Month: March 2018

JOURNALISM’S FUNERAL MARCH LED BY CORPORATE VULTURES

Eons ago, I covered the Minnesota Legislature for the St. Cloud Daily Times. It was approximately 1970, and I was paid $1.45 an hour, the then prevailing minimum wage. Thanks to my parents, I was able to pay for my Greyhound Bus trips to and from the Capitol in St. Paul. The newspaper had been in the hands of a local family for decades. The publisher was a miserly old Dickensian character who deeply resented having to shell out money for a news operation. One day, I was chatting with a coworker who sold ads for the paper when Scrooge staggered up to us, moderately anesthetized by a long martini lunch. He slapped the ad guy on the back and slurred, “asset”. He poked me in the chest and said, “liability”. That was pretty much his business plan.

Little did I know then that those were the good old days of journalism. Owning a newspaper was a license to print money. Advertisers had few viable alternatives for marketing their wares back then. The formula was simple: subscribers read the papers for the news and then stumbled onto the ads. The result was newspaper profit margins ranging from 30-something to 40-something percent. Scrooge wouldn’t pay my expenses to cover the legislature because that would diminish his profits. Besides, he knew he could get the work on the cheap because I wanted the experience and the story clips to get a better job on a larger paper. As a result of this capital-labor symbiosis, he got rich, I got hired by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and more importantly, people in St. Cloud got to read about what their legislative representatives were up to.

Those days are so gone. The once idealistic, if naïve, illusion that for-profit journalism is a calling, a search for the truth, a check on those in power, has been brutally shattered by sheer, unbridled greed. It’s capitalism run amuck. Yes, the Internet knocked newspapers for a loop. Ad revenue plummeted. Pages, stories and jobs were eliminated. But for the most part, these media companies struggled to survive, to reinvent news delivery on multiple platforms, to find some way to make their product – journalism – relevant and vital.

Then the hedge funds took over. Newspapers across the country have been gobbled up by vulture capitalist companies for the sole purpose of sucking all remaining value out of them, and then letting these once vital community assets die or go bankrupt. Their business objective is the direct opposite of viability. They just want to pick the bones, sell off the real estate, fire upwards of 90 percent of the journalists. It’s the same thing that happened to Toys R Us. The gigantic toy retailer was hurting from online competition, but was still profitable when purchased by a vulture fund. Rather than scaling back and finding a way to keep the operation going, the new owner simply bled it until it was no more, at a significant profit for its shareholders. Since 2004, Julie Reynolds writes in the Nation, “speculators have brought and sucked dry an estimated 679 hometown newspapers that reached a combined audience of 12.8 million people.”

As tragic as the Toys R Us implosion was for the 31,000 workers who lost their jobs without a dime in severance pay, the dismantling of community newspapers moves the needle to an even higher level of evil. Consumers can still obtain their favorite Hasbro action figures. Former newspaper subscribers, however, have nowhere else to go to find out what is going on with their local school board, city council or municipal leaders.

When I worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the 1970s and early 1980s, there were well over 200 journalists on staff. That number now stands at 25 and falling, thanks to its current owner, Alden Capital, a private equity firm that acquired Digital First Media (DFM), now the second largest newspaper company in the country. This outfit has zero interest in journalism. In fact, it makes money by dismantling whatever journalism was left. DFM is leaving its footprint of news annihilation across the land. Once clearly one of the ten best newspapers in the country, the San Jose Mercury News has gone from a news staff of 400 to 40. Denver once had 600 journalists reporting the news at two papers. Only one remains, The Post, and Alden, true to its 90 percent reduction rule, has taken the newsroom count to around 60. The same thing is happening all over, from the Orange County (CA) Register to the Boston Herald.

These newspapers are being gutted, drained of all remaining value. Despite the fact that Alden’s media properties are operating on profit margins as high as 20-some percent, there is no pretense of maintaining ongoing viability. The strategy is simply one of managing decimation in a way that maximizes profits until death arrives.

Think for a moment of all the local news stories that have mattered to us over the years: city building inspectors on the take; school administrators doctoring test scores, police corruption, school busses that fail safety inspections, sexual harassment at City Hall. The list is endless. Those are the stories that come from reporters sitting through endless meetings, cultivating sources, pouring through public records that ordinary citizens don’t have the time to look at.

Killing a newspaper is not like killing a toy store. “Democracy,” as the Washington Post motto has it, “dies in darkness.” It’s a death brought on not only by authoritarian tyrants, but also by the sheer immorality of unregulated capitalism. Life in a civilized society demands that we weigh conflicting rights and values in order to remain true to our core principles. Surely, there must be a way in which the interests of corporate billionaires can be tempered just enough to prevent the premeditated slaughter of the public’s right to know. We need to find that way before the darkness consumes us.

