Media consumption diet 2024

Long time Senior Legal Columnist for the LA Times' Op-Ed section Harry Litman quit in disgust when the newspaper's owner, healthcare entrepreneur billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, vetoed an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Litman now has some cogent thoughts on ABC's $15 million capitulation to Donald Trump on the matter of whether the incoming president is a rapist. 

I talked to several high-powered defamation defense lawyers about this point. They all affirmed that under the longstanding practice in the NY Times v. Sullivan era, it would have been near inconceivable for ABC to settle but for the prospect of Trump’s return to power. A prominent news organization would sooner have switched to all-cartoon programming than agree to a settlement on such favorable terms. 

This is clearly where we are going in Trump 2.0 -- so-called "mainstream media" can be expected to bend the knee to the Donald. Sometimes this will be glaringly obvious. More often we'll be treated to omissions and sane-washing. The President-elect is a misogynist, a con man, a sociopath, an emotional toddler, and utterly unserious in Ms Harris's memorable formulation. But the big guns aren't going to say any of that; it might hurt their owner's bottom line.

So what's a consumer of news to do? I consume neither TikTok nor TV; I'm a unicorn. I read and I listen and sometimes I debate. That seems enough.

Actually, I had already adjusted my consumption before we came into the second Trump era. Yes, I've quit the Washington Post and the LA Times (or will have when my subs runs out.)

I still pay for the New York Times. It's frequently infuriating and will almost certainly get much worse, but it currently is reputed to employ somewhere around 7 percent of all working journalists in the country. Some great stuff slips through the commercial sieve. 

For balance, I read the US edition of The Guardian from Britain. This is particularly important for anything outside the USofA. They don't always get us Yanks -- but then we don't always get them.

When something has happened and trusted sources seem weak, I start with AP News.

I subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle which is mighty thin, but has had moments under the current editorial regime.

ProPublica does real reporting on under-covered news unearthed by real reporters.

Sources I trust to be what they say they are -- not that I'm always in agreement -- include Talking Points Memo, The Bulwark, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the New Yorker, Mother Jones ...

And then there are the substacks. Just as blogs once did, these appeal to the actual way I consume news -- by prioritizing known authors. I read the NY Times by byline; why shouldn't I get the benefit of individual thoughts from individual people I find interesting, provocative, or informative? So I do, voluminously.

Like most people on the liberal side of things, I've quit Xitter. Yes, I'm on BlueSky (@janinsanfran.bsky.social) Kind of fun. Not sure it will stay that way or continue useful.

• • •

Looking over this collection, it seems kind of boring. And there are days when it is.

For all the breadth of sources here, I'm determined not to follow every twist and feint thrown out by our fascist-in-chief. 

As of now I know I'll be following as many developments as I can stomach from the war on immigrants and also the attempt to shove the gender-genie (trans, LGBQ+, and other noncomforming folks) back under wraps. And then there will be the times I go chasing off after new news ...

Some critical thinking all around, please

Kevin Drum did the work to create this visual summary of common Republican beliefs based on wide ranging poll questions by the firm YouGov.

Click to enlarge

There's a lot of scary stuff in there. He comments:

My point is ... that, thanks to Fox News and Donald Trump and the rest of the conservative ecosphere, this is what Republicans think of the world. 

They believe Christians are widely discriminated against. They believe Biden stole the election. They believe COVID came from a Chinese lab. They believe we're in a recession. Virtually all them believe the country is "out of control."

If you believed this stuff, you'd act like a Republican too. We are all far more susceptible to what the media tells us than we like to think. The problem with Republicans is just that their media is so much worse than ours.

Yes, I think that's fair. We have a right to expect that which labels itself "news" -- and even responsible politicians -- to operate in a world of verifiable fact. 

But also, above and beyond all our different information sources, people in this country live in different worlds. And all of us need to cultivate the habit of subjecting our own worlds to critical examination.

Media consumption diet--surfing the Substack wave

A few years ago, I got really mad at the New York Times. I do subscribe, more or less happily. There's not really any daily word-based journalism to equal it, though there are other worthy outlets, especially the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.  But suddenly, in what felt like a fit of algorithmically-endorsed design "improvement," the NYT's online landing page stopped showing the bylines of its writers. You had to click on any given story to find out who wrote it. (You still have to click; the design flaw persists.)

This was in complete contradiction to how I decide where to dip into the onrushing flood of daily journalism. I have long preferred to read by author. I know whose journalism has enhanced my understanding of matters I'm interested in. I choose to put my limited attention on their pieces. And also to avoid authors who have lost my trust -- on the NYT, looking at you Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker ...

So when Substack came along, I'd found a medium that nearly perfectly matched how I want to consume information and other content. Here were individual authors writing relatively long form who I had already identified and chosen to trust. And I admit, I've turned into a Substack glutton. I follow some 30 writers -- some paid, though many only for their loss-leader free content. The medium accords with how I want to float through information world.

Here are a few I recommend -- including some less frequented ones:

Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day

Peter Beinart on Israel/Palestine

Don Moynihan, student of public policy, asks Can We Still Govern?

