I will be on the Wisconsin Public Radio Joy Cardin program today at 7:30 a.m.
(Yes, I am aware it’s not Friday at 8 a.m. More irony follows.)
I am appearing on the State Capitol Report not because I was in Dane County yesterday, but over the impending departure from the airwaves — yes, not public radio airwaves — of WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes.
I will be able to be heard on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Some scoffed at me, while others said hold on, it’s way too early. And others wrote recently that there was no reason to believe ratings would contintue to dorp.
But I believe the league has alienated many fans who either do not want politics to enter their NFL experience, or simply are disgusted with players being disrespectful of our national anthem.
We are almost finished with week four of the 2016 season and Sunday Night Football, while still the top rated show of the evening last night, are getting worse each week.
The numbers are even worst when compared with last year.
As reported this morning by Deadline Hollywood, the SNF game with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs on NBC came in with a preliminary 6.1 rating and 16.68 million viewers in the early numbers. Last year’s week four SNF contest between the Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints drew a 14.1 rating and 24.2 million viewers.
That’s a drop of almost one-third year over year.
More bad news for the league: Sunday Antonio Cromartie, the former Jets cornerback who became the first member of the Colts to join the Colin Kaepernick-led protest last week, raised his fist and kneeled during “The Star-Spangled Banner” Sunday at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Meanwhile, president Obama weighed into the debate over the national anthem protests sweeping across the US a few days ago, saying he hoped it would prompt Americans to listen to others’ concerns and not just go into separate corners.
But neither the protesters, NFL or the president apparently get it. Many viewers have had enough!
Nearly one-third of American adults say they are less likely to watch a National Football League game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests that are happening by players on the field, a Rasmussen poll found.
Thirty-two percent polled online and by telephone said they’re willing to skip NFL games this year because of player protests over racial issues, the pollster said on Tuesday. Only 13 percent said they were more likely to watch the games because of the protests, and 52 percent said the protests had no impact on their viewing decisions.
Twenty-eight percent of African Americans said they were more likely to tune-into an NFL game because of the protests, compared to 8 percent of whites and 16 percent of other Americans, the poll found.
Whites were twice as likely as blacks to say they are less likely to watch this year. …
The NFL, which has refused to do anything about the protests, has had its ratings collapse this season. Although some have blamed blow-out contests, and others point to the presidential election, some see the protests and #boycottNFL online campaigns as the root of the ratings free-fall.
The stupid thing is that it’s very easy for the NFL to do something about the protest without abrogating players’ First Amendment rights — tell teams to play the National Anthem while the players are in the locker room.
By now, though, that’s only going to deal with the first symptom. For one thing, the media is chiming in, as SI.com reported:
Numerous members of the NFL media made a show of support Sunday for players who have been kneeling during the national anthem. In unison at 1 P.M. ET, they tweeted: “I stand with those who kneel.”
The act of kneeling, which 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began in the preseason, has become a widespread practice throughout the league for players protesting racial inequality and police brutality in America. Among those who tweeted their support for the kneeling players include The MMQB’s Peter King, The Nation’s Dave Zirin and ESPN’s Jim Trotter.
None of those aforementioned sportswriters, nor any other I’m aware of (the Forbes writer is a sports business reporter), have chimed in on the NFL’s dropping ratings, as far as I know. Which is rather gutless of them.
Unless, of course, to quote Gertrude Stein, who wrote of Oakland that “there’s no there there,” the theory falls apart under evidence: Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch:
In a particularly troubling trend, ratings for Monday Night Football were down 19% prior to Monday’s Giants-Vikings game, including the lowest-ever viewership in the history of the series when just 8.047 million viewers watched the Saints-Falcons. (That game went head-to-head with the first Presidential debate.) The Giants-Vikings drew a 9.1 overnight rating on Monday, which was the highest MNF overnight of the year. That’s the good news. The bad news? It was still down 8% from the 9.9 for last year’s Week 4 matchup (Seahawks-Lions) that didn’t feature the New York market.
More troubling data: NBC’s Sunday Night Football drew an 11.0 overnight for Steelers-Chiefs on Sunday, down 26% from the same window last year with the Saints-Cowboys. That’s an alarming drop, even with Dallas as the NFL’s best television draw and a blowout game. (The NBC Sports p.r. department said in a release that the Steelers’ 22–0 first quarter was the most-lopsided opening quarter in 155 NBC SNF games. One can admire the rapid response team, but you can’t spin lemonade out of tomato juice.)
On Sunday, per Sports Business Daily, Fox led all Week 4 NFL broadcast windows with a 14.8 overnight rating thanks to the Cowboys-49ers, but that number was down 10% for the comparable Week 4 matchup last year.
CBS did see an increase on Sunday, drawing a 10.6 for its singleheader window, up 2% from a 10.4 in 2015, per SBD.
So what’s up? Well, one theory making the rounds—and it’s very plausible—is that the craziness of this Presidential election campaign has siphoned viewers (particularly males) away from football. In a terrific piece by Sports Business Journal reporters John Ourand and Austin Karp, two of the sharpest observers of sports television ratings, the reporters detailed how the news networks—Fox News, CNN and MSNBC—have gained significant viewers against the losses of the sports networks. One of the executives quoted in the SBJ piece was Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’s senior vice president of programming and research, who said that the opening weeks of the NFL season reminded him of the fall of 2000, the only year from 2000 to 2010 where all four NFL TV packages dropped from the previous year and a year which saw a very tightly contested Presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Interestingly, Ourand and Karp pointed out that World Series viewership dropped by 22% in 2000, mirroring some big events this year (such as the Summer Olympics) and long-running series (Sunday Night Baseball), which had big drops in viewership.
Personally, I’m buying what Mulvihill is selling. I believe the hyper-insanity of the political news cycle and the reality show nature of Trump’s candidacy has taken some viewers away from sports. I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a big one. What would back up this thesis would be an uptick in the NFL ratings from the middle of November to the end of the season.
I’m also of the belief that the league has been hurt this year by a number of factors including a smaller group of star quarterbacks (no Peyton Manning or Tom Brady), an awful set ofMonday Night Football games, a potential slowing down in fantasy football growth, some fatigue from what Mark Cuban discussed as the NFL expanding its television package to an additional night, and some truly awful games on Sunday.
There’s also this: Nothing goes up forever, and the NFL was due for some sort of ratings correction.
There are those who posit that the migration to digital services and cord-cutting from television are responsible for the drops, and long-term this will impact the ratings, for sure. But the shift this year feels too dramatic for that to be the primary reason. Plus, if you look at the overall viewership numbers on, say, Twitter’s broadcasts of the NFL, they are minimal.
