On Tuesday, dozens of high-profile New York Times journalists signed onto a private letter defending the paper’s coverage of transgender issues and firing back against their own union leadership in what has become a deepening internal row over the paper’s transgender coverage.
The letter was sent to NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava, taking her to task for suggesting that the paper’s coverage of transgender issues — including the adverse effects of hormonal and surgical intervention and the recent dramatic increase in gender dysphoria in girls — might have created a “hostile” workplace.
“Factual, accurate journalism that is written, edited, and published in accordance with Times standards does not create a hostile workplace,” reads the letter, which was obtained by Vanity Fair and signed by dozens of Times journalists.
The internal back-and-forth began on Wednesday, February 15, when two separate groups published open letters to the Times‘ leadership calling the paper biased in its coverage of transgender issues. The groups also singled out particular articles and authors. One letter was signed by a collection of LGBTQ organizations and the other was signed by hundreds of Times contributors.
“The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” read the letter signed by Times contributors.
The Times’ leadership didn’t take the criticism laying down. Executive editor Joe Kahn and opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury internally rebuked the staffers who joined the effort. “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums,” the pair wrote.
It was after this reprimand that DeCarava decided to embroil the staff union in the debate. “Employees are protected in collectively raising concerns that conditions of their employment constitute a hostile working environment,” DeCarava wrote in a letter posted to the internal Times Guild listserv. The Guild also told Vanity Fair that Kahn and Kingsbury’s email had implied that staffers could be disciplined for criticizing the paper.
DeCarava’s entrance into the debate only stacked hostilities upon hostilities, leading to the private letter against the union leader organized by reporter Jeremy Peters.
“Every day, partisan actors seek to influence, attack, or discredit our work. We accept that. But what we don’t accept is what the Guild appears to be endorsing: A workplace in which any opinion or disagreement about Times coverage can be recast as a matter of ‘workplace conditions.’… We are journalists, not activists. That line should be clear,” Peters and company explained.
“We ask that our union work to advance, not erode, our journalistic independence,” the letter concluded.
Category: media
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When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida convened a round-table discussion about the news media this week, he spared no effort to play the part, perching at a faux anchor’s desk in front of a wall of video screens while firing questions to his guests like a seasoned cable TV host.
But the panel’s message was as notable as its slick presentation: Over the course of an hour, Mr. DeSantis and his guests laid out a detailed case for revisiting a landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the press from defamation lawsuits.
Mr. DeSantis is the latest figure, and among the most influential, to join a growing list of Republicans calling on the court to revisit the 1964 ruling, known as The New York Times Company v. Sullivan.
The decision set a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures, and for years it was viewed as sacrosanct. That standard has empowered journalists to investigate and criticize public figures without fear that an unintentional error will result in crippling financial penalties.
But emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent willingness to overturn longstanding precedent, conservative lawyers, judges, legal scholars and politicians have been leading a charge to review the decision and either narrow it or overturn it entirely.
Mr. DeSantis, a likely Republican presidential candidate, put the effort at the center of his war against the mainstream media.
“How did it get to be this doctrine that has had really profound effects on society?” he said at the event, which featured two libel lawyers known for suing news organizations and a conservative scholar who recently published an essay titled “Overturn New York Times v. Sullivan.”
Under Sullivan, public figures who sue for defamation must show not only that a report contained false and damaging information, but also that its publisher acted with “actual malice” by knowing that the report was false or by recklessly disregarding the truth.
The precedent applies not only to mainstream media organizations, but also individuals, companies, partisan websites and podcasters that could face far greater exposure to defamation lawsuits if the standard of proof were lowered.
During the panel discussion on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis accused the press of using Sullivan as a shield to intentionally “smear” politicians and said the precedent discouraged people from running for office. Would the current Supreme Court, he asked the panelists, be “receptive” to revisiting the case?
Donald J. Trump, who talked of changing libel laws as president, raised the same question in a court filing in December. The motion, part of a defamation lawsuit Mr. Trump filed against CNN, asked whether the high court “should reconsider whether Sullivan’s standard truly protects the democratic values embodied by the First Amendment.” His lawyers called the lawsuit, which accuses the network of unfairly comparing Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler and seeks $475 million in damages, a “perfect vehicle” for revisiting the precedent.
CNN, which declined to comment, has denied the accusations and in November moved to dismiss the case. That motion is still pending.
A defamation lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, against The New York Times, was once seen as a potential test of the “actual malice” standard first set by Sullivan. But a jury rejected her claim after a trial early last year, and a judge denied her bid for a second trial. The case is on appeal.
