Author Archives: Sheila

Good News About News

For the past several years, I have shared my growing concerns about America’s information landscape. One of those concerns revolves around the fragmentation–and increasing partisanship–of national coverage, a process that has contributed to our polarization and corresponding retreat into those often-impenetrable “bubbles.”

The “Fox-ification” of national media sources has been widely covered. But there’s been another less recognized and very unfortunate effect of today’s still-robust (albeit often less credible) national news coverage: thanks to the collapse of local news, Americans have been living in a nationalized  information environment.

I’m not going to repeat the gloomy statistics about local news “deserts.” We’ve all seen them–and worse, experienced them. Thousands of local newspapers have simply disappeared, and others–owned by large, profit-hungry corporations like Gannett–richly deserve the appellation of “ghost newspapers.”

The lack of local coverage has had very negative consequences. It rather obviously facilitates political and governmental corruption–after all, if no one is looking…But the negative consequences go far beyond the shenanigans of local and state poo-bahs. The lack of a common source of information erodes the bonds of community, the sense that those of us who occupy a particular geographic subdivision have both common concerns and sources of pride–that we are “in it” together.

Which is why I have been so gratified to see several new entrants into our local news desert, and why I was absolutely thrilled when I heard, at a recent gathering, that yet another is on the horizon.

As the Statehouse File  (a Franklin College product) reported:

Local news coverage is beginning to thrive in Indiana with several online news organizations taking root and a new newsroom to be opened by the end of the year.

VOX Indy and Chalkbeat Indiana hosted a panel Tuesday in Indianapolis that highlighted these changes in Indiana’s news market while discussing the future of local news.

The panel discussed nonprofit outlets emerging in Indiana and what this emergence portends for media consumers. As panelist Karen Fusion put it,

“I believe, and national research shows, that journalists and local news help connect people to their communities and help support our democracy,” said Fuson. “With such a significant decline in journalists, I believe information that we all need to live our day to day lives is not being provided to us. And so that, in my mind, is a crisis impacting our democracy.”

I am particularly enthusiastic about the planned Local News Initiative and the promise–noted by all the panelists–of collaboration among these recent and planned media outlets. The Local News Initiative (which will probably launch under a different name)  plans to go live later this year. It’s a new nonprofit–it was formed by a coalition of locally based organizations working with the American Journalism Project, and its mission is to provide residents with accessible local news that reflects the community’s needs. Indiana organizations and philanthropies raised $10 million to create it.

The need for the Initiative was shown in a comprehensive study done by the American Journalism Project. The study found that ‘more than 1,000 Hoosiers across 79 counties said they needed more unbiased, fact based information about their communities’ according to the Indiana Local News Initiative site.

The goal of the American Journalism Project is to fill gaps in local news by launching nonprofit organizations, facilitating investments in partner news organizations and fostering collaboration between local news outlets.

Fuson said the Indiana Local News Initiative is committed to making communities feel heard. This means implementing the feedback Hoosiers give by creating a news room that represents the population, having reporters out in the community on a regular basis and including residents wherever possible.

The commitment of the philanthropic community evidences a (somewhat belated) recognition of the absolutely vital role that local news plays in the building of healthy communities. The emphasis on collaboration between outlets (including the IndyStar, WISH-TV, WFYI, the Recorder, Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism, Chalkbeat Indiana, Hoosier State Press Association, The Indiana Citizen and several others) is especially important, because building genuine community requires people who are occupying the same reality–and that requires swimming in the same information pool.

My inner Pollyanna (yes, I do have one!) came away from that presentation looking at the bright side of the wrenching changes that have doomed so many local “legacy” news organizations. These new media providers don’t need to buy paper or enormously expensive printing presses, don’t have distribution costs, and apparently won’t require advertising dollars to support their newsrooms. They can focus their resources on reporting.

Maybe flowers will bloom in the desert after all….

