On real fake news

The newspaper I worked for hired a journalistic "hero," who had served a month in jail in Colorado for refusing to reveal a news source.  She had written about judicial corruption in Colorado and a judge sent her to jail when she wouldn't say who gave her the information or how she got it.  Her stance earned her national recognition and she was featured on the cover of Life magazine. 

She came to the Quad-Cities area to work for a newspaper in Davenport, Iowa.  After a short time, she left that paper-- at its request-- and came across the river to work on the Moline, Illinois, paper where I worked.  She was features editor and covered higher education.  That's where some problems with her showed up.

In her reporting, she showed a personal dislike for the president of the local community college.  Her reports implied that his staff members resented him and questioned his competence.  I knew a number of the faculty, and they said her contention was simply not true.  That circumstance was something that greatly perturbed other journalists on the newspaper staff.  She made things up but claimed they were the results of her investigations.  The editor was reluctant to restrain her because her stories sold newspapers; she was well regarded by many readers.  However, the area had a press club, and two of its members documented the falsehoods she made and wrote about them in the organization's newsletter.  Their purpose was to disassociate honest working journalists from a person who they thought did not meet the ethical and professional standards of a true journalist.  The same attitude prevailed at the newspaper I worked for.  The matter came to a head one day.

She ran a story that purported that illegal gambling activities were taking place throughout the countryside.  She included a photograph of a line of cars parked on the side of a country lane leading to a farmstead where she said men gathered to play high-stakes poker and craps.  I recognized the scene portrayed, as I was there.  The event was actually a workshop on grooming and handling cattle for show conducted by University of Illinois extension specialists for 4-H and Future Farmer members.  I covered the workshop on the farm page, but many readers read and believed the woman's story that gambling  was taking place there.  The owners of the farm requested that a retraction and correction be printed, but the reporter claimed that her story was true and that gamblers used the workshop contention to cover their gambling activities. 

The owners of the farm were prominent community leaders and had their lawyer call the editor to inform him that they intended to enter a defamation suit if the story was not corrected.  The editor came to the realization that the "investigative reporting" by the woman was largely made up.  He enforced a rule that she had to identify her sources either in her stories or at least to him so that he could verify the information.  The reporter rebuked the editor, saying that he was trying to gain access to news sources that she had developed.  Tension between the editor and her got intense, and was aggravated by the fact that her work was often slovenly.  The managing editor complained about the quality of her work, which detracted from the professional work produced by other staff members. Her work degraded the reputation of the newspaper, which was considered one of the most influential news sources in downstate Illinois.  Her effect on the newspaper was so discouraging that I decided it was time to change jobs.  I did not find any attractive openings in the news business.  That and the passage of a peacetime GI Bill resulted in the decision to go to graduate school.  However, I was just one of seven editorial staff members to leave the paper at that time.  Another factor was that the owners--the editor and the publisher--had decided to sell the paper, and none of the prospective buyers sponsored the kind of publications than hardcore journalists wanted to work for.  So, we left.

Many newspapers were not beacons of journalistic light.  Their editorial policies were shaped more to please the advertisers and serve the social and political interests of community leaders than to provide reliable factual information to a readership engaged in a democracy.  The journalists at the Moline paper thought that the made-up stories of that "star" journalist were a serious betrayal of the trust that serious journalists try to create in their readers.  Her work was fake news, because it was made up.  Trump applies the term to any news that displeases him, although it is usually carefully reported and factually accurate.

The internet has shattered the community news business.   Aberdeen, for example, does not have a full-fledged news organization operating in the community anymore.  When I moved here, there was a newspaper, two television news departments, and three radio stations with staffs reporting the local news.  All of that is gone.  Now there are only partial efforts at coverage by internet sources.  The economics of the news business has been destroyed and journalists have not found a way to re-establish thorough and consistent coverage.  Bad writing and false stories fill the internet pages.  Major news organizations are easily available on the internet, but local news reporting is sporadic at best.  Serious efforts get mixed in with the fakes, and readers are bewildered by trying to distinguish the real from the fake.

Real journalists need to organize and clarify their efforts so that readers and watchers know who they can depend on for real news.

 

The proctology caucus and the end of America

The matter of Donald Trump is not one of partisan politics.  It is a matter of what comprises decency.  A colleague calls the MAGA cult the proctology caucus because it is so enamored of an asshole.  He points out that these people will be around after Trump is gone and that their admiration of Trump raises questions about whether the United States can sustain an honorable, uncorrupted government.  To endorse Trump is to reject democracy.