I think the big tell will be how the NFL does from the middle of November to the end of the regular season. The election will have passed (we hope), and the winter weather will keep many at home on Sundays. If the ratings are flat versus 2015 or tick up during the last six weeks of the NFL’s regular season, you’ll know the Presidential election campaign had a lot to do with it. If not, well, then we’ll re-examine some other theories.
Deitsch doesn’t explain why people would watch more news and less sports. (One political answer: Political commercials during games.) I suppose we’ll know by Thanksgiving (assuming the presidential campaign and/or a Cubs World Series win hasn’t brought on the Apocalypse) whether Deitsch’s theory is correct.
Anyone who has spent time in business knows that businesses that don’t listen to their customers go out of business. To be blunt, what the players think is rather meaningless, because they are very replaceable. The First Amendment, remember, protects government’s incursion on your free speech rights, not necessarily anyone else’s (including your employer). Viewers not watching or fans not going to games affects the bottom line, which is what the entertainment business is all about.
Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch writes something you may have a hard time believing:
Fox Sports announcer Joe Buck feared for his broadcasting career five years ago when he suffered a paralyzed left vocal cord. The ailment struck him a few weeks before the start of the 2011 baseball season, and it wasn’t until October of that year that he truly felt his voice was back. At the time, Buck told people that he had developed a virus in the laryngeal nerve of his left vocal cord.
But that was a lie.
This is the story of what really happened, revealed for the first time here and explored in more detail in his upcoming memoir, Lucky Bastard: My Life, My Dad, And The Things I’m Not Allowed To Say On TV. The book will be released on Nov. 15 (you can pre-order using link above) and was written with Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Rosenberg.
As a young man, one of Buck’s overwhelming fears was losing his hair, and the possibility soon consumed him. So at age 24, in Oct. 1993, he flew to New York City to get his first hair replacement treatment. He writes that, after the procedure, “I, Joseph Francis Buck, became a hair-plug addict.”
Buck said that whenever he had a break in his schedule—usually between the end of the NFL season and the start of baseball—he would fly to New York to have a plug procedure.
“Broadcasting is a brutal, often unfair business, where looks are valued more than skill,” writes Buck. “I was worried that if I lost my hair, I would lose my job. O.K., that’s bulls—-. It was vanity. Pure vanity. I just told myself I was doing it for TV.”
A few weeks before the start of the 2011 baseball season, Buck underwent his eighth hair replacement procedure. But something went wrong during the six-hour-plus procedure. When he woke up from the anesthetic, Buck could not speak. He believes his vocal cord was paralyzed because of a cuff the surgery center used to protect him during the procedure. A doctor not part of the operation theorized to Buck that the cuff probably got jostled during the procedure and sat on the nerve responsible for firing his left vocal cord. Buck was also going through personal stress at the time, as his marriage to his high school sweetheart was ending. That stress, Buck theorizes, could have made him more susceptible to nerve damage.
Panicked, Buck sought a voice specialist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St, Louis, Dr. Bruce H. Haughey, who told him he had a paralyzed vocal cord and there was no guarantee on when his voice would come back.
Given his embarrassment over what had happened, Buck lied to his bosses, to the media, to friends. He told people that he had a virus and that his voice would come back. “I was too scared and embarrassed to tell them the truth,” Buck writes. “But I’m doing it now.”
In an interview on Wednesday with SI.com, Buck further explained why it was important to him to reveal publicly this episode in his life.
“When I started thinking about writing a book, this was the main reason why,” Buck says. “It wasn’t about stories with my Dad. I wanted to detail the time in my life where I had a lot going on and I was stressed, a time when I started to take anti-depressants and was going through a divorce. Then I had this situation with my voice that rocked me to my knees and shook every part of my world. I’m 47 years old now and willing to be vulnerable sharing a story. Whether the book is read by one person or one million doesn’t concern me. Getting this out and being honest, really telling my story, that was was the impetus behind this.”
Stories about Buck from 2011 described him as having a virus that struck the laryngeal nerve in his left vocal cord. “This is a nerve issue,’ Buck told The New York Times in 2011. “It’s not like I have polyps or a strained vocal cord. I’m waiting for one of the longest nerves in the body to recover. Nobody has said this is something that won’t come back, but they told me it could take six, nine or 12 months.” Buck continued to discuss the impact of losing his voice as late as last year (see this profile in Cigar Aficionado) but never the reasons why. Few people knew the truth beyond Buck’s immediate family and some close friends, including his NFL broadcast partner, Troy Aikman. Most people at Fox Sports will learn of this upon reading this piece.
“I was lying,” Buck said of the stories about his vocal cord issues. “I think people bend the truth all the time, unfortunately. It was really for self-preservation and ego for me. As I look back, I gave partial truths. Where I lied was when I said the reason why. People would ask, ‘Why is your vocal cord paralyzed?’ I said it was a virus. I didn’t say it was an elective procedure to add hair to the front of my head. It was embarrassing. There’s an embarrassing element to that. Any surgery done to improve one’s looks is not really something someone wants to talk about. So it’s very cathartic to get this out. There are a lot of people across the country, for as silly as this sounds, who obsess about hair loss. I would tell myself I needed to look younger, I needed to have thicker hair, I don’t want to look older than I am. The truth of it is that it was an ego thing, whether I was on TV or not.”
In the book, Buck candidly discusses taking Lexapro to relieve his anxiety from the stresses of his personal and professional life. Eventually, Dr. Hughey referred him to a doctor in Boston named Steven Zeitels, a professor of laryngeal surgery at Harvard Medical School and the director of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Laryngeal Surgery and Voice Rehabilitation. Zeitels had worked with well-known voices including Adele, Bono, Roger Daltrey and Dick Vitale, among many others.
As part of the treatment, Zeitels injected Buck with a long needle and filled his vocal cord with Restylane, a filler-like substance most often used for lip enhancement. Buck returned to Zeitels every three months for additional shots. The doctor told him the more he used his voice, the more the vocal cords would swell from usage and the better he would sound. Buck’s voice got a little better in August and September of 2011, though nowhere near where a network-level announcer should be. Buck said because of the equity he had built up Fox Sports and by having a strong relationship with his bosses, he was allowed back on the air when he should have been replaced by other announcers. By October, his voice was rapidly improving. Buck said by Game 6 of the 2011 World Series between the Cardinals and Rangers, he felt like his old self. He does, however, still think about the strength of his voice prior to working games today.
