In Merced or Dayton, if an insurance agent, eager to help his wife facing indictment, barged into a restaurant where the local DA is known to lunch, he would almost certainly be told to get the hell out.
But among the Washington elite, the scenario is apparently quite different. The two parties, in supposedly serendipitous fashion, just happen to touch down at the same time on the Phoenix corporate tarmac, with their private planes pulling up nose to nose. Then the attorney general of the United States and her husband, in secrecy enforced by federal security details, welcome the ex-president onto her government plane. Afterward, and only when caught, the prosecutor and the husband of the person under investigation assure the world that they talked about everything except Hillary Clinton’s possible indictment, Loretta Lynch’s past appointment by Bill Clinton and likely judicial future, or the general quandary of 2016.
There has been a lot of talk since Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump of the corrosive power and influence of the “elite” and the “establishment.” But to quote Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”
In the case of the ancient Romans or of the traditional British ruling classes, land, birth, education, money, government service, and cultural notoriety were among the ingredients that made one an establishmentarian. But our modern American elite is a bit different.
Residence, either in the Boston–Washington, D.C., or the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor, often is a requisite. Celebrity and public exposure count — e.g., access to traditional television outlets (as opposed to hoi polloi Internet blogging). So does education — again, most often a coastal-corridor thing: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.
Net worth, whether made or inherited, helps. But lots of billionaires, especially Midwestern sorts, are not part of the elite, in that their money does not necessarily translate into much political or cultural influence — or influence of the right sort. (Exceptions are Chicago traders who bundle millions for Hillary.)
Especially influential are the revolving-door multimillionaires, especially from big banks and Wall Street — the Tim Geithners, Jack Lews, Hank Paulsons, and Robert Rubins, but also the lesser flunkies of the Freddie/Fannie Clintonite crowd, a Franklin Raines (raking in $90 million) or a Jamie Gorelick ($26 million), all of whom came into the White House and its bureaucracies to get rich, but who always seem shocked when the public does not like their incestuous trails of bailouts, relief plans, favorable regulations, etc.
Creepy too are the satellite grifters like “investment banker” Rahm Emanuel — who somehow, between the White House and the House of Representatives, made off with $16 million for his financial “expertise” — or Chelsea Clinton, who made her fortune ($15 million?) largely by being a “consultant” for a Wall Street investment group (her fluff job at NBC News was small potatoes in comparison). The locus classicus, of course, is the Clinton power marriage itself, which invested nearly 40 years of public service in what proved to be a gargantuan pay-for-play payoff, when they parlayed Hillary’s political trajectories into a personal fortune of well over $100 million. Give them credit: From the early days, when they would write off as IRS deductions gifts of their used underwear, they ended up 30 years later getting paid $10,000 to $60,000 a minute for their Wall Street riffs.
The nexus between Big Government, Big Money, Big Influence, and Big Media is sometimes empowered by familial journalistic continuity (e.g., John Dickerson, son of Nancy Dickerson) or a second generation of fashion/glitz and media (Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper), but again is increasingly expressed in the corridor “power couple,” the sorts who receive sycophantic adulation in New York and Washington monthly magazines. The Andrea Mitchell/Alan Greenspan power marriage was hailed as a threefer of media, government, and money. What was so strange, however, was just how often wrong were Mitchell in her amateurishly politicized rants and Greenspan in his cryptic Delphic prophecies — and always in areas of their supposedly greatest expertise.
Take also the Obama Cabinet. When we wonder how Susan Rice could go on television on five occasions in a single day to deceive about Benghazi; or John Kerry — in the middle of a war whose results Obama would come to call a “stable” and “self-reliant” democratic Iraq — could warn American youth that the punishment for poor school performance was “to get stuck in Iraq”; or Jay Carney (now senior vice president of global corporate affairs at Amazon) and Josh Earnest could both repeatedly mislead the country on Benghazi, the reason may be not just that they felt their influence, status, and privilege meant they were rarely responsible for the real-world consequences of their own rhetoric, but that they had forgotten entirely the nature of middle-class America, or never really knew it at all.
I get the impression that members of the D.C. elite do not wait in line with a sick kid in the emergency room on a Saturday night, when the blood flows and the supporters of rival gangs have to be separated in the waiting room; or that they find dirty diapers, car seats, and dead dogs tossed on their lawns, or wait two hours at the DMV, or are told that their journalistic assignment was outsourced to India, or read public-school teachers’ comments on their kids’ papers that were ungrammatical and misspelled to the point of being incomprehensible. The elite seems to be ignorant that, about 1975, Bedford Falls flyover country started to become Pottersville.
In forming perceptions about Benghazi, the Iran deal, globalization, or illegal immigration, it is sometimes hard to know who is making policy and who is reporting and analyzing such formulations — or whether they are one and the same. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is married to former ABC television producer Ian Cameron. Ben Rhodes, who drew up the talking-points deceptions about Benghazi and seemed to boast of deceiving the public about the Iran deal, is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. Will 60 Minutes do one of its signature hit pieces on Ben Rhodes?
Secretary of State John Kerry — who famously docks his yacht in Rhode Island in order to avoid paying Massachusetts taxes on it — is married to Teresa Heinz, the billionaire widow of the late senator and catsup heir John Heinz. Former Obama press secretary Jay Carney married Claire Shipman, senior national correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America; his successor, Josh Earnest, married Natalie Wyeth, a veteran of the Treasury Department. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s “body woman,” is married to creepy sexter Anthony Weiner; perhaps she was mesmerized by his stellar political career, his feminist credentials, and his tolerant approach to deviancy? And on and on it goes.
These Christiane Amanpour/Jamie Rosen or Samantha Power/Cass Sunstein types of connections could be explored to the nth degree, especially their moth-to-the-flame progressive fixations with maximizing privilege, power, and class. But my purpose is not to suggest some conspiratorial cabal of D.C. and New York insiders, only to note that an increasing number of government and media elites are so entangled with each other, leveraging lucrative careers in politics, finance, and the media, and doubling their influence through marriage, that they have scant knowledge of and less concern for the clingers who live well beyond their coastal-corridor moats. And so when reality proves their preconceptions wrong — from Benghazi to Brexit — they have only outrage and disdain to fall back on.
Sometimes their smug isolation is the stuff of caricature. Mark Zuckerberg waxes poetically on about the illiberality of building border walls (e.g., “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others”), but he is now simultaneously involved in three controversies involving either hyper-private security patrols or walls or both as he seeks to use his fortune to create Maginot Lines around his Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Hawaii properties to keep the wrong sort of people quite distant.
I should end by returning to Hillary Clinton, whose insider arc from the cattle-futures con to quarter-million-dollar Wall Street chats to the e-mail scandal shares the common and persistent theme of influence peddling, greed, and lying, while she lectures Americans about the need for trust, fairness, and transparency. Or perhaps I should finish with Chelsea, a chip off the old blockess, who became instantly rich as she decried the culture’s overemphasis on wealth, and whose husband’s hedge fund is tottering, after disastrously investing in Greek bailout bonds — at a time when his mother-in-law and Sidney Blumenthal were exchanging classified speculations over whether German banks would guarantee Greek debt and hence investors’ money.
