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Response to “Star Wars,” “Lawrence of Arabia,”Freud, and Trump

September 13, 2022 By

Dan Manellla wrote an excellent response to my “Star Wars,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” Freud, and Trump post. I especially enjoyed watching the scene from “Judgment a Nuremberg” Dan linked to, and I urge you to watch it. It’s scarily relevant.

On the subject of movies…and Trump….and accountability…. I cannot help thinking about MAGA supporters – many of whom have no clue what they are supporting…many who are historically illiterate people who have no appreciation, nor imagination of what has happened in the past, and what could easily be recreated and repeated….because history does have a way of doing that – especially to the illiterate.  

I am often reminded of this scene from the film Judgement at Nuremberg….   https://youtu.be/8Ioc2KD-I1U

What will these supporters do when they realize what a crook this guy is?  Will they double down…or will they admit that they followed a rat?

After April of 1945 – Nazi’s still existed….they just took the uniforms off…and hid in plain site.

The only thing I would disagree with in what Dan wrote is that I do not believe that all MAGA/Trump supporters are illiterate. Many are college educated, and not all of those college graduates are from evangelical colleges such as Liberty University. By the way, the new Fox News Sunday anchor, Shannon Bream, graduated from Liberty.

Prime time Fox News personalities/bloviators Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham are all college graduates, so, technically are not illiterate, although they sure seem to be.

Filed Under: MAGA, Trump Tagged With: , , ,

Women In News

August 4, 2021 By

On Tuesday, August 3, Daisy Veerasingham, Associated Press (AP) executive vice president and chief operating officer, was named AP’s president and CEO.   Veerasingham joins other females and other women of color to head major national news organizations. 

It’s about time.

Of 11 major national news organizations (ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, AP, Reuters, the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal), half are headed by women: AP, CBS News (co-president), Fox News, MSNBC, AP, Reuters and the Washington Post.  Of the six women, two, Rashida Jones of MSNBC and Daisy Veerasingham are a woman of color.

Six of the major national news organizations are headed by men: ABC News, CBS News (co-president), NBC News, CNN, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal.  Of the six men, one of them, Dean Baquet of the NY Times, is Black.

Two large metropolitan daily newspapers have recently hired Black women as Editor-in-Chief,  Hearst’s Houston Chronicle (Maria Douglas Reeve) and A. H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News (Katrina Hardy).

I looked at the dominant newspapers in 11 cities (Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, San Francisco and Boston) and found that men headed nine and women headed two.

What will it mean in the future that more and more women and women of color are heading news organizations?  Will the news coverage and agendas change?  If Kamala Harris is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024 or 2028, will editorial endorsements change?

In terms of news coverage, I think news coverage, especially local news coverage, will change.  More coverage of issues such as the child tax credit, evictions and the affordable housing crisis will increase in news organizations headed by women, and we’re likely to see less horse-race political coverage.

For example, Jon Allsop writes in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) that:

Writing for The Hill, Daniel Schneider and Peter Tufano, academics at Harvard and Oxford universities, respectively, assessed the recent conversation around the implementation of the child tax credit.  “Politicians, policy analysts, commentators, pundits and journalists have reported widely on the structure of the program—and their opinions of it,” Schneider and Tufano argue, but the voices of parents themselves have been less audible, a problem the academics set out to resolve by conducting a national survey.  The debate around extending the credit, they write, must be informed by both evidence parents’ voices.

I think women editors might be more empathetic to “parents’ voices” than to “the structure of the program.”

Also, Jon Allsop writes in the CJR about evictions:

In November, CJR’s Savannah Jacobson spoke with Matthew Desmond, a sociologist and founder of Princeton’s Eviction Lab, about Evicted, his book on the eviction crisis, and the media’s wider coverage of the issue. “I think where we could be better is really to tell the story about who owns our cities—the real business dynamics on the ground,” Desmond told Jacobson.  “If you ask me, What’s the best data that explains eviction, then I could explain, Race matters, if you live with kids that increases your odds, gender matters.  But are people evicting themselves?”

Women editors could well be more empathetic to people being evicted and provide information on what to do about it.

The question of what will happen if Kamala Harris runs for president is more complicated.  There are three issues involved: 1) news coverage, 2) opinion and 3) editorial endorsements.

I don’t think news coverage will change much.  ABC News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, AP and Reuters play it pretty straight (that’s my view, but right-wingers will disagree).  They do news, not opinion, and they don’t endorse candidates.

We know what Fox News and MSNBC will do.   They are virtually all opinion.  Fox News will do what the Murdochs want and be a propaganda outlet for Republican candidates.  MSNBC will be a propaganda outlet for Democratic candidates.

The idea of the Murdochs hiring a Black or a woman editor for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is an absurd longshot; nevertheless, news coverage will still be pretty straight and unbiased.  The opinion section and editorial endorsements will stay the same – right-wing.

