In case you thought Donald Trump was becoming presidentialish since his election Nov. 8, well, the New York Post reports:
Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.
“It was like a f–ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.
“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.
“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.
A second source confirmed the fireworks.
“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.
“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”
The stunned reporters tried to get a word in edgewise to discuss access to a Trump Administration.
“[CBS Good Morning co-host Gayle] King did not stand up, but asked some question, ‘How do you propose we the media work with you?’ Chuck Todd asked some pretty pointed questions. David Muir asked ‘How are you going to cope living in DC while your family is in NYC? It was a horrible meeting.”
Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway told reporters the gathering went well.
“Excellent meetings with the top executives of the major networks,” she said during a gaggle in the lobby of Trump Tower. “Pretty unprecedented meeting we put together in two days.”
The meeting was off the record, meaning the participants agreed not to talk about the substance of the conversations.
The hour-long session included top execs from network and cable news channels. Among the attendees were NBC’s Deborah Turness, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd, ABC’s James Goldston, George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and Martha Raddatz,
Also, CBS’ Norah O’Donnell John Dickerson, Charlie Rose, Christopher Isham and King, Fox News’ Bill Shine, Jack Abernethy, Jay Wallace, Suzanne Scott, MSNBC’s Phil Griffin and CNN’s Jeff Zucker and Erin Burnett.
Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, plans to meet with Trump Tuesday.
There was no immediate comment from the Trump Team.
It says something, but nothing very good, that someone set up that meeting. The anchors’ presence seems to infer they feel they did something wrong, doesn’t it? (And just in case you thought Trump was an outsider, obviously he’s not.) The meeting looks like network news executives and anchors decided they had to suck up to the new guy.
Certainly Trump’s supporters could not care less about how Trump treats the evil media. People who don’t support Trump but hate the media probably look at it as two groups who deserve each other.
Of course, the media will double down on its efforts to speak (their version of) truth to power, and channel their inner Woodward and Bernstein in an effort to bring down Trump (or so they think). The only thing that will be interesting to watch is to see how Trump figures out to go over the media and speak to his supporters and, one hopes, the rest of us.
I would not have gone to that meeting. (I wasn’t invited, and I was busy anyway.) Reporters who are doing their jobs should have an arm’s-length relationship with the people they cover. Trump’s supporters are going to give the media no credit for doing their jobs anyway, and neither will most Republicans, most likely. (If you’re in my line of work to be liked, to quote someone about having friends in Washington, D.C., get a dog, who will always be happy to see you.)
It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.
But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.
One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.
But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)
When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?
This campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and minorities at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an extraordinary social achievement — and has even changed, quite literally, the face of right-wing media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham have gained prominence. But it also appears to have encouraged the assumption, especially among younger journalists and editors, that simply by focusing on identity they have done their jobs.
Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for example, the laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X to do Y” — is told and retold. Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own. No major news outlet in Europe would think of adopting such a focus.
But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.
The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.
Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.
We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)
Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history. A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote. A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion. And it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.
Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. The hall was full of representatives from local chapters — men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt’s speech. As I looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear — freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for “everyone in the world” — I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are.
I wrote Thursday about announcing a state football championship game, to which a friend wrote:
I would appreciate it if you could send in some of your game tapes to FOX as Joe Buck desperately needs to be replaced. What a great announcer story. Big guy from small conference in middle America hits the big time! Almost as good as the game itself.
Independent of the fact that Fox shows no inclination to replace Buck, to think Fox would replace Buck with a part-timer who has never done network TV at any level is most kind but most unlikely. I do maintain, however, that Fox and CBS should hire announcers for each team, and then using the Second Audio Program allow viewers to choose their announcers instead of being stuck with whoever Fox assigns, similar to what TBS has done with NCAA Final Four games.
