Today in 1958, Alan Freed joined WABC radio in New York, one of the great 50,000-watt rock stations of the AM era.
Birthdays include Captain Beefheart, known to his parents as Del Simmons:
Charles Miller, flutist and saxophonist for War:
One of Gladys Knight’s Pips, William Guest:
The headline on Kyle Pope‘s piece is: “So You Wanna Be a Journalist?” (Hence the headline.)
As far back as I can remember, I have known exactly what I wanted my job to be. I worked at my grade school newspaper (shout-out to The Bobcat Chat), then my high school paper, then my college one. My first car carried a support press freedom bumper sticker, and my most-prized Christmas present as a kid was a knee-length tan trench coat, to match the ones I saw the foreign correspondents wearing on TV. (Never mind that I grew up in the desert of West Texas, where a trench coat was the single most impractical piece of clothing you could own.)
My parents, then political conservatives who watched Richard Nixon resign from office when I was 10, would justify my interests to their friends as such: “This is our son, Kyle. He wants to be a journalist. (Beat.) But he’s not like all of those other journalists out there.”
In fact, I wanted to be exactly like all of those other journalists out there and would spend the rest of my working life making it so, carving out a career that took me through local newspapers to national dailies to glossy magazines to, now, the editorship of the publication you’re reading. (In between, in the 1990s, I worked as a foreign correspondent in London, where my trench coat dreams came true.)
Today, I find myself thinking a lot about the 10-year-old kid, or the high school newspaper editor, or the college graduate looking for a way into working journalism. Or, increasingly, to the veteran editor with one wary eye on the next round of layoffs. How can they find a way to do that thing they’ve always wanted to do? Is there even a career path in journalism anymore? Who can afford to be a reporter, anyway?
Let’s first dispatch with the bad news, which you already know: The jobs picture in journalism is terrible. Since 2005, newspaper employment in the country has fallen by more than 50 percent. And while print jobs have taken the biggest hit, the employment picture has darkened in radio, TV, and, recently, digital media as well. News companies continue to cut their most senior (and best-paid) people, and lower levels of hiring have made what had been a tight market for new arrivals even more brutal. If you do manage to land a job? The pay is dismal, with the starting median salary for a reporter stagnating at $34,150.
All of which leads us to ask: Who in their right mind would want to go into this business in the first place? That, essentially, is the question we have set out to answer in this issue of CJR.
Being a working journalist is, of course, a job. Someone pays us to write or talk or edit other people’s words. But it is also, as long as I’ve been doing it, an identity, as much a part of who I am as being a father or a husband or a New Yorker. (Sorry, kids.) And it is that sense of identity that is being tested and strained—and, at times, buttressed—by the moment in which we live.
It’s impossible to be a journalist today without the sense that our work carries extra weight. When the president calls us enemies and liars, and his supporters across the country and around the world echo his talking points, it’s hard to escape the sense that doing our job has a new element of risk. Even if we’re simply reporting on high school football scores or the opening hours of the local library, the act of doing what we do has a renewed tinge of the oppositional, maybe even the transgressive. How could it not, when the very fact of our profession is being held up in some quarters as a sign of dishonesty and disloyalty?
Like many other journalists I know, I’m attracted to the outsiderness of what we do, so this moment has me more invested in my journalistic identity than I’ve ever been. And I can wear that identity with confidence because of the amazing work and reporting I see all around me, in markets big and small, by journalists young and old. I’m also energized by the subscribers and scholars and even celebrities who see this moment as a rallying cry for a much bigger (and apparently much-needed) conversation about the critical role of a free and vibrant press in a democracy, even if you don’t happen to agree with what’s being published. Given how few Americans seem to care on any given day about threats to press freedom in this country, the First Amendment is a much more fragile thing than any of us had previously realized.
For students of journalism history, from The Front Page to the Daily Bugle, the dismal journalism jobs picture is familiar. For decades in America, reporters were working-class troublemakers, the kind of people who would walk into a room (or, more often, a bar) and prompt everyone else in the place to groan.
