David Brooks is The New York Times’ idea of a conservative, who is not necessarily a conservative, but read what he wrote before yesterday:
I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.
These people wrote about politics, but they also wrote about a lot of other things: history, literature, sociology, theology and life in general. There was a sharp distinction then between being conservative, which was admired, and being a Republican, which was considered sort of cheesy.
These writers often lived in cities among liberals while being suspicious of liberal thought and liberal parochialism. People like Buckley had friends of every ideological stripe and were sharper for being in hostile waters. They were sort of inside and outside the establishment and could speak both languages.
Many grew up poor, which cured them of the anti-elitist pose that many of today’s conservative figures adopt, especially if they come from Princeton (Ted Cruz), Cornell (Ann Coulter) or Dartmouth (Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza). The older writers knew that being cultured and urbane wasn’t a sign of elitism. Culture was the tool they used for social mobility. T.S. Eliot was cheap and sophisticated argument was free.
The Buckley-era establishment self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards. It rebuffed the nativists like the John Birch Society, the apocalyptic polemicists who popped up with the New Right, and they exiled conspiracy-mongers and anti-Semites, like Joe Sobran, an engaging man who was rightly fired from National Review.
The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.
First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise. Small magazines have been overwhelmed by Rush, O’Reilly and Breitbart.
Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment. In search of that mass right-wing audience that, say, Coulter enjoys, conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.
It’s ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism, but that is the essential truth. Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump. Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.
Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else. The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party.
Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory. According to a Public Religion Research Institute survey, 72 percent of white evangelicals believe that a person who is immoral in private life can be an effective national leader, a belief that is more Machiavelli than Matthew.
As conservatism has become a propagandistic, partisan movement it has become less vibrant, less creative and less effective.
That leads to the third big change. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.
For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good. Trump demagogy filled the void.
This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound. That’s because of an observation the writer Yuval Levin once made: That while most of the crazy progressives are young, most of the crazy conservatives are old. Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great. It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex. Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).
A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth. It was good to be a young conservative back in my day. It’s great to be one right now.
Brooks didn’t mention back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan was a conservative, unlike Clinton and Trump.
Alyssa Rosenberg writes about the hidden stories behind some of my favorite entertainment:
From “Dragnet” to “Dirty Harry” to “Die Hard,” Hollywood’s police stories have reinforced myths about cops and the work of policing — ideas that resonate painfully today as police-involved shootings and questions about race and community relations wrack U.S. cities and play a starring role in the presidential election.
The police story is one of the elemental dramas of American popular culture, the place we face down whatever crimes frighten us most in a given era and grapple with what we want from the cops who are supposed to stop those crimes. “Dragnet’s” Joe Friday bolstered public faith in law and order in the ’50s. “Dirty Harry” Callahan stoked terror and rage about the violent crime wave that began in the ’60s. And John McClane of “Die Hard” awed audiences when he singlehandedly saved a whole office tower from ruthless criminals in the 1980s.
If these were only fantasies, they would still be powerful. But the ideas that popular culture embeds in the public consciousness about policing remain after the story is over. This five-part series examines the evolving relationship between police officers and the communities they are supposed to serve; the way Hollywood shapes our expectations for shootings by police; the entertainment industry’s embrace of a more violent style of policing during the drug war; and the changing composition of police forces in an increasingly diverse society.
Because it is not possible to understand the stories Hollywood tells about the police without looking back at the industry’s own vexed relationship with the law, this series begins by exploring how police pressure, government regulation and censorship helped mold pop culture’s stories about the police.
This is not a straightforward story about how police departments are bad and Hollywood is good, or vice versa. Nor is it a simple morality tale about how creative freedom made it possible for a liberal industry to critique a conservative profession. Artists such as Simon have used their independence to challenge public perceptions about policing. But driven by the need for drama and excitement, Hollywood used genres such as action movies and reality shows to glamorize the very ideas about policing that have generated such division in the United States today.
A century ago, the prospect of city governments and police departments deferring to artists was unimaginable. From Hollywood’s earliest days, these institutions took for granted that regulating movies was an essential crime-fighting function.
In 1908, New York Mayor George McClellan Jr. used police power to close every movie theater in the city. To prove they could manage themselves, theater owners and movie distributors founded what eventually became known as the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, which examined movies for objectionable content and suggested cuts that directors should make before films reached the public.
The board, and the movie business as a whole, had a daunting task convincing the public and police that it was up to the task of self-governance. In 1910, the International Association of Chiefs of Police adopted a resolution condemning the movie business because, as the organization’s president put it, “the police are sometimes made to appear ridiculous.”
Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that a 1913 state censorship statute did not infringe on either free speech or interstate commerce. Movies weren’t independent arguments worthy of First Amendment protection, Associate Justice Joseph McKenna wrote in the court’s decision, but rather “mere representations of events, of ideas and sentiments … vivid, useful, and entertaining, no doubt, but . . . capable of evil.” It would take 37 years for the Supreme Court to reverse itself.