But I conclude on a much more sober, judicious, and appropriately unimpeachable D.C. figure, the rightly revered Thomas Pickering, career diplomat, bipartisan Council on Foreign Relation fixture, co-chairman of blue-ribbon investigative committees, and perhaps heir to the itinerant fixers of a bygone age, such as Sumner Welles, John McCloy, and Clark Clifford. Pickering — multilingual, veteran of hazardous diplomatic posts, confidant to presidents of both parties, and octogenarian “wise man” — was asked by the State Department to conduct its internal investigation of the Benghazi debacle, as chairman of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board.
Four of the five members of this board, including Pickering, were apparently recommended by Hillary Clinton’s own State Department team in good Quis custodiet custodes? style. No one would dare suggest that Pickering, appointed as an undersecretary of state and an ambassador by Bill Clinton, and a well-known Clinton friend, might have various conflicts of interest in investigating fully the allegations that Hillary Clinton refused to beef up security at the consulate in Benghazi, or falsely claimed in public that the loss of four Americans was the result of an inflammatory video, just hours after she confided in e-mail communications that it was a preplanned al-Qaeda attack.
Instead, Pickering decided that Clinton would never appear before his committee and declared that he was not interested in a gotcha finding; yet somehow Clinton aide Cheryl Mills found a way to review the board’s findings before publication. In the end, the State Department chastised and put on leave lowly subordinates for seemingly working within the security parameters established by the sacrosanct secretary of state.
Nor would anyone suggest that the temperate and esteemed Pickering, as a vice president of Boeing from 2001 to 2006, and then a consultant to Boeing from 2006 to 2015, had any special financial interest in promoting the Clinton, and then the Kerry, outreach to Iran. Indeed, Pickering testified before Congress and wrote elegant op-eds about why the Iran non-enrichment accord was a good deal — but without ever quite telling the country that a liberated Iran was also considering a $25 billion purchase of aircraft (with potential dual use as military transports) from Boeing — which just happened to be Pickering’s quite generous corporate client.
Is it all that strange that when Washington fixtures write outraged op-eds about the “fascistic” Donald Trump or the “self-harming” Brexit voters, no one seems to listen any more? Does a Hank Paulson — former assistant to John Erhlichman, former CEO of Goldman Sachs (which has given over $800,000 to Hillary’s campaigns as well as $675,000 in speaking fees), former Treasury secretary, and of some $700 million in net worth — ever sense that his assurances that Hillary is presidential and not corrupt are not believable? Or that the effect of his politicking is analogous to angrily waving a Mexican flag at a Trump rally?
In a sense, these revolving-door apparatchiks and incestuous couples are bullies, who use their megaphones to disparage others who are supposedly blinkered and ignorant to the point of not believing that a videomaker caused the attacks in Libya, not trusting the Iranians, being skeptical about the theory of sanctuary cities, missing the genius of the European Union, not seeing the brilliant logic in allowing in 12 million immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America under unlawful auspices, panicking about $20 trillion in debt, and incapable of appreciating the wonders of outsourcing.
In matters of deception, ostentatious vulgarity never proves as injurious as the hubris of the mannered establishment. So what I resent most about the Washington hollow men is not the sources and methods through which they parlay wealth, power, and influence, or the values they embrace to exercise and perpetuate their privilege and sense of exalted self, but the feigned outrage that they express when anyone dares suggest, by word or vote, that they are mediocrities and ethical adolescents — and really quite emotional, after all.
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The number one single today in 1960 was the first, but not only, example of the caveman music genre:
Today in 1962, Joe Meek wrote “Telstar,” the first song about a satellite:
Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared live on (British) ABC-TV’s “Thank Your Lucky Stars.” The appearance was supposed to be taped, but a strike by studio technicians made that impossible. The band had just appeared at the northern England premiere of their movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” requiring them to get to London via plane and boat.
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Two anniversaries today in 1965: The Beatles’ “Beatles VI” reached number I, where it stayed for VI weeks …
… while the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” was their first number one single:
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Today in 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was played around the clock because it hit number one:
One year later, Dick Clark made his first appearance on ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand”:
Today in 1972, Paul McCartney and Wings began their first tour of France:
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I have written here before about the (largely inaccurate or exaggerated) portrayals of journalists in entertainment, from the heights (“All the President’s Men” and “The Green Hornet”) to the depths (the brief CBS-TV series “Hard Copy”).
(That includes the scare quotes in the headline. Heroes should be rightly identified as soldiers who give their lives for their fellow soldiers, or police officers and firefighters who see one of the World Trade Center towers collapse, and nonetheless head into the other tower to try to save lives, or police officers who headed toward the gunshots last night in Dallas while the people protesting those same police were running in the opposite direction.)
While looking up the old radio drama “Night Beat,” which is occasionally on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Old Time Radio Drama weekend nights, I came upon an entire website, “Newspaper Heroes on the Air,” described by its creator thusly:
“JHeroes.com” or “Newspaper Heroes on the Air” is a nostalgic media-history blog and podcast about old-time radio’s portrayals of journalists, from fictional role models like Clark Kent and Lois Lane to dramatized biographies of Greeley, Pulitzer and other pioneer printers, publishers, editors and reporters. Since 2011, the site also has been a Web-first draft of what may be a printed book someday.
The phenomenon of mid-20th century radio dramatists glorifying newspaper journalists strikes me as ironic and interesting, considering that radio was the “new medium” of the day — competing with newspapers for audience attention and advertising. But, through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, radio’s dramatic writers couldn’t help reflecting just how big a part of daily life newspapers were. Along the way radio offered its listening audience lessons in newspaper history, reporting-practice, newspaper ethics, newspaper business, and newspaper romance. …
I’m interested in how the public formed its opinions of 20th century newspaper journalists: Their ethics, professional practices, personal lifestyles, and importance to society. Obviously some impressions came from what journalists said in the newspapers themselves, but images of reporters, editors and publishers were present throughout American popular culture, from Broadway to Hollywood to best-selling fiction. Numerous books have focused on movie portrayals of journalists, but radio had its own messages, delivered them right into the home, and has been mostly neglected by “image of the journalist” researchers.
Some of Hollywood movies’ newspaper characters were romanticized or heroic; others were presented as sad stereotypes — immature, sexist, drunken and unreliable. I don’t have “quantitative” conclusions, but I think radio’s portrayals of newspaper journalists were more positive, benefitting from broadcasters’ sensitivity to the living-room audience, to advertisers, and to critics who might pounce on antisocial messages.
While some of the programs discussed here are comic-book shallow or soap-opera silly, others explore serious “newspaper drama” themes — media ethics, reporters’ loyalty to a newspaper (sometimes devastating to personal relationships), journalism as a career for women, editors’ civic spirit, citizens’ respect for their local paper, the value of a free press, abuse of media power, and more. You’ll also hear about the value of newspapers’ investigative work, political crusades, muckraking, crime-fighting, and sometimes a bit of cynical frustration about “the system.” (The sort of thing that drove Britt Reid to becomeThe Green Hornet.)
The related areas of portrayal of journalists in films, fiction, comic books, songs, or other manifestations of popular culture “pop” up from time to time in these pages, along with links to media-history research resources. (See the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at USC Annenberg for related materials, especially concerning Hollywood film portrayals of journalists.) …
I also discovered that NPR’s All Things Considered — the best of present-day radio — had posted online 10 minutes of Walter Cronkite reminiscing about another old series I’d been listening to, one that had dramatized his own adventures during World War II.
