The number one single today in 1959:
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1971, selections from the Beatles’ White Album were played in the courtroom at the Sharon Tate murder trial to answer the question of whether any songs could have inspired Charles Manson and his “family” to commit murder.
Manson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.
The number one single today in 1960 was written by a one-hit wonder and sung by a different one-hit wonder:
The number 45 45 today in 1964 was this group’s first charting single, but not last:
Today in 1974, members of Free, Mott the Hoople and King Crimson formed Bad Company:
By the summer of 2016, Donald Trump had secured the Republican nomination for president. In the eyes of the elite media, a Trump presidency no longer seemed an outlandish fantasy but rather a menacing if unlikely outcome. Angry and anxious, prominent journalists asked in earnest whether the old norms – report the facts, get the story right, separate news gathering from opining – were still adequate.
The obvious answer should have been yes. One could accurately report Trump’s loopy and alarming statements, his many character flaws, and his dubious policy pronouncements – along with his preternatural ability to give voice to many people’s discontent with elites of both parties – without embellishing the facts, inventing misdeeds, and adopting an oppositional stance.
Instead, having convinced themselves that Trump posed a fatal threat to democracy in America and apparently doubting that citizens could be trusted to evaluate the facts about his candidacy on their own, some of our most prestigious journalistic outlets decided to scrap the old norms. They downplayed or obscured Hillary Clinton’s unlawful use of a private email server to conduct State Department business (including the transmission of highly classified information) while sugarcoating the extraordinary indulgences Clinton and her team received from investigators in the Obama administration FBI and Department of Justice. At the same time, elite journalists took the lead in convicting Trump in the court of public opinion of Russia collusion based on a dossier of tall tales marketed to the public and the FBI by the Clinton campaign.
As part of The 1735 Project – a special RealClearPolitics series that explores the precipitous decline in public trust in the media, the consequences for freedom and democracy, and remedies to the deepening crisis – RCP Washington Bureau Chief Carl Cannon recently revisited questions that journalists raised in 2016 concerning the norms that should guide their coverage of Trump. In “The Art of Covering Politicians Who Lie,” Cannon observed that elite journalists largely concur with the elastic new legal theory advanced by the Biden administration Justice Department’s criminal indictment of Trump for his conduct in relation to the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots: A president breaks the law by lying to the public to hold onto power.
Cannon identifies three problems with the theory shared by Special Counsel Jack Smith and prominent journalists. First, it flies in the face of the First Amendment, which above all protects political speech, including political speech that is hateful and untrue.
Second, the theory presupposes knowledge of Trump’s state of mind on Jan. 6. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a lie as “a false statement made with intent to deceive,” notes Cannon. But there is reason to suppose that Trump’s singular personality led him to ignore the chorus of voices on his own staff and instead embrace the far-fetched theories of informal advisers Rudy Giuliani and then-Chapman University Law School Professor John Eastman that the election had been stolen and that on Jan. 6 he was within his rights under the Constitution to challenge the results in the House of Representatives.
Third, as Cannon reminds with several colorful examples – FDR, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton, for starters – U.S. presidents and their loyal minions have routinely uttered falsehoods to the public for political gain. Acknowledging that “Donald Trump presented problems of a whole new order of magnitude,” Cannon also recognized that many Trump supporters take his boasts, embroideries, and outright fabrications – his grandiosity and narcissism – with a grain of salt.
Showing more than telling, Cannon indicates that the old norms were adequate to covering Trump and still furnish the best approach to keeping citizens informed. Select journalists could (and did) accurately report his wild exaggerations, boorish behavior, and ignorance of policy and governance without boasting of their fidelity to a new and higher ethic. The new standards, however, gave many in the elite media leave to embroider Trump’s questionable conduct and participate in the fabrication of treasonous deeds. Adhering to the old norms would have required trust in the public and understanding of the journalist’s vital but limited role in a liberal democracy.
To recover an appreciation of the journalist’s calling, one could hardly do better than read “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” in which Lance Morrow offers elegiac observations on what journalism once was and restrained ruminations on what it has become.