Diana Butler Bass on faith, spirituality, and history at The Cottage

John Ganz at Unpopular Front on history for our times

Claudia Sahm, a high-end economist for the people, at Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

Robert Wright at Nonzero Newsletter on averting (many) apocalypses

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on what's on the great man's mind

... and so many more.

In the last few days, Substack has added Notes which seems a lot like Twitter without the bots and Elon Musk. For the moment it appears mostly to be a home for the same writers I encounter via Substack  -- but can it stay congenial? It's hard to imagine a mass of people attracted to Substack can achieve internet-level scale.

Mike Masnick at The Verge interviewed Substack's CEO Chris Best about his platform -- but in particular how the company planned to deal with various kinds of bad actors who will likely find their way to Notes. Best did not convince me or the interviewer that Substack has a clue about solving social media's downsides ... unhappily.

For the moment, Substack has reminded me that the World Wide Web was once a magical arena where I could search out everything I was ever curious about -- before Facebook and Google and so on polluted it. Let's hope Substack endures as a useful platform for awhile.

A righteous rant from Radley Balko

Some twerp named Michael Knowles who writes for a rightist propaganda outfit called the The Daily Wire suggested recently that  it was time for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life.” Knowles got pissed when folks drew the logical conclusion that this is the language of genocide for trans peope. But quibbles aside, that is what it is.

Knowles' demagoguery, along with more from his partner in bullshit Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee, teed off that great civil libertarian and scourge of bad cops Radley Balko. (Here's more on Balko's masterful history of policing, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.) Balko is having none of Knowles' whining. 

It isn’t hyperbolic to send up the distress flares when prominent figures in your society first begin using the same sort of rhetoric previous aspiring authoritarians deployed to lay the groundwork for what later became atrocious crimes against humanity — even if you think the odds of similar crimes happening here on a similar scale are pretty low.

No society goes from “not at all like genocide” to full blown genocide without passing through countless “not exactly like Hitler, but still unacceptably Hitler-like” phases along the way. You needn’t wait until the ovens are running or until you stumble onto a pile of spent Zyklon-B canisters to raise alarms. It’s perfectly okay to say, “It’s pretty fucked up that a guy with 400,000 followers who works for a network with an audience of millions thinks trans people don’t exist in an ‘acceptable state of being.’”

... The point here is that Knowles knows exactly what he was doing, and what he’s doing is as common among aspiring demagogue bigots as part lines and flop sweat. You craft a message that you know your nuttiest, most foaming-at-the-mouth supporters will hear as reassurance — but that also leaves you with plausible deniability should one of them resort to violence. “Stand down and stand by.” “Really fine people.”

Balko apparently is no longer an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, a gig he had for nine years. But truth telling like this and an ongoing diet of sophisticated commentary on police misbehavior can be found at his Substack, The Watch. Highly recommended. 

Found item

This is too delicious not to pass on. The Los Angeles Times, on February 8, 1952, reported the coronation in a fashion it today calls "cheeky."

She continued to strive to be a "good queen," whatever that means. If anything.

Her coronation is my first memory of seeing a "world event" on television in flickering black and white. I guess it could then still be considered something of a "world event" since Britain was still very much a world empire, though that wouldn't last long. And the royal family then was something more than a source of gossip, though just what it meant was already up for grabs.

The current Los Angeles Times publishes surprisingly good national political coverage. It helps to be in a sizable market outside the East Coast bubble.

Good news. No, really.

Among my year-end musings are two very positive developments, one idiosyncratic, one societal/political.

Idiosyncratic to me: the migration of many thinkers and writers to the Substack platform has been a change maker for my media diet.

I work moderately diligently to stay current with observers who seem to me to delve into subjects that need to be explored or something that just needs to be said somewhere. In the past I would scan online newspapers, magazines, and Twitter for voices that broadened my field of vision. I still do that. But with the Substack phenomenon, I can ensure I see the new output of the most interesting writers regularly. Yes, I put some money into subscriptions, but I also appreciate free content that some authors share.

Some of my favs:
The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Jill Filipovic
The Beinart Notebook
Adam Tooze Chartbook
The Crucial Years by Bill McKibben

Societal/political good news: You may not have noticed, but the United States has a mainstream political party which is closer to being a unified, multi-racial, multi-gender, economically progressive force than at any previous moment in my lifetime. Here's a version of something I wrote recently on a Democratic Party discussion substack -- and I believe it:

The wonder of this time is that you can write "Democrats will always be in the position of persuading and compromising with people more conservative than we are." You are accurately (I think) annexing and identifying "Democrats" -- a broad "we" -- with a progressive agenda. 

For most of my life, that would have been a fantasy. Apparently some combination of demographic change, encroaching fascism, imperial decline, and climate crisis have got us here. Do we still have the time and talent to do anything with that democratic (small "d") development?  

We should not sell the democratic impulse short. Americans really do tend to believe that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." With organizing help, and luck, we act on that. ...

Pretty much all of Dem Congresscritters, 48 Dem Senators, and Joe Biden have drifted, under pressure, into espousing an agenda that is miles to the left of anything on offer since Ronald Reagan.