The NY Times and the Washington Post also have opinion sections and endorse candidates.  Their liberal positions will not change.  Both papers will run an occasional conservative opinion piece to give a weak impression of balance, but these papers’ readers know where the editors’ hearts and minds are.

In terms of editorial endorsements, the Times and the Post will endorse liberal, Democratic candidates as they have in the past.  What many people forget is that editorials are very specifically the voice of management, which, in the case of the Times, means the Sulzberger family.

For example, even though the Times has an editorial board of 13 editors (six women), their votes can be overridden by the Sulzbergers.  For example, I heard from a reliable source that for the 2008 New York state Democratic presidential primary the editorial board voted to endorse Obama, but A. G Sulzberger, Sr., then publisher, overruled the editorial board because he thought Clinton would be better for Israel.  I do not know if this story is true or not, but it is certainly possible – the opinion of the owners is what counts.

From everything that I read, the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, leaves editorial decisions up to the Post’s editorial board and does not get involved, which is as it should be.

Be that as it may, you can bet your last dollar that the Times and the Post will endorse the Democratic candidate for president.

But, do newspaper editorial endorsements have any effect on national elections?  No.  No effect.  On local elections?  Yes.  The Times’ endorsement of Katherine Garcia in the recent Democratic mayoral primary vaulted Garcia into an extremely close second place (49.5 percent of the final vote as tabulated in a rank-order ballot).

So, I for one, hope this trend of women heading newsrooms continues and that news coverage of issues close to the hearts and pocketbooks of the underserved and underinformed 90 percent of the population get highlighted and covered. 

It’s about time.

Filed Under: Women, Women in news Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Murdoch to Fox News

July 27, 2021 By

Top Secret

To: Suzanne Scott, CEO Fox News

From: Rupert Murdoch

Subject: Vaccination

This note is to remind you that the sole mission, the only purpose of Fox News is to maximize shareholder value, which means maximizing revenue.

As you well know, maximizing our advertising revenue means getting the highest ratings possible, which we do by entertaining, outraging and reinforcing the biases of our audience. 

You’ve done a great job of hiring beautiful women and handsome men who are good at entertaining and outraging people.  However, with the new Delta variation of the virus, by some of our hosts advising people not to get vaccinated, we are killing off our viewers.

Let me remind you that over 70 percent of our viewers are over 65, the most vulnerable to get infected and die.  In states with low vaccination rates (where a large percentage of our audience lives) more than 99 percent of COVID-19 deaths over the past six months were among unvaccinated people.  We’re losing viewers!

Create more PSAs about getting vaccinated and run them more often.

It’s OK for our entertainers to support that idiot Trump, but it’s not OK for them to tell people that ”it’s their choice” to get vaccinated.  If our audience doesn’t get vaccinated, the worst possible thing imaginable might happen: Our audience might decline and we could lose money.

Filed Under: Fox News Tagged With: , , , ,

The Media Are Killing Us

July 21, 2021 By

The first allusion to media and death that I remember was Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman’s thesis was that:

TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused.

Postman’s idea was that TV was killing our culture. On Friday, July 16, when President Joe Biden was asked by an NBC reporter what his message was to social media platforms, particularly Facebook, Biden replied, “They’re killing people,” then added, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”

Even though Biden backed off a little a few days later after Facebook complained and laid out all the things they were doing to promote vaccination, the President was essentially right. In fact, he should have included Fox News in his condemnation.

In an article titled “Facebook, Fox, and what ‘killing people’ means in a pandemic” in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Jon Allsop wrote:

Biden’s intervention—along with rising cases and plummeting vaccination rates—have reignited urgent media conversations about vaccine hesitancy, whose fault it is, and to what extent. Facebook has been central to this conversation, with observers debating the proper balance between the good messaging it has instigated and the bad messaging it has allowed on its platform. Right-wing media outlets—and, given its huge reach, Fox News, in particular—have also been central, with some commentators arguing that they deserve a greater share of the blame for sowing mistrust of the vaccines and Biden’s efforts to distribute them. (“Who’s winning the war between Biden and Facebook?” a headline in Wired asked. “Fox News.”) On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Murthy [Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general] whether Fox is also “killing people”; Murthy replied that the general cost of misinformation “can be measured in lives lost,” but declined to be more specific. Oliver Darcy, a CNN media reporter, called this a “dodge” that reflected poorly on the administration’s priorities: “misinformation on Fox is distributed intentionally, while Facebook is at least putting some effort to combatting it.” 

With the increase in COVID infections and deaths due to the Delta variant, there really is a pandemic among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are killing not only themselves but others as well. It seems they would rather die than admit they were wrong about believing in science and getting vaccinated.

