The Press
Only 1,450 days to go...
When I was in high school, a horrific tragedy befell one of my good friends. Her little brother was in a private plane crash with a classmate and his parents. The dad was flying the plane to Wisconsin for the weekend, when the plane crashed and all four people were killed.
My friend was the oldest child of a big family. One can only begin to imagine the grief that came with the news, that one of their sons/brothers was gone. It was my first real experience with a situation like that, and it was beyond devastating.
The dad/pilot was a well-known executive with personal and professional ties to our then US Senator, so it became a big story, that the press wanted to cover. On the very evening, when it happened and just after my friend’s family had been notified about the crash, a reporter from one of the papers had the audacity to call their house. One of the little ones answered the phone. The reporter asked an idiotic question like, “How are you feeling about losing your brother?” It was cruel, unnecessary and truly despicable.
Since that experience in high school, I’ve always had complicated feelings about “the Press.” As these commentators stick a microphone in the face of a victim of some horrendous catastrophe … well, there is a ghoulish voyeurism with reporters, that I find distasteful.
Television reporting has gotten so much worse since the 1980s with cable news and 24-hour coverage. The never ending news cycle has given really bad people way too much air time. And even worse are these shows that tout themselves as “news” with a bunch of highly paid commentators or political consultants. All they do is spin the facts talking for hours ad nauseum pretending it’s hard hitting journalism. I really can’t stand cable “news” and rarely watch it.
My ambivalence holds true for print reporting as well. When I was with Andersen Consulting (aka, Accenture), we were often written up in the press because of our combative relationship with our then Arthur Andersen partners. I would read some of these accounts, and it was often clear that the reporter had their storyline figured out without ever doing any due diligence. They spun the quotes or facts to support the story they wanted to write, which was frequently misleading and sometimes even flat-out wrong.
Print journalism — especially local papers — are disappearing as advertising dollars are being transferred to the Internet and, as we can all see, the Internet is a cesspool of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and AI stories that are generated to create partisan outrage.
But on the other hand… I have seen the importance of the press holding government officials accountable. I went to a college near DC during the Watergate years, so I would read Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post columns religiously, utterly spellbound by their daily revelations. Remember, these were two junior reporters, who were assigned a minor municipal story about a burglary attempt at the DNC, who eventually went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. Katherine Graham took a huge risk to allow these young reporters to keep doing their job, because there was a lot of demonizing pushback from the Nixon administration at the time. (Who can forget when Nixon's then attorney general, John Mitchell, threatened reporter Carl Bernstein with his crude comment: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer, if that's published.")
Even more important, a number of governmental reforms came out of their work. Revealed by the Watergate scandal and other perceived presidential excesses, both Congress and the White House put in new laws and norms aimed at curbing future crimes and abuses of power. Both Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter implemented a series of executive branch reforms, ranging from increasing the Justice Department’s independence from the White House to the annual public release of presidential tax returns. Clearly #FOTUS has consistently and blatantly flaunted or ignored both of these reforms. He is the textbook case of abuse of power.
Throughout our history, members of the press have made a real difference. Edward R. Murrow called out Joseph McCarthy. Ida B. Wells exposed widespread lynching, white mob violence, segregation and discrimination. Ida Tarbell, after years of painstaking research, was able to report on John D. Rockefeller’s illegal means to monopolize the early oil industry. Dorothy Thompson reporting on the rise of Nazism led to her being expelled from Germany in 1934. And my personal favorite, Walter Cronkite, was able to turn the tide of public opinion with his CBS “Report from Vietnam.”
Good reporting is indispensable to holding our government accountable. Demonizing the press is the de rigueur of many politicians, but muzzling the press (or worse imprisoning the press) is de rigueur of authoritarian dictatorships.
While I seldom watched his reporting, I have been aware of Jim Acosta. He was CNN's chief White House correspondent during the Obama and the first Trump administrations. He gained prominence with his tough questioning of Trump. Typical of his perennial projections onto others, #FOTUS described Acosta as "a rude, terrible person.” Subsequently, Acosta's press pass to the White House was suspended "until further notice."
CNN described Acosta's suspension as "retaliation for his challenging questions."
That was then. This is now. As you may have read, CNN planned to move Jim Acosta to the graveyard shift of their cable network. One media executive was quoted saying, "They want to get rid of Acosta to throw a bone to Trump. Midnight is not a serious offer when his ratings are among the best on the network."
So after 18 years with CNN, Acosta resigned. (I’ve included his closing statement from his last show on CNN below.)
Just as the Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and ABC is owned by Disney, CNN is owned by Warner Brothers. These businesses need to be “practical” and “consider the repercussions” that could happen to their earnings per share, if they alienate a vengeful bully. The free press doesn’t seem to be very free these days.
