Category Archives: Random Blogging

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….

Comments

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.

Comments

About That Bubble…

Humans have always occupied bubbles–after all, as sociologists and philosophers tell us, we are inevitably embedded in the particular cultures into which we’re born and raised. But our ability to confine ourselves to a small slice of the larger culture–to occupy an agreeable, albeit distorted or manufactured reality –has been dramatically increased by the Internet.

When I first shared The Filter Bubble with my class on media and public affairs, a student objected that life in a bubble was nothing new. As she said “I was raised in Martinsville, Indiana, and I lived in a White bubble.” True enough–but her subsequent life in the “big city” (cough) of Indianapolis had allowed new experiences and ideas to penetrate that original, geographical bubble.

Today’s Republican Party depends for its continued relevance on two things: gerrymandering, and voters who live in a bubble that is also largely geographic (i.e., rural), but one that–thanks to the Internet and Rightwing media– reality can rarely penetrate.

A while back, the New York Times ran an op-ed focused on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former spokesperson for Trump and now Governor of  Arkansas. Sanders had just delivered the GOP response to President Biden’s State of the Union address, and as the article noted, her message was inaccessible to most Americans, despite the fact that it was an opportunity to address voters who might not otherwise tune in to a Republican speech.

“In the radical left’s America,” she said, “Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race but not to love one another or our great country.”

Sanders attacked Biden as the “first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is” and decried the “woke fantasies” of a “left-wing culture war.” Every day, she said, “we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with big tech to strip away the most American thing there is: your freedom of speech.”

As the columnist noted, there’s nothing wrong with giving a partisan and ideological State of the Union response–after all, that’s the point of the exercise.

The problem was that most of these complaints were unintelligible to anyone but the small minority of Americans who live inside the epistemological bubble of conservative media. Sanders’s response, in other words, was less a broad and accessible message than it was fan service for devotees of the Fox News cinematic universe and its related properties.

As the columnist admits, this critique rests on the assumption that, in a democratic system, political parties actually want and need to build majorities. But he then considers another possibility: what if today’s GOP is uninterested in appealing to a majority of the nation’s voters?

What if the structure of the political system makes it possible to win the power of a popular majority without ever actually assembling a popular majority? What if, using that power, you burrow your party and its ideology into the countermajoritarian institutions of that system so that, heads or tails, you always win?

That’s a stunning question, but a lot of evidence supports its premise.

After all, there’s no need to win over a majority of voters if you can depend upon the structural realities that militate against genuine majority rule– what the columnist identifies as the “malapportionment of the national legislature, the gerrymandering of many state legislatures, the Electoral College and the strategic position of your voters in the nation’s geography.”

 And if your political party also has a tight hold on the highest court of constitutional interpretation, you don’t even need to win elections to clear the path for your preferred outcomes and ideology.

This analysis recognizes that America’s political system has become so slanted toward  overrepresentation of the Republican Party’s core supporters–the rural and exurban inhabitants of a deeply disturbing ideological bubble– that even when the party’s policy preferences are contrary to those of  most American voters, the party can remain competitive.

The question for the rest of us is: how long can this last? How long until that bubble bursts–and what will it take to burst it?

It won’t burst as long as Americans continue to choose the “facts” they prefer from an  information smorgasbord offering everything from credible reporting to propaganda and fantasy– and continue using those choices to curate and inhabit incommensurate realities.

Bubbles.

Comments

That Impervious Alternate Reality

I haven’t added what would be superfluous commentary to the news of Donald Trump’s overdue indictment. The media has already reported pretty much anything you might want to know about that indictment and the various reactions to it.

Did The Former Guy (TFG) break the law? Obviously. Were the potential consequences serious? Very definitely. (In fact, we have no way of knowing whether TFG actually sold or otherwise shared highly sensitive information with the oligarchs and autocrats he admired. Was that two billion dollar infusion of Saudi cash to Jared payment for information? Who knows?)

For those who reside in the real world, nothing in that indictment was a surprise–and despite TFG’s efforts to characterize it as politically motivated, it very clearly was not the product of a “witch hunt.”

What, then, is most troubling about this long-awaited legal confirmation that TFG is a crook? Why am I adding text to the millions of words being exchanged about this predictable indictment?

I’m commenting because I am absolutely gobsmacked by the reaction of the crazies who now constitute most of the GOP.

In the face of overwhelming evidence–much of it produced by Trump himself in his endless blatherings–you would expect partisans to simply shut up, or to defer to the operation of the legal system. Instead, those on the farthest edge are evidently calling for armed resistance, and elected officials are insisting that there is no difference between the inadvertent retention–and immediate surrender–of documents by Pence and Biden and Trump’s clearly intentional and deeply corrupt theft of national intelligence.

An article in the Intelligencer attempted to explain why Republicans will never admit Trump’s guilt.

Despite what you may have heard about the federal charges against Donald Trump, there is actually nothing shocking or unprecedented about a former head of state facing criminal charges. It has happened several times in other democracies, and it would have happened in the United States but for Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon.

What is shocking, and carries the ominous reek of banana-republicanism, is the response by the opposition party to the news. Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking Republican leader, depicts the charges as a personal plot by Joe Biden — “It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him” — and a “grave injustice.” Trump’s leading Republican opponent denounces the charges as “political bias” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene likened Trump’s arrest to those of Jesus Christ and former South African President Nelson Mandela. Kari Lake–still insisting she won her election– threatened civil war.

Evidently, whenJonathan Chait wrote in the linked article that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit the GOP to acknowledge Trump’s guilt, he knew whereof he wrote.