“I am an extremely lucky and blessed person, but I’m pretty self-aware,” Buck said. “I’m a flawed, hard-working, hard-trying person. I didn’t write this book to change anyone else’s life. I wrote this book to be as open and as honest as I can be. If there is any mission statement, I wrote it to give viewers and people who think they know me a better and clearer picture of who I really am. If you read it, great. If not, that’s great, too. But I am just glad that it’s out there.”
One might have thought that seeing his father …
… might have been a tipoff for the younger Buck about his follicle future.
The bigger point here, other than arguing over Buck’s hair (which requires bringing up non-hirsute baseball announcers Joe Garagiola, Jon Miller and John Smoltz, among others who have less hair now than they once did) is the cutthroat world at the top of broadcasting, particularly in our social media world, where those who don’t like an announcer can let the world know that:
Buck might have learned some of that from watching his father, who was first hired by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1954. (Jack Buck worked with Harry Caray, which, according to Buck and others … well, let’s say that Caray was a better announcer than coworker.) Jack Buck was then fired in 1959 because the Cardinals wanted to hire an announcer with more name than Buck had at the time. (That came four years after Caray’s and Buck’s partner, Milo Hamilton, was punted to bring on Garagiola.)
Two years later, the announcer for whom the elder Buck was fired, Bud Blattner, left, and so Buck, having not burned bridges on his way out, was rehired. Buck got the Cardinals’ lead announcer job when the Cardinals fired Caray, allegedly for an extramarital dalliance with (depending on whom you ask, and I’ve heard multiple versions from people who knew the parties involved) the daughter-in-law or girlfriend of the Cardinals’ owner, Gussie Busch.
Jack Buck then went part-time with the Cardinals when he was hired by NBC to host its “Grandstand” show, which turned out to be a poor career move for reasons mostly not Buck’s fault, at least according to his book. Fifteen years later, Buck was named CBS-TV’s number two baseball play-by-play announcer, getting the number one job after CBS fired Brent Musburger. (I saw the headline for that in the Chicago Tribune on April Fool’s Day. It wasn’t a joke. Musburger’s firing announcement was the day of the 1990 NCAA basketball championship game, which he announced.) CBS fired Buck after two seasons, allegedly for poor on-air chemistry with partner Tim McCarver (ironically a former Cardinals catcher).
So if you’re keeping track, that’s three firings for reasons that didn’t have very much to do with Jack Buck. Between that and the fact that Joe Buck’s on-air demeanor is off-putting to some (not myself, as a fellow member of the ironic ’80s), can you blame Joe Buck for being a hair (sorry, couldn’t resist) professionally paranoid?
The irony, perhaps, is that if for some reason Fox fired Joe Buck, another broadcaster, and certainly the Cardinals, would hire him in a second, even if that meant pushing out another announcer to make room.
We drive our cars because they make us free. With cars we need not wait in airline terminals, or travel only where the railway tracks go. Governments detest our cars: they give us too much freedom. How do you control people who can climb into a car at any hour of the day or night and drive to who knows where?
Davis died in 2011. One of Davis’ most colorful Car and Driver writers, Brock Yates, died Wednesday.
“Brock has been a hero of mine since I first got to know him,” Dan Gurney said at a Yates tribute several years ago at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles. Gurney and Yates drove a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 across the country in 1971 in 35 hours, 54 minutes in the original Cannonball. “He is a pioneer, historian, instigator and defender of freedom.”
Yates’ columns in Car and Driver attacked everything from the 55-mph speed limit to the arrogance of safety advocate Ralph Nader. They spoke to the frustrations of people who loved cars but who were prevented from enjoying them by meddling government bureaucrats. Yates said in the pages of the magazine and in other outlets in which his work appeared what so many car enthusiasts felt.
“He was always a guy who was just a little farther than the rest,” said Yates fan Jay Leno, who also spoke at the Petersen tribute.
“Brock and I were in a bar,” said director Hal Needham, recounting the founding of “The Cannonball Run” movie, “and he told me about this race he created.”
Other tributes that night came in video form from Bob Lutz, Bob Varsha and David Hobbs. By the time Yates got up to speak, he was, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.
“I don’t know what to say other than to say, thank you,” he said that night.
No, thank you Brock, for everything you did and everything you inspired us to do. Godspeed.
Yates joined Car and Driver in 1964, as managing editor—although he claimed no experience in either managing or editing. The task at hand, envisioned by editor and publisher David E. Davis, Jr., was lifting Car and Driver up and out of the mediocrity miring the day’s automotive publications. Along with Leon Mandel, Steve Smith, and Patrick Bedard, Davis and Yates sharpened their wits and words to venture well beyond routine race reports and road tests. Nicknamed “car and social commentary,” this publication nominated Dan Gurney for president, toasted the day’s brightest engineers and executives, and mounted vicious attacks on those deemed impediments to the automobile’s advancement. Yates earned his Assassin sobriquet with a 1968 exposé of Detroit’s intransigence titled The Grosse Pointe Myopians, which accurately forecast the rise of Japanese-made cars in America. The barbs of Yates’s pen sank deep and often into early safety advocates Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook.
Bored with tilting at windmills, Yates created the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in 1971, a coast-to-coast public road race. Although it was never officially sanctioned by this publication, the inaugural test run and four additional sprints following the rules-free format made memorable reading in Car and Driver. Yates and Dan Gurney won the first race in just under 36 hours in 1971 with a (borrowed) Ferrari 365GTB/4 Daytona. About that exploit, Gurney noted, “At no time did we exceed 175 mph.” When Hollywood took notice, Yates teamed with stuntman and director Hal Needham to write the screenplays for Smokey and the Bandit II and The Cannonball Run I and II, which, together, earned more than $100 million at the box office.
Yates penned 15 books, sharing his insights as an amateur racer in Sunday Driver and untold drama in Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine. He contributed to Car and Driver as an editor at large for four decades, but Yates and Davis exchanged virulent verbal assaults through the 1980s. These sumos of the written word eventually shook hands and resumed their friendship. …
A selection of Brock Yates’s best writing for Car and Driver can be found here.
The best way to give tribute to a writer is to show off his writing. Yates wrote this in 2002:
A couple of months ago I received a phone call of a type that is common to ink-stained wretches in this trade. A young graduate student was preparing a thesis in his field of study-motion-picture history-and was seeking information on the madness I composed over 20 years ago called The Cannonball Run. This seemed odd, considering the fact that the old flick has long since descended into late-night limbo and video and DVD sales.
