Ten Essential Bob Dylan Albums

James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown," starring Timothee Chalomet as the 1961-1965 Bob Dylan, has been getting rave reviews. Chalomet captures Dylan's brooding and iconoclastic postures of that era to a tee. Other great performances include Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash. Anyone old enough to have lived in the 1960s will find something in the movie to appreciate. 

For me the high point of the film was Chalomet's rendition of Dylan singing "The Times They Are A-Changin'" at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Mangold's direction of that scene captures what Dylan really meant to the civil rights and youth movements of the time; the audience connected with Dylan in a way that labor movement activists had connected with Seeger and Woody Guthrie decades earlier. It was a connection that Dylan himself ultimately could not or would not sustain, much to the disappointment of various activists and movement leaders. 

I ultimately found the movie disappointing, for two main reasons. First, even though Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo (who is actually Dylan's then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo; Dylan asked Mangold not to use her real name) are portrayed as strong, independent women who ultimately (in not so many words) tell him to fuck off, one is left feeling that both of them would have sacrificed their political identities and activism FOR Dylan if he had only been more willing or able to commit to a relationship. As such, the film seems to imply that Baez and Russo would sell out their ideals for a traditional American romance--which reduces them to a tired Hollywood trope IMHO. 

Second, the film reinforces the myth that Pete Seeger was somehow opposed to Dylan "going electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the performance at which Dylan was allegedly booed by the majority of the audience (ostensibly for betraying the sound of pure folk music.). Seeger addressed this matter a number of times before he died, always emphasizing the same two points: (1) there was no opposition to electric instruments. Indeed, blues great Howlin' Wolf had played an electric set at the festival the day before Dylan. (2) The problem with Dylan's set was that the sound mixing was so terrible that Dylan's lyrics could not be heard, at least not without an auditory struggle. Especially for the Dylan of that era, a performance with indecipherable words defeated the point. 

The film did get me back to listening to Dylan's music. Below are what I consider to be ten of his most essential albums. Note that not one of them was recorded in the 21st century, even though Dylan has recorded a number of albums since 2001. It's not that his 21st century output has been bad as much as the fact that his 20th century output included so many iconic classics. Here they are: 

10. Time Out Of Mind (1997): Includes the classics "Love Sick" (which somehow ended up in a 2004 Victoria's Secret ad), and "Make You Feel My Love" (which has been covered by more than 450 different artists, most notably Adele). 

9. Oh Mercy (1989): An album that will always have great meaning for me, in large part because it came out the same year I moved to Oshkosh from Rochester, New York. Moving to the Midwest was not something I did easily or without trepidation, but I remember that this album somehow inspired me to venture into new territory. "Political World, "Everything is Broken," "Ring Them Bells," and "Disease of Conceit" remain as four of my all time favorite songs--the last two strike a chord with my Catholic upbringing. 

8. Slow Train Coming (1979): This was the first of three albums that represent Dylan's Born Again Christian phase. There are a number of great songs on it, but "Gotta Serve Somebody" is about as perfect a Dylan song as you can get. It's preachy without being too overbearing or hypocritical. 

7. Blonde on Blonde (1966): Dylan does not usually get credit for being one of the pioneering figures in the "progressive rock" movement of the 1960s and 1970s, yet Blonde on Blonde most certainly inspired that movement. In vinyl terms, it was one of the first double albums to include great tunes on each of the four sides. It also featured a mix of genres--certainly grounded in folk rock--but sending out word to other artists of the time that it was okay to push the musical envelope. My favorite song on the album is probably "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," a 7-minute epic that stayed in heavy rotation on FM radio for many years. 

6. Nashville Skyline (1969):  Dylan's foray into full-blown country music. As I watched the movie "A Complete Unknown," I wondered if "I Threw It All Away" was meant for Suze Rotolo or Joan Baez. 

5. Blood On The Tracks (1975). I listened to this album in high school, and it moved me greatly even though I did not have the emotional sophistication at the time to grasp the turmoil reflected in so many of the songs. "Simple Twist Of Fate" is a wonderful example of Dylan's ability to narrate a story in third and first person in a seamless way. Not sure how he does that. 

4. Highway 61 Revisited (1965): Probably the greatest folk-rock album ever recorded, groundbreaking in the best sense. Every song on it became iconic. The best known is "Like A Rolling Stone," which forever changed the sound of 1960s popular music. The lyrics open themselves up for numerous interpretations, and Al Kooper's intro organ never gets old to this day. 

3. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963): The album that led everyone to believe Dylan was the new Woody Guthrie. Epic songs that inspired a generation of topical folk-singers. "Blowing In The Wind" remains as the best known, but "Masters of War" and "A Hard Rains-A-Gonna Fall" (which imagines the world post-nuclear holocaust), both of which seethe with baby boom generation anger and fear, remain as my personal favorites. 

2.  The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964): The title track remains inspiring after all these years, but "When the Ship Comes In" (which was the first song Dylan performed at the 1963 March on Washington) is for me his most hopeful and optimistic song. In fact I still listen to it whenever I allow myself to get too depressed about our collective future--it helps to get me back on track. 