… on the day Bo Diddley made his first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show. Diddley’s first appearance was his last because, instead of playing “Sixteen Tons” (which was a Tennessee Ernie Ford song) Diddley played “Bo Diddley”:
The number one single today in 1965 could be said to be music to, or in, your ears:
The Supremes became the first all-girl group with a British number-one single today in 1964:
The Supremes had our number one single two years later:
The number one album today in 1994 was Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged in New York” …
… on the same day that David Crosby had a liver transplant to replace the original that was ruined by hepatitis C and considerable drug and alcohol use:
Mrs. Presteblog and I went to the final UW football game in 1995, a 3-3 tie with Illinois.
Little did we realize (or too cold to appreciate) we were watching history in the making. That was the final tie in college football.
Adam Rittenburg describes the details of a game as dull as the score would lead you to believe:
The sport introduced overtime in the 1995 postseason and for all games in 1996, which meant Illinois-Wisconsin, the regular-season finale, would become the final deadlocked collegiate contest.
Some of college football’s most famous games ended in ties, including the 1966 Notre Dame-Michigan State clash, billed as the “Game of the Century.” Other notable ties include the 1946 Army-Navy contest and the 1973 Ohio State-Michigan game, which led to a controversial vote about the Big Ten’s Rose Bowl participant.
The Illinois-Wisconsin tie, meanwhile, was in a different category.
“It generated nothing,” Lisheron said. “It was two feckless teams going back and forth. I’ve been at games where Wisconsin has taken it on the chin, but I’ve never been to a worse football game because nothing happened. Neither team moved!”
Those on the field shared the sentiment.
“The game itself it’s probably one of those everybody-wants-to-forget-it games,” Wisconsin offensive lineman Chris McIntosh said. “Did anybody leave that day happy?”
Despite the general dullness, the game featured more subplots than points.
This is the story of The Last Tie.
Bevell’s last stand
Darrell Bevell deserved a better sendoff. He had been the face of Wisconsin’s football renaissance, coming to Madison by way of Northern Arizona University and a two-year Mormon mission in Cleveland. In 1993, he set team records for pass yards (2,390) and pass touchdowns (19) in leading Wisconsin to its first Big Ten title and Rose Bowl appearance in 31 years.
But Wisconsin was 4-5-1 — yes, the Badgers tied Stanford earlier that season — entering Bevell’s senior day. He didn’t make it to end of the game.
Wisconsin’s uncharacteristically inconsistent run game and young and mediocre offensive line left Bevell exposed to a ferocious Illinois defense, led by Kevin Hardy and Simeon Rice, the Nos. 2 and 3 overall selections in the 1996 NFL draft.
“Bevell got knocked all over the stadium,” recalled longtime Wisconsin broadcaster Matt Lepay. “He kept getting up. I was thinking, ‘Dude, get off the field.’”
Illinois didn’t record a sack in the first half but piled up hits on Bevell. One in particular, delivered by Rice and Hardy on a pass, deposited Bevell on his side, leaving him with terrible back pain.
“Darrell would play through anything,” Badgers offensive tackle Jerry Wunsch said.
Bevell pushed forward. It was senior day. His parents were in the stands. His abdomen ached at halftime, but the trainers couldn’t tell him the exact cause.
With three minutes left in the game, the pain had peaked and Bevell couldn’t even bark the cadence. He hobbled off the field and went to the locker room on a golf cart. Before taking X-rays, he used the restroom and urinated blood.
“I still had my cleats on and I was looking at this little X-ray tech,” said Bevell, now the Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator. “I remember saying, ‘I’m going, I’m going.’ I just felt it. I ended up passing out.”
An ambulance transported Bevell to University Hospital, where he entered intensive care. The diagnosis: a lacerated kidney. His abdomen had filled with blood until it “couldn’t bleed anymore,” he said.
Had the blood gone through the lining in Bevell’s abdomen and into his legs, he would have needed surgery.
“I was real fortunate,” he said.
