Welcome To Tony Palmeri's Media Rants! I am a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I use this blog to try to promote critical thinking about mainstream media, establishment politics, and popular culture.
In last month's Rant, I identified five contemporary commonplaces that strike me as DUMB in the sense that they do little to improve the sorry state of public discourse in the United States, AND are easily exploited by political hacks and opportunists. The five identified were:
"Literally"
"It is what it is"
"Both sides do it"
"Russian Asset"
"Concerns mount"
Snopes has verified that President Ulysses S. Grant actually did utter this quote in an 1875 speech. Ignorance is often created or reinforced by the mindless use of dumb commonplaces.
This rant identifies five more dumb commonplaces. Much more than last month's list, these five are particularly nefarious in how they tend to be employed by bad faith political actors for the purpose of bamboozling the public. These same bad faith political actors willfully exploit commonplaces in an effort to appear like some kind of conscientious or noble public servant. In other words, when you hear these commonplaces come out of the mouth of your local, state, or national officials, be sure to consider the very real possibility that she or he is COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT.
Commonplace #6: "It's Not Sustainable." In the days when sustainability had a direct and recognizable connection to humans and their interaction with the natural environment, cogently arguing that something was "not sustainable" had the rhetorical force of a wake-up call. Environmental activists, scientists, and even some politicians helped the world to see, for example, how "it's not sustainable" meant that our current methods of creating, consuming, and disposing of "stuff" would make life more difficult for future generations.
Today, "it's not sustainable" is used just as frequently by bad faith actors to argue against anything they don't like. For example, elected officials who were always against public school budgets anyway--often in hostile terms--now adopt somber tones to tell us that more resources for schools is "not sustainable." Much of the developed world can have health care for all, paid family and medical leave, high speed rail systems, and many other things that are the hallmarks of decent and civilized societies, but for us they are "not sustainable." Ask the same people about bloated military budgets, or about the billions spent annually on the war on drugs and incarceration, or about corporate welfare policies (if you're a Wisconsinite, think Foxconn) that drain public treasuries, and you won't hear a peep about how each program is not sustainable.
The point is that "it's not sustainable" went from being an ethical descriptor of bad planning to a deceptive propaganda device designed to make bad planning sound good and good planning sound bad. Put another way, "it's not sustainable" became a "heads I win, tails you lose" trick. If Mr. Smith From Hell wants something, it's sustainable. It he doesn't, it's not. Fuck him.
Commonplace #7: "It's not politics, it's math." One of the major responsibilities of government is to pass a budget. Because budgets are less about numbers and more about values, budget discussions are hard. This is true at the local, state, national, and even international levels. Most people don't like hard discussions, and hard discussions about values tend to send them into apoplectic tizzies.
Over the years I've listened to and even participated in a number of budget discussions. The most educational are at the local level; because local government is non-partisan, government officials don't just fall back on partisan talking points or (as in the Wisconsin state legislature) just parrot the views of party leaders. Instead, officials will often trot out shibboleths seemingly designed to silence opponents: "we have to listen to what the people are telling us" (translation: we don't have to listen to what the people are telling us), or "the people want this" (translation: the people DON'T want this) or "the people don't want this" (translation: the people DO want this).
All of the above are transparently weasel-like, but this one is my favorite: "it's not politics, it's math." That gem is usually said by someone attempting to position him or herself as somehow being above the fray that we mere mortals mess around in. I'm not sure when I first heard "it's not politics, it's math," but it is the kind of phrase that started to gain currency during Bill Clinton's remaking of Democratic Party rhetoric in the 1990s. Clinton endorsed the "triangulation" strategy, a tactic of framing oneself as the "reasonable" middle ground between polar extremes. So you would end up getting pure bullshit like this (I'm paraphrasing typical triangulated rhetoric): "Partisan politics won't let us get anything done. The Democrats think we can spend our way out of our problems. The Republicans want to starve government while cutting taxes for their rich donors. So both sides just keep playing politics to appease their tribes. But when I look at our budget deficit I want both sides to understand, it's not politics, it's math." Brilliant, eh?
Commonplace #8: "It's Just Common Sense." Public advocates framing their policy ideas as "just common sense" is something that has irked me for a long time. In fact in 2013 I wrote an entire Media Rant on it. As noted in that piece, in the public sphere when advocates say their plans are "common sense" they generally mean one of three things:
In my experience this is true.
I really, really want this to be true.
People I admire believe this is true.
Privileging our experience, privileging our desires, and privileging the views of authorities are three of the major enemies of critical thinking. So what do we do when officials insist their appeals are grounded in "common sense?" Once again I'll refer to what I wrote in 2013: "The good news is we don’t have to be passive victims of common sense appeals. All we need to do is keep asking critical questions, be mature enough to change our minds when the evidence suggests we should, and resist all the pressures urging us to be intellectually lazy."
Common Place #9: "Violence against women." How could anyone possibly be opposed to the "violence against women" commonplace? Everyone's against "violence against women," right? Wrong. As noted most eloquently by University of Massachusetts professor of media studies Sut Jhally, the phrase "violence against women," because it does not identify the agent of the violence, makes it easy to ignore the fact that violence against women is an issue that MEN have the responsibility to do something about. Women of course have a role in ending violence against women, but the failure to clearly and unambiguously identify the agent of the violence has let most men "off the hook" on being part of the solution.
As noted by Dr. Jhally, we (men) need to "break the silence" and call out our complicity in enabling the small amount of men responsible for most of the violence against women. A huge part of that effort requires changing the language of domestic/relationship violence. So whenever someone in your presence says something about "violence against women," politely interrupt them and ask, "you mean MEN's violence against women, right?"
Commonplace #10: "We are better than this." I was a fan of the late Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Congressman who represented his district for 23 years in the House of Representatives. Rep. Cummings' booming voice and moral tone always brought forth memories of the giants of the 1960s Civil Rights movement like Martin Luther King, Jr. Part of the Cummings brand was to express in vivid and moving terms some atrocity being committed by the government, and then end with "we are so much better than this!"
When Elijah Cummings said "we are better than this," his emotive force made me suspend any attempt to ask if the statement was/is true. Are we in fact "better than this?" When anyone else besides Cummings uses the phrase, it seems as if ALL I think about is its accuracy or lack thereof. And unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that we are NOT "better than this." In fact, in most areas we are probably a lot worse than we think. Imagine a Roman senator thousands of years ago, surveying the cruelty and greed of the actions of powerful people across the empire and concluding "we are better than this." With sober hindsight, we can reasonably conclude that Rome could never "be better" as long as it insisted on running a cruel and greedy empire.
