Edgy and interesting

Every once in a while, one of the best things about a book are its footnotes. That's how I felt about Tina Nguyen's The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out). Rather than burden her text with explications of the catalogue of right-wing think-tanks, conferences, and media outlets that she wandered through in her early career, she simply footnotes explanations. She knows most readers don't keep this map of right infrastructure in our heads.

(Okay -- to a considerable extent I do carry this stuff in my head, because I was employed when Nguyen was still a small child by a left think-tank that tracked those rabbit holes. Many are still the same outfits, but with new names. The personnel migrate. But such familiarity is rare where I come from.)

Nguyen explains the purpose of writing a memoir in her early 30s:

... if you are a liberal wondering why all this nativist populism seemed to come out of nowhere, to the point that it is on the precipice of subsuming American civic life, this book is for you. If you're a Republican who thought the GOP looked like a Mitt Romney paradise in 2012, believed that Trump was an aberration in 2016 and 2020, and have no idea why he's still a presence in 2024, this book is for you. ...

She disappointed her immigrant mother, Thanh Nguyen, by not getting into Harvard. A less than diligent student in high school at the private Milton Academy, she ended up following a boyfriend to Claremont McKenna in California with no idea she'd put herself on a conservative fast track that was invisible to world from which she came.

I'll give everyone else a pass on not knowing about the sheer scale of the right inside American civic life, because when I was a young conservative activist, I didn't know what they were trying to do either. Between 2008 and 2012 -- from college until my early twenties -- I was simply a politics nerd with an unnerving obsession with the US Constitution and American history, who dated an odd but highly ambitious conservative boy in high school and followed him to Claremont McKenna College, a renowned college with a notoriously conservative government department, and a deep affiliation with a right-wing think tank whose scholars and papers formed the backbone of the Trump doctrine.

From there I found some interesting internships through a local think tank, got involved in some weird ghoulish groups in Washington, DC, met Tucker Carlson, wanted to be Tucker Carlson, went to work for Tucker Carlson, experienced an identity crisis (as one does in their early twenties), and then left the movement to pursue a career in normal journalism (assisted by a nice favor from Tucker Carlson). In a bizarre twist, it brought me back to covering the movement ... when Donald Trump was elected. ...To the rest of the world, the things I'd taken for granted were actually obscure, esoteric, and hidden knowledge.

It's a convoluted story, but eventually she escaped the conservative news arena and has reported for Vanity Fair, Politico, and Puck, often covering Trump and the right wing boys emerging from the same swamp where she'd been nurtured. She writes it all with lingering amazement: these people are both formidable and a bit pathetic. She knows many of them are truly nuts; she's not convinced they won't someday take over America.

The warmest notes in the book are the descriptions of her mother, who pushed but also encouraged this strange American daughter to make a success of herself. When she was briefly hired by Tucker Carlson, her mother wondered:

"Oh, he's on television?" Mom asked. "You should ask him to help you get on TV. I think you'd be good on TV, like Connie Chung."

By the end of the book, her encouraging mother has died. Nguyen's book and still rising career seem a kind of memorial from a not very dutiful daughter who, perhaps, has made it in American journalism.

As queers have long insisted, we are everywhere

Tim Mak was reporting from the war in Ukraine for NPR until that network laid him off in March in response to funding shortfalls. The former DC journalist and US Army combat medic decided he wasn't done. So he has stayed on in that invaded country and launched a substack, The Counteroffensive, promising: 

Readers will come with me to cities all across Ukraine, tasting the soups made by Ukrainian cooks, meeting the heroic animal shelter volunteers in frontline cities, and listening to patriotic Ukrainian music that’s making a comeback.

You will also experience the cruelties of war: walking through bombed out cities with Ukrainian soldiers; late-night conversations in a bomb shelter with a four-star general; observing war crimes that the Russian military and Putin are responsible for.

Pursuant to that mission, along with his journalist friends, he followed a story -- and get a rude reminder of our domestic culture war.

Editor’s note: This week we posted a story highlighting a trans activist in Ukraine; after all, Russia cited LGBTQ+ rights as a reason for the war. We didn’t anticipate the negative reaction: more than 1,000 readers unsubscribed, and we lost paid subscribers as well.

For a publication that is just two months old, it was devastating. We work seven days a week to grow our audience. However, we believe that subscriber numbers don’t mean anything if we don’t hold true to our values. We will continue to highlight marginalized communities and the people you don’t hear about in other outlets.