Moreover, the whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me, in that Burt Reynolds, who starred in the picture, butchered the original script I had written for the late Steve McQueen, and the result, while a massive moneymaker, was lashed by the critics. But like the old joke about Pierre the Bridge Builder, The Cannonball Run is indelibly inscribed on my so-called career portfolio, and few conversations with strangers pass without the subject of the picture arising.
But the conversation with the student took a strange turn. Although he insisted the picture is a cult favorite among his fellow students, he had no idea The Cannonball Run was based on a real event; that five actual Cannonball races were run between 1971 and 1979, with all manner of incidents in the picture based on fact. I explained to him that three guys actually ran disguised as priests (a modest sin, considering the firestorm that has descended on the Catholic Church recently) and that myself; the movie’s director, Hal Needham; my wife, Pamela; and a Los Angeles radiologist named Lyle Royer drove the same ambulance used in the movie to compete in the last Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in April 1979.
Here was a kid practically young enough to be my grandson, waxing eloquent over a movie he could recite line for line, yet he had no idea its genesis arose from the real stories behind it. As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.
Now, 23 years after the last Cannonball was run, the whole wacky affair is coming back to life. Within weeks, Motorbooks International will publish Cannonball! World’s Greatest Outlaw Road Race. Because I was the founder of the races, I served as a sort of trail boss of the book and managed to herd 37 of my co-conspirators to write their own recollections. These “usual suspects” include Dan Gurney, with whom I won the 1971 race; Cobra designer Peter Brock (one of the “priests”); edgy Indianapolis journalist Robin Miller; director Needham; Amelia Island Concours impresario Bill Warner; our own Fred Gregory; La Carrera Panamericana organizer Loyal Truesdale (who with a pal ran the Cannonball in 1979 on a motorcycle); and other notables. Their stories are universally riveting and often hilarious.
About the time you read this, Pamela and I will embark on a coast-to-coast book tour driving a Jaguar XK8, the modern counterpart to the 1979 version that holds the cross-country record at 32 hours and 51 minutes.
Within hours of the Cannonball book going to press, a wonderful footnote surfaced. It was triggered, oddly enough, in the carriage house of our home in upstate New York. Barry Meguiar, the well-known, widely respected owner of the splendid line of Meguiar’s car-care products, came to Wyoming to tape Car Crazy-his half-hour show on the automotive hobby he hosts on the Speed Channel.
Surrounded by my two Eliminator hot rods, old and new, and my old Cannonball Dodge Challenger that is a veteran of two Cannonballs (1972 and 1975), the interview inevitably turned to those legendary races and the madness surrounding them.
I noted that the 130-mph, Bill Mitchell-modified, Dick Landy 440 Dodge ambulance we used in 1979 was in fact the vehicle used by Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Jack Elam, and Farrah Fawcett in the movie and that the scene in which they were stopped was a near-verbatim repeat of the near-arrest of Needham and me on Interstate 80 in the Garden State. I mused to Barry that for more than 20 years I have wondered if the two cops who stopped us ever found out about the scam.
At that point, Meguiar turned to the camera and asked that if either officer were watching, he should contact Meguiar headquarters in Irvine, California. A neat idea, I thought, but was convinced that nobody would surface.
I was wrong. Within hours of the show’s airing, a friend of one of the officers called Meguiar and hooked us up with now-retired Bergen County Police Department deputy chief Marc Fenech. During a four-way conference call with Fenech, Needham, Meguiar, and myself, it was revealed that Fenech and (now) police chief Jack Schmidig were on drug patrol on the night of April 1, 1979 when I-who was driving at the time-tore past them at somewhere between 95 and 100 mph.
“Actually, we weren’t on speed-enforcement patrol,” recalled Fenech, “but your speed got our attention, and we began to follow. Then you kept going past exits leading to nearby hospitals. When you drove by the last one for another 50 miles, we stopped you.”
Fenech, a car nut and regular reader of this magazine who has two Vipers in his garage, recalled the entire incident with grand humor. “We let you go after the ‘doctor’ told us the ‘patient’ [Lady Pamela], a ‘senator’s wife,’ could not be flown in a pressurized cabin and had to be driven to California-although we wondered later why you didn’t ship her by train.
“Actually, I didn’t think any more about the incident until Jack called me up after reading a story about Yates and the movie in People magazine. He said, ‘Marc, we’ve been had.’”
Although some victims of such a ruse might take umbrage and refuse to discuss it, both Fenech and Schmidig recall the incident with great amusement and have told their story hundreds of times over the years. “It’s one of those things in a career that you never forget,” said Fenech during the call.
I guess Marc’s like the rest of us who played roles, large and small, in those outrageous convulsions of motorsport called the Cannonballs. Now comes the book, and yes, serious discussions about yet another movie-the seventh-dealing with the races that began in idle conversation and general paranoia (a common malady in the ’70s) over the rising power of Ralph Nader.
There will probably never be another race like it. (I say probably.) But damn, it was fun. You had to have been there.
Charlie Sykes posted this on the Right Wisconsin website, “powered by Charlie Sykes”:
This morning, I announced that I am stepping down from my daily radio show on WTMJ at the end of this year:
“It has been both a pleasure and honor to work here,” said Sykes. “It has been an extraordinary privilege to be a part of the momentous changes that have taken place in Wisconsin over the last two decades. This is not a decision that I made either lightly or recently and it was not driven by this year’s political season. I made this decision more than a year ago for both professional and very personal reasons. My father died when he was 63, and I will turn 62 this year, so this year has always been circled on my calendar. Frankly, if I was ever going to make a move, it was now. While I am stepping back from my daily radio duties I intend to remain an active voice. I want to write more, travel more and pursue new opportunities.”
I know that lot of people will assume that my decision has something to do with this current campaign and the rise of Trumpism. But, the reality (as my friends and family know) is that I made this decision a long time ago. Twenty-three years is a long time to do a radio show and most hosts don’t get to go out on their own terms. So I’m lucky to have had that chance.
But it would also be fair to say that this campaign has made the decision easier. The conservative movement has been badly damaged; obviously the conservative media is broken as well. So this is a good time for step back, sit down for a while, and ask “What the hell just happened here?” …
I intend to continue to write and edit RightWisconsin.com and remain editor of Wisconsin Interest Magazine.And I plan to spend much of the next year working on a book about the crackup of the conservative movement. My working title is “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”
I’ll have more to say later about my other plans. But I keep thinking of what my one of my early mentors said when I asked what he planned to do after retirement.
“I plan to sit on a rocking chair on my front porch,” he said. “After a couple of weeks, I plan to start rocking. Slowly.”