Of “Night Beat,” it says:
Opening with a mixture of kettledrums and jazz clarinet, “Night Beat” was a Chicago-flavored 1950s drama about a newspaper columnist, narrating his own half-hour tales of writing a late-night column on deadline.
The well-written series appears to have caught the ear of professional journalists: At the end of one episode, star Frank Lovejoy stepped out of character to deliver praise and congratulations to the real-life officers of the National Press Club. Another week, the president of a fraternity for women journalists presented Lovejoy with a scroll for his “honest and convincing portrayal of a newspaperman.”
Each week, the columnist’s first words set the mood for the episode, which ranged from suspenseful “newsroom-noir” detective-mystery to sentimental melodrama and human interest; an O.Henry twist often took them from one genre to the other. The opener usually began this way:
“Hi, this is Randy Stone. I cover the night beat for the Chicago Star. My stories start in many different ways. This one began…”
Frank Lovejoy played columnist Randy Stone with a cast of Hollywood’s strongest supporting voices, often including the very recognizable William Conrad, Gunsmoke’sMatt Dillon on radio, whose film appearances included the gruff city editor in the newspaper film “- 30 -” with Jack Webb. On Night Beat, Conrad might be a punch-drunk boxer one week, a dying mobster another — or Stone’s boss.
Whatever the setting and cast, Stone told quite a “how I got the story” tale, from his opening summary to his wrap-up remarks, usually accompanied by the clack of a telephone receiver or the ratchet of a typewriter carriage, and a call of, “Copy boy!” Sometimes the idea of a reporter starting work at dusk and delivering his story before dawn provides a frame. …
Frank Lyons, listeners learn, was a career-driven Northwestern grad who had made himself the top newspaperman in town when Stone was “a cub,” but Lyons was set-up, given fake records and tricked into publishing a big story that led to a libel suit and destroyed his reputation.
“I was bounced and black-balled and washed up overnight,” he tells Stone. In classic film-noir fashion, a femme fatale is involved. And so is a hood, involved in the original frame-up years earlier, who slugs Stone when he isn’t looking and adds insult to injury with the line, “They’ve got the dumbest reporters in the world in this town.”
After Stone comes to, he digs up the old details with the help of a researcher back in the Star’s file room, and winds his way to a moral about the dramas and ironies of life and death, and a promise to put Frank’s byline on one last story.
Details like Lyons’ Chicago area journalism school, his reflections on the excitement of a newspaper career, Stone’s willingness to help out another newspaperman in trouble, and his reporting techniques are all examples of the series’ attention to journalistic details. …
Stone reflects on the realities of the newspaper business as well as the details of life in Chicago, from the sound of an elevated train to the jazz clubs and street sounds. Like Chicago columnists from Finley Peter Dunne to Mike Royko, he paints vivid pictures of the city and its people, even if the prose does get a bit purple at times. Lovejoy’s narration sometimes wraps a story around the story.
“Tonight is just about washed up. The sky is getting that tattle-tale grey around the edges. Another hour or so, three million alarm clocks will start yakking against the eardrums of Chicago’s dear hearts and gentle people. A goodly number of said dear hearts and gentle people will stumble to the front door for their copy of the Morning Star.
“I’m wondering what they’ll say when they read the opening sentence of the Night Beat story for today, the line that goes, ‘This is a love story with the happiest ending that I’ve ever heard.’
“I guess they’ll figure spring has got me in its perfumed clutches and more than likely I’ll wind up wrapped around the baloney sandwich and that will be that. Only if they just keep reading, maybe they’ll be in for a strange kind of surprise…”
Another WPR series is “Frontier Gentleman“:
In the 1958 series “Frontier Gentleman,” radio drama brought a cultured London Times correspondent to the American West of the 1870s — and in the process explored ethics, bravery, style, humor and a sense of adventure that might be hoped for in professional journalists in any century.
John Dehner, a character actor in films, radio and television since the 1940s, starred in the weekly CBS adult Western as J.B. Kendall, who may have looked (or sounded) like a city dude, but proved to be a man of action.
The show’s opening set the tone:
“Herewith, an Englishman’s account of life and death in the West. As a reporter for the London Times, he writes his colorful and unusual stories. But as a man with a gun, he lives and becomes a part of the violent years in the new territories.”
In the 41 available episodes, Kendall meets newsmakers like Jesse James, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, among others. He hopes to interview George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull, but with less success. From the scripts and acting to the cinematic musical score, Frontier Gentleman was an example of mature state-of-the-art radio storytelling just before American radio drama as a genre disappeared in the glare of television. …
Despite the series title and Kendall’s cultivated accent, this mild-mannered reporter was no London dandy. Described as a former British cavalry officer in India, he was shown to be handy with a six-gun, a knife and his fists, while he spun his prose poems from Missouri to Montana Territory. He even had a flair for language when getting the drop on the bad guys:
“You may very slowly and carefully unbuckle your gunbelt and let it drop to the floor. If you try to be foolish and brave, I shall be delighted to shoot you in the stomach.” (Remittance Man)
Alas, “Night Beat” was on for only two years, and there were only 41 “Frontier Gentleman” episodes. Another series was on for 15 years:
“The power and the freedom of the press is a flaming sword; that it may be a faithful servant of all the people, use it justly. Hold it high. Guard it well!” — Edward J. Pawley as “Steve Wilson, fighting managing editor” of the Big Town Illustrated Press
That motto was announced at the start of eachBig Town episode for most of the series’ 15-year run. With such a lead-in, it may seem the most outspokenly “pro-journalism” radio drama, although most episodes involved more crime-fighting than news-reporting.
Even a December 1948 episode titled “Deadline at Dawn” that opens with a star reporter being sent to Washington to cover preparations for President Truman’s second inauguration becomes a typical battle against “racket rats.”
By the end of the half-hour, Wilson is holding a gun on one crook and his photographer is apologizing for slugging another with “$280 bucks worth of camera.” “Cheap at twice the price,” the editor replies.
In its later years, the show’s “fighting managing editor” punched bad guys more than anyone punched a typewriter at the Illustrated Press. Editor Steve Wilson also had a habit of calling his star reporter “Lorelei, my lovely” and inviting her to sit on the corner of his desk for a chat, with a “What’s on your mind, beautiful?” (At least he didn’t ask her to sit on his lap, like Walter Burns did with ex-wife Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday.”)
Judging by the episodes available for online listening, “Big Town” may have spent less time on reporters doing interviews, shouting across the newsroom, or heading off on assignment than “The Green Hornet” and “The Adventures of Superman.” But “Big Town” was still the best known of radio’s newspaper-focused series for much of its 1937-1952 run, according to On the air: the encyclopedia of old-time radio by John Dunning.
“Writer Jerry McGill had been a newspaperman himself but took great creative license, slipping into high melodrama,” Dunning said. Still, he called McGill’s reporters “diligent sober champions of justice.” (p.89)
Instead of showing Illustrated Press reporters tracking down stories with tips, interviews and shoe-leather in a “newsroom procedural,” McGill told newsworthy stories about rackets, wrong-doing and risks to public safety — all woven into dramatic half-hour episodes. His “Big Town” stories used an economically small cast and were limited to a confining half-hour format, unlike daily serials like “Front Page Farrell,” “Wendy Warren and the News,” “Betty and Bob,” or even “The Adventures of Superman,” which took weeks to tell a story in 15-minute installments. It’s no wonder Steve Wilson came off as more two-fisted detective than pencil-pushing editor.
