Category: media

Vermont journalist Paul Heintz has a rejoinder to those who think only Republicans hate the news media:

In the fall of 1988, Bernie Sanders charged up the stairs of a Montpelier bar to the Vermont offices of the Associated Press, followed by CBS News reporter Harry Reasoner and a camera crew from “60 Minutes.”

Sanders, who was running for a U.S. House seat, was steamed that the AP had skipped his news conference earlier that day at a farm in central Vermont. Once again, Sanders thought, the mainstream media had ignored the problems plaguing America — and refused to cover his proposed solutions.

“If you’re getting screwed by the media, you don’t have much recourse,” Sanders wrote of the incident in his 1997 memoir, “Outsider in the House.”

This time, Sanders thought he had recourse, in the form of a national reporter he hoped would cover the snub and his subsequent confrontation with AP bureau chief Chris Graff. “I could expose the AP to the world,” Sanders wrote. “It was delicious.”

Graff remembers it differently. “He had been embarrassed,” Graff told me years later. “He holds a press conference and not one reporter shows up.”

Such has been the story of much of Sanders’s political career. Since he mounted a failed 1972 bid for the U.S. Senate on the left-wing Liberty Union Party ticket, Sanders has been underestimated, underappreciated and often ignored by the press. He has long maintained that if the media would only cover what he has to say, the American people would embrace it — a theory that was bolstered by his surprising success in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

But Sanders’s remedy for what ails the media — uncritical, stenographic coverage of his agenda — betrays a misunderstanding of the role of a free press. And his dismissal of legitimate journalism not to his liking as “political gossip” bears a troubling resemblance to what another politician refers to as “fake news.”

Like most of Sanders’s political positions, his views on the media have remained remarkably consistent over his nearly five decades in public life.

In an essay published 40 years ago in the Vanguard Press, a since-shuttered Vermont alt-weekly, citizen Sanders argued that the television industry’s corporate owners were seeking to “use that medium to intentionally brainwash people into submission and helplessness,” creating “a nation of morons.” He bemoaned the “psychological damage that constant advertising interruptions have on the capacity of a human being to think.”

Eighteen years later, Sanders argued in “Outsider in the House” that “Television, which provides instantaneous coverage of earthquakes thousands of miles away, seems to have ‘missed’” the “precipitous decline” of the nation’s working class.

“One of the greatest crises in American society,” Sanders added, “is that the ownership of the media is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.”

Many of those views now seem prescient. Corporate consolidation has decimated U.S. newsrooms, contributing to a 23 percent decline in journalism jobs over the course of a decade. The rise of right-wing propaganda outfits such as Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting has validated Sanders’s thesis on the influence of corporate owners. And reporters’ obsession with the political horse race and the latest clickable micro-scoop has come at the expense of a serious discussion about public policy.

Though Sanders understands the problem, his solutions leave something to be desired. The way the senator sees it, the job of a journalist is merely to transcribe his diatribes unchallenged and broadcast his sermons unfiltered.

“He would not be happy with anything that did not basically publish his press release in its entirety — word for word, quote for quote,” said Graff, who spent nearly three decades reporting in Vermont for the AP.

Back when Sanders held regular news conferences in Vermont — it’s been a few years — he typically refused to answer questions unrelated to his chosen topic of the day. That’s problematic for local reporters, who rarely have the opportunity to quiz the members of Congress they cover without spokespeople running interference.

At a 1985 forum on the media, the late Vermont political columnist Peter Freyne complained to Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, that he had reneged on his promise to hold regular press conferences, pointing out that “When asked a question you don’t want to answer, you leave the room.”

Sanders’s response? An ad hominem: “Peter, you are basically a gossip columnist.”

Decades later, Sanders hasn’t changed. During my time covering him for Seven Days, a statewide weekly based in Burlington, the senator has refused to answer questions I’ve posed on topics ranging from gun rights to the Syrian civil war to drone strikes on American citizens — hardly “political gossip.”

Sanders has always preferred to bypass the news media in order to stay on his chosen message. That’s why he hosted his own cable access show as mayor, his own talk radio show as a member of the House and his own podcast and social media empire as a senator.

In December 2015, as Sanders’s first presidential campaign was gaining traction, the candidate returned to familiar rhetoric, accusing the networks of engaging in a “Bernie blackout.”