An award-winning essayist of uncommon perceptiveness and elegance, Morrow provides in “The Noise of Typewriters” a loose and flowing meditation on the mechanics of publishing newspapers and magazines; the peculiarities and indispensable contributions of publishers, editors, and reporters; and the frustrations and joys, the tedium and rush, the private vanity and public spiritedness of writing and disseminating the first draft of history. Bringing a light touch to profound issues and eminent individuals and eliciting striking insights from seemingly casual occurrences and ordinary people, Morrow’s explorations of ideas, events, and people revolve around a simple proposition: The purpose of journalism is to search for and communicate the truth.
A senior fellow at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center whose occasional writings now appear in the Wall Street Journal and City Journal, Morrow joined Time magazine in 1965. Over the course of more than three decades, he covered culture and politics in America and diplomacy and war abroad. The search for and communication of the truth, the veteran journalist well knows, are no simple matters, particularly on a looming deadline.
Nevertheless, “Journalism in the twentieth century proceeded on the assumption that there was such a thing as objective reality,” Morrow writes. “But in the writing and editing, objective reality tended to become subjective reality; facts were well enough, but important facts needed to be evaluated, judged – characterized.”
Accordingly, journalism required both the intelligence to distinguish between the way the world really is and how we would like it to be and the moral character to respect the distinction: “A journalist needs a disciplined reverence for the facts, because the temptations of storytelling are strong and seductive.”
Those temptations, amplified by the reach and convenience of the Internet and social media, have proven difficult to resist. “In the twenty-first century, on the other hand, journalism would find itself plunged into the metaverse,” according to Morrow. “Politics and culture would migrate into the country of myth, with its hallucinations and hysterias – the floating world of a trillion screens. There might come to be no agreed reality at all.”
Morrow is living proof that the temptation to replace the facts with storytelling can be resisted, and his thoughtfully meandering recollections and reflections illustrate why the temptation should be resisted. He returns again and again to the remarkable career of Henry Luce who founded Time along with Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. Through consideration of the publishing mogul’s long tenure at the apex of American journalism, Morrow brings into focus “essential questions – about the nature of journalism, about the politics of storytelling, about the morals of power.”
He admiringly quotes his old friend, Carl Bernstein – half of the Washington Post’s famed Watergate reporting team of Woodward and Bernstein – who said that journalism’s task “was to obtain ‘the best available version of the truth.’” The best available version, Morrow advises, will combine respect for “hard, quotidian, worldly facts” and “the essential truth of things, the inner truth, the poetic truth.” Responsible journalism puts storytelling in the service of the truth.
Morrow illustrates the point in a recollection of the 1964 Georgetown murder of the socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, which he covered as a young reporter for the old Washington Star. The story was Morrow’s “initiation into certain mysteries of storytelling, and into the follies of conspiracy theories and the truth that sometimes you can never know the truth.”
If he had served on the jury, Morrow states, he would have voted to acquit the defendant: “They never found the gun. There was no evident motive. Two eyewitnesses were on the other side of the canal, a little too far away to be absolutely certain about the man they saw on the towpath.”
Yet the “reasonable doubt” that governs trials is not the last word on the truth. Morrow thinks the acquitted defendant killed Mary Pinchot Meyer.
While the hard, factual truth about Pinchot Meyer’s murderer has proven elusive, Morrow’s graceful storytelling illuminates the larger truth about the truth’s frequent murkiness and refines appreciation of the difference in the kind of judgments that confront jurors and journalists.
With election 2024 approaching, nerves fraying across the political spectrum, and the self-indulgent passions of scorn and resentment all the rage, we could use a thousand more journalists like Morrow – and Cannon – in the national media.
