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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: , , ,

Putin and Hitler

March 15, 2022 By

Here’s part of the Wikipedia Early Life entry for Vladamir Putin:

Putin was born on 7 October 1952 in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), the youngest of three children of Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin (1911–1999) and Maria Ivanovna Putina (née Shelomova; 1911–1998). His grandfather, Spiridon Putin, was a personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Putin’s birth was preceded by the deaths of two brothers, Viktor and Albert, born in the mid-1930s. Albert died in infancy and Viktor died of diphtheria during the Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany‘s forces in World War II.

Putin’s mother was a factory worker and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. Early in World War II, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.

Putin’s mother was 41 when he was born. She had lost two sons before her last son, Vladamir, was born in 1952. Do you think she might have spoiled her last surviving son?

Here’s part of the Wikipedia Early Years entry on Adolph Hitler:

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary (in present-day Austria), close to the border with the German Empire.[15][16] He was the fourth of six children born to Alois Hitler and his third wife, Klara Pölzl. Three of Hitler’s siblings – Gustav, Ida, and Otto – died in infancy.

Hitler’s mother was 25 when he was born. She had lost three children–two sons and a daughter–before her last son, Adolph, was born in 1889. Do you think she might have spoiled her last surviving son?

Sigmund Freud taught the world that if you wanted to understand an adult (or adults wanted to understand themselves), understand the child. Freud was also one of the first to define narcissism. As Freud wrote about narcissism in 1917, every child in their oral stage is narcissistic. According to Freud, the ego starts to develop in infancy during the oral stage of psychosexual development. During this time, the child is highly egocentric and believes that he is the center of the world probably because of the fact that almost all of their needs and desires are being fulfilled by their mother.

But as they grow up, things change. A child starts to realize that things cannot always go the way they want and that not everything is for or about them. Therefore, his self-centeredness starts to decline. Or it doesn’t, and a full-fledged narcissist is let loose on the world.

Psych Central indicates that narcissism ranges from an “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance to selfishness, involving a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and a need for admiration.”

Psychologists seem to be ambivalent about the root cause of narcissism, but it’s probably safe to write that there is general agreement that it’s about 50-50 nature (genetics) versus nurture (environment). In other words, there might be a genetic tendency in some people that is triggered by environmental factors, according to Wikipedia, such as:

In Gabbard’s Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders (2014), the following factors are identified as promoting the development of narcissistic personality disorder:

* An oversensitive temperament (individual differences of behavior) at birth

* Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic criticism

* Excessive praise for good behaviors, or excessive criticism for bad behaviors in childhood

* Overindulgence and overvaluation by family or peers

* Being praised by adults for perceived exceptional physical appearance or abilities

* Trauma caused by psychological abuse, physical abuse or sexual abuse in childhood

* Unpredictable or unreliable parental caregiving

* Learning the behaviors of psychological manipulation from parents or peers[.

If we consider “Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic criticism,” “Excessive praise for good behaviors, or excessive criticism for bad behaviors in childhood,” and “Excessive praise for good behaviors,” we might call that spoiling.

Looking at the above definition and list, with certainty we can add Donald Trump to the list, as did the 25 psychiatrists who identified Trump, along with Putin, Hitler, Stalin, and Kin Jong-Un as malicious narcissists in the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.

But why is it that we recognize these pathological, malicious, narcissistic monsters too late–after they are in power? The U.S. military does psychiatric screening that is integrated into an induction physical examination in order to identify only “gross mental health deficits.” In other words, military inductees take a personality test that can usually identify psychopaths, which makes sense. Test people before you give them a gun.

Why don’t we give politicians personality tests before they run? When people file to run for a Federal office, why not make them take a personality test? Skeptics will say that personality tests are too easily gameable by smart people and that such tests might identify a disturbed psychopath but not a narcissist. My reply would be, who says all politicians are smart, and they are all narcissists.