Thank you for engaging part II of "Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces." Let us all pledge to be less dumb by being more mindful of our linguistic choices. To cite another commonplace I hate, "we got this!"
In the 1950s and 60s the late French scholar Jacques Ellul wrote insightfully about technology, language, politics, and culture. His books The Technological Society (1964) and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes(1965) provoked critical conversations in sociology, media and communication studies, political science, and other fields. My personal favorite is the 1966 A Critique of the New Commonplaces. In that work Ellul did something I regard as the responsibility of intellectuals: he exposed the stupidity of much discourse in the public sphere without sounding like an out-of-touch academic elitist. Though Ellul wrote from a French perspective, in urging readers to be more conscious and critical of the language they consume, the book marched on terrain traveled by George Orwell in his classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language.
Ellul defines commonplaces as "ready-made ideas which are found in all the newspapers . . . The commonplaces are the excrement of the society." Commonplaces have wide acceptance; politicians, pundits, professors, and really anyone can cite them without having to worry about too much pushback. All cultures have a need for ready-made, "common-sense" ideas; that quality by itself does not make commonplaces comparable to excrement. But when ready-made ideas get hijacked to support vile political agendas, that is when the excremental aroma becomes unbearable. New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is in Ellul territory when he calls out "zombie ideas." He writes, "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."
I agree with Dr. Krugman that today's Republican Party is especially prone to exploiting, for hardball politics purposes, commonplaces that should have been put to rest long ago. However, the GOP's linguistic marksmanship is but a subset of a more general dumbing down that's been creeping up on us for quite some time. In the remainder of this post I want to highlight some particularly dumb commonplaces commonly heard in our society. A few have more ominous political consequences than others, but all of them contribute to the sloppiness in public discourse that frustrates mindful citizens while empowering political hacks and opportunists. I'll feature ten dumb commonplaces, five this month and five next.
*Commonplace #1: "Literally." Pre-pandemic, a student approached me in the hall one day and said, "that article you assigned us was so hard to read that I literally pulled my hair out." My response was, "wow, that's a freakin' amazing toupee you have on because it looks exactly like your real hair!" Of course my student did not mean that he actually pulled his hair out. He was merely trying to emphasize the frustration that comes on when confronted with difficult reading. Lots of English language purists out there react violently (usually not in a literal sense) to the way my student used "literally," though Merriam-Webster claims that using literally just for emphasis is correct too. My student could have legitimately said to me, "Don't like the way I used literally? Go look it up in the literal dictionary, asshole." (He literally looked like he might be thinking that.).
Recognizing my obsession with the overuse of literally, my sister-in-law Jen got me this shirt!
My problem with the overuse of "literally" is not that usage of it to show emphasis is "incorrect." Who am I to argue with the word gods and goddesses at Merriam-Webster? My problem is that the overuse has made "literally" into a mindless cliche'. When words or phrases become cliches, they lose whatever communicative power they may have once had. "Literally" has become equivalent to "selling like hotcakes," "avoid like the plague," or "the rest is history;" word choices that peg the user as devoid of original thoughts. As a teacher, I think it's my obligation to encourage students to generate fresh images--to make a literal impression on the brains of their listeners and readers (;-).
*Commonplace #2:"It is what it is." Dictionary.com traces this mother-of-all defeatist expressions to a 1949 news article trying to describe life in frontier-era Nebraska. Every time I hear someone say the expression I want to say back, "what the fuck is it, really?"
Politicians use "it is what it is" in what I perceive as a passive-aggressive manner. City councilors will often say something like this: "We can't really do anything about wages at the local level. The state has our hands tied. It is what it is." Translation: "Working people are getting screwed by the system, but I am not going to do shit about it unless you force me to."
*Commonplace #3: "Both Sides Do It." This is a particularly intoxicating commonplace for mainstream journalists. So fearful of being accused of bias, mainstream journalists will go out of their way to show that no matter what horrible thing the Republicans are doing, the Democrats are somehow doing it too. "Both sides" reporting has always been part of what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the "savvy" style of reporting in which the journalist gets to position him or herself as somehow "detached" and without viewpoint, a positioning that is both disingenuous and literally (ha ha) impossible for any person with a pulse to hold.
Though disingenuous and impossible, the "both sides do it" mantra could make some sense in an era when both major parties believe in representative democracy and argue over legitimate policy differences. In such an era, the journalists can see themselves as a kind of "referee" standing in between both sides. But it's not clear that such an era ever really existed anywhere other than in TV soap operas like The West Wing. More troubling, today's Republican party has openly renounced representative democracy, from suspending their responsibility to construct a party platform in 2020 and replacing it with a blind endorsement of Trump to doing everything in their power across all 50 states to make voting more difficult for constituencies not already in the GOP corner. The Democratic Party is awful and is the place where, as Green Party activist David Cobb once said, "progressive ideas go to die," but they at least do not try to win elections by preventing their opponents from voting.
*Commonplace #4: "Russian Asset." Here's an example of establishment MSNBC Democratic Party awfulness. In 2016 the Dems could not admit that they lost fair and square to a crass doofus like Mr. Trump, so the narrative for the next four years was a never ending lurid tale of foreign interference and intrigue. Some went as far as to claim that the Orange Man had been a "Russian Asset" since the 1980s. Meanwhile Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon, Tulsi Gabbard, popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, and really ANYONE who somehow failed to sufficiently defer to Hillary was also a Russian Asset. As noted by Matt Taibbi (an independent journalist so frequently accused of being a Putin Puppet that he and his co-host Katie Halper sarcastically named their podcast "Useful Idiots"):
"Rather than confront the devastating absurdity of defeat before an ad-libbing game show host who was seemingly trying to lose – a black comedy that is 100% in America’s rich stupidity tradition – Democrats have gone all-in on this theory of foreign infiltration. House speaker Nancy Pelosi even said as much in a White House meeting, pointing at Trump and proclaiming: 'All roads lead to Putin.'"
Openly calling dissenters "Russian Assets" has become a norm in US discourse. Shameful.
