Tag: Journalism

TO RECOUNT, PERCHANCE TO DREAM

I admit being a wee bit intrigued by the straw-grasping prospect of a presidential election recount. Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, has raised more than $5 million to finance a re-tabulation of votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The margins were thin in all three states, and there have been unconfirmed reports there of hacking or machine malfunction. Should this Hail Mary pass reach the end zone, reversing the outcome in those states, Hillary Clinton would take 46 electoral college votes from Donald Trump and become the 45th president of the United States.

Needless to say, in a week filled with a parade of wingnuts anointed for key cabinet and White House positions, this recount talk has been a soothing salve for us liberals. We had already fastened our Time Machine seatbelts in preparation for the flight back to the 1950s. Now we can at least squint through the aircraft window and, if we pretend hard enough, almost see a secretary of state who is neither Rudy Giuliani nor Mitt Romney. It proves the old adage that when you desperately want to give up on reality, you will happily settle for a good fantasy.

We have all used these fleeting and illusive what-if moments to breathe new life into different scenarios that seemed to have suddenly died very late on that very dark night of November 8. Some have chosen to fix their imaginary sights on a rock solid liberal Supreme Court majority. Others let themselves see possible health care fixes, instead of an end to coverage for millions of Americans. As a recovering journalist, I’ve carved out a considerably different niche, one that is totally delicious to contemplate.

My fantasy is nothing less than a complete and total reversal of all those deeply analytical, thumb-sucking, ponderous think pieces cranked out by news outlets over the past three weeks. You know, the ones that attempted to explain, in 10,000 words or less, precisely how it was that a racist, crotch grabbing buffoon, with no government experience or aptitude, became the leader of the free world. I’m talking about this kind of stuff:

“Democrats Embrace of Neoliberalism Won it for Trump.”

“Election of Trump is Stunning Repudiation of Establishment.”

“Failed Polls Question the Profession of Prognostication.”

“Clinton’s Loss is Nail in the Coffin of Center-Left Politics.”

So now comes the juicy part, the joyous fantasy: Clinton wins in the electoral college through the recount, complimenting her popular vote advantage. Now what do we want to say to the opus writers? Well, let’s cue the audio from the third debate and isolate those rich, snide Trumpian tones: “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.”

Better yet, flash way back to SNL’s Emily Litella: “Never mind!”

This would be so much better than the classic “Dewy Defeats Truman” headline in the 1948 Chicago Tribune. That was simply the wrong outcome. Here we’re dealing with deep existential analysis about who we are as a nation, all based on facts that just turned into a bunch of hooey and are no longer in evidence. Reverse three states and, presto, neoliberalism saves the day for Clinton, Trump’s loss validates the establishment and the pollsters and Clinton breathe new life into center-left politics.

How wonderful would that be? The best part is that it might well persuade serious newsroom types not to pound out those definitive post-election what-does-it-all-mean pieces hours after the polls close. When I wrote about politics, back in the pre-digital Gutenberg days, the ritual was to work up an analysis for the Sunday paper following a Tuesday election. That gave us a few days to think things out and, more importantly, to talk with political types after they had a chance to process the election results.

Now, of course, the deep, navel gazing begins around noon on election day, as soon as the first exit poll numbers come in and are chewed up and spit out by the talking heads on cable news and other soldiers of information and misinformation in the Twittersphere, blogosphere and wherever else our clicks and eyeballs may take us. Sadly, the poor legacy media tries to keep up, rather than sticking to its brand of waiting to make sure it gets it right.

And so it was, at 3 a.m., November 9, that a group of New York Times political reporters recorded a podcast aimed at answering the question, “How Did We Get This Wrong?” One of them said the media’s inability to sense the magnitude of pro-Trump sentiment was “a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.” Another Times staffer, less than an hour after Trump appeared to have amassed more than 270 electoral votes, offered this instant analysis: “Fundamentally Clinton, as it turns out, was the worst candidate Democrats could have run. Had almost any other major Democratic candidate been the nominee, they would have beaten Donald Trump.” So many conclusions with minimal facts and so little sleep.