After reaching the hospital, Bevell immediately wanted to know whether Wisconsin had won the game. That’s when he heard about the tie.
“It sucks, it sucks,” he said. “You don’t feel like you win or lost. It’s like, ‘What did we do?’ There’s no credit either way.”
Illini bowled over
A win over would have made Illinois bowl eligible, but it wouldn’t have guaranteed a spot. Athletic director Ron Guenther had spent the days before the game furiously brokering bowl options. He proposed a scenario: if Illinois and Iowa won their last games and Michigan State lost its finale, Iowa would go to the Sun Bowl, Michigan State to the Liberty Bowl and Illinois to the Independence Bowl. Illinois had played East Carolina in the Liberty Bowl the previous year, and organizers didn’t want a rematch.
But MSU coach Nick Saban didn’t want the Liberty Bowl, either, as the school hadn’t enjoyed its experience there two years earlier. If Michigan State had won its last game, it would have gone to the Sun Bowl, and Iowa would have accepted the Liberty Bowl, freeing up the Independence Bowl for Illinois. But a Spartans loss meant they would go to the Independence or Liberty, and they wanted Shreveport.
After a week of talking with bowl officials, television networks and schools, Guenther told the Chicago Tribune that Illinois’ bowl hopes were “on life support” entering the Wisconsin game. Guenther’s big selling point remained the Chicago TV market.
“I remember being in the press box with these guys who had flown in from the Independence Bowl,” Guenther said. “I had one of our donors with us, and we came down to stand on the sideline.”
They stood there in the final minute as Illinois drove to the Wisconsin 36-yard line. The Illini lined up for a 54-yard field-goal attempt that, if successful, would almost surely win the game.
Guenther watched the ball flip toward the goal posts, right on line. It fell a few feet shy of the crossbar.
“In my opinion, it’s worse than a loss,” Guenther said.
The AD went to the locker room afterward, as he always does. But he had no idea what to say. The bowl reps? They just left.
“We knew 6-5 was going to put us in [a bowl],” Hardy said. “There’s a bit of emptiness. You didn’t win, you didn’t lose, but the game is over. You’re looking at the scoreboard and you’re like, ‘3-3, that’s ridiculous.’ This is our last game playing for Illinois. It’s like, ‘What’s going on now?’ I do remember being in the locker room and some guys were wondering, ‘Do we still have a chance?’
“We didn’t have a losing season, but we didn’t have a winning season, either.”
‘Maybe a foot short’
The plaque still hangs on Bret Scheuplein’s wall at his home in Florida.
It reads:
AT&T Long Distance Award
Brett (sic) Scheuplein, Illinois
Longest Field Goal
November 25, 1995
Perhaps the ultimate irony of The Last Tie is that it featured the longest made field goal in college football that week, a 51-yarder Scheuplein converted midway through the fourth quarter. The kick turned out to be Scheuplein’s career long and earned him a national honor.
It was a cool day, 40 degrees at kickoff, but not overly windy or frigid for Wisconsin in late November. Scheuplein kept a hunting boot over his right foot to keep it warm and nearly forgot to remove it before kicking the 51-yarder.
But it was his second attempt, the 54-yarder in the final minute, which lingers.
“It was actually a very good kick,” Illinois punter Brett Larsen recalled. “He hit it well. I don’t remember what that wind was doing, but as soon as he hit it, I think he thought it was good. If I remember right, he kind of put his hands in the air, like, ‘Yeah, that’s good.’ And then it just fell short. It was like a yard short or a half-yard short, right in front of the crossbar.”
Scheuplein thought he had it, until he didn’t.
“No one was hard on me,” he said. “It wasn’t like I missed a 25-yarder. They knew it was a long shot. But it’s the ones you miss, those are the ones that stick with you, especially when they’re that close.
“As a kicker, you can’t beat yourself up too much. But that one stung.”