Meanwhile, as Hollywood grew larger, cooperation with police and other law enforcement agencies became more important for reasons beyond censorship.
Hollywood needed the cooperation of the Los Angeles Police Department to preserve its stars’ reputations. The rape and manslaughter trials of silent-film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in the early 1920s and federal tax investigations of actors including Tom Mix tarnished the industry. Later, LAPD historian Joe Domanick wrote, cooperation between the movie business and police ensured discretion for “carousing wild men like Errol Flynn and homosexual stars.”
The increasing complexity of Hollywood productions created strong logistical imperatives for the movie business to play nice with police. Like Simon decades later, movie studios needed permits to shoot on city streets, and police officers to enforce those permits, roping off thoroughfares and working off-duty as security.
And in the late 1940s, an actor named Jack Webb would find an even more effective way for the LAPD and the entertainment industry to pursue their mutual self-interest.
Jack Webb got the idea for “Dragnet” when he met Marty Wynn, an LAPD detective who was working as technical adviser for a movie in which Webb played a forensics investigator. In pursuit of the access that would let him market “Dragnet” as an authentic look at police work, Webb forged an extraordinary partnership with LAPD chief William Parker and department publicity wizard Stanley Sheldon — accepting stringent censorship from the police department in exchange for story ideas, logistical help and a patina of truth. That bargain would help create America’s first enduring cop drama and a model for police storytelling for decades to come.
“Dragnet” began as a radio show in 1949. When it moved to TV in 1951, Webb became even more dependent on the LAPD. “On television you could see things, see if the police work, the station house, the squad car, seemed right,” Domanick explained. “Authenticity was a major component of what Webb, as a producer and in his persona as detective Joe Friday, was trying to sell.”
Webb agreed that scripts would be formally approved by the LAPD’s Public Information Division before filming began. The comments weren’t advisory: If the department objected to something, such as the depiction of a woman dying from an illegal abortion, the entire episode might be scrapped.
In exchange, Webb obtained not only story ideas, but also invaluable financial help from the department.
“The LAPD gave him carte blanche,” recalled Joseph Wambaugh, who rose to the rank of detective sergeant in the LAPD before leaving to write police novels full time. “They could shoot wherever they wanted. They could have cops for extras, and police vehicles and equipment,” perks that helped lower the budget for “Dragnet.”
For all its pretensions to accuracy — each episode began with the sonorous promise, “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true” — the version of the LAPD that Webb presented was the one Parker wanted the world to see.
The show depicted black and Latino police officers, although, as pop culture scholar Roger Sabin noted tartly in his critical survey “Cop Shows,” “the LAPD’s racial segregation policies were not mentioned.” Wambaugh remembered that “any shooting that was done on the shows was squeaky clean,” with the officer in strong control of his emotions, rather than firing out of fear, or worse, revenge.
And Joe Friday, the cop played by Webb, became an icon of law enforcement who respected the Constitution, hated drugs and solved crimes by using modern, scientific investigative techniques and focusing squarely on “just the facts, ma’am.”
The show quickly became a model: “Highway Patrol,” which debuted in 1955, was the response to the California Highway Patrol’s commissioner, Bernard Caldwell, who demanded that his own public relations division “get us a show like ‘Dragnet.’”
Hollywood pursued law enforcement agencies, too. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover turned down several potential TV shows before signing on with ABC to create “The F.B.I.” Hoover maintained full script approval and vetted actors’ politics before they were cast.
As with “Dragnet,” “The F.B.I.” served Hoover’s interests as much for what it didn’t show as what it did. The series ran from 1965 to 1974, a period when Hoover was, among other things, surveilling and harassing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Agents on “The F.B.I.” never engaged in such skullduggery.
Shows such as “Dragnet” and “The F.B.I.” were, by design, misleading about the harshest realities of the law enforcement agencies they portrayed. Webb’s claims to authenticity also made “Dragnet” itself vulnerable. What would happen when actual police officers started telling their own versions of what it was like to police Los Angeles?
‘Dragnet” had concluded its revival, which ran from 1967 to 1970, and Webb’s next cop show, “Adam-12,” named for an LAPD radio call sign, was in its third season, when then-Detective Sgt. Joseph Wambaugh did just that with the publication of his first novel, The New Centurions.
A former Marine and steel-mill worker, Wambaugh joined the Los Angeles Police Department when he discovered that he could make more money as a cop than as an English teacher. After he made sergeant, he was posted to the Public Information Division. Though Wambaugh found the posting dull and transferred as soon as possible, he began asking his friend Stephen Downing about Downing’s experiences writing for “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” and contemplated trying to sell a script of his own.
Wambaugh’s literary aspirations — he earned a master’s degree in English — drew him toward novels instead. The result was The New Centurions, which followed three LAPD officers from the police academy through the 1965 Watts riots. It’s a raw, intimate look at the psychological costs of policing. Because Wambaugh knew the book could never survive the LAPD’s approval process, he didn’t even bother to submit it.
