“Criticism of the News Media Takes On a More Sinister Tone,” reads the headline of Jim Rutenberg’s latest New York Times column. “It sure does get exhausting working for the global corporate media conspiracy,” he begins, soon stopping himself: “I probably shouldn’t joke.”
Well, no harm done in that regard! But then Rutenberg strikes a serious, and aggrieved, note:
The anger being directed at the news media has become dangerous enough that some news organizations are providing security for staff members covering Trump rallies. “Someone’s going to get hurt” has become a common refrain in American newsrooms.
The reader who alerted us to Rutenberg’s column suggests in an email that it takes some chutzpah for him to complain about “anger being directed at the news media.”
After all, it was Rutenberg who in August urged news reporters and editors “to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century” and become “oppositional” against Trump, whom he described as “a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies.” As we noted last week, the Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, has since acknowledged Rutenberg’s August column reflects the editorial policy of the Times newsroom.
One critic observed that if journalists followed Rutenberg’s advice, it “will only serve to worsen [Trump supporters’] already dim view of the news media.” That critic was Rutenberg himself, in the same column. So he can’t claim to be surprised by the intensified anger.
What’s somewhat surprising about his new column, though, is that it eventually gets around to acknowledging that the other side has a point:
[The charge of media bias] is resonating with a large portion of the American electorate. There are many reasons, some of which should cause the news media to make good on its promises to examine its own disconnect from the cross section of Americans whose support for Mr. Trump it never saw coming.
How biased are the media? Rutenberg gets no more specific than this: “The answer, as I see it, is more than they’ll admit to themselves and less than conservatives claim.” That’s not even specific enough to be a middle-ground fallacy: He’s saying media bias ranks somewhere between 1 and 9 on a scale of 0 to 10.
Rutenberg acknowledges that “there . . . tends to be a shared sense of noble mission across the news media that can preclude journalists from questioning their own potential biases.” Again, this is a bit rich coming just two months after Rutenberg’s call for an “oppositional” approach to covering his disfavored candidate. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point:“The people who run American journalism, and who staff the newsrooms, think of themselves as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and, culturally speaking, on the right side of history,” Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, told me. …
As far as he’s concerned, mainstream journalists are “interested in every kind of diversity, except the kind that would challenge their own prejudices.” Those include, “bigotry against conservative religion, bigotry against rural folks and bigotry against working-class and poor white people.”Dreher’s operative definition of media bias is identical to Jim Roberts’s ostensive one. On Sunday Roberts, a former Times assistant managing editor, tweeted: “Yes. The media is biased. Biased against hatred, sexism, racism, incompetence, belligerence, inequality, To [sic] name a few.” Roberts left the Times in 2013, but surely a lot of like-minded people stayed behind in the newsroom.
The media, and not just the Times, have more or less followed Rutenberg’s August advice and become openly oppositional toward Trump—though it would be more accurate to say the parade was already under way when Rutenberg stepped to the front and took on the role of leader. In any case, it raises the question: What next?
That is, assuming Trump loses, do journalists continue in their role as partisans for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, or do they undertake some sort of a correction? Rutenberg urges the latter approach:
American newsrooms will be making a big mistake—and missing a huge continuing story—if they fail to adjust their coverage to better illuminate the concerns of Mr. Trump’s supporters well beyond Election Day.
Doing so might begin to build up trust in the news media, which the Gallup Organization reported as hitting a new low in September.Color us skeptical. Sure, journalistic partisanship will probably not have as sharp an edge in the immediate aftermath of a Trump defeat as in the weeks and months leading up to it. But that’s just a matter of regression toward the mean.
Consider: After urging an adjustment in coverage (after the election, tellingly), Rutenberg himself immediately calls in addition for “a far more assertive defense from the news media” against “false and misleading political-style attacks that too often are mixed in with the valid criticism.”