In the article, Chait traces what he calls the GOP’s “decades-long descent into paranoia,” a descent that has led to the “idiosyncratic embrace of a career criminal.”

Chait reminds us that the culture of today’s Republican Party was shaped by what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter was writing about a conservative movement that, at the time, was only a far-right fringe faction of the Party.. Today, as we know, that fringe has completely assumed control of the party– and Chait writes that it has imposed its “warped mentality” on half of America.

To its adherents, every incremental expansion of the welfare state is incipient communism, each new expansion of social liberalism the final death blow to family and church. Lurking behind these endless defeats, they discern a vast plot by shadowy elites.

As a result of that warped world-view, the party went in search of a strongman, someone who would “crush its enemies.” Chait writes that the GOP  could have found that strongman “in a politician, a general, a movie star, or an athlete. Instead, Republicans located their warlord in a crooked real-estate heir.”

It is the interplay of the two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point. Trump’s endlessly repeated “witch hunt” meme blends together the mobster’s hatred of the FBI with the conservative’s fear of the bureaucrat. His loyalists have been trained to either deny any evidence of misconduct by their side or rationalize it as a necessary countermeasure against their enemies.

The concept of “crime” has been redefined in the conservative mind to mean activities by Democrats. They insist upon Trump’s innocence because they believe a Republican, axiomatically, cannot be a criminal.

I hope Chait is wrong about this paranoia infecting “half of America.” If it’s that widespread, we are in very deep do-do.

Comments

Dense Pence

I’ve been told that Mike Pence’s law school nickname was “dense Pence.” Perhaps that was apocryphal–I wasn’t in school with him– but Pence’s entry into the Presidential sweepstakes suggests its appropriateness. 

Allow me a couple of admissions.

I’ve known Pence ever since we were both losing Republican candidates for Congress. I was an occasional “guest” on his call-in show, trying–without much success–to defend those “un-Christian” First Amendment clauses mandating separation of church and state…

By the end of his embarrassing term as Indiana Governor qua Priest, I was the owner of several of those “Pence Must Go” signs that were widely displayed around Indiana prior to Trump’s rescue of Pence’s doomed candidacy for a second term.

So–as these admissions suggest–I’m not a fan.

That said, the media reaction to his Presidential candidacy has largely confirmed my belief that anyone who actually thinks Pence might be the eventual nominee is smoking something, and it’s very strong.

The New York Times polled the paper’s opinion writers. Let me share a few of their responses.

When asked how seriously a Pence candidacy should be taken, Michelle Cottle said: “As seriously as the wet dishrag he impersonated for most of his term as V.P.” Katherine Mangu-Ward contributed: “Mike Pence is a serious person. He is seriously not going to be president.”

Frank Bruni admitted to being  “unsettled by how strongly Pence has always let his deeply conservative version of Christianity inform his policy positions.” Bruni noted that while he deeply respects people of faith,  Pence “makes inadequate distinction between personal theology and public governance.” Bruni was far more polite on that subject than Cottle, who said that Pence “wants to ram his conservative religious views down the nation’s throat.”

Jane Coaston described Pence’s entry as “a candidacy no one wants.”  Michelle Cottle offered backhand praise with “He’s a uniter: Everyone dislikes him.”

Coaston summed up the panel’s verdict: He might be the most uninspiring candidate currently running. (She did say he has great hair.)

Then there’s the Washington Post headline: “Mystery surrounds Mike Pence’s doomed presidential candidacy.”

Having spent the past 2½ years being booed by Republican audiences and mocked on social media, Mike Pence has decided that the American people are finally ready for him. So, with the obligatory period of prayer and contemplation out of the way, the former vice president has officially filed the paperwork to run for president.
 
There’s no mystery about whether Pence could overcome former president Donald Trump and seize the leadership of his party. The mystery is why he thinks he has any chance at all.

Pence is a photo negative image of contemporary political attractiveness, simultaneously repelling Republicans, Democrats and independents. In his bewildering belief that he might become president, he demonstrates the power of ambition to cloud the mind of even the most experienced politician.

The article describes Pence as someone who “reminds you of a regional manager at a midsize Indiana ball-bearing manufacturer.” And if that description isn’t sufficiently dismissive, the article points out that “there is almost no significant group of voters who does not already dislike Pence for one reason or another.”

In a general election, Pence would offer voters the worst of all possible worlds: an uncharismatic candidate advocating the GOP’s unpopular policies. Voters are not clamoring for someone to tell them why we need to cut taxes for the rich and outlaw abortion, delivered in the tone of a stepdad explaining why you’re being grounded for the rest of the school year….

Other long-shot candidates have something resembling a rationale. Nikki Haley paints herself as the leader of a new generation of conservatives. Tim Scott offers a conservatism that is hard right in substance but kinder and gentler in manner. But Pence — who at some point might have seemed as though he was constructed in a lab to become the GOP nominee (experienced! conservative! devout!) — is now exactly what no one wants.

If elections revolved around policy preferences, no GOP candidate would stand a chance; poll after poll confirms that a majority of Americans soundly reject Republican policies on abortion and guns, its wars on trans children, books and (undefined) “wokeness,” the party’s steadfast refusal to raise taxes on the obscenely rich …

What does appeal to today’s Republican voters is bigotry and White Nationalism. Pence’s original usefulness to Trump and the GOP was his ability to cloak racism, misogyny and homophobia in Christian piety–to pretend that he represented a party that hated the sin but loved the sinner.  

In the intervening years, the GOP has thrown off the cloak, and thus no longer has any use for Pastor Pence. Why he doesn’t understand that is, as the Post says, a mystery.

 

Comments