Swan song for a man in stripes
Wisconsin-Illinois was college football’s last tie game, but for the Big Ten officiating crew at Camp Randall Stadium, it also marked the final game for J.W. Sanders, the field judge that day. Sanders had started officiating Big Ten games in 1975 before moving to the NFL for most of the 1980s. He returned to the college game for his final few seasons on the field.
Referee Dick Honig gathered his crew for dinner in downtown Madison the day before the Wisconsin-Illinois game. The crew then returned to the InnTowner Madison, a few blocks west of the stadium, for their pregame meeting.
That night, line judge John Kouris read a passage he had written for Sanders to the crew.
An excerpt:
When we step unto a torrid stadium floor in late August or stand tall in the November snow, wind and rain amidst the catcalls and epithets, we are not officiating a college football game. We are instead standing at the edge of time and looking into eternity. And for those precious moments when we are sprinting down the sidelines with wide receivers less than half our age or jumping into skirmishes with young men twice our size, we are quenching our collective thirst with short sips from the fountain of youth.
We are the September winds sweeping across Midwestern towns — Coal City, Cloverdale, Newton, Delphi — and hosts upon hosts of silo-filled, steeple-attended villages. We are the parched breath of autumn and the harbinger of summer’s death.
Kouris said officials often got on one another for “showing a sensitive side,” but Sanders appreciated the tribute.
“J.W. was a very well-respected official,” Kouris recalled. “He was always leading clinics and helping those of us wanting to get to the Big Ten. He was a prince of a guy.”
The officials had reviewed overtime rules during their clinic before the 1995 season. After the game, Kouris approached Honig.
“If this game was next year, we’d still be playing,” he said. “We’d be freezing our ass off a lot longer.”
Hollow in history
When the game ended, those involved didn’t give much thought to their involvement in a small piece of college football history.
Even as they reflect on the game more than two decades later, the feelings aren’t overly fond.
Wisconsin offensive tackle Jerry Wunsch: We just did all this work, blood, sweat and tears, people broke bones and no one got anything. It feels like a loss because you didn’t win. The result is so deflating, actually.
Illinois linebacker Kevin Hardy: It’s not one of those situations we could have done anything different. There wasn’t that, ‘Oh no, it can’t end like this!’ But in hindsight, we would have liked to be able to decide it.
Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez: It was just blah. You feel like nothing was accomplished. So the game’s over, you don’t win, you don’t lose, you can’t celebrate. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a fan in that stadium.
Illinois punter Brett Larsen: There’s something to be said for history. That does make it intriguing, especially Notre Dame-Michigan State [in 1966], some of those games. But I’m definitely in favor of overtime rules and giving somebody a chance to win.
Wisconsin linebacker Tarek Saleh: Many years later, it’s OK to talk about. I wouldn’t want to advertise it, especially when I was 22 years old. Now it’s hey, we were part of something. You would rather have won the game and moved on, but it’s fine to be mentioned, somebody remembers you for something. So it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Well, neither are ties, but having witnessed and announced several, they’re just unsatisfying. It’s as if the game was never played at all. I refer overtime, even if my team loses in overtime.
Our retired pastor was expert at weaving more contemporary literature into his sermons, such as …
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
That whole poem (Yeats’ “The Second Coming”) has been on my mind reading recent posts from my friends on the left and the right.
On any number of issues I have little hope that our president-elect will make good decisions.
Yet. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” After years of stigmatizing the “deplorables’” responses as –phobic, etc., was not a reaction to be expected?
So, with last Sunday’s lessons (Isaiah 65:17ff etc.) I ended up in my sermon first focusing on “Your kingdom come” and then on “Forgive us our sins,” recalling Ben Sira 28:2-4:
Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done,
and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray.
Does anyone harbor anger against another,
and expect healing from the Lord?
If one has no mercy toward another like himself,
can he then seek pardon for his own sins?
Deep breath. And perhaps less attention to that very large speck in my neighbor’s eye.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 