Some entertainers on Fox News seem to be developing a little conscience and adjusting their moral compass slightly. Jon Allsop in CJR reports:

Many media observers have this week noticed an apparent shift in Fox’s coverage of COVID vaccines. On Monday, the network ran on-screen banners advertising official vaccine resources, and Sean Hannity urged his viewers to take the pandemic seriously; on Tuesday, Steve Doocy, of Fox & Friends, said that the vaccine “will save your life.” These efforts have met, in more liberal quarters, with relief, and even some praise. It’s not clear, however, that they really represent any sea change. Hannity and Doocy have both endorsed vaccines before; in February, the latter appeared, alongside several other Fox hosts, in a vaccine PSA. And, more pertinently, hosts who have consistently cast doubt on the vaccines have continued to do so: following Hannity on Monday, for instance, Laura Ingraham accused Democrats of trying to cancel “inconvenient opinions regarding their Covid response,” and brought on a guest who called the idea that there is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” a “lie.” Some of this week’s Fox-has-changed commentary reminded me of the post-election period, when supposed instances of hosts turning on Trump belied a more sordid reality. With vaccines, as with Trump’s election lies, low expectations can dilute our standards of accountability.

So, some entertainers on Fox News seem to be accountable, but not all of them. Facebook? No. Facebook is still defensive and will not take down vaccination disinformation. If some people would rather die than believe in science, Facebook would rather make more money than be accountable by removing vaccination lies that are killing people.

In 1985 Neil Postman was right: in the media, people are amusing themselves to death, and some of the media could care less. Money before morality.

Filed Under: Covid-19 Tagged With: , , ,

Tucker Carlson

June 29, 2021 By

In Jonathan Rauch’s just published, excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth, the author writes: “Digital media have turned out to be better attuned to outrage and disinformation than to conversation and knowledge.” The same thing could be said about all media.

The right is currently outraged about schools teaching critical race theory. The left is currently outraged about the disinformation promulgated by the right. And no one on the right does outrage and disinformation better than Tucker Carlson on Fox News. On the left, the number-one outrager on cable news is Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

Carlson has the highest ratings on cable news with approximately three million viewers. Wednesday, June 23, seemed like a typical cable news prime-time night. Carlson on Fox News (8:00 pm) had 3,064,000 total viewers, 494,000 25-54 viewers (83% not 25-54). Maddow (9:00 pm) on MSNBC was number three behind Hannity (9:00 pm) on Fox News. She had 2,289,000 total viewers, 318,000 25-54 viewers (86% not 25-54).

Why is Carlson number-one? He’s not only the top outrager and disinformationer, he’s also a liar and a hypocrite.

David Frum wrote in the Atlantic on June 21, that Carlson lied about protesters attacking his home when he said on his show, “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door.” Subsequent investigations determined there was no crack in his front door. Frum writes:

Carlson’s own lawyers have argued in court that he regularly speaks in ways that are “loose, figurative, or hyperbolic.” Carlson’s descriptions of events—including outright accusations of criminal conduct by named individuals “would not have been taken by reasonable listeners as factual pronouncements but simply as instances in which [people like Carlson] expressed their views over the air in the crude and hyperbolic manner that has, over the years, become their verbal stock in trade.”

In other words, he lies.

The New York Times media columnist, Ben Smith, wrote a column titled “Tucker Carlson Calls Journalists ‘Animals.’ He’s Also Their Best Source” in which Smith claims that Carlson is hypocritical because he recently said on his show that the media at large are “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect,” yet has also been a consistent source for mainstream media reporters, including some New York Times reporters, about conversations with Trump when he was president. Smith writes that Carlson “spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them” and asks of Carlson viewers “How can the guy who tells you every night that the media is lying be texting with the enemy?” In other words, Smith makes the case the Carlson is a hypocrite.

So if Carlson is a liar and a hypocrite who dishes out disinformation, why would anyone watch his show (it’s a show, not a news program)?

Confirmation bias, of course, but there is another reason that is detailed by Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge: group status.

Rauch refers to psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s position that “people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.” Human beings are social animals who feel safe and secure in groups, in their tribes. Rauch writes that our group identity is primary. We want acceptance and status in our group more than we want reality or the truth. The tendency is for groups, and thus for individuals in that group, to connect emotionally with a charismatic leader and then to rationalize backward from our emotions rather than reason forward from policy views.

Therefore, a person can be a nice, caring person and generally a good community member, yet believe in conspiracy theories, support Trump and watch and believe Tucker Carlson because of their group identity and need for status in that group.

For liberals, it is difficult to change group identity. It takes a long time and needs the support of the media to debunk disinformation and calm down outrage.

But help may be on the way — the media is changing. A recent analysis from Axios titled “Boring news cycle deals blow to partisan media” shows that “in the months since former President Donald Trump left office, media companies’ readership numbers are plunging — and publishers that rely on partisan, ideological warfare have taken an especially big hit.”