Well, that’s how you know it’s fiction. What overweight editor (the result of too much sitting and not enough getting out of the office) could be two-fisted when he only needs one fist with which to drink his daytime coffee and nighttime adult beverage? For that matter, I know of no journalist who is remotely handy with firearms. Notebooks and cellphones are not lethal weapons. (However, a UW–Madison classmate of mine used a 400-mm telephoto lens as a weapon when, while shooting photos of a White House protest, one of the protesters got too close to her. She, however, was an Army veteran.)
What about my favorite superhero, the Green Hornet?
Clark Kent’s Superman was not the only superhero on radio to take advantage of the information flow of a “major metropolitan newspaper.” The Green Hornet’s adventures almost always kept one foot in the newsroom of The Daily Sentinel, a newspaper that offered a reward for his capture — but had an even closer relationship than that.
The original Green Hornet answers the question, “What can happen when a publisher gets frustrated with the failure of his editorials to Bring About Change?”
Almost 30 years after The Green Hornet’s first success on radio, a TV version was launched in 1966 by the same network that had been running the “camp” pop-art juvenile Batman series. The two shows even had cross-promotion episodes, although The Hornet generally attempted a slightly more serious tone. A 1966 cameo, stored at YouTube, has Batman and Robin encounter The Green Hornet and Kato — probably the only time the Hornet said he was “on special assignment for The Daily Sentinel.”
The Hornet, after all, was newspaper publisher Britt Reid’s secret identity. On TV as well as radio, The Daily Sentinel‘s star reporters considered the Hornet a menace — a masked mystery man who always seemed to escape just as the police arrived to corral other racketeers and gangsters.
Radio listeners knew the secret: The Hornet was really The Daily Sentinel’s young publisher, donning a mask and pretending to be a crook to bring down criminals who operated “inside the law,” despite the paper’s editorial campaigns against crime and corruption.
Assisted by his brilliant inventor/valet, Kato, who had provided him with a super-fast car and a sleeping-gas gun, radio’s Green Hornet brought criminals to justice by hoaxing, blackmailing or trapping them in contrived “sting” operations.
The TV version relied more on James Bond or Batman style gadgetry, plus actor Bruce Lee’s martial arts expertise as Kato. The radio series and the quickly spun-off 1940-41 movie serials had Kato deliver a karate chop now and then, but fighting was never his main function until the TV series came along.
Like TV itself, that 1960s Hornet was about visual action, and the newspaper played a smaller role. In fact, by then Britt Reid’s media empire included a TV station as well as the paper; he even had a remote studio in his home, the better to broadcast emergency editorials.
On radio, the Green Hornet had much more to do with traditional newspaper journalism — reporters hitting the street, providing eyewitness accounts, interviewing newsmakers, trying to get at shifty businessmen and crooked politicians. The Sentinel’s meat was the racket-busting, crusading type of journalism popular in B-movies and hit radio series like “Casey, Crime Photographer” and “Big Town.”
Sentinel reporters were an active part of almost every Hornet story, sometimes uncovering crimes while demonstrating solid newsgathering skills, sometimes getting taken in by the Hornet themselves. One reporter, the Irish-accented Michael Axford, was mostly for comic relief — a former policeman who helped cover the police beat for the Sentinel while serving as Reid’s bodyguard. (He was also a spy for Reid’s father, the real media mogul.)
The Sentinel’s racket-busting was rarely comic book “super-hero” stuff. There were no aliens or costumed villains, but plenty of crooked dealings involving corrupt officials, public works projects, protection rackets terrorizing small businesses, and a wide range of confidence games and swindles. During World War II, spies and saboteurs were part of the problem, along with domestic black market criminals… all topics that might be find in a hard-hitting real-world newspaper.
Whie the Sentinel never seemed to run into serious business trouble, some Hornet plots centered on competition with its sensational tabloid competition, the Clarion, and gave Britt Reid a chance to explain the differnce between responsible and irresponsible journalism. At least one story concerned an investigative reporter for a radio station, and the newspaper reporters’ attempt to investigate his murder.
That sentence “The original Green Hornet answers the question, “What can happen when a publisher gets frustrated with the failure of his editorials to Bring About Change?” is the best sentence I’ve read this week.
The website also includes my favorite newspaper movie, “Deadline USA“:
If you can’t see the film, listen to this radio version.
The newspaper is after a murderer. The founder’s daughters are after a profitable sale that will close the paper. Their mother has a change of heart, and tells her daughters, “Stupidity is not hereditary; you acquired it all by yourselves.”
A gangster is after the editor: “You’ve got two Pulitzer Prizes, they say. Are they worth much?”
Editor Ed Hutcheson (Humphrey Bogart in the film, Dan Dailey on the radio) has great lines about good newspapers and bad. …
Memorable scenes:
1. The Day… A 1950s newsroom full of typewriters, pneumatic tubes, rewrite men in headsets, and a AP teletype bulletin saying the paper is being sold.
2. The newspaper wake. The staff “testify” at a journalism saloon… One man remembers being interviewed by the paper’s founder:
“Are you a journalist or a reporter?… A journalist makes himself the hero of the story; a reporter is only a witness.”
Hutcheson describes the competing newspaper, ironically named The Standard:
“It’s wild and yellow, but it’s not exactly a newspaper.”
To a young man seeking a newspaper job:
“So you want to be a reporter? Here’s some advice about this racket. Don’t ever change your mind. It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.”
Later, he assigns the guy to the rewrite desk on the (late-night, red-eyed) “lobster shift,” even if it is only for a night or two before the paper closes.
3. When one of his reporters is assaulted outside the Hall of Records, the editor gets fighting mad. At a meeting with the owners, he quotes the founder’s statement of Pulitzer-like principles, to publish…
“Without fear, without distortion, without hope of personal gain…”
4. Another reporter is sent to investigate the beating:
“From this a fellow could catch a hole in the head…”
“He could. That bother you?”
“Oh no. No. No.”5. Ed:
“The newspaper has no political party. We support men for office, some good, some bad.”
Even the competing yellow sheet’s publisher is impressed, ordering his city editor to get on the story and do some good old-fashioned journalism. (Coincidentally, the city editor is played by Joseph Crehan, the same actor who — as another city editor — gave an idealistic young news photographer a hard time 14 years earlier in Here’s Flash Casey.)
6. Editor:
“I figured with a story like this they’d never close us down. Well, we showed them how a real newspaper can function.”
7. The closing conversation…
Gangster: “Print that story, you’re a dead man!… (editor holds phone at arms length, toward the roaring presses) What’s that noise?”
Ed:”It’s the press, baby! And there’s nothing you can do about it…”That is one of the greatest final scenes in the history of film. (Not that I’m Siskel or Ebert.)
Surprisingly to me, one newspaper movie not on the website is “-30-“, the name signifying the end of a story in the pre-computer days, starring Jack Webb and William Conrad:
Everything I’ve listed so far, and all the other depictions on the website, are necessarily spiced up because, well, reporting is not very exciting to watch. How exciting is watching someone write something down? How exciting to watch is typing?