To be clear: Vladimir Putin is a thug, but his ascendance to power had much to do with awful policy decisions made by NATO and bipartisan majorities in the United States after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. We failed to support genuine democrat movements in Russia (as we have failed to do all over the world), and as a consequence made the "strong man" more appealing to the Russian people. But instead of examining and reforming our now almost 30 years of crapola policy toward post-Soviet Union Russia, the Democrats would rather revive a kind of Cold War redbaiting, casually and maliciously maligning even sincere critics as "Russian Assets." Trump and Republicans in general have nothing positive to contribute toward Russia policy, but being unimaginative, ignorant trolls does not make them "Russian Assets."
*Commonplace #5: "Concerns Mount." We need a definitive glossary of all the bullshit terms and phrases that are a result of our politics being held hostage by military-industrial-complex interests for all these years. Take a look at this lead paragraph from a CNN story on Joe Biden's announcement that the US will finally leave Afghanistan:
"Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women's rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country."
So apparently we are supposed to stay in Afghanistan forever. Hey, why not? The US has as many as 800 military bases in around 80 countries and territories around the world, and "concerns mount" any time an effort is made to close any of them.
It's interesting that we rarely see "concerns mount" when it comes to domestic policy. For example, it's hard to find a story about the pandemic that says something like, "concerns mount that lack of universal healthcare during a time of massive unemployment will enhance the misery inflicted by the pandemic."
Next Month: Five More Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces!
In early November of 2020 I heard a National Public Radio interview with journalist and anti-fascist activist Talia Lavin. She was discussing her recently published book Culture Warlords: My Journey Into The Dark Web of White Supremacy (New York: Hachette Books). Lavin's story of spending a year infiltrating the Internet chat rooms of neo-Nazi, incel ("involuntarily celibate"), and other anti-Semitic, white nationalist, and misogynist clans almost sounded funny. Her description of how she assumed a white supremacist femme fatale persona as "Ashlynn" to get racist, hate-filled buffoons to let down their guard and reveal their motivations in "love letters" to her had a Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" quality to it. I ordered the book, but with President Trump's defeat and with still learning how to teach during a pandemic, I did not treat it with much urgency. Surely, I thought, the election results represented at least in part a desire to move toward the national unity necessary to tackle the profound public health, economic, and other crises we are facing. Obsessing over hate groups would just be a huge waste of time and energy.
But then as November rolled on it became clear that neo-fascist elements in the country were energized by the Trump/Giuliani "Stop the Steal" rhetoric. On January 6th, 2021 a number of self-described Nazi and white supremacist organizations participated in the Capitol insurrection. The New York Times of January 16th cited law enforcement and domestic terrorism experts warning that the insurrection could "fuel extremist recruitment for years." Meanwhile, Republican legislatures throughout the country--acting on distortions fed them by Trump/Giuliani after the election--are poised to pass a range of ballot access restrictions in what's looking like Jim Crow 2.0. The Brennan Center for Justice has tracked more than 250 bills that restrict voting access across 43 states. Georgia's recently passed legislation actually makes it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in line.
Suddenly Talia Lavin's book seems urgent.
Starting on June 1, 2019 and continuing for a year, Lavin joined more than
ninety far-right groups on the Telegram messaging app. She writes that “My
intent in joining these groups was to gain a fly-on-the-wall view of far-right
rhetoric, surveilling its violence, racial animus, and anti-Semitism in an
environment in which contributors felt safe to speak freely, embracing the new
platform on which they found themselves connecting enthusiastically with one
another.” The chats she joined ranged from 22 to over 5,000 members, and she estimates that the chats collectively hosted about 32,000.
Lavin found that people in the chats did not meet the stereotype of the hard working salt-of-the-earth patriots distressed and left behind by neoliberal trade and other economic policies. She certainly came across such types, but there were also huge numbers douchebaggy, secure professionals; i,e. people not struggling in the modern economy. During the Trump Administration, Stephen Miller--a Duke graduate with little personal connection to white victims of post-NAFTA trade wars-- brought white nationalist ideas to the highest levels of power. Lavin found lots of Miller-type individuals in the chat rooms.
White supremacists on the internet are skilled at finding and sharing anti-Semitic and other hate texts dating from the middle ages to modern times. As stated by Lavin, "Everything old is new again online, and the worst of history, freed from its paper bonds and any context, floats in a void, to be plucked up and championed by hatemongers." Across all chats she infiltrated, she found persistent and disturbing allegiance to fabricated anti-Semitic texts like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and more modern hate such as New Zealand mass murderer Brenton Tarrant's "The Great Replacement Manifesto". Among hardcore white supremacists she found repeated mentions of the late David Lane's "14 Words:" "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." David Lane was a member of "The Order," a 1980s white supremacist terrorist organization.
Before setting out to infiltrate the fascist side of the Web, Lavin was already known as an outspoken antifascist. Her Jewish identify made her the target of especially virulent hate, including death and rape threats. In 2018 along with many others on Twitter, she mistakenly claimed that an ICE agent had a Nazi tattoo. The ugly reaction to her mistake was one of many factors that sparked her to investigate the depth hate in networld. In the introduction to the book, she claims that after a year of immersing herself in the dark world of online fascists, she began to feel rage not just at them but at white moderates; "The people who say: Ignore them! Let them march! Let them tweet, let them speak on campus, let them have their say and they will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. The people who bill themselves as reasonable, who say: Let them air out their arguments. But the effect of these ideas when they are aired out is much like Zyklon B. Studying them as deeply as I have has made me realize no amount of such rhetoric is acceptable in the country's discourse, just as there is no acceptable amount of poisonous gas to let seep into a room."
Later in the book she revisits the question of whether it might be best just to ignore the haters: "Aren't these just losers pontificating and arguing on the internet? . . . The thing about hate, though, is it metastasizes. The thing about channels that are filled, twenty-four hours a day, with stochastic violence--testosterone filled megaphones shouting for blood--is that, sooner or later, someone is going to take them up on it. From Robert Bowers to Anders Breivik to Brenton Tarrant, racist networks have proven over and over again that the steady dissemination of murderous propaganda leaves a trail of blood behind it. And when that happens, being about to trace, isolate, and identify these ideologies means that racists can't hide behind slippery code words or private vocabularies. In identifying their inspirations, and their ideological and theological motivations, we give them less room to operate in the shadows . . . The chat rooms would continue without my sock puppet or with it. But if I'm there, I can tell you about it, you can help me strep the shadows away, and disinfect these crusty dens of hate with a blast of much-needed sunlight."