The number one album today in 1976 was Earth Wind & Fire’s “Gratitude” …
The number one British album today in 1999 was Fatboy Slim’s “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby,” and if you like it you have to praise it like you shoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oould:
Martin Gurri wrote this before the Iowa caucuses:
We are a nation of rules. American politics and government are defined by rules. “Our democracy” is an empty abstraction: it doesn’t really exist. Instead, we have rules and procedures for choosing those who govern us and for holding them accountable. The rules aren’t immutable; they evolve, but slowly and with care. This feels boring and uninspiring. It was designed to be that way and it is precisely what makes our country great. If you want excitement, you’ll get a Fidel Castro. That’s the place I came from—a land of political overstimulation and seven decades of tyranny.
We are a nation of rules and the rules are boring. Embrace that. In times of difficulty, go with the boring option. When faced with a frightening crisis, tamp it down with ultra-boring moves. No matter what, stick with the rules.
I can’t avoid talking about Donald Trump, but I’m going to make it brief. I know a lot of you don’t like him. Neither do I. But let’s assume he’s only a politician. He’s not Hitler, Godzilla, or the Beast of the Apocalypse—just a guy with a loud mouth and a desperate need for attention. Most Americans think of him that way.
This is not about him. It’s about you.
When you demonize those who disagree with you, you invite treatment in kind. When you refuse to engage in political argument and resort to performative moralizing, you make it clear to any neutral observer that, for you, there’s only one side, one opinion, one conformist crowd that can ever govern legitimately. The rest are disgusting subhumans who should never be tolerated near the levers of power. When you trample on the rules that say “all are created equal” like that, you are destroying the fabric that holds the country together. And believe me when I say this: you will reap the whirlwind.
Free speech is a rule among us. It’s closely bound to the search for truth. When you justify state censorship, you pitch your camp in the kingdom of lies. And believe me: the chaos you impose from above will erupt with a million times the force and consume you from below.
The law exists to maintain order. It’s not for settling our political disputes. That’s the rule. When you criminalize dissent and equate nonconformity with terrorism, you have lost the thread of how this country works. When you joke about putting opponents in reeducation camps so they can be converted into loyal followers, you channel the regime in Cuba. When you prosecute an opposition presidential candidate, you practice the same style of mafia politics as Vladimir Putin in Russia. When you ban a candidate’s name from the ballot to preserve “our democracy,” you sound, frankly, like you have gone nuts. And believe me: it will come back to haunt you.
You and I may disagree but I have no wish to dismiss you as a moral abomination, or prosecute you for your political views, or disqualify the candidates you prefer. Disagreement is information—it’s a favor you do for me by calling out the potential gaps and the mistakes in the opinions I hold. I realize that, in the excitement of the moment, it feels like an enormous gulf separates us. But that is only true if you want it to be. Distance is always a matter of perspective. And you know perfectly well that in your family and among your friends, there are individuals who disagree with you politically—people just like you except for this one little thing. You are not so different from them. From where I stand, you and I are not so distant, either.
The two big parties will nominate their candidates. A few outsiders may find their way onto the ballot. We, the American people, as we have done for more than two centuries, will choose among them. The results will be counted state by state and sent to the Electoral College. Those are the rules. If you mess with them, there will be hell to pay. If your side wins, be boring about it—no censorship, no demonization, no show trials. People will love you for it. If your side loses, ask yourself why. Fake news? Russian manipulation? Systemic racism? The totalitarian temptation? Each of those narratives is an insult to the American people, for whom you must retain some vestige of affection and respect.
If your side loses, look in the mirror. You are the reason your side lost in 2016. A man like Trump can only get elected because he’s not you and there are few alternatives. Reflect on how you can win back those who feel so disenfranchised that they would vote for such a man over your choice.
Whatever the outcome, we’ll have to live together. Talk of resistance and civil war is exciting but self-destructive. Be boring instead. Look for common ground in politics. If there is none, then look to our common humanity. Our differences of opinion may seem profound, but all of us want what is best for our families, the neighborhoods we live in, and the country we love. We can raise our voices in anger but there should be no malice in this debate. If after 700,000 Americans died in battle, Lincoln felt no malice toward the enemy, we can do the same after a presidential election—win or lose.
