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Nicer Ads

December 31, 2020 By

On December 24, Tiffany Hsu wrote a story in The New York Times titled “A Century After Phony Flu Ads, Companies Hype Dubious Covid Cures” that reported on fraudulent Covid-19-cure advertising.

Hsu writes:

With a pandemic raging, a spate of ads promised dubious remedies in the form of lozenges, tonics, unguents, blood-builders and an antiseptic shield to be used while kissing.

That was in 1918, during the influenza outbreak that eventually claimed an estimated 50 million lives, including 675,000 in the United States.

More than a century later, not much has changed. Ads promoting unproven miracle cures — including intravenous drips, ozone therapy and immunity-boosting music — have targeted people trying to avoid the coronavirus pandemic.

But there is a major difference between the 1918 quackery and the current spate of false advertising. As Hsu writes:

In recent years, a surge of digital advertising has led to more space for ads on more platforms, and the ability to switch them out within seconds. But as print publications, broadcast television and other traditional media outlets tightened their advertising protocols, online advertisers began relying on automated auctions rather than human gatekeepers for placement.

The key difference is the Internet — digital ads bought in auctions on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter where algorithms make decisions on ad claims and are, thus, “untouched by human hands” or unseen by human, discerning eyes

When I was at CBS in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ralph Daniels was the head of the broadcast standards group. Every ad that ran on the CBS Television Network and the CBS TV and radio stations had to be OKayed by the standards group, which at one time had up to 50 people working in it. The standards group looked at competitive claims of being “better” than competitors and for any false claims in advertising. The goal was to protect consumers against false and misleading advertising.

I also remember when I was General Manager of NBC-owned WMAQ-AM in Chicago (now WSCR), that we had a continuity person who applied NBC’s standards to any commercials that ran on the station. Our continuity person turned down a commercial from a well-known, major publisher for a mystery novel. When I asked why, the continuity person said “the commercial was too scary.” It had a young woman alone in a room hearing footsteps in a hall outside the room slowly getting louder and louder as the unknown stalker got nearer and nearer.

This decision seemed a little extreme at the time, but I knew better than to argue with the NBC broadcast standards and legal departments, whose goal was to bend over backwards to make sure the massive audiences to all of NBC’s broadcast properties were not deceived, offended or too frightened.

When the algorithms of Google, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms took over from humans to make decisions about appropriateness of ads, and when auctions took over from salespeople accepting and scheduling ads, advertising deception and mendacity exploded.

When 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dorm room in 2004, he didn’t like advertising. But as the social network grew, he realized that to support Facebook’s growth, he had to accept ads. Therefore he eventually followed Google’s lead and set up an algorithm-controlled auction system to sell and place ads.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Zuckerberg watched ad-sanitized TV and listened to FCC-regulated radio where he didn’t hear George Carlin’s seven dirty words. I’m guessing he never heard false, misleading advertising, so he probably naively thought it didn’t exist. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Even as late as 2016, he thought that it was “crazy” that a foreign country would try to influence a U.S. election with misleading ads on Facebook. Of course he thought that. He’d never seen or heard dishonest ads because ABC, CBS or NBC or their stations didn’t run them. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Also, in 1996 Congress passed the Communication Decency Act that in Section 230 reads: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”  In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech in the form of user-generated content are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.

Of course the unintended consequence of Section 230, which was meant to protect free speech, has been to open the floodgates of lies, misinformation and quackery, and has led, in part, to the increase in polarization and to the train-wreck of he-who-cannot-be named.

The noble profession of advertising and the gallant media that passed advertising on to trusting consumers has been tarnished by oversaturated ad scheduling, lying and outrageous quackery.

I want Ralph Daniels back. I want someone with standards of decency, truth and facts who will tastefully curate the ads I see. I want the news anchor I watch to be the most trusted person in America. I want to watch sports and never see an automotive commercial.

Why the hell are Volkswagen, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Honda, Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot advertising when Tesla, which has a market value more than all of those companies combined, doesn’t advertise at all? . The biggest automotive ad spender in 2019 was General Motors, which spent almost $3 billion. Tesla spent $0. Does this mean that the more car companies advertise, the higher Tesla’s market value goes up?

It may be that 2020 was the craziest year in American history: An insane, incompetent, incoherent president, who the Senate wouldn’t convict of obvious crimes; a shattering pandemic; Black-lives-matter protests that set off social- and racial-justice movements; and advertising as worthless wallpaper.

I’ve been writing this past fall about the need for the return of decency to our politics and national conversation. I now realize that the call for decency must also go out to two intertwined industries that I have devoted my life to — advertising and media.

Can’t we just be nice to each other. Can’t we have more commercials like Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” or this DocMorris one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Tom Buchanan Makes America Great Again

December 30, 2020 By

The following was written by my dear friend, Paul Talbot, at my request. Enjoy!

One of my longstanding rituals is reading The Great Gatsby every year.

Naturally, our moods and our preoccupations season the flavor of our reading.  In the case of Gatsby, various passages, characters and even sentences have drawn more attention than others over the years.

On my annual pilgrimage back to “that slender riotous island” in the autumn of 2020, it struck me that Tom Buchanan would be an ardent Trump supporter. 

If not an archetype, he fits the bill in enough ways to make this a sure bet.  Tom Buchanan’s arrogance, ostentation, infidelity and racism, his boorish and brackish behaviors don’t simply mirror Trump.  They drape Tom with the essentials for an admiration of Trump that can‘t help but come home to roost at the East Egg ballot box.