Perhaps the major value of Talia Lavin's book is that it is an antifascism primer; a kind of "anti-fascism for dummies." In an accessible and easy-to-read format, the book presents a history of hate, making clear links between old school anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and modern versions. She also shows clearly that resistance to hate has a long history. "Antifa," which in conservative media is a nefarious cabal of violent extremists bent on destroying America, is in Lavin's view a foil for real far right violence. Alt-right activists and their apologists and enablers in media need to portray antifascists as violent extremists so that their own anti-social actions might seem tame by comparison.
According to Lavin, antifascist activity does not usually occur in the streets or in active physical confrontation with alt-right wingers. Rather, much of antifascist activity "takes place in the form of research, infiltration, and perhaps most of all 'doxing'--revealing the names, locations, and occupations of members of hate groups." She argues that "while antifascism itself is roughly a century old, it has evolved, in the twenty-first century, to embrace novel techniques and technological advances. In some ways it has never been easier to participate in everyday fascist work, provided you have a good internet connection, a measure of patience, and the ability to engage in painstaking amateur detective work." She also claims that the majority of active antifascists she has met are women and people of color--quite the contrast with the mainstream media image of antifascists as young, masked middle-class white guys dressed in black.
There is no easy answer to the question of how to curb the spread and impact of internet hate. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen, in his viral speech delivered upon receiving the International Leadership Award from the Anti-Defamation League, argues that social media companies have been slow to control hate on their platforms because their business models require large scale engagement. Lies, conspiracies, and outrage generate such engagement. Cohen wants to see government aggressively pressure social media companies to do what is necessary to reign in hate. He argues that such action does not offend the First Amendment, since the social media companies are private entities and thus are free to purge hate from their platforms.
Lavin is on the same wavelength as Cohen, though she is wary of the idea that fascism can be defeated by government action. She believes that the rise of fascism will not ultimately be dismantled by "punitive measures of the state" or by "lone vigilantes" like herself. Fascism will be dismantled by "people working together to stamp out hate wherever it arises." I agree.
Talia's Lavin's Culture Warlords is in some ways a reminder that, if you claim to be a sincere believer in democracy and human rights, then you are by definition an antifascist. And if you truly are antifascist, then you are obligated to do what you can to support others doing genuinely antifascist work. The challenge is immense; years of propaganda and uncontested nonsense have too many people thinking, for example, that fascists are those who support mask mandates to protect public health. Sometimes what we are up against seems so big that there is a temptation to just want to give up. Yet just in Wisconsin in the last few days we have learned that we've got Nazi statues in Baraboo, while the Jewish Community Relations Council in Milwaukee recently reported that 2020 saw a 36 percent increase in reported incidents of anti-Semitism across the state.
The recent death of right-wing radio firebrand Rush Limbaugh should--but probably won't--provoke mainstream news media producers to reflect on at least two important questions:
(1) How did someone like Rush Limbaugh, who openly trafficked in (to put it charitably) straw (wo)man caricatures of "liberals" and other "undesirables," become so popular in the first place?
(2) What was it about the Limbaugh brand that made him, for millions of listeners, more trustworthy than the mainstream press?
A common response to question #1 is that Rush benefited from the Reagan Era (1987) repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Proponents of this position argue that absent any legal pressure to give rebuttal time to the targets of his scorn, Rush was able to reinforce the views of millions of like-minded folks without ever having to worry about giving voice to the other side. As noted by Business Insider's Jake Lahut, "From that turning point in 1987, what were once considered fringe attitudes about the declining influence of the white working class in America and racial resentment became increasingly mainstream in the GOP as Limbaugh's show went nationwide . . . Limbaugh didn't just yell incendiary things into the microphone all day, but rather cultivated a sense of shared grievances among his audience."
The Fairness Doctrine's repeal in 1987 aided the rise of right wing media, as did a number of other factors
Rush and other right wing talk radio raconteurs no doubt benefited from the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, but realistically it took more than that to aid their AM band ascendancy. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, MIT Professor of Film and Media Heather Hendershot argues that while the Fairness Doctrine historically "did help to keep demagoguery at bay," what's more significant about Limbaugh is the manner in which he reconceived the right wing talk format. Right wing media figures of the Cold War era, like Dan Smoot, were information heavy and humorless. According to Hendershot, Rush did the opposite: "Limbaugh created a right-wing, national entertainment show that was indebted to the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine and that overlapped at points politically with earlier right-wing radio — in its racism, opposition to entitlement programs and support of deregulation — but he brought comedy into his act. This made right-wing politics fun, in theory, a move that was not just smart business but also, like the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, a response to the rise of a diversified media environment."
In an insightful late 2000s primer on "The Fairness Doctrine Distraction," media critics Josh Silver and Marvin Ammori surmised that the rise of conservative talk radio had much to do with the "explosion of mergers" that followed the relaxation of ownership caps in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. For Silver and Ammori, "The new radio giants spawned a market
for nationally syndicated content. The conservative talkers were the first to enter this market and
to capitalize on the desire for bundled content." To attribute conservative emergence solely to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made it easier for Rush and others to trot out the Doctrine as a bogeyman every time democracy activists and responsible politicians tried to address the REAL problems: ownership rules that create media monopolies unresponsive to the communities they allegedly serve, the failure of the FCC to enforce strict licensing requirements focused on localism and serving the public interest, and the continuing attacks on net neutrality (the principle at the heart of keeping the Internet open to diverse viewpoints.).
Theories analyzing the reasons for Limbaugh's popularity will no doubt be the topic of scores of academic and popular works for years to come. For me the more interesting question is how, for millions of people, he became more trustworthy than the mainstream press. I asked a similar question when Jon Stewart stepped down from the Daily Show, and concluded (following the lead of media scholars Rod Hart and Johanna Hartelius), that Stewart's brand of political cynicism made viewers feel engaged in civic action merely by adopting the host's style of mocking the political system mercilessly. (In that same piece I expressed hope that the post-Daily Show Stewart would become an activist comedian in the Dick Gregory mold. His work on behalf of 9/11 first responders shows that he has been moving in that direction.).