In fact, we’re all narcissists to some degree. In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump in a chapter titled “Pathological Narcissism and Politics: A Lethal Mix,” Dr. Craig Malkin writes that narcissism falls on a scale of 1-10 and that moderate narcissism (4-6) on the scale is healthy self-esteem. However, pathological narcissism occurs at 9 or 10 on the scale, which is dangerous: Putin, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Un, and Trump.

If the U.S. Military won’t give a gun to psychopaths, why do we give unevaluated politicians nuclear weapons?

So, who’s gonna stop World War III? Psychiatrists.

Filed Under: Putin Tagged With: , , ,

“News of the World”

January 17, 2021 By

Last night Julia and I paid $19.99 on Amazon Primes to watch Tom Hanks in the movie “News of the World” that NBC-owned Universal originally opened in theaters across the country. We enjoyed the movie, especially the performances of Mr. Everyman, Tom Hanks, and the newcomer, young Helena Zengel. Watching it triggered some thinking about the half-title of this blog, “media.”

In ” News of the World” Hanks deftly plays a character named Captain Jefferson Kidd, who in 1870 travels the Texas Hill Country reading stories from newspapers to a largely illiterate crowd for a contribution of 10 cents — i.e. a subscription revenue model.

The movie opens with a scene in which Captain Kidd reads a story about a coal mine disaster, which intrigues his audience. In a later session in another, a larger town, Kidd reads a story about the recently passed and controversial (in Texas) 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

In reflecting on the movie I realized that whether intended or not, “News of the World” was a metaphor for the dilemma the media faces currently. Hanks’ Captain Jefferson Kidd is an 1870 media — a channel distributing news, a message (content ) to a receiver (an audience). Classic communication theory.

As an aggregator and distributor of content to an audience, Kidd must figure out a way to monetize (not an 1870 word) his efforts. The revenue model he chooses is a subscription model — pay upfront whether you listen to or, more importantly, whether you agree with the message or not. The model works well when he reads stories about disasters because, as 1980s research on TV news content showed, people like to hear about disasters somewhere else so they feel better (“Things may be bad here, but not as bad as there.”)

Captain Kidd learns the danger of the subscription model when he reads about the 13th Amendment. The last scene in the movie (spoiler alert) shows Kidd reading an entertaining story about a man who was buried alive, but comes back to life, and gives a raucous, rousing, revealing last line. He has learned that the news of the world has to be entertaining.

In 1870 the advertising revenue model had not been invented yet. But is the advertising model a better than subscriptions for monetizing news distribution? In the1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s I thought so. I thought that by depending on advertising that the media was able to keep free of government interference and go down the Walter Cronkite middle. Keep the news balanced, and most of all entertaining. Advertisers wanted to avoid controversial content. They wanted a bland content environment so their ads could stand out.

The pressure that Hanks’ Captain Kidd faced from subscribers to hear only stories that amused them has been carried forward in the media today, regardless whether the pressure comes from subscribers or advertisers. Probably the pressure to increase advertising revenue is greater because the rewards are higher. Advertising revenues scale higher because the ceiling can be higher.

In the 1960s through the 1980s, the primary goal of many media outlets was to serve their communities first, and make a profit second. Especially family owned newspapers and network-owned TV and radio stations tended to follow this community-first, “we” model.

It all changed when the FCC trashed the Fairness Doctrine and conservative talk-show hosts and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News decided on a profit-first, individualist, “me” revenue model. Then this me-first, profit-first, give-me-what_I-want approach model was accelerated by social media — Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube. Truth and decency be damned, full speed ahead with lies and misinformation, led by the criminal-in-chief, because that’s what made the most money.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube finally did the decent thing and shut down Trump’s dangerous, sedition mongering, but not until a mob of crazies had stormed the Capitol. The riot at the Capitol was the fault of social media and, of course, the insane criminal in the White House.

I heard a report on WNYC that said a poll of Americans had revealed that a majority of those surveyed thought the riot at the Capitol was caused by, number-one social media and, number-two, by Trump.