At this point, Clinton’s lead in the popular vote surpasses 2 million and continues to grow, giving her a margin of about 1.5% over Trump, not too far from most of the pre-election polls. If you added to that the fantasy scenario of her winning a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, what would we have? I say that would really and truly be a “failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.”

And, oh, what a sweet failure it would be!

HEY WIKILEAKS: YOUR CREDIBILITY IS LEAKING!

When – and if – the dust settles from this hallucinogenic presidential election, serious news outlets need to rethink the journalistic value of Wikileaks. Once viewed as a noble whistleblower, a digital version of Watergate’s Deep Throat, this unseemly outfit has become an ugly goiter on the body politic.

Founded by Julian Assange in 2006, the organization was devoted to “combating secrecy”, largely by procuring leaked, hacked or otherwise purloined information that shed light on the shadows of unsavory government operations. In 2010, for example, Wikileaks released thousands of classified documents that raised serious questions about the manner in which the United States conducted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was praised by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) as a “new breed of media that offers important opportunities” for news organizations. That was then. Now is a whole different deal.

Right wing websites have been ablaze this week (here, here and here) with Assange’s promises that his next batch of Hillary Clinton emails will lead to her arrest, just in time for the election. He made that boast from his perch in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he’s got a bed-and-asylum deal protecting him from a Swedish rape charge. Heralding Hillary’s arrest, of course, was the promised capstone of Wikileaks’ summer and fall project: the serialized release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign staff. There seems to be a rare consensus among U.S. intelligence operatives that Russia was responsible for the email hacking. Predictably, Assange would not reveal his source. You cannot, after all, combat secrecy without keeping some secrets. But what he did share with us, through an interview last July with a British television host, was that he absolutely opposes Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and views her as a “personal foe.” He told the interviewer that he would rather see Donald Trump elected.

So let’s review: an avowed political partisan with an ax to grind is dodging rape charges while systematically releasing his political opponent’s private emails that were likely hacked by Russian spies. Compared to the pedestrian position paper stuff I covered as a political reporter in the 1970s, this all seems rather otherworldly. Of course it is a much different world than the Carter v. Ford days of 1976. With the Wide World Web, you don’t have to go to Alice’s Restaurant to get what you want. A flick of the keyboard connects you to endless verbiage on how the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and the Moon Landing were both staged for political purposes.

The difference here, however, is that serious, responsible media institutions have, with seemingly little forethought, bestowed the banner of credibility on Wikileaks. On a daily basis, the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Politico have been doling out the hacked emails despite an absence of authenticity and, with a few notable exceptions, any meaningful news value. The thinking seems to be that the emails are news simply because they are out there. I don’t seem to remember that standard from journalism school, but I was young then and skipped class a lot.

There is a compelling need for news organizations to step back and seriously think out how they should responsibly treat Wikileaks in the future. It seems abundantly clear that it has changed significantly since the days when the IFJ characterized it as a serious new media outlet. Even without the Russian connection and Julian Assange’s political vendetta, there remains the question of whether responsible news organizations should routinely make public the content of private communication that is otherwise void of substantive value. The vast majority of the published emails rose only to the level of what we baby boomers remember from the ancient days of party line telephones, where you could occasionally hear a neighbor say something that you weren’t supposed to hear.

For political junkies, it’s fun and amusing to read how Clinton campaign director John Podesta totally trashed some party functionary. But the news value is limited. It doesn’t begin to compare to Edward Snowden’s releases concerning the National Security Agency’s secret access to the emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens. Having spent a good chunk of my life in and around newsrooms, large and small, I can tell you that a collection of hacked emails from those places would make fascinating reading. Reporters and their editors are pretty creative when it comes to trashing each other and their rivals.

