Feeding The Wrong Wolf

The title of this post refers to a story usually attributed to the Cherokees (although evidently its origins are murky). Commenters to previous posts have occasionally referenced it.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil–he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you–and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Like many of you, I’ve loved this parable; it reminds us that we have moral/ethical choices (no matter what psychological researchers tell us…).  What brought it to mind, rather forcefully, was an article from Politico, analyzing the business model employed by cable news channels. Apparently, their practices aren’t all that different from those employed by Facebook. And it isn’t only Fox. All of the cable networks–CNN, MSNBC, etc.– “behave more like political players — emphasizing one side while disparaging the “enemy” — than they do independent news organizations.”

By flattering the perceived political prejudices of their audiences and avoiding a story when the news becomes inconvenient to their agenda, the networks behave like vendors of political entertainment.

There’s nothing immoral or unprofessional, of course, in pursuing a partisan news agenda. There’s a long tradition of partisan, activist journalism in America, starting with the colonial era and extending to today. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, labor organizers like John Swinton, naturalists like John Muir and anti-corporatists like Ida Tarbell and Ralph Nader, just to name a few names from the past, reported the news through ideological lenses, and magazines like Mother Jones, Reason, and the National Review continue that practice. But these activist journalists made it apparent where their reporting was coming from. The cable networks, on the other hand, pretend, to use the old Fox slogan, to be “fair and balanced.” By attempting to have it both ways — tilting while at the same time posing as straight news — cable news tarnishes journalism’s good name and needlessly increases viewer tribalism.

I would quibble with the Politico story’s portrayal in degree–“They all do it” elides the rather obvious evidence that Fox “does it” to a far greater degree than CNN or MSNBC. (Confusing fair coverage with false equivalence really isn’t analytic rigor.) But that said, the article raises an issue that has no identifiable solution.

The problem is that, unlike the out-and-out propagandists and liars I posted about yesterday, news anchors–even on Fox– aren’t lying. (The pundits–the Tucker Carlsons and similar “personalities”– are a different matter, and it’s troubling that most viewers don’t recognize the difference between actual news and the wildly distorted commentary they are being fed.) Like all of us, news anchors and reporters can only view the world through their own eyes. Their individual lives and backgrounds inevitably form the context of what they see and report.

Yesterday, I cheered on the growing number of lawsuits against the most egregious propagandists–the individuals and websites trafficking in (sorry for the expletive) obvious bullshit.

The dilemma presented by the “slant” of the cable networks, falls into a different category. For one thing, omitting coverage of events that may be considered unpalatable or inconvenient or simply un-newsworthy isn’t technically lying, although in many cases it certainly is intellectually dishonest. For another, “spin,” intentional or unintentional, is ubiquitous–again, because we all see and filter events through our own world-views.

Saying that we all inevitably see the world through our own eyes isn’t simply another way of saying that we bring our own biases and prejudices to our news consumption. It also involves bringing such knowledge as we may have to bear, which is why I keep harping on the importance of civic education. (If your favorite “personality” is attributing the failure of Congress to pass the XYZ bill to President Biden, for example, it helps if you are aware of the GOP’s constant misuse of the filibuster and a President’s legal inability to do anything about that particular form of obstructionism–or actually, if you just understand that American Presidents aren’t kings.)

The Politico article was troubling, however, because it demonstrated one of the many, many ways in which Americans today are feeding the wrong wolf.

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Sue The SOB’s

I’ve spent a lot of time–and pixels–on what sometimes seems like an insurmountable problem: how do we stop media outlets from blatant political  lying– out-and-out propaganda– without doing irreparable harm to the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment?

The problem is everywhere.

One recent example: a site called Big League Politics reported that Nancy Pelosi purchased a $25 million-dollar oceanfront mansion on Jupiter Island “an elite community with the distinction of its residents possessing the highest per capita income of any municipality in the United States.” Rightwing sites eagerly circulated the report, which actual reporters found to be demonstrably, patently false.

What to do? I’m beginning to think the answer is “sue their socks off!”

According to last Thursday’s New York Times,

Two Georgia election workers who were the targets of a right-wing campaign that falsely claimed they manipulated ballots filed a defamation lawsuit on Thursday against one of the nation’s leading sources of pro-Trump misinformation.

The suit against the right-wing conspiratorial website The Gateway Pundit was filed by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, both of whom processed ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 election for the Fulton County elections board. It follows a series of defamation claims filed by elections equipment operators against conservative television operators such as Fox News, Newsmax and One America News.