I didn’t find this observation particularly deep.   As insights go, it probably could have been made by many of the high school students who read Gatsby.

But what struck me about placing Tom Buchanan in the Trump camp was the impetus for this.  Only two possibilities come to mind.  One is that the novel so perfectly evokes our American ethos that the Tom Buchanan character is as timeless as it is repugnant.

The other is that the poison of Trump seeped through my defenses and tainted my enjoyment of the novel.

It probably doesn’t matter.  Either way The Great Gatsby endures. 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Merry Imbruvica

December 23, 2020 By

The first week in December I called Optum Pharmacy to renew my monthly supply of Imbruvica, a medicine that keeps my chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) from returning.

Beginning in October of 2019, I had undergone nine months of monthly chemotherapy treatments because my CLL had flared up after being in remission for 22 years. This past March, at the end of the chemo treatments (which worked, by the way), my oncologist prescribed Imbruvica.

When I first called to fill the Imbruvica prescription, I was asked a lot of questions and was told that a monthly dose (two pills every night) would cost $522.12. I was asked if I wanted to explore and apply for financial help. I checked online and discovered that Julia and my annual household income was too high to qualify me for financial assistance, so I OKed the payment and was sent the pills.

When the December supply of Imbruvica didn’t arrive on the Thursday it was supposed to, Julia called Optum. She discovered that they had sent it to the wrong address — to our Rhode Island address. Julia asked them to send me another supply, but Optum said they had to recover the missent shipment because each monthly supply of 60 pills was worth $15,000.

What? $15,000! That’s $180,000 a year!

When I heard this, my immediate reaction was guilt. Was it worth $180,000 a year to keep an 88-year old man alive in a pandemic that had struck down over 300,000 Americans, many who were as old and as physically compromised as I am?

It got me thinking. What does this situation say about America?

In a Trump-imagined, “me” America, where selfish individualism reigns, if his majesty needed medicine that cost $180,000 a year, he’d: (1) Buy stock in the company (Abbvie) that made and distributed it, (2) Tweet about the company, (3) hold a jam-packed White House party announcing he’d taken the medicine, (4) once he owned the stock, tell the company to raise the price after putting his name on the product (“ImTrumpica”) and (5) insist the company pay him an exorbitant licensing fee.

In socially-conscious-imagined, “we” America, where a sense of the dignity of all human life reigns, if anyone needed medicine that cost $180,000 a year, the government, under the auspices of Medicare, would pay for the drug and charge those who could afford it about 3 percent of the cost.

After getting over feeling guilty, I realized how fortunate I was to live in a country that respected the life of everyone. My life, considered in the context of single life by itself, might not be worth $180,000 a year, but considered in the context of an overall respect for all human life, my life, in fact any life, is priceless.

I’m so lucky to be able to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, 2020.

Filed Under: Imbruvica

Response to “Twins Research and Benford’s Law”

November 24, 2020 By

Below is a response by my son, Chris Warner, to my blog post about twins research, Benford’s Law and confirmation bias.

We are who we are, and each individual has a personality they are born with, even twins. Their nature is the realm of psychology. The concept that “we” are bigger than “me” relates self to other.

It takes at least two to get along. This is the realm of sociology. government, politics, the economy, etc., and are social issues. The lone wolf is a myth. It turns out that wolf packs have social hierarchies. Short of killing bad people, the worst form of punishment in our penal system is solitary confinement.

Demonizing social constructs is a profitable mental disorder. Hopefully, the focus can be shifted to emphasize that social is natural and good. The battleground of individual freedoms vs. common good is a tenuous balance. Both exist in each of us, as a running dialogue with the devil of greedy self-interest on one shoulder and the better angel of our nature whispering on the other shoulder, competing for our attention. 

Sadly, the inexorable march toward social democracy that Steven Pinker [author of The Better Angels of Our Nature] documents, takes generations. It’s hard for early adopters to wait for stragglers. The incessant noise distorts the air and brain waves deliberately to scramble the signal.

Fake news is popular with masses. The boring drone of science, technology, engineering and mathematics eloquently state the obvious of who, what, when, where and how. The arts and creativity unlock the “secrets” of why, take a lot of effort to search, mine and filter, but often don’t pay the bills.

Although futile, the arts are rewarding, worthwhile and important to try. Although nobody with the possible exception of the Dalai Llama, Mother Teresa, etc. gets it all the time, and some don’t ever get it, love and kindness are the answer.

Many are born with wounds. It has been documented that abuse can be passed down genetically through several generations. As evolutionary psychology has demonstrated, homo economicus is an adolescent mindset because the art of the deal has a winner and a loser. The survivors of descent with modification by virtue of reciprocal altruism are those that can practice win-win cooperative exchange, which ensures the other wins too.

Except for life and death, living is not binary, but a spectrum. We are blessed with choice, so I try daily to choose happiness. It is hard work, and worthy. I continue to imagine that one world is enough for all of us.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Twins Research and Benford’s Law

November 22, 2020 By

Lawrence Wright in his 1997 book, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are, writes about the massive amount of research psychiatrists and psychologists have conducted on twins separated at birth and raised in different environments. The studies of twins raised in dissimilar home environments can, theoretically, give us some insights into the relative effects of nature (heredity) versus nurture (environment).

