks while gathering and reporting the news in 2018, as documented by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. More than two dozen newsrooms have received hoax bomb threats, disrupting their operations. Not only is the role of the news media in our democracy under attack, but the safety of individual journalists is threatened. The Journalist Protection Act would not elevate journalists to a special status, but rather would ensure they receive the same protections if attacked while gathering and reporting the news.”
One of those sponsors’ names might seem familiar to you. The Western Journal explains why:
A reporter who has chronicled one senator’s threat to call the police on him for doing his job is now pointedly asking a question of that same senator, who supports the proposed Journalist Protection Act.
This week, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez used “Sunshine Week,” an annual event to support the right of the American people to know what goes on in government, to cite his support of the bill that would make “certain attacks on those reporting the news” federal crimes.
Menendez said the importance of the media “can’t be overstated.” Menendez implied that abuse of journalists was a one-party issue, attacking President Donald Trump for “dangerous rhetoric,” and citing Trump’s reference to the media as “the enemy of the people,” according to The Hill.
That set Henry Rodgers to tweeting a very pointed question.
“Remember that time you threatened to call the police on me for asking you if you would vote for the Green New Deal last month? I’m a credentialed reporter. So this applies to me as well, right?” asked Rodgers, who works for The Daily Caller.
Last month, Rodgers and Menendez had a run-in at a Washington Metro station. Rodgers was asking about the Green New Deal.
“Not interested,” Menendez said in comments Rodgers recorded.
“I have nothing to say to The Daily Caller. You’re trash. I won’t answer questions to The Daily Caller, period! You’re trash! Don’t keep harassing me or I’ll call Capitol Police!”
However on Tuesday, Menendez saw the role of the media in more glowing terms.
“A free, and independent press — a strong Fourth Estate — is essential to the American people and our democracy, ensuring an informed public and holding those in power accountable,” said a release from Menendez, fellow Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California.
The bill was originally introduced in February 2018, according to The Hill. Menendez, Blumenthal and Swalwell re-introduced it on Tuesday.
“The Journalist Protection Act makes it a federal crime to intentionally cause bodily injury to a journalist affecting interstate or foreign commerce in the course of reporting or in a manner designed to intimidate him or her from newsgathering for a media organization,” the release stated.
“It represents a clear statement that assaults against people engaged in reporting is unacceptable, and helps ensure law enforcement is able to punish those who interfere with newsgathering.”
Media unity has been shattered in recent days as some news outlets have worked together against Fox News.
Some in the media have said that as assaults on journalists rise, some form of action is needed.
“Dozens of physical assaults on journalists doing their jobs were documented by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in 2017,” said Rick Blum, director of News Media for Open Government, Forbes reported in 2018 when the bill was introduced.
“Online harassment of journalists has included death threats and threats of sexual and other physical violence. Taken together, it is clear that not only is the role of the news media in our democracy under attack, but the safety of individual journalists is threatened. It’s time to reverse course. Physical violence and intimidation should never get in the way of covering police, protesters, presidents and other public matters,” he said.
Major media outlets have provided little or no coverage of a Democratic congressman’s suggestion the government would use “nukes” against Americans who resisted efforts to confiscate semiautomatic weapons.
On Friday, during an exchange over his proposal to confiscate certain firearms, Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) suggested the government would use nuclear weapons against Americans who resisted confiscation efforts.
“And it would be a short war my friend,” he tweeted. “The government has nukes. Too many of them. But they’re legit.”
Swalwell later claimed his suggestion the government would use nuclear weapons against Americans was “sarcastic” but did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment or clarification of his views.
Advocates believe journalists are special people because of the inclusion of the free press in the First Amendment. (Which at least Menendez appears to not support.)
As someone who has been physically threatened in this line of work (anonymous phone call to the wrong employer suggesting I was going to be run off the road and beaten for following a particular government body), I shudder to think that journalists might support this. As with hate-crime laws, even if this proposal became law it would prevent or stop not a single violent act toward a journalist; it would only punish the journalist-assaulter. (Assuming that person is caught.) If they feel too intimidated by someone’s words to do their jobs, they need to be in a different line of work — say, public relations.