PORN STAR AND PLAYMATE MASK REAL ISSUE: TRUMP’S SEXUAL ABUSE

A fair triage of Donald Trump’s victims would put Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal near the bottom of the pack. I get how unseemly it is for the president’s high powered legal team to bully a porn star (Daniels), and a former Playboy Playmate (McDougal), into silence. What I don’t get is why any woman who consented to have sex with this bloated, orange-tinted misogynist would want to share that indiscretion with the world.

I don’t mean to be overly judgmental here. We have all led imperfect lives and experienced moments of vile, disgusting behavior. But, as a rule, we don’t confess our sins on “Sixty Minutes”, as Daniels will supposedly do Sunday night. The closest anyone came to that was 26 years ago when Bill and Hillary Clinton used the CBS venue to reaffirm their marital bond in the wake of reports that Bill had been unfaithful. That was when Hillary famously said, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”

Oh my. Those were simpler, more innocent times, even as the country’s moral axis was shifting from a paradigm in which marital infidelity – once acknowledged or proven – was a bar to holding high office. The bar has not merely been lowered, it’s been buried in a swamp of moral depravity. We now have a president who was elected after boasting on tape about forcibly kissing women or grabbing them by their genitals, prompting more than a dozen women to credibly accuse him of doing just that.

If there is any real news in the Daniels and McDougal stories, it rests with the fact that their alleged Trumpian sexual contact was consensual, and therefore a clear break in his behavior pattern. Other than that, there is, sadly, nothing new or even shocking about the notion that Donald Trump chose to bed other women while his wife, Melania, was recovering from giving birth to their son. This is a man congenitally incapable of maintaining anything other than a transactional relationship with another human being. The notion of a deeply textured, soulful connection, or even a trusting, caring friendship, is totally foreign to the Donald. This is true across the spectrum of his relationships: wives, staff, cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries. He lives in a quid-pro-quo world where loyalty is a one-way street.

The only mystery offered by the Daniels and McDougal sideshows is why the president’s lawyers are exerting so much energy to keep two women from talking about their bedroom romps with Trump. This is a guy who used to impersonate his own assistant in order to pass tips to reporters about the women with whom he was supposedly sleeping. This is a guy who has publicly fantasized about dating his daughter, a guy who brought presidential debates to a new low by raising the subject of his penis size. Unless Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal turn out to be Russian agents, the news value in all of this is negligible.

If “Sixty Minutes” wants to crack a real mystery, how about this one: where is the #metoo reckoning for all those women who say Trump sexually abused them? When does #timesup kick in for POTUS? What about Jessica Leeds, who says the Donald groped her on an airplane? Or Kristin Anderson or Jill Harth, both of whom describe similar instances of Trump grabbing their vaginas, just like he bragged about doing on the Access Hollywood tape? Or any of a long list of other women who came forth with similar claims, all backed by credible evidence.

In the post-Weinstein world, powerful men have fallen like bowling pins to similar, or even lesser, accusations. These guys have headed for seclusion, leaving behind public statements that sound like they came from the same damage control template: “I am profoundly sorry to know that I have caused (insert woman’s name here) so much pain. Although I have a different recollection of events, I deeply respect her for coming forward.”

Trump took a different approach. He called all of his accusers liars. He said they were “sick” women seeking fame or money. In a couple of cases, he told cheering campaign rallies that they weren’t attractive enough for him to touch. “You look at her,” he told one crowd, “You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”

As the #metoo movement gained steam, reporters frequently pushed White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to address the president’s accusers. She recites the same sterile stanza and moves on: “. . .this took place long before he was elected to be president, and the people of this country had a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.” Who would have thought that Electoral College math would one day be used to deliver a lifetime clemency for sexual assault?

What’s going on here? None of the other gropers, grabbers and harassers got off the hook with an it-happened-a-long-time-ago defense. “House of Cards” President Francis Underwood might have gotten away with pushing his mistress in front of a speeding Metro train, but the real life actor who portrayed him, Kevin Spacey, was immediately fired from the Netflix series based on accusations that he sexually harassed and abused young men and boys as long as three decades ago. He hasn’t been publicly heard from since.

Donald Trump likes to think that he was elected by what he calls the “forgotten people”, hard-working middle class folks ignored by the powerful elites, or so the spin goes. Well, there are a number of forgotten women out there wondering just how it is that the #metoo movement appears to have left them behind, simply because their transgressor won a presidential election. But this is about a lot more than just those individual accusers. As long as it remains normal and okay for an accused sexual predator to hold the highest office in the land, #metoo remains more of an aspiration than a destination in reach. #timesup will become real only when it pulls in #trumptoo.