Wright is a journalist, not a scientist, so he attempts to look at both sides of the nature versus nurture arguments. What he discovers is that even highly qualified, scholarly scientists often start with an ideological hypothesis and then look for data to support their ideology.

For example, scientists with a liberal ideology look for data that supports the concept that home environment, or nurture, is the main factor in determining IQ, not nature, or heredity. They reason that if environment is the dominant determinant of IQ, then the government spending money to improve the home environment is the right path to pursue.

According to Wright, the home-environment-dominant, liberal view was probably best argued in the 1984 book, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, by Lewontin, Rose and Kamin. Not In Our Genes “assails the entire field of behavior genetics.” I read the book the year it was published, and bought into its persuasive arguments that there was no one IQ gene and that IQ was primarily correlated with environment.

However, Wright avers that subsequent mapping of the human genome after 1984 and scientists being able to isolate individual genes in the DNA string of chromosomes has shown that IQ is, in fact, largely determined by a complex array of genes. These findings would tend to support the conservative, behavioral determinist position of heredity-dominant ideology. However, a second edition of Not In Our Genes in 2017 reinforces the authors’ ideological home environmental position in light of recent DNA research.

In pointing out that highly qualified scientists come to different conclusions after looking at data, Wright reinforces the position that even respected, qualified scientists often start with ideology and then analyze data to confirm their biases, just the way politicians, ordinary citizens and you and I do. Well, of course you don’t do this — you’re perfectly rational — but I do.

On the podcast Radio Lab, “Breaking Benford,” host Jad Abumrad details how far-right, conservative bloggers, social-media posters and broadcasters have cited “a century-old quirk of math called Benford’s Law” to support a crazed notion of voter fraud. The math involved in Benford’s Law is way, way over my head and way, way over the heads of the right-wing wingnuts who refer to it. But the bottom line is that they are totally misusing this obscure math law, understood by highly-trained, professional mathematicians, but not by the wingnuts, to justify their nutty voter fraud theories.

The wingnuts appropriation of Benford’s Law is example of an attempt to bend science to fit preconceived ideologies, another exercise of confirmation bias, of shoehorning data to fit into the shoes you already have.

What does the confirmation bias of twins research have to do with the confirmation bias of wingnuts misusing Benford’s Law? I think the underlying motivation of both is economic. Money.

Liberals believe environmental factors are the major determinant of IQ and, therefore, want to spend money for education, retraining, welfare, equality and low-cost housing because doing so will raise IQs and, thus, raise the downtrodden out of poverty.

Conservatives believe hereditary factors are the major determinant of IQ and, therefore, do not want to spend money for education, retraining, welfare, equality and low-cost housing because no amount of money will raise the IQ of people who are born dumb. Conservatives would rather spend money on jet fighters, aircraft carriers and missiles that their donors manufacture.

Liberal media believe that pushing their ideas will, first, lead to change, lead to reform, and, second, will make them enough money to survive. Conservative media believe their ideas will engage people and, will, first, make money so they can get rich, and, second, lead to keeping things the same, lead to no change, lead to no reform.

Therefore, if you want change, want reform, confirm your bias by reading The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation or by watching MSNBC. If you don’t want change, don’t want reform, confirm your bias by reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, or watching Fox News.

And if you watch the Fox News, you’ll be “standing up for what’s right,” the channel’s new slogan. Not what’s right, a synonym for “correct,” but what’s right, a synonym for “conservative.” The slogan is an extremely clever play on words, but do not be mistaken about it’s meaning. And do not be mistaken that by reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or watching Fox News or reading The New York Times or watching MSNBC that you are not confirming your biases and are getting the undiluted truth.

Always keep in mind that producers of conservative media believe that “you can’t handle the truth.”

Filed Under: Twins Research Tagged With: , , ,

Monet

November 14, 2020 By

I’m writing this on November 14, Claude Monet’s birthday. The quintessential Impressionist master was born in 1840 and died in 1926 at the age of 86.

Monet was an exceptionally productive artist, in fact the Impressionist movement got its name from a Monet painting titled “Impression, Sunrise” in the 1874 exhibition of a group of “independent artists.”

Monet struggled to get fully recognized for his genius and to sell paintings at a respectable price until art dealer Durand-Ruel exhibited his haystack series in 1891. After the successful haystack series of paintings, Monet created several more series, including his most famous — the water lilies. The water lily painting above is hanging the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was painted in 1919.

So what? Why write about Monet in November, 2020?

Because when Monet painted the picture above, he was 79 years old, a year older than Joe Biden will be on November 20, 2020. Monet created his water lilies masterpieces while he was in his late 70s, and finished his greatest masterpiece, the huge water lily panels in the Musee de L’Orangerie in 1924, when we was 84, the same age Biden will be when he finishes his first term in 2024 as the 46th President of the United States.

I predict that Biden’s greatest masterpiece as a politician is yet to come — he has the experience and he is exactly the right age.

Filed Under: Monet Tagged With: , ,

I Wept

November 8, 2020 By

For 10 days before Saturday, November 7, when all the TV networks called Biden the winner (and more important, Trump the loser) I couldn’t look at the news because I was so worried than Trump might win.  I was a media coward.  I realized that this behavior was a pattern. Whenever I am faced with a difficult and distasteful situation, I often retreat and shut down rather than confront it.

On the other hand, my wife, Julia, for the last month confronted the situation and did something about it.  She, like millions of women had the courage, discipline and grit to turn out the vote for the Biden-Harris ticket.  Julia was on the phone every evening for over two hours calling people to urge them to vote.