1. Bringing It All Back Home (1965): When I teach "The Rhetoric of Rock and Roll," occasionally a student will ask me what I think is the greatest album of all time. My answer changes from year to year, but "Bringing It All Back Home" has got to be near the top of the list. In vinyl terms, it includes an electric side with bluesy tunes--all with provocative lyrics and social commentary--and an acoustic side that is Woody Guthrie 2.0. I don't think any other song has impacted me as much as "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," which I am pretty sure I heard for the first time in the early 1970s on some college radio station broadcasting from a New Jersey campus (I was living in New York City at the time). 

Go see the movie! 

The 2024 Tony Awards: Celebrating Paul Krugman

Every year since 2003, I have given out Tony (Palmeri) Awards for the year's outstanding media. This is the first time since 2010, when I recognized the remarkable video documentarian (and Oshkosh native) Colin Crowley, that I am awarding only one Tony. In 2024 the award goes to the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist who announced in December that he would no longer be a regular contributor to the New York Times opinion page, contributions that he's made since January of 2000. Though I've disagreed with Krugman many times, I've always admired his ability to communicate his thoughts about complex [and often divisive] topics in a language that most everyone can understand. That is, Krugman has played the public intellectual role in a way few academics can pull off. 

Before diving into my reasons for celebrating Krugman, I'd like to explain why I am not handing out any other awards this year. Quite simply and depressingly, 2024 was the worst year for American journalism and punditry since 2003--the year the mainstream corporate media enabled the duplicity and depravity that gave us Operation Iraqi "Freedom." (More than 20 years after deposing the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, the US government today remains silent as the current Iraqi government carries out unlawful executions at a staggering rate.). 

In 2024, mainstream media in its coverage of the presidential election proved once again that when it comes to anything Trump related, the freedom of the press as the great "bulwark of liberty" will be sacrificed in the name of what is good for the news as a BUSINESS. New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen provided a framework for how the 2024 election should be covered that mainstream media ultimately failed to incorporate in any meaningful way. Rosen tweeted: 

Not the odds, but the stakes. That's my shorthand for the organizing principle we most need in journalists covering the 2024 campaign. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.

Instead what mainstream media provided us was essentially a repeat of 2016: obsession with polling data, treating bad faith actors known to flood the media space with "alternative facts" as credible sources, allowing blatantly false claims in political advertisements to go unchallenged, and framing Mr. Trump's anti-democratic tendencies as accusations made by his political opponents rather than as empirically verifiable facts. And while it is true that the so-called liberal spaces of mainstream media assisted establishment Democrats in covering up President Biden's decline until the June debate made it no longer possible to do so, that paled in comparison to the persistent "sanewashing" of Trump.

I think when future generations look back on the American continent of 2024, they will be hard pressed to explain the results of the Mexican presidential election compared to what transpired in the USA. In June of 2024, in a country still struggling to reign in a culture of toxic male machismo, Mexico elected its first female president--who also happened to be a climate scientist by trade. Meanwhile the United States elected a climate change denialist who also happened to be twice impeached, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and led an insurrection after he lost in 2020. No doubt future generations will somehow have to conclude that mainstream media had something to do with these topsy turvy results.

Maybe the worst mainstream media offender of 2024 was, sadly, the New York Times. Media critic Dan Froomkin's excellent analysis and critique of NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger's speech at Oxford University demonstrated convincingly that the paper was not willing to go to bat for its OWN definition of independent journalism. For Froomkin, Sulzberger communicated two messages to media critics very clearly in his speech:

1. You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.

2. You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.

As someone who has been a NYT reader and subscriber for many years, it's hard for me to disagree with Froomkin's analysis. Paul Krugman has not commented on the changing (sinking?) journalistic and editorial standards at the Times, but one has to wonder if his decision to leave was motivated at least in part by not wanting to be associated with a news organization that trolls its own core readers. 

Regardless, allow me to spend the remainder of this post celebrating Paul Krugman's writing. Over the years he has come up with dozens of concepts and arguments that have provoked me to think more critically about topics, reconsider my own thoughts, and/or write about certain topics myself. Let me just provide five examples: 

1. Kakistocracy: I'm sure he was not the first to use the term, but when Krugman described the Trump cabinet as a "kakistocracy" it struck me as the most perfect descriptor possible. A kakistocracy is "a form of government in which the worst persons are in power." (In his most recent substack piece, Krugman comments on Trump's sudden betrayal of his MAGA base to align his views more closely with his wealthy donors, and reaches this spot-on conclusion: "What all three of these reversals suggest to me is that the 2024 election wasn’t a victory for populism or actually any kind of 'ism.' What it did, instead, was deliver the levers of power into the hands of people who can be bought.")

A kakistocracy indeed.

2.  The Confidence Fairy. I happen to work at a University recently decimated by austerity budgets manufactured by highly paid external consultants. In justifying austerity, UW System administrators assert the same tired rhetoric politicians use when slashing programs that benefit workers: these tough decisions will result in short-term pain, but ultimately build confidence in the System and inspire great taxpayer and private stakeholder support. That is, somehow an institution can build confidence by destroying it. It's kind of like a pathetic variation of the Vietnam era admonition that we had to "destroy the town to save it." Look for Krugman's "confidence fairy" to make a grand return in Republican discourse later this month as they try to rationalize why we need massive cuts to the federal budget while giving more tax breaks to the richest one-percent. 