Those journalists who feel their safety is in danger need to do something about it, instead of cowering behind the skirts of Big Government. (As even police will tell you, when you need help in seconds, police will be there in minutes.) Take a self-defense class, learn how to handle and shoot a gun (which for one thing might reduce the amount of ignorance of a lot of journalists toward firearms and gun owners), and carry that gun with you. Most bullies reverse course when faced with the threat of imminent harm, let alone the end of their lives.
I host a comedy-driven radio show for guys. Until Sunday, no one confused it with something that should be taken seriously. Given my on-air name, “Bubba the Love Sponge,” I assume most people get the joke. We are rude, sometimes profane.
Tucker Carlson called into my satellite radio show regularly from 2006-11, and like all my guests, he adopted an edgy comic persona for the broadcast. He said really naughty things to make my audience laugh, and they did. The 100 or so shows we made with Mr. Carlson weren’t a secret.
Do I really need to go into the rich history of insult comedy? Lisa Lampanelli, Andrew Dice Clay, Rodney Dangerfield, even Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. Comedy breaks taboo subjects that release the unspoken into the air in ways that are, dare I say, funny.
To be sure, we say really mean things on my radio show, and we laugh instead of getting mad. Why do we allow things to be said in comedy that wouldn’t be acceptable elsewhere? Believe it or not, scientists have studied comedy for an answer, and they found one. It’s called benign violation. We laugh when social norms are exceeded—the violation. But it’s not permanently harmful—it’s benign. No one called into my show authentically outraged about what Mr. Carlson said—not once—because everyone knew we were goofing in the spirit of the show.
To understand the mood of today, the only name you need to know is Lenny Bruce. A brilliant and shocking comic, Bruce was arrested over and over for obscenity—jailed for saying the wrong words. In New York he was convicted and died before his appeal could be heard.
Mr. Carlson is being smeared by a new generation of speech police for a new crime—refusing to give in to a small group of political activists who love all forms of “diversity” except of political thought. They take his comic words of a decade ago, reframe them as hateful, and require adherence to their demands. They attack the advertisers that simply want a chance to sell things to his audience, and threaten them with reputational destruction by public shaming unless they repudiate him. In the marketplace of ideas, these guys are shoplifters.
This is not only unfair but makes the world a sadder and angrier place. It’s a violation. There is nothing benign about falsely calling a good man a misogynist or a racist to force your politics on the half of the American public that rejects them.
If Mr. Carlson’s detractors think the way to counter his wit is to close him down by blacklisting him, I am afraid they’ll be disappointed. The chest-beating of the thought police will only help him grow. Americans love the underdog, and we love the unfairly maligned. Most of all, we love to be entertained. The people who hate Tucker Carlson are elevating him.
Did you hear the one about the political activists who decided to win on the strength of their own ideas, rather than smearing those they opposed? Me neither—and that’s no joke.
Five minutes late, Darrell Todd Maurina sweeps into a meeting room and plugs in his laptop computer. He places a Wi-Fi hotspot on the table and turns on a digital recorder. The earplug in his left ear is attached to a police scanner in his pants pocket.
Maurina, who posts his work to Facebook, represents the press — in its entirety.
He is the only person who has come to the Pulaski County courthouse to tell residents what their commissioners are up to, the only one who will report on their deliberations about how to satisfy the Federal Emergency Management Agency so it will pay to repair a road inundated during a 2013 flood.
Last September, this community in central Missouri’s Ozark hills became a statistic. With the shutdown of its newspaper, the Daily Guide, it joined more than 1,400 other cities and towns across the U.S. to lose a newspaper over the past 15 years, according to an Associated Press analysis of data compiled by the University of North Carolina.
The reasons for the closures vary. But the result is that many Americans no longer have someone watching the city council for them, chronicling the soccer exploits of their children or reporting on the kindly neighbor who died.
In many places, local journalism is dying in plain sight.
The Daily Guide, which traces to 1962, served the twin towns of Waynesville and St. Robert near the Army’s sprawling Fort Leonard Wood. It was a family owned paper into the 1980s before it was sold to a series of corporate owners that culminated with GateHouse Media Inc., the nation’s largest newspaper company.
As recently as 2010, the Daily Guide had four full-time news people, along with a page designer and three ad salespeople.
But people left and weren’t replaced. Last spring, the Daily Guide was cut from five to three days a week. In June, the last newsroom staffer, editor Natalie Sanders, quit — she was burned out, she said. The last edition was published three months later, on Sept. 7.