Back home, Vermont news organizations were suffering from a different kind of Bernie blackout: For more than two years, he refused to speak with VTDigger or Seven Days, and he refused to appear live on Vermont Public Radio’s marquee call-in show, “Vermont Edition.”Unlike the “corporate” media he loathes, it should be noted, the three news outlets are nonprofit or locally owned.

The boycott coincided with aggressive reporting the three organizations conducted on his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders’s, troubled presidency of the bankrupted Burlington College, which prompted an FBI investigation.

In January 2018, nearly three years after Sanders blacklisted Seven Days, his spokesperson finally granted me an interview. But the offer came with a caveat: The senator would not answer questions about “political gossip” or members of his family.

Such conditions are unacceptable to ethical news organizations, so I declined the offer — but I showed up anyway to Burlington International Airport, where the interview was to take place. As I followed him to security, I asked when he’d finally grant us a real interview.

“I don’t talk to gossip columnists,” he said. “I talk about issues.”

No, Sanders talks about what he wants to talk about, which apparently is only himself.

Facebook Friend Michael Smith:

The Smollett fake attack has now devolved to where all these fake attacks go to live an eternal life – to Ratherland.

Ratherland is that imaginary place created by former CBS anchor Dan Rather, where things are “fake but accurate” and even when disproved, are kept alive because they represent a “greater truth”.

Here’s the process:

1 – Person fakes an outrageous situation (almost always one with political benefit).

2 – Media and politicians immediatley jump to virtue signal by siding with the “victim” and running feet of columns and hours of broadcast coverage.

3 – Situation proves to be faked or untrue.

4 – Rather than chastising the perpetrator, the media and politicians immediatley blame people for noticing it is fake.

5 – Perpetrator disappears from the news, relegated to page 27 below the fold.

6 – Media and politicians claim that even if the situation was faked, the conditions exist in America for such a situation to happen, so even if it didn’t, we should treat it as if it did (a GQ writer actually stated such).

7 – You are a racist homophobe if you think differently.

8 – Welcome to Ratherland!

Progressives claim that an event that never happened somehow proves their points and supports the idea that they are better, more compassionate and more woke than you are. Members of the media are now claiming they are the victims.

I saw another tweet that cluelessly claimed the right is using the Smollett situation to blame all people who report such crimes and how bad it is to generalize one bad apple to represent the whole barrel. Wonder where they were when anyone who didn’t jump on the Smollett bandwagon was being called a racist homophobe.

And yet a whole political movement is bases on nothing but claiming your opponent is bad because you want them to be. This is why honest debate is impossible today – in true Kafkaesque fashion, no matter what you do or what you say – even (especially) if you don’t say or do anything, you are guilty.

And if you are guilty, you are shipped off to Ratherland.

The Associated Press:

The steady loss of local newspapers and journalists across the country contributes to the nation’s political polarization, a new study has found.

With fewer opportunities to find out about local politicians, citizens are more likely to turn to national sources like cable news and apply their feelings about national politics to people running for the town council or state legislature, according to research published in the Journal of Communication.

Southwest Wisconsin, where Presteblog World Headquarters is located, presently has two Democratic Congressmen, but has had Republicans in both houses of the Legislature nearly all the time since the Civil War. Ripon, the previous home of Presteblog World Headquarters, might be even more Republican than that in terms of state legislative representation, and it sits in a Congressional district that has had overwhelmingly Republican representation for decades. In each area there is basically one weekly newspaper per market, but the great consolidation of newspapers ended in the 1960s, and representation hasn’t changed very much in those years.

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable, morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen. “You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty.

It’s getting worse. Despite presenting an opportunity for sobriety and excellence, the election of President Donald Trump has been an unmitigated disaster for the political media, which have never reckoned with their role in Trump’s elevation and eventual selection, and which have subsequently treated his presidency as a rolling opportunity for high-octane drama, smug self-aggrandizement, and habitual sloth. I did not go to journalism school, but I find it hard to believe that even the least prestigious among those institutions teaches that the correct way to respond to explosive, unsourced reports that just happen to match your political priors is to shout “Boom” or “Bombshell” or “Big if true” and then to set about spreading those reports around the world without so much as a cursory investigation into the details. And yet, in the Trump era, this has become the modus operandi of all but the hardest-nosed scribblers.