Limbaugh had an impact on Republican politics in a way that Stewart never did (and never wanted to) for the Democrats. Stewart's criticism of mainstream media, even that which he seemed most appalled by like Fox News, always at some level seemed designed--perhaps naively--to push them to be better. His well publicized debates with the hosts of Crossfire and with Bill O'Reilly, and his conversation with Rachel Maddow, had a tone of Socrates challenging Athenian ideology.
Rush Limbaugh never had any interest in making mainstream media better. Indeed, his entire brand was centered on the idea that the "liberal media" could not be trusted to tell the truth. In the Watergate Era, when Gallup Poll first started surveying Americans' views on the topic, around 70 percent said they trusted the mass media. As of 2019, "13% have a great deal of trust, 28% a fair amount, 30% not very much and 28% none at all." As views of news media went south, Rush played the activist antagonist, almost every day finding some outrage to get his listeners worked up about.
Mainstream news media was and is not an innocent victim of Rush's and other right wing bashing. The problem never was, as right wingers continue to shriek to this very day, that mainstream news media are joined at the hip with Democrats and actively engaged in a liberal conspiracy to colonize our minds. If there is a bias in mainstream media, it is not toward red or blue as much as GREEN (as in the almighty dollar) and protecting established power. If anything, mainstream media share Rush Limbaugh's bias toward toward attention grabbing conflict, as that particular quality tends to generate the most clicks, views, and shares and is thus more easily monetized. The difference is that Rush overtly took sides in such conflicts and thus came off as a "truth teller" in comparison to the not credibly "objective" mainstream.
My thinking on these matters is in part inspired by a great recent Twitter thread by New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen. He tweeted about a number of useful distinctions he makes in his critical work, including one that stood out for me: Journalists as Truth Seeking v. Refuge Seeking.
According to Rosen, "truth seeking needs no definition. It is finding out what actually happened--and telling us." Refuge-seeking, on the other hand, "is telling the story in a way that protects against anticipated attacks." The refuge-seeking mentality of mainstream news media gives us such awful practices as "both sides do it," steering the story "down the middle," and framing every conflict as "dueling realities" in a hopelessly divided nation.
The refuge-seeking tendency of the press has had terrible impacts on coverage of critical issues, especially elections. In the name of "balance," mainstream journalists allow stories to be coopted by hacks, special interest pleaders, and overt liars. It cannot be a coincidence that while the mainstream media's tendency toward refuge-seeking increased, the perception of the media as a trustworthy source of information decreased. The most trusted journalists in history were those who, like the late Mike Royko, wrote and spoke with "unnerving clarity" about the issues impacting everyday people. That kind of journalism doesn't just "speak truth to power;" more importantly, it speaks truth to the powerless and in so doing empowers them to understand the forces working to keep them down. Today Royko, along with other heroic reporters like Ida Wells, I.F. Stone, Molly Ivins, William Evjue and many others, are looked at as products of a different era. (Today I would put Thomas Frank and Barbara Ehrenreich in that category.). In today's refuge-seeking mainstream media, such journalists are the exception. They should be the rule.
In a way that is as distressing as it is pathetic, Rush Limbaugh became the "truth seeker" for millions of Americans. One can imagine an old-time Mike Royko fan with a taste for news that unapologetically tells the truth and names names, starting to notice in the 1980s and 1990s a steady movement away from that kind of journalism. You can imagine that old-time Royko fan getting tuned in to Limbaugh and thinking "I don't agree with everything he says, but at least he stands for something." Royko himself wrote a satirical "endorsement" of Limbaugh in 1993, and not surprisingly some letters in response came from people who liked both of them.
Until the mainstream media finds out what it is for, and stops seeking refuge in bland mediocrity, the era of Limbaugh will continue. In a competition between blustery loudmouths and business as usual hacks seeking refuge in "safe" reporting, the blustery loudmouths will always be perceived by more people as the truth seekers. In fact the competition won't even be close--it will be a rout.That's not the only lesson of the Limbaugh years, but it's sure as hell one of the more depressing ones.
An impactful president is one whose actions outlive his administration. By "actions" I mean more than executive orders, managing wars, or specific pieces of legislation signed. Presidential appointments to the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and other offices often exert monumental impact across generations. So too do presidential speeches and other forms of messaging that mobilize (and sometimes de-mobilize) the populace. Visions emanating from presidential rhetoric often survive in popular discourse--for better or worse--for many decades. Two academic classics from the 1980s, Jeffrey Tulis' The Rhetorical Presidency and Kathleen Hall-Jamieson's Eloquence in an Electronic Age, cemented the view that, in modern times especially, a president's skill at maneuvering a bill through Congress is less vital than his ability to go "over the heads" of Congress and develop popular support for an idea or program.
New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg has a similar framework in mind in an excellent recent piece in which she argues that Joe Biden stands a good chance of being the first "post-Reagan" president. What she means is that Reagan's message of government as the evil that can only make things worse, a nonsensical but deeply American narrative that has ruled Washington since the 1980s, may finally be ending its reign in the public mind. The overwhelming need for effective government response to the pandemic and the economy makes government action more acceptable to the masses. (Goldberg is more optimistic than I am about Mr. Biden's ability to seize the moment.).
Does a president need at least two terms to be impactful? Of course not. Mr. Trump recently became the 13th one-term president. He will go down as the worst president in the history of the United States (Andrew Johnson is the only one who even comes close in terms of sheer awfulness), but also as one of the most impactful. Here's my ranking of the 13 one-termers, from least to most impactful:
#13 Franklin Pierce (1853-1857): By the 1850s the anti-slavery abolition movement was in full gear and it should have been clear that decades worth of putting off the crisis via congressional gag rules or lame compromises would no longer cut it. Imagine being an abolitionist and hearing these words in Mr. Pierce's inaugural address: "I believe that involuntary servitude, as it exists in different states of this Confederacy, is recognized by the Constitution. I believe that it stands like any other admitted right, and that the states where it exists are entitled to efficient remedies to enforce the constitutional provisions." Like today's climate change deniers, Pierce exhibited a mix of denialism and subservience to powerful interests that made his administration nothing more than an enabler of the most wretched overseers of the slave states.
