Author Archives: Sheila

The Death Of Local News

A recent story in the Statehouse File began with an all-too-familiar report.

Two years ago, Indiana had 70 daily newspapers. Now there are fewer than 50, and over the last year, 13 paid circulation newspapers in the state closed their doors.

The story relayed the personal experience of editors and others at the papers that closed, and went on enumerate the consequences for local communities that have lost their newspapers–either entirely, or by “ghosting” in the wake of acquisitions by companies like Gannett (now part of the even more rapacious Gatehouse).

Citizens who have lost what we used to call “watchdog journalism” are significantly disadvantaged by not knowing what is going on in their communities. Studies show losses in community cohesion, voter turnout and civic participation. Taxpayers take a hit, too– a recent study, “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance,” showed that newspaper closures were followed by higher costs of issuing bonds. (Presumably, bond purchasers anticipate a higher degree of risk when no one is watching the store.)

It isn’t just Indiana. The Guardian recently considered the threat to journalism’s future posed by the degree to which hedge funds are snapping up distressed properties.

As the pandemic recedes in the United States, few businesses may emerge so transformed as local and regional newspapers.

More than 70 local newsrooms have closed over the past 15 months, with hundreds of media jobs lost, as the already difficult financial conditions in the industry intensified during the crisis. By some estimates, a staggering 2,100 local newspapers, or one in four, have closed in the US since 2005.

But into the carnage a new breed of owner has emerged: one that has industry veterans and media observers deeply worried about the future of journalism in America and its ability to act as part of a functioning democracy.

According to a recent analysis, hedge funds or private equity firms now control half of US daily newspapers, including some of the largest newspaper groups in the country: Tribune, McClatchy and MediaNews Group.

Needless to say, these hedge funds have zero commitment to journalism. Their entire focus is on the bottom line and the return on their investments. Groups like Alden Capital have earned a reputation for ruthlessness by dramatically cutting editorial staff and selling off assets to boost profits.

As the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review has noted,

The debate we need to have is do we value these newspapers as an investment like a car dealership or a pawn shop, or do they have a different function in the community? I argue that they do, and they’re important to the way we function every day, but local communities need to buy into that idea.

If professional, verifiable news gathering is lost, a significant percentage of the American public will be left to the not-so-tender-mercies of the Breitbarts and their leftwing analogs.  Aside from bias, these outlets add to the increasing nationalization of news and politics–they aren’t replacing the local newspapers we’ve lost.

It will be interesting to see what happens in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the  New York Times reports that– following the “ghosting” of the Standard Times, the local paper, employees decided to create an alternative. They created a digital paper, The New Bedford Light.

The Light, which has no print edition, is free to readers. It does not accept advertising, relying on donations, grants and sponsorships from local businesses. It plans deep community involvement, including media literacy workshops for residents who might become contributors.

It is largely following a playbook for digital nonprofit news sites prepared by the Institute for Nonprofit News, a group that guides start-ups and emphasizes editorial independence and financial transparency.

According to the Times, similar nonprofit news sites are appearing across the country. There are hundreds now online, and more than 50 have gone up in the last two years.

None, to the best of my knowledge, have emerged in Indiana.

For those of us who are determined to figure out what’s going on in our city and state, there are  reliable, specialized sources we can consult. What we don’t have, however, is a “one-stop” source that doesn’t just give us the news we are looking for, but the answers to  questions it wouldn’t occur to us to ask–and an explanation of why we should care.

What we also don’t have are substantial numbers of citizens who read the same headlines and stories, and as a result, occupy the same reality.

As we are seeing with the Big Lie, it’s one thing to argue about what a particular fact means; it’s another matter altogether to argue about a “fact” you’ve invented. The first argument strengthens democracy; the second one justifies democracy’s abandonment.

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America’s Troubling Exceptionalism

“American Exceptionalism” means different things to different people.

Historically, the phrase was embraced by politicians pandering to voters’ belief in America’s superiority. We were the inventors of “freedom,” with a national “can do” spirit. “Exceptionalism” was a nicer word than “best,” a way to proclaim that we were Number One.