“It felt like an old friend died,” Sanders said. “I sat and I cried, I really did.”
The death of the Daily Guide raises questions not easily answered, the same ones asked at newspapers big and small across the country.
Did GateHouse stop investing because people were less interested in reading the paper? Or did people lose interest because the lack of investment made it a less satisfying read?
GateHouse said the Daily Guide, like many smaller newspapers across the country, was hurt by a dwindling advertising market among national retailers. It faces the same financial pressures as virtually every other newspaper company: Circulation in the U.S. has declined every year for three decades, while advertising revenue across the industry has nosedived since 2006, according to the Pew Research Center.
The challenges are especially difficult in smaller communities.
“They’re getting eaten away at every level,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst at Harvard’s Nieman Lab.
The Daily Guide supplemented its income through outside printing jobs, but those dried up, too, said Bernie Szachara, president of U.S. newspaper operations for GateHouse. Given an unforgiving marketplace, there’s no guarantee additional investment in the paper would have paid off, he said.
Szachara said the decision was made to include some news about Waynesville in a weekly advertising circular distributed around Pulaski County.
“We were trying not to create a ghost town,” he said.
To residents of Waynesville, the loss of their newspaper left a hole in the community. Many are still coming to grips with what is missing in their lives.
“Losing a newspaper,” said Keith Pritchard, 63, chairman of the board at the Security Bank of Pulaski County and a lifelong resident, “is like losing the heartbeat of a town.”
Pritchard has scrapbooks of news clippings about his three daughters. He wonders: How will young families collect such memories?
Other residents talk with dismay about church picnics or school plays they might have attended but only learn of through Facebook postings after the fact.
“I miss the newspaper, the chance to sit down over a cup of coffee and a bagel or a doughnut … and find out what’s going on in the community,” said Bill Slabaugh, a retiree. Now he talks to friends and “candidly, for the most part, I’m ignorant.”
Beyond the emotions are practical concerns about the loss of an information source.
Like many communities, Waynesville is struggling with a drug problem. The four murders last year were the most in memory, and all were drug-related.
Without a newspaper’s reporting, Waynesville Police Chief Dan Cordova said many in the community are unaware of the extent of the problem. Social media is a resource, but Cordova is concerned about not reaching everyone.
It isn’t just local residents who notice the absence of community-based journalism. As the newspaper industry has struggled, a host of philanthropic efforts have begun to fill at least some of the gaps.
Whether any of those efforts ever help Waynesville and small towns like it remains to be seen.
After the Daily Guide folded, Waynesville briefly had an alternative. A local businessman, Louie Keen, bankrolled a newspaper, the Uranus Examiner, that was delivered for free. It was shunned by local advertisers and lasted just five issues.
I have a copy. It’s pretty hysterical. I think Keen, owner of Uranus Missouri (think of a somewhat tasteless Wisconsin Dells attraction), may be a bit too cutting-edge.
So Waynesville is left with local radio and Maurina’s Facebook site. He says that for journalism to survive, reporters need to get back to the basics of being at every event and “telling everyone what the sirens were about last night.”
As “small newspapers wither and die, that’s going to cause major problems in communities,” he said. “Somebody needs to pick up the slack and, at least in this community, I’m able to do that.”
Part of the problem with reporting like this is its lack of attention to bad business decisions of the now-closed newspapers’ owners. It’s ironic the first time I saw this was on STLToday.com, the website of the St. Louis Post–Dispatch, owned by Lee Newspapers, which has cut back its Wisconsin State Journal severely because Lee purchased more newspapers than it should have purchased. Like every other media outlet, newspapers are businesses first and foremost, and if they’re not bringing in more (advertising and subscription and single-copy sales revenue) than is going out, they’re not going to survive indefinitely. This cynical writer wonders how many people who bemoaned the departure of their local newspaper actually paid to read it or advertise in it.
It’s not as if the news goes away if the local newspaper goes away. Maurina is trying to do something about that, and it may well be that newspapers need to think about alternative forms of delivering their news. (Particularly since the U.S. Postal Service decided earlier this year that delivery of the mail was optional in bad weather.) My prediction, though, is that unless Maurina comes up with a revenue source, he’s not going to be Waynesboro’s journalist for very long.