When Wisconsin conservative radio host Charlie Sykes made the surprise announcement this week that he would depart his radio show at year’s end, theories sprung up on why and what’s next for him.
Sykes batted away one of them Wednesday: that he’s mulling a challenge to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2018.
This week Robert Kraig -— in a post to the website of the liberal group he directs, Citizen Action of Wisconsin — floated the prospect of a Sykes Senate run as “the hot rumor in Republican political circles.” Kraig is not the only person to share that suggestion with Wisconsin political reporters in recent weeks.
Baldwin’s first U.S. Senate term is up in two years, and there likely will be plenty of Republicans vying to challenge her.
But Sykes told the Wisconsin State Journal he won’t be one of them. He called the idea “ludicrous conspiracy mongering from the depths of the left wing fever swamps.”
“My interest in running for anything is subzero,” Sykes said. …
Kraig, in his post, suggested Sykes might be distancing himself from Trump — who polls show is not viewed favorably in Wisconsin and elsewhere — and his own past controversial statements to launch his own run for office.”
We can’t let Charlie Sykes run away from his right-wing radio past if he runs against Tammy in 2018,” Kraig wrote.
Readers know I’ve appeared on his “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” back when I was a Northeast Wisconsin pundit and we had the same employer:
For some reason I look 25 percent larger than everyone on set on this show. The smaller people are (from left) Jeff Fleming, Mikel Holt, Sykes and … I’m not sure.
And after one show, where I had to bring our sons along (mom and sister were on a girls-weekend-away thing) …
… they got their photo on the TMJ4 news set.
Sykes’ WTMJ show started in 1993, when conservatism wasn’t doing very well nationally, given the election of Bill Clinton and (re)election of a Democrat-controlled Congress. Wisconsin had Gov. Tommy Thompson and a Republican-controlled Senate, but Democrat-controlled Assembly. Sykes previously had substituted for WISN radio’s Mark Belling, who had come there in 1989 from the former WTDY radio in Madison. (Belling in turn sometimes subs for Rush Limbaugh, whose show precedes Belling’s on WISN.)
While Belling has been around longer, Sykes has had far more influence, to the point of being the object of the so-called “Sykes effect,” his influence over Republican legislators whose constituents listen to WTMJ. Sykes also has authored several books that have gotten him national attention in the commentariat, particularly about education. WISN’s owners didn’t create a website for Belling; WTMJ’s owners did, Right Wisconsin.
To say the least, a lot of water has gone under the political bridge since 1993, including Clinton, the 1994 Demodisaster, the Brewers’ stadium deal, Rep. Scott Walker’s election as Milwaukee County executive, the rise of Paul Ryan through the House of Representatives, Hillary Clinton, the month-long election of George W. Bush, 9/11, James Doyle, the caucus scandal, the Great Recession, Barack Obama’s election, the rise of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, the election of Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker as governor in the 2010 Demodisaster, the rise of Ron Johnson and fall of Russ Feingold the phony maverick, the Act 10 debate and Recallarama, the John Doe persecution, the Obama Recovery In Name Only, Walker’s brief run for president, and now this traveshamockery of a presidential election.
Sykes has presented a mostly consistent conservative/libertarian point of view all this time (in fact, in the 1990s Sykes identified himself as a small-L libertarian) while generating enough listeners to generate enough advertising revenue for his employers. His detractors claim his three marriages (the second to one of Trump’s supposed Supreme Court candidates, if you can trust Trump, who himself is on his third marriage) as not representing family values. Of course, libertarians value privacy, and divorcing your spouse is, I guess, more honest than, say, Bill Clinton and his chronic bimbo eruptions, aided and abetted by his “wife,” the current Democratic presidential candidate. He has also represented one of the poles of the Wisconsin GOP, suburban Milwaukee, which figures as a Milwaukee talk show host. (Green Bay’s Jerry Bader represents another pole, northeastern Wisconsin; of the talk radio Big Four, Vicki McKenna, in the bowels of the People’s Republic of Madison, would seem to have the hardest job.)
I wrote “mostly consistent.” The maxim of politics making for strange bedfellows applies to talk radio too. Sykes strayed from the small-government thing by supporting the five-county sales tax for Miller Park under the premise that Milwaukee would suffer if the Brewers left. Sykes supported then-U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett (D-Milwaukee) for Milwaukee mayor against Marvin Pratt, the city council president who became mayor after John Norquist resigned. (Norquist was right about school choice, and for a Democrat he had more appreciation for markets than any Milwaukee mayor before or since then.) Sykes also treated Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dick Leinenkugel a bit harshly because Leinenkugel had served as Doyle’s secretary of commerce.
Sykes’ job (as well as the jobs of Belling, Bader and McKenna, and for that matter Limbaugh) drives Wisconsin liberals nuts. They are under the impression that the broadcast media’s job is to present their point of view — I mean, present someone’s definition of “both” points of view — instead of making money for their owners. (Because media outlets are businesses first, believe it or don’t. The airwaves as a public trust stopped mattering when Internet access became widespread.) If Sykes didn’t make money for WTMJ’s owner, Sykes would have been fired long ago. Sykes brought in listeners who were not merely conservativish, but had desirable demographics, such as income and disposable income. There is basically one local (that is, non-nationally syndicated) liberal talk show host on commercial radio. That fact and the collapse of previous liberal talk radio attempts (including hosts who followed Sykes on WTMJ) prove that, until ratings and ad revenue say otherwise, conservative talk radio isn’t going anywhere.
Sykes also has drawn considerable heat from conservatives who should know better for Sykes’ opposition to Trump the non-Republican and non-conservative, which (along with the opposition of Belling, Bader and McKenna) had something to do with Trump’s loss to Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin GOP primary. Given the fact that not a day goes by without Trump’s saying something ridiculously embarrassing (for instance, Trump’s appearance on Sykes’ show), Sykes is right, and Trump’s conservative supporters are mistaken. (For one thing, as you know, the Trump conservatives support is not a real person.) Sykes appears more committed to Republican victory than some Republicans do, given the unlikelihood of Trump’s getting elected and the real possibility of Trump’s loss dragging down other Republicans with him.
Sykes’ radio show was probably self-selecting in audience, but his TV show has given non-conservatives a voice, most consistently Holt, who supports school choice because he has seen for decades how bad Milwaukee Public Schools is. He also gave me a chance to appear, and it always amazed me that people would tell me they watched me.