If Wambaugh thought The New Centurions would arrive on shelves quietly, he was mistaken. The Book-of-the-Month Club picked The New Centurions as its main selection for January 1971, guaranteeing a wide audience and drawing attention to the novelty of hearing about police work from an actual cop, even through the lens of fiction.
The attention was wonderful for Wambaugh’s sales, but it put him in a precarious position. Police chief Ed Davis, himself a technical adviser for “Dragnet” and “Adam-12,” was displeased.
“He made one statement to the LA Times, ‘Well, I hope Sgt. Wambaugh makes a lot of money with this book, because he’ll need it. He won’t have a job,’ ” Wambaugh recalled. “And that’s when the press just swarmed in on my behalf and waved the First Amendment.”
For a moment, it seemed that Webb himself might come to Wambaugh’s defense. Wambaugh recalled receiving a call from one of Webb’s employees asking for a copy of the manuscript. Wambaugh eagerly dropped off page proofs — and waited. Two weeks later, the same employee called Wambaugh to let him know he could pick the manuscript up. When he did, Wambaugh found that his book had acquired a new and unexpected heft. Webb had stuck a paper clip next to everything he found objectionable.
“I just scraped off all the paper clips, threw them in the trash, and gave up on Mr. Webb,” Wambaugh said. “He knew that what I was presenting to the American public was something that would undermine his sanitized portrayal, and it did.”
‘The New Centurions” didn’t entirely kill heroic portraits of the police. But Wambaugh was one of the most prominent examples of a major shift in Hollywood: Pop culture began taking its inspiration not from the heads of law enforcement agencies, but from individual cops — men who believed policing was important work but also recognized the toll that it took on individual officers.
“The Mod Squad,” Aaron Spelling’s series about a special unit of young officers who try to solve cases that might remain impenetrable to older, squarer, detectives, grew out of a conversation Spelling had with his friend, Buddy Ruskin, a former member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. When the show premiered in 1968, Spelling positioned “The Mod Squad” as an explicit counter to the revival of the conservative “Dragnet” a year earlier. “They thought everybody under 25 was a creep, we thought everybody under 25 was misunderstood,” Spelling wrote in his memoir.
In the early 1990s, when Steven Bochco and David Milch were creating the show that would become “NYPD Blue,” Milch recruited Bill Clark, a New York Police Department detective, to help with logistical challenges and act as an adviser to the series. The show drew inspiration from Clark’s cases and from the way he described the toughness, even numbness, cops have to acquire to investigate serious violent crimes.
Another cop would go much further in facilitating a wide-ranging critique not merely of his former department but also of the national strategies that guided American policing.
Ed Burns’s relationship with David Simon preceded Simon’s emergence as one of the defining showrunners of his time. They met when Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter and Burns was a detective with a tendency, annoying to his supervisors, to get himself detailed to complicated investigations involving wiretaps. Burns and Simon collaborated on Simon’s second book, The Corner. Burns’s work on drug cases and his post-police job as a teacher would become inspirations for substantial sections of “The Wire,” which premiered in 2002. If previous cop shows leaned on authenticity to reassure audiences about the strength and integrity of police departments, Burns helped guide “Wire” fans on a tour of crumbling institutions.
From Webb to Wambaugh to “The Wire,” authenticity has been a selling point for generation after generation of police shows. And beyond the promise of getting up close and personal with a profession that’s alternately venerated and denigrated, these efforts at accuracy and authenticity tend to be the tools storytellers use to persuade audiences to take their big ideas about policing more seriously.
Webb used accurate details to convince viewers that his portrait of the LAPD as hyper-professional, emotionally controlled and highly effective was also true. For Wambaugh, his novels were a way to tell the public about what he believed to be the real and largely ignored dangers of policing, including divorce, suicide and substance abuse. Bochco writes of a proud moment on the 1980s-era “Hill Street Blues,” when a woman wrote to tell him that an episode in which two cops were shot helped her police officer husband to open up about his own shooting and join Alcoholics Anonymous.
Simon hoped that if he earned viewers’ trust on “The Wire,” he could argue against a mission police had been given rather than against the police themselves.
Of course, as artists like Simon and Wambaugh were bringing their own brands of verisimilitude to cop fiction, a new genre of television emerged, offering its own spin on the reality of policing.
Reality television offered beleaguered police departments a way to reassert their dominance. Instead of telling Jack Webb what the LAPD wanted to see on screen, police departments could simply show camera operators only what they wanted audiences to witness.
The formula for “Cops,” a reality show now in its third decade, is simple: Producers ride along with police officers and film as they respond to complaints and then pursue, arrest and process suspects. The show is often astonishingly boring: Watching officers conduct traffic stops or small-time drug arrests to break the monotony of patrol is a testament to the gap between fictional policing and the mundane truth of the actual work.
The devious genius of “Cops” is that while the show is staged by police departments, the people the police arrest sign off on their own depictions as lying, luckless incompetents who climb drunk out of car windows, try to eat large quantities of marijuana and even get stopped biking under the influence. The police get the opportunity to present themselves as dedicated and sympathetic, conducting patient questioning and offering help with drug treatment. And their targets acquiesce in the show’s depiction of their own worst moments: Creator John Langley has said that once the show took off, as many as 90 percent of those arrested on camera signed releases so that their unblurred faces could appear on screen.