The pattern is now drearily familiar. First, a poorly attributed story will break — say, “Source: Donald Trump Killed Leon Trotsky Back in 1940.” Next, thousands of blue-check journalists, with hundreds of millions of followers between them, will send it around Twitter before they have read beyond the headline. In response to this, the cable networks will start chattering, with the excuse that, “true or not, this is going to be a big story today,” while the major newspapers will run stories that confirm the existence of the original claim but not its veracity — and, if Representative Schiff is awake, they will note that “Democrats say this must be investigated.” These signal-boosting measures will be quickly followed by “Perspective” pieces that assume the original story is true and, worse, seek to draw “broader lessons” from it. In the New York Times this might be “The Long History of Queens Residents’ Assassinating Socialist Intellectuals”; in the Washington Post, “Toxic Capitalism: How America’s Red Hatred Explains Our Politics Today”; in The New Yorker, “I’ve Been to Mexico and Was Killed by a Pickaxe to the Head”; in Cosmopolitan, “The Specifics Don’t Matter, Men Are Guilty of Genocide.”

By early afternoon, the claim will be all the media are talking about, and the talking points on both sides of the political divide will have become preposterously, mind-numbingly stupid. On a hastily assembled panel, a “political consultant” who spends his time tweeting “The president is a murderer. This. Is. Not. Normal” will go up against a washed-out politician trying desperately to squirm his way around the protean Trump-didn’t-do-this-how-dare-you-but-if-he-did-it’s-actually-good-because-Trotsky-was-a-Communist-and-anyway-didn’t-Obama-drone-terrorists position that he contrived in a panic in the green room.

And then, just when the fracas is reaching boiling point, a sober-minded observer will point out that Donald Trump wasn’t actually born until 1946 and so couldn’t have killed Trotsky in 1940, and everyone will wash his hands, go to bed, and move on to the next “Boom!” project.

Everyone, that is, but the victim of the frenzy — who is usually Donald Trump but might also be Brett Kavanaugh or Nikki Haley or Ben Shapiro or a county comptroller from Arkansas or the children of Covington High School or someone who just happens to share a name with a school shooter and once complained online about his property taxes — who will complain bitterly about the spectacle and then be condescended to on the weekend shows by professional media apologists such as CNN’s Brian Stelter.

This phase is the final one within the cycle, and it may also be the most pernicious, for it is here that it is made clear to the architects of the screw-up at hand that they should expect no internal policing or pressure from their peers and that, on the contrary, they should think of themselves as equals to Lewis and Clark. To watch Stelter’s show, Reliable Sources, after a reporting debacle is to watch a master class in whataboutism and faux-persecution, followed by the insistence that even the most egregious lapses in judgment or professionalism are to be expected from time to time and that we should actually be worrying about the real victim here: the media’s reputation. This, suffice it to say, is not helpful. Were a football commentator to worry aloud that a team’s ten straight losses might lead some to think they weren’t any good — and then to cast any criticisms as an attack on sports per se — he would be laughed out of the announcers’ box.

“Accountability” doesn’t mean “always running a retraction when you get it wrong.” At some point it means learning and adapting and changing one’s approach. It is not an accident that all of the press’s mistakes go in one political or narrative direction. It is not happenstance that none of the major figures seem capable of playing “wait and see” when the subject is this presidency. And it is not foreordained that they must reflexively appeal to generalities when a member of the guild steps forcefully onto the nearest rake. Ronald Reagan liked to quip that a government department represented the closest thing to eternal life we are likely to see on this earth. In close second is a bad journalist with the right opinions, for he will be treated as if he were the very embodiment of liberty.

That, certainly, is how they regard themselves. “The last person to rule America who didn’t believe in the First Amendment was King George III,” wrote MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt, back in June — which is true only if you discount that the colonists actually enjoyed robust speech protections relative to their English cousins; if you are insensible of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the pro-slavery “gag” rules that bound the House of Representatives from 1835 to 1844, the Civil War, the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, New York Times Co. v. United States, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Schenck, or Eugene Debs; and, most crucially, if you remain wholly incapable of distinguishing between criticism and restriction.

Donald Trump, at whom Hunt’s quip was aimed, does indeed have instincts toward the First Amendment of which he and his acolytes should be ashamed; he does indeed have a tenuous relationship with the truth; and he does indeed wear a skin so thin as to border on the translucent. But he has not — ever — “attacked the free press”; he has not prevented, or attempted to prevent, the publication of a single printed word; and he has made no attempt whatsoever to change the law that he might do so. Rather, he has repeatedly — and often stupidly — criticized the press corps. The difference between these two actions is the difference between a bad art critic’s savaging a painting in print and a bad art critic’s savaging a painting with a chainsaw. One is the exercise of liberty; the other, vandalism and intimidation.