Franklin K. Pierce
#12 James Buchanan (1857-1861): After Lincoln's election in November of 1860, southern states began seceding from the union on Buchanan's watch. Though personally opposed to slavery, until his last day in office he continued to place more blame for the nation's crisis on northern anti-slavery agitators than on the institution of slavery itself. Like his predecessor President Pierce, Buchanan boxed himself into a constitutional "originalist" position that made it impossible for him to do anything meaningful to address the crisis.
James Buchanan
#11: Martin Van Buren (1837-1841): Van Buren had the misfortune of following President Andrew Jackson, who was at the time the most popular politician in the land even though he had been censured by the Congress. (Representative Davy Crockett of Tennessee reportedly said that "Van Buren is as opposite to General Jackson as dung is to a diamond."). To make matters worse, Van Buren inherited an economic crisis of a type that the US federal government was ill-equipped to handle until the expansion of federal powers in the 1930s. The murder of abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, IL in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob produced an ineffective response from the administration. Van Buren was denied a second term in part because he was the victim of the one earliest political attack ads: Pennsylvania Congressman Charles Ogle's "Gold Spoon Oration" created an image of the President as living a lavish lifestyle in the Peoples' White House. The speech was released in pamphlet form and for its time was the most effective anti-incumbent diatribe the young nation had ever seen.
Martin Van Buren
#10 Herbert Hoover (1929-1933): Hoover was a decent man (he probably would not be allowed into the contemporary Republican Party) so committed to the 19th century view of the federal government and presidency that he left himself powerless to address the Great Depression. Hoover's problem was not incompetence as much as ideology: he could not imagine a "big government" role to address human suffering. When he sent federal troops to disperse the "Bonus Marchers" (World War I veterans camped out in DC to demand their war pensions), he became a personal symbol of the government's heartless response to the depression.
Herbert Hoover
#9 Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893): Harrison lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland, but became president as a result of securing enough votes in the Electoral College. By the 1880s it was clear that corporate power controlled government at all levels. Harrison's inaugural address teased the populace with language suggesting he might do something about it: "If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with their operations." Harrison did support the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but the law was too vague to address corporate abuses rigorously, and Harrison found himself essentially irrelevant.
Benjamin Harrison
#8 John Quincy Adams (1825-1829): Because his election was the result of a "corrupt bargain" that gave him the office over the more populist Andrew Jackson, Adams possessed little political capital and had difficulty moving any major measures through Congress. Like Jimmy Carter more than a century later, Adams became more widely respected for his post-presidential accomplishments. The only former president ever to get elected to Congress post-presidency, Adams served 17 years in the House of Representatives. He was a powerful voice of conscience against slavery, and was able to bring an end to the "gag rule" that limited discussion of the matter on the House floor. Adams heroically represented slaves before the Supreme Court in the famous Amistad case, securing an improbable victory for the abolitionist cause at a time when victories were too few and far between.
John Quincy Adams
#7 Jimmy Carter (1977-1981): Elected after the Watergate crisis, Carter had a mandate for reform that he could not quite deliver on. The fact that Ted Kennedy challenged him for the Democratic nomination in 1980 was symbolic of Carter's inability to reformulate the New Deal/New Frontier/Great Society vision that still resonated with the Democratic base and independents. Only Teddy's bumbling incompetence as a candidate enabled Carter to be re-nominated and ultimately blown out in the general election by Ronald Reagan. Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech in July of 1979 was much lambasted on all sides at the time, but I think it has been vindicated as one of the few times a president has told the the American people the unvarnished Truth about what ails them. With the possible exception of J.Q. Adams, he is the most effective ex-president in history, inspiring millions of people globally as an activist, humanitarian, and author.
If you remember Jimmy Carter jumping the fence at LaGuardia Airport, you are officially old
#6 William Howard Taft (1909-1913): Some might argue that the federal income tax, for better or worse, has been the most impactful public policy accomplishment in the history of the nation. If so, then much credit for it must go to the portly President Taft. He campaigned in support of an income tax, and lobbied heavily (no pun intended) for the 16th amendment that established it. Less well known, but impactful in its own right, was Taft's creation of the Children's Bureau in the Department of Commerce, and bringing in social reformer Julia Lathrop to run it. Lathrop became the first woman to run a federal bureau, a major stride at a time when women still did not even have the right to vote in federal elections.
William Howard Taft has been body shamed by generations of pundits, often taking away from some meaningful strides made during his administration
#5 Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881): Hayes lost the popular vote and won in the Electoral College only after the most shameful political maneuvering ever to have occurred in the United States up to that time. To get Florida's electoral votes, Hayes had to agree to end military reconstruction in the south. His actions, taken for reasons of sheer political expediency, gave us the Jim Crowe South and condemned African-Americans to political, economic, and social oppression for generations to come. Hayes did appoint John Marshall Harlan ("The Great Dissenter") to the Supreme Court, and Harlan's lone vote against white supremacy in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case remains inspirational. But the white supremacy Harlan argued against was in large part the result of Hayes' caving in on reconstruction. Yes, cowardice and political ambition in the presidency can have great impact. Hayes will forever be the poster child for how that works.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#4 George H.W. Bush (1989-1993): President Bush #41 signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, the most far reaching and impactful anti-discrimination law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was not as enlightened in foreign policy: his invasions of Panama and the Persian Gulf represented executive abuses of the all-volunteer military that opponents of ending the draft in the 1970s worried about. Think about all the wars America has been in since the Bush years. How many of them would have happened--or gone on as long as they have--it we had a military draft? Bush #41 was also mocked for declaring a "New World Order" (unwittingly using Hitlerite language) after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, but his post-Cold War vision (American exceptionalism + international law as a nice suggestion to follow only when convenient to do so) has been upheld by every succeeding administration. Don't be surprised if President Biden's foreign policy boldly endorses Bushism. Yikes.
George H.W. Bush responded to the breakdown of the Soviet Union by touting American exceptionalism--a major mistake according to this blog post
# 3: John Adams (1797-1801): Adams did two things that forever changed the United States for the worse. First, he appointed John Marshall to the US Supreme Court. Marshall established the principle of Judicial Review (in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison case), which is found nowhere in the Constitution and which gives the Court the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. It is usually forgotten that the Progressive Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries opposed judicial review, in part because activists (like the great Fighting Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin) saw clearly that hack judges would use it to reverse popular progressive initiatives. Adams also gave us the "Alien and Sedition Acts," blatant attacks on freedom of speech and the press which established the precedent that the Bill of Rights was nothing more than a "good idea" that the feds could undermine whenever necessary. The Adams Administration reinforced the view of all true patriots in the nation who feared that the revolution had been betrayed. Even Thomas Jefferson stopped communicating with Adams.