I’ve spent my adult life selling advertising in the media, getting a master’s degree in media, teaching about the media and writing five editions of a textbook about selling advertising in the media. After hearing about the poll reported on WNYC, I thought of a joke my father used to tell.

We lived in Chicago in the early 1930s, and my father had a friend who was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Apparently, the reporter had written a story my father liked, and my father said to the reporter, “That was a great story, I’m sure your mother is very proud of you.” The reporter replied, “Never tell my mother I work for the Chicago Tribune! She’s very liberal and thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.”

I’ve never been ashamed before about devoting my life to the media and to selling advertising, but I’ve changed my mind. Don’t tell anyone I’m in the media, tell them I play piano in a whorehouse.

Filed Under: Uncategorized 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: , , ,

Liberal or Conservative Press?

May 29, 2020 By

A friend sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal by former CBS President Van Gordon Sauter titled “The ‘Liberal Leaning’ Media Has Passed Its Tipping Point” with a sub-head that read: “A return to balance would be commercially unviable. The best solution may be an honest embrace of bias.”

My friend tends to be on the conservative side politically and probably thought I might agree with Sauter that the press should be honest about its bias. Or perhaps he was suggesting that I admit the obvious liberal, progressive bias of MediaCurmudgeon, which of course I’m delighted to do.

Here is what Sauter wrote:

About 35 years ago I was sitting at lunch next to Jeane Kirkpatrick, a onetime Democrat who became a foreign-policy adviser to President Reagan and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was lamenting what she called the “liberal leaning” media. As the president of CBS News, I assured her it was only a “liberal tilt” and could be corrected.

“You don’t understand,“ she scolded. “It’s too late.”

Kirkpatrick was prophetic. The highly influential daily newspapers in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Boston are now decidedly liberal. On the home screen, the three broadcast network divisions still have their liberal tilt. Two of the three leading cable news sources are unrelentingly liberal in their fear and loathing of President Trump.

News organizations that claim to be neutral have long been creeping leftward, and their loathing of Mr. Trump has accelerated the pace. The news media is catching up with the liberalism of the professoriate, the entertainment industry, upscale magazines and the literary world. Recent arrivals are the late-night TV hosts who have broken the boundaries of what was considered acceptable political humor for networks.

To many journalists, objectivity, balance and fairness—once the gold standard of reporting—are not mandatory in a divided political era and in a country they believe to be severely flawed. That assumption folds neatly into their assessment of the president. To the journalists, including more than a few Republicans, he is a blatant vulgarian, an incessant prevaricator, and a dangerous leader who should be ousted next January, if not sooner. Much of journalism has become the clarion voice of the “resistance,” dedicated to ousting the president, even though he was legally elected and, according to the polls, enjoys the support of about 44% of likely 2020 voters.

This poses significant problems not only for Mr. Trump but for the media’s own standing. If Mr. Trump prevails in November, what’s the next act, if any, for journalists and the resistance? They will likely find Mr. Trump more dangerous and offensive in a second term than in the first.

More important, how will a large segment of the public ever put stock in journalism it considers hostile to the country’s best interests? Unfortunately, dominant media organizations have bonded with another large segment of the public—one that embraces its new approach. Pulling back from anti-Trump activism could prove commercially harmful.

On the other hand, how would the media respond to a Joe Biden victory (beyond exhilaration)? Will Mr. Biden be subjected to the rigor and skepticism imposed on Mr. Trump? Will he get a pass because he is a liberal and “not Trump”? The media’s protective coverage of the sexual-assault allegation against Mr. Biden is perhaps a clear and concerning preview to how his presidency would be covered.

The media seems uninterested in these issues of bias. But wouldn’t a softening of its editorial orientation bring new readers or viewers? Probably not. The growth of new customers would be more than offset by the defection of outraged members of the current audience. The news media seems very comfortable with its product and ability to sell it.