Then, beginning in the late 1980s, journalism became professionalized. Reporters snagged book deals. They started appearing on TV. Their salaries climbed. That sense of being an outsider faded away. In fact, it was insider cred that a lot of these people most craved.
Before long, journalism became cool. And people who in previous lives may have been lawyers or bankers or doctors, people who wanted to have a career with a splash of glitz, became journalists instead. That old sense of identity, of mission and of purpose, was gone. The dilettantes blended in with the true believers.
Now we’ve come full circle. Terrible pay for reporters, a shortage of jobs, even a social stigma in some circles have filtered the business to the point that most of the journalists I meet—and especially the young people trying to get into the field—are here because they desperately want to be here, and can’t imagine themselves anywhere else. They are exactly where I was, four decades ago.
How, then, do we get them from here to there, from principled dreams to a paying job?
As we chronicle in this issue, there’s a lot wrong with the state of the journalism job market. It still favors white, privileged, highly educated people at precisely the moment it needs to be more inclusive, given the changing demographics of the country. It’s classist, populated with members of the same social strata, at a time when it should be more open to people from different economic backgrounds. It discounts age and experience when mentoring and life skills are critical. (And I’ll leave it to our writers in this issue to debate the merits, and demerits, of journalism education, which, depending on your worldview, is either insidious or indispensable, but is without a doubt enormously expensive.)
You’ll read about how the push for productivity has vastly expanded journalists’ skill sets, but at a potential cost in the quality of what we do, and about how the financial demands of working in journalism today often require people to take second or third jobs to subsidize the work they love. At what point does your passion become its own kind of punishment?
And yet people continue to pour into the business, many returning to journalism from careers elsewhere, because they believe in what we do. Digital tools are spawning new journalistic entrepreneurs, and innovations in data visualization and AI and podcasting are giving rise to rich new forms of storytelling, finally matching the ambitions of new reporters with the tools they need to tell their stories.
The challenges of the job market, and the questions they raise for all of us, are not inside baseball; they get to the heart of what journalism is and should be. We shouldn’t treat those obstacles as fringe concerns, to be untangled while we try to keep the lights on and the presses rolling. With fewer job openings, every hire becomes that much more important, both in terms of creating the workforce that best serves our calling, and in recognizing the loss that comes with every dismissed worker. The hiring choices we make now will shape the journalism that follows: Do we focus on filling as many of the existing slots we have, or do we instead reimagine our newsrooms and the beats they contain? Should we continue to cover incremental, breaking news, or should we instead steer our resources toward more ambitious accountability reporting? At a time of severe budget constraints, can we afford to continue pouring money into soft-feature sections and service journalism that has, in many cases, become a commodity?
We are in a moment of our industry’s professional life that we can’t afford to squander. We are surrounded by eager, committed, energized colleagues, the majority of whom hear a calling that had either been quieted or silenced. It’s ringing loudly now, in newsrooms around the world.
Readers know that for years I have made occasional appearances on Wisconsin Public Radio’s morning show Friday 8 a.m. Week in Review segment against someone on the opposite side of the ideological aisle.
Given that I for some reason kept appearing on holiday weekends, my drive for self-promotion included, in the blog posts announcing my imminent presence on the state’s public radio airwaves and at wpr.org, a listing of the holidays of the weekend, including, this weekend, National Donut Day today, National Bubba Day Saturday (insert rude comment about Bill Clinton here), and, on Sunday, my birthday, and my oldest son’s graduation from high school. (An anecdote about him follows.)
I have been on WPR since, I believe, 2008, when I returned to the media world after seven years in private-college public relations. (In that world, you’re not supposed to have publicly expressed opinions separate from your employer’s. Faculty can express themselves; staff cannot. Also, though that was my favorite employer, I was a political minority, and so those of us of similar political worldviews kept that quiet.) Before that, I was occasionally on Wisconsin Public Television’s WeekEnd show and its pundit panel before WeekEnd ended in 2001. My role was to be the non-liberal non-Madisonian, usually from WPT’s studios at UW–Green Bay. (There were two exceptions, one of which I’ll get to presently.)