3. Zombie Ideas. This might be my all-time favorite Krugmanism, discussed extensively in his 2020 book Arguing With Zombies and summarized in a column entitled How Zombies Ate The GOP's Soul: 

"A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating people’s brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves — a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse."

Krugman shows how the Republican party has been overrun by zombie ideas. If the party is ever to rescue itself from Trumpism at the national level and its Trump-lite derivatives in the states, it will have to come to grips with what Krugman says here: 

Think about what is now required for a Republican politician to be considered a party member in good standing. He or she must pledge allegiance to policy doctrines that are demonstrably false; he or she must, in effect, reject the very idea of paying attention to evidence.

It takes a certain kind of person to play that kind of game — namely, a cynical careerist. There used to be Republican politicians who were more than that, but they were mainly holdovers from an earlier era, and at this point have all left the scene, one way or another. John McCain may well have been the last of his kind.

What’s left now is a party that, as far as I can tell, contains no politicians of principle; anyone who does have principles has been driven out.

The Republican Party is right now held way too tightly in the grips of MAGA for those words to even be heard. But heard they must be if we are ever going to be able to return to a "normal" two party system. To be clear: the Democrats have their own variety of dysfunctions, most notably the establishment's fierce opposition to the progressive wing of the party. But factional disputes and fear of progressive upstarts is not the same as requiring delusion as the price of admission to the party ball. Not even close. 

4. The Years Of Shame: On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Krugman wrote a short piece that literally provoked former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to cancel his New York Times subscription. The piece said in part:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Krugman's piece stuck with me for a long time, and on the 20th anniversary of September 11th I wrote a Krugman-inspired piece on 2001-2021 as our nation's "third score of shame." 

5.  The Public Intellectual Style: What I've most admired about Paul Krugman is his ability to write for a general audience. This is not an easy thing for academics to do, and most fail at it. In 2011 he wrote another short piece explaining his efforts to write in a conversational tone. I was impressed, though not surprised, that his "bible" for commandments on how to write clearly is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," a work that--when I first read it in graduate school back in the 1980s--transformed my entire outlook on what I should be doing as a budding academic. Few public intellectuals demonstrate Orwell's commitment to clarity as well as Paul Krugman. 

Dr. Krugman has left the New York Times, but he most certainly has not stopped writing. His excellent substack, "Krugman Wonks Out," is well worth your time. And it's free!  

Congratulations to Dr. Paul Krugman for being the sole recipient of the 2024 Tony Award. 

Campaign '24: Ten Epic Media Fails

In the aftermath of Kamala Harris' stunning loss in this year's presidential election, Democrat leaning politicians and pundits offered up a range of blame for the fiasco. The most common hot takes include: 

• Blame the Voters: Too many were motivated by racism, misogyny, and sexism. A view endorsed most explicitly by the National Organization of Women. 
• Blame Joe Biden: He should have stepped down earlier to allow the Dems to have a competitive primary. 
• Blame the Global Movement Against Incumbents: Given the toppling of incumbent parties and politicians all over the globe, 2024 was going to be tough for the Democrats no matter who got the nomination or how they got it. 
• Blame the Democrats' Abandonment of the Working Class: This is Senator Bernie Sanders' shtick, which he trots out after every Democratic Party loss. Before the election, Sanders was calling Harris a "progressive" and lauding Biden/Harris for accomplishing more than any administration since FDR. If Sanders sincerely believes the Dems have abandoned the working class, he should stop endorsing establishment Democrats. 
• Blame Kamala Harris: Her campaign undoubtedly sparked more enthusiasm than any since Barack Obama in 2008. Unfortunately, she could not or would not distance herself from Joe Biden, which made it impossible for her to be the candidate of change in a year when voters clearly wanted change. Anyone who has ever run a losing political campaign can think of a thousand things they would have done differently, but I'm quite sure that for Kamala Harris it would be this: her answer that "There is not a thing that comes to mind" to a question about what she would have done differently from Joe Biden. 
• Blame Identity Politics:  According to this view, Democratic preoccupation with issues of gender identity, race, and sexual orientation are an electoral turnoff not only to white working class voters, but to working class people of color. The Trump campaign's anti-trans ads, featuring the tag line "she's for they/them and he's for you" clearly had an impact on the race that the Harris team was not prepared to respond to. 
• Blame Democratic Party Consultants: The Harris campaign spent millions of dollars on consultants, whose solution to all campaign problems is to buy another 30-second ad. Worse, the high-paid consultants generally get their ideas for what should be the dominant messages of a campaign from party insiders and wealthy donors. 

Given that this is a Media Rants column, it would be easy and maybe even appropriate to add "blame the media" to the litany of "why she lost" explainers. I won't do that, because in my view no matter how awful the media perform in a given election cycle, it is never THE main reason why candidates win or lose. Smart candidates and political parties proceed from the assumption that media coverage will be awful, and plan accordingly. 

Still, it must be acknowledged that mainstream media in 2024 failed in an epic fashion. I want to highlight ten of the most egregious media shortcomings of the year. None of them were unique to 2024, which makes them even more tragic as it proves that mainstream media never learn from past mistakes (or does not care to learn.). 

#10.The 2016 Campaign All Over Again. In 2016 then CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves said of Donald Trump's candidacy: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." Moonves tried to walk back those comments, but in 2024 it became clear that the networks really can't get enough of Trump. As former CNN commentator Roland Martin put it: "A lot of legacy media people were pining for Trump's return because they know it's going to be a sh*t show every day. It will be another four year reality show about his craziness."  The irony is that legacy media stand to be a major target for persecution in Trump's second term. 