As Grace Segers writes in a deeply reported discussion of the Democratic House of Representatives:

[A] progressive Democratic member who spoke with me on condition of anonymity agreed. “It’s unfortunate that we’ve got a 50–50 majority, so to speak…. But we’ve got 98 percent or 99 percent consensus.”

As the future of majoritarian democracy itself comes into question under our broken Constitutional framework, that's amazing and heartening. And provides a platform from which a democratic left can build.

Media consumption diet: here comes Substack

Digital communications guru Howard Rheingold reminds us all:

"Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."

When I looked in my email this morning, I realized I had a half dozen substantive newsletters waiting for me ... and realized it was time to write another one of these media consumption diet posts. So where do I get my news these days?

Over the last couple of years, I've given up and accepted that if I want quality online journalism, I have to pay for it. And given how little of anything else I've had to spend money on this pandemic year, I've gone hog wild on supporting journalism/paying for subs. So these days, I pay for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.  I donate dollars/memberships/subscriptions to probably 20 other web-available journalistic outfits, from my neighborhood's Mission Local to Open Democracy. 

Since I've set myself up to have access to so many periodicals and other sources, how do I decide what to read first? I can't, and don't want, to read everything. Some of choices are topical: I keep an eye on election information, follow my country's imperial adventures, and am curious about the sociology of U.S. religion. I'm always interested in demographics and in struggles for more justice. I don't chase stories of outrages for outrage's sake, but if activism can accomplish something, I want to know what people are doing.

But I've made so much web based information accessible to myself, that I've had to figure out what to bother to check out and what to skip. And I realize that more and more I follow particular individual commentators, particular bylined writers, that I've learned to trust. If they move on from one outlet to another, I'm likely to follow. For example, I subscribe to The New Republic to keep up with Walter Shapiro. And I pay for New York Magazine for Olivia Nuzzi and Rebecca Traister. 

I'm consistently furious with the New York Times because I have to click on anything they categorize as a news story to find out who wrote it; other newspapers give the byline in the teaser. I would think the NYT union would be hopping mad, but I guess the prestige of writing for the Times overrides that slight to the authors. The other newspapers don't put me through that.

 

All of which brings me to the morning haul of email newsletters: I''m now following quite a few writers from whom I can learn, or who I enjoy, onto the Substack newsletter platform.

Anna Wiener explored Substack's business model for the New Yorker in December. From the consumer point of view, Substack is a medium through which to pay for and read email newsletters from writers I've discovered elsewhere -- usually on more recognizable journalistic platforms. This fits very well with how I read in other venues. Wiener is skeptical; she rightly observes that the form largely works for writers who have already established themselves elsewhere. 

But for the moment, I'm finding various Substacks satisfying. I use them to keep up with people who annoy me (Matt Yglesias via Slow Boring and Yascha Mounk via Persuasion come to mind) but who nonetheless make my horizons wider. I read Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American) putting current events in U.S. historical perspective with pure pleasure. I read David Roberts (Volts) because nobody explains climate change better. I'm grateful to Peter Beinart for being honest about U.S. empire and also about Israel/Palestine. Ditto Tony Karon. Nadia Bolz-Weber and Diana Butler Bass expand my religious sensibilities. 

Yes, all this adds up. I'm not sure how long I'll keep it up. I'm not sure how well the Substack phenomenon will hold up either; these people are out on their own creating a lot of content with little support. 

Media changes -- that's why I like to review my media consumption diet every few years.

I'm from the stay mad and get even school of political philosophy

I still think my Erudite Partner is full of it on this subject. But if the musings of a philosopher/mathematician-manqué on the orange sociopath's TV show interest you, read it all here.

Just keep in mind:

Trump will sacrifice Americans to coronavirus if it will save the market and his prospects for re-election. Which is to say that given the choice between solidarity and barbarism, Trump will choose barbarism. We’ll see, in November, if the rest of the country follows suit.

Jamelle Bouie

Let's think differently ... ?

One of the oddest things about the current political moment is that Billionaire Mike's bullion is resuscitating a dying medium as a political tool.

Broadcast TV is on its way to extinction. Younger people don't watch TV though they certainly consume plenty of product through screens. Only time sensitive events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars draw significant live audiences.

But TV still outpaces all other information sources -- social media, radio, print -- when it comes to "news." Those of us immersed in other media may wonder at that, but survey data says it is true.

The political campaign serves as a "made for TV" event and ongoing spectacle. Because national terrors are real, it's quite a draw. Wednesday's delightful debate was the most watched primary debate ever. Kick billionaire butt, Liz!

In the big states, particularly the Super Tuesday anchors California and Texas, TV really remains the most likely point of contact with the whole kerfuffle for most potential votes. Only Bloomberg can afford to rule there. Justin Powers has reported on watching 185 Bloomberg ads, immersed in what he quotes Elizabeth Spiers describing as "mediocre messaging at massive scale." He concludes that Bloomberg has made himself "inescapable," but we still don't know if that equals "electable." You can replicate Powers's disturbing media diet by following this link.