Dan Rather wrote about the incident:
Trump’s second electoral victory has cowed the news network. With a new executive at the helm, CNN seems to have been neutered…
It seems that the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned network is trying to rebrand itself as more centrist, less anti-Trump.
And that is a problem. A news organization, a good one, shouldn’t have an agenda, a vibe, a slant. It should report the news.
If you want, you can read the whole text:
Even George W. Bush, who was skewered by the press (and especially by Dan Rather), acknowledges the role of a free press:
"I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy. That we need the media to hold people like me to account. I mean, power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power, whether it be here or elsewhere.”
Because of the transformation of TV news as entertainment with ratings to consider, and good print journalism disappearing to social media sites owned by either cowered or selfish billionaires, I don’t watch cable news and I carefully curate, what I am reading. The organizations that answer to shareholders rather than to the public are becoming increasingly reticent to bravely report the news honestly, objectively and unhesitatingly.
So while my feelings about the press are complicated, I acknowledge that their role is essential to our way of life. Why else would the very first amendment to our Constitution be the Right to the Freedom of the Press?
I find there are still principled people out there, who are willing to speak truth to power… many of them on Substack. I’m sure you agree with me when I say, we need to hear their voices and we need to listen.
Thoughts for the day…
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.” ~Thomas Jefferson
"Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy." ~Walter Cronkite
What I read every day…
I read Letters from an American and The Bulwark every day. I very much encourage you to subscribe to both. The links to their sites are below.
Quote of the day:
“In fact, Kennedy may not even have been the most embarrassing man in the hearing room. He got stiffish competition from the GOP senators simping for his nonsense.”
~ Charlie Sykes
What I’m reading today….
There Is a Strategy Behind the Chaos
It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch, and this week’s drama is better understood as a battle over priorities within the Republican Party than as unmanaged chaos.
Trump memo claims authority to ignore Congress
The late Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative justices in the court's history, summarized the Supreme Court's view on impoundment:
President Nixon, the Mahatma Gandhi of all impounders, asserted at a press conference in 1973 that his "constitutional right" to impound appropriated funds was "absolutely clear"... Our decision two years later in Train v. City of New York (1975), proved him wrong.
The Elon-ification of the federal government
If Musk's takeover of Washington is anything like his takeover of Twitter, federal workers — and Americans more generally — had better buckle up. His "slash first, ask questions later" management style has already been reflected in some of President Trump's biggest moves… There are key differences here: Musk doesn't own the U.S. government and can't just order mass firings. Also, many federal workers belong to unions.
The specter of a federal prosecutor putting a city’s mayor or a state’s governor in jail will raise what may be the greatest source of conflict in the U.S. Constitution.
What an Undervaccinated America Would Look Like
Should vaccination rates drop across the board, one of the first diseases to be resurrected would almost certainly be measles… Before the measles vaccine became available in 1963, the virus struck an estimated 3 million to 4 million Americans each year, about 1,000 of whom would suffer serious swelling of the brain and roughly 400 to 500 of whom would die. Many survivors had permanent brain damage. Measles can also suppress the immune system for years, leaving people susceptible to other infections.
Stricter abortion laws may cause increased infant deaths
Infant mortality in the U.S. has increased by 7% since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, according to an October 2024 study.
When Did Brains Fall So Far Out of Fashion?
At the Senate hearing that preceded Hegseth’s confirmation, he couldn’t answer a question from Senator Tammy Duckworth about the number and names of the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. But he could — and very proudly did — answer a question from Senator Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican, about the number of push-ups in his fitness routine. “I did five sets of 47 this morning,” Hegseth said. That settled it. Put this Adonis in charge of America’s arsenal.
Is Kash Patel worse than J. Edgar Hoover?
If confirmed, Patel is likely to be worse than J.Edgar Hoover. Hoover at least worked under presidents, who understood that they worked for the American people. Patel will work for Trump, who works only for Trump.
Researchers are terrified of Trump’s freeze on science. The rest of us should be, too.
For the rest of us, a disruption to government science is like a car crash five miles up the road. The incident itself may be too distant to see, but its ripple effects will reach us.
Gen Z seeks safety above all else
We asked participants to rate the importance of 14 personal goals. These included classic teenage desires such as “being popular,” “having fun” and “being kind.” None of these ranked as the top priority. Instead, the No. 1 answer was “to be safe.”
Worth Watching:
Things I read everyday….
I read Letters from An American everyday, so I am no longer going to reference it in my Substack posts. Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletters are fabulous, so I encourage you to subscribe on your own.
I’m also a big fan of The Bulwark. I started subscribing to it shortly after I discovered it in 2019. The Bulwark was founded to provide analysis and reporting in defense of America’s liberal democracy. That’s it. That’s the mission. I find their podcasts and articles thoughtful and helpful in making sense of what is going on with the US.