It’s not clear whether the court is ready to revisit Sullivan. Two justices on the conservative-majority Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, have indicated their willingness to roll back the ruling in written dissents in recent years, but it would require two more votes for a challenge to even be heard.
Last June, the court declined to hear a defamation suit brought by a Christian organization against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had called it a “hate group.” Justice Thomas dissented, writing that he “would grant certiorari in this case to revisit the ‘actual malice’ standard.”
Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer who represented The Times in the Pentagon Papers case in the early 1970s, said there was “a growing sense in the conservative community that this is their day to set aside New York Times v. Sullivan.”
Mr. Abrams and other legal experts point to the court’s recent decisions on abortion and gun rights as signs that it may be willing to revisit other longstanding precedents.
For Mr. Abrams, the attacks on what he considers “the gold standard in the world for the protection of the press” are thinly veiled attempts to shelter the country’s most powerful figures from the scrutiny that a healthy democracy requires.
“Essentially what they’re saying is that they want to crack down on American journalism,” he said.
Some of those pushing for a review of Sullivan argue that state legislatures, rather than the federal courts, should determine the scope and magnitude of libel law and press protections. Mr. DeSantis’s office last year drafted legislation that would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for journalists to use anonymous sources. (The bill was never filed to the Florida Legislature.)
Another complaint among critics is that subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court allowed Sullivan to expand beyond public officials to include a larger group of public figures that includes people cast unwillingly into the spotlight by news events.
“I believe the pendulum has swung too far for the average person who is wronged by false media reports,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a California lawyer who specializes in defamation cases and recently lost her bid for leader of the Republican National Committee.
Ms. Dhillon and others point to Nicholas Sandmann, who in 2019 found himself at the center of a national controversy after he was filmed facing a Native American elder at the Lincoln Memorial while wearing a MAGA hat. He sued multiple news outlets, including The New York Times, claiming they relied on the statements of the Native American elder without verifying them and subjected him to mass ridicule and derision. Mr. Sandmann reached settlements with CNN, The Washington Post and NBC. The lawsuit against The Times and other outlets was thrown out by a federal judge.
Mr. Sandmann, who has appealed the decision, appeared on Tuesday’s panel, which was staged in a studio outside Miami and streamed online. As Mr. DeSantis sat in front of screens reading “Speak the Truth,” Mr. Sandmann said his experience had “predetermined part of what the rest of my future is,” which is why, he said, “we need to look at defamation.”
Charlie Sykes wrote this three years ago:
Under the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in Times v. Sullivan, public officials must prove that a media outlet acted “with actual malice” in publishing false information. A unanimous court cited America’s “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” Mere errors would not suffice; litigants would have to prove that the media published information “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard” for the truth.
Justice Hugo Black wrote a concurring opinion joined by Justice William O. Douglas that would have gone even further. “An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment,” he wrote. “I regret that the Court has stopped short of this holding indispensable to preserve our free press from destruction.”
Despite Black’s disappointment, that ruling has been one of the pillars of press freedom for more than half a century. Times makes it extraordinarily difficult for any public official or political actor to win damages in a court of law. And that, of course, has been a source of frustration for political actors for decades. …
All of this comes at a moment of particular vulnerability for the press, which has seen public trust erode along with its economic viability. Even though Times v. Sullivan is unlikely to be overturned in the foreseeable future, terms like “actual malice,” and “reckless disregard for truth,” are terms of art that rely on a legal and cultural consensus that is being ground down by relentless battering from partisan critics. …
Trump has denounced the current state of libel law – governed by Times v. Sullivan as “a sham and a disgrace,’ complained that it does not “represent American values or American fairness.” Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that he wanted to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
He was clear how he might use such a right. “So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” he said.
Even since his election he has repeated his desire to scrap the media’s protection from libel suits. “We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” he declared at one cabinet meeting.
As the Times noted:
Mr. Trump is no stranger to defamation claims, having filed several of them himself, without success. In 2009, a New Jersey judge dismissed a $5 billion suit brought by Mr. Trump against a biographer, Timothy L. O’Brien; Mr. Trump had claimed that Mr. O’Brien understated his personal wealth.
Back in 2016, Hulk Hogan (backed by billionaire Peter Thiel) won a libel lawsuit against Gawker that drove the publication out of business. That proved the power to sue is the power to destroy. But even threat of lawsuits can chill speech.
Experience suggests that it is naïve to thinking that gutting the libel laws will affect only statements of fact or would be used simply to target egregious errors. In an age of ideological and cultural hand-to-hand combat, the lines between fact, opinion, and analysis can quickly blur.