WPR is getting a new morning host, replacing retiree Joy Cardin and her short-time replacement Kate Archer Kent, and, I’m told, discontinuing the Week in Review segment. I may be appearing on the new morning show on days other than Fridays (as I have on occasion). Those who have a burning desire to hear my previous work dating back to 2011 can find me on WPR’s archive.
My connection with public broadcasting is probably my longest non-paid media association, given that it goes back to my first term at Marketplace Magazine. Nothing lasts forever, particularly in the media, and particularly today.
My favorite opponents probably were four from the news media. Matt Rothschild and I as debaters date back to the WeekEnd show, so you can guess how old that makes us.
(Matt wasn’t on one of my two Madison WeekEnd appearances. I was asked the Friday of Memorial Day weekend 2000 to appear, but I was heading to the in-laws in Southwest Wisconsin that weekend. So instead of going to Green Bay, we stopped in Madison, and while Mrs. Presteblog and our four-week-old son watched, and the latter got oohs and ahs from guests and crew, I debated, among others, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, the same communist now running for governor. The subject was campaign finance reform, and the last thing I said was that the best way to reduce campaign spending was to reduce the stakes in elections by reducing the size of government. That made Soglin literally sputter. I felt that was one of my best closes of all time.)
Bill Lueders popped in and out of the media; he’s now the managing editor of The Progressive magazine. He and I may have had the most fractious Week in Review segment of all time during the Act 10 drama, and it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t there. We were, however, able to laugh about it when I finally met him in person a year later.
Louis Fortis is the publisher of the Shepherd Express and a former state legislator. Though he’s not anywhere close to me ideologically, he seems to have the proper cynical view politics, so we were able to probably find more agreement than disagreement in what we were discussing.
John Nichols is the national affairs correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison. He has a left-libertarian bent, so we have that in common, and unlike many, many liberals, he allows someone to have a different point of view from his.
In fact, all four respect debate. That cannot be said about many liberals and many conservatives. I appeared on the show when requested because (1) as Charlie Sykes and a former coworker correctly observed, I’m a media “ho” (and in other shocking news the sun will rise in the east tomorrow), and (2) I don’t believe you present your side of the story very well if you’re only preaching to the ideological choir. The echo chamber exists even among people who vote Republican most of the time, with Trump-worshippers and reflexive Trump-haters.
I’m pretty certain I didn’t change anyone’s mind during my appearances. Most WPR listeners are — surprise! — on the left side of the political aisle. During one appearance I talked on the phone while watching the morning show Facebook page, and I learned to not do that thereafter. In addition to the echo chamber, a growing number of people appear to harden their points of view instead of being able or willing to refute counterarguments. There are probably multiple reasons for that. On my wall at work I wrote a piece of advice from Andrew Breitbart, “Question the premise.” A lot of people don’t like when you do that.
As I said, nothing lasts forever, but it is kind of sad that something I’ve been involved with for this long is going away.
The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1967, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”:
The number one single today in 1968:
Today in 1969 during their Montreal “Bed-In” (moved from New York City due to a previous marijuana conviction), John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with backing vocals from Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers, Dick Gregory, DJ Murray the K, Allen Ginsburg and others, recorded this request:
The number one single today in 1970:
Christian Schneider:
In 2013, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the floor to support shutting the federal government down. At the time, Cruz thought threatening a shutdown would force the authors of a new spending bill to delay implementation of Obamacare. But hitting the snooze button on Obamacare was a fever dream; the bill would have needed the signature of a president whose name was on the health care plan.
Cruz peddled this impossibility to voters, raising expectations to a level Congress could never satisfy. In response, GOP voters selected an erratic, bombastic presidential nominee who claimed he could achieve far-fetched accomplishments simply by virtue of his personality. Yet even with a Republican House and Senate, President Donald Trump couldn’t undo Obamacare.