Turner Classic Movies just premiered a month-long series, Journalism in the Movies, but its ballyhoo has a truth-in-advertising problem. Promos for the 21 films being shown promise “to defend Democracy” and to “dispatch facts, not fiction. What drives us? The truth!” These Hollywood fantasies made during the 1930s through the 1970s cover the hacking trade, from newspaper to television, from All the President’s Men on up. But TCM’s celebration comes at the wrong time.
Journalism is now at its least trustworthy. It has entered a new phase of Yellow Journalism, which one broadcaster aptly characterized: “All restraints are coming off now; it’s no accident that public opinion of media is at its lowest point.”
Despite such widespread disapproval, TCM positions its regular anchor Ben Mankiewicz as a hardnosed cheerleader. Hailing from a family of Hollywood Democrats and the son of Frank Mankiewicz, press secretary for Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, the host boasts about his favorite films in the series: Citizen Kane (co-written by Mankiewicz’s uncle Herman Mankiewicz), All the President’s Men, Sweet Smell of Success, Ace in the Hole, His Girl Friday. TCM’s programming includes interview presentations with famously liberal CNN mouthpieces Anderson Cooper and Carl Bernstein (former Washington Post mascot), who routinely use TV face time to proclaim their partisanship.
By avoiding any alternative or original perspective on journalism or movies (no Mollie Hemingway, Pete Hegseth, or James O’Keefe permitted), TCM reveals its liberal bias. Democratic-party media wonks officiate as if that’s all there is to contemporary journalism. Naïve film lovers might be especially susceptible to this partiality, believing it was normal — or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang’s 1956 thriller that anticipates Norman Mailer’s New Journalism).
Divided into sections — “Journalism and Politics,” “Newspaper Noir,” “TV News,” “Newspaper Comedies,” “Reporters at War,” “N.Y. vs. L.A.” — Mankiewicz’s beloved journo films promote professional cynicism. There’s gossip (Sweet Smell of Success); skullduggery (Ace in the Hole); unnamed sources (All the President’s Men); inappropriate workplace sexuality (His Girl Friday); and the megalomania (Citizen Kane) that’s applicable to moguls from William Randolph Hearst to Jeff Bezos. But you must figure that out yourself, and given the age of these films, it’s a distant alarm that fails to address the modern habits that force the public to be wary of media agendas: The way opinion is now presented over facts and editorializing replaces reporting indicates institutional self-infatuation. There’s a reason the term “fake news” has taken hold, and Hollywood is partly to blame.
In Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic 1920s newspaper comedy The Front Page, the unscrupulous editor Walter Burns declares that “there’s an unseen hand that watches over newspapers.” This kind of self-mythologizing has ruled the newspaper genre and even infected the attitude of hero-worshiping readers who regard papers of record with religious authority. Our vainglorious media’s thin-skinned reactions to the “fake news” charge shows in the abiding affection for the hardboiled yet self-aggrandizing The Front Page and made it adaptable to changing times — it was first filmed in 1931, then 1975, with sex-role-reversal adaptations filmed in 1940 and 1988.
At its beginning, Hollywood’s newspaper genre was personified by the whippersnapper nerve of bantam 1930s reporter icon Lee Tracy, whose only Oscar nomination came decades later, ironically for playing a dying U.S. president in The Best Man. Tracy, the cocky herald of an openly indecent profession now commanded by self-proclaimed sophisticates, is suspiciously absent from this series. TCM shows journalistic wrongdoing only as an aberration rather than the psychotic norm it has become. Its programming concept cannot escape the professional-class narcissism that is always with us.
After Robert Redford (Lee Tracy’s temperamental opposite) enshrined himself as Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, then informed the New York Times of the Pentagon Papers in Three Days of a Condor, he directed Lions for Lambs, using the Iraq War to expose journalistic duplicity through a reporter played by Meryl Streep (who later showed her true bias by deifying Washington Post owner Katharine Graham in The Post). Redford then revived “Woodstein” egotism by sentimentalizing disgraced newscaster Dan Rather’s shameless narcissistic posturing with Cate Blanchett as his CBS producer in Truth.