John Adams
#2 Donald Trump (2017-2021): Even though he lost the popular vote, Trump was able to remake the Supreme Court with three appointments (if you think I exaggerated the negatives of judicial review in my riff on John Adams, wait until you see what the current Roberts Court does with that power in the next few years.). Trump also completely remade the Republican Party; it's now pretty much a vice-signaling troll farm that without blinking an eye can place a person who harassed school shooting victims on the EDUCATION Committee. It's still too early to tell what will be the ultimate impact of Trump's January 6th insurrection, but it looks like Washington, D.C. will be a Baghdad-like Green Zone in the immediate future and the insurrection may fuel fascist recruitment drives for years. That's impact.
The majority of House and Senate Republicans don't think that inciting an insurrection against the United States government is impeachable. If that's not impeachable, what is?
#1 James K. Polk (1845-1849): Under President Polk, the United States acquired more than 500,000 square miles in the southwest, while Mexico was reduced to about half of its former size. Much of the land seizure was the result of the Mexican-American War, a battle whose origins and need were hotly contested by then freshman Congressman Abe Lincoln. I consider Polk's actions more impactful than any other one-termer because he acted on the "Manifest Destiny" narrative, the idea that America has some kind of God-given right to expand wherever she wants and "civilize" native populations. Manifest Destiny changed the character of the United States government: the founders were enlightenment era thinkers wary of calling on an almighty power to rationalize secular actions. Manifest Destiny was a rejection of enlightenment thinking; it introduced spiritual arrogance ("God is on our side") as a legitimate form of evidence and argument in the public sphere. Even the young Bob Dylan railed against that kind of propaganda.
Manifest Destiny as an ideological weapon rightly reviles us when we see it practiced by other cultures. If civilian and military leaders believe they are acting according to the dictates of Providence, then they not surprisingly will find it easy to manufacture a case for war. Just as important, Polk's method of advocacy for the war started a trend we still see today: rather than figure out the predictable consequences of the war policy and use that knowledge to temper our actions, we instead will "figure it out later." That kind of irresponsibility has cost us at least $6.4 trillion since 9/11 and a tragic number of lives. We've out-Polked Polk.
James K. Polk's advocacy for and conduct of the Mexican-American War established a way of conducting American foreign policy that remains with us to this very day
You don't agree with my ranking of the impact of the one-termers? Great, come up with your own ranking!
Welcome to another edition of the Tony Awards! Annually since 2002 I've dedicated one column to naming what was, for me, some of the most outstanding journalism and/or commentary of the year. I operate from no automatic set of criteria when deciding what media to honor, but in general I am drawn to:
insightful works that shed light on some important public issue.
creative works that deserve a wider audience.
informative works that provide eye-opening education on a difficult topic.
courageous works that speak truth to power.
humorous works that skillfully provoke laughter and thought at the same time.
local works that promote community and civic engagement.
Though 2020 gave us environmental crises, racial strife, and one of the most contentious presidential elections in history, without question the tragedy of covid-19 will be what the year is remembered for. I'd like to dedicate this year's Tony Awards post to all the global victims of the virus, many of whom had the misfortune of living in places run by incompetent, ignorant, inhumane, pathetic buffoons who privileged politics over people at every turn.
Given that this is a MEDIA rants column, I'd also like to dedicate this column to all of the journalists of integrity who have found themselves furloughed or laid off during this terrible time. Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed News accurately called the coronavirus a "media extinction event."
Journalist Amy Brothers, formerly of the Denver Post, is a good representative of what's happening to thousands of media workers across the country. In April she was laid off while on assignment, and wrote a moving and insightful twitter thread about the experience. Like many local journalists, she made some outstanding videos during her time at the paper, including this one on covid and cannabis dispensaries in Denver.
The Denver Post is owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund with an awful reputation for wrecking newsrooms. The Denver Post continues to get clicks off of Brothers' stories even as they no longer employ her.
Writing about the sick state of journalism, Monika Bauerlein in Mother Jones Magazine argues that "the immune system of democracy is crashing before our eyes." Let's all pledge to do what we can in 2021 to strengthen that immune system. Support journalism, especially quality independent work at the local level.
Best Oshkosh Journalist: Miles Maguire, The Oshkosh Examiner. This is the fourth consecutive Tony Award for Maguire, who is unmatched among journalists in Oshkosh for his ability to report "local facts that matter." Every day the Oshkosh Examiner stays true to its mission statement:
The Oshkosh Examiner works to bring you local facts that matter so that you can be smarter about your community.
We want you to know about decisions and events before they happen, which means that you can be involved while there is still time to make a difference.
We focus on scoops—news that hasn’t been reported elsewhere—and on investigative and explanatory stories that go far beyond old headlines to make sense of things you may have already heard. We also follow stories that are still important but may have faded from mainstream coverage . . .
The work that is presented here is based on an approach to journalism that emphasizes careful, methodical fact gathering as a way of assuring a high degree of credibility. Our goal is to give you information that may surprise you but that you can rely on and make decisions on.
If you want to understand what is happening in your community, the Oshkosh Examiner is the way to stay ahead of the news curve.
The Oshkosh Examiner—local facts that matter.
Over the summer, anti-mask advocates were showing up in large numbers at local government meetings to bully officials and give off an impression of representing the majority. Miles Maguire did an open records request and found that emails to the Oshkosh Common Council were overwhelmingly in support of a mask ordinance.
Until now, all Oshkosh Examiner material has been available for free. In 2021 Maguire plans to launch a paywall-protected website. Given the quality of the product Maguire produces daily, I will pay to support his efforts and encourage others to do the same.
Most of this year's Tony Awards are for Covid-19 related works. Here are some that impressed me during the year:
In this piece, written when the number of covid dead in the USA "only" numbered in the five digits, Warzel expressed fear that we would eventually throw up our collective hands and resign ourselves to the deaths, just like we do with gun violence. Tragically, Warzel's fear came to be realized. With hundreds of thousands dead and no clear end in sight, too many respond with "oh well."