The allegations had been thoroughly investigated and found to be false, but that didn’t stop the pro-Trump disinformation campaign.The women received death threats and unending harassment from phone calls and text messages. Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, both of whom are Black, were also subjected to racial slurs.

A far more high-profile series of lawsuits has been filed by manufacturers of election technology.  Dominion Voting Systems has filed defamation lawsuits against Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. A federal judge recently ruled that those lawsuits can proceed. The court gave short shrift to claims that the defendants didn’t defame Dominion with their discredited allegations that the company was involved in election fraud that delivered the presidential election to Joe Biden.

Powell and Lindell claimed during a June hearing they could not be sued for defamation because they stood by their fraud claims and Dominion could not prove they made the allegations with “actual malice” knowing that they were false.

The judge noted that the claims were sufficiently fanciful that they demonstrated either knowing falsity or “reckless disregard for the truth”and said “a reasonable juror could conclude” Lindell’s claims of a “vast international conspiracy that is ignored by the government but proven by a spreadsheet on an internet blog is so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would believe it.”

The complaint filed by the two women suing The Gateway Pundit and other right-wing outlets did not specify a dollar amount that would compensate them, but Dominion is asking for billions of dollars in damages. In addition to the defendants listed above, it has also sued Fox News, Newsmax, One America News and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne.

Smartmatic, another election machine provider, has filed several suits as well.

The First Amendment protects citizens against government censorship. It does not protect purveyors of out-and-out lies from lawsuits charging libel or slander. And those lawsuits can be effective, as the New York Times reported in February.

In just a few weeks, lawsuits and legal threats from a pair of obscure election technology companies have achieved what years of advertising boycotts, public pressure campaigns and liberal outrage could not: curbing the flow of misinformation in right-wing media.

Fox Business canceled its highest rated show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on Friday after its host was sued as part of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit. On Tuesday, the pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax cut off a guest’s rant about rigged voting machines. Fox News, which seldom bows to critics, has run fact-checking segments to debunk its own anchors’ false claims about electoral fraud.

These lawsuits hit propagandists where it counts–in their pocketbooks. Fox News had to pay millions last year to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member that Fox hosts had falsely accused of leaking emails to WikiLeaks.

Can the tactic be abused? Absolutely–just look at Donald Trump, who  routinely sued anyone who reported on him negatively. Defending against even spurious claims can be expensive; I don’t want to minimize the downside.

That said, I agree with Roberta Kaplan.

This shouldn’t be the way to govern speech in our country,” Ms. Kaplan said. “It’s not an efficient or productive way to promote truth-telling or quality journalistic standards through litigating in court. But I think it’s gotten to the point where the problem is so bad right now there’s virtually no other way to do it.”

Sue the liars.

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If We Can’t Get Rid Of It, Reform It

One of the very few things in today’s political environment that is abundantly clear is the critical need to pass election reform. We need federal legislation to outlaw gerrymandering and a variety of vote suppression tactics, to make it easier rather than more difficult to vote, and to restore trust in the maxim “one person, one vote.”

The only impediment to that critical necessity is the continued existence of the current form of the filibuster, which has made a mockery of majority rule. As everyone reading this blog knows, the way in which the filibuster now works requires any measure to be passed by super-majority.  Wedded to Republican nihilism, It has brought the business of government to a standstill.

As a recent article from The Brookings Institute noted, the Senate’s ability to pass pending voting rights legislation–which is favored by large majorities of Americans and even by majorities in both houses of Congress–is the filibuster.

I have previously shared the filibuster’s relevant history, but let me repeat it.

Originally, the use of the filibuster was based on a recognition that so long as a senator kept talking, the bill in question couldn’t move forward. Once those opposed to the measure felt they had made their case (or at least exhausted their argument,) they would leave the Senate floor and allow a vote. The first change came In 1917, when filibustering Senators threatened President Wilson’s ability to respond to a perceived military threat.  The Senate responded by adopting a mechanism called cloture, allowing a super-majority vote to end a filibuster.

In 1975, the Senate again changed the rules; this time, the change made it much, much easier to filibuster.

The new rules allowed other business to be conducted during the time a filibuster is (theoretically) taking place. Senators no longer are required to take to the Senate floor and publicly argue their case. This “virtual” use has increased dramatically as partisan polarization has worsened, and it has effectively abolished the principle of majority rule. It now takes the sixty votes needed for cloture to pass any legislation. This anti-democratic result isn’t just in direct conflict with the intent of the Founders, it has brought normal government operation to a standstill.

Meanwhile, the lack of any requirement to publicly debate the matter keeps Americans  from hearing and evaluating the rationale for opposition to a measure–or even understanding why nothing is getting done.