Biden and Harris owe their victory to urban and suburban women like Julia and, especially, to Black women. 

Even though I couldn’t muster the courage or energy to work for the outcome I wanted, the first candidate in the Democratic primary way back in what seems to be decade ago in January, 2019, that I supported financially was Kamala Harris.  I supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, and I supported Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren in 2019 and 2020 because I felt that men had screwed up long enough, and that we needed a compassionate, nurturing, caring woman for president.

The title of my Ph.D. dissertation (unfinished) in 1983 was “The Nature of Broadcast General Manag­ers’ Work: A Comparative Study of Results-Based Effective and Less Effective and Male and Female Managers.”  An overly opaque, academic way of saying “why women are better managers.”  I had recognized that women were better, more effective managers when I was able to observe them as sales managers and news directors in radio and television stations I consulted and did training for in the late 1980s and 1990s and at the Management Seminar for News Executives at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

These women were better salespeople, better sales managers, better news directors and better general managers because they were more collaborative, more cooperative and more nurturing (better coaches).  If this was true in broadcast sales, news and general management, why wouldn’t it be true in other businesses and in politics?

My admiration for Black women probably began when I was a teenager in Washington, D.C.  when I realized that the cook, Maggie, my mother and father hired for special and holiday meals was a superior chef and person.  One summer we took Maggie to our summer rental home in Rehoboth, DE for the two weeks my father had off.  After dinner, I would do the dishes while my father and Maggie would drink scotch and talk about life and politics like two old buddies.

This admiration for Black women was reinforced when I was on the Graduate Admission Committee at the University School of Journalism.  One year, it might have been 1992, we admitted Lynise Weeks to the graduate program.  We reversed our original vote not to admit her because the graduate dean, Esther Thorson, advocated for Lynise and urged us to admit her.

As I remember, the reason Esther Thorson advocated for Lynise was because after the Graduate Admissions Committee turned her down, Lynise sat outside the graduate dean’s office for almost a day insisting that she wouldn’t leave until the dean saw her.  Exasperated, Thorson, finally saw Lynise, who told the dean that, “You have to let me in because I’m going to change the world.”  Thorson believed her and urged the committee to reverse our decision and admit Lynise into the Broadcast News sequence.  So, we did.

Lynise was a large woman with a dark black complexion. She filled the television screen and was hard to light, but she broke down these barriers just as she broke down the barriers to admission into the J School. She became the most popular (internally and externally) reporter on university-owned KOMU-TV because of her warm, sonorous voice, her commanding presence and her highly intelligent reporting.

At the J School graduation award ceremony I gave Lynise a hammer and said, “This is the new Hammer Award and goes to Lynise because she broke down barriers and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Almost immediately after graduation she got a job as a reporter at WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, and after several years there was given her own half-hour weekly consumer-advocacy program, virtually unheard of in local television. Lynise passed away in early 2008 after battling kidney failure.

I think one of the reasons I admired Lynise was because she reminded me of another Black woman, in addition to Maggie, who I admired — Barbara Jordan. Jordan was the first Black congresswoman from Texas, and was a member of the House Judiciary Committee. As a member of that committee, she gave a magnificent opening speech in July, 1974, at the impeachment hearing of Richard Nixon. I remember watching her speech on television and how it influenced me to turn against Nixon, for whom I had voted.

When my daughter, Crickett, sent me the picture at the top of this blog post, I wept. I wept buckets. I wept because the picture of Harris and the shadow of the courageous little Black girl going to a desegregated school in Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting perfectly portrayed the historic, gritty journey of Black women that culminated in Harris’s election. I wept as a cathartic release of my anxiety. I wept because of my shame of non-involvement. I wept because I realized that Maggie, Lynise and Barbara, all of whom I admired, were not here to weep for joy.

My reclamation was weeping for them.

Filed Under: Kamala Harris Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

October 17, 2020 By

Darth Vader lives in an alternative universe. He is a figment of George Lucas’s imagination, an “alternative fact.” As an imaginary figure, we can manipulate his image to make any point we want to make, just like Donald Trump lives in an alternative universe and manipulates his image to make his own reality, i.e bigger inauguration crowds than Obama and higher town-hall ratings than Joe Biden’s.

Who is Darth Vader? As we learn in “The Empire Strikes Back,” he is Luke’s father. But why would George Lucas make the villain of “Star Wars” the hero’s father? I’m not smart enough to get into Lucas’s mind, but I’m guessing that the message he wanted to convey is that Vader represents the dark side, the evil side of all beings in any universe. The duality of the universe. The ying and the yang, the male and the female, the good and the evil.

As humans, we don’t want to believe that we have an evil side. We are all heroes of our own story. We are Luke and Leia, not Darth Vader. But why is it, then, that of all the characters in the “Star Wars” story Darth Vader is the most popular, the most lasting, the most recognizable? Do we yearn for the power of Darth Vader? Do we secretly, subconsciously want to choke all of our enemies? Is this why we elected an orange-masked, clearly evil Donald Trump as our power-mad leader?

When we was running for president in 2016, everyone knew Trump was evil, that he lived in an alternative, totally unrealistic universe and that he rose to power by verbally killing his adversaries. Was he our Darth Vader?

No. Trump is worse, more evil. One of the reasons we like Darth Vader is because even though we know he is our evil side, in the story’s climax being Luke’s father is a more important value than being evil or having power. Vader saves his son’s life, and we forgive his evilness.