As the renowned linguist, Deborah Tannen, recently observed in a Washington Post op-ed, we all communicate with at least two voices, public and private. For the sake of civility and relationship preservation, we vent and carry on something fierce about friends, family and coworkers when talking or emailing with a trusted few, and then clean up our acts for broader exposure. If the only value in publishing hacked emails is to destroy that construct, then I think it best to let those who really want to wallow in that kind of muck go directly to the Wikileaks site. Fascination is an insufficient standard for news value. Millions of people are fascinated by pornography, but they don’t get there through the Washington Post or the New York Times.

The only thing about political journalism that hasn’t changed over the years is the relationship between partisan sources and reporters – the users and the used. It is, at once, symbiotic and codependent. It works best when both parties fully comprehend their roles and motives, when journalists weigh and evaluate not just the information given to them but also the sources who provided it. The problem with Wikileaks is that it was once considered a serious news outlet in its own right. That is obviously no longer the case. It is as partisan as those it hacks, and should be treated accordingly.

A COLLECTIVE NUMBNESS TO TRUMP ATROCITIES

The most perplexing mystery of our time, other than Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, has been how Donald Trump can say so many stupid things and continue to be a viable presidential candidate. Let me crack that cold case with one word: volume. He says so many stupid things that they evolve into an anesthetic blur. Under the power of that anesthesia, well over 40 percent of likely voters are ready to extend their middle finger to the political establishment and send this clown to the White House.

Take the past 24 hours as an example. Trump came clean about his fabricated conspiracy over President Obama’s birthplace, falsely accused Hillary Clinton of creating the issue, and then suggested that her Secret Service agents disarm and see if anyone tries to kill her. And Al Gore paid a price because he claimed to have invented the internet. But don’t you see? That’s the point. We remember Gore’s internet gaffe because it was one of the very few stupid things he said. He spent the rest of time talking about boring stuff, like carbon footprints and Social Security lock boxes.

If Trump had been intently focused on well thought out policy issues for the last 10 months and then, in a weak moment, advocated the assassination of his opponent, it would have been curtains on his campaign. It’s all people would have talked about from now until the election. Instead, in a matter of hours, he will have pushed that thought from our minds and replaced it with another outrage. The human brain is not equipped to simultaneously concentrate on multiple atrocities.

Broadcaster Keith Obermann took a stab at it this week, much to the delight of the progressive community. In a well scripted and delivered 17-minute rant, Obermann listed 176 truly outrageous things Trump has said or done. He included the attack on the Pope and the Gold Star parents, his history of not renting to black people, his claim that Obama invented ISIS, his suggestion that Russia hack Clinton’s emails, his insistence that his buddy, Valdimir Putin, would never go into Ukraine, which he invaded two years ago, and 170 other equally bizarre comments and actions. Yet, days later, when I started to write this paragraph, I had to download a transcript of Obermann’s rant because I couldn’t remember the laundry list. It’s like laughing your head off at a comedy club but being unable, the next day, to remember more than one or two of the jokes.

This is why it seems like the media is hounding Clinton on the email and foundation stuff while not holding Trump to his foibles. In one instance you have two issues with long shelf lives. In the other, you have serial defects, each succumbing to its successor. In the history of dumb political stuff, nobody holds a candle to Trump’s volume. That’s why it is easy to recall those other non-Trump blunders. Remember how John Kerry “voted for the bill before I voted against it”? Or, Howard Dean’s scream? Or Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato? Or Rick Perry’s “Oops”? Or a helmeted Michael Dukakis ridding in an armored tank? Or Gerald Ford promising no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe when such domination was already well in place? Or Sarah Palin’s foreign policy bonafides based on the proximity of her back yard to Russia?

Donald Trump outdoes all of them combined, before breakfast. On a rational level, it is eminently sensible to suggest that the American people would be embarrassed to have as their leader someone so thoroughly entrenched in ignorance and buffoonery. For a sizeable portion of the electorate, however, this campaign is not about rationality. It is about their utter disgust for our government. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is their savior. He’s their middle finger, their protest vote against a changing world they’ve come to hate. They are united in anger and there is no revelation, no October surprise, that will deter them from trying to foist their candidate of rage onto the source of their scorn. Instead, the only path to hope in this election rests with those who, despite all that is wrong with this country, care enough to change it rather than blow it up with a middle finger.