It’s only recently that technology has given ordinary citizens the power to tell stories about themselves and their interactions with cops — perspectives that police departments would prefer stay invisible and that Hollywood has largely ignored.
Earlier this year, Diamond Reynolds used Facebook Live to broadcast her interactions with police officers after her boyfriend, cafeteria supervisor Philando Castile, was shot. The live stream captured Reynolds’s 4-year-old daughter comforting her mother in a heartbreaking moment of childish composure. And in September, after a Charlotte police officer shot and killed Keith Scott, his wife, Rakeyia Scott, released her own video that showed her begging the police not to shoot her husband and insisting that he was unarmed.
These videos aren’t exciting or entertaining in the way Hollywood’s polished police stories so often have been. They are shattering.
The rise of cellphone video throws into sharp relief a question that has always dogged police fiction: Who’s telling the truth about what the police do?Is it a reality show like “Cops,” which for all its manufactured quality, does capture the pathetic nature of certain classes of crime, the relentless dullness of police work and the craving some officers have for action? Is it “Dragnet,” with its mythic, and mythical, version of policing? Is it “The Wire,” informed by Simon’s years of reporting and Burns’s years of policing and teaching? Is it Joseph Wambaugh, who for a brief period in the ‘70s captivated Americans not with police procedurals about how, as he puts it, “the cop acts on the job,” but with searing portraits of how “the job works on the cop”?All these storytellers have contributed their own pieces to our understanding of one of America’s most complex professions. And given the times in which they told their stories, the power of the police in that moment and their levels of personal courage, they told the stories they were capable of telling and that they had the freedom to tell.“Jack Webb wanted to make his shows grittier and more true to life, psychologically, showing all the damage that police work does to cops,” Wambaugh remembered. “The premature cynicism, the constant psychological bombardment from the worst of people and from ordinary people at their worst. All of that, he wanted to do some of that. But he couldn’t if he wanted the cooperation that he always got from the LAPD.”
Webb didn’t have the fortitude, or the personal appetite for risk, to walk away from the LAPD. More than half a century later, Simon’s willingness to leave Baltimore ensured that he would be able to shoot the story that he wanted on the streets where he meant for that story to take place.
When Simon testified before the Baltimore City Council about a resolution intended to counteract the negative image of Baltimore depicted in “The Wire,” he made a larger point that might have seemed laughable or even dangerous, back when Hollywood was young, and mayors and police departments treated pop culture as a potential source of crime.
“My testimony was like …‘I live here. And I pay taxes here, and I’m a storyteller … This is about what I think matters,’” Simon recalled. “‘If you don’t like the show, stand up and say as an individual, you can even stand up as a politician and say I don’t like the show. But … don’t spend civic time and put the civic imprimatur on what is a good or bad story. That’s not your f—— business.’”
But even as Hollywood shook off formal censorship, ties between cops and artists remained. If we can’t understand Hollywood without examining the way the police shaped the entertainment industry, we can’t understand the state of policing in America without exploring Hollywood’s seductive visions of what it means to be a cop.
I have a doubleheader of sports to announce today, ending with Lancaster at Clinton in Level 3 football at 6:45 p.m. on WGLR (97.7 FM) in Lancaster, available online at wglr.com.
Before that, I will be announcing state tournament soccer, Rice Lake against Mount Horeb, in Milwaukee for Rice Lake’s WAQE (also 97.7 FM), also available online at waqe.com and msbnsports.net. (Which marks the first time I have ever announced games for two different radio stations on the same frequency in the same day. I hope I keep one separate from the other, lest one get an unscheduled format change, given that the first is a Hot Adult Contemporary station and the other is a country station.)
When I was asked to announce state soccer, it occurred to me that there was someone residing in Presteblog World Headquarters who would know something about Mount Horeb, since the Vikings ended his season last week. And so …
… Platteville/Lancaster goalkeeper Michael Prestegard will join me on the broadcast. He’s certainly seen enough of my on-air work from the booth (including when I accidentally hit him in the face with my clipboard), but today will be his on-air sports broadcasting debut. (To add to various things he and his brother and sister have done for my main employer the newspaper.)
The closest I have come to this before now is when my father accompanied me on two interviews with microbrewery owners for a magazine story. The owners and he kind of monopolized the conversation, but I got enough material for the story just by listening and taking notes. (My father’s career was not in journalism, but if you can talk to people, that’s a start. My kids already know Who, What, Where, When, Why and How and What Does This Story Mean to the Reader.)
Mrs. Presteblog has been with me for many games over the years …
… but sadly not today due to this thing called work.
It’s a much smaller scale than, say, having Chip Caray work with his father Skip and Skip’s father Harry …
… or the numerous other father–son baseball teams (Marty and Thom Brennaman, Harry and Todd Kalas, etc.). But today will be a personal thrill for me.
Wisconsinites know that the first radio station was what now is WHA in Madison. Today in 1920, the nation’s first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air.