THE CURTAIN NEEDS TO FALL ON TRUMP’S ONE-MAN SHOW

The unprecedented mass exodus of presidential appointees is no surprise. After all, the Donald made clear from the outset that he was prepared to go it alone. Remember that line from his Republican convention acceptance speech? “I alone can fix it,” he said. Trump is reportedly exhilarated by all the staff churn and turmoil. Those vanquished cabinet members and senior advisors were merely awkward stagehands, fools who got in his way and stole his scenes. They didn’t understand that this administration is a one-man show.

Donald Trump is absolutely certain that he doesn’t need a merry band of experts telling him how to run this country. As he likes to remind us, President 45 has a power greater than any font of knowledge, an unassailable force guaranteed to lead us to greatness: his instincts. “I rely on myself very much,” he once said. “I just think you have to have an instinct and you go with it.”

A Google search of “Trump instincts” turns up more than 800,000 entries. He points to a passage in a book he wrote in 1999 about Osama Bin Laden being a “shadowy figure,” as evidence of an “instinct” that predicted the 2001 terrorist attacks. He told Bloomberg News that he did no research on immigration but made the issue a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign because he “. . . just knew instinctively that our borders are a mess.” The New York Times reported this week that Trump has told confidants that he’d rather rely on his superior instinct than on advice from his cabinet.

This is, of course, a gigantic load of bunk. Instinct is not a mysterious psychic power. It is a byproduct of our experience, offering a conscious assessment based on patterns instantly detected, and subconsciously based on stored memory. An MIT report suggests a person needs at least 10 years of “domain specific experience” in order to make good instinctive decisions. That means Trump may have a well-honed instinct for real estate transactions, but that power hardly transfers to dealing with Congress or a North Korean dictator.

The president has an alliterative confusion over two approaches to decision making. His is impulse, not instinct. Instinct aligns a pending decision with rhythms drawn from a deep well of experience. Impulse is utterly without cognition and is driven by a lust for immediate pleasure. Trump’s “stable genius” mind is not performing a rapid review of past experiences in search of a pattern that would trigger an instinct. He simply acts on a child-like impulse to say or do whatever he believes makes him look the best in that particular moment, with zero regard for what that choice may reap for him in a future moment.

If the events of the past couple weeks had unfolded in any other administration, it would be meaningful to ask these questions: What’s the strategic game plan behind Trump’s decision to meet with Kim Jong Un? How does a new Secretary of State affect the administration’s approach to diplomacy? Will threats to impose tariffs on South Korea and Japan have an impact on seeking the denuclearization of North Korea? Where is the White House headed on gun control, or relief for young DACA-covered immigrants?

Yet, those and similar questions are predicated on a foundation of deep thought and serious contemplation that is totally foreign to this president. Unless you’re talking about trying to keep a porn star quiet, this is a White House free of strategic planning.

Instead, Trump:

SHOCKED every foreign diplomat and his own advisors by agreeing on the spot to meet with the North Korean dictator, and then rushed to the White House pressroom to alert the media he so despises that a big announcement was about to be made. The Donald’s narrative was that his hard line on Kim has brought the tyrant to his knees, all without a clue as to where to go from there.

INSISTED, days after the Florida school shooting, that now is the time to challenge the NRA and enact meaningful gun control legislation. After basking in self-adoration for such courage, he reversed course and retreated to the NRA party-line.

TOOK at least 14 different positions on protection for the Dreamers, young immigrants who grew up in America, all based on who talked to him last, and/or on the audience he was trying to please at the time.

ANNOUNCED stiff new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, saying “trade wars are good”, just after his Treasury Secretary reassured allies that “We’re not looking to get into trade wars.”

In his bizarrely quixotic campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly complained about how all of his predecessors were so weak that other countries were “laughing at us”. Only he, alone, could win America’s respect back, or so the campaign line went. Well, that’s not happening anytime soon. Trump, and his make-every-moment-all-about-me operating system, has heads shaking all over the globe. As one South Korean newspaper editorial recently noted, “His style of governing, marked by disconnectedness and arrogance, is just mind-blowing.”

The trajectory of this presidency keeps heading for new lows every day. We are long past the point of writing off his fumbles to a mere lack of experience. Like a monster in a bad science fiction movie, Trump grows worse and more out of control with the passage of time. Rather than sensing his inadequacies and failings, and seeking guidance from those with expertise and experience, the president seems almost emboldened by an incompetency he can’t or won’t see.

If a beloved family member had that level of disconnect from reality, we’d be looking for a well-staffed protective care place for them. Unfortunately, the “family” in this case is a congressional Republican majority pathologically adverse to dealing with this delusional head of household, unless and until he gets much worse. Sadly, that time will come. Let us pray that this country is still intact when it does.