The Sandmann lawsuit illustrates the process. Yes, the media behaved badly in the coverage of the confrontation between students from Covington Catholic and protesters on the Mall. Mistakes were made, and reputations were unfairly maligned. But the $250 million suit does not merely target the errors of fact. As a writer in Vanity Fair notes:
Whatever its merits, the lawsuit itself reads like an overtly partisan political statement. [Sandmann’s lawyers] claim that the Post “wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump (“the President”) by impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the President.” They also claim that the Post’s coverage of the Covington incident was part of a campaign “in furtherance of its political agenda . . . carried out by using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles which effectively provided a worldwide megaphone to Phillips and other anti-Trump individuals and entities to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the President.” …
This will be immensely appealing to Trump’s conservative base. As Trump has learned, attacking the “fake news media” is the reddest of red meat and has the added advantage of feeding his own obsession with discrediting his critics. Having marinated in distaste for the media for years, conservatives will be tempted by the opportunity to strip the press of its legal protections.
But embracing the Trump/Thomas position would be a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating mistake. It would also be an ironic retreat on the issue of free speech. In recent years conservatives have embraced the First Amendment to push back against the stifling environment on some university campuses; and have adopted sweeping interpretations of its protection on free speech to invalidate a host of campaign finance laws.
In the very recent past, conservatives were appalled and outraged by suggestions that the federal government restore the Fairness Doctrine as a way of regulating and reining in conservative talk radio. They rightly saw the doctrine as restoring a form of “speech police,” who could be used to chill and harass the expression of unpopular (read conservative) opinion.
Pre-Trump, conservatives understood that their support for a free press was based on both principle and prudence. A weapon that can be used to shutter liberal media outlets can just as easily be turned against conservative activists, publications, and outlets.
Lawsuits are unlikely to put the New York Times or CNN out of business, but can the same be said of outlets like Breitbart, the Drudge Report, or the Daily Caller?
Billionaire litigants could make life miserable for Jim Acosta or Rachel Maddow; but billionaires on the left could also bankroll devastating legal attacks on talk radio hosts and right-leaning bloggers. The schadenfreude on both sides would be exceptional, but the price tag for democratic debate would be catastrophic.
So conservatives will once again face a choice in the Age of Trump, and this one may be distasteful for some, because they would be siding with the folks in the media they have been taught to loathe.
But this is the price of freedom and it is the genius of the Constitution that they claim to revere. By all means, conservatives should continue to criticize media malpractice when they see it; but they also need to reaffirm their support for “the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” It was, after all, Ronald Reagan who declared:
There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our ‘experiment’ in self-government.
Republicans also lack enthusiasm for open government laws such as the state Open Meetings and Open Records laws. This is despite their use during the Scott Walker recall in which, thanks to the Open Records Law, the identity of those who signed petitions to have Walker recalled were public record, including numerous elected officials and government employees.
Sykes’ blithely casting aside a 17-year-old kid who did not meet anyone’s reasonable definition of “public figure” is ironic given that he asked on his podcast where Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, goes to get his reputation back after speculation on less responsible conservative media about what Pelosi was doing the night he was attacked. Guess which Supreme Court decision probably protects those media outlets from legal liability. (One also wonders how Sykes would react to being the target of less-than-responsible reporting, since as a national commentator he probably wouldn’t be successful suing a media outlet.)
The difference in the media world between 1964 and now is that there are many more conservative media outlets that are fully capable of holding up Democrats to scrutiny in the same way that Republicans have been held to scrutiny by the liberal-leaning mainstream media for decades.
You can’t have it both ways; you cannot say that the media should scrutinize Democrats but not Republicans. No one should want politicians of any or no party to be immune to criticism, which is the danger of overturning New York Times v. Sullivan.
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Growing up I was a religious reader of car magazines — first Motor Trend, then Hot Rod, then Car and Craft. The former rarely had anything bad to say about cars it reviewed (and was rumored to have based its Car of the Year picks on advertising money spent); the other two were about modified cars.
One of those modified cars that caught my eye was this …
… explained by Corvette Blogger:
“The Big Banana” is ready to peel off again.
This heavily modified 1968 Corvette convertible was featured in a series of build articles in Car Craft Magazine from November 1975 through August 1976 and definitely stands out in a crowd with its IMSA-style widened fenders and adjustable rear deck spoiler.
Now after three years of extensive refurbishing by the current owner, it’s being offered on Bring a Trailer …
Since the new owner acquired it in 2018, this custom Stingray has been repainted in a bright shade of yellow with orange and brown stripes by Butch Brinza of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the 383 stroker V8 engine with a Holley carburetor and Edelbrock intake manifold was rebuilt last year.
The seller also has rebuilt the power-assisted four-wheel disc brakes and three-speed TH400 automatic transmission, replaced the shocks, wiring harness, radiator, various belts and hoses, windshield wiper motor, and exhaust, recharged the air conditioning, and changed the oil in July.