We forgive Vader because we want to believe our evil side is really not that bad. We believe that if Vader’s alternative universe were infected with the coronavirus, he’d wear a mask to protect his children and colleagues.

In Trump’s alternative universe, he doesn’t care about others. He doesn’t wear a protective mask over his orange makeup mask. He’s pure evil. However, just like in the final “Star Wars” episode, “The Return of Skywalker,” the uncompromisingly evil Palpatine is eliminated by Rey turning his evil force back on him, in this election women will turn Trump’s evil back on him and give him what he deserves — defeat.

The world will know he’s a loser.

Filed Under: Darth Vader Tagged With: , ,

$750

October 3, 2020 By

“$750 in 2016 and 2017,” is what flashed into mind when I saw Trump, wearing the biggest mask I’ve ever seen, get into the helicopter that took him to Walter Reed Medical Center to treat his COVID-19 infection.

How much did that helicopter ride cost the American taxpayers? How much is his medical team of at least ten people at one of the best hospitals in the world costing the American taxpayers?

How much did the White House super-spreading reception last Saturday, September 26, for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett cost the American taxpayers?

All of the above cost in multiples of 100 times more than the $750 Trump paid in Federal Income Taxes in 2016 and 2017, and as a taxpayer I’m outraged.

But isn’t it crass, heartless and dehumanizing to look at the monetary implications of the President’s illness, even when the hypercritical NY Times’s Editorial Board writes, “Get Well, Mr. President.”

Yes, putting Trump’s illness in monetary terms is crass, heartless and dehumanizing. But it’s exactly how Trump approaches the job of being President — from a monetary, transactional perspective, and not from a perspective of what is best for taxpayers, but what is monetarily best for him.

Many people who are familiar with Trump’s personal and business background believe that he ran for President as a marketing ploy to help him get out of a bad financial crunch. The NY Times reporting on his tax returns, which it finally got a hold of, show Trump is a terrible businessman, an abject failure as a real estate developer. What saved him was the celebrity he got from “The Apprentice.” He licensed his name to businesses, and then became the Kim Kardashian of politics.

Trump has no humanity, no empathy, no greater purpose than to rob taxpayers. He has no class, no honesty, and no decency, and, up until his perb walk to the hospital-bound helicopter, no mask.

If I were the Secretary of the Treasury, I would send a bill to Trump for every mask he now has to wear for $750.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Labor Day 2020

September 7, 2020 By

The afternoon I am writing this is Labor Day, 2020, which was established as a Federal Holiday in 1894 to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United States.

The concept of a national holiday honoring labor was initiated by two labor unions, the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. In the United States the percentage of the labor force that belonged to unions peaked at 35 percent in 1954 and peaked in the total number of of union members at 21 million in 1979.

In 2019 (the most recent numbers I could find) union membership had declined precipitously to 10.3 percent and 14.6 million. Union membership in the private sector was 6.2 percent and in the public sector was 33.6 percent.

Not only has union membership plummeted in the last 40 years but also the embrace of blue-collar workers by the Democrats has also declined. Michael Sandel, Harvard professor and political philosopher, brilliantly identifies this deterioration in an op-ed piece in The New York Times on September 2, titled “Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice.” Sandel writes that “By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue-collar and middle-class voters who once constituted its base.”

Sandel writes that in 2016 “two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.” As you might expect, the people who Hillary Clinton’s referred to as “deplorables” didn’t vote for her and led to Trump’s win. The “technocratic liberalism” that infected the Democratic Party led, in part, to this disastrous outcome.

Sandel points out that Joe Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate in 36 years without a degree in an Ivy League university, which might enable Biden to “connect more readily with the blue-collar workers the Democratic Party has struggles to attract in recent years. More important, this aspect of his candidacy should prompt us to reconsider the meritocratic political project that has come to define contemporary liberalism, Sandel suggests.

At the heart of this project are two ideas: First, in a global, technological age, higher education is the key to upward mobility, material success and social esteem. Second, if everyone has an equal chance to rise, those who land on top deserve the rewards their talents bring.

This way of thinking is so familiar that it seems to define the American dream. But it has come to dominate our politics only in recent decades. And despite its inspiring promise of success based on merit, it has a dark side.

Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.

Sandel writes that the rhetoric of getting ahead because of getting a college degree has been echoed across the political spectrum — “from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton — and what they are really saying is “If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault.”

It is important to remember that most Americans — nearly two-thirds — do not have a four-year college degree. By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees.

Sandel further writes that what he calls “credentialism” is “the last acceptable prejudice.” And he also indicates that “elites are unembarrassed by this prejudice.”

Even Congress is packed with credentialism. Over the last five years , Congress has become more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class. But, you might ask, “Isn’t government by well-educated university graduates is a good thing?” Sandel asks, “Aren’t highly credentialed leaders best equipped to give us sound public policies and reasoned political discourse?”

Then Sandel answers his question with, “Not necessarily.”

Governing well requires not only technocratic expertise but also civic virtue — an ability to deliberate about the common good and to identify with citizens from all walks of life. But history suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment and the ability to win admission to elite universities. The notion that “the best and the brightest” are better at governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.

Google, which has the reputation for being among, if not, the best at hiring people of any company in the world, found that success at Google, contrary to what it initially thought, has no correlation to where someone went to college, or, surprisingly, even if they went to college at all. How well an engineer wrote code or how well a salesperson sold or how well a manager managed wasn’t based on a college diploma.