The number one British single today in 1956 is the only number one song cowritten by a vice president, Charles Dawes:
Internal strategy documents and emails among Clinton staffers shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships between the campaign and various members of the U.S. media, as well as the campaign’s strategies for manipulating those relationships.
The emails were provided to The Intercept by the source identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0, who was reportedly responsible for prior significant hacks, including one that targeted the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the resignations of its top four officials. On Friday, Obama administration officials claimed that Russia’s “senior-most officials” were responsible for that hack and others, although they provided no evidence for that assertion.
As these internal documents demonstrate, a central component of the Clinton campaign strategy is ensuring that journalists they believe are favorable to Clinton are tasked to report the stories the campaign wants circulated.
At times, Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted “on background” and what should be described as “on the record.”
One January 2015 strategy document — designed to plant stories on Clinton’s decision-making process about whether to run for president — singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a “friendly journalist” who has “teed up” stories for them in the past and “never disappointed” them. Nick Merrill, the campaign press secretary, produced the memo, according to the document metadata:
That strategy document plotted how Clinton aides could induce Haberman to write a story on the thoroughness and profound introspection involved in Clinton’s decision-making process. The following month, when she was at the Times, Haberman publishedtwo stories on Clinton’s vetting process; in this instance, Haberman’s stories were more sophisticated, nuanced, and even somewhat more critical than what the Clinton memo envisioned.
But they nonetheless accomplished the goal Clinton campaign aides wanted to fulfill of casting the appearance of transparency on Clinton’s vetting process in a way that made clear she was moving carefully but inexorably toward a presidential run.
Given more than 24 hours to challenge the authenticity of these documents and respond, Merrill did not reply to our emails. Haberman declined to comment.
Other documents listed those whom the campaign regarded as their most reliable “surrogates” — such as CNN’s Hilary Rosen and Donna Brazile, as well as Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden — but then also listed operatives whom they believed were either good “progressive helpers” or more potentially friendly media figures who might be worth targeting with messaging. The metadata of the surrogate document shows the file was authored by Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director of the campaign. As The Intercept previously reported, pundits regularly featured on cable news programs were paid by the Clinton campaign without any disclosure when they appeared; several of them are included on this “surrogates” list, including Stephanie Cutter and Maria Cardona:
The Clinton campaign likes to use glitzy, intimate, completely off-the-record parties between top campaign aides and leading media personalities. One of the most elaborately planned get-togethers was described in an April, 2015, memo — produced, according to the document metadata, by deputy press secretary Jesse Ferguson — to take place shortly before Clinton’s official announcement of her candidacy. The event was an April 10 cocktail party for leading news figures and top-level Clinton staff at the Upper East Side home of Clinton strategist Joel Benenson, a fully off-the-record gathering designed to impart the campaign’s messaging:
A separate email chain between Clinton staff (one that was not among those provided by Guccifer 2.0 but appeared on the DCLeaks.com site earlier this week) contains plans for a separate off-the-record media get-together in May. Food and drinks were provided by the campaign for the journalists covering it, on the condition that nothing said would be reported to the public.
Many of the enduring Clinton tactics for managing the press were created by the campaign before she even announced her candidacy. A March 13, 2015, memo from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook provides insight into some of the tactics employed by the campaign to shape coverage to their liking. In particular, Mook was concerned that because journalists were assigned to cover Clinton, they needed to be fed a constant stream of stories that the campaign liked. As he put it, a key strategy was to “give reporters who must cover daily HRC news something to cover other than the unhelpful stories about the foundation, emails, etc.”
All presidential campaigns have their favorite reporters, try to plant stories they want published, and attempt in multiple ways to curry favor with journalists. These tactics are certainly not unique to the Clinton campaign (liberals were furious in 2008 when journalists went to John McCain’s Arizona ranch for an off-the-record BBQ). But these rituals and dynamics between political campaigns and the journalists who cover them are typically carried out in the dark, despite how significant they can be. These documents provide a valuable glimpse into that process.
I can, as readers know, relate to what Warren Bluhm writes:
When the news broke late last week that layoffs were imminent at the corporation that owns the venerable small-town paper where I worked for most of 14 years, I started to think about how logical it would be to lay me off. I suppose all of my co-workers had similar thoughts about themselves, but I just had a feeling.
I don’t take horoscopes seriously, but I do read mine because they often contain good advice. On Monday morning, I read it out loud to Red and we both laughed nervously:
“Changes at work are coming: This could be the luckiest turn of events that’s happened in months. To prepare yourself, bone up on your skills and make sure your client base is ample.”
If ever there was a moment when I went over to the dark side and embraced the idea that my fate is sealed by the position of stars light years away, that might have been that moment. Whether or not I “believed,” in any case, by golly, it was good advice.
And: A little after noon on Tuesday, I was given the word that I was part of the company’s latest round of cuts to contain costs.
It was a cordial conversation, and I was assured this was not a performance decision but an economic one yada yada yada, and they explained some nice going-away benefits, and off I went to let the folks who work with me know they were safe, and only I was leaving (at least in the newsroom; a trio of other, tremendous support people were also let go).