Was 2024 merely a repeat of 2016? Mainstream media willing to suspend civic responsibility for profits? 

#9. Sanewashing Trump. President-elect Trump is convinced that the mainstream media are his enemies (and the enemy of The People), and yet the mainstream media have assisted him greatly--not just by giving him millions of dollars of free campaign coverage--but by turning him into a "normal" candidate by grossly cleaning up his most nonsensical comments and overall image. A typical example would be when Trump sent out an unhinged, insult laden social media post that seemed to include an agreement to debate Kamala Harris. Major media simply reported it as "Trump agrees to debate Harris."  Parker Molloy in The New Republic wrote the best piece about the media "sanewashing" of Trump: 

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality. When major news outlets consistently present a polished version of Trump’s statements, they create an alternate narrative that exists alongside the unfiltered truth available on social media and in unedited footage.

Voters who rely solely on traditional news sources are presented with a version of Trump that bears little resemblance to reality. They see a former president who, while controversial, appears to operate within the bounds of normal political discourse—or at worst, is breaking with it in some kind of refreshing manner. 

#8: The George Clooney Op-Ed. On July 10, 2024 the New York Times published an op-ed by the actor George Clooney called "I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee." I found it fascinating that the New York Times, which recoils at even the suggestion that they allow themselves to be exploited for partisan purposes, gave Clooney a green light to send out the message that big money Dem donors were done with Biden. The most outrageous part of the op-ed was this: 

We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won't win the House, and we're going to lose the Senate. This isn't only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I've spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.

The New York Times allowed its op-ed page to be used as a space for rich Democratic Party donors to express their unease with Joe Biden. The people at-large had made it clear long before Clooney's piece that they thought President Biden should keep his 2020 pledge to be a transitional figure. The fact that Biden resisted those calls, yet dropped out not too long after Clooney's  op-ed appeared only seemed to reinforce the perception that the voice of the wealthy, not the people at-large, is more important to establishment Dems. 

How on earth could the Times publish that without demanding to know the names of the officials who spoke to Clooney? Clooney and the big money donors ultimately got their way, Kamala Harris ended up setting fundraising records, and yet the end results were exactly what Clooney predicted would happen if Biden stayed in the race. 

#7. Local Media Campaign Rally Announcements. Donald Trump came to Wisconsin many times during the campaign season. Each rally featured his standard litany of insults, grievances, exaggerations, and lies. Appalling to me was the way local television news announced the rallies: "Donald Trump will be in Green Bay today to talk about economic policy." "Donald Trump heads to Milwaukee today to lay out his plan for immigration reform." The announcements made it sound like Trump was running a traditional Republican campaign, when in reality his speeches rarely addressed policy matters in any meaningful way. 

#6. Focus Group Failure: For the entire campaign season, the New York Times ran a series of focus groups with voters. Many of them were moderated by Frank Luntz, the political consultant most known as a Republican spin doctor. The focus groups were maddening in how much the participants were guided by inaccurate information or just sheer ignorance. At the end of each focus group, Luntz and other moderators included this qualification: 

"As is customary in focus groups, our role as moderators was not to argue with or fact-check the speakers, and some participants expressed opinions not rooted in facts."

Without any kind of fact-checking of the focus groups, the Times in a real sense allowed itself to be used as a space for partisan propaganda. The Times should have published a column after each focus group that, at a minimum, identified factual inaccuracies in the focus group content. Doing that would not have required arguing with the participants. Perhaps they would have learned something. 

#5. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Non-Endorsement:  Ownership of the L.A. Times and Washington Post made the odd decision, within two weeks of the election, of not endorsing a candidate for president. Instead of admitting the obvious--that they did not want to risk angering Donald Trump should he win the election--they instead gaslighted their readers and tried to argue that they were upholding some kind neutrality principle. A number of staff resigned, and thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions.  Here's what former Washington Post editor Marty Baron called the paper's action: a case of "disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage."

#4: No Pushback On Political Advertising Lies: We all expect political ads to feature exaggerations, and for candidates to stretch the truth just enough to make themselves look good and their opponents look bad. In 2024, however, there just seemed to be an overabundance of ads that had absolutely no basis in reality. The example that stood out for me was Wisconsin Republican US Senate candidate Eric Hovde's ad claiming that incumbent Tammy Baldwin "gave stimulus checks to illegals." That one stood out for me because it's easily refutable. 

It is true that FCC guidelines prohibit censoring or rejecting ads paid for and sponsored by legally qualified candidates. But it is also true that there is nothing that prevents the network running the ad from exposing lies that are being broadcast on said network. During campaign season, each network should create a weekly news feature dedicated simply to fact-checking the ads being run. 

#3: Debate Moderating:  I've been watching television political debates since the 1970s, and I can honestly say that the moderating this year was the worst I have seen. Joe Biden clearly was not ready to participate in the June debate with Donald Trump, but even a younger and more coherent Joe Biden would have done poorly in a debate in which the moderators refused to fact check even the most baseless assertions.  Moderators for the Trump/Harris debate in September were mildly better, but there too Mr. Trump was for the most part able to spew alternative reality with little pushback. I argued in July that Biden should have refused to debate Trump, and I would have given the same advice to Harris. When one side in a debate lies repeatedly, and continues to tell the same lie(s) even when corrected, then genuine debate is not possible. 