The site, however, also includes real-life journalists, including the one I’m starting to emulate in worldview, H.L. Mencken:
When Henry Louis Mencken died in January 1956, both NBC and CBS memorialized the Baltimore newspaperman who had become one of the nation’s most outspoken magazine editors. Their presentations demonstrate two very different radio approaches to storytelling.
CBS Radio Workshop’s dramatized biography, broadcast in June, was titled “Bring on the Angels.” The cast of at least 10 actors included Jackson Beck — well-known announcer for “The Adventures of Superman,” Luis Van Rooten, and Mason Adams, who was back in a newsroom as editor Charlie Hume on the Lou Grant TV series 20 years later. The program was described as an affectionate revival of Mencken’s earlier writing, and — based on his own notes and published work — captured his love of newspapering, from his first job as a young man in 1899, “with a typewriter, a spitoon of my own, and a beat.”
As city editor in 1904 at the age of 24, he supervised what he called his greatest story — intense coverage of the Great Baltimore Fire — ultimately publishing the paper in Philadelphia after the newspaper building itself was burned out. The radio production is complete with sounds of crashing masonry and crackling flames… and the crumpling papers as the actor playing Mencken rummages through the remains of the office. The fire had destroyed almost everything, he said, “even my collection of pieces of hangman’s ropes.”
The caustic Mencken of later years is not part of the CBS story, but became the focus of the NBC broadcast a month later.
NBC’s Biographies in Sound broadcast its profile in a more journalistic or documentary style, as “The Bitter Byline.” It featured soundbites of Mencken himself, living up to the title of the episode, along with reminiscences and analysis from a variety of experts.
Among others, novelist James T. Farrell, journalist Alistair Cooke and Mencken biographer William Manchester discuss Mencken’s life and works, his respect for truth, his early championing of young writers, his use of language, his hand-washing habits, and his feelings about Germany and Hitler.
The website even talks about going from one disrespected profession, journalism, to another, politics:
From adventure series like The Green Hornet to soap operas like Betty & Bob, comedies like Bright Star, and serious dramatic anthologies like NBC University Theater, radio’s fictional newspaper men and women covered elections, took on political corruption, or went to work for the candidates of their choice.
The DuPont Cavalcade of America’s inspiring stories of American values often featured editors who advised presidents of the United States — Anne Royall helping Andrew Jackson take on the bankers, Horace Greeley counseling Lincoln on what to do with Jefferson Davis, William Allen White lunching at the White House. Other stories showed the political power of the press to mold public opinion: Nast’s editorial cartoons bringing down Boss Tweed, Pulitzer raising pennies to build a base for the Statue of Liberty, Sarah Josepha Hale mounting campaigns to establish Bunker Hill monument and Thanksgiving Day, and many more.
As in real life, journalists portrayed in radio dramas walked the line between covering civic life and becoming a partisan — or actually running for office.
Actress Irene Dunne seems to have been a likely candidate for such parts. As newspaper publisher Sabra Cravatt in the film and radio adaptations of Cimarron, she was elected to Congress. As newspaper editor in the series Bright Star, she ran for mayor. So did Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet, after Clark Kent assured him the paper did not need his daily attention.
Will Rogers Jr., in real life newspaper publisher who was elected to Congress, settled for covering an election or two in his series “Rogers of the Gazette,” except for the episode where he gets to play golf with the president.
The strongest political novel of the era was adapted for radio a few months before it made it to the silver screen.
In the movies of All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford (1949) or Sean Penn (2006), charismatic Southern politician Willie Stark is obviously the main character.
But for the only radio adaptation I’ve found of Robert Penn Warren’s novel — as in the novel itself — the burden is literally on the teller of the tale, former journalist Jack Burden.
NBC University Theater adapted the story for broadcast January 16, 1949, before the firstfilm version premiere that November and a year before its general release. Following the program’s university-of-the-air format, it added scholarly discussion of Warren and his book at the half-way point, presented by critic Granville Hicks. …
Eight minutes into the story, Burden explains how they met when he was covering Stark’s first campaign, trimming his fingernails during the speeches — until the key “a hick like you” speech that showed Stark’s promise as a populist leader, not unlike Louisiana’s real-life Huey Long, who met a similar end.
Burden doesn’t reflect on his shift in role from journalist to partisan hack putting his research skills to work on tasks that come close to blackmail. But students of politics, ethics and the media can read a lot between the lines of the hour-long broadcast.
In the end, Burden is almost a reporter again, lining up facts, asking the key question, “How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?” Historian or journalism student, it’s a good question to keep asking.
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Sandy Hingston is not pleased with the millennial generation:
As a boomer, I have a special interest in millennials. It’s the same sort of interest I have in car wrecks: I don’t want to see what’s going on, but I can’t look away. Take, for instance, the cover story that Time magazine had a few months back about how millennials are raising their children. I didn’t read the article. I couldn’t, because the very first paragraph stopped me cold. Here it is, reproduced in full:
On a playground in San Francisco, 4-year-old Astral Defiance Hayes takes a stick and writes his name in the sand. His twin brother Defy Aster Hayes whizzes around their father.
The fact is, I don’t need to know anything more about how millennials are parenting than that two of them thought it was a great idea to name their twin boys Astral Defiance and Defy Aster.
I mean: Who does that?
There are so very many boys’ names out there that aren’t Astral Defiance and Defy Aster. Old-fashioned names like Ezekiel and Joseph and Malachi. Newer names like Ryan and Marcus and Jack. Even names that are silly but super-popular right now and at least sound like names, like Jace and Jayden and Jaxon. Why would anyone hang a 50-ton albatross like Astral Defiance around his own child’s neck?
I can’t stop wondering how Astral Defiance and Defy Aster’s grandparents reacted when their offspring informed them of their new grandsons’ names. How would I react if my children told me they were doing something so rock-dumb? Would I be able to control my instinctive grimace of pain? I probably would, because every day at work, I get practice hiding my expressions of perplexity and disbelief at the odd things millennials do.
I was sitting just the other day at what we call, here in our office, “the newspaper table.” We call it that because it’s where, since time immemorial, our copies of the daily papers get placed each morning. I was paging through the New York Times when a passing intern paused. “What are you looking for?” she asked.
What was I looking for? “I’m reading the newspaper,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said.
I’ve never felt more old.
There’s an Ed Sheeran song lots of millennials are using for the first dance at their weddings. It’s a lovely song, except for this one line: “Darling, I will be loving you till we’re seventy.” Seventy! Seventy is the outside limit of the youthful imagination when it comes to age. Never mind that the average American now lives to be many years older than that — years, I suppose, that are loveless and forlorn. Fifty, 60, 70 — it’s all the same, it’s old, it’s decrepit, it’s stupid, it has nothing to say or do that’s relevant.
Still, I believe the children are our future, so I try to be kind to them in spite of their obliviousness. It helps that I’m not the only one struggling to come to terms with millennials in the workplace. Philly Mag’s November cover package highlighted the pretzels that local companies are twisting themselves into to attract and keep younger workers. Forget about a salary and some health insurance. Kids today want “hardwood floors, greenery and sunlight,” gourmet staff breakfasts, “nap rooms,” ping-pong tables, slides, rooftop lounges and beer on tap. Floor plans are open, with no doors to close or etch titles into. “The modern workplace has got to be a lot more egalitarian,” advised Al West, chairman and CEO of SEI, the investment giant out in Oaks. “If you’ve got offices for more senior people, it creates a hierarchy and gets in the way.” When did “hierarchy” become a dirty word? Hierarchy is the way the world works.