Now, my dear friends and colleagues have railed about how could the company do this, and I love them, but let’s note that the goal is to keep the doors open, and under this ownership the newspaper has endured for 12 long years since the previous owner decided he couldn’t make a go of it any longer. My fondest desire was always to grow the paper despite the odds, but in the absence of such growth, the alternative is to cut costs, and frankly I was the costliest cost in the room.
The paper survives to fight another day. My loyalty has always been to the 154 years of folks who toiled under the banner before me and with me, and not to the corporation that bought the brand, and perhaps that helped put me on the list. You know what? It doesn’t matter. The brand survives, and if anyone can save it from oblivion, it’s the incredible journalists and other people who still work in that building.
I am so proud to have been a part of that tradition and grateful for the high bar set by the people who walked those hallways before me. Anytime I started feeling my oats, all I had to do was remind myself, “Bluhm, you’re no Chan Harris,” or someone would come along to say it for me. I wouldn’t have tried as hard as I did without those noble ghosts chasing me.
Today is the first day of the next phase of my life, and oh, what an adventure it shall be.
It seems that the worst thing a media person can do these days is work for a publicly traded media company. I guess I was not specifically laid off, but when the company that owns your magazine decides to close the magazine, you are definitely surplus.
The Door County Advocate has for decades been the state’s largest weekly newspaper, with thousands of its subscribers living in Door County only during the summer. But at least, like me and my former Journal Communications colleagues, Warren has a lot of company with former Gannett Co. employees. (That sentence has a double meaning in that no one works for Journal Communications anymore, with the broadcast/print split and subsequent print sale to Gannett.)
Gannett’s next purchase, by the way, reportedly will be the thing called “Tronc,” the print arm of the former Tribune Co., which like Journal split off its broadcast (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times) and broadcast (the WGNs) properties. Again, change is not necessarily progress.
“Criticism of the News Media Takes On a More Sinister Tone,” reads the headline of Jim Rutenberg’s latest New York Times column. “It sure does get exhausting working for the global corporate media conspiracy,” he begins, soon stopping himself: “I probably shouldn’t joke.”
Well, no harm done in that regard! But then Rutenberg strikes a serious, and aggrieved, note:
The anger being directed at the news media has become dangerous enough that some news organizations are providing security for staff members covering Trump rallies. “Someone’s going to get hurt” has become a common refrain in American newsrooms.
The reader who alerted us to Rutenberg’s column suggests in an email that it takes some chutzpah for him to complain about “anger being directed at the news media.”
After all, it was Rutenberg who in August urged news reporters and editors “to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century” and become “oppositional” against Trump, whom he described as “a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies.” As we noted last week, the Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, has since acknowledged Rutenberg’s August column reflects the editorial policy of the Times newsroom.
One critic observed that if journalists followed Rutenberg’s advice, it “will only serve to worsen [Trump supporters’] already dim view of the news media.” That critic was Rutenberg himself, in the same column. So he can’t claim to be surprised by the intensified anger.
What’s somewhat surprising about his new column, though, is that it eventually gets around to acknowledging that the other side has a point:
[The charge of media bias] is resonating with a large portion of the American electorate. There are many reasons, some of which should cause the news media to make good on its promises to examine its own disconnect from the cross section of Americans whose support for Mr. Trump it never saw coming.
How biased are the media? Rutenberg gets no more specific than this: “The answer, as I see it, is more than they’ll admit to themselves and less than conservatives claim.” That’s not even specific enough to be a middle-ground fallacy: He’s saying media bias ranks somewhere between 1 and 9 on a scale of 0 to 10.
Rutenberg acknowledges that “there . . . tends to be a shared sense of noble mission across the news media that can preclude journalists from questioning their own potential biases.” Again, this is a bit rich coming just two months after Rutenberg’s call for an “oppositional” approach to covering his disfavored candidate. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point:
“The people who run American journalism, and who staff the newsrooms, think of themselves as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and, culturally speaking, on the right side of history,” Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, told me. …
As far as he’s concerned, mainstream journalists are “interested in every kind of diversity, except the kind that would challenge their own prejudices.” Those include, “bigotry against conservative religion, bigotry against rural folks and bigotry against working-class and poor white people.”
Dreher’s operative definition of media bias is identical to Jim Roberts’s ostensive one. On Sunday Roberts, a former Times assistant managing editor, tweeted: “Yes. The media is biased. Biased against hatred, sexism, racism, incompetence, belligerence, inequality, To [sic] name a few.” Roberts left the Times in 2013, but surely a lot of like-minded people stayed behind in the newsroom.
The media, and not just the Times, have more or less followed Rutenberg’s August advice and become openly oppositional toward Trump—though it would be more accurate to say the parade was already under way when Rutenberg stepped to the front and took on the role of leader. In any case, it raises the question: What next?