The Axios chart linked to above shows the following declines of selected media publications, August 2020-January 2021 (before) and February 2021-May 2021 (after):

  • Far Right (e.g. NewsMax) – 43.8%
  • Far Left (e.g Mother Jones) – 27.3%
  • Right Leaning (e.g. Fox News) – 26.9%
  • Mainstream (e.g. US Today) – 18.3%
  • Left Leaning (e.g. Vox) – 16.7%

So, the Trump slump affects all media, but affects the far-right media the most and the left-leaning media the least. If these trends continue, perhaps agendas will change. Perhaps the groups that listen to and believe far-right and right-leaning media will shrink in size and, thus, be less influential. Perhaps Tucker Carlson will fade in importance and left-leaning media such as the Atlantic and The New York Times will stop writing about him and, thus, giving him exposure and publicity. Maybe he’ll just fade away.

Let’s hope.

Filed Under: Tucker Carlson Tagged With: ,

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: , , ,

Fox News’s Contempt for the Truth of COVID-19

March 18, 2020 By

The Washington Post’s headline for a March 10, 2020, article by Max Boot hit the nail on the head: “The right-wing media’s contempt for the truth has never been more dangerous.”

Boot’s lead read:

“President Trump has been widely and correctly excoriated for the way he is dealing with the novel coronavirus. By minimizing the danger, he heightens it. Even on Monday, Trump was comparing COVID-19 to the ordinary flu, even though its mortality rate appears to be many times higher and its economic effect infinitely greater. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait is right that Trump is acting like “the mayor in Jaws, blithely ignoring reports of a gigantic shark because he didn’t want to hurt the tourism season.”

Boot then goes on to detail how Fox News promulgates narratives “so at odds with reality that they are likely to get people killed.” Boot cites comments by Fox News liar-in-chief, Sean Hannity, and bloviator Tucker Carlson that support Trump’s delusional thinking about COVID-19 and minimize the pandemic’s danger.

Boot’s Washington Post article also links to the liberal-leaning fact-checking website Media Matters For America, which has video links to many Fox News’s and Fox Business’s most egregious lies about COVID-19. And if you want to raise the hackles on the back of your neck even higher, view the video of Rush Limbaugh huffing and puffing about COVID-19: “Who cares if it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu?”

What has happened to the media that we have the completely fake news of Fox News and have to have an organization like Media Matters to keep track of and document the lies of Fox News and the right-wing media?

What happened to the media is greed–pure economics, as detailed brilliantly in James T. Hamilton’s All the News That’s Fit To Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News.

I think there are three events in the history of television news that are bellwethers of the TV news switch from public service to profits being the indicator of success:

  1. In 1965, KYW-TV’s news director, Al Primo, created the “Eyewitness News” format for the Philadelphia station’s local newscasts. The news philosophy was “if it bleeds, it leads.” The news anchors became personalities instead of presenters and used banter, or “happy talk,” between stories. KYW-TV’s “Eyewitness News” overtook market leader, CBS-owned WCAU-TV, in the ratings. The strategy behind the “Eyewitness News” programming was if news stories were sensational, outrageous, and scary enough about crime, they would instill fear in viewers and, thus, were the path to higher ratings.
  2. In 1986, CBS founder, William S. Paley, was 85 and was still CEO of a foundering CBS, which was the target of several hostile takeover attempts by, among others, Ted Turner, Marvin Davis, and Ivan Boesky. Paley invited investor (and bottom-feeder) Larry Tisch to invest in CBS and help stop the other takeovers. Tisch invested $750 million for a 24.9 percent stake in the company, and within a few months, with Paley’s support, Tisch became CBS’s CEO. And, thus, began the Tisch era of ruthless cost cutting. Tisch fired 230 of 1,200 news division employees and cut $30 million from the news division’s budget because Tisch believed that the news division should make a profit, which was an unheard of concept up to that point. A younger Paley and his long-time president, Frank Stanton (since 1946) had always believed that news was a public service and that the CBS news division was not expected to enhance CBS’s bottom line: public service, not profit. Tisch changed that, and NBC followed suit the same year and demanded that its news division be profitable.
  3. In 1996, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch hired former Republican consultant, Roger Ailes, to create the Fox News Channel. The decision to slant its news programming toward the right was a financial one, not an ideological decision. Murdoch has always been more about money and profit than ideology. What the financial success of Fox News signaled was that there was a lot of money to be made pandering to conservatives. For example, the conspiracy theorist and wingnut, Alex Jones, is telling his viewers that the toothpaste he is selling will kill the COVID-19 virus. If you are dumb enough to watch Alex Jones, you’re dumb enough to buy his toothpaste and probably dumb enough to vote for Trump in 2020.

Fox News’s contempt for the COVID-19 truth is like the virus itself–it infects people and kills reality.

Filed Under: Fox News Tagged With: ,