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Ezra Klein Read DeSantis’ Book So We Don’t Have To

As horrifying as I find the prospect of TFG (aka Donald Trump) retaking the Presidency, the idea of Ron DeSantis in the Oval Office makes me even more nauseous.

At a gloomy brunch a couple of days after the 2016 election, a friend opined that the only thing that would save the country was TFG’s obvious incompetence. She was right–so many of the administration’s efforts failed because TFG’s ragtag group of “captains of industry” had absolutely no idea how government operated (or, in many instances, what governments are for.)

Ron DeSantis poses a significantly greater threat. He’s smart. And as Ezra Klein has recently written, he thinks Trump didn’t go far enough toward the dark side.

Klein says it’s a mistake to dismiss campaign books written by politicians. He thinks we  “can learn a lot about people by paying close attention to how they want to be seen.” And he notes that Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to be Free”–while not a good book– is a revealing one.

As I read through it, I started marking down every time he told a story about using the power of his office to punish or sideline a perceived enemy or obstacle. There is his bill to make it easier to sue tech companies if you feel they’re discriminating against your politics. Here are his laws limiting what teachers can say about gender identity and imposing criminal penalties on medical providers who offer certain types of gender-affirming care. There’s his effort to punish Disney for opposing his anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws by removing its self-governing status. Here’s his suspension of Andrew Warren, the state attorney for Hillsborough County, because Warren declined to enforce laws criminalizing abortion. There’s the bill to increase criminal penalties against rioters during Black Lives Matter protests.

Then there’s what DeSantis wants to do, but hasn’t yet done. He thinks the federal government has become too “woke” and too liberal, and Congress should “withhold funding to the offending executive branch departments until the abuses are corrected.” He is frustrated that President Donald Trump didn’t do more with an authority known as Schedule F that can reclassify around 50,000 federal employees to make them more like political appointees, enabling the president “to terminate federal employees who frustrate his policies.” He tried to make it easier to sue media outlets for defamation, though that plan got bogged down in the Florida Legislature. Outside the book, he has called for a national “reckoning” on Covid and promised to hold people like Dr. Anthony Fauci “accountable” for the damage he believes they’ve caused.

Klein hones in on the essence of DeSantis’ view of Trump–and his own approach to  governing. DeSantis argues that, despite Trump’s complaints about the “deep state,” he didn’t use the power of the Presidency to destroy what DeSantis regards as the “threatening forces of the left.” (My friend would argue–correctly–that this was due to Trump’s incompetence, rather than an absence of bile.) Whatever the reason, as Klein reports, “DeSantis is trying to show, in vignette after vignette, that he has both the will and the discipline to do what Trump did not.”

DeSantis delights in describing the methodical, relentless effort he put in to bending the state of Florida to his will. He describes winning Florida’s governorship and ordering his transition team to “amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor.” Much of the rest of the book is an exhaustive, and at times exhausting, account of how he used them.

In media coverage of his campaign, DeSantis emerges as a humorless martinet, utterly unable to engage with people in retail politics.  Klein notes that he also can’t  bring himself to

“extend even a modicum of compassion to his opponents. When he describes the George Floyd protests he doesn’t spare even a word condemning or grieving Floyd’s murder. His anti-L.G.B.T.Q. agenda is unleavened by even the barest sympathy for L.G.B.T.Q. kids.”

Despite painting a truly appalling picture of Florida Man, Klein warns readers not to underestimate his chances–a warning that sends chills up and down my spine.

If American voters needed any further confirmation of the Republican Party’s U-Turn from political party to cult, DeSantis might be that U-Turn’s poster boy.

The GOP of my younger days was firmly opposed to what the party characterized as government over-reach. It was so averse to the exercise of federal authority, especially, that the party opposed many programs and regulations that were clearly warranted. Today, however, Republicans like DeSantis are enthusiastic about wielding government power– so long as government is  imposing an agenda benefitting Republican oligarchs and culture warriors, and ensconcing Republican politicians in office.