There’s probably no way to seal the gap between the media and a large segment of the public. The media likes what it is doing. Admires it. Celebrates it. There is no personal, professional or financial reason to change. If anything, the gap will expand. Ultimately, the media finds the “deplorables” deplorable.

Dan Abrams, ABC’s chief legal-affairs anchor and founder of the website Mediaite, has a novel but valuable idea for the media—candor. Speaking to the matter at February’s Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Mr. Abrams said “I think the first thing that would help . . . is to admit . . . that the people in the media are left of center.”

It would be delightful if a publisher, an editor, a reporter, would just say: Yes, I am left of center! I’m proud of it. I think our reporting is accurate. It best serves the public. And the credibility of the media. So there!

Publications open about their bias might feel freer to focus on the specifics: story selection, presentation, facts, fairness, balance. Not devoid of subtlety for sure, but manageable.

Journalism affects social cohesion. Convinced of its role and its legitimacy, however, the media doesn’t seem to much care. And the other side can certainly enjoy throwing rotten tomatoes at distant targets.

But America won’t reunite until far more people can look at a news story in print or on the screen and, of all things, believe it.

So, it seems that Sauter is of the opinion that journalists, especially those who report for “newspapers in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Boston” should declare themselves to be: 1) liberal or 2) conservative.

I would suggest that journalists should declare themselves to be: 1) holding President Trump and all public officials accountable for their actions, words and tweets or 2) genuflecting to a malicious narcissist, white-supremacist racist and compulsive liar. Those are the two choices. You can keep your “liberal” or “conservative.”

Filed Under: The Liberal Press Tagged With: , ,

The WSJ Doesn’t Know the Meaning of “the Establishment.”

April 14, 2020 By

Following is a post from guest blogger, John Parikhal:

About 3 weeks ago, a friend sent me a WSJ article about “the establishment” and it got under my skin because of the slippery way that word is being used these days. The article ended with these two paragraphs:

Attacks on the establishment aren’t always rational or fair.  They can be one-sided and fail to do justice to the accomplishments the U.S. has made in the recent past.  Populism on both the left and the right always attracts its share of snake-oil salesmen, and America’s current antiestablishment surge is no exception.  But the U.S. establishment won’t prosper again until it comes to grip with a central political fact: Populism rises when establishment leadership fails.  If conventional U.S. political leaders had been properly doing their jobs, Donald Trump would still be hosting a television show.

Unless the president’s opponents take the full measure of this public discontent, they will be continually surprised by his resilience against media attacks.  And until the establishment undertakes a searching and honest inventory of the tangled legacy of American foreign and domestic policy since the end of the Cold War, expect populism to remain a potent part of the political scene.

In response to my friend, I sent the following:

The WSJ article dances brilliantly around the truths of populism while cleverly inserting the Murdoch and rich Republican messaging.

They miss a central point one that was predicted in Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death decades ago.  TV started the destruction of rational discourse.

Here’s the deal, from my point of view… 

Because our neural systems have been reprogrammed by TV, we don’t know that the “new reality” isn’t “true.”  George Orwell’s 1984 is a prescient foretelling of this: “He loved Big Brother.”

Adding to this is the way that extremely precise political polling entered the picture in the late 70s.  Using research, geo-targeting, and fear-based, highly polarizing narratives on TV, it worked to get politicians elected.  The best-known case was pollster Richard Wirthlin’s seminal work in getting Reagan elected.  The Republicans never forgot how well this worked.  And, politicians around the world have used the same tools ever since.

Now, along comes the Internet and the explosion of narratives – with no agreed upon context anymore.  In the Middle Ages (and even today in much of the world, including America), the church gave context and meaning to events.  Then, after hundreds of years, “reason” and “science” gave context and meaning to events.  Then, under “mass media” conditions, radio and TV (as well as newspapers) gave meaning and context. 

Now that we are de-massified, the Internet provides thousands of alternate ways to context the world – many of them exclusionary, tribal, and base.  We can choose our narrative for meaning and context.  Here are just a few – vaccines are a plot, conspiracies are the basis of every event, the government is always against us (even though we vote for it!), etc.