Nevertheless, credentialism is still a common prejudice among both wealthy liberals and conservatives. And even though you’d never guess it from his typically incoherent rambling, President Trump is an Ivy Leaguer (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania).

If the rhetoric of rising and the reign of technocratic merit have led us astray, how might we recast the terms of moral and political aspiration? We should focus less on arming people for a meritocratic race and more on making life better for those who lack a diploma but who make important contributions to our society — through the work they do, the families they raise and the communities they serve. This requires renewing the dignity of work and putting it at the center of our politics.

On this Labor Day, 2020, as a country, we need to think about how we can renew the dignity of work and honor and reward fairly those who do the labor that keeps us safe, clean and fed.

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I’m Worried

September 1, 2020 By

As the protests around the country get more violent, I’m worried that the Trump strategy of stoking hate and rage and blaming Democratic mayors, governors and Biden might take hold with some voters in Midwestern swing states.

What Trump and his right-wing, Republican strategists are doing is taking venomous pages from Hitler and Goebbels’ Nazi playbook of sowing chaos and inciting violence on a minority community (the Nazis on Jews, Trump on Blacks) in order to gain power. This fascist, authoritarian playbook of using violence to grab power is as old as history. Just read the Old Testament or the Koran.

Trump is desperate. He knows he’s losing. Why else would he lie about voting by mail being dangerous? Why else would he try to deflect attention away from his incompetent, stupid response to the pandemic and his and the Republican’s embracing of big business and heartless ignoring of small businesses and blue-collar workers to focus on the bogus — law and order?

To claim he is the law-and-order president when he has broken practically every law and certainly every norm of honesty and decency is as outrageous as his falsely claiming that no president, except for perhaps Lincoln, has done more for Black people.

Trump’s gargantuan and constant lies and norm-breaking behavior make the title of Matt Taibbi’s book, Insane Clown President, seem understatedly naive and quaint. It’s like calling the murderous Joker a clown. A clown makes you laugh, the Joker was fueled by rage and kills people.

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 25 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, the consensus of these experts was that Donald Trump is a malicious narcissist, the same personality disorder that Hitler and Stalin had, and is a sociopath to boot. A sociopath is someone who is incapable of empathy, which Trump has demonstrated over and over.

Trump’s sociopathy is reinforced by another expert, Donald Trump’s cousin, Mary Trump, in her New York Times best-selling, scary book, Too Much and Never Enough. In the book Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, details how Donald became such a narcissistic, greedy mob-like criminal. In the book she gives the name of the man Donald paid to take his GRE exams that allowed him to transfer from Fordham to the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He cheated. And cheating is habitual. He cheated to get into Wharton, he cheats at golf, he cheats on his wife, he cheats on his taxes (why else would he insist on hiding them), he cheats on norms and laws. He even cheats on following the rules of Twitter.

I’m worried that somehow this insane, lying, criminal, authoritarian populist cheater will be reelected. As Barack Obama said in his speech at the Democratic convention, goodbye democracy.

A very dear friend of mine told me several months ago that I was too hard on Trump in a blog I wrote. I now fear I wasn’t hard enough. So, I say to Donald Trump: “Fuck you! Strong letter follows.”

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A Referendum on Decency

August 22, 2020 By

On one my favorite podcasts, “The Ezra Klein Show,” Ezra’s guest on podcast #352 was Stuart Stephens, a former high-level Republican consultant, who said that what the upcoming election boiled down to was “a referendum on decency.”

While I watched the Democratic convention, the one word that I heard more than any other (with the obvious exception of “Joe”) was “decent.” In a “Five Thirty Eight” podcast that discussed the convention, one analyst said that the Democrats had nominated “a decent guy who everyone can relate to.”

In previous blog posts I have emphasized the concept of decency. In a post titled “The Cancel Culture Is Illiberal” I wrote “Instead of a list of ideas that should be excluded from a free-expression dialogue, I believe a broad concept should be applied — decency.” In a blog post titled “What Is The Future of the Republican Party?” I ended the post with “Will the future of the Republican party be driven by hate speech or decency?”

I’m convinced that the presidential election is absolutely a referendum on decency, and my point of view was reinforced by the title of Maureen Dowd’s most recent column titled “Joe’s Fearsome Weapon Against Trump: Simple Decency.”

So be it.

Filed Under: Donald Trump Tagged With: , ,

The Cancel Culture Is Illiberal

August 1, 2020 By

The recent resignation of The New York Times Editorial Page editor was one of the events that triggered a discussion of free expression and allowing conflicting ideas to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. 

Opposition to the concept of a free-flowing marketplace of ideas tend to come from a vocal cadre of mostly left-leaning and mostly young (under 50) people who seem to want to censor, shut down or cancel what they considered to be hate speech (articles or social media posts), speech they consider racist, speech that promotes right-wing conspiracy theories or speech that favors the use of violence, such as The New York Times Op-Ed piece titled “Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops.”

At a time in our country’s history when people are typically sequestered at home and lonely, a time when a majority of Americans (especially sports fans) support the Black Lives Matter movement against police violence against Black people, a time when outrageous misinformation and hateful opinions are shared on social media and a time when our country’s leadership has failed to lead during a lethal pandemic, it is understandable that people are frustrated and enraged and want to cancel conflicting conversations and diss dissenting dialogues. 