Just look at nature. Young elks tilt at grizzled older elks, and older elks smack them into place. Wolf pups nip at their elders’ necks, and the elders bite back. It’s the same with humans. Baseball rookies get hazed; sorority pledges have to buy their big sisters lattes; new Army recruits get latrine duty. People who know more get to say more. People who don’t know squat are supposed to watch and learn.
But millennials, West notes, “want to be heard and appreciated.” You know what’s awkward from an elder’s standpoint? Being expected to listen to and appreciate people who haven’t earned that right. Consider, for example, John Lim, a senior at Swarthmore College and, until this past fall, a member of its baseball team. A recent article in the independent student newspaper the Phoenix noted that before Lim left the team, baseball was his life. Yet he quit playing the sport for Swarthmore because he reached this sad conclusion: “I think athletics is really bad for this campus. I really do.” And what, pray tell, has convinced him of this? Why, it’s the unfairness of the athlete-coach dialectic: “[T]he relationship on the field between the player and the coach,” he told the Phoenix, “is very much whatever the coach says, you do.” Whatever the coach says, you do. Oh, the humanity!
Can you imagine coaching an entire team made up of John Lims?
It’s technology that’s skewing the picture, of course. My generation was raised on stories and myths about people who trudged their way through the ranks to positions of power: Ben Franklin, John Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey. Millennial fairy tales are all about disrupters, the young Jacks who slay the old, slow giants: Evan Spiegel, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs. Raised with iPhones in hand, young people scorn the slow learning curves of their elders. Their prowess with gewgaws like Slack and Snapchat has made them our masters; we’re forced to turn to them for information and advice on our devices. (Though a major Slack theme in our office is, “Who has a charger for my device that has run out of juice because I apparently did not anticipate needing to use it at work today, again?”) What seems to escape their notice is that all the tech is just the delivery system. And cool, fancy new delivery equipment doesn’t make what’s being delivered worthwhile.
There was a time when young people were expected to read the classics — books written by old, or even dead, people. Granted, most of those people were white and male, but that alone shouldn’t see their work summarily dismissed. Yet recently, in the ongoing war over whether college students should be permitted to swaddle themselves in fluffy, fluffy cotton balls, the faculty senate at American University in Washington, D.C., voted in favor of a “free-speech resolution” that would require students who demand trigger warnings in classes to provide medical documentation of their “psychological vulnerability.” In response, the students rose up to complain that being required to provide actual proof of the disabilities for which they were demanding accommodation was onerous. Part of the reason the faculty senate took that vote was that the 18- and 19- and 20-year-old students had been calling on the university library to provide warning stickers on the covers of books that contain controversial material. You know, like The Great Gatsby (“gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” according to one Rutgers student), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“marginalizes student identities,” say kids at Columbia). Students tiptoe out of these feather-lined ivory towers into the office, still cotton-swathed — and they want to be journalists! Do they think they’ll be writing about sunshine and rainbows and puppies, for chrissake? If you haven’t read great works of literature because you find them triggering, how will you write about famine or child rape or serial killers or global warming? What fathoms of the human experience will go unplumbed because gazing into those depths is really, really hard? …
It’s not their fault, entirely. They haven’t been exposed to older people very much. Their best friends may be their parents, but since the reverse is also true, their parents haven’t any adult friends. I saw my grandparents every day when I was growing up; they lived with us. My kids see their grandparents five or six times a year. Again, I’m not laying blame. Everybody’s trying to get together, texting and Skyping and emailing about availability. It’s just that families are different these days — smaller, more spread out, less centered on the hearth. Also, if Grandma wants to see me, she can just sign up for Facebook, right?
But when youngsters haven’t ever been exposed to the brutish behavior of elderly boomers — especially boomers not related to them by blood — that behavior can come as a great shock. Sometimes in the workplace, we have to tell you that you’re doing something wrong. Sometimes we raise our voices. Especially if it’s the fifth or sixth or seventh time we’ve had to rouse you from the nap room to tell you that you’re still spelling “separate” wrong, and that there’s this nifty thing called spell-check that would inform you of that if you would only employ it, and that if you don’t start using it now, today, we’re not going to employ you. It’s no swing down the office slide to be told you need to adapt to the structures that are in place instead of having those structures warp to accommodate you. Sometimes there isn’t any trigger warning at all on your annual review. …
On the very day that then-69-year-old Princeton professor Angus Deaton was named the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Vox’s Dylan Matthews posted a treatise titled, “Nobel Winner Angus Deaton Is Very Critical of Foreign Aid. The Reality Is More Complicated.” Which led Gen-Xer Michael C. Moynihan of the Daily Beast to tweet a tart link to Matthews’s piece:
I love when omniscient 25-year-old bloggers Voxsplain to newly minted Nobel laureates
I find it immensely heartening that as the Gen Xers mature and we boomers die off, they’re assuming our burden.
Generational stereotyping is dangerous because not everyone of the same age came from the same family background. I know millennials who aren’t lazy and self-centered. They are college student–athletes, however, and lazy and self-centered college student–athletes don’t remain athletes very long.
Complaints about the next generation are also as old as observations about culture. That doesn’t mean complaints aren’t valid.
Even one of them, Johnny Oleksinski, agrees:
Millennials are the worst. I should know — I am one.
At 26, I’m stuck in the middle of the world’s most maligned, mocked and discussed age group. And I hate it. Imagine being forever lumped into a smug pack of narcissists who don’t just ignore the past, but openly abhor anyone and everything that came before them.
“My boomer co-workers get paid more and they have no clue what Reddit is!” drones the millennial victim as the tiny violin plays. Meanwhile, baby boomers gave us, um, computers, and our major contributions to society are emojis and TV recaps.
2016 hasn’t exactly been a banner year for the Lousiest Generation.
First there was Talia Jane, the dopey, 25-year-old Yelp employee who was rightly fired for whining about her low salary on social media. Next came the 27-year-old Mic writer who told his boss he was taking time off for a funeral when he was actually building a tree house.
And then entered the Sandernistas, Bernie Sanders obsessives who preached reform and inclusion by berating their closest friends and family for daring to think differently. (One post on the “Bernie or Bust” Facebook group reads, “I don’t want to be friends with you if you support Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.”)
This is what happens when parents slap their toddler’s headshot on a birthday cake.
Recently, a comment from a colleague hit me like a stray selfie-stick. She said, “In some ways I love being a millennial, because it’s so much easier to be better than the rest of our generation. Because they suck.” It was jarring to hear the truth so plainly stated. But she’s right. We suck. We really suck.
Like a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, I must admit that I’m powerless to my biological age. Nonetheless I fight back every day against the traits that have come to define Gen Y: entitlement, dependency, nonstop complaining, laziness, Kardashians.
People like me are called “old souls,” or “26-going-on-76.” We’re chided by our peers for silly things such as enjoying adulthood, commuting to a physical office and not being enamored with Brooklyn. Contentment has turned us into lepers. Or worse: functioning human beings.