With Senators like Manchin  (aka McConnell’s favorite Democrat) defending the filibuster, eliminating it is probably not an option. But even Manchin has displayed an openness to revising it. In the Brookings  article linked above, the authors share a number of proposals for amending the process, and consider the pros and cons of each. They look at a variety of ideas: reducing the number of senators needed to open debate in the face of a filibuster; requiring the objectors to be present with one of their number speaking at all times during a filibuster; and shifting the burden to those mounting the filibuster–making them muster the votes required to maintain the filibuster whenever it’s challenged, instead of enlisting the 60 who wish to proceed to so vote.

Whatever the merits of these proposals–and I definitely like the one requiring these obstructionists to stay on the Senate floor and bluster throughout–I especially like the paper’s final suggestion–to carve out an exception for voting rights, modeled on the exception that already exists for fiscal measures:

In Part III, we advocate for one additional option that the authors have previously written about, and that has been getting some significant proponents of late. We term that approach “democracy reconciliation.” It is based upon the existing practice of budget reconciliation, which allows certain fiscal measures to have an up-or-down simple majority vote. As we explain, we would craft a similar exception for voting measures, allowing them a similar opportunity to be voted upon by a majority. Reconciliation operates on a key principle known as the Byrd Rule, named after the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. Because the current fate of the filibuster swirls around his successor, Senator Manchin, one may refer to this hoped-for new compromise of democracy reconciliation as “the Byrd-Manchin” Rule.

Name it anything–just get it done. Quickly.

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Some People Shouldn’t Be Parents

Not long after I joined the faculty at IUPUI’s School of Public and  Environmental Affairs (now the O’Neill School), I had a student whose answer to virtually every thorny policy issue we discussed was the same: license people before allowing them to become parents.

This was in an upper-level undergraduate class in Law and Public Policy, and the student’s “day job” was as a probation officer. (Like a significant percentage of undergraduate students at IUPUI back then, he was older than traditional college students, and had a full-time job.) Each time, I would patiently explain why the Bill of Rights prevents government from making so personal a life choice for individual citizens, and he would respond to the effect that such a constraint was unfortunate, because he saw the results of bad or inadequate parenting on a daily basis.

As I reflect on those discussions, I’ve concluded that we were both right.

It should be obvious that the decision whether to procreate is not a decision that government in a free society can or should make. (Speaking of obvious–someone needs to  forcefully remind six Justices on our current, politicized Supreme Court just why liberty requires procreation decisions to be left to the individuals involved .) But my student wasn’t wrong when he pointed out that some people simply should not be parents.

I thought about that student, and those long-ago discussions he initiated, when I read reports about the utterly unfathomable conduct of the parents of Ethan Crumbly, the young man who killed four classmates and wounded seven others in Michigan. Per CNN, we learned that the parents have been charged along with their son after they failed to appear for their arraignment, withdrew 4,0000 from an ATM, and hid out in a warehouse some 40 miles from their home in an apparent effort to flee.

The judge has set their bail at 500,000 each.

Parents of a school shooter are almost never charged, even when their negligent storage of weapons is implicated in a shooting. But these parents are–as my students might put it–something else.

Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald has alleged that James Crumbley on November 26 bought the gun at a store in Oxford, and that the parents gave the weapon to their son as an early Christmas present.

During Saturday’s arraignment, McDonald said, “It’s … clear from the facts that (Ethan Crumbley) had total access to this weapon,” and that the parents “didn’t secure (the gun) and they allowed him free access to it.”…Shortly after James Crumbley bought the gun November 26, his son posted a picture of a gun on an Instagram account and captioned it, “Just got my new beauty today. SIG SAUER 9mm” with a heart-eyes emoji, McDonald said.

If the parental culpability had stopped with the purchase and  grant of access, I doubt they’d have been charged, but their jaw-dropping behaviors went far beyond stupidity and negligence. Jennifer Crumbley  posted about the gun on social media, calling it “his new Christmas present,” and took her son to a shooting range the weekend before the school shooting. When a teacher discovered Ethan searching for ammunition on his phone–the day before the shooting– and reported it to school officials, the mother not only didn’t respond when those officials called her, but sent a text message to her son saying, “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”  

On the day of the shooting , a different teacher became alarmed by pictures Ethan had drawn showing bullets, a bloody body, and a laughing emoji–along with alarming text.

The parents were called for a meeting in the school with a counselor and their son, who by that time had altered the illustration “by scratching out the drawings of the gun and bloody figure, along with the words, according to McDonald.”

The parents refused to take their son out of the school, and he was allowed back to class.