The dictionary definition of exceptional is neither positive nor negative: one can be exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. It simply denotes something unusual or atypical. One way that America’s political structure is definitely atypical is our two-party system, and as a recent post to FiveThirtyEight makes clear, that bit of exceptionalism is a significant source of the country’s current dysfunction.

The post begins by reiterating what is obvious to anyone who follows American politics:

As the “Big Lie” of a stolen election continues to dominate the Republican Party, GOP-controlled states enact restrictive voting laws and pursue preposterous election audits, aspiring candidates embrace the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, and a majority of GOP voters still believe Trump is the “true president,” the obvious questions follow: Where is this all headed? And is there any way out?

In one telling, the Republican Party will eventually come back to its senses and move past former President Donald Trump and Trumpist grievance politics, especially if Republicans lose a few elections in a row and realize that it’s a losing strategy. But there’s another possible outcome: More contested elections, more violence and, ultimately, a collapse into competitive authoritarianism enabled by electoral advantages that tilt in one party’s favor.

The post, by political scientist Lee Drutman, refers to historical patterns of democratic decline , and attributes the “cracking of the foundation of American democracy” to hyper-polarization. That polarization has given us a political environment within which one party can break democratic norms with impunity– because, as he notes, winning in the short term has become more important than maintaining democracy for the long term.

Drutman says that the hyper-polarization that threatens us is–to a significant extent– a product of the two-party system.

There’s no shortage of plausible explanations for why U.S. politics has become so polarized, but many of these theories describe impossible-to-reverse trends that have played out across developed democracies, like the rise of social media and the increased political salience of globalization, immigration and urban-rural cultural divides. All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U.S., then the problem should be consistent across all western democracies. But it isn’t.

Drutman points to four ways in which America’s polarization is different from–and arguably more dangerous than–that of other countries (I encourage you to click through and evaluate that analysis for yourselves) and notes that in other countries where two parties dominate its politics, populations also display more unfavorable feelings toward the political opposition than populations in multi-party democracies.

In fact, in a new book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” another team of scholars, Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, shows that citizens in majoritarian democracies with less proportional representation dislike both their own parties and opposing parties more than citizens in multiparty democracies with more proportional representation.

This pattern may have something to do with the shifting politics of coalition formation in proportional democracies, where few political enemies are ever permanent (e.g., the unlikely new governing coalition in Israel). This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.

Even the urban-rural split, which can be seen globally, is substantially less binary in proportional systems, partly because multiple parties can still win seats in geographically unfriendly areas, resulting in coalition governments with both urban and rural representation.

But it’s not just the lack of a stark urban-rural divide. As Drutman points out, there isn’t a strategic benefit to demonizing the opposition in an election that has more than two parties.

In a multiparty election, taking down one party might not necessarily help you. After all, another party might benefit, since negative attacks typically have a backlash. And because parties can take stronger positions and appeal more directly to voters on policy, there’s less need to rally your supporters by talking about how terrible and dangerous the other party is. Moreover, in systems where parties form governing coalitions, demonizing a side you’ve recently been in a coalition with (or hope to be in the future) doesn’t ring quite as true.

Can the U.S. change its political system to be more proportional? Unlikely. After all, today’s Republicans aren’t even willing to support the right of their opponents to vote….

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Critical Race Theory

I was really hoping I could avoid ever posting about the asinine debate over Critical Race Theory–but the other day, I saw that our bootlicker-to-the-Right Attorney General had entered the fray, a clear sign that the racists and their enablers think they’ve found a winning formula for 2022.

So I guess I do need to weigh in, in a (probably useless) effort to clarify what all the noise is about.

I didn’t encounter Critical Legal Studies and its cousin, Critical Race Theory until I was a college professor. Both approaches were–and are–relatively arcane, primarily the preoccupation of a subset of legal scholars. As Heather Cox Richardson recently explained it,  Critical Race Theory was a theory conceived in the 1970s by legal scholars trying to understand why the civil rights legislation of the past twenty years had not eliminated racial inequality in America.

They argued that general racial biases were baked into American law so that efforts to protect individuals from discrimination did not really get at the heart of the issue. While this theory focused on the law, it echoed the arguments historians have made—and proved—since the 1940s: our economy, education, housing, medical care, and so on, have developed with racial biases. This is not actually controversial among scholars.