My millennial friends want me to be hopelessly nostalgic for the ’90s, obsessing over which “Saved by the Bell” character I’m most like, while ironically purchasing Dunkaroos and Snapchatting my vacant expressions for 43 pals to ignore. Or flying home for the weekend to recover from office burnout by getting some shut-eye in my pristine childhood bedroom. Thanks, but I’ll pass.
This is my number one rule: Do whatever millennials don’t. Definite no-nos include quitting a job or relationship the moment my mood drops from ecstatic to merely content; expecting the world to kowtow to my every childish whim; and assuming that I am always the most fascinating person in the room, hell, the zip code.
Millennials are obsessed with their brand. They co-opted the term from Apple and Xerox to be — like so many other things — all about them. “What’s your brand?,” millennial employers ask. The trouble is that a young person’s brand rarely extends beyond a screen: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. When you meet them, they’re never quite as witty, attractive or entrepreneurial as they seem on Facebook. They’re fiction authors, spinning elaborate yarns about their fabulous lives: “The Great Cathy” or “Asher in the Rye.”
But the truth is more like “A Tale of Two Cindys.” She’s the life of the party online, dull as dishwater in person.
Last year, sitting at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, a 29-year-old friend asked, “How do you just start talking to somebody you don’t know?” The best answer I could muster was, “I’m interested in other people. I like to ask them questions about themselves.” Simple, right?
Not when your mind has been warped to believe you’re automatically deserving of others’ attention like the pope in Vatican City.
Perhaps their messiah complex is a result of being coddled, petted and worshiped like toy poodles from infancy all the way to college. Pundits love to cite soccer participation trophies as the downfall of Western civilization — but it gets even worse.
Last week, Hastings High School in Westchester, NY, handed out 87 commendations at its Senior Awards Ceremony. The graduation class size? 141 teens. A Reason Foundation survey found 58 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds think their own generation is entitled. Huh. Why could that be?
The social awkwardness of 20-somethings is a problem caused by two enemies: Kanye-sized egos and smartphones. But in order to be a good networker — still the best way to secure a job — you need to stop filtering mediocre selfies with “valencia” on Instagram, look up from your device and string together a few words with strangers. Preferably, words about them.
Too often, during a conversation, a young person’s eyes glaze over as they decide what scintillating tidbit about their brilliant selves to reveal next, be it the three days they didn’t leave their apartment, or how a study abroad experience in Portugal nine years ago shaped who they are today. News flash: Nobody cares.
(Sorry, I just got a text from someone I’d rather be spending time with. Feel free to keep reading while I carry on a separate conversation with them.)
The self-obsession doesn’t go down well at the office, either. Millennials make up the largest portion of the workforce. But employers are terrified of them — with good reason. They’re serial job hoppers. According to Gallup, in 2016, 21 percent of the commitment-phobes left their job after less than a year. Sixty percent are open to it. The “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question has never been more redundant, because the answer is almost definitely “Not here.”
One friend of mine has tackled six different jobs in two years, which seems more stressful than just sticking with one less-than-perfect spot for a while. How long should any person stay in a gig? At least 18 months, according to most career experts. Think of it as binge-working.
And once they do land their dream job as a hoverboard tester paid in wads of cash and sushi burritos? They want to work from their apartment. A US Chamber Foundation study said work-life balance drives the career choices of 75 percent of millennials. In my experience, however, the balance generally tilts toward wherever you can type pantsless.
The situation looks bleak — but we can turn it around, millennials. Here’s how. Action item one: Stop blaming everybody. Don’t blame the big banks, don’t blame your mom, don’t blame the baby boomers, don’t blame your employer, your landlord, the economy, the Apple store, the media, the airlines, the weatherman, George R.R. Martin. By absolving ourselves of responsibility, we’ve become forever 8-year-olds, tattling on the world in hopes it will better our situation. It won’t. It will only make it crummier.
Action item two: Stop being so insular. Many young people were shocked when Brexit won out in the UK, or when Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. That’s because you’ve curated your social media accounts — where most of your interaction takes place — to be in total agreement with your opinions. But most of the world doesn’t think the way you do, which doesn’t make them bad, just different. Try empathy on for size. Befriend some dissenters. Grab a beer with them, listen to what they have to say. For once, don’t yell at them.
Action item three: Stop waiting around for something big to happen. Getting a job is hard. Filling out a million online forms isn’t enough. Primping your LinkedIn and hoping your God-given greatness will finally be recognized by everybody else like your grandma always said it would will get you zip, zilch, zero. You need to leave your apartment, meet people, be assertive, interested, open. I’ve gotten full-time jobs by sitting at bars and dancing at wedding receptions.
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To be indicted for drug trafficking is not generally considered to be a good career move, but that’s what happened to Jonathan “Chico” and Robert DeBarge today in 1988:
Birthdays begin with Jaimoe “Johnny” Johanson, drummer for the Allman Brothers:
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The headline is Latin for “The law is for little people,” which must be the motto for the Clinton School of Law.
James Taranto goes on from there:
“I may be alone in saying this,” writes PJMedia’s Roger Simon, “but . . ., James Comey may have hurt Hillary Clinton more than he helped her in his statement Tuesday concerning the Grand Email Controversy. He may have let her off the hook legally, but personally he has left the putative Democratic candidate scarred almost beyond recognition.”
Simon may be engaged in wishful thinking, but he isn’t alone. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver observes that “the chance of an indictment was extremely low”:
And conditional on there not being an indictment, this wasn’t a great outcome for [Mrs.] Clinton. Comey was quite critical of [Mrs.] Clinton and elevated the issue above the partisan fray a bit, in a way that could play well in attacks down the line.
A New York Times headline echoes the sentiment: “F.B.I.’s Critique of Hillary Clinton Is a Ready-Made Attack Ad.” Alan Dershowitz, writing at the Hill, suggests that Comey should have kept quiet:
In general, the principal [sic] of “lenity”—which requires doubts to be resolved in close cases against prosecution—applies even more strictly when the decision to indict would effectively deny the public the right to exercise its judgment about who should be the president.
So the bottom line is that [Mrs.] Clinton will not be indicted, but the director of the FBI has issued a statement that may have a considerable impact on the upcoming election. This raises fundamental structural questions about the role of the FBI in investigating political figures.
Dershowitz hedges, insisting that “Comey is an honorable man” and that what really worries him is that “a future J. Edgar Hoover” might “make the kinds of decisions that Comey has made in this case.”
Scott McKay at the American Spectator likens Comey to a Vietnam war hero:
If you want to understand Comey’s statements you might have to recall those messages the downed pilots at the Hanoi Hilton occasionally would record for the folks back home—and particularly the one Rear Adm. Jeremiah Denton offered up, in which amid his happy statements about humane treatment by the North Vietnamese were obscured by what looked like unnatural blinking. When Denton’s off-putting tics were matched with Morse code, it was obvious he was spelling out the word “torture” to the American public.
Comey’s statements can be seen as a bit like Denton’s. He laid out a perfectly defensible case for prosecuting Hillary and then gave a cursory, obviously indefensible case for leaving her alone at the end. In doing so, he set the American public ablaze with outrage and signaled to all who would listen that something fundamentally corrupt is going on in the Justice Department.