That is, assuming Trump loses, do journalists continue in their role as partisans for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, or do they undertake some sort of a correction? Rutenberg urges the latter approach:
American newsrooms will be making a big mistake—and missing a huge continuing story—if they fail to adjust their coverage to better illuminate the concerns of Mr. Trump’s supporters well beyond Election Day.
Doing so might begin to build up trust in the news media, which the Gallup Organization reported as hitting a new low in September.
Color us skeptical. Sure, journalistic partisanship will probably not have as sharp an edge in the immediate aftermath of a Trump defeat as in the weeks and months leading up to it. But that’s just a matter of regression toward the mean.
Consider: After urging an adjustment in coverage (after the election, tellingly), Rutenberg himself immediately calls in addition for “a far more assertive defense from the news media” against “false and misleading political-style attacks that too often are mixed in with the valid criticism.”
That’s not objectionable in itself, and we’d agree with him that some criticism of the media is bogus and unjustified. But if, as Rutenberg acknowledges, journalists have a problem with political bias, why should we expect them to be able to distinguish between “false and misleading political-style attacks” on the one hand and “valid criticism” on the other? To pick on Jim Roberts, who certainly deserves it, he no doubt thought of his tweet as an assertive defense against a misleading political-style attack.
Anyway, it’s a lot easier to yield to your baser instincts, as Rutenberg urged journalists to do in August, than to develop discipline, as he now calls for. The best indication of that is that unlike his August column, this week’s did not appear on the front page.
The group in the headline includes neither myself nor Kimberley Strassel, who writes:
If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women.
But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.
It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.
Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.” …
A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”
Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot.
A senior FBI official involved with the Clinton investigation told Fox News this week that the “vast majority” of career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”
The Obama administration—the federal government, supported by tax dollars—was working as an extension of the Clinton campaign. The State Department coordinated with her staff in responding to the email scandal, and the Justice Department kept her team informed about developments in the court case.
Worse, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show, took special care of donors to the Clinton Foundation. In a series of 2010 emails, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton asked a foundation official to let her know which groups offering assistance with the Haitian earthquake relief were “FOB” (Friends of Bill) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs). Those who made the cut appear to have been teed up for contracts. Those who weren’t? Routed to a standard government website.
The leaks show that the foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and money. The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner, suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation official wrote: “Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds crazy to do.”
The entire progressive apparatus—the Clinton campaign and boosters at the Center for American Progress—appears to view voters as stupid and tiresome, segregated into groups that must either be cajoled into support or demeaned into silence. We read that Republicans are attracted to Catholicism’s “severely backwards gender relations” and only join the faith to “sound sophisticated”; that Democratic leaders such as Bill Richardson are “needy Latinos”; that Bernie Sanders supporters are “self-righteous”; that the only people who watch Miss America “are from the confederacy”; and that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is “a terrorist.”
The leaks also show that the press is in Mrs. Clinton’s pocket. Donna Brazile, a former Clinton staffer and a TV pundit, sent the exact wording of a coming CNN town hall question to the campaign in advance of the event. Other media allowed the Clinton camp to veto which quotes they used from interviews, worked to maximize her press events and offered campaign advice.
Mrs. Clinton has been exposed to have no core, to be someone who constantly changes her position to maximize political gain. Leaked speeches prove that she has two positions (public and private) on banks; two positions on the wealthy; two positions on borders; two positions on energy. Her team had endless discussions about what positions she should adopt to appease “the Red Army”—i.e. “the base of the Democratic Party.”
Voters might not know any of this, because while both presidential candidates have plenty to answer for, the press has focused solely on taking out Mr. Trump. And the press is doing a diligent job of it.
It seems that at every turn during this crazy presidential election campaign — with its deeply flawed principal candidates (whom do you hate less?) — someone’s personal or professional computer records are being hacked. First it was Hillary Clinton’s emails that she had failed to surrender to the State Department. Then it was a portion of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns, showing a $916 million loss he claimed during boom times. Then it was those Clinton emails again, this time showing her unacted-upon doubts about two of our Middle Eastern allies’ involvement in 9/11 and her revelation of some secrets about the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The reason we know about these leaks is the common thread among them — the willingness of the media to publish what was apparently stolen. Hence the question: Can the government hold the press liable — criminally or civilly — for the publication of known stolen materials that the public wants to know about? In a word: No.
Here is the back story.
When Daniel Ellsberg, an outside contractor working in the Pentagon, stole a secret study of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in 1971, which revealed that President Lyndon Johnson had lied repeatedly to the public about what his military advisers had told him, the Department of Justice secured an injunction from U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, sitting in Manhattan, barring The New York Times from publishing what Ellsberg had turned over to Times reporters. Such an injunction, known as a “prior restraint,” is exceedingly rare in American legal history.
This is so largely because of the sweeping language of the First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” — as well as the values that underlie this language. Those values are the government’s legal obligation to be accountable to the public and the benefits to freedom of open, wide, robust debate about the government — debate that is informed by truthful knowledge of what the government has been doing.