Trump posts statements on the social media that are so crudely malevolent that they are characteristic of an emotionally disturbed, mentally deficient fifth-grader,  certainly not of a functioning adult.  And that brings up the divided state of our country.  The politicians talk of unifying.  That talk ignores the fact that people of some intelligence and decency do not want to be allied with people who lack and disparage those qualities. People who revere those qualities are aware that democracy works only when it is applied with scruples in regard to the rights and aspirations of others.

The election of Donald Trump marked a failure of American democracy.  Although we claim to be a democracy, about half of our citizens think that leadership has to be authoritarian.  They are used to obeying teachers, bosses, ministers, spouses, police, whatever form authority figures can come in.  The founders of our republic were clear about designing a system of governance that would not permit a king or anything resembling one to be in charge.  Still, there are people who are enthralled by royalty and its privileges. Walt Whitman recognized the problem when he said the democratic United States 'are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time."  The election of Trump, the heir millionaire with a predatory criminal history, was a step backward into the iniquities of feudalism.  When Trump speaks of making America great again, he is speaking of its vagaries of the past which democracy works to overcome.

Trump is a despicable person who flouts the principles that the republic was formed to develop and protect.  He is an asshole who embodies the values of many Americans, and those are not the values of a functioning democracy.  They are the values of pageantry and power that are rooted in feudalism.

A vote for Trump is a vote to stop the quest for liberty, equlality, and justice.  We borrowed a term from the black American vernacular, woke, to describe people who are extremely sensitive to the inequities, and injustices of the world, and have made it a term of derision and contempt.   That is how close we have come to losing our democracy.

Trump is an asshole, but he has a lot of fellows who admire that quality in a man.  But the biggest problem is how do you unify with people who do not, in fact, want the qualities of life that America was created to develop and preserve?

That is what is at issue in the upcoming election.

 

Gaslighting an entire nation

 The Republican Convention was an exercise in mass gaslighting.  Its premise was that anything negative in Trump's past was a malevolent contrivance of the Democrats.  The speakers at the Tuesday night session of the convention sounded as if they were nominating him for sainthood.  And there were shots of him with his bandaged ear as evidence of the mockery and abuse he suffered in his quest to redeem the nation from its diminished plight.

The Trump slogan [Make America Great Again] has always puzzled me.  When was it that America was so notably great?   What characterized its greatness?  When and how did it lose those characteristics?  Just what characteristics will restore its greatness?  Or has it always been what it is?

The whole MAGA business is a baseless contention.  There are no facts that stand up under scrutiny that define the greatness.  Some of the momentum of the civil rights movement has declined, but the MAGA people are behind that setback.  The right wing is in a frantic frenzy to destroy the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (DEI) to extend the civil rights principles into matters of employment and everyday life.  It has had some success in that regard.

The United States from its inception has strived to meet in practice the words of its founding, to achieve liberty, equality, and justice for all.  But there has always been a significant portion of the population that has no real interest in those qualities.The current push for equity has involved more women getting into positions of authority usually held by men.  I have not witnessed that process from the inside because the jobs I have held were in places where women were already in leadership positions--in journalism and education.  I do understand, however, that men dominated the executive suites in the nation. And that includes the White House.  That may soon change, as we've seen women become contenders for the presidency. Women are now the  top officers in some corporations, and that fact marks an achievement in behalf of  gender equality.  It doesn't, however, signify an advance in social equality, as corporate officers cling to authoritarian roles in their exercise of executive function, no matter what their gender.

During what we refer to as the civil rights era, we made important strides toward addressing racial and social discrimination.  Those gains were apparent at the Democratic Convention with the number of prominent black people participating and the nominee for president being a multi-racial woman.  Much of their efforts were to refute the MAGA efforts to return to a past that was short on human rights and catered to the privileges  of a wealthy few and excluded others on a racial and social basis.  The rallying cry of the Democrats is "We won't go back!"

The irony is that the GOP, under the marshaling of Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) exerted leadership in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 over the obstruction of a block of Democratic senators.  The MAGA folks think greatness was a time when a select few had power and privilege over ordinary Americans.  The current Democrats are defining just what Trump and his ilk mean by "greatness."  America's greatness is in its arduous efforts to achieve equality and attain liberty and justice for all.  Trump represents a setback in the progress we've made.  And a number of Republicans who worked for him and spoke at the Democratic Convention explained that.  

Trump speaks of America's failures as a nation, but he is its most significant one.  

The flag of a failed democracy.