The result is that we no longer strive to be “better” people and we don’t care about getting along with each other.  We delight in the fact that we don’t have to grow, that we can wallow in our limitations, that we don’t have to care about others.  That’s why all the winner and loser TV shows dominate.  There’s no cooperation, just a sick survivalism.  When you add the celebration of stupidity and excess – the Kardashians come to mind – we’re heading fast to the bottom.  We seek out others like us, rather than trying to learn from and discuss with those unlike us.

The horse is out of the barn.

Now, here’s where WSJ plays its slippery game.  They speak about the “establishment” without defining it properly.  They never mention that there is always an “establishment”, that today it is a corrupt cabal that is mostly dominated by Republicans.  They say that the “establishment” created a poor health care system – when it was Republicans who successfully derailed Clinton’s attempt to get it reformed and blocked Obama’s attempts as soon as they could, then began gutting it (rather than improving it) as soon as Trump got into power.  It was Republicans, not “the establishment.”

The people could have cried out for health care but their churches told them to vote Republican (abortion was such a brilliant tool to create a stir), Fox News created “enemies” out of centrists, running a 24/7 misinformation campaign, and all of the technology I mentioned above allowed them to rewire their world view to work against their self- interests.

I could do a more precise job of analyzing the way they present “facts,” but why bother.

I know you’ve read Thinking, Fast and Slow, but most people haven’t.   If they had, they’d see how our brains fool us so brilliantly to do things against our best interests.  And, people simply don’t want to believe this, which is proof of how effectively it works.

So, without science, without logic, without discussion – rather than name calling – we’re in trouble.  We’ll fall for whatever “sounds right.”  Evangelicals and other religious groups have been gutting courses on Critical Thinking in our schools for decades, and, now we’re doing it to ourselves.  People go to college to study “business;” they no longer go to learn how to think more rigorously.  

America is now number 28 – at the bottom of the list – among 28 developed countries when it comes to “belief in science.”

No wonder the previously #1 country in the world is such a mess when it comes to the novel coronavirus. 

Just figured it was important to get the role of TV, the internet, radio, etc. properly focused in all this.  Because each of these mediums has changed our brains, the content follows.

McLuhan was right, “the medium is the message.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

The Media, Donald Trump and the Ring of Gyges

March 29, 2020 By

A public radio station in Seattle, KUOW, announced that it would no longer air White House press briefing on COVID-19 “due to a pattern of false and misleading information provided that cannot be fact checked in real time,” according to The Hill.

Should other media follow suit?

Journalism professor Jay Rosen answers the above question positively in his influential blog “Press Think.” Rosen wrote: “This means…journalism will work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming us.”

Furthermore, on March 27, on “Press Think” Rosen suggests that the five major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN) collaborate in producing an independent, fact-based daily briefing on the coronavirus. The independent briefing would appear from 4:00-5:00 pm ET, have an objective moderator–someone like Steve Scully of CSPAN–and 3-4 producers. The networks could collaborate on such a project because they already do so with a network pool, which they use to cover events such as debates.

Further in his “Press Think” post, Rosen states that in order to get the networks to cooperate in an independent, pooled briefing, “…we appeal to their public service mandate.”

What public service mandate?

The only public service “mandate” that exists for the media are the licenses that the FCC gives to television and radio stations to operate “in the public good, convenience and necessity.” Television, cable and radio networks, newspapers, magazines, podcasts, Google, Facebook and Twitter are not licensed by the FCC and, therefore, are not mandated to serve the public good, convenience or necessity.

Television and radio networks’ programming has to be delivered by stations that are FCC licensed, so those networks have to follow FCC regulations because the stations require it. But cable networks, Internet-distributed content, print media and podcasts are free to distribute all the profanity, sex, and lies their audiences crave because these media are not regulated by the government. They are self-regulated, which means they can choose to do the right thing and serve the public, choose to serve their stockholders or in a few rare cases choose to serve both.