Sykes, and not Bill Gates, also authored this list in his Dumbing Down Our Kids:
Rule 1: Life is not fair, get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it’s not your parents’ fault so don’t whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one…
No one is irreplaceable in the media, except for Paul Harvey. Sykes said he won’t miss getting up at 4:15 a.m. before his 8:30 a.m. show. Sykes and I both worked for Journal Communications, which formerly owned the state’s biggest newspaper, single 50,000-watt radio station and oldest commercial TV station, but no more. (And I’ll always be grateful to Sykes for reaching out after Journal Communications terminated Marketplace.) Vin Scully announced Dodger baseball for 67 years, but no more.
Sykes may think that his job isn’t as fun as it used to be. (See the aforementioned 4:15 a.m. wake-up call.) He has done considerable writing over the years, and obviously plans on continuing that. Those of us in the media work in an environment that is continuously and unpredictably changing, which includes people who think they can do our jobs while lacking the training, experience, initiative and willingness to actually do the work. Politics is like sports in that it has winners and losers, but the political season never ends.
Sykes also has publicly pondered the role of conservative talk radio in promoting, mostly by accident, Trump. The Christian Science Monitor recently profiled Sykes:
For Sykes, the conservative media’s disdain for “liberal” truths – the “monster” – allowed Trump to crash the GOP party and claim its mantle. He says his own listeners, like “Steve from the north side,” refuse to read conservative columnists in The New York Times because they prefer online sources that traffic in lurid allegations about the other side, just as Trump imbibes conspiracies and rumors and fashions them into a 24/7 media spectacle that can seem immune to fact-checking.
“This is the shock of 2016. You look around and you see how much of the conservative media infrastructure buys into the post-factual, post-truth culture…. I understand that we are advocates and defenders, but when do you veer off into pure raw propaganda?” he asks.
One of Sykes’s biggest beefs with Trump is that his views on race and gender have confirmed all the stereotypes applied by liberals to conservative politicians and made it even harder for future GOP leaders to broaden the party’s appeal among minorities. His other complaints about Trump are familiar ones: unqualified and intemperate, inconsistent on issues like abortion and gun control, shaky on constitutional principles.
Sykes refuses to consider Trump as the lesser of two evils for the job as president, as so many fellow Republicans have done in recent months. “It’s painful for me to listen to conservative media folks who think it’s their job to rationalize and justify everything that he says,” he gripes.
Sykes’ departure from daily radio will certainly be the end of an era. Replacing Sykes — assuming WTMJ wants to keep going in that direction — won’t be easy for either WTMJ or for Sykes’ replacement, particularly in the wreckage of the post-2016 election.
Curtis Houck reports on Wisconsin native Jim Vandehei:
On Tuesday morning, one of the more intriguing debates about media bias took place on MSNBC’s Morning Joe as the assembled co-hosts and Politico founder Jim Vandehei excoriated their colleagues in the media for flashing their liberal bias “in a way they never did before” in their collective desire to take down Donald Trump (to the benefit of Hillary Clinton).
Co-host Joe Scarborough made clear at the onset that opinion-based media figures as himself are different because he’s paid to opine whereas the job of a reporter for a top newspaper has been to be neutral but end up doing “the end zone dance…opining as irresponsibly as if they were like me.”
Vandehei then fired back with the disclosure that he’s typically never been a big believer in media bias, but 2016 has left him convinced otherwise:
In a way they never did before like I’ve said this before. I’ve always been a defender of the media. I think these accusations of bias are usually overdone. I think that that’s all out the door, all out the window in this campaign. I think reporters have become so biased, so partisan, particularly on Twitter.
“Go look at the Twitter feeds of the reporters from your major newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, others — and tell me if those are things that they would say on TV or that would have ever been acceptable in previous campaigns….Just let the facts be out there and let people make a judgment,” Vandehei added.
Co-host and Sunday Today host Willie Geist further observed that “[s]omewhere along the line in this presidential race, a decision was made by many members of the media that Trump had to be stopped, that this couldn’t happen, that this year was different, that it was incumbent on people to stop [him]” and leaves readers shocked when they see their tweets then read their print stories.
Vandehei agreed and struck at one of the main tenets of journalism in that by espousing their liberal or anti-Trump views on Twitter, “they’re not speaking truth to power”:
They’re not saying anything that we don’t already know. Trump says everything that people need to hear and they are making their judgements on him. They’re not helping it by — by doing — it’s not just an end-zone dance, they’re doing their little shimmy and they all like slap each other on the back — “haha, you’re even wittier than I was.”
Harkening back to a time before the internet and social media, Scarborough wondered aloud to co-host and longtime Boston Globe write Mike Barnicle:
I can’t imagine what would have happened in the Boston Globe newsroom in 1985 if — some reporter, you know, that was supposed to write a straight-down-the-middle news story is doing this sort of end zone dances and again we are — please — we are all offended by what Donald Trump said.
Barnicle responded with the befuddlement that more newspaper editors don’t have stricter social media policies in an age when record numbers of Americans don’t trust the media:
Look, I am actually kinda surprised that in an age where it may be 99 percent of the people in the country thinks the media tilts left and thinks the media is biased that more editors and publishers actually don’t tell reporters, stay off Twitter, you can’t go on Twitter because all you do with Twitter is get yourself in trouble and raise these questions[.]
Geist helped wind down the discussion by making clear to the liberal diehards watching that they were supportive of the media being “tough as hell on both of these candidates” with one example being The New York Times story on Trump’s taxes.
“I think objectivity is a totally false premise and people are humans. They come with their biases, but your job is to just cover the race fairly. I don’t want to think what you hear about it on Twitter if you’re a reporter. Opinion business? Go for it,” Geist stated.
My high school political science teacher posted on his blog:
In “A Cheap, Easy High—With No Side Effects” Patrick Kurp refers to Terry Teachout’s “post devoted to the music he listens to whenever he feels ‘the urgent need to upgrade my mood.’ He writes, ‘I’ve always found music to be one of the most potent means of attitude adjustment known to man,’ and his experience jibes with mine. …. Music’s impact is prompt and unambiguous. In contrast, literature is an oral ingestion of medicine compared to the intravenous immediacy of music.” Kurp goes on to list some of the works of literature that invariably lift his mood. For instance:
Most anything by…P.G. Wodehouse
Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation
Tristram Shandy, especially the scenes with Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman
The essays of Joseph Epstein and Guy Davenport
Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” and “The Lady’s Dressing Room”
Teachout’s list of music that provides “a cheap, easy high” is long. A few of the many he listed:
I heard there was a debate last night. I looked for it but all I found was an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos with 90 minutes of two old people saying things…and they weren’t funny. One seemed to have Tourette’s Syndrome and the woman was clearly suffering from dementia, remembering things that never happened and forgetting those that did.