Many political professionals had come to doubt the efficacy of TV advertising; they had measured the effect of any ad as small and fleeting, gone in about a week at best. We're getting to see whether flooding the zone can overcome that -- or whether real world events such as the Nevada debate and caucuses (and Trump rallies) can interrupt the flow.

I think I would not bet on TV even at Bloomberg volume. But, to my horror, I might be proved wrong.

Out of my clutter: offered to your brain

"Talk to any electric utility company and they will explain."

There's a signal to run screaming from any opinion column or columnist....

David Neiwert reflects on far right marches in Portland, OR and Washington, DC.

... we have also learned that far-right activists prefer to march without opposition—and that when the opposition is overwhelming in numbers, they may just choose to remain at home. That will be useful knowledge down the road.

...
Why getting news from TV and videos is a recipe for missing nuance ... this apparently is why I almost never choose to watch video feeds.

One thing that normal consumers may not appreciate is that there is a wide gulf in the information density offered by print media and on television news. In the first 15 minutes of a Trump rally in New Hampshire earlier this week, he said about 1,700 words. The average American reads about 238 words per minute, meaning that you could read Trump’s remarks in about half the time it took him to say them. And he was speaking without commercial interruption or any back-and-forth with a network anchor. This article would have taken you twice as long to read out loud to this point as it has been for you to read it silently.

Philip Bump

I do sacrifice learning what people and scenes look like. Is my trade off worthwhile?...
If we are going to have cars in cities ...

Media consumption diet: podcasts

I haven't written one of these for awhile, so why not? Anyone who reads here will have noticed that I consume a lot of books in audio form. Of late, I've found myself "reading" quite a few serialized podcasts.

Serialized literature was, after all, what built the emerging magazine culture of the late 19th and early 20th century. Podcasts are another booming new form of media, still finding its potential and consequently still often imaginative. I don't go looking for serials, but the same outfits where I find weekly podcasts seem to be producing them. Obviously, their creators believe the extended format gives them additional tools with which to explore their topics.

Last year I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight's The Gerrymandering Project, which explored and explained this moderately technical subject as six podcasts over six weeks. Anyone looking for a solid explantion of an important political challenge should listen up.

Also last year, I listened to fourteen episodes of The Wilderness from Crooked Media, which offered Jon Favreau and the other Obama boys' take on how the Democratic Party lost its way before and after the 2016 election. Since this has been very much my subject over decades, I found it uneven, though ambitious and more broad than I had expected. It was meant as fodder and encouragement for mobilization for the 2018 elections and probably served its purpose well.

These days I'm on episode three of The Asset from The Moscow Project. It explains "Trump's history with Russia, from his extensive business dealings with Russian oligarchs to his presidential campaign and the investigations that have sent some of his closest associates to prison." Three episodes in, I'm appreciating the orderly narrative structure they are giving to previously reported events and connections. That's vital storytelling.

A miscellany of podcasts I often listen to:

Press the Button: National security from the point of view of people who know that war will not make us safer.

The Weeds: All policy all the time. Matt Yglesias is snotty and jaded, but insightful. Dara Lind is simply the best immigration reporter around. Jane Coaston brings genuine familiarity with right wing opinion.

Ezra Klein Show: Klein has been writing a book on what the hell is going on with our dysfunctional politics; his resulting interviews with all sorts of thinkers including conservatives who aren't mouth-breathers have been fascinating. He's very good at conversation. I don't find him so interesting when his explorations shift to woo-woo stuff, but your mileage may vary.

The Lawfare Podcast: Sometimes stuffy and pretentious, other times a thought-provoking offering from the legal website at the Brookings Institution. They are good at presenting recordings of smartly abridged Congressional testimony -- there are few experiences quite like listening to Michael Cohen while running.

Deep State Radio: Informed, charming, slightly miserable commentators commiserate about the condition our condition is in. David Rothkopf, Rosa Brooks, Kori Schake, and Ed Luce are the core.

Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick: All things Supreme Court. Informative.

Politics Podcast at FiveThirtyEight: Data guru Nate Silver, reporter Clare Malone, and a revolving cast of others kick around what can be discerned about election horseraces. They are usually dispassionate and often accurate.

The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk: A global exploration of "populism" from a European-inflected political science perspective.

Trumpcast: Yascha Mounk is here too, along with journalists Virginia Heffernan and León Krauze. Interviews about all things Trump and US politics and culture with interesting guests. Short, which sometimes entertaining, sometimes encouraging.

On the Media: Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield were in radio before podcasts were cool and these fully produced explorations of whatever catches their left-leaning, often skeptical fancies achieve unmatched journalistic professionalism -- at least in this list.

With Friends Like These: Ana Marie Cox is self-revealing, oh-so-woke -- and sometimes wise, while presenting a diverse cast of guests. I think she benefits from having escaped the nation's media hubs by decamping to Minneapolis.

What to do about Facebook?