Those underlying values spring from the Framers’ recognition of the natural right to speak freely. The freedom of speech and of the press had been assaulted by the king during the Colonial era, and the Framers wrote a clear, direct prohibition of such assaults in the initial amendment of the new Constitution.
Notwithstanding the First Amendment, Judge Gurfein accepted the government’s argument and found that palpable, grave, and immediate danger would come to national security if the Times were permitted to publish what Ellsberg had delivered.
The Times appealed Judge Gurfein’s injunction, and that appeal made its way to the Supreme Court. In a case that has come to be known as the Pentagon Papers case, the high court ruled that when the media obtains truthful documents that are of material interest to the public, the media is free to publish those documents, as well as commentary about them, without fear of criminal or civil liability.
The government had argued to the Supreme Court — seriously — that “‘no law’ does not mean ‘no law’” when national security is at stake. Fortunately for human freedom and for the concept that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and means what it says, the court rejected that argument. It also rejected the government’s suggested methodology.
The government argued that because Congress and the president had agreed to void a constitutional mandate — the First Amendment’s “no law” language — in deference to national security, the judiciary should follow. That methodology would have rejected 180 years of constitutional jurisprudence that taught that the whole purpose of an independent judiciary is to say what the Constitution and the laws mean, notwithstanding what Congress and the president want. Were that not so, the courts would be rubber stamps.
Moreover, the high court ruled, it matters not how the documents came into the possession of the media. The thief can always be prosecuted, as Ellsberg was, but not the media to which the thief delivers what he has stolen. In Ellsberg’s case, the charges against him were eventually dismissed because of FBI misconduct in pursuit of him — misconduct that infamously involved breaking in to his psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt on him.
Since that case, the federal courts have uniformly followed the Pentagon Papers rule. Hence, much to the chagrin of the Obama administration, the media was free to publish Edward Snowden’s revelations about the ubiquitous and unconstitutional nature of government spying on Americans by the National Security Agency. The same is true for Trump’s tax returns and Clinton’s emails.
Are these matters material to the public interest?
Of course they are. In a free society — one in which we do not need a government permission slip to exercise our natural rights — all people enjoy a right to know if the government is spying on us in violation of the constitutionally protected and natural right to privacy. We also have a right to know about the financial shenanigans or uprightness and the honesty or dishonesty of those who seek the highest office in the land. That is particularly so in the 2016 campaign, in which Trump has argued that his business acumen makes him uniquely qualified to be president and Clinton has offered that her experiences as secretary of state would bring a unique asset to the Oval Office.
Efforts to silence the press or to punish it when it publishes inconvenient truths about the government or those who seek to lead it are not new, and the vigilance of the courts has been unabated. Thomas Jefferson — himself the victim of painful press publications — argued that in a free society, he’d prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Would Clinton or Trump say that today?
As the highest ranking elected member of the GOP, the Janesville Republican is the de facto head of his party, which began 162 years ago in Ripon’s one-room schoolhouse that stands today on Blackburn Street.
Back then, Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats gathered to discuss how to respond to the Kansas-Nebraska bill that, if enacted, would repeal the 1820 Missouri Compromise restricting the spread of slavery. People from disparate factions gathered that cold, windy night in March 1854 to consider a cause greater than themselves.
The nobility of that meeting can’t be lost on Ryan as he has had to ponder how to respond to allegations that his party’s standard bearer has bragged about groping women’s genitals.
If Ryan disavows Trump, many will brand him a traitor. If he supports Trump, others will call him spineless. For putting Ryan and other Republicans in that no-win position, Trump should, for once, be selfless. He should resign from the top of the ticket.
Trump apologized for his 2005 predatory pronouncements; he should be forgiven. But mercy doesn’t permit him to destroy the Republican Party, risking 469 down-ballot races while dragging America deeper into the cultural cesspool that includes music, movies, TV and books that regularly objectify women.
The only other time the Commonwealth published an editorial on its front page was on Aug. 20, 1998. It called for the resignation of President Clinton, a man it claimed “whose sole moral compass is based on personal pragmatism and preservation of power.”
That fellow’s wife, Trump’s opponent, also is flawed in so many ways: Benghazi lies, a pay-to-play foundation, private email servers, a career littered by scandal, secrecy and arrogance. Hillary Clinton’s admission via WikiLeaks that a politician needs two positions — one that is genuine and one for the masses — would be disqualifying during a normal election campaign. It was not Lincolnesque; it was, to use her own word, “unsavory.”
But unsavory is not as bad as predatory, narcissistic, pro-Putin, ignorant, fickle, unstable, lazy, foolish, reckless, shallow, irresponsible, insensitive, impetuous, unpatriotic, vacuous, vain and selfish.
Either Trump steps down, now, or the Republican Party will be crippled if not destroyed.
Though I do not professionally agree with front-page editorials, my friend the publisher is 100 percent correct with the lone exception of the assertion that Trump is a Republican. He is not, which is another reason the GOP should dump Trump immediately. If Trump wants to cobble together a third-party running using someone else’s money than the GOP’s, that’s up to him.
Trump is a national disgrace. So is Hillary Clinton, for different reasons.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 