While CRT explicitly focuses on systems, not individuals, and while it is largely limited to legal theory classes rather than public schools, Republicans have turned this theory into the idea that it attacks white Americans and that history teachers are indoctrinating schoolchildren to hate America. In the past three and half months, the Fox News Channel has talked about CRT nearly 1300 times.

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked to discover that people who couldn’t define either “socialism” or “capitalism” if their lives depended on it are having trouble distinguishing between their fear of being “replaced” by Jews and scary Black people and a graduate-level study of how and where racial stereotypes are reflected in the country’s legal system. (I guess they never heard of redlining…)

Assertions that CRT is being taught in America’s elementary and high schools is ludicrous–as I have been complaining pretty much forever, schools aren’t even teaching the most basic concepts required for civic literacy, let alone a theory that requires a familiarity not just with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but with significant elements of America’s legal structures.

The GOP-hyped hysteria over Critical Race Theory is just another effort to mask garden-variety racism  by pretending that the fight is really about something else. It takes its place beside the party’s rejection of “political correctness” (i.e., I refuse to abide by your social expectation of basic civility) and “cancel culture” (i.e., I should be free to spew my venom but you shouldn’t be free to respond by signaling your disapproval).

 One of the biggest disappointments of my adult life has been my reluctant recognition of the extent and depth of American racism, and the degree to which it infects our politics. That said, despite the evidence of the past few years–the hysterical reaction to Obama’s election, the subsequent election of an ignorant blowhard willing to demonize the “other”– I  still refuse to believe that the majority of Americans are in thrall to hate and fear.

The problem is, the rabid racist minority–thanks to gerrymandering,  vote suppression (and let’s be honest, voter apathy) and the Electoral College– has seized outsized control of America’s government. And when it comes to turnout, rage is a great motivator. If dishonest and dishonorable politicians can drum up fear and anger by emphasizing culture-war issues like the “threat” of a mischaracterized CRT, they may yet overwhelm the majority.

We live in an incredibly dangerous time.

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All Art Is Political

It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that in the past several years, the performing arts have been dominated by Lin Manuel Miranda. The Broadway version of In The Heights was followed by the overwhelming event that was and is Hamilton and more recently, we’ve had the updated movie version of In The Heights. 

These productions secured Miranda’s reputation as an impresario, and his activism and demeanor secured his reputation as a nice guy with good political values. Given his prominence, it wasn’t a surprise to come across recent references to an essay he wrote in December of 2019 for the Atlantic.

It was titled “The Role of the Artist in the Age of Trump,” and it argued that the arts are always and inevitably political.

I was particularly open to Miranda’s thesis because I had just finished reading Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. I lived through the events of that time-period, and I was familiar with many–but certainly not all–of the artists and philosophers and cultural icons that Menand meticulously describes (and frequently deconstructs), but I hadn’t recognized how deeply they were influenced by the times they lived in, nor how deeply they influenced those times in turn. (I recommend the book, but with the warning that it’s a pretty dense read.)

Miranda’s opening paragraph makes his thesis explicit:

All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political. Art lives in the world, and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work about the world in which we live without reflecting it. If the work tells the truth, it will live on.

What Miranda’s essay and Menand’s book both underscore is that “art” and “political art” are not the exclusive province of the more rarified and snobbish precincts we call “high” art.

Miranda makes that point by looking at the messages conveyed by–of all people– Rogers and Hammerstein.

Consider The Sound of Music. It isn’t just about climbing mountains and fording streams. Look beyond the adorable von Trapp children: It’s about the looming existential threat of Nazism. No longer relevant? A GIF of Captain von Trapp tearing up a Nazi flag is something we see 10 times a day on Twitter, because all sorts of Nazis are out there again in 2019. As last spring’s searing Broadway revival of Oklahoma! revealed, lying underneath Hammerstein’s elephant-eye-high corn and chirping birds is a lawless society becoming itself, bending its rules and procedures based on who is considered part of the community (Curly) and who is marginalized (poor Jud … seriously, poor Jud). Or consider your parents’ favorite, South Pacific. At its center, our hero, Nellie Forbush, must confront her own internalized racism when she learns that the new love of her life has biracial children from a previous marriage. Let your parents know if they forgot: Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals form the spine of Broadway’s “golden age,” and they also deeply engage with the politics of their era.