Or is it? Sign from Occupy 2012

Anne Applebaum writes that we must somehow regulate Facebook, proclaiming: The future of democracy is at stake. She likens our love/hate relationship with the behemoth to radio's value to totalitarians in the 1930's, pointing to Hitler's broadcast bile. (She also name checks Stalin although a cursory web search on Soviet radio suggests it was more mind-numbingly boring than effective propaganda -- not wide enough access.) She points out that at present we are leaving the decisions as to what flies in social media to the profit-seeking tech entrepreneurs who own the companies and who have not necessarily demonstrated they have the interests of society at heart. She concludes

If we don’t do it [regulate] — if we don’t even try — we will not be able to ensure the integrity of elections or the decency of the public sphere. If we don’t do it, in the long term there won’t even be a public sphere, and there won’t be functional democracies anymore, either.

That is, she's fully on the war path.

The hook for Applebaum's article is that Facebook, after over a year of cooperation, decided without notice or explanation to deactivate ProPublica's browser plug-in which tracked what political ads were targeted to users who installed it. I knew that; my Facebook feed stopped allowing me to post articles with previews one day recently and began flipping around randomly. By trial and error, I figured it was the ProPublica thing, removed it, and the feed now mostly works as I'd come to expect it to.

So I very much get Applebaum's point; Mark Zuckerberg is offering a front end view of our world that masquerades as a neutral public utility -- until he wants to control how we use his toy marketing environment.

Whether we think Facebook should be regulated hangs a lot on what we think it is/how we choose to use it. If it is primarily a venue to socialize and share fun stuff for which we pay by getting ads thrown in our faces, it's just a another slightly more friendly broadcast medium -- like TV, but addictingly interactive. If we use it as a source of information without a lot of discernment, we're nuts. I wouldn't look at anything cute or adrenaline-raising on Facebook unless I would be willing to browse the website that hosts it directly. That deprives me of some potential web connections, but it seems worth it. If I looked at a bunch of venues I'd never heard of, then I'd have to research them for accuracy. I'm used to the inaccuracies and coverage lapses of my known media outlets.

I participate in Facebook because I share my blog posts in that venue -- that is I'm broadcasting. Facebook doesn't seem to show my stuff around much; don't know if that's because my friends aren't interested (their right) or because of some incompatibility with the algorithm.

My blog appears in 3 1/2 web places: its home page: via Twitter automatically; on Facebook which I have kept up manually since August when the platform broke the auto-post function I had used; and intermittently as a "diary" on Daily Kos when the subject matter seems appropriate. I have friends who do not overlap in all those venues. That's okay with me, though I suspect it is not so okay with Mr. Zuckerberg's world-engulfing dreams.

There is something wrong with the reality that a private company -- a private person in fact -- determines what we get to see on such a vital access point for so many. And there's something wrong with the fact that media organizations have built their distribution mechanisms around Facebook only to find that an unpredictable algorithm has tweaked them away from their audience.

Vox has published a sort of symposium marking Facebook's 15th anniversary. Some entries were thought provoking:

• Meredith Broussard: We need more regulation of Facebook and tech companies. I think that we have done the experiments of “let’s try this and see how it goes.” And it has not gone as well as we have hoped. We need to have a conversation about this, as a public and as a community. I think part of the problem has been that we have a couple of a couple of people saying that this is how it’s going to be and trying to govern tech as a dictatorship. I think we’re a democracy, and we need to have a public conversation about it.

• Aminatou Sow: ... as citizens we cannot outsource our privacy and security to tech moguls. They always have ulterior motives and we are pawns in their game. We are living the consequences.

• Peter W. Singer: Facebook is a kind of mirror of what exists in real life. We use it, and the network of companies it’s bought — from Instagram to WhatsApp — to reflect out to the world the stories of our lives. ... The question of its net positive or negative, thus, will be answered by what we see in that mirror, and what each of us chooses to do about it.

• Antonio Garcia-Martinez: Technologies, particularly in the media sphere, seem to inevitably move from improbable contraption, to dangerous tool whose implications are worryingly discussed, and thence to dull and semi-obsolete utility.

What do you think about our ubiquitous companion?

Who are men?

As a rule, I don't put much energy into thinking about men and manhood. One of the great benefits of age, economic stability, and lesbian-identification is that I don't have to. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of men around me who I like and even admire. I just enjoy the privilege of thinking of them as people, not as men.

So I probably would never have listened to the podcast from Death, Sex and Money called Manhood, Now if they hadn't partnered with FiveThirtyEight which dropped it in my feed.

Their polling findings from over 1600 respondents are fascinating. Here's what men worry about:

If I hadn't told you this was what men worry about, would you have known these were the concerns of guys? I'm not sure I would have; women worry about the same stuff, though perhaps not so much about the appearance of our genitalia.

But the interviews in the podcast were absolutely fascinating to me.

"Don’t be weak. Don’t be small. Don’t be poor. Don’t be emotional. Don’t be feminine. Don’t be aggressive. Don’t be unapproachable. Don’t be sexist. Don’t be patronizing. Don’t be entitled. Don’t be unemotional. Don’t be big. Don’t be loud.

You might notice a lot of contradictions here."