That’s not objectionable in itself, and we’d agree with him that some criticism of the media is bogus and unjustified. But if, as Rutenberg acknowledges, journalists have a problem with political bias, why should we expect them to be able to distinguish between “false and misleading political-style attacks” on the one hand and “valid criticism” on the other? To pick on Jim Roberts, who certainly deserves it, he no doubt thought of his tweet as an assertive defense against a misleading political-style attack.
Anyway, it’s a lot easier to yield to your baser instincts, as Rutenberg urged journalists to do in August, than to develop discipline, as he now calls for. The best indication of that is that unlike his August column, this week’s did not appear on the front page.
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No comments on After Nov. 8, media edition
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Ripon College Prof. Brian Smith:
Glenn Beck said recently in an interview on “Meet the Press” that he was gravely concerned about whether the new president could govern effectively. How can we all come together, he asked, after such a bitter and divisive election?
The divisiveness has gotten even more extreme due to recent claims by several women that they were molested by Donald Trump, and in light of the Wikki leaks of purported emails by Hilary Clinton indicating that what candidates say in private may be different from their public positions.
Will 40% of the electorate whose candidate loses say, “That is not my president”? Will the Congress continue to be gridlocked no matter how many seats change hands? Will representatives in the losing party announce from the beginning that they will fight to make the winner a one-term president and do all they can to block his or her agenda before even considering it?
The percentage won’t be 40 percent, it will be more than half. Hillary Clinton seems unlikely to get half of the popular vote. (The rest being Hillary’s “deplorables” and others.) Donald Trump certainly will not get half of the popular vote. So more than half of the electorate will be disenfranchised after Nov. 8. And as for the losing party, their purpose to defeat the winner will be just like Republicans in 2009, Democrats in 2001, Republicans in 1993, Democrats in 1981, Republicans in 1977 … you get the picture. Since the first purpose of politics is to win, and politics is a zero-sum game, Smith’s previous paragraphi is a seriously naïve point of view.
This divisiveness has very serious implications for the future of the nation. Many commentators have not been addressing this concern in the heat of a closely contested and nasty campaign, but it is a very critical question with far more lasting effects than who wins on Nov. 8.
When asked at the end of his remarks what was the solution, Beck responded by saying reconciliation among citizens, beginning at the local level.
Here is where the moral and religious leaders of the country have a crucial role to play over the next several weeks, before and after the election. They have the moral stature to speak credibly to our “better angels” and to remind us that we all are citizens of the same country with a responsibility to come together and treat one another with respect.
Respect, of course, is a two-way street. Opponents of Barack Obama can cite a long list of things that have gotten worse in this country since Obama took office, including Obama’s rhetoric against his political opponents. Hillary has doubled down on this (“deplorables”?), and has not apologized for anything she’s said and done. Trump has done the same thing to his political opponents, including those within his supposed own party. Exactly how do you get past that — an apology? Saying you really didn’t mean it?
Beyond the rhetoric, the Democrats and Republicans (sometimes but not always including Trump) can’t even agree on what the problems are (for instance, police shootings), and if you can’t agree on the problems you’re wasting breath talking about solutions.
Some clergy already have taken sides in the partisan struggle, appearing at party conventions or endorsing particular candidates at rallies. Others participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday recently, calling for an end on IRS restrictions on clergy from endorsing candidates without losing tax exempt status for their churches.
No matter what one thinks of these tactics, there is a larger and more important role for religious leaders of all faiths to play at this critical time. They need to speak to the deeper moral bonds we as a people share with one another and that protect the vitality of our republic.
The Founding Fathers wanted a separation of church and state. They also wanted religion to play an important role in educating citizens with a moral conscience so that they could work for common goals in society. Without that foundation, they knew the new republic would not survive.
We are at a critical moment in our history. Some feel we have not been this divided politically since the eve of the Civil War. It may not be that dire, but many certainly have lost almost total respect for those who disagree with them politically, and this bodes harm for effective government after the election.
Again, respect is a two-way street. Hillary’s “deplorables” were described by Obama eight years before as “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Why not a Pulpit of Reconciliation weekend in the next few weeks in which clergy of all faiths remind us that we have far more in common than what divides us and that respectful dialogue is needed to keep us together as we face a challenging future?