In the essay, Miranda discusses the “message” of In The Heights, and its depiction of immigrants as human beings (a “radical act!”), the contrast of that portrayal with the dehumanizing rhetoric of then-President Trump, and the reason such portrayals are important.

What artists can do is bring stories to the table that are unshakably true—the sort of stories that, once you’ve heard them, won’t let you return to what you thought before.. ..I believe great art is like bypass surgery. It allows us to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us.

At the end of the day, our job as artists is to tell the truth as we see it. If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it. Times may change and politics may change, but if we do our best to tell the truth as specifically as possible, time will reveal those truths and reverberate beyond the era in which we created them. We keep revisiting Shakespeare’s Macbeth because ruthless political ambition does not belong to any particular era. We keep listening to Public Enemy because systemic racism continues to rain tragedy on communities of color. We read Orwell’s 1984 and shiver at its diagnosis of doublethink, which we see coming out of the White House at this moment. And we listen to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, as Lieutenant Cable sings about racism, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” It’s all art. It’s all political.

No wonder so many reactionaries hate Hollywood.

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Cost Of Doing Business

Politico recently reported on a proposed law in Maine that would tax food wrappers. Before you react (either by yawning or rolling your eyes), consider the likely motive for imposing such a tax, and the potential implications.

Maine’s bill is an effort to recoup at least some of the costs governments incur when recycling tons of packaging waste. Managing America’s trash is expensive, its costs continue to escalate, and a significant percentage of those costs are paid with tax dollars. 

According to the report,  business groups actually asked lawmakers to tax food wrappers and containers. Industry groups did emerge to oppose certain parts of the proposal–mainly, who would control the tax revenue and how it’s spent. Packagers and consumer brands wanted authority to manage the money and use it exclusively for recycling. Maine regulators and their allies in the Legislature wanted the revenues to reimburse municipalities for hauling waste to landfills, too.

The industry won that battle, and the bill–that has now passed– designated revenues for recycling. This legislation appears be the first of its kind in the country; it could give momentum to a broader push to curb plastic waste and rationalize a recycling system that is outdated and varies from town to town. 

What I find really hopeful, however, is that I see  this as an (admittedly small) step toward dealing with the serious challenges posed by  externalities.

As I have often noted, I am a proponent of markets and capitalism–properly understood and properly regulated. The usual description of a working–and workable–market is that it is characterized by transactions between willing buyers and willing sellers  who are each in possession of all  information relevant to the transaction. That description is an accurate depiction of the ultimate purchase and sale, but it elides other, equally important assumptions–including the assumption that the pricing of a good accurately reflects the costs of its manufacture plus a reasonable profit.

That assumption isn’t necessarily accurate.

If I am manufacturing widgets, and the process involves the use or creation of a pollutant, the cost of production–and the price charged to the consumer– should include the expense of properly disposing of that pollutant. If –instead of following the rules for such disposal– I dump my contaminated waste in the local river (where it will have to be cleaned up by adjacent municipalities) I can price my widgets more advantageously than widget manufacturers who follow the rules and pay to dispose of their waste properly.

In a properly operating marketplace, the price of goods will reflect the complete cost of their manufacture–the expense of raw materials, all costs of turning those raw materials into a salable item, and the associated expenses of marketing and packaging. Appropriate regulations are those aimed at preventing some companies from gaining unfair advantage by “offloading” a portion of what should be their costs onto unsuspecting taxpayers.

Properly operating markets benefit us all. What doesn’t benefit us are (1) markets in clearly inappropriate economic sectors, like health care, where there is a huge (and unbridgeable) disparity in information and urgency between the parties to a transaction, and (2) inadequately or improperly regulated markets that allow–or even encourage–companies to profit by cheating.  

The packaging issue being addressed in Maine isn’t an instance of cheating; technically, I doubt that the need to recycle packaging is even a true externality–at least, as economists would categorize it–but the need to recycle packaging waste clearly does impose a cost that is currently being covered by taxpayers rather than manufacturers.

Maine appears to be the first state to address the allocation of that expense, and it will be interesting to see how many other states (if any) follow suit. At the very least, efforts of this sort raise awareness of an issue that is all too easy to ignore.

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