There’s a reason Neo-Nazis support DeSantis. He’s a fellow fascist.

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Why Women Will Save America

A million years ago, when I was in law school, I wasn’t a committed feminist. I didn’t become a lawyer so that I could challenge the rules keeping women second-class citizens; rather, I wanted to be a lawyer, and to the extent existing rules got in the way, I opposed them.

Over the (many) ensuing years, I’ve become increasingly opposed to anti-woman social norms–and laws based upon those norms. They aren”t just outdated. They’re unjust, unAmerican–and stupid. (Denying women equality is unjust and unAmerican because such measures ignore differences between individuals in favor of imposing disabilities based on group identity. They’re stupid because they keep women from contributing to the general welfare.)

Over the past decades, as women, African Americans, LGBTQ citizens and other marginalized folks have improved their status in society, the White Christian males who view that improvement with alarm–seeing it as a loss of their own paternalistic primacy–have increasingly resisted. 

A couple of recent examples: 

Southern Baptists are rebelling against the very notion that women might be pastors in that denomination. In our recent book, Morton Marcus and I explored the immense role played by fundamentalist religion in keeping women subservient and defining “women’s place” as necessarily and permanently subordinate. The linked article, published on June 13th, reported:

Southern Baptists will have the opportunity to vote on a measure that would enshrine a ban on women pastors within the denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee decided Monday.

The decision by the SBC Executive Committee ahead of the 2023 SBC annual meeting doesn’t guarantee the eventual passage of the measure, which is a proposed amendment to the SBC constitution. The amendment is one of several major decisions facing Southern Baptist voting delegates, called messengers, that will permanently affect the status of women pastors in the SBC.

The vote was triggered by appeals from two congregations that had been ousted for having women pastors.  (Update: women lost that vote. Resoundingly.)

Then there’s the radical Right organization, Turning Point USA.  Turning Point recently sponsored a truly bizarre “Women’s Leadership Summit.”    (Speaking of bizarre, the conference offered “bejeweled” guns for sale….pictures at the link…)

Speakers like TPUSA influencer Alex Clark, Fox host Laura Ingraham, and The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens both covertly and overtly discouraged the audience of young women from pursuing high-powered careers,” she reports. Clark railed against the young women in the audience for using birth control, blasted “day care,” and take-your-pick.

Clark claimed, “The feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce.” She went on: “The feminist movement gave way to the notion that a woman could have her cake and eat it too. You can have the career you want and you can raise your children in a positive, educational environment, aka day care.” She described it as “a lie to tell women that we can have it all.” Just because day care is “normal or common doesn’t mean it’s right,” according to Clark

Fundamentalist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey opened day two of the conference. She, unsurprisingly, struck a notably more pointed Christian extremist tone than the other speakers, though religious rhetoric was ubiquitous throughout the conference. “I can tell you what your highest calling is,” she said. It’s not to have a career, “it’s not even to be a wife and a mom, as wonderful as those things are. Your highest calling is to glorify God.”

Her version of God, of course…

This “summit” provided unambiguous evidence of the real purpose of contemporary assaults on reproductive choice. If women can choose if and when to have babies, they will be tempted to pursue “callings” that are inconsistent with “Godly” subservience to men.

Over the last 100 years, women have made remarkable progress—from laws that essentially made them the property of their fathers or husbands, to today’s almost-equal legal parity with men. In the years since I was in law school, that progress has increasingly infuriated the White Christian “culture warriors” who see women’s advancement toward equality as an existential threat to their social dominance–a dominance they have convinced themselves is divinely ordained.

The elections of 2024 will decide many important issues, arguably including the continued viability of American democracy.. Our constitutional democracy requires (among other things) the right of American women to bodily autonomy–something  men have long enjoyed.

Women’s civic equality is impossible without that autonomy–and women know it.

In 2024, electoral choices about choice will be clear. Republicans at the municipal, state and federal levels are all committed to the GOP’s anti-choice position, while Democrats are pro-choice.