Other features of the car include a black soft top, front and rear independent suspension, 3.08:1 differential, 15-inch American Racing wheels, power steering, and vintage-look AM/FM stereo.
Proof that this is indeed “The Big Banana” is provided by a plaque still present in the engine bay, along with magazine articles spotlighting this one-of-a-kind Corvette and how it was built. The new owner will also get two replica Hot Wheels toys and refurbishment records.
Bring a Trailer added before it sold for apparently $28,000:
This 1968 Chevrolet Corvette convertible is finished in yellow with brown and orange striping and was modified with widened bodywork as part of a build series featured in consecutive Car Craft Magazine issues between November 1975 and August 1976. Nicknamed “The Big Banana”, the car was acquired by the seller in October 2018 and refurbished over the following three years with work including repainting the body, rebuilding the 383ci stroker V8 and three-speed automatic transmission, and refreshing the brakes, suspension, and air conditioning. Additional equipment includes a black soft top, a 3.08:1 differential, 15″ American Racing wheels, four-wheel disc brakes, power steering, an adjustable rear deck spoiler, fender vents, air conditioning, power windows, and a vintage-look AM/FM stereo. This modified C3 Corvette is now offered in California with magazine articles featuring the car and build process, spare keys, refurbishment records, spare parts, two replica Hot Wheels toys, and an Arizona title in the seller’s name.
The fiberglass bodywork was modified with IMSA-style widened fenders and an adjustable rear deck spoiler as part of a build featured in Car Craft Magazine in the late 1970s. The car was repainted in yellow with orange and brown stripes by Butch Brinza of Milwaukee, Wisconsin as part of a refurbishment completed in 2021. Exterior equipment includes a black soft top, cowl-induction hood, driver-side mirror, concealed headlights, fender vents, and a dual exhaust system. The seller states that the windshield wiper motor was replaced under current ownership.
The 15″ American Racing 200S wheels measure 10″ wide up front, 12″ wide out back, and wear Hankook Ventus tires measuring 265/50 and 295/50, respectively. The car is equipped with front and rear independent suspension along with power steering. Work completed as part of the refurbishment reportedly included rebuilding the power-assisted four-wheel disc brakes and replacing the shocks.
The cabin is trimmed in black vinyl upholstery and features lap belts, air conditioning, a console-mounted gear selector, power windows, sun visors, and a Corvette-branded vintage-look AM/FM radio with an auxiliary input. Replacement air conditioning components were installed as part of the refurbishment, and the air conditioning was recharged in July 2022.
The three-spoke steering wheel is mounted to a tilting column and fronts a 160-mph speedometer and a 7k-rpm tachometer along with an analog clock and auxiliary gauges in the center stack. The clock does not work. The five-digit odometer shows under 45k miles, approximately 2,500 of which were added under current ownership. Total mileage is unknown.
The 383ci stroker V8 was rebuilt in 2021 and is equipped with a Holley carburetor and Edelbrock intake manifold. Additional work completed at that time is said to have consisted of replacing the wiring harness and radiator along with various belts and hoses. The oil was changed in July 2022.
Power is sent to the rear wheels through a three-speed TH400 automatic transmission and a 3.08:1 differential. The transmission was rebuilt, and the exhaust was replaced under current ownership. …
Various magazines featuring the car and build process are included in the sale and shown in the gallery along with included spare parts and memorabilia.
Among the numerous modifications is the 1974–77-style rear end (with the 5-mph bumpers, which scandalized the owner of the first Corvette I remember seeing, a neighbor down the street) and a later-than-’68 steering column. How do I know that?
The 1968 Corvette was the only C3 to have its ignition switch on the instrument panel. In 1969 GM moved all car ignition switches (except for the Corvair, which was about to die) to the new locking steering column, one year ahead of the federal mandate. Notice through the steering column where the ignition switch is.
The Car Craft story I saw also noted that the sound system had a PA microphone added, which fascinated me for some reason.
This is the sort of thing I thought was really cool when I read it, even though I had no concept of (1) how much these mods cost and (2) how what you spend on modding a car you never get back in its resale.
Motor Trend Online adds:
Petersen magazines got a lot of mileage (so to speak) out of this widebody Vette in 1976. “It’s big, yellow, goes like the devil and attracts oglers of both sexes and every age group,” wrote Chuck Nerpel in a feature Motor Trend published in the December 1976 issue. This story capped a year in which Car Craft magazine devoted nine issues to the buildup of the “CC Vett,” taking it from an auto theft victim to the “only Corvette of its kind in the world.”