This is not a violation of the clergy’s role. It is fulfilling clergy’s responsibility to the nation as moral leaders, a role our Founding Fathers expected of them.
Scripture teaches us, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). Let us hear from religious leaders some vision right now, some hope for political reconciliation.
Ironically, both major candidates for president are not particularly religious. That should make a bigger difference to Republicans than Democrats.
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We begin with one of the stranger episodes of live radio, Arthur Godfrey’s on-air firing of one of his singers today in 1953:
The number one song today in 1959 was customized for sales in 28 markets, including Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Pittsburgh and San Francisco:
The number one British album today in 1967 was not the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; it was the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” two years after the movie was released, on the soundtracks’ 137th week on the charts:
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You know what we need right now? A trip to the mall, not even to buy, but to observe and learn. See how people engage with each other. Observe how they coordinate their movements in the public spaces without direction. Appreciate the kindness that salespeople show for customers whom they do not know, and how this ethos of mannerly sociability extends out to the hallways and the entire space. Consider the complexities of production that make all of this available to you without mandates or impositions.
Or perhaps we need a walk in the park while playing Pokemon GO, meeting new people and laughing with them. It’s fascinating how the mobile app creates a digital reality that sits atop the real one, and how we can all experience this technological marvel together. Strangers are given an excuse to speak and get to know each other.
Really, just any visit to an awesome commercial center, teeming with life and full of human diversity, would be palliative. Or maybe it is a visit to a superstore to observe the products, the service, energy, the benevolence, of the commercial space. We can meet people, encounter their humanity, revel in the beauty and bounty of human life. Or it could be your local watering hole with its diverse cast of characters and complicated lives that elude political characterization.
Also thrilling is to attend a concert and see how the arts and music can serve as a soundtrack to the building of community feeling. With public performance, there are no immigration restrictions to the category of “fan.” We can sing, clap, and dance to shared experience, and everyone is invited in.
And while in these places, we need to reflect on the meaning of the existence of these spaces and what they reveal about ourselves and our communities. Here you will see something wonderful, invigorating, thrilling, magical: human beings, with all our imperfections and foibles, can get along. We can provide value to each other and find value in each other. We can cooperate to our mutual betterment.
These spaces are all around us. And here politics don’t exist, mercifully. No one will scream at you or threaten you for failing to back the right candidate or for holding the wrong ideology or being part of the wrong demographic or religion. Here we can rediscover the humanity in us all and the universal longing for free and flourishing lives.
In this extremely strange election year, escaping the roiling antagonism and duplicity of politics, and finding instead the evidence all around us that we can get along, however imperfectly, might actually be essential for a healthy outlook on life.
Politics Makes a Mess of Our Minds
Some startling new evidence has emerged about the effect of this year’s election on the psychological well being of the US population. The American Psychological Association has released an early report on its annual survey and found that more than half the population reports being seriously stressed, anxious, alarmed, depressed, and even frightened by the election. Essentially, the constant coverage, dominating the news every minute of every day, is freaking people out.
I totally get this. I’ve felt it – some nagging sense that things are not quite right, that the lights in the room are dimming, that life is not quite as hopeful and wonderful as it usually is.
I’ve regarded this as my own fault; for the first time I’ve followed this election very closely. I made this awful bed and now I’m lying in it. The message that politics beats into our heads hourly is that your neighbor might be your enemy, and that the realization of your values requires the crushing of someone else’s.
That’s a terrible model of human engagement to accept as the only reality. It is demoralizing, and I’ve felt it this year more than ever. But everyone I know says the same thing, even those who are trying their best to tune it out. Now we have evidence that vast numbers are affected. It’s one thing for politics to mess up the world around us, but it’s a real tragedy if we let politics mess up our minds, spirits, and lives.
Why Is this Happening?
Carl von Clausewitz is believed to have said that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” It may be more accurate to say that politics is the continuation of warfare by other means. There are winners who get the power and what comes with it, and losers who forfeit power and pay. This isn’t like business competition in which my win only affects your future revenue stream. In politics, my win comes at your expense through the violence of state action. That’s what gives this moment prescience.