Which is why I predict women will vote Blue and save America.

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How Old Is Grandma, Anyway?

My husband recently shared a FB meme going around, a recitation that–in addition to being generally interesting–sheds a good deal of light on the reason so many older Americans are disoriented, uneasy and cranky.

The story went like this: A grandson was asking his grandmother what she thought about shootings at schools, the computer age, and just things in general.

In response, the grandmother notes that she’d beenI born before: television, penicillin, the polio vaccine, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, Frisbees and the pill. She was born before credit cards, laser beams, ballpoint pens, pantyhose, air conditioners, dishwashers, and clothes dryers.

When she was born, men hadn’t walked on the moon.

In her youth, she’d never heard of FM radios, tape decks, CD’s, electric typewriters, yogurt, or guys wearing earrings. Anything “made in Japan” was junk. Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and instant coffee were unheard of. 

The list didn’t even include the Internet or social media…

The meme ended with grandma saying that, In her day,’ “grass” was mowed,  “coke” was a cold drink, “pot” was something your mother cooked in, “Aids” were helpers in the Principal’s office, “hardware” was found in a hardware store and.”software” wasn’t even a word. 

Add to all that, when we did get TV, news anchors, weathermen, sports reporters etc. were all White men…women were just entering the workforce (except for Black women, who had mostly only been allowed to be domestics.) Gay people were still way behind the coats in the closet.

The meme’s big “reveal”–“grandma” is only 70 years old. She was born in 1952.

Full disclosure: I did not go through this list and check its accuracy. It seems incredible that so much of our environment–so many of the things we simply take for granted and assume have always been around–weren’t part of our realities until after 1952.

I was born in 1941, and I can confirm the absence of many of these inventions. I can also confirm the disorienting impact of many of them; the laptop computer on which I compose these blog posts–not to mention the advent of the Internet–still doesn’t feel natural. (I’m reasonably okay until the computer has a problem…)

I know that a significant percentage of those who read this blog are in my general age cohort, and can probably add items to the “when did that happen?” list. We older folks should also stop to consider that living through immense changes in technology and society have presented “grandma” (and grandpa) with significant personal challenges.

Some of us–including yours truly–have welcomed most of these changes. Others have found them to be very threatening.

When Morton Marcus and I were researching our recent book–the one I’ve been shamelessly promoting--we were essentially exploring the changes in grandma’s life. Morton wanted to understand how technology had emancipated women–how appliances like washing machines and innovations like frozen food had enabled women to enter the workforce. I wanted to document the enormous importance of the pill and other medical advances allowing women to control their own reproduction, and I wanted to trace the political consequences of efforts to nullify those advances.

There’s a side benefit to reviewing the enormity of the changes in “grandma’s” environment; it should generate a bit of sympathy for the numerous older Americans who have found the extent and pace of those changes unnerving. These are folks who look at a world that is immensely different from the world into which they were born and socialized and who feel unseen and unmoored.

As anyone who’s had children can attest, different personality types respond differently to change, and we have arguably been living at a time when the rate of both technological and social change has greatly accelerated.

For eons, humans occupied relatively stable environments. Since the time of the first Industrial Revolution (scholars tell us we are now in the second), that stability has been regularly upended. It is inarguable that the inventions and innovations have made life far better for most people–but constant disruption comes with a cost.

I’m pretty sure that the MAGA Americans screaming about making the country great “again” are disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the people most uncomfortable with modern life. They want to return to a more familiar environment–one in which they not-so-incidentally enjoyed a superior status. They want their grandchildren to inhabit that same world. 

That worldview can be dangerous–especially when those who hold it are armed. It is also doomed. The culture has moved on.

That said, memes like this one about grandma’s age ought to elicit some sympathy for those of our fellow-citizens who find themselves visitors in a world they didn’t expect and no longer understand.