The car belonged to CC publisher Steve Green, who spent years sketching and planning the dream machine he wanted to build. Once his ideas gelled, he sought a subject car and found what Nerpel described as “a stripped 1968 Vette that had found its way into a small junkyard as the result of a car theft insurance settlement.”
There wasn’t much to the wreck, apparently, but that was fine with Green, as he would completely rebuild the car. He was fortunate that the Vette came with a heavy-duty suspension, as that gave Dick Guldstrand a solid starting point to “work his magic” on the chassis. Along with heavy-duty shocks and a rear camber kit, the suspension required “special tuning to handle the extra-wide Firestone Parnelli Jones G50x15 front tires on 8-1/2-in. rims and N50x15 rear tires on 10-in. rims.”
The wide rear meats also posed a challenge when it came time to mount the IMSA-style fenders. “New Chevy IMSA wheel coverings were cast of fiberglass; then, with lots of grinding, cutting and fitting, they were blended into the body shell. The end result was a very smooth-looking treatment combining both function and distinctive styling without that added-on look,” wrote Nerpel.
The bulging hood covered a 350ci V-8 that was modified “to achieve the best performance possible and still have an engine flexible enough to drive comfortably in traffic or on the highway,” said Nerpel. After trying out a variety of induction systems, Green settled on an Edelbrock Torker intake manifold topped by a Carter Thermoquad 9800 carburetor, “which seems to be just the right combination. On a recent 1,200-mile vacation trip, cruising at near-legal speeds, Steve logged 15.5 to 16 mpg, not bad for a 3,600-lb roadster that does a 100-mph quarter mile in 14 sec.”
Inside, Green rode in Scheel bucket seats fitted with Simpson competition belts. Stewart-Warner gauges replaced all the stock instruments, while tunes (we wonder if Green was into K.C. and the Sunshine Band, or more of a Steve Miller guy) played through a Blaupunkt AM/FM/cassette system. A radar detector was mounted near the windshield; there’s an early mobile phone tucked between the seats; and, this being the 1970s, there’s a CB radio in there, too. Given the value of all these onboard electronics, Green invested in a “very sophisticated” alarm system that had its own power supply and was “hooked to a transmitter that signals a small beeper unit Steve carries with him whenever the car is left unattended.”
The Big Banana was an attention-grabber for sure, “truly a one-of-a-kind Corvette,” as Nerpel put it. Even in car-crazy Los Angeles, during the height of the bell-bottoms-and-polyester era, it would stand out wherever Green took it.
This car not only piqued my interest in Corvettes, it piqued my interest in automotive journalism. I was a business magazine publisher once, but I didn’t own a Corvette then, before then or since then. -
First: Today is, or was …
The number one album today in 1965 received no radio airplay on any pop radio station:
The number one British single today in 1968 was based on, but didn’t directly come from, a movie made in Italy with an American star:
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Today in 1938, CBS (radio, obviously, because there was no TV yet) broadcasted The Mercury Theater on the Air production of “The War of the Worlds,” from H.G. Wells’ novel.
Some number of listeners who missed the opening (such as those listening to the NBC Red Network’s “Chase and Sanborn” show with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen who changed the channel when Nelson Eddy started signing) thought the simulated news bulletins were actual news bulletins about the Martian invasion, or an invasion by Nazi Germany. Half an hour into the broadcast, the CBS switchboard lit up, and police arrived at the studios. As he had planned, Welles concluded the broadcast by calling it the equivalent “of dressing up in a sheet, jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!’”
Then, the actors and producer John Houseman (before he became a law school professor and pitchman for Smith Barney) were locked into a storeroom while CBS executives grabbed every copy of the script. And then the reporters showed up.
The New York Times/Wikipedia At WGAR radio in Cleveland, host Jack Paar (yes, that Jack Paar) reassured callers that Martians were not actually invading. Paar was immediately accused of covering up the news.
The number one single today in 1971:
A low, low moment in rock history: Today in 1978, NBC-TV broadcast “Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park”:
(The entire movie, believe it or don’t, can be viewed on YouTube.)
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George Santayana famously said that “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.
That appears to include Democrats now campaigning as if Trump were on the ballot, along with a lot of Republicans, as Hugh Hewitt writes:
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Today in 1926, Radio Corporation of America — then owned by General Electric Co., Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit Co. (now known as Chiquita Brands International) — created the National Broadcasting Co. …
… which later returned to RCA’s parent, General Electric Co. (from whose name came the famous NBC chimes), and now is part of what used to be Universal Studios …
… and is part of Comcast cable TV …
In a possibly strange way, that makes every Universal-owned show on NBC “pure NBCUniversal,” or something.