Given this evolution, journalism as depicted in Hollywood (much as in real life) no longer simply provides news; it has brazenly shifted its mission from objectivity to advocacy. We no longer have stalwart Humphrey Bogart in Deadline U.S.A. but arrogant Tom Hanks in The Post and sanctimonious Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight — portrayals that promote the #resistance media combine. A character like Sally Field’s egoistic careerist in Absence of Malice would be inconceivable in today’s Hollywood.
TCM’s nostalgia is stealth activism; Hollywood’s liberal drift is emphasized while journalism’s craven ruthlessness — Nathanael West’s shocking point in the newspaper melodrama Miss Lonelyhearts (1958) — is ignored, just like the contemporary outrages of newspapers and media outlets that operate as partisan platforms.
The mainstream media have misled the public by championing political bias, often hiding sources of information for their own benefit. Today’s covey of mainstream journalists don’t follow a code, but they all hold hive-mind political perspectives, and they command the same status, prominence, and wealth that high-profile journalists always have. The history of journalism in film is based in narcissistic opportunism, and the difference between the media and the public comes down to a class war. It goes back to ex-newsman and novice screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s famous 1926 telegram beckoning newsman Ben Hecht to Hollywood: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots!”
Some of the TCM offerings may be casually enjoyed, but critical thinking exposes fundamental cracks in the genre: TCM promotes only the profession’s trickster moralism and its delusion of modern knight’s gallantry. Since journalists have become incapable of fairness, this series is difficult to watch; its nostalgia is unhelpful, starting with the most disingenuous and lugubrious of all journalism movies, All the President’s Men. (The damnable film, which inspired generations of wannabe investigative reporters and led to the disaster of adversarial journalism, deserves a separate essay.)
Will celebrating journalism in the movies during the era of fake news inspire self-reflection from either Hollywood or the press, or accountability to the public? Or will TCM turn America’s most cynically abused readership into equally cynical sycophants?
I’ve maintained here that there is little quality entertainment about journalism, because journalism is boring to watch take place. (Typing? Page layout? Video editing?) The ultimate journalism movie moment is still from “Deadline USA,” a movie about the potential last day of a newspaper and its … doing its job:
As I wrote here last week, I have practically overdosed on high school and college sports on the radio this winter.
Last week, I announced six games. The previous week, I announced five games and then an entire day of high school wrestling.
I thought I was done with high school sports, until I was assigned to do something I have never done before — an Illinois high school boys supersectional game between East Dubuque and Chicago’s Providence–St. Mel, which you can hear yourself at 5:45 Central time on SuperHits106.com.
While doing a little research on East Dubuque’s opponent, I found a list of Providence–St. Mel’s famous alumni, which includes Lee Loughname, trumpet player for my favorite rock group, Chicago.
As you can imagine, this news does …
… and makes me think of other songs of Chicago’s that have been used as sports bumpers, or should have been:
Jonah Goldberg is leaving National Review in the coming months to start a new conservative media company with Steve Hayes, who was editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard when its owner shut it down in December.
Details: Goldberg and Hayes tell me they plan a reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical company that will begin with newsletters as soon as this summer, then add a website in September, and perhaps ultimately a print magazine.
Hayes, the likely CEO, and Goldberg, likely the editor-in-chief, are the founders.
Hayes tells me about the startup, which doesn’t have a name now: “We believe there’s a great appetite on the center-right for an independent conservative media company that resists partisan boosterism and combines a focus on old-school reporting with interesting and provocative commentary and analysis.”
Hayes and Goldberg are seeking investors.
Goldberg joined National Review in 1998 and was the founding editor of National Review Online. He’ll continue as a fellow for the National Review Institute.
The reason to be skeptical about this has less to do with the anti-Trump conservative bent as the media environment into which Scoop will be born, from which Hayes’ Weekly Standard just exited. Non-partisan and non-ideological media are doing poorly these days, so bringing another media company into this atmosphere seems like a dubious idea.
That is a bigger issue than the “Trump-skeptical” viewpoint. Whether you like Trump or not (and recall Trump deserves praise when he does good things and criticism when he does bad things), at some point — 2021 or 2025 — the GOP will become a post-Trump party. Then what? Does the GOP revert to Reaganesque optimism and belief in free markets and free trade? Does it delve further into opposition to the idea that those from outside this country might have something positive to bring here?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 