These interviewers did a great job of mixing conversations with men of many ages, races, sexual orientations, and gender identities in 43 minutes. If interested in contemporary masculinity, highly recommended.

Trump's video trailer for his nothingburger summit

Much of the media finds this weird video apparently gifted from Trump to Kim simply dumbfounding. I don't.

A story: years ago, when I was doing some consulting on organizational effectiveness for the ACLU, I had the sad duty of researching and explaining one of the facts of life to the civil liberties groups' brilliant director. According the best opinion studies, about 16 percent of citizens thought TV cop dramas were documentaries, literally true. (Obviously these folks had no personal experience of police or courts.) This phony film is for these same people. I doubt if it will occur to polling and marketing companies to inquire, but it is aimed at the segment of the population who will believe it. They exist.

Letter to some editors

Dear Washington Post,

Why so mealy-mouthed? The nomination of Gina Haspel to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency has once again raised awareness of the torture practices the George W. Bush regime instigated, allowed, and covered for in the wars of the '00s. Nobody disputes that Haspel ran one of the "black sites" where the CIA literally taught itself how to torture, using the body of Abu Zubaydah. Nobody disputes that she dispatched the order to destroy video tapes of waterboarding, though the CIA contends she was just following orders (no shit, that's how this action is discussed.)

But over and over, the Washington Post writes around what all the world calls by its name: torture. Some samples:

• "techniques often referred to as torture"

• "[Senator Rand] Paul also intends to vote no because of her role in harsh interrogations during the Bush administration."

The debate is over. The torture apologists lost. The US tortured and has been rightly condemned around the world. Even that careful Senator Diane Feinstein calls what we were doing "torture."

Call it what is was. Get real with your "Democracy Dies in Darkness" stuff. Democracy dies when truth is obscured by phony polite obfuscations.

Yours sincerely,

A concerned citizen

Reality through a mirror, darkly

Brooke Gladstone, co-host of the On the Media radio show and podcast, was just as gobsmacked as any of us by the Cheato's electoral victory in November. She wanted to delve into what made such a perverse result possible -- so she spent the first few months of 2017 writing a small book (or longish essay), The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time.

If you are an OTM listener (and you should be), you can almost hear Gladstone declaiming her disgust, her puzzlement (she's good at puzzlement) and her erudition in these slight pages. In this book she does not tackle the almost over-covered alienation of older, poor white America from our democracy; she was well versed in that horror story through a series on entrenched rural poverty she broadcast in the months before the election. Rather, she wants to know what it is about us as human animals in society that makes us marks for a demagogic con man. She essentially concludes, after a quick tour through the insights of such pop social science luminaries as George Layoff and Drew Westen, that just about all of us are natural suckers, at least some of the time.

Michael Signer, author of Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies wrote that true demagogues must meet four criteria ...: They must pose as a mirror for the masses; ignite waves of intense emotion; use that emotion for political gain; and break the rules that govern us. Enter Donald Trump, gasbag billionaire, reality-TV hotshot, invincible ratings rocket. Stressed by shrunken audiences and revenue, the media are willing marks for a candidate their own pundits variously describe as a “carnival barker,” a “crackpot,” “the biggest goofball ever to enter the Oval Office Sweepstakes,” and a “tire fire in an expensive suit.”

... Trump’s mirror did not present a pretty picture, but to those who saw themselves reflected there, it offered the deep relief of validation. It was a mirror reflecting loss, righteous anger, and future redemption.

... Trump’s rhetoric underscored what his supporters already believed: that the politicians, professors, scientists, and coastal elites who wept great salt tears over immigrants and minorities didn’t care about, didn’t see, the coming catastrophe.

Trump saw....

Since Gladstone's beat is the media, she is hard on her own profession: economic incentives made (and make) Trump the most efficacious, profitable click bait to come along since the digital revolution; how could the media resist giving him a dominating podium from which to perform his lying show? Media have to make money, even if parts of these outlets also aspire to professional journalistic credibility.

Gladstone observes:

... The sheer abundance of lies demonstrates, again and again, that facts are disposable, confusing devices that do not serve you, that do not matter. ... This fantastical world of unkillable lies and impotent truths arose because much of the country had accepted Trump’s deal: Believe what he says, or don’t and assume with a wink and a nod that you are in on the joke.

... As of this writing, ... investigations may well prove the most effective weapon; but for Trump, who reflexively attacks any democratic institution that criticizes or constrains him, the leaks are more infuriating. They threaten his most crucial power source: public opinion. Lose that, and he deflates faster than a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

So he dominates the ether to ensure that thorny facts find no purchase there. And if he can neutralize one institution in particular, an institution that is not an institution, the rest of the resistance can probably be managed.

Clearly, the press is vulnerable. ...

Interestingly, to me, this essay is surprisingly hopeful that we needn't be mired in the current slough of deceit and despond forever.

American history is pocked with ferment, battles, and brawls over what is true. But at this moment, the nation seems to be waging civil war over reality itself. It is thrilling to watch, and tough to sit out, because the stakes are so high. But how will it end? [The German emigre philosopher of the 20th century Hannah] Arendt suggests that demagogues have a fatal vulnerability: “The deceivers started with self-deception.” ...