We all have some sense, whether true or not, that so much is at stake. Then you look at the epic unpopularity of the candidates and it is truly amazing. If the Republican weren’t running, the Democrat would be the most despised candidate for the presidency in American history. Then you add to that the beyond-belief loathing of the GOP candidate and you really do gain a sense of the seeming hopelessness of it all.
And talk about divisive! Look at these angry rallies, the screaming for destruction of the enemy. And this has spilled over to social media. We are all losing friends. People we used to hang out with we no longer speak to. Whole population groups are feeling afraid of what’s coming – and this is true of everyone no matter their race, religion, or gender. Predictions of the coming doom are everywhere around us.
And there is a sense in which they are all correct. As Bastiat explained, the state turns people against each other, shattering the harmony of interests that normally characterizes human life. Watching the state’s political gears in motion is an ongoing exhibition of low-grade warfare that seems to demand that we fight or take cover. The shrillest voices, the meanest temperaments, and the most amoral plotters are the ones who dominate, while virtues such as wisdom, charity, and justice are blotted out.
Is it any wonder that this is not exactly uplifting of the human spirit?
The Lessons
What if the whole of life worked like the political sector? It would be unrelenting misery, with no escape, ever. As it is, this is not the case. We should be thankful for it, and remember that the thing that makes life wonderful, beautiful, and loving is not crushing your enemy with a political weapon but rather the gains that come from turning would-be enemies into friends in an environment of freedom.
In these environments, we have the opportunity to discover a different model of human engagement. By letting people choose, innovate, associate, and cooperate – to do anything peaceful – we discover proof that human beings can self-organize. We can get along. We can build wealth. We can create institutions that reward goodness, charity, justice, and decency. We can serve ourselves and others at the same time.
A slogan passed around some years ago in academic circles was that “the personal is the political.” That sounds like hell on earth. The slogan should be flipped and serve as a warning to all of us: whatever you politicize will eventually invade your personal life. We should not allow this to happen. The less that life is mediated by political institutions, the more the spontaneous and value-creating impulses in our nature come to the fore.
I’m convinced that we all want this. We don’t really want to live amidst anger or revel in the destruction of our enemies. Hate is not a sustainable frame of mind. We intuitively understand that when we use politics to hurt our neighbor, we are also hurting ourselves. We are being dragged down instead of being lifted up.
We owe the good life to the remaining liberties we have to discover the possibility of genuine human community all around us. Without liberty, the world would sink into a pit of mutual recrimination and violence. Human beings thrive in the absence of politicization. Discovering that great truth is one way to avoid the mire into which the politics of our time seeks to plunge us.
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The number one song today in 1969:
Britain’s number one single today in 1979 probably would have gotten no American notice had it not been for the beginning of MTV a year later:
The number one album today in 1986 was Huey Lewis and the News’ “Fore”:
The City of Los Angeles declared today in 1990 “Rocky Horror Picture Show Day” in honor of the movie’s 15th anniversary, so …
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The group in the headline includes neither myself nor Kimberley Strassel, who writes:
If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women.
But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.
It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.
Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.” …
A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”
Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot.
A senior FBI official involved with the Clinton investigation told Fox News this week that the “vast majority” of career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”
The Obama administration—the federal government, supported by tax dollars—was working as an extension of the Clinton campaign. The State Department coordinated with her staff in responding to the email scandal, and the Justice Department kept her team informed about developments in the court case.
Worse, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show, took special care of donors to the Clinton Foundation. In a series of 2010 emails, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton asked a foundation official to let her know which groups offering assistance with the Haitian earthquake relief were “FOB” (Friends of Bill) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs). Those who made the cut appear to have been teed up for contracts. Those who weren’t? Routed to a standard government website.
The leaks show that the foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and money. The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner, suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation official wrote: “Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds crazy to do.”