Last weekend, Journal Sentinel reporter Patrick Marley asked the leading Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidates whether they favored repeal of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature accomplishment — the virtual elimination of collective bargaining for government employees. Every one of them pledged to overturn Walker’s “Act 10” law, which passed in 2011 amid nationally publicized protests at the Capitol and around Wisconsin.
In making this pledge, the Democrats vying to face Walker are selling primary voters a product they can’t possibly produce.
For one, overturning Act 10 would mean defeating Walker, something no Democrat has been able to achieve in three tries — even during a 2012 recall election when the state was engulfed in tumult. And Democrats would have to win control of both houses of the Legislature — not an impossible feat, but an unlikely one.
Suppose Democrats were able to overcome Republican majorities in 2018 and found themselves in full control of state government. If they wanted to repeal Act 10, they would face a public that still supports Walker’s reforms. Over the span of four polls conducted by the Marquette University Law School between 2012 and 2014, Wisconsin residents favored keeping Act 10 reforms in place in every poll; in October of 2014, respondents favored retaining Walker’s union law by a margin of ten percentage points (52% to 42%.)
And even if they went ahead with repealing the law, Democrats would have to deal with the effects of reversing the myriad proposals under Act 10’s umbrella. One of Walker’s primary initiatives was to require state and local employees to start paying towards their pension and health care benefits, which saved both levels of government money. This allowed him to reduce aids to local governments and school districts, knowing they would be able to replenish those funds by having to pay less for employee benefits.
If Democrats reinstate Wisconsin as a union utopia and teachers and local government employees once again start to collectively bargain, it will certainly increase the cost of providing services, and thus push property taxes significantly upward. That is, of course, unless the Democratic candidates want to move back to a system in which the state provides aid to local governments and school districts to subsidize these benefits. If that is the case, Democrats should be willing to provide examples of which state taxes they would raise to provide the billions of dollars it would take to restore this aid model.
In practice, it’s not even certain teachers and other government employees would move back to a system of mass unionization. Under Act 10, employees were perfectly welcome to remain in unions, and many have. But thousands of others have gotten used to not having dues automatically deducted from their paychecks and have begun to recognize they can get along fine without having to belong to a union. Even if Act 10 is reversed, union organizers may not see potential brothers and sisters lining up to re-enlist.
The Democratic candidates for governor will forge ahead, each trying to prove they are more vigilant in opposition to a law that has saved taxpayers billions of dollars and gotten the state budget back into working order. And when they can’t make good on their promise, a new candidate from the fringes will emerge, vowing only he or she can make the changes the progressive base craves.
Accordingly, Democrats would be wise to heed the lesson Republicans have learned — with unrealistic promises come unpredictable results.
Proof that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers is out of touch with the schools he supposedly supervises is his parroting the Democrats’ Act 10 position. You will not find a school district administrator — and they are all Democrats — who opposes Act 10 because Act 10 gives more budget control to administrators in the single biggest spending item of any school district budget, employee salaries and benefits.
Repealing Act 10 would result in school districts’ spending money on their employees instead of their students.
The New York Times:
Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.
“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.
He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.
In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages, according to a new book by his longtime adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes. At times, the departing president took the long view, at other points, he flashed anger. He called Mr. Trump a “cartoon” figure who cared more about his crowd sizes than any particular policy. And he expressed rare self-doubt, wondering whether he had misjudged his own influence on American history.
Set to be published next week by Random House, Mr. Rhodes’s memoir, “The World as It Is,” offers a peek into Mr. Obama’s tightly sealed inner sanctum from the perspective of one of the few people who saw him up close through all eight years of his presidency. Few moments shook Mr. Obama more than the decision by voters to replace him with a candidate who had questioned his very birth.