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Calling Out The Lie

It appears that the World’s Worst Legislature is succeeding in its goal of destroying–or at least fatally wounding– public education in the Hoosier state. An inconvenient side-effect of that success is the now-clear evidence that initial arguments for the state’s voucher program were always bogus.

Participation in Indiana’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program jumped to the highest level since its start over a decade ago – even as the number of low-income and families of color using vouchers decreased. 

According to a new state report, the Choice Scholarship Program totaled $311.8 million in grants for 53,262 students in the 2022-23 academic year. That’s 9,000 students and $70.4 million more than the previous school year. 

But those increases will be dwarfed over the next two years, as nearly all Indiana students will become eligible for vouchers in the coming weeks. Those changes, enacted by new state law, are estimated to qualify 41,800 additional students for the program and cost $1.136 billion in total.

Those of us who have followed the General Assembly’s persistent efforts to privatize education will recall the original, pious justifications for “school choice.” Vouchers, they assured us, were a mechanism that would allow poor minority students to leave those underperforming “urban” (read “ghetto”) schools. The educational voucher program was sold as an effort to “level the playing field” for the underprivileged.

Right–and I have a bridge to sell you…

What also proved to be untrue was the claim that vouches would improve educational outcomes. Years of academic research–previously shared on this blog and elsewhere–have demolished the claim that the “private” (basically, religious) schools benefitting from those vouchers would do a better job of imparting academic skills. 

In the face of incontrovertible evidence that vouchers are actually used by middle and upper-middle class families–a significant number of whom had been paying to send their kids to private schools before our legislative overlords kindly eased their financial burden–and similarly overwhelming evidence that educational outcomes were not improving, the justification changed.

Now it’s enabling “parental rights.”

(I will restrain myself from pointing out how hypocritical Republicans are when they talk about “choice” and parental rights….parents who might want to take their kids to Drag Queen story hour, or who want them to learn accurate American history sure don’t get rights or respect for their choices…but I digress.)

As with other policies flying in the face of evidence, the GOP’s fondness for vouchers can best be understood if we follow the money.

In Indiana,

In the program’s 12th year, the average student is described as White, elementary school-age, and from a household of around four people with an income of $81,818, according to the Indiana Department of Education. Indiana’s median household income is around $62,000.

The report found the high-income eligibility likely led to the 9.3 percent decrease in the number of participating families with an income of $50,000 or less. Families earning $100,001 to $150,000 saw the largest increase in voucher use at about 8.4 percent.

As the Indianapolis Star reported,

The increase in participation will likely only continue in the coming years now that the state legislature expanded the income limit threshold to 400% of the free-and-reduced-lunch threshold, enabling a family of four making $220,000 a year to get a voucher, whereas the program currently cuts off families of that size at an income of $166,500.

It’s interesting that the Hoosier lawmakers who are so generous to upper-income constituents when it comes to siphoning students from the public schools suddenly become “fiscally conservative” when it comes to helping poor Hoosiers. Look, for example, at the income limits for pre-school vouchers. Those are limited to families with household income below 127% of the federal poverty limit, or about $32,700 for a family of four — and in order to be  eligible, parents must be working, attending school or participating in some sort of job training.

In Indiana, government works best for the well-off. It’s a lot more punitive when dealing with the working poor.

The worst part of this travesty , however, isn’t fiscal. It isn’t even the substandard educational results provided by those private “academies.” It’s the deepening of social polarization, the deliberate encouragement of tribalism.

Public education–as political scientist Benjamin Barber emphasized–is constitutive of a public.In an interview before he died, Barber cited Jefferson:

Jefferson saw a profound connection between the Bill of Rights — the document embodying the rights of citizens — and education as the foundation which made democracy work and made the Bill of Rights work. The founding of the common school, the public school, in America was for Jefferson the foundation for an effective and successful democracy. I think we have lost sight of the connection between the schooling, citizenship and democracy.

In an increasingly fragmented and hostile America, that connection is more important than ever. Indiana’s GOP supermajority doesn’t understand that. Or care.

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