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Non-conservative Matt Taibbi:
CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta, famed for being the WWE version of a media tough guy during the Trump years, curled up like a kitten last weekend when interviewing Phil Mudd, onetime head of the FBI’s National Security Branch. Also a former CIA man, Mudd is now an Acosta colleague, a “senior intelligence analyst” on the CNN payroll.
“You know, there are real consequences,” said Acosta, “when people go out and trash the integrity of the FBI…”
It was less question than invitation, and Mudd jumped at it. The FBI man seethed that even if you’re upset about the raid of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, if you think state police can deal with the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, white collar crime, mortgage fraud and cyber-porn involving kids, you suck.
“If you say defund the FBI,” he went on, “let your kid be abused by an adult!”
“Yeah,” said Acosta. “It doesn’t add up.”
Mudd — who’s supposed to be both retired from law enforcement and a member of the media now — then went on about how difficult things are for FBI agents now that the unredacted warrant was out, releasing names and robbing agents of their birthright anonymity just as “our kids are going back to school.”
“Yeah…” said Acosta again. “They want to intimidate people in law enforcement.”
As they spoke, CNN flashed a graphic of mean things people said online about the FBI last week, like “kill all feds.” Acosta noted, as if spontaneously, that this reminded him of the atmosphere before January 6th (I thought of the “kill all cops” memes, but what do I know?) before asking Mudd if he was worried about another “spasm” of “domestic terrorism. Mudd said yes, America is filled with extremists like the ones “abroad,” and “I think we’re going to see a catastrophic event” like January 6th.
Watching, I found myself wondering, “What is this?” There was no pretense of separateness between the CNN employees, and the spot’s purpose appeared to be to let a senior CIA/FBI counterintelligence official whine about the reaction to the Trump raid, stoke fear, and compare Americans to al-Qaeda. It felt less like news than something out of a dystopian novel like Fahrenheit 451 or We, and this is essentially on air round the clock. Dollars to doughnuts, if you turn on cable right now, you will find, somewhere, a former intelligence official yammering at you through your telescreen.
We’re a week into one of the biggest stories of our time, and the feds and media have spent most every minute acting as an unembarrassed unified front. One after another, national security “analysts” lined up to give breathless, hyperbolic, and and eerily synchronized commentary about the Mar-a-Lago raid. If the message on day 1 was about how they “must have” probable cause of a crime, that was the word up and down the dial. If by the weekend it was “I’ve never seen this level of threat,” you heard that in more or less the same words from the likes of Mudd, McCabe, and others on multiple channels. What’s the public supposed to see, other than an American analog to China Central TV or Rossiya-1, when they tuned in to all this? …
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I was amused by this report in the Washington Post about how black women in D.C. are getting gun permits and learning how to shoot. According to the Post, black women represent “a fast-growing group of gun owners.” A black woman who trains some of them to shoot says the increase in females who want her instruction is “over 1,000 percent recently.”
The Post spins this development as a reaction to church shootings, the shooting at that Illinois parade, the one at the Buffalo grocery store, Trayvon Martin, and even “the insurrection.”
But the odds of these women being shot in any of those contexts are miniscule compared to the odds of being attacked in one’s neighborhood by an ordinary criminal who, in all likelihood, is black.
Towards the end of its report, the Post gets to the point:
Black women are unsafe. . .Violence against Black women and girls shot up nearly 34 percent in 2020 amid an overall spike in homicides, to about 8 deaths per 100,000 — a rate more than twice that for White women, at about 3 per 100,000, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Five Black females — women and girls — were killed every day in 2020.
The handful of mass shootings, the shooting of Trayvon Martin (a male), and the “insurrection” (in which no black women were killed) contributed essentially nothing to these statistics.
The Post blames “America,” saying it has let black women down. A more realistic view is that the left-liberals who run cities like D.C., most of whom are black, have let blacks down by abandoning common sense measures that in the past curbed violent crime — proactive policing, serious anti-crime prosecutors, stiff sentences, etc.
These leaders have willfully failed to keep city streets even moderately safe. Black women are responding sensibly. They are engaging in self help by arming themselves.
The crime rate against women would drop significantly if male perpetrators got shot in their attempt to rob, rape or kill their intended victim. The recidivism rate of a bad guy bleeding out in the street will be zero.
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Fans of Mel Brooks know “The Producers,” in which two producers’ plans to make money by making money-losing movies is foiled by their accidentally making a popular movie.
Proving that real life is stranger than fiction, Buzz Dixon tells this story:
The Mob had a problem:
Deep Throat was making too much money.I won’t recount the history of porn in America at this time — it’s fascinating stuff (and not for the reasons you think!) — but it’s too much of a sideshow to what I want to post about.