The big take away for me (and this will be a shocker…not really) is that neither are acceptable. We all should be embarrassed that these two people made it to the top of our political system. It is a true indication of just how broken our system is. A person of principle has no chance to lead this country – and with Cruz’s endorsement of Trump, the evidence is in that politics will always trump (no pun intended) principle in the current process.
I didn’t think Trump did well at all – he didn’t suck – but all Hillary did was repeat canned phrases from her campaign commercials. It was like she was reading a script – but with Lester Holt “fact checking” every “a”, “and” and “the” out of Trump’s mouth, this “debate” was tailor made for her to just spout off sound bites without challenge. Trump didn’t hurt himself but I don’t see it as a win. His optics were awful – his facial expressions made him look as if he was sucking a lemon all night. His rambling answers and third grade playground ruffian style just turn me off…but on the other hand, Hillary is the daughter of Satan so she has that going for her. …
These “debates” are a farce. Have a real one. Have a single topic, let them go at it for 90 minutes and then have an independent panel decide the winner on points just like a real debate. These televised food fights are a waste of time and are always an advantage to the candidate favored by the media – the Democrat.
Another Facebook Friend, a reluctant Trump backer, adds:
Observation: Trump couldn’t explain how to flush a toilet properly, but it would be beautiful, that I can tell you. He HAS the right ideas (on many, many things), let there be no doubt, but his mind is a disarranged gallimaufry of half-remembered talking points that collectively equal balderdash. He is incapable of ordering and then explicating his thoughts in a coherent manner verbally, from a starting point to a conclusion normally, but especially so during a “debate” when the moderator is interrupting and Hillary is sniping back from the other side of the stage thus constantly discomposing an already-terribly incoherent man. It flustered and frustrated and aroused his anger. Devastatingly so. …
It is entirely Trump’s fault for allowing himself to be baited so easily, and failing to be able to respond in anything better than what will be depicted in political cartoons in the papers today as a sputtering, infuriated, confused old crackpot totally out of his depth, and totally outclassed. By Hillary. In the first 20 minutes.
Of course, it’s possible to win on style and lose on substance. Edmund Kozak:
Clinton’s nose began to grow from the very start, as she asserted that the nation needs to “finally guarantee equal pay for equal work” for women in her opening statement. The notion that women on average do not receive the same pay as men — the 77 cents to a dollar myth — has been proven false repeatedly.
The fact is that it is already illegal to pay men and women different wages for the same work if they have the same experience. The 77 cents myth is derived from looking merely at average income accrued over a lifetime, and ignores the fact that men on average tend to work longer hours, often work in higher paying industries, and spend more active years in the work force.
When confronted by Trump about her former strong support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Clinton claimed that she “hoped it would be good deal.” The truth of course is that she called it the “gold standard” of trade deals.
Clinton also advocated raising taxes on the wealthy based on the premise that they do not currently pay enough. “I think it’s time to suggest that the wealthy pay their fair share,” she said. The truth is that America has the most progressive tax system in the developed world — the top 10 percent contribute over half of all income tax revenue.
Bizarrely, Clinton claimed that “slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked.” Her comment implied that slashing taxes on the wealthy is why the economy is in such poor shape currently. This is an odd thing to say, considering Obama has been in office for the better part of eight years and has done anything but slash taxes for anyone.
When Trump said he wished to lower the corporate tax rate, Hillary said: “We’ve looked at your tax proposals. I don’t see changes in the corporate tax rates … you’re referring to that would cause the repatriation.”
Clinton and her team couldn’t have been looking very hard, as Trump’s plan to lower to corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 is written quite clearly on the economic plan posted on his website.
Taking time to remind the country that Clinton’s success is due in large part to her surname, she asserted that “my husband did a pretty good job in the 1990s.” Clinton, like all Democrats, loves to take credit for the financial stability of her husband’s presidency. Of course, it was the Republican-controlled Congress led by Newt Gingrich that blocked Clinton’s desired spending measures and balanced the budget.
Clinton also claimed that in being party to the Iran deal she helped “put the lid on Iran’s nuclear program.” But many said the deal guarantees no such thing. Indeed, it rests entirely on Iran’s acting in good faith and upholding their end of the bargain.
When Trump defended the use of stop-and-frisk policies in New York City, Clinton attacked them as unconstitutional and asserted “it was uneffective it did not do what it needed to do.” This is simply false.
“Data from the few cities that report police stops show their effectiveness,” Dennis C. Smith, professor of public policy at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote in The New York Times in 2012 .
“My trend analysis with SUNY Albany professor Robert Purtell found that the increased use of stops correlated significantly with accelerating drops in most of the major crimes. A Harvard study of policing in Los Angeles under William Bratton, when crime dropped significantly, reported a surge in stops by the L.A.P.D. [with per capita stop rate higher than N.Y.P.D.],” Smith continued.
Perhaps Clinton’s most egregious lies were two concerned with emails. “I made a mistake using a private email,” Clinton said. Of course, Clinton didn’t use a “private email.” She used multiple private email servers. The word mistake implies Clinton didn’t know she was doing anything wrong, a claim belied entirely by the fact that so many of her aides and associates pleaded the Fifth or were granted immunity by the FBI — not to mention the fact that many of them engaged in the destruction of evidence and that she herself made false exculpatory statements.
Finally, in visiting her favorite Trump-Putin conspiracy theory, Clinton claimed that “Donald publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans.” The truth, as is obvious from the context of his words, is that Trump was calling on the Russians to release Clinton’s missing emails in the event that they already had them.
The stop-and-frisk point is one Trump needs to hammer on repeatedly the rest of this trainwreck of a campaign, whether or not stop-and-frisk is constitutional. (Neither he nor his supporters care if it is, and you’ll never convince Hillary and her Black Lives Matter supporters that it is.) If people feel less safe, stop-and-frisk is a way for police to keep a constant eye on the bad guys. Trump also needs to keep hammering on Hillary’s horrible Iran deal, though, again, Hillary’s toadies will continue to claim, right up until the mushroom clouds materialize in front of their eyes, that we need to give money to Iran’s illegitimate government.
I watched about 10 minutes of the debate by accident. Trump was his usual blustering mouthy idiot, saying “bigly” twice and getting off one and only one good line, saying he’d release his income tax records when Hillary released her 30,000 deleted emails. Hillary looked like something the labs of Harcourt Fenton Mudd developed.