When enraged, people often  abandon rationality and yearn to purge from sight and consciousness any contrary opinions or ideas, particularly if those ideas are complex, as explained by George Will of the Washington Post in his column titled “Authoritarianism and the politics of emotion.”  Also, on social media, where a majority of Americans get their news, confirmation bias and the titillation of the simplistic and outrageous allows people not only to ignore or cancel opposing views but also to actively promote positions they support, no matter how irrational.

On the other hand, although it is extremely difficult to discard emotion in a time of great national stress, if we are able to approach the issue of freedom of expression rationally, it is my view that we have to adhere to the liberal principle of encouraging dialogue, debate and discussion of opposing views, as articulated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, in which he argues that opinions should never be suppressed.

I first encountered Mills’ ideas on liberty when I earned my master’s degree in Journalism, and also was able to debate these ideas with thoughtful students when I taught a graduate class on Media Ethics at The New School.  What I learned was that suppressing or canceling a dialogue about important issues often comes from a defensive sense of insecurity or, even more likely, from a personalization of the issues.  The faulty, emotion-driven, personalizing thinking seems to be “I hate this awful person; therefore, I have to hate all of their ideas.”

If you support, as I do, the notion that there should be a free and open exchange of opposing views in the marketplace of ideas, does this mean the free, open exchange of all ideas?  Are there some ideas or positions that should be excluded?  My answer is “yes.”

OK, the logical next question is what ideas should be excluded.  I don’t think you can produce a list of ideas that should be excluded because any such specific list would be so contentious that the argument over each item on the list would be interminable and, thus, unresolvable.  Instead of a list of ideas that should be excluded from a free-expression dialogue, I believe a broad concept should be applied – decency.

Decent people respect others’ viewpoints, decent people listen to their opponents and are open to ideas and to learning, decent people are not bullies, decent people are not racist, decent people are not going to shout “fire” in a crowded theater and decent people will try to follow Congressman and civil rights leader, John Lewis’ advice as expressed in The New York Times Op-Ed piece he wrote to be published on the day of his funeral: “So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”

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What Men Can Learn From AOC

July 28, 2020 By

Men can learn a lot from the speech that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the controversial Democrat, gave on the floor of the House of Representatives on July 26.

David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker wrote in an article titled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Delivers a Lesson in Decency on the House Floor:” Remnick wrote: “One could be forgiven for thinking that rhetorical dynamism long ago vanished from the hallways and chambers of the United States Congress.”  He praised AOC by writing: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a first-term Democrat from New York provided a rare exception Thursday as she stepped to the microphone in the House chamber to make hash of Ted Yoho, a veterinarian, Tea Party member, and veteran Republican from Florida.”

Remnick also wrote this about the speech: “…it should be studied for its measured cadence, its artful construction, and its refusal of ugliness.” 

I decided to take Remnick’s advice for three reasons: 1) Because I am taking an online Harvard course on edX titled Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking.  I thought I could learn something by analyzing the speech from a rhetorical perspective, as Remnick suggested.  2) AOC’s 14th Congressional district abuts my district (12) in New York, so she’s a neighbor sort of.  3) I have two daughters who I love very much, and I wanted to cheer on someone who would stick up for them.

AOC’s speech begins with a fairly standard exordium (introduction) by setting scene on the steps of the Capitol when she and Ted Yoho had an unpleasant exchange:

I was minding my own business, walking up the steps and Representative Yoho put his finger in my face.  He called me disgusting, he called me crazy, he called me out of my mind and he called me dangerous.

Notice the effective use of anaphora – a form of parallelism that refers to the repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses – it nicely emphasizes the names Yoho called her.

The speech continues:

I walked back out [after voting] and there were reporters in front of the Capitol and in front of reporters Representative Yoho called me, and I quote, “a fucking bitch.”  These were the words Representative Yoho levied against a congresswoman.  The congresswoman that not only represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, but every congresswoman and every woman in this country.

In this section of the speech AOC uses an ethos appeal.  She establishes her credibility to be able to talk for women, even though she is the youngest woman ever elected to the House.  Her measured tone gave emphasis to her message, not to her emotional state.  However, in the next section diction (choice of words) helps her move smoothly from an ethos appeal to a pathos appeal (emotion).  

I want to be clear that Representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me.  Because I have worked a working-class job.  I have waited tables in restaurants.  I have ridden the subway.  I have walked the streets in New York City. And this kind of language is not new.  I have encountered words uttered by Mr. Yoho and men uttering the same words as Mr. Yoho while I was being harassed in restaurants.  I have tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr. Yoho’s, and I have encountered this type of harassment riding the subway in New York City.  This is not new.  And that is the problem.

Mr. Yoho was not alone.  He was walking shoulder to shoulder with Representative Roger Williams.  And that’s when we start to see that this issue is not about one incident.  It is cultural.  It is a culture of a lack of impunity, of acceptance of violence and violent language against women, an entire structure of power that supports that.

Then, she switches to a logos (rational, logical) approach and uses strong deductive reasoning by stating several facts to bolster her argument:

Because not only have I been spoken to disrespectfully, particularly by members of the Republican Party, and elected officials in the Republican Party, not just here, but the President of the United States last year told me to “go home” to another country with the implication that I don’t even belong in America.  The governor of Florida, Governor DeSantis, before I was sworn in, called me a “whatever that is.” Dehumanizing language is not new.  And what we are seeing is that incidents like these are happening in a pattern.  This is a pattern of an attitude towards women and the dehumanization of others.