The entire progressive apparatus—the Clinton campaign and boosters at the Center for American Progress—appears to view voters as stupid and tiresome, segregated into groups that must either be cajoled into support or demeaned into silence. We read that Republicans are attracted to Catholicism’s “severely backwards gender relations” and only join the faith to “sound sophisticated”; that Democratic leaders such as Bill Richardson are “needy Latinos”; that Bernie Sanders supporters are “self-righteous”; that the only people who watch Miss America “are from the confederacy”; and that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is “a terrorist.”
The leaks also show that the press is in Mrs. Clinton’s pocket. Donna Brazile, a former Clinton staffer and a TV pundit, sent the exact wording of a coming CNN town hall question to the campaign in advance of the event. Other media allowed the Clinton camp to veto which quotes they used from interviews, worked to maximize her press events and offered campaign advice.
Mrs. Clinton has been exposed to have no core, to be someone who constantly changes her position to maximize political gain. Leaked speeches prove that she has two positions (public and private) on banks; two positions on the wealthy; two positions on borders; two positions on energy. Her team had endless discussions about what positions she should adopt to appease “the Red Army”—i.e. “the base of the Democratic Party.”
Voters might not know any of this, because while both presidential candidates have plenty to answer for, the press has focused solely on taking out Mr. Trump. And the press is doing a diligent job of it.
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NBC News went to Brookfield Thursday:
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday adamantly ignored the controversy dogging Republican nominee Donald Trump and insisted his party is “running on ideas” in a speech that laid out the GOP policy agenda.
“Not much going on these days, so there is not much to talk about,” Ryan joked at the top of his address to the Waukesha County Business Alliance luncheon.
“We actually are running on ideas in this election,” he added. “You would never know it would you? Guess what? There is an actual choice between two different schools of thought, two different philosophies, two different agendas, before us in this country, but you wouldn’t know it if you turn on the computer or the TV would you?”
Ryan told the crowd he would “take a break from all the mud slinging and the mess that is out there on TV and introduce you to some ideas and some solutions,” and in his speech, Ryan did just that, laying out the bundle of tax, business and regulation reforms that make up the House GOP’s “Better Way” policy agenda.
Though the program for the event stated Ryan would take questions from the crowd, he left without doing so, after speaking for just 20 minutes.
It was a stark contrast with the speech the Republican nominee was giving at the same time, hundreds of miles away in Florida. In front of a crowd of thousands, Trump railed on “the corrupt establishment” and attacked the women that have accused him of assault, continuing the freewheeling, burn-it-down style and message he’s unleashed on the trail over the past week.
But Ryan’s speech Thursday meshed with his announcement on a Monday conference call with House Republicans that he was all but abandoning Trump to focus exclusively on electing downballot Republicans. His decision came in the wake of the release of a taped 2005 conversation in which Trump bragged about groping women against their will, comments that sparked an exodus of support from prominent Republicans and calls for the GOP nominee to drop out.
The Speaker is still voting for Trump, but he told lawmakers he wouldn’t campaign with or defend Trump for the rest of the election. And on Thursday, it was clear his plan is to run his own campaign as the GOP standard-bearer, to offer a positive, issue-oriented vision of the Republican Party for voters turned off by the vitriol at the top of the ticket.
“This is the agenda we are running on in Congress, but you wouldn’t know about it would ya?” Ryan acknowledged.
He went on to instruct the crowd to “forget about the buzz of the day and forget about the, what twitter storm is going on in the last 20 minutes, last 5 minutes…this is who we are, this is what we believe, these are taking our principles — the ones that built this country — applying them to the problems of the day, offer solutions, win an election, get it done, save this country, go Packers!”
What was Trump, the alleged presidential choice of Republicans, doing? Attacking Ryan and Republicans.
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The number one song today in 1960:
The number one song today in 1964:
The number one song today in 1970:
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The number one single today in 1964:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Rick Nelson was booed at Madison Square Garden in New York when he dared to sing new material at a concert. That prompted him to write …
If I told you the number one British album today in 1983 was “Genesis,” I would have given you the artist and the title:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 