Most major media companies, especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch, choose to serve stockholders first and put profits way ahead of public service. Murdoch’s Fox Business cable network showed some uncharacteristic conscience when it cancelled Trish Regan’s prime-time program two weeks after she was benched because of a monologue in which she dismissed concerns about coronavirus and blamed reports about the pandemic as a scam fueled by Trump enemies. Regan made her remarks in front of a graphic that read,”Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.”

In The Republic Plato has a dialogue titled “The Ring of Gyges” that starts with a story about a shepherd who discovers a golden ring that when he puts it or and adjusts it a certain way, it makes him invisible. The shepherd puts on the ring, becomes invisible, goes to the king’s palace, rapes the queen, kills the king and becomes a plundering, murderous monarch. Glaucon, who tells the story in the Republic, then posits the moral dilemma: If a man were invisible and could get away with rape, murder and gaining power and never get caught or held accountable, would he do the right thing or would he be unable to resist temptation and rape, kill and usurp power. J.R.R. Tolkien brilliantly dramatized this moral dilemma in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy as Peter Jackson did in his film adaptations of Tolkien’s masterpiece.

This moral dilemma is played out today in the media and in the presidency. Do the media do the right thing and put the public’s interests above their own profits even if they are not required to by government regulations? Some media do and some don’t. For example, Fox News and Breitbart News don’t and The New York Times, Apple and Google do. The Times took down its paywall on its superb, thorough coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and Google removed Alex Jones’s Infowars app from its Google Play store, as Apple had done earlier this year. Google removed the app after Mr. Jones posted a video disputing the need for social distancing and for some of the isolation policies aimed at curbing the virus and also for making false claims that his diet supplement and toothpaste could be used to fight the coronavirus.

And the president? Is Trump doing the right thing even if he can’t be held accountable. He put on the golden ring after the Republican-majority Senate didn’t convict him after the House impeached him, and Trump knew that he would be invisible (invincible) and didn’t have to do the right thing or do anything he didn’t want to do. He could murder and gain power with impunity. And he has

Trump’s lies and misinformation in his press briefings (longings?) are probably responsible, in part, for hundreds of deaths from COVID-19. His lying and incompetence are so destructive that many responsible media are considering not showing his briefings live and are being urged to have an alternative, truthful daily information briefing.

Why is Trump lying? Why does he want to get people back to work the Monday after Easter, which according to pandemic experts and doctors is too soon? It’s crazy.

Crazy like a greedy Fox (forgive the capital F, but it’s appropriate). Think about what Trump believes his number-one priority is. Is it being President of the United States or is it being head of the Trump real estate empire? Even though he claims to have turned over decision making to his three older children, do you really believe that he is not involved in making business decisions?

The Trump organization’s top money making property is the Trump Doral Hotel and Resort in Miami, which according to the Washington Post is in a deep decline.

At Doral, which Trump has listed in federal disclosures as his biggest money maker hotel, room rates, banquets, golf and overall revenue were all down since 2015. In two years the resort’s net income…had fallen 69 percent…for instance, the club expected to take in $85 million but took in just $75 million.”

Add to the Doral, the Mar-a-Lago Club and Resort, the Trump International Hotels in New York and Washington, D.C. and you have an overpowering motivation for Trump to want to get Americans back to traveling and booking rooms.

Therefore, should the media, especially the broadcast and cable networks, carry live Trump’s press pimpings in which the head of the Trump real estate empire exhorts people to get back to “normal?” (Nomal to Trump means booking rooms.)

You might say, “Only if Trump takes the golden ring off, does the right thing and puts the public first, not himself first.” What are the odds of that happening? And what are the odds that Fox News and the broadcast and cable networks will collaborate and air a truthful, impartial, fact-filled COVID-19 briefing?

Those things will happen the day that you find the ring of Gyges on your morning walk.

Filed Under: Ethics, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,