Other media outlets have reported that school officials strongly recommended that the parents obtain immediate psychological counseling for Ethan, but the parents appeared to dismiss that recommendation.

Later in that day–the same day his parents had refused to take him home– Ethan Crumbley “opened fire outside a bathroom, aiming at students in the hallway as well as those who were hiding in classrooms.” He killed four students and injured seven.

Maybe my long-ago student was right when he opined that some individuals shouldn’t be parents.  Since the Supreme Court appears ready to give government the right to require parenthood, maybe the Justices should stop cloaking that decision in rhetoric about fetal personhood, and just hold that government can decide who gets to procreate.

After all, the government with power to tell people they can’t abort can also tell them they must…

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Defining Privilege

Let me begin this discussion by admitting that communication is hard. Words mean different things to different people in different contexts, which is why consultants like Frank Luntz have made lots of money teaching Republicans to use phrases like “Death tax” rather than the demonstrably more accurate “estate tax.” (What the government is taxing, after all, is the estate–the assets left by the decedent–not the death.)

Understanding the power of language both to illuminate and confuse helps us recognize the problem with clumsy and misleading slogans (i.e. “defund the police.”)  There are also terms, however, that are arguably appropriate and/or accurate, but that nevertheless raise the hackles of folks who  (intentionally or unintentionally) interpret them differently.

One of those is  “privilege.” White privilege. Male privilege.

Evidently, a lot of people hear the word “privilege” and assume it refers to luxury, or at least ease. What it actually is intended to convey is the absence of a barrier–White people don’t get followed around in shops by clerks convinced that Black people are likely to be shoplifters; men don’t face “casting couch” situations when they apply for jobs. They have the “privilege” of being judged on the basis of relevant credentials and behaviors.

I’m not sure what other word we might use to convey that absence of added burdens.

The Indianapolis Business Journal recently ran a column by Tom Gallagher that struck me as a perfect example of White privilege. It was about redlining.

Gallagher explained that, in the 1930s, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and its operational arm, the Home Owners’ Loan Corp., were established to stabilize the real estate market as the Great Depression was ending.

They are also responsible for creating the maps that ultimately gave the discriminatory practice of redlining its name.

To encourage “responsible” lending practices, working with local real estate professionals, financiers and appraisers in communities across the nation of more than 40,000 people, Home Owners’ Loan Corp. created color-coded reference maps investors could use as a standard to determine the “security” of their investments. Based on their assessments, the “best” neighborhoods were graded “A” (in green). “B” (in blue) were “still desirable” and those given a “C” were considered “definitely declining” (in yellow). The neighborhoods given the lowest grade of “D” were regarded as “hazardous” and were, of course, colored in red.

The idea of a locally based, data-informed basis for decision-making was a good one. The problem arose in the values applied to the assessments. There was a clear bias toward newer and more spacious development, for example. Most shocking was that the residents were being graded, perhaps more than the real estate itself, not in terms of their credit value or economic viability but in terms of the “kind of people” they were. The Mapping Inequality project points out, “HOLC assumed and insisted that the residency of African Americans and immigrants, as well as working-class whites, compromised the values of homes and the security of mortgages.” To be sure, the maps didn’t create prejudice, but they did codify and normalize it.

As Gallagher and many others point out, the practice of redlining resulted in a “systematic and fundamental restructuring of our cities to favor the privileged and divert opportunities for wealth from those deemed unworthy.” It has had a lasting effect on the health and wealth of communities of color.

The Brookings Institution dubbed those effects the “destructive three “Ds.”

Black neighborhoods are denied the opportunity to build wealth through housing (which is the predominant mechanism through which White folks amass assets); they experience the systemic devaluation of their existing assets (both residential and business/commercial properties); and thanks to the results of redlining, banks frequently deny loans, which  leads to disinvestment that undermines efforts to arrest and reverse decline.

To those three “Ds,” Gallagher adds two others:  asset devaluation, which leads to a drop in prices and allows outside investors to step in, acquire property “on the cheap” and displace long-term residents and small businesses.

It seems accurate to describe those of us who don’t have to deal with the consequences of those racially discriminatory policies as privileged.

It also seems appropriate to note that redlining and its persistent after-effects are an excellent example of what we mean when we talk about structural/systemic racism–one of the “built into the law” systems that are the focus of  Critical Race Theory studied by law professors.

I don’t know whether Frank Luntz or one of his clones is responsible for turning that example of relatively arcane graduate-school study into a phrase meaning “hey, White people, ‘they’ are coming for you..,” but Republicans do have a genius for turning descriptive words into weapons.

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