Mr. Rhodes served as Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser through some of the most consequential points of his presidency, including decisions to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, send more troops to Afghanistan, pull most troops out of Iraq, restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, seal a nuclear agreement with Iran, intervene militarily in Libya and refuse to intervene militarily in Syria.
But his book offers a new window, if only slightly cracked open, into the 44th president’s handling of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump get elected and the aftermath.
In handing over power to someone determined to tear down all he had accomplished, Mr. Obama alluded to “The Godfather” mafia movie: “I feel like Michael Corleone. I almost got out.”
Mr. Rhodes describes the reaction of foreign leaders. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan apologized for breaching protocol by meeting with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan after the election. Mr. Obama urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada to take on a more vocal role defending the values they shared.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama that she felt more obliged to run for another term because of Mr. Trump’s election to defend the liberal international order. When they parted for the final time, Ms. Merkel had a single tear in her eye. “She’s all alone,” Mr. Obama noted.
And yet despite criticism even from former advisers to Mr. Obama, Mr. Rhodes offers little sense that the former president thought he could have done more to counter Russian involvement in the election. Mr. Obama had authorized a statement to be issued by intelligence agency leaders a month before the election warning of Russian interference, but was thwarted from doing more because Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, refused to go along with a bipartisan statement.
Mr. Rhodes called Mr. McConnell’s refusal “staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic.” But Mr. Obama, whose Supreme Court nomination had been blocked by Mr. McConnell for months, seemed less surprised.
“What else did you expect from McConnell?” he asked. “He won’t even give us a hearing on Merrick Garland.”
Still, in preparatory sessions before meetings with the news media before the election, aides pressed Mr. Obama to respond to criticism that he should speak out more about Russian meddling. “I talk about it every time I’m asked,” he responded. “What else are we going to do? We’ve warned folks.”
He noted that Mr. Trump was already claiming that the election would be manipulated if Hillary Clinton won. “If I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Rhodes writes that neither he nor Mr. Obama knew at that time that there was an F.B.I. investigation into contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, despite Mr. Trump’s recent unsubstantiated claims that the departing president placed a “spy” or multiple spies in his campaign.
Mr. Rhodes writes he did not learn about the F.B.I. investigation until after leaving office, and then from the news media. Mr. Obama did not impose sanctions on Russia in retaliation for the meddling before the election because he believed it might prompt Moscow into hacking into Election Day vote tabulations. Mr. Obama did impose sanctions after the election but Mr. Rhodes’s suggestion that the targets include President Vladimir V. Putin was rebuffed on the theory that such a move would go too far.
Mr. Obama and his team were confident that Mrs. Clinton would win and, like much of the country, were shocked when she did not. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,” Mr. Rhodes writes. “Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change.”
On election night, Mr. Obama spoke by telephone with Cody Keenan, his chief speechwriter, and Mr. Rhodes to figure out what he should say. Mr. Rhodes asked if he should offer reassurance to allies. “No, I don’t think that I’m the one to tell them that,” the president said.
The next day, Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff. At one point, he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”
But days later, Mr. Obama seemed less sanguine. “I don’t know,” he told aides. “Maybe this is what people want. I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon.”
He added that “we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”
The day Mr. Obama hosted Mr. Trump at the White House after the election seemed surreal. Mr. Trump kept steering the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Mr. Obama could draw big crowds, but Mrs. Clinton could not, Mr. Rhodes writes.
Afterward, Mr. Obama called a few aides to the Oval Office to ruminate on the encounter. “I’m trying to place him in American history,” he said.
“He peddles” bull, Mr. Rhodes answered. “That character has always been part of the American story. You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.”
“Maybe,” Mr. Obama answered, “that’s the best we can hope for.”
Not exactly a surprise, is it? Stupid voters voted for Trump, or didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, to channel their inner redneck instead of as a reaction to eight years of ObamaCare, the traitorous Iran deal, a crappy economy, and unprecedented verbal hatred of conservatives by a president and his would-be successor.