I’m only a voice crying out from inside a media ghetto, but I wish that you could hear me and we could find a way to talk. I wish we could push aside the worst among us and bring the best forward to be the beating heart of this crazy pluralistic society. I wish I could open your eyes and let you see yourself the way people see you. For all our sakes, I wish I could persuade you that the rules are the rules, and breaking them is suicide. And don’t take it the wrong way, friend, but I’m going to wish you—and all of us—a very boring 2024.
The number one single today in 1956:
The number one single in Great Britain in 1964:
… and in the U.S. today in 1964:
We are about to embark on what might be one of the wildest years in the history of American politics, and it may end up merely as a prelude.
If 2024 is set to be tumultuous and unpredictable, just wait until 2025 if Donald Trump wins the presidency again later this year.
His adversaries don’t have a history of accepting his victories with equanimity. Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 launched conspiracy theories about how Russia had helped him win, catalyzed a yearslong law-enforcement investigation into him and his campaign based on those theories, and set off protests in the streets.
All that was mild, given what may yet be in the offing.
Trump’s opponents are sincerely, and to some extent understandably, alarmed by his conduct after the 2020 election and how he’s branded his political comeback as a revenge tour.
For most of them, though, saving democracy doesn’t mean upholding the rules no matter what and letting the voters decide the election and the fate of the next president. No, it means blocking Donald Trump by any means necessary, regardless of the consequences for the rule of law, democratic politics, or faith in our system of government.
In this view, democracy has only one legitimate outcome, and it doesn’t involve Donald Trump back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Some Democrats deserve minimal credit for distancing themselves from the Colorado and Maine decisions striking Trump from the ballot and arguing that the right way to defeat Trump is via the voting booth, although this isn’t much of a concession.
What’s already happened has put the country in an unprecedented place. It is hard to imagine what’s more extreme than one side in our politics indicting its leading opponent, creating the real prospect of jailing him in the months prior to an election, and excluding him from the ballot in select states.
Yet, if Trump wins, we have to assume that this is only a taste of things to come. It’s not as though his enemies are going to conclude that Trump was an intolerable threat as a candidate, but once he’s been elected president again, the voters have spoken and everyone should revert to politics as usual.
The Washington Post ran a long, much-discussed essay by respected foreign-policy writer Robert Kagan arguing that Trump has brought the U.S. to the brink of dictatorship. If he returns to power, it will mean “the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom.”
This dire view depends on every institutional bulwark of America’s system — from the courts to the military to public opinion — surrendering to a one-term president who, if history is any guide, will get rebuked in the midterms and become a lame duck by his third year in office.
But if tyranny is where you think we are headed, what’s the appropriate response? Running anti-Trump super-PAC ads this year? Canvassing for President Biden? Going on CNN panels to sound very concerned? In other words, simply all the standard means of political organization and persuasion?
And if Trump emerges victorious, and the alleged dictatorship is underway in earnest?
Certainly, the reaction will make the pro-Hamas protests that have roiled college campuses and disrupted transportation nodes around the country look small-scale by comparison. If the republic is supposedly on the verge of falling, extra-legal means of resistance are justified.
At least some portion of the Left will convince itself that only a color revolution can save the country.
Prior to the 2016 Trump–Clinton contest, one school of Trump supporters posited that it was the “Flight 93 election” — possibly the last chance to save the country. The consequences of failure were so awful that anything was justified to win. Now, that’s the way the Left feels, except Trump won his Flight 93 election, and Joe Biden could well lose his.
If so, there will be much to fear from democracy’s self-styled defenders.
Today in 1967 was not a good day for fans of artistic freedom or the First Amendment, though the First Amendment applies to government against citizens and not the media against individuals.
Before their appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, the Rolling Stones were compelled to change “Let’s Spend the Night Together …”
… to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together”:
The number one British album today in 1977 was ABBA’s “Arrival” …
The number one British single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1978:
The number one British single today in 1995 came from a Swedish group that did a wacky country-ish song:
The number one single today in 1960 topped the charts for the second time:
It’s not a secret that the number one album today in 1973 was Carly Simon’s “No Secrets”:
Today in 1973, Eric Clapton performed in concert for the first time in several years at the Rainbow Theatre in London:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 