Suffice it to say this:
The same black market-to-barely legitimate distribution system that made bootlegging not only possible but highly profitable during Prohibition, the same system that got pressed into service to spread comics and pulp magazines far and wide, that same system had a modestly earning sideline in shoveling porn around the country up to the 1960s.At that point, as more and more adult films began being imported from Europe, as American indie producers found more legal tolerance for their grindhouse features, the Peraino members of the NYC-based Colombo crime family decided to splurge ($22,500 to $50,000 depending on who tells the story) on a feature length 35mm full color porn film that had an actual bona fide (albeit goofy) story and something that could be loosely interpreted as acting by less discriminating members of its audience.
We’re talking Deep Throat, folks, and I’ll head everyone off at the pass and say Linda Lovelace (nee Linda Susan Boreman) was at the very least coerced and intimidated into making the film, so sympathy to her, and a big hearty horselaugh to all those others involved as you read further.
We come not to praise Deep Throat (which in addition to being the first American porn feature with an actual story was also a musical [!] and a borderline sci-fi film [!!]), but in the words of another / later / even more infamous Deep Throat: “Follow the money.”
. . .
Deep Throat may very well be the biggest return on investment of any movie ever made, basically walking around pocket change for Mob wiseguys turned into a $250 million grossing picture! (And that’s just the generally agreed upon lowest gross estimate for the film; nobody really knows for sure. Gawd only knows what they could have done with Lucasfilm’s marketing team.)
Of course the Mob harbored absolutely no desire to let the Feds have any of that, and so for ideas on how to hide it, they turned to a bigger / badder / even more financially corrupt institution: Hollywood
I’ve posted elsewhere about the financial shenanigans the Hollywood studio system employs to hide its loot. One of their mainstays is cross collateralization.
It works like this:
Say a studio release six movies in a three month period. One smash hit, one modestly successful, two break even, one mild disappointment, one bomb.The studio takes money from the smash hit and modestly successful films’ revenues and apply them to the losses of the bottom two films. With any luck all six films barely break even, and as such the studio keeps all the revenues and the profit participants (har!) get bupkis.
They call it “standard industry practices”.
And that’s what the Mob wanted to do with Deep Throat.
. . .
Problem:
Deep Throat wasn’t conceived of as a franchise tentpole; it was just a standalone stroke film.So they cobbled together a distribution company called Bryanston Films (presumably because it was the least Mafioso-sounding name they could think of) and, like Mel Brooks’ ill-fated The Producers, went out in search of the worst movies they could lay their hands on so they could “lose” money with them and siphon off that sweet, sweet Deep Throat cash (and more on why they wanted to do that in a bit).
Among the very first films they distributed was Dark Star, a low budget sci-fi movie shot mostly on 16mm as a student film by two USC classmates: John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon.
Budgeted at a final grand total of $60,000, it looked a helluva lot more polished and professional that Deep Throat. Still, Bryanston expected to lose money on this and were surprised when word of mouth among sci-fi fans earned the film a cult reputation that edged it into break even territory.
Oh, well, you can’t lose ‘em all, can you?
. . .
So they tried again, picking up a couple of Hong Kong imports to cash in on the kung fu craze they knew next to nothing about.
They figured by overpaying for a film, it would be easy to claim they lost money on it, and normally that would be true…
…unless one of the Hong Kong films you pick up is The Way Of The Dragon with Bruce Lee, and you release it just as a larger studio announces their (relatively) big budget Bruce Lee epic, Enter The Dragon.
Well, lightning can’t strike three times, can it?
Wanna bet?
They opted for something safe and crappy, absolutely guaranteed not to make any money. A film made by some punks from some podunk place down south, shot on 16mm with even lower production values than Deep Throat and arguably far worse acting. A stupid, ugly, vulgar film about a family of cannibals.
After running it for Bryanston, the screening room projectionist looked them square in the eye and famously said: “There are a lot of sick bastards in this world and every single one of them will pay five dollars to see this movie.”
Boy howdy, was he ever right!
Ladies and gentlemen, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
. . .
Meanwhile, outside the confines of Bryanston’s front offices, virtuous forces were gathering against them.
It’s hard for people to fathom today, but once upon a time hard core porn was illegal in many if not most communities in the United States.
Typically the reason had to do with blue nose morality, but law enforcement also knew the Mob liked to move money around using liquid assets.
That’s why local authorities waged war against pinball machines: They made it possible for the Mob to hide cash from heroin sales by claiming it was just millions of kids putting their quarters down.
Having a string of failed movies, and using Hollywood-style cross collateralization made it possible for the Perainos to hide a lot of the Colombos’ illicit cash —
— but the movies had to fail massively for the scheme to work.