During the Bush II regime, our imperial dreamers insisted, when we act, we create our own reality ... They acted, they invaded Iraq because they wanted to, and reality has been biting us, and even more the peoples of the Greater Middle East, ever since. People eventually notice when they keep painfully stubbing their toes! But turning the ship of state is hard work as a president elected to do just that found out.

Gladstone wants us to avoid facile confidence that truth wins out. We all have to train ourselves to get better at discerning reality among emotional and intellectual prompts from both foes and friends.

Meaningful action is a time-tested treatment for moral panic. …But activism alone does not address the bigger issue, the focus of this tract. You cannot march to a long-term solution to your reality problem with a cadre of like-minded allies. That is a solitary journey, and it never ends. You have to travel out of your universe into the universe of others, and leave your old map at home. ...

... Personally, I wouldn’t blame you, whatever you choose to do or not do. It is possible that, after just a few bad years, all this horror, the terrible mystery of it, will slowly sink beneath our carefully curated horizons from whence it came. But we can’t simply retreat back into our own realities after what we’ve seen.

Though we are quite adept at not seeing, unseeing is an altogether different matter. We experienced reality crash. Now our reality is going to need some tweaking.

Facts are real and will reassert themselves eventually. In order to repair our reality, we need more of them, from people and places we do not see.

***Gladstone's essay reminds me that I should do an update on my perennial subject: media consumption diet. Since the Trump election, like many others, I've become more willing to pay for online news sources, adding subscriptions to the Washington Post and the Guardian to my usual menu. Will this omnivorous media consumption endure? I don't know. For the moment, I can afford it. There's more to read than I choose to consume daily.

What are you listening to now?

Since I'm training for an ultramarathon these days, I'm getting as much of my news by ear (podcasts) as by eye (reading). As I lumber along, sometimes I'll listen to escapist fare -- but often I'll want a dose of new White House outrages.

To this end, I've added some new podcasts to my repertoire:


These four come from an outfit that calls itself Crooked Media. Whenever there is a change of administration, there are staffers cut loose from important, often satisfying, sometimes powerful, jobs. When the incoming administration is a wrecking crew of doubtful rectitude, what better for such people to do than take their communication skills, their knowledge of how systems actually work, and their commitment to progressive policy goals -- and create a small political podcast empire?

Jon Favreau (former Obama speech writer), Jon Lovett (speech writer to both H. Clinton and Obama), Dan Pfeiffer (Obama communications strategist) and Tommy Vietor (former national security spokesman) discuss all things political on Pod Save America. Their background gives them access to major political figures like Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee, while their relative youth and new outsider status keeps things fresh.

On Pod Save the World, Vietor uses his foreign policy experience to talk about ... well, the world. His previous job gives him access to actual experts on places like Syria and China. Would that the Trump administration seemed to have a clue about any of this.

Pod Save the People is activist Deray McKesson's showcase for everything from the fight for voting rights to an interview with Edward Snowden in which the fugitive gives his slant on Trump firing FBI director Comey.

With Friends Like These is Ana Marie Cox's attempt to prove that people can talk with each other, often across wide differences. Cox founded Wonkette, a great site for raw news.

Two other podcasts I find informative these days:
There was a time when discussions among national security legal eagles would have repelled me. I don't trust that their point of view leads anywhere but justification for overreach by the powers-that-be. But Trump's shenanigans have brought me to this source and so I find myself appreciating Lawfare. Somebody still thinks law matters, even if it isn't the President and his enablers.

On the Media is a long time favorite, now more vital than ever. Brooke Gladstone and Bob Edwards are journalists who can pick up the scent of bullshit -- most notably when it emanates from people whose sympathies they might well share. We need this talent these days.

What are you listening to?

Media consumption diet

Today a friend offered this:

I'm doing my best to boycott / not listen to any Chump speeches / press conferences for as long as I can. It's a self-preservation thing (gotta watch the blood pressure and anxiety levels) but also a strategic thing. He lies half the time (or more), retracts the other half, and almost all of it is nonsense, not to mention white supremacist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-poor people and anti-planet. ... We have to get smart, people, and play the long game. The stakes are too high to do anything else.

To this I respond a loud AMEN. Part of keeping our sanity is controlling how much bullshit we have to sort through.

An article from Politico describes the perils of the Trumpian information environment. The orange con-man is working hard to get into our brains.

What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us—hypothetically, of course—that there had been serious voter fraud in Virginia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way).

Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking—it happens automatically and effortlessly—the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place. As Gilbert writes, human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.”

Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly ...But Trump goes a step further. If he has a particular untruth he wants to propagate—not just an undifferentiated barrage—he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads.

Ah, yes, today he's selling voter fraud snake oil.

We do have a defense mechanism: we can make thoughtful choices about what information we consume and how we consume it.