See if you can make any sense of this Trump “statement”:
As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.
She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don’t know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.
And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a, it is a huge problem.
I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.
Not a single viewer’s mind was changed last night. Not a single American should think either of these people (to use that term loosely) should be president.
The Chicago Tribune editorializes on a story it ran June 7, 1942:
With each court ruling, the secret testimony that a Chicago grand jury heard during World War II edges closer to public scrutiny. If that testimony is unsealed, all of us will know more about the government’s only effort to prosecute the news media for an alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. The journalists in the dock? Our predecessors at the Chicago Tribune.
This as yet unfinished yarn traces to the U.S. Navy’s ambush of an Imperial Japanese navy strike force near Midway Island. The little atoll halfway between Asia and North America was a steppingstone in Japan’s plan to seize the Hawaiian Islands. As the U.S. neared victory on June 7, 1942, the Tribune published a front-page scoop, “Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea.” The story reported the size and schedule of Tokyo’s armada. The story’s richness of detail strongly implied (without stating explicitly) that Washington had cracked Japan’s secret naval code: The Tribune evidently had obtained the Japanese plan from an official U.S. source — someone who had access to decoded Japanese secrets.
The Tribune’s tacit revelation of the code-breaking coup infuriated Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to have Marines occupy Tribune Tower. Under pressure from Roosevelt and Navy officials, a special prosecutor impaneled a federal grand jury here to consider espionage charges against reporter Stanley Johnston, managing editor J. Loy Maloney and the Tribune itself. The grand jurors decided not to indict. But for 74 years the testimony they heard from some 13 witnesses — including naval officers and staffers from the Tribune and two other newspapers that ran its story — has remained sealed.
In 2014 a coalition of historians and the national Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press asked the U.S. District Court here to open the grand jury records. Government lawyers fought that request and, when they lost, appealed. Last week a panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to open the records. The legal dispute has little to do with the Midway story and much to do with the rare circumstances in which grand jury proceedings can become public. Courts have permitted that in such historically significant cases as those of accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss, executed “atomic spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. Historical relevance adds heft to a release request, as do the deaths of the principals and the expiration of security threats, as is the case here.
The testimony might detail how war reporter Johnston got his controversial scoop. We don’t know. But we’ve written before that many historians think Morton Seligman, a U.S. Navy commander, intentionally or inadvertently leaked the info. A month earlier, during the Battle of the Coral Sea, Johnston had raced below deck to rescue badly burned sailors on Seligman’s sinking carrier, the USS Lexington. On June 7, as the Navy’s angry commander in chief Adm. Ernest King absorbed the Tribune’s Midway report, he had on his desk a draft citation honoring Johnston for his heroism aboard the Lexington.
What happens now? Katie Townsend, litigation director for the Reporters Committee, tells us the feds have until Sept. 29 to appeal to the full 7th Circuit, or until mid-December to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. One of Townsend’s filings neatly synthesized the stakes here: “The Tribune case speaks directly to a fundamental tension at the core of our democracy, involving the public’s right to know and the government’s duty to protect its citizens in time of war.” FDR and naval officials thought the breaking of the Japanese code should remain secret because doing so would make it useful as the war progressed. The Tribune thought it had a right to publish its thinly veiled disclosure of the code-breaking. It’s possible the grand jury testimony offers evidence on those points.
We’ve also written that our predecessors knew what it was to have the full force of the government, from the White House on down, try to punish this news organization for publishing information it held, in a manner that did no harm. The Tribune’s response to word that the feds would convene a grand jury: “We have said and proved that we cannot be intimidated and now, once again, we are going to prove it.”
Fighting unwarranted government secrecy is a big part of what news organizations like the Tribune do, in wartime and peacetime. That’s one reason we hope government lawyers admit defeat and end this lingering battle of Midway.
Taxpayers United of America adds in a news release:
Recent unprecedented disclosures of government malfeasance have forced Americans to confront unpleasant truths about the nature of our government. Americans do not trust the government – and in record numbers. It is understandable, and equally troubling, then, for Americans to come to expect opaqueness from a government that commonly flouts the U.S. Constitution and the laws intended to bind its authority. We shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that the government is still fighting a seventy-four-year battle over transparency and the historical record, dating back to World War II. …
The implications of these revelations are far-reaching, just as Taxpayer Education Foundation reported previously. In a December 2011 analysis of the extensive body of scholarship concerning FDR’s foreknowledge of the Japanese military’s naval codes and planned attack at Pearl Harbor, Taxpayer Education Foundation’s research director, Dennis Constant, wrote, “In September and October of 1940, Army and Navy cryptographers solved the principal Japanese government code, the Purple code, which was the major diplomatic code. The naval codes were a series of 29 separate operational codes. According to Stinnett, Japan used four of these codes to organize and dispatch her warships to Hawaii by radio. American cryptographers had solved each of the four by the fall of 1941, even though the Japanese were introducing minor variants every three months to foil cryptographers.”
“Taxpayers, regrettably, are forced to fund the government even when its policies are opposed to the interests of Americans and our liberty,” said Jared Labell, executive director of Taxpayers United of America (TUA). “While it is clear that the government is naturally incentivized to over-classify information and maintain strict secrecy over its vast realm of perceived interests, Americans must demand transparency and support all efforts to pull back the curtain on the machinations of the government. Disclosures not only help clarify the historical record and provide further insights into past policies, but they are tremendous opportunities to learn how tax dollars are spent by the government and in pursuit of what ends.”
“These recent legal developments further threaten the government’s ability to act in complete secrecy without risk of exposure,” said Labell. “We aren’t certain of the precise revelations contained in the sealed grand jury testimony. The documents might further corroborate longtime claims made by numerous historians implicating FDR and his administration in failing to protect the American military personnel based at Pearl Harbor, although the Japanese naval codes were deciphered. The code-breaking revelations the following year in the Chicago Tribune did not please the administration, to say the least.” …
President Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917 into law in June of that year, only a couple months after the United States entered World War I. The case against the Chicago Tribune, its managing editor, and its reporter, Stanley Johnston, is the only known attempt to charge journalists with violating the Espionage Act, although the panel eventually declined to indict.
The government has until September 29 to appeal to the full 7th Circuit Court, or opt to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court until mid-December 2016. Litigation director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Katie Townsend, summarized what’s at stake in this case that dates back nearly three quarters of a century, “The Tribune case speaks directly to a fundamental tension at the core of our democracy, involving the public’s right to know and the government’s duty to protect its citizens in time of war.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 