And try as they might, Bryanston just couldn’t get their movies to fail.
(Well…most of them…)
To help hide money from the Colombos’ other rackets, the Perainos began siphoning for of their Deep Throat cash off to Mob-dominated Las Vegas casinos.
Casinos, like pinball machines, could hide a lot of illicit cash.
Cash the FBI and the IRS would love to be able to trace.
Question:
How do you penetrate many levels of Mob security to get a look at their books?. . .
By now the Bryanston boys were growing desperate.
Despite their best / worst efforts, their movies kept making money!
It finally dawned on them that their least profitable films (“least” as in “but still”) were more conventional films with recognizable although far from big box office draw names.
Finally an independent production showed up that was ideal for their purposes: A dumb medium budget horror film with a bunch of has been stars in it, too well made to appeal to the freaks buying tickets for Blood For Dracula and Flesh For Frankenstein (two Andy Warhol produced horror films that surprised the hell out of everybody by being modestly successful), too inept for mainstream audiences who came to see The Human Factor or Caravan To Vaccares.
With a cast featuring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, and William Shatner — all woefully miscast — it was sure to turn off younger audiences.
In fact, the only young character in it was just a minor supporting role played by a kid who was one of a half dozen sidekicks on a modestly successful sit-com, a kid whose next role would be in a dumb disco dance fad movie.
So Bryanston acquired The Devil’s Rain and put it into general release.
And it fared poorly, and it lost money, and the boys at Bryanston smiled because at long last their scheme was working…
…until 18 months later when Saturday Night Fever was released and suddenly theaters were demanding every movie with John Travolta in it get re-released to cash in.
. . .
The Feds finally found a crack in the financial wall surrounding the Mob’s money.
Remember, even in the late 1970s, porn was not legal everywhere in the United States.
On July 7, 1974, the FBI arrested Harry Reems, Ms. Lovelace’s Deep Throat co-star, in New York for a federal obscenity charge filed in Memphis.
Dick Nixon, desperate to distract Americans from his own political scandals, kept pressing for crime bills and prosecution against porn, even though his own commission on pornography saw no societal harm in it.
The FBI, on the other hand, saw the Deep Throat obscenity case from a different perspective: A chance to finally get their hands on the Mob’s books.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Using their right of discovery from the Reems’ case and similar indictments in other federal courts around the country, the FBI swooped in on Bryanston and grabbed their financial records.
Sound familiar?
It should.
If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s Casino, you know roughly half-way through the film the FBI launches raids across the country to crack the Mob’s money laundering schemes.
Casino clocks in just shy of three hours — and Scorsese spends about a fourth of that time just explaining how the casino business works so the rest of the movie will make sense.
Adding a whole big sub-plot about how Deep Throat and Bryanston led the FBI right to the Mob’s piggy banks would have been fascinating — and incredible long.
So Scorsese just dismisses how the FBI found their way in and follows what happens after they did.
Wiseguys went to jail, that’s what happened.
. . .
Bryanston’s books provided the loose thread the FBI pulled that unraveled the whole deal.
No, it didn’t eliminate organized crime or shut down Mob influence in Las Vegas, but it sure put a dent in ‘em.
And it put a lot of guys — many named Peraino — behind bars.
Bryanston went inert for 30 some years. It makes noises now like it wants to come back as a legitimate distribution company, but so far…nothing.
All the original players are pretty much dead and gone, the lucky ones via natural causes, the not-so-lucky ones by other mobsters.
I was sparked to write this because several online friends had shared The Devil’s Rain poster recently without knowing how it fit into the weird history of the Mob and porn and Las Vegas, so I thought I’d write up this summary for them.
Up above I mentioned almost every film Bryanston release proved modestly successful at the very least.
The one exception is The Last Porno Flick (a.k.a. Those Mad, Mad Moviemakers).
I knew and worked with the late Larry DiTillio, who wrote the screenplay for the movie.
Without knowing it, he and the other film makers pitched a movie to Bryanston that was exactly like what Bryanston was trying to do!
i.e., a movie about some con men trying to make a bad porn movie so they could hide money.
Larry described the horror he and the other members of the production team felt when they realized they were in the Mob’s den, pitching a movie that made fun of what the mobsters were actually trying to do. He felt sure they were all going to leave with broken kneecaps at the very least —
— but to their surprise the Bryanston boys went for it and not only agreed to distribute the film but financed it as well.
And it flopped.
Larry felt sorry for them.
They had tried so very, very hard to be a failure, but they just kept on succeeding.
And when somebody brought them a film idea that reflected what they had been going through, they probably thought to themselves, “Yeah, let’s do this, let’s show the world what it was like for us.”
And the world didn’t give a crap.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 