We started and ended with jazz yesterday, so it’s worth noting that today is the anniversary of the release of the first jazz record, “Darktown Strutters Ball”:
The number nine …
… seven …
… and five singles today in 1969:
Facebook Friend Michael Smith on Roseanne Barr’s tweet that ended the revival of “Roseanne” yesterday:
ABC had every right to terminate her and cancel her show for what she did. If she did not live down to their standards, they had every right to arbitrarily and capriciously apply discipline – but (and it is a big but), ABC’s actions cement forever their bias.
If you are white and Christian, you are a fair target. Anything can be said about you in a tweet, on air or in a live situation and nothing will happen to the Disney/ABC/ESPN employee who does it. Shows like The View will remain and people like Keith Olbermann, Jemele Hill and Jimmy Kimmel will still have jobs.
CBS will still employ Steven “Cock Holster” Colbert.
NBC and MSNBC will still employ Joy Reid and Al Sharpton.
Bill Maher will still work for HBO.
And they wonder why people support Trump and hate the media…
They wonder why whites support Trump.
Whites support Trump, not because they hate blacks; they do so because in the reactions of the media and the progressive Democrats to Trump, they see themselves.
The bias exhibited by ABC is real and obvious and don’t get me wrong – I think what Roseanne tweeted was reprehensible but I also have eyes and ears and know there are current employees at ABC who have expressed worse and still have jobs – that is my issue – the unfairness of it all. If Rosanne Barr should be fired, then Joy Behar should also be fired.
It seems curious that the media notices an increase in “white nationalism” and doesn’t notice their own increased attacks on whites. It’s hard to come together when you are constantly under assault. I don’t think it is about race at all, it is about a group of people tired of being unjustly blamed for every ill in the world. Whites are not being drawn together because they are white, they are forced together because they are the focus of so much ill will.
Private businesses can be as fair or unfair as they wish – but they shouldn’t be surprised when people notice.
It should be pointed out that ABC didn’t decide merely to end Barr’s show yesterday. It also ended the employment of every actor on that show and every crew member, something that tends to get ignored when TV shows are ended.
Double standard?
Robby Soave at least is consistent:
Huge ratings weren’t enough to save the rebooted Roseanne, which was formally cancelled by ABC on Tuesday after star Roseanne Barr described former Obama administration aide Valerie Jarrett as if “the Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby” on Twitter.
It was a vile thing to say, though no one has any right to be surprised that Barr said it. The notoriously pro-Trump comedian—who is otherwise something of an ardent leftist—has a long history of offensive, nonsensical utterances. She once said Wall Street bankers should be executed via guillotine, has flirted with 9/11 trutherism, and claimed the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag operation. She doxed George Zimmerman’s parents, and suggested people should go to their homes unless Zimmerman was arrested for killing Trayvon Martin. In March 2018, she falsely accused Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg of making a Nazi salute; it was Roseanne herself, of course, who posed as Adolf Hitler for a satirical magazine in 2009, holding a tray of overbaked gingerbread men labelled “burnt Jew cookies.”
Roseanne is crazy, and her disgusting remark about Jarrett is perfectly in character. No one is allowed to pretend that Roseanne finally went too far, or some such nonsense: the Jarrett comment—for which she swiftly apologized, to no avail—is hardly more offensive than any number of things she has said over the years. If people who say very bad things do not deserve to work in television, then Roseanne should never have been rebooted in the first place.
The only thing that’s different this time is this: social media turns up the volume on offensive statements, and provides a perfect platform to pillory the perpetrator into submission. The network executives at ABC had to watch the Twitter villagers reaching for their pitchforks in real time, and feel the pressure to respond.
There’s nothing technically wrong with this: ABC can end any of its shows, prematurely or not, for any reason. Roseanne doesn’t have a First Amendment right to a platform on television, and if outraged liberals can persuade her bosses to jettison her, more power to them.