The Counteroffensive offers both paid and free subs. Check it out. 

• • •

Over the past weekend, the Episcopal Church commemorated the life and witness of the civil rights activist and legal innovator, the Rev. Pauli Murray. Decades before Rosa Parks, Murray refused to move to the back of a segregated bus and was arrested for her pains. 

While in law school at Howard University in DC during World War II, she participated in sit-ins demanding service at a lunch counter that refused to serve Black people. (I think we can assume Murray would have viscerally recognized the threat to all public accommodation laws implicit in the Supremes' recent decision exempting a website designer from the legal obligation to serve all comers.) 

NAACP lawyer and future Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (he's May 17 in the Church calendar) called Murray's writing "the 'Bible' for civil rights litigators." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray for developing the legal underpinnings for Equal Protection law -- which is all we've got in the absence of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Late in life, Murray followed a calling to be ordained a priest, one of the first set of women to take up the vocation in 1977.

Murray enjoyed a long, complicated friendship with First Lady and human rights agitator Eleanor Roosevelt; the fragments in the previous couple of paragraphs derive from the short bio of Murray posted at the National Park Service site for one of ER's residences. 

That site attempts honestly and honorably to present one of the puzzles the amazing Pauli Murray sets for us in our current state of understanding of who people are (and who they were) to themselves:

Pronouns, Gender, Pauli Murray

Terminology and language referring to LGBTQ communities, gender expression, and gender identities is different today than it was in Pauli Murray’s lifetime. Murray self-described as a “he/she personality” in correspondence with family members. Later in journals, essays, letters and autobiographical works, Pauli employed “she/her/hers'' pronouns and self-described as a woman. Scholars use a range of pronouns when referring to Murray: “he/him/his” pronouns (Simmons-Thorne), “they/them/theirs” pronouns (Keaveney), “s/he” pronouns (Fisher), and “she/her/hers” pronouns (Rosenberg, Cooper, Drury). We don’t know how Pauli Murray would identify today or which pronouns Pauli would use for self-expression. This remains an ongoing discussion in the National Park Service, but we do recognize that pronouns matter.

Exactly. We don't know how Murray might have engaged with the possibilities of expanded understandings of sex and gender. But I think we can be sure she would have engaged forthrightly and bravely.

We can't let myths take over

In October 2022, in an article in the Atlantic which skewered the hypocrisy of Trump-enamored evangelical Christians, David French wrote:

A partisan mindset is a dangerous thing. It can make you keenly aware of every unfair critique from the other side and oblivious to your own side’s misdeeds. I was indignant about attacks against Romney, for example, while brushing off years of birther conspiracies against President Barack Obama as “fringe” or “irrelevant.”

Then, of course, Republicans nominated Trump, the birther in chief, and the scales fell from my partisan eyes.

French is a former staff writer for the National Review. That is, he's a conservative guy. He hold views on abortion that privilege a zygote over a living, breathing adult potential mother. But he's also a morally serious member of the never-Trump center right who will argue that the contemporary Republican Party is a danger to majoritarian democracy. He knows his Christian comrades on the right and I find his explorations of that world thoughtful.

This excellent background has now earned French an opinion writing slot at the New York Times. I will read him with some interest, especially if his new digs don't cut him off from the grassroots Republican evangelicals I find so inexplicable. He seems genuinely interested in overcoming partisan strife.

But his introductory column includes a casual affirmation of a right-wing myth that no serious commentator should be peddling. He writes of "the riots of summer 2020" in reference to the Black Lives Matter protests over the police murder of George Floyd -- and of so many other victims. 

The notion that the protests of that summer were somehow widespread eruptions of deliberate mob violence -- on a par with Trump supporters' attack on Constitutional process on January 6 -- is propagandistic nonsense.  

93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) analyzed more than 7,750 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in all 50 states and Washington D.C. that took place in the wake of George Floyd’s death between May 26 and August 22.

Their report states that more than 2,400 locations reported peaceful protests, while fewer than 220 reported “violent demonstrations.” The authors define violent demonstrations as including “acts targeting other individuals, property, businesses, other rioting groups or armed actors.” Their definition includes anything from “fighting back against police” to vandalism, property destruction looting, road-blocking using barricades, burning tires or other materials. In cities where protests did turn violent—these demonstrations are “largely confined to specific blocks,” the report says.