My field of Communication Studies is guided by a code of ethics ("Credo For Ethical Communication") that should guide debate moderators and participants. Moderators should especially be ready to call out violations of these two principles: 

We advocate truthfulness, accuracy, honesty, and reason as essential to the integrity of communication. 

We condemn communication that degrades individuals and humanity through distortion, intimidation, coercion, and violence, and through the expression of intolerance and hatred. 

In Wisconsin, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin and her opponent, Republican Eric Hovde, had one debate that was broadcast live on a Friday evening. The moderators asked a boatload of questions with little follow-up and limited time for the debaters to respond. The end result was a "debate" that featured each candidate reverting to their stump speech talking points and/or taking a cheap shot at their opponent. It really was one of the most awful debates I've ever seen. The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association, which hosted the debate, needs to be better. 

#2: Ignoring the Urban Voters, Distorting the Rural: Given the the existence of the Electoral College, candidates have to spend most of their time in swing states with large rural populations. Since 2016 mainstream media have given us countless reports, feature stories, podcasts, and documentaries about the plight of the rural voter allegedly abandoned by Democrats. Meanwhile, about 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, yet the concerns of urban America rarely get sustained attention during presidential campaigns. This in spite of the fact that urban issues like failing infrastructure, housing shortages, underfunded schools, cost of living, and many others create an urban population every bit as distressed as the rural.  Without question, urban distress contributed to Trump making significant gains with Black and Latino voters in urban areas even as he trashed the cities they live in and has produced no clear plan as to what he might do to address the distress. 

What distresses me as a citizen following the campaigns is that the mainstream media not only minimize the concerns of 80 percent of the population, but they don't even provide a complete portrait of what exactly IS rural America. According to professor Christabel Devadoss of Middle Tennessee State University, rural America is not just White America, as always implied in mainstream news reports. Dr. Devadoss looked at census data and found this: 

Nationwide, 24% of rural Americans identified as people of color in the 2020 census.

That figure is probably low because the census tends to undercount nonwhite respondents – a problem that was particularly evident in 2020. Even so, that’s a quarter of rural residents who don’t fit the national stereotype of rural America.

Rural America is white and Republican. It’s also trans, queer, Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, South Asian, Democratic and much more. Even if some are Republican, they still aren’t the rural Rust Belt Republicans portrayed in the national media.

Ignoring these nuances reinforces stereotypes that the rural Rust Belt is the exclusive domain of white conservativism. But this region isn’t now, and never has been, simply red and white.

#1: Resurrecting the Dead Horse Race: New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has long been critical of mainstream media's "horse race" coverage of elections. Horse race coverage minimizes discussion of issues of concern to voters, or the consequences of elections, in favor of nonstop "who's in the lead" stories. In 2024 a running joke became the image of political junkies frantically checking their phones every five minutes to see if the polls budged.  In 2023 professor Rosen asserted, quite correctly in my view, that the 2024 election coverage should be guided by these six words: "Not the odds, but the stakes."  Put another way: "Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy." 

Writing for the Freedom Forum, Scott Leadingham argues that horse-race journalism is interested in more that just polls: "More broadly, it's a focus on the day-to-day and ins-and-outs of campaigning; Who said what at a rally? Who posed for a photo with what group? Who posted what on social media and how did their opponent respond? Who 'won' the debate or had the most 'cringe' response to a question?"

As we entered the 2024 campaign season I was hoping, probably in a naive way, that mainstream journalists might declare the horse race model dead and instead cover "the stakes." Instead they resurrected the horse race and made it more prominent than ever. 

In every election cycle there are individual journalists who resist resorting to conventional templates. I might recognize some of them in next month's annual Tony Awards column. But the responsible journalism of a few will not prevent future generations from concluding that 2024 election coverage, on balance, represented an epic fail. That failure did not cause, but was certainly a contributing factor, to Donald Trump's victory. What could that victory mean for the free press? I'll let media researchers Julie Posetti, Kaylee Williams, and Mel Bunce answer that and close out this post:

Donald Trump’s second term promises to deliver historic threats to US press freedom – directly from the Oval Office.

The president-elect made it clear during the campaign that he had the press in his sights. He told a rally on the eve of the election that he “wouldn’t mind” if an assassin shot the journalists standing in front of him.

Ahead of the election, he also signaled his desire to jail journalists, hunt down their confidential sources, cancel the broadcast licences of major networks and criminalize work to counter disinformation.

Is the threat to jail adversaries just another case of Trump throwing red meat to his MAGA base? Or is Trump 2.0, thanks to the Supreme Court not having to worry about prosecution while in office, intending to make good on his threats? We will soon find out. 

Journalists in the US – a country long at the forefront of global press freedom advocacy – now find themselves facing threats more familiar to their colleagues in the Philippines, Hungary or Venezuela. And it is from journalists in such countries that the US press must now learn how to defend press freedom and fight for facts.

The Electoral College Again

I'm writing this less than a week before the November elections. For the first time in my life, the phrase "the most consequential election in history" is not an exaggeration. If anything the phrase understates the severity of the stakes we face. I'm in agreement with the respected historian Robert Paxton, who told the New York Times that "If Trump wins, it's going to be awful. If he loses, it's going to be awful too." 

As we all know by now, to become president of the United States requires 270 Electoral College votes. In the last six presidential elections, the Republican candidate has lost the popular vote five times, yet won the presidency three times. Only in 2004 did the Republican (George W. Bush) win both the popular and Electoral College vote. 

In 2024 the volatility of the polls suggests any number of possible outcomes. It is conceivable one candidate could win by a landslide in both the popular and Electoral College vote. If Trump wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania we could easily see a repeat of 2016. It's not likely, but we could even see a situation in which Harris loses the popular vote but wins in the Electoral College. 

In 2020 Joe Biden won both the popular and Electoral College vote. But because of how close the vote was in the so-called swing states, Mr. Trump only needs to flip several thousand votes in a handful of states in order to repeat his 2016 triumph.

For me, the racist origins of the Electoral College should by itself be enough to abolish it. Because of the "3/5 compromise" in the 1787 Constitution, the southern states were able to include slaves in the census count, which increased those states' congressional representation and electoral votes. According to constitutional law professor Akhil Amar, in 1800 the "free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes." Not coincidentally, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the White House for 32 of the Constitution's first 36 years. The Electoral College is worth rejecting if for no other reason than rejecting that sordid past. 

Okay, I know that righting historical wrongs is not a high priority for people who have more pressing things to think about. But even if we ignore the history, just focusing on the present ways that the Electoral College makes our presidential election an international embarrassment should be enough to force change.  Here are just three electoral college absurdities: 

The Electoral College Empowers Only a Small Group Of Voters.  At my university (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh), we now have a number of students from Illinois. One of them--who happens to follow politics more closely than most students--came up to me about a month ago, told me he was registered to vote in Illinois, and said he was going to vote by absentee ballot. I told him that, since Kamala Harris was certain to win Illinois, his vote for Trump or Harris would actually carry much more weight in Wisconsin where the result was less certain. What complicated matters for this particular student was that he happens to be from Illinois's 17th Congressional District, which happens to be the only genuinely competitive one in the entire state. This particular student cares deeply about the presidential election and that congressional election, yet the realities of the Electoral College made him have to think about where his vote would have most impact. 

Even though Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by about seven million popular votes nationwide, the candidates would have been tied in the Electoral College but for 44,000 votes across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. About 67 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in 2020; if that same percentage holds this year, about 162 million people will vote. Is it really rational or ethical that 44,000 of those voters have substantially more power than everyone else?  Of course not. 

The Myth Of The Small State Benefit.  The most common argument I hear in support of the Electoral College is that it somehow gives small states more of a voice in the presidential election. That could not be more wrong. Small states have been ignored for many decades. The only states that have a real voice in the presidential election are the swing states, which this year are Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada.  Just how "small" are these states?: 

• Pennsylvania is the 5th largest state
• Georgia is the 8th largest state 
• North Carolina is the 9th largest state 
• Michigan is the 10th largest state
• Arizona is the 14th largest state 
• Wisconsin is the 20th largest state 
• Nevada is the 32nd largest state 

Nevada (population 3.1 million) is the only one that I think can legitimately be called "small," and even IT is not in the bottom ten. 

The Electoral College benefits "swing" states, which are defined as those in which the winner prevails by five percent of the vote or less. In a very real sense, 40+ states are pretty much irrelevant in the election, with candidates rarely showing up in them. This creates a bizarre phenomenon in which a state becoming more red or more blue takes it out of the presidential race, and thus does not get its needs addressed in a meaningful way.  Ohio and Florida, for example, have become red to the point where very little presidential campaigning happens there anymore. This is tragic, as Ohio's manufacturing plight and Florida's status as ground zero for climate changes catastrophes make them places that should get sustained presidential campaign attention. 

Lewis Hine's Lesson For Today's Media

 Lewis Hine, a brilliant photographer whose pictures exposed the crime of child labor in the United States in the early 1900s, was born in Oshkosh, WI on September 26, 1874. His family lived in the building on North Main St. that currently houses the Jambalaya Art Gallery. The gallery hosted a reception on Sept. 26 to recognize Hine's 150th birthday, at which Rep. Lori Palmeri read a proclamation from Governor Tony Evers, while the Oshkosh Landmarks Commission presented the owner of the building with a plaque designating it as a historical landmark. An exhibit of Hine's works will be in display at Jambalaya Thursdays and Fridays from 4-8 p.m. and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. thru October 31st. In late October the Time Community Theatre will be screening a free documentary on the works of Lewis Hine.

One of many photos taken by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Commission. Hine once said, "There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work." 

It's extremely disappointing, though not at all surprising, how little interest the regional, state, and national media have in Lewis Hine. His photo journalism inspired a generation of children's rights and worker's rights activists, which eventually led to Keating-Owen Act of 1916 (declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1918) and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Among other provisions, FLSA mandated minimum wages, overtime pay, and prohibition on the employment of minors in "oppressive child labor."  

Unfortunately child labor abuses did not end in 1938, which is why we need modern media not just to issue rare periodic reminders of Lewis Hine and his photos, but to incorporate his ethic into their own reporting on modern employment practices.  The Department of Labor found "688 minors employed illegally in hazardous occupations in fiscal  year 2022, the highest annual count since fiscal year 2011." DOL found two 10-year-old workers at a Louisville McDonald's franchise. In 2023 the New York Times featured a shocking expose' on exploitation of migrant children illegally allowed to work in brutal jobs. As noted in the report, "Arriving in record numbers, they're ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws - including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom." Meanwhile Republicans in Wisconsin would apparently have no problem having 14-year-olds serve alcohol in the state. 

Some of Lewis Hine's most impactful and iconic photos were of children working in brutal conditions in coal mines. 

Reporting on child labor abuses is virtually absent from mainstream television news. Print media, as noted above, will report on the abuses, but their reports rarely feature photo essays as powerful as what Hine produced. Samples of his photos can be found here, here, and here. 

Why are modern corporate media minimizing or ignoring the plight of contemporary child laborers? Writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, photo historian Beth Saunders hypothesizes factors related to immigration status and race: 

A recent surge of unaccompanied minors, primarily from Central America, has brought new attention to America’s old problem of child labor and has threatened the very laws Hine and the National Child Labor Committee worked to enact.

Some estimates suggest that around two-thirds of migrant children end up working full time, with some laboring more hours than current laws permit or working without the proper authorizations. Many of them perform hazardous jobs similar to those of Hine’s subjects: handling dangerous equipment and being exposed to noxious chemicals in factories, slaughterhouses and industrial farms.

While the content of Hine’s photographs remains pertinent to today’s child labor crisis, a key distinction between the subject of Hine’s photographs and working children today is race.

Hine focused his camera almost exclusively on white children who arrived in the country during waves of immigration from Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As art historian Natalie Zelt argues, Hine’s pictorial treatment of Black children—either ignored or forced to the margins of his images—implied to viewers that the face of childhood in America was, by default, white.

The perceived racial hierarchies of Hine’s era reverberate into the present, where underage migrants of color live and work at the margins of society.

Ending modern child labor abuses, especially given the racial hierarchies described by Saunders, will require sustained activism on behalf of the voiceless victims of corporate greed and governmental neglect. Mainstream corporate media could assist the effort by empowering photojournalists to produce Hine-like iconic photos. Visual rhetoric scholars Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites defined iconic photos as "photographic images produced in print, electronic, or digital media that are (1) recognized by everyone within a public culture, (2) understood to be representations of historically significant events, (3) objects of strong emotional identification and response, an (4) regularly reproduced or copied across a range of media, genres, and topics." 

Given the hyper visual age that we are living in, it is simply impossible to spark action on social injustices without iconic images, especially those that produce a "strong emotional identification and response." Taking such photos often requires the photographer to take great personal risks. Hine himself, it is said, often had to disguise himself as a Bible salesman in order to get access to the inside of a factory abusing children. When his true intentions were discovered by shop foremen, he sometimes faced physical violence. He was willing to pay that price to expose the extreme injustice taking place inside. 

Regional, state, and national media can be excused for ignoring a 150th anniversary reception. What cannot be excused is their failure to expose, systematically and repeatedly, predatory harm and abuse in American society, and not just of children. Lewis Hine taught journalists how to use the power of photographic images to spark social change. Modern mainstream media have yet to learn the lesson. 

Hine did not just photograph child labor. His images capturing the building of the Empire State Building never fail to give the viewer a jolt. 

The How and Why of "Weird"

In July Joe Biden announced his decision to step aside and endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency. Given that the announcement came so close to the start of the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris had roughly two weeks to decide on a running mate. According to an NBC News' insider account of the Harris campaign, 

"Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was a dark horse from the start, left off early lists of potential running mates. But no one used the 16 days since President Joe Biden stepped aside more effectively than Walz, who charmed Harris and national Democrats alike with a Diet Mountain Dew-fueled media tour that labeled the opposition as 'weird' and won him a spot in history."

Labeling former President Trump, GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and MAGA doctrine in general as "weird" represents a rare instance--since 2015 at least--when Democratic messaging has actually put the Republicans on the defensive. The Associated Press looked to George Washington University professor of strategic communications David Karpf for some insight. He said that labeling Republican comments as "weird" is "the sort of concise take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters." Equally important, according to Karpf, is that the "weird" label "frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses."

The archetype of the kind of "weird" position/rhetoric that Walz and other Dems have in mind is this verbal diarrhea by J.D. Vance from his 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson:

"We're effectively run in this country--via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs--by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too . . . It's just a basic fact -- you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC -- the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children . . . And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?" 

Vance made those statements while running for the US Senate in Ohio. We know that hack politicians will say anything in the heat of a competitive race. Still, it is somewhat shocking that a published author with a law degree can so easily confuse his opinion with "basic fact." Imagine if I said, "it's just a basic fact--J.D. Vance is a moron." That millions of people agree with the statement does not make it a "fact." 

When called out, Vance doubles down and claims that he is not criticizing childless people, but rather the Democratic Party for being "anti-family and anti-child." Sure. 

Weirdness, of course, is largely subjective: one person's "weird" posture is another's "principled stance."  The problem in the Trump-dominated GOP is that the MAGA worldview--which features an unhealthy mix of QAnon conspiracy theories and Trump's unhinged rants-- is objectively weird. At some level Mr. Trump knows this to be true; why else would he so quickly distance himself from Project 2025, a far right-wing wish list of reactionary ideas about which "weird" is probably the kindest thing that could be said? 