I have a confession to make. As yesterday's post showed, I'm a news consumer formed by the Vietnam-era. By that I mean that I have almost never in a long life trusted government statements, especially about our foreign military adventures, but even about most anything. I've worked a long life in politics of various kinds. I've seen a fair number of politicians in action. By and large, I don't consume anything they say either, at least not by way of TV or video. I might listen to some audio or scan the text of a pronouncement, but infrequently. In general, I try to wait a little until the dust has settled before consuming complicated stories. For one ancient example, although I was surrounded by headlines and shouting TVs, I intentionally didn't attempt to understand the ins and outs of Watergate/the Nixon impeachment until after that crook resigned; I waited til All the President's Men came out. Far more recently, I didn't really try to understand the ins and outs of Obamacare until Dems finally managed to write the law.

Yet I've never felt seriously under-informed. As I've written here before, I scan the New York Times for a general picture of what the talkers of the world are talking about. On most topics, the headlines are plenty. Most of my input comes from other sources; these days I'm liking Talking Points Memo, Slate, and Vox. On this blog, I'll usually find a mainstream source for anything contemporary I want to discuss, but my reflections have often been spurred by something I encountered elsewhere, including from the sites on the blog list at the right.

I ignore Twitter. Half a decade ago I assembled a list of interesting reporters to follow. It worked for awhile, pointing me to journalism I might want to read. But then most Twitter users, including the journalists, turned the platform into a playpen for clever self-display, so I've stopped caring.

I do consume podcasts, particularly those from the same sources I also read online. That's because podcasts work well with my running habit.

And I still read widely in that obsolete source: books! Historical experience both alarms and reassures. It can help us survive Trump; after all, we're writing our own saga of defending democracy and decency in a mature capitalist, multi-ethnic, over-burdened society and planet. Let's make it a good story!***UPDATE on how I read news: this morning, the Washington Post has a headline that reads "Trump signs executive orders clearing way for oil pipelines to move forward." That's a story there is no point in reading. We knew he'd do that. Soon enough, in other venues, I'll be able to read how Native nations, water protectors, and friends are responding. That's worth reading.

Graphic stolen from Slate.

Facebook rant

I'm feeling a little rant about Facebook. Why should I have to look at bullshit like what I've posted next to this?

Both these ads are obvious fakes. Both gents are alive and more or less kicking. But somebody pays Mark Zuckerberg to show them to me in the vain hope that I'll click on them.

And this crap is inescapable. I have no control over what turns up next to my feed -- and no control over what turns up in my feed. Twenty percent or so of that seems to consist of planted garbage from institutions that some friend incautiously "liked" at some point. I mean, I don't hate the National Geographic or Amnesty International, but if want to relate to them I can visit their digital premises. In no sense have I asked for them just because someone I know "liked" them once.

I didn't like AOL back in the day -- that ancient (1983-2009) connectivity service tried to give us a diminished internet selected to meet AOL's commercial needs. AOL mailed half the population floppy disks in the hope we'd sign on. Many did, for awhile, till they discovered they didn't need it to venture online. AOL merged with/purchased Time-Warner as the temporarily more valuable partner in 2000. But most of us wanted an unfiltered web and that old AOL died of disuse.

But the unconstrained potential of the web apparently was too much for us. These days most all of us have allowed ourselves to be corralled in Zuckerberg's stable. I'd never look at Facebook except that too many of my friends and acquaintances who want to comment on my blog seem to live there. I try to be polite and friendly. I show courteous interest in others. I respond if contacted. But dammit, the space is a commercial playpen! I'd be quite happy if I never had to look at it again.

Anyone want to tell me what is good about Facebook?

What we are all asking ourselves ...

... and fearing the answers. Jay Rosen goes there. Professor Rosen (Journalism-NYU) has long been an observer of the foibles of a disoriented press and media. Thanks to Digby for storifying this series of tweets.

***"Don't hurt us, we'll be good!" Another Professor, Timothy Snyder, who teaches Central European history at Yale, gives this weasel response a useful label: "Anticipatory Obedience."

Politico reports on the legal avenues the Trump administration might use to constrain the press.

If Trump wants to wage war on the press, he certainly has the tools to do so. He can’t open up the libel laws, but he could still make life very difficult for the reporters covering his administration. For now, all reporters and media lawyers can do is remain vigilant and push back if Trump tries to restrain or punish the press. If the Trump administration takes unprecedented steps to prosecute journalists under the Espionage Act, it will face aggressive legal challenges.

Fine -- if journalistic outlets don't flop into Anticipatory Obedience mode.

On the other hand, Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post reports that engaged citizens can help the press do its job better by paying sharp attention:

... some Americans are tuning in. The New York Times and The Washington Post say subscriptions have soared since the election. The investigative outfit ProPublica, as well as other journalism nonprofit groups, report a flood of donations.

One Post reader wrote to me recently asking how her family’s foundation could help defend reporters against potential legal challenges. After conferring with Post Executive Editor Marty Baron, I suggested she consider a donation to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She got back to me to say that they had done just that — to the tune of $10,000. ...

Most of us can't do that. But we probably can subscribe to media we find make us more informed and vigilant.

Resist much, we must.