*Honorable Mention: Noah Berlatsky's "As Bethany Mandel's Grandma Killer Tweet proves, vice-signaling is the right's newest and most toxic trend" (The Independent, May 7, 2020).
What's been shocking to me during this pandemic is not the lack of compassion for victims and the rejection of medical and scientific expertise--our addiction to bullshit, bluster, and bullying long ago put compassion and expertise on the defensive. What has been shocking is the utter cruelty in some of the right-wing responses to the coronavirus: everything from gross attempts at minimizing the tragedy to explicit announcements of just not giving a flying fuck about anyone. In the London Independent, Noah Berlatsky provided the best explainer of this right wing "vice signaling":
It's startling to see someone boast in public about how they are willing to sacrifice others’ loved ones for a trip to the zoo. But it's not exactly uncommon.
During the pandemic, conservatives have repeatedly and publicly trumpeted their disregard for the lives of the old and the sick. Historian and writer David Perry has called this kind of public callousness "vice-signaling": a public display of immorality, intended to create a community based on cruelty and disregard for others, which is proud of it at the same time. It is, essentially, the polar opposite to “woke” left-wing virtue-signaling.
The right's embrace of vice-signaling, and indeed of vice, is how we got Trump. It's also why his administration has been so unable to deal with a crisis requiring collective civic virtue.
*Best Twitter Feed: Faces of Covid. Created by Alex Goldstein, Faces of Covid is an online archive of news reports and obituaries about covid victims. The feed represents a refusal to minimize the tragedy, and treats victims and their families with the dignity denied them by too many mainstream politicians and corporate media pundits.
Alex Goldstein is the founder of the moving Faces of Covid Twitter feed.
*Local Reporting on Covid: Jen Norden's Facebook Feed. Jen Norden is a front-line health care worker in northeast Wisconsin. Since the beginning of the crisis in March, she has provided no-nonsense updates about what is going on in our hospitals and what we need to do to bend the curve. She also does a wonderful job of forwarding reliable information to contest the mountain or misinformation and disinformation spread by coronavirus denialists, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers. Typical Nordenism:
MASKING
This isn’t going away anytime soon, even after the vaccine is rolled out. So suck it up and get used to wearing a mask. Please don’t argue with your health care providers about it—we are kind of sick of that discussion.
Along the same lines—if someone dies of covid-19, please don’t ask if the patient had underlying medical problems. If they died of cancer, would you ask that question? I’m not sure what the point is—did the patient deserve it because they had other problems like obesity or diabetes? Or are you discounting the severity of covid-19? Or are you afraid of getting seriously ill and think you won’t if you don’t have underlying problems? Whatever the motive of the questioner—that question provokes an intense emotional response in me!!
*Statewide Reporting on Covid: Robert Chappell of Madison 365. Every afternoon, Madison365 Foundation Executive Editor Rob Chappell provides an update of Wisconsin's covid numbers. I really appreciate Chappell's style: to me, he comes off as an intelligent person with an old school sense of journalism as the fuel that powers civic engagement. His daily broadcasts represent an act of goodwill toward all Wisconsinites. If you are looking for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to support, madison365 has earned it.
Rob Chappell provides invaluable information about covid and other matters every day on madison365.com
*National Reporting on Covid: Zeynep Tufekci and Ed Yong of the Atlantic Magazine. Zeynep Tufeki is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society. Ed Yong is a staff writer for the Atlantic, specializing in science issues. Since March, both have written outstanding covid pieces for the magazine. Their pieces are academic yet accessible, blunt yet hopeful, informed by peer-reviewed research yet respectful of personal narratives. Probably my favorite pieces of the year were Tufekci's "It Wasn't Just Trump Who Got It Wrong" (a powerful indictment of corporate media complacency in the early days of the virus), and Yong's "How the Pandemic Defeated America." This paragraph by Yong should be put in a time capsule so that future generations can know how ill-prepared the richest country in the history of the world was for this crisis:
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.
Zeynep Tufekci and Ed Yong have written spectacular pieces for the Atlantic Magazine on the covid crisis. Much to its credit, the Atlantic has kept all coronavirus related journalism in the magazine free for the duration of the crisis.
*Best Cable Television Commentary: Chris Hayes on "Coronavirus Trutherism."
Chris Hayes "Coronavirus Trutherism," broadcast in April as a response to Fox's Tucker Carlson willfully and shamelessly minimizing the impact of the virus, should be required viewing for all Americans. Money quote: "A tidal wave of grief and trauma has been unleashed upon this nation, in large part because the president and his enablers would not listen. And no amount of cynical whataboutism, or politically expedient wishful thinking, or junk science is going to change that brutal fact." Amen.
That's it for the best written, social media, and cable pieces of the year. I want to close by recognizing some musical accomplishments for 2020.
*Song of the Year: "Thoughts and Prayers" by the Drive By Truckers
The Drive By Truckers are an alternative country band. "Thoughts and Prayers" is from the 2020 album "The Unraveling," and--probably because of the pandemic--did not get the attention it deserves. "Thoughts and Prayers" is the perfect response to the cowardly politicians who refuse to do anything about gun violence except offer insincere "thoughts and prayers" to the victims. The song is really a shout out to the youth who want to tackle the problem:
When my children's eyes look at me and they ask me to explain
It hurts me that I have to look away
The powers that be are in for shame and comeuppance
When Generation Lockdown has their day
They'll throw the bums all out and drain the swamp for real
Perp walk them down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels
Tramp the dirt down, Jesus, you can pray the rod they'll spare
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers
*Song of the Year Honorable Mention: Seasick Steve "Love And Peace". Lots of technical solutions are available that could improve the plight of humanity. But none of that really will matter until more of us pledge allegiance to Seasick Steve's simple message: "Gotta stop the hatred now, get back to love and peace."
*Best Musical Series: Rolling Stone Magazine's "In My Room"
Rolling Stone Magazine's In My Room Series features artists playing music from their homes. For me and many others, the series has been a great way to stay connected to live music without have to leave your home. The series features great diversity in musical styles and performers, from older classic rockers to newer pop, R & B, hip-hop and other genres. Some of my favorites include Boy George's (remember him?) performance of his great 2020 song "Frantic," Warren Haynes' remarkable guitar playing, and Graham Nash's renditions of old CSNY favorites.
Congratulations to all the award recipients! I hope you enjoyed the selections. Have a great 2021, and remember to support local journalism!