How did the GOP get this "weird?"  And why does the "weird" label have so much rhetorical force for Democrats? 

To explain how the MAGA era GOP got weird, let's first take a step back and think of our family lives. Suppose you're at a family barbecue and uncle J.D. shows up. Uncle J.D. is a midlevel manager at a midsized corporation who was recently passed over for a promotion; they gave the job to a single, childless woman. While everyone's enjoying burgers and hot dogs, uncle J.D. goes off on a rant about the childless cat ladies who run his corporation who passed him up because they wanted "one of their own" in the position. You know, "the ones who are miserable at their own lives and so they want to make everyone else miserable too." 

Even though it usually ends up ruining the party atmosphere, in that situation you would probably get at least a few family members who would probe uncle J.D. for more information and/or pushback against his hostility: "how do you know that's why you didn't get the promotion?" "Why are women without kids miserable?" "I don't have any kids and I'm doing just fine," etc. etc. etc. Maybe after a few drinks, the usually quiet uncle Tony tells uncle J.D. to do everyone a favor and "shut the fuck up." 

What has happened in the MAGA GOP is that it exists in a media environment in which uncle J.D. gets no pushback. "Weird" statements get responded to with either approval and/or even more extreme weirdness. The late Rush Limbaugh's radio program for decades mastered the art of having an authoritative sounding figure (i.e. Rush) make a series of weird claims with full knowledge that the callers' initial responses would be "ditto." Rush was the first nationally known media personality to thrive in the post-Fairness Doctrine era, in which one-sided political programming with zero pushback became the norm. 

If you look at the actual interview in which Vance made the "childless cat ladies" statement, it was a classic example of what I'm talking about. As Vance uttered a stream of inanities, Tucker Carlson sat there with his typical dumbfounded expression (what the Daily Show's Michael Kosta once described as "looking like Frankenstein walked in on his parents having sex."). No pushback. No counterpoint. No prodding for evidence. And of course absolutely no attempt to interview one of the targets of Vance's creepy ire. 

If you would like a more academic explanation of how our public discourse became so harebrained, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's "Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles" (2018) is worth your time. Inspired by a number of authors including legal scholar Cass Sunstein (who coined the expression "echo chamber") and activist Eli Pariser (who wrote an important book on "filter bubbles"), he writes: 

An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. 

With the MAGA movement we have what is probably the most toxic mix of an epistemic bubble and echo chamber in the digital age. When a movement refuses to hear relevant voices while actively undermining others, the discourse that results cannot be anything other than confrontational, aggressive, and self-righteous. Governor Walz's characterization of MAGA leaders and discourse as "weird," while clearly a political attack, is actually quite mild compared to the vicious vitriol that is more typical of contemporary political language. 

Why have Walz and the Dems gotten so much mileage so far out of labeling MAGA "weird?"  I think John McWorther's New York Times opinion piece on "The Hidden Grammatical Reason That 'Weird' Works" (behind a paywall) provides some useful insights. He argues that "Applying 'weird' to MAGA is a great debate team tactic, a deceptively complex rhetorical trick that uses the simplest of language to make a sophisticated point: that the beliefs that MAGA is supposed to be getting us back to defy expectation, usually for the simple reason that they’re false." For example, "The idea that a single woman without children is less qualified to lead is jarring even amid the trash talk flying throughout our political landscape."

McWorther is a Columbia University linguist and political conservative who regularly chides the political left for its abuse of language and woke excesses. But he's equally appalled at what MAGA has done to the political right, and sees the application of "weird" to it as a winning political strategy: 

"Weird" pegs MAGA as a detour, a regrettable temptation that  serious politics ought to render obsolete. Calling it "weird" is deft, articulate, and possibly prophetic. . . It's also an example of the power of language, in particular a kind of grammar that too few people are taught. Wouldn't more kids take interest in the subject if they knew they could use it to shut down a bully.

I would go further and say that part of the appeal of "weird" is that it protects listeners from having to confront blunt, harsh statements about reality and instead gives them a comforting euphemism. What I mean is that since 2015 Democrats have been hurling labels like "fascist," "authoritarian," "misogynist" and "deplorable" at almost everything that comes out of the mouths and social media posts of Trump and his enablers. Much to the chagrin of Dems and other anti-Trump activists, those labels tend to repulse the average American, or make us feel like we could somehow be stupid or irresponsible enough to elect a dictator. 

Hurling the term "weird" at MAGA allows us to express disagreement with the basic tenets of the movement without implying that its followers are fundamentally evil, anti-American, or desirous of ending democracy. As the late scholar Kenneth Burke might have put it, "weird" is a comic frame that portrays opponents as mistaken, whereas "fascist" is a tragic frame that portrays opponents as debased and rotten. 

Obviously it's going to take much more than a clever euphemism for Harris/Walz to score a victory in November. The supremely weird and outdated Electoral College method of electing the chief executive means that a very small number of voters in a handful of states will be deciding the election--and those states are populated by large numbers of voters who inhabit the MAGA epistemic bubble/echo chamber. 

But regardless of what happens in November, we still owe kudos to Governor Walz for bringing the comic frame back to American politics. We sure as heck need it.