If the media understand this difference, they are doing an excellent job pretending otherwise. In complaint after complaint, the “press” and “the First Amendment” are held to be synonymous when they are no such thing and cannot logically be so. Thomas Jefferson, who was as reliable a critic of suppression as the early republic played host to, wrote famously that if it were left to him “to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” And yet he also contended that “nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” This represented no contradiction whatsoever. One can believe simultaneously that the press must remain free and that it has built itself into an ersatz clerisy that regards its primary job not as conveying information in as effective a manner as possible but as translating writs for the benighted public, the better to save its soul. If the polls are to be believed, a majority of Americans believes exactly this.

And why wouldn’t they, when it’s made so obvious? Last year, when the White House unveiled an immigration change that it hoped to persuade Congress to pass, CNN’s Jim Acosta showed up in the press room with an indignant look on his face and began to recite poetry from the stalls. It is true that Acosta, a man who seems unable to decide whether he’s a political correspondent on basic cable or a member of the cast of Hamilton, is particularly absurd. But he is by no means an aberration. It is for a good reason that one cannot imagine a member of the mainstream press behaving toward a Democratic administration in the manner that Acosta behaves, and the reason is that he’d never think to do so against his own team.

KATV-TV in Little Rock, Ark.:

Prior to last year, Arkansas schools were required to offer journalism classes as an elective. But many lawmakers voted to remove it, calling it a mandate.

State Rep. Julie Mayberry, R-Hensley, told KATV she was appalled when lawmakers did away with the requirement. That prompted her to file House Bill 1015 this legislative session.

Under Mayberry’s proposed legislation, all Arkansas public schools would be required to offer journalism as an elective. It’s a requirement that she said dates back to 1984.

“Journalism is essential to our American government,” she said. “We have three branches of government so that we have a watch on each department. But who keeps an eye on them? The journalist.”

Mayberry said journalism classes aren’t just about training future journalists but about teaching future generations how to stay informed.

“People are sharing information and not understanding where the source is,” she said. “They’re just trying to get something out there really quickly. And in journalism school we are taught make sure you get the story right, get your facts straight first and then present the story. And that’s not what’s happening right now, so it’s something everybody can learn from.”

Lawmakers against bringing back this requirement said it puts public schools in a difficult position.

“Journalism is a great class,” said state Sen. Trent Garner, R-El Dorado. “I think it’s a great profession. But mandating by the state that every single school teaches it puts a financial strain and other strain on schools. I grew up in a very rural school. My graduating class was 60 people and we barely had enough teachers for Spanish and other kind of basic courses.”

Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in a statement that he opposes the bill on similar grounds.

“I appreciate Rep. Mayberry’s efforts to include journalism in all of our schools, but I believe the decision to do so is best left to local school districts,” he said. “All Arkansas high schools have the option to offer a journalism course, and in fact, the vast majority already do. Journalism is an important area of study, and high school is the perfect place for students to learn the fundamentals of gathering news and checking facts. However, with 38 courses already mandated in every Arkansas public school, another mandate would be burdensome and expensive for many districts—especially those with limited resources.“

Caitlin Flanagan:

On Friday, January 18, a group of white teenage boys wearing maga hats mobbed an elderly Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, chanting “Make America great again,” menacing him, and taunting him in racially motivated ways. It is the kind of thing that happens every day—possibly every hour—in Donald Trump’s America. But this time there was proof: a video. Was it problematic that it offered no evidence that these things had happened? No. What mattered was that it had happened, and that there was video to prove it. The fact of there being a video became stronger than the video itself.

The video shows a man playing a tribal drum standing directly in front of a boy with clear skin and lips reddened from the cold; the boy is wearing a maga hat, and he is smiling at the man in a way that is implacable and inscrutable. The boys around him are cutting up—dancing to the drumbeat, making faces at one another and at various iPhones, and eventually beginning to tire of whatever it is that’s going on. Soon enough, the whole of the video’s meaning seems to come down to the smiling boy and the drumming man. They are locked into something, but what is it?Twenty seconds pass, then 30—and still the boy is smiling in that peculiar way. What has brought them to this strange, charged moment? From the short clip alone, it is impossible to tell. Because the point of the viral video was that it was proof of racist bullying yet showed no evidence of it, the boy quickly became the subject of rage and disgust. “I’d be ashamed and appalled if he was my son,” the actress Debra Messing tweeted.