“Ablaze with outrage” sounds hyperbolic, but a Rasmussen poll taken last night finds 54% of likely voters disagree with Comey’s decision not to recommend criminal charges. Unsurprisingly, opinions vary by party, with 79% of Republicans and 63% of unaffiliated voters disagreeing, vs. just 25% of Democrats. Moreover, “81% of all voters believe powerful people get preferential treatment when they break the law. Just 10% disagree.”
McClatchy reports that “in focus groups in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Florida throughout this year, . . . the emails kept coming up among undecided voters. While most people were not familiar with the emails’ contents, they thought this much: They were stark evidence that [Mrs.] Clinton was arrogant and untrustworthy.”
As Simon observes, Comey’s decision pretty much guarantees the Democrats are stuck with Mrs. Clinton: “A Hillary indictment, in all likelihood, would have meant a new and more scandal-free Democratic candidate, a Joe Biden perhaps, far more potent than the seriously wounded [Mrs.] Clinton who now has even more explaining to do.” …
Several commentators have compared Comey’s performance with Chief Justice John Roberts’s effort, in the 2012 ObamaCare case, to have it both ways. Roberts agreed with Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito that the law as written was unconstitutional—but he effectively rewrote it, allowing himself to join the four other justices in letting it stand.
“It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices,” Roberts declared in a section of his opinion that no other justice joined. That’s true as a general matter but was a cop-out in the case at hand. It most assuredly is the job of the Supreme Court to protect the people from unconstitutional laws—the enactment of which by definition is a consequence of their political choices.
Likewise, it is the job of the FBI and the Justice Department to enforce the laws. By making a strong case against Mrs. Clinton while declining to pursue it, Comey has given reason to think that election or appointment to, or nomination for, high office is a license to violate the law.
A USA Today poll published early yesterday (i.e., before the Comey announcement) finds Mrs. Clinton ahead of Trump by five points, 45.6% to 40.4%. “Sixty-one percent report feeling alarmed about the election,” the paper notes. You have to wonder about the 39% who don’t.
Apparently national security is also for little people. Any federal employee with security clearance who had done a fraction of what Clinton did would have been at minimum fired, and probably prosecuted. Gov. Scott Walker said that the Russians and Chinese know more about what is in those emails than Americans do. And certainly Vladimir Putin and China’s leaders will, instead of release the emails, use their content to blackmail Hillary once she becomes president. Ponder that one, liberals.
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I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review Friday at 8 a.m. opposite UW-Oshkosh Prof. Tony Palmeri.
Given my habit of being chosen for Cardin’s show around holidays, you might have assumed I would have been on last week. But that ignores the vital importance to our society of National Blueberry Day today (one day after National Fried Chicken Day, Chocolate Day — which you’d think would be celebrated on days ending with the letter Y — and National Strawberry Sundae Day), National Sugar Cookie Day Saturday, Teddy Bear Picnic Day Sunday, Cheer Up the Lonely Day Monday, Different Colored Eyes Day (which one of our cats will celebrate) and Pecan Pie Day Tuesday, Celebrate Your Geekness Day Wednesday, and, next Thursday, Bastille Day and National Nude Day. (Really.)
You can hear me Friday on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org, which should play “Night Beat” more often on its weekend night Old Time Radio Drama.
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Uri Friedman begins with …
On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you’d think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user’s friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain sources over others, but about better “connecting people and ideas.”
But Richard Edelman, the head of the communications marketing firm Edelman, sees something more significant in the change: proof of a new “world of self-reference” that, once you notice it, helps explain everything from Donald Trump’s appeal to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. Elites used to possessoutsized influence and authority, Edelman notes, but now they only have a monopoly on authority. Influence largely rests with the broader population. People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.
For 16 years, Edelman’s company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm’s findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe “a person like me”—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A “person like me” is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “We have a reversal of traditional influence. It is going not top-down, but sideways.” This is part of a larger divide that has been opening up between “mass populations” and “informed publics” (Edelman defined the latter group as those who have a college degree, regularly consume news media, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group in a given country). The 2008 financial crisis, he argued, produced widespread suspicion that elites only act in their own interests, not those of the people, and that elites don’t necessarily have access to better information than the rest of the population does. The sluggish, unequal recovery from that crisis—the wealthy bouncing back while many others struggle with stagnant incomes—has only increased the skepticism.
The result of all this is deepening distrust of institutions, especially the government and the media, among “mass populations” in many countries. (Among “informed publics,” by contrast, trust in institutions has grown in the years since the economic crash.)
The financial crisis may have occurred eight years ago, but some of its gravest consequences are only now becoming evident. “It took people a long time to come around to the idea that, ‘I’m actually not going to get back to where I was [before the financial crisis]. In fact, my future is actually quite dim,’” Edelman said.
“Between the top 25 percent of income earners and the bottom 25 percent of income earners, there’s a 31-point gap in trust in institutions in the United States,” he added. “Donald Trump comes right out of that statistic.”
The gap persists across countries facing varying degrees of economic difficulty: It’s 29 points in France, 26 points in Brazil, and 22 points in India.
The gap is 19 points in the United Kingdom, where those who recently voted to leave the European Union, generally had lower incomes and less education than those who voted to remain. In the run-up to the referendum, the market-research firm YouGov found that “Leave” supporters were far more likely than “Remain” supporters to prefer relying on the opinions of ordinary people than on those of experts. On the question of Britain’s membership in the EU, 81 percent of “Leave” voters said they didn’t trust the views of British politicians, compared with 67 percent of “Remain” voters. Eighty-five percent of “Leave” voters said they didn’t trust the views of political leaders in other countries, compared with 50 percent of “Remain” voters.
Edelman said that people tend to trust businesses more than governments, in part because “business gets stuff done” while government is seen as “incapable.” People trust technology companies in particular because “they deliver value.”
This is the essential rationale for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He claims to be the complete opposite of America’s “stupid, incompetent, crooked” leaders. He presents himself as a businessman—more an entrepreneur, the head of a family business, than an elitist Big Businessman—who will get stuff done and deliver value. He asks voters to put their faith in him, not in the discredited institution of the government that he would nonetheless need to lead if elected president.
Indeed, a 2015 Pew poll found that Trump is viewed more favorably by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are angry with government than by those who aren’t.
So far, what Friedman writes makes sense. And then he goes off the rails to some extent:
In democratic systems, this deep distrust of government is corrosive. For democracies to function properly, the German journalist Henrik Müller recently wrote, there must be “enough common values that [people] trust their institutions, that majorities and minorities respect one another, and that everyone generally deals fairly with one another.”
The anger currently on display in many parts of the world is borne of anxiety, including concern that “we may not know how to architect trusted institutions at scale in public space,” said Jane Holl Lute, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, at a separate session at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “Our institutions—their weight-bearing effectiveness for social problems of enormous complexity is being called into question now across the board.”
Donald Trump’s message may be a response to this collapse of trust in government, but it also might further undermine that trust. Writing in Foreign Policy, the journalist Valentina Pasquali pointed out that, like Trump, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi mercilessly trashed the media, the judiciary, and political parties. The upshot: During his time in office, voter-turnout rates and public trust in Italian institutions plummeted. “Today,” Pasquali wrote, “Italy’s voters remain as apathetic and embittered as ever.”
“As ever” dates back approximately to 1945 and Italy’s World War II loss, so suggesting Berlusconi is to blame is an overstatement.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 