BODY SHAMING THE NEWS

America may be on the verge of electing its first woman president, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that rampant sexism has left the building. That point was just pounded home in a very personal way. A child kidnapping case that gripped the hearts of Minnesotans for 27 years was solved last week. The man who snatched, sexually assaulted and murdered 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989 confessed and led authorities to the child’s body. I lived in Minnesota when Jacob was kidnapped and know only too well how visceral that crime was – and is – to Minnesotans. News that his remains had been found quickly sucked the air out of the entire state. It was all anyone talked about.

Well, almost. That, and the couture of a young female television reporter. The diversion came from a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist who noted that Jana Shortal wore jeans on TV while reporting Jacob’s story and didn’t look good in them. Cheryl Johnson, whose column is called simply “CJ”, wrote that somebody at the local NBC affiliate “didn’t do Jana Shortal any favors with that wide camera shot. . .She looked great from the waist up in a polka-dot shirt and cool blazer, but the skinny jeans did not work. I was among a number of media types who found them inappropriate and, given the gravity of the day’s subject, downright jarring.”

So much for Minnesota Nice. So much for Jana’s bold and daring efforts to abandon what she calls the “lady uniform” as a prerequisite for delivering the news, a lingering legacy of the Roger Ailes school for women in broadcast journalism. Jana, who has been doing a daily breaking news show for the past year, goes on camera in her own clothes because the emphasis is on what she is reporting, not on how she looks. That should not be, but unfortunately is, a revolutionary move for television news in 2016. There was, to say the least, a major firestorm over the C.J. column, which the newspaper promptly pulled from its website and replaced with a full-throated apology.

It is so sad that there are still forces measuring the worth of a woman by how she looks, and a man by what he does. I wrote a research paper on this subject in 1983. It described and quantified a societal tyranny in which women had to either conform to the way a male-dominated culture insisted they look, or pay the price. Mostly, they paid the price. The currency was life threatening eating disorders, chronic stress and/or repeated rejections for the better jobs as a result of not looking the part. The phenomena back then was called “lookism,” and it painfully enforced this toxic double standard. Today, the term is “body shaming” and, as the newspaper columnist demonstrated, it is every bit as insidious.

I gathered the studies more than 30 years ago, all of them showing how companies made hiring, pay and promotional decisions on the basis of how women looked and on what men could do. The empirical evidence was staggering, but not surprising. I was a morbidly obese man when my journalism career took off in the 1970s. Despite being between 200 and 300 pounds overweight, I had the choice of beats on my newspaper and won countless awards and accolades. Women just as capable, if not more, were held back if they were carrying an extra 25 pounds or just didn’t have the “right look”.

Nearly two generations later, not much has changed. Jana Shortal is critiqued not on the quality of her reporting, but on the cut of her jeans. We have a Republican presidential candidate who insults men based on their behavior, but reserves adjectives like fat, ugly and disgusting for the women he wants to diminish.

I cringed when I read Jana’s Facebook reply to the CJ column. Although eloquent and poignant, it was painfully obvious that the columnist’s words hit her hard. A short snippet from her post: “I wore my clothes. The clothes it took me a very long time to feel comfortable in no thanks to the bullies like you who tried to shame me out of them.”


Here was this bright, strong, young woman, anchoring her own news show in a major regional market, and doing it her way, making it about the journalism instead of about herself. And right smack in the middle of reporting the biggest local story of the year, she is attacked by a veteran columnist for not looking good in skinny jeans. It stung something fierce because, far below the intellectual surface of gender equality, complete with its admonishment of body shaming, lurks this ancient notion that women, no matter what else they do, must “look good” doing it. It’s a notion that needs to die. Now.