And yet I think we ought to be a little worried about what will come of this. Roseanne was by some accounts an interesting show that offered insights into the kind of Trump-voting working class American family that doesn’t often grace our TV screens. “Like most of us, they live, and live through, their differences, an accomplishment the show’s more ideological critics don’t seem to give people much credit for,” wrote Reason‘s Scott Shackford in a review of the show for the July issue of Reason.
Can a person find Roseanne interesting without endorsing Roseanne the person? If so, why was that possible yesterday, but not today—given that nothing about Roseanne’s nature has fundamentally changed?
Many conservatives are already criticizing what they will undoubtedly view as ABC’s capitulation to political-correctness-run-amok, and it’s easy to see how this could play directly into the right’s narrative that the left is determined to silence everybody who says the wrong thing. In response to left-of-center pundit Toure calling on ABC to address the fact that “millions are hurt, offended, and traumatized by Roseanne’s racist comments,” conservative commentator Jesse Kelly tweeted the following:
REMINDER:
Liberals will come for your career for wrong-think. People on the Right have had about enough of it and will start returning the favor.But conservatives are already coming for people’s livelihoods. Not even a week has passed since the NFL caved to pressure from conservative viewers—as well as the president himself—and banned players from kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police violence.
And that’s the problem. Conservatives won’t watch football unless all the players comport themselves perfectly, rigidly adhering to the right’s version of patriotic correctness. How dare you disrespect the flag, they say. Liberals don’t think a television show should continue to exist if somebody central to its production does or says something super bad. How dare you traumatize our marginalized communities, they say.
This race to find more things to be offended about and more reasons to start lynch mobs doesn’t seem particularly healthy for the fabric of American society, especially if right and left are determined to one-up each other on the outrage front. Many media companies will attempt to appease viewers on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and their output will be that much less interesting. I won’t particularly miss Roseanne, but I do miss being able to appreciate a television show, book, or work of art, even if I thought the artist was a lunatic.
I have sad news to report. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett will not be running for governor this year. “I hope to serve as mayor for many years to come, to continue to advance Milwaukee forward,” Barrett told WisPolitics on Tuesday. “I’ve still got the fire in the belly, and I wake up every day ready to roll up my sleeves to get to work.”
As my friend Brian Fraley noted, “In related news, the odds of him becoming governor did not change with this announcement.”
This leaves the Democrats with ten possible candidates for governor speaking at their convention next weekend in Oshkosh. If you don’t think it’s a problem for Democrats, consider that it’s going to be really hard for one of the candidates to stand out from the pack. We’re more likely going to see headlines like, “Democrats say they would repeal Act 10 if they unseat Gov. Scott Walker.”
The whole Barrett-for-governor trial balloon was about the weakness of the Democratic field. If the Democrats had a strong challenger to Governor Scott Walker, Barrett would never have considered entering the race to risk losing to Walker a third time. When the Democratic field is so weak that someone like former state Rep. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) enters the race because she had just as much money as the other Democratic candidates, that’s not a good sign for the party.
That doesn’t mean that Walker is unbeatable. This should be a Democratic year, and Walker is vulnerable, especially if Republicans take his re-election for granted.
In 1992, Democrats fielded a weak group of candidates for President of the United States against, President George H. W. Bush, who was presiding over a recovering economy after a small recession, had led the country in the first Iraq War and had led the country during an invasion of Panama. The Democrats nominated a draft-dodging, womanizing, pot-smoking governor from the corrupt politics of Arkansas out of a field of weak candidates while Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo of New York sat out the race.
President Bill Clinton served two terms and, despite being impeached in the House of Representatives, almost got his wife elected president, too. His daughter is being groomed as Democratic royalty.
The Democratic candidates for governor may look like an angry mob of political pygmies, but Republicans cannot underestimate the Democrats’ motivation to vote out Walker.
Two more Beatles anniversaries today: “Love Me Do” hit number one in 1964 …
… four years before the Beatles started work on their only double album. Perhaps that work was so hard that they couldn’t think of a more original title than: “The Beatles.” You may know it better, however, as “the White Album”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 