SEARCHING FOR DUE PROCESS AT THE ALTAR OF GUN WORSHIP

In an odd rhetorical twist, our latest national conversation on guns has embraced an unlikely term: due process. After all, guns are the antithesis of due process. They kill instantly and indiscriminately, not on accepted rules of justice, but on the capricious basis of a sight line. Yet, some of the suggestions aimed at reversing the growing phenomena of mass shootings raise critical due process concerns – on both sides of the gun control divide.

Take poor Donald Trump, for example. In a rare and short-lived moment of sensibility, he suggested that we might want to think about relieving dangerous people of their guns before giving them due process. His acolytes at the NRA and Fox News went apoplectic. To them, the president sounded very much like Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts in the infamous case of a tart-stealing Knave. So eager was her Highness to have the suspect beheaded, she called for a reordering of jurisprudence: “First the sentence, then the verdict.”

In fairness, that’s not exactly what Trump had in mind last week when he opined that, in the case of deeply disturbed people, we should “take the guns first, (and) go through due process second.” The concept seems eminently reasonable. If the issue before the court is whether a gun owner is a raving lunatic filled with homicidal rage, you don’t want him fiddling with his AR-15 semi-automatic on the witness stand while a judge determines if he is dangerous. Yet the reaction from the well-armed right was predictable. They have long been programmed to go into immediate convulsions upon hearing the words “take the guns”. This crowd’s favorite slogan has long been: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” They don’t take kindly to talk of gun taking.

The concept of due process has been around a lot longer than guns and dates back to early English common law. It was codified in the Magna Carta in 1215, and our founders later did a cut-and-paste, inserting those words into both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Although the nitty-gritty of what constitutes due process is an ongoing judicial work in progress, the basic notion is that government can’t take people’s life, liberty or property without going through a fair and just judicial process.

To the NRA, the only due process that should ever separate a guy and his gun is an involuntary commitment to a mental institution or an adjudication of being a “mental defective”. That standard would have kept 97 percent of recent mass shooters legally armed and ready to fire. The well-heeled gun lobby claims to have pulled Trump back from his momentary lucidity that gave rise to the concept of take-the-guns-first-and then-have-a-hearing. Fox News labeled the idea as “un-American as imaginable”.

Quite the contrary, Trump’s suggestion was deeply seeped in American due process tradition. For example, police can detain suspects on the “reasonable suspicion” that they committed a crime. They then go before a judge within a reasonable time period and the state must show “probable cause” to hold them for trial. Finally, in order to trigger a prison sentence, the state needs a conviction that comes only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the same sequential approach Trump was talking about before he was reined in by his NRA handlers. There was ample evidence that the 19-year-old man charged in the recent Florida shooting was deeply distressed, armed with assault rifles and threatening to shoot up a school. Those facts should have been sufficient to temporarily confiscate his guns, pending a due process hearing on the question of his dangerousness.

In fact, that is precisely what happens right now in five states – California, Connecticut, Indiana, Washington and Oregon – that have adopted so-called “red-flag” laws. Based on evidence from friends, family or police of a credible threat, a judge can order the temporary confiscation of a person’s guns, pending a future hearing on the issue. Studies have shown that those laws have resulted in a significant reduction in gun homicides and suicides.

Trump came up with another brain storm on the gun issue last week, and this one would blow the entire concept of due process to smithereens. Waxing nostalgic about nineteenth century insane asylums, the president suggested this might be a way to lock up potential shooters when there is no evidence to support apprehension. “You know,” said Trump, “in the old days we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this (the Florida shooter), because they knew something was off. (Then) he’s off the streets.”

Trump’s memory of the days when you could “nab” undesirables and toss them into the loony bin represents one of the more inglorious chapters of this country’s history. Based on a belief that mental illness could be dealt with only by locking people up, hundreds of thousands of Americans were confined to these draconian dungeons with little or no due process, many because they just seemed to be different. Once locked up, they were constantly sedated and, in many cases, surgically lobotomized. Prodded largely by rapid advances in mental health treatment, the Supreme Court ruled in 1975, that people could be involuntarily committed to mental hospitals only upon proving to a judge that they are a danger to themselves or others.

Even if the law changed, it’s hard to imagine building enough insane asylums to house all of the angry, socially awkward young men who have guns and talk about killing people. Recent reports indicate that the internet is filled with hundreds of group chats involving thousands of mostly young males who venerate school shooters and fantasize about joining their ranks. While carting them all off to a mental hospital and sedating them until their fiftieth birthday might reduce mass shootings, it totally destroys any semblance of due process.

There is a better solution: take their guns. After all, those students they are yammering about killing are also entitled to due process. Maybe one day, when the Congress and the White House are no longer owned by the NRA, we can finally get around to protecting that right to life, free from weekly mass shootings.