In the next section, AOC uses anaphora (repetition) again effectively to build her case:

But then yesterday, Representative Yoho decided to come to the floor of the House of Representatives and make excuses for his behavior.  And that I could not let go.  I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse and, worse, to see that — to see that excuse and to see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology and to accept silence as a form of acceptance, I could not allow that to stand.  Which is why I’m rising today to raise this point of personal privilege.

In the next section, she switches back to a strong pathos (appeal):

Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters.  I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter.  I am someone’s daughter too.

My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter.  My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this house towards me on television, and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.

Now, what I am here to say is that this harm that Mr. Yoho levied, tried to levy against me, was not just an incident directed at me, but when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters.

In using that language, in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community, and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable.  I do not care what your views are.  It does not matter how much I disagree or how much it incenses me or how much I feel that people are dehumanizing others.  I will not do that myself.  I will not allow people to change and create hatred in our hearts.

On the video of the speech you can see a slight crack in her voice as she mentions her father.  She’s emotional, yes, but in total control – not angry – powerfully measured.

In two of my last three blogs I have discussed the importance of returning to decency in our public dialogues and debates.  In the next section of AOC’s speech, she addresses the subject of decency:

And so, what I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent.  Having a wife does not make a decent man.  Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.  And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize.  Not to save face, not to win a vote.  He apologizes genuinely to repair and acknowledge the harm done so that we can all move on.

Finally, in her conclusion (peroratio), AOC uses parallelism again to bring home the main point of her compelling argument:

Lastly, what I want to express to Mr. Yoho is gratitude.  I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women.  You can have daughters and accost women without remorse.  You can be married and accost women.  You can take photos and project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity.  It happens every day in this country.  It happened here on the steps of our nation’s Capitol.  It happens when individuals who hold the highest office in this land admit, admit to hurting women, and using this language against all of us.

Once again, I thank my colleagues for joining us today.

A wow finish.  “Wow” is not an official rhetorical category, by the way, but it’s appropriate for AOC’s speech.

What men can learn from this speech is not only how to use rhetorical devises but also how to treat women – two lessons our inarticulate, nasty, misogynistic President is incapable of learning.

Filed Under: AOC Tagged With: , ,

The Letter

July 21, 2020 By

When I first read about “The Letter,” I thought of the 1967 hit by the Box Tops.  The chorus goes like this:

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a-goin’ home
My baby just a-wrote me a letter

But in 2020 “The Letter” refers to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in the July issue of Harpers Magazinethat was signed by 153 artists, writers and intellectuals.  The letter repudiates the cancel culture and calls for:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is becoming more constricted.  While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance for opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.  We uphold the values of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

The letter ends by stating, in part:

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.  We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.  As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.  We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

Among the 153 people who signed the letter were five columnists from The New York Times: three liberals (Roger Cohen, Michelle Goldberg and Jennifer Senior) and two conservatives (David Brooks and Bari Weiss).  Interestingly, a week after the letter was published signatory Bari Weiss resigned from the Times in a fiery letter that accused the Times’s editorial decisions to be driven by a woke, cancel culture designed to appeal to a narrow slice of its readers, as determined by Twitter.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times.  But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.  As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.  Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.  I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history.  Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

The Times ran letters that both supported Weiss and that did not support her.  However, the two letters, the one Weiss signed and the one she wrote, bring up an interesting question:  Has the switch from an advertising-driven business model to a subscription-driven business model changed the editorial/opinion decisions of the Times?

Many journalism historians and theorists have written that the switch in newspapers’ business model from dependency on government, church or political party revenue to a dependency on advertising revenue made most newspapers less partisan and more objective.  Thus, the principle of journalistic objectivity was primarily an economic decision, not a journalistic one.  This principle of objectivity – news down the middle – was adopted by radio news and later by television news.  In local television station news and in network news, this down-the-middle approach reigned supreme, and by being non-partisan Walter Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America.”  Not pissing off either side of the political spectrum was profitable.

The notion that dependency on advertising made news producers and publishers freer and less partisan may have had some credibility when applied to the political spectrum, but not to those on the economic spectrum.  The New York Times was founded on the value proposition of appealing to the business class, to the upper-middle and upper class as defined by economics.  The Times was consistent in its approach to appealing to an economically high-end audience (which also means an educated audience). 

In contrast Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post’s appeal is to working class readers.  There is a story, probably apocryphal, that at a social event Murdoch asked the CEO of Bloomingdale’s why the tony department store didn’t advertise in the NY Post.  The Bloomingdale’s executive’s apparent answer was, “Because your readers are our shoplifters.”

This elitist (and probably racist) viewpoint tends to permeate advertising-revenue driven publications that produce content that appeals to consumers who have money and who advertisers want to reach.  But where is the content bias of publications that have a subscription-driven model?  Does money talk?  Does subscriber bias replace advertiser bias?

These questions bring us back to The Letter, to the concept that there should be a free exchange of ideas and opinions, and that these ideas and opinions should compete freely in a marketplace of ideas so citizens can decide for themselves. 

Just as the principle of objectivity was driven by economics, I think the principle of giving a respectful voice to different sides of an argument will win out eventually because of, once again, economics.  By respectful, I mean that any position must respect the rules of debate and not be an ad hominin, personal attack but should attack only ideas and the other side’s arguments, assumptions and logic.

Therefore, no one asked me to sign The Letter, but I enthusiastically support it.

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a-goin’ home
My baby just a-wrote me a letter

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