Sure -- there were a few locations where protests turned into violent chaos -- Portland and Kenosha come to mind. But mostly folks marched and demonstrated peacefully in cities and towns across the country. Getting the rage and grief out in the open threatened some people but engaged millions of others carefully and thoughtfully.

This small, mostly white, gathering on Martha's Vineyard was probably quite typical.

In the same issue where Mr. French's new column appeared, the paper is still following up on the New York's Civilian Complaint Review Board's report on the 750 complaints against the police that came out of the 2020 protests. Even this quite toothless body reckoned that, in some instances, police had used pepper spray indiscriminately and beaten protesters with batons while covering up their identifying badges. The Police Union is predictably wroth that any blame for violent episodes might be placed on the cops. I'm sure protesting New Yorkers think the report is a whitewash.

It's hard to credit writers who casually repeat partisan myths. We all have to be conscious of our partisan blinders.

Interesting people; engaged reporting

Historian Deborah Cohen's Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War strikes me as an odd but charming picture of a coterie of journalists who were significant interpreters of the wide world -- so foreign, so exotic -- for middle Americans in the 1920s and '30s -- and who have nearly disappeared from our, always feeble, historical memories. These people were part of my parent's mental furniture in the 1930s.

Cohen's core subjects are HR (Knick) Knickerbocker, Vincent (Jimmy) Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, and John Gunther. They lived within an "outer circle" of people whose fame has proved more enduring: the playwright and novelist Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy's brilliant, unhappy alcoholic husband; William Shirer, the author of the magisterial Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; in Britain, the literary Bloomsbury Group; and in India, the anti-imperial movement leader and later president, Jawaharlal Nehru.

They ventured from the American midwest to the old world, young and brave after the Great War of 1914-18. They checked out Moscow, open to seeing a new sort of human being raised up in the Soviet Union after the horrors of war and revolution. Disillusionment in the person of Stalin and with his dictatorship came by the end of the 1920s, as one man and his apparatus replaced the creative moment they had welcomed.  

The United States was not yet much of an empire, so an instinctive anti-British, anti-colonialism came easily. Some of them developed real connections to the Indian National Congress movement; Jimmy Sheean was visiting Gandhi in 1947 when that mystical and mysterious figure was murdered. In the interwar period, Zionism in Palestine also seemed to some of them an anti-colonial cause, a struggle against the British mandate authorities who had been imposed on the land by the Peace of Versailles in 1919. Others were alert to Zionist fascism, an exterminationist force frighteningly akin to American treatment of our continent's native peoples.

But the center of their reporting was Europe, especially fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the European states -- Austria, Czechoslovakia, Spain -- where the rising authoritarian moment played out. They worked for whatever newspapers and syndicates would pay them and chased interviews with heads of state and political leaders, who to an extent amazing today, often took them up on their invitations to talk.  Gunther boasted of having landed British Prime Minister Lloyd George, President Mazaryk of Czechoslovakia, and King Carol of Romania while Knickerbocker one-upped his friend by getting to Mussolini and Francisco Franco. Dorothy Thompson was the first American woman to head a major news bureau in Berlin -- and the first American to get an interview with Hitler in 1931. The Nazi leader had not yet come to power, but his party's popularity was surging.

She was all prepared, she would write, to be bowled over by Hitler. But less than a minute in his presence, and what struck her was his "startling insignificance." "I Saw Hitler!" was scathing. "He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she began, noting the dictator's boneless face, his awkward gestures, his shyness. ... Could such a man rule Germany? He was "an agitator of genius," Thompson judged. Of course his theories made no sense, but she well knew too, that "reason never yet swept a world off its feet."

Thompson was the first U.S. correspondent expelled from Berlin when the Nazis came to power. And with time she became ashamed of how lightly she'd taken Hitler's potential for evil. All Cohen's subjects were viscerally anti-fascist by the late 1930s. Knickerbocker and Sheean served in the American military in World War II; Thompson broadcast for NBC from Britain under the German bombs of the Blitz.

They make fascinating subjects for biography because they were interesting people as well as interesting as journalists. They were premature practitioners of a loose, if often tortured, culture of sexual exploration, their biographies a chronicle of complicated marriages, affairs, and gender fluid liaisons. As proper interwar moderns, they had a faith that they should understand themselves (and fuck better) by undergoing Freudian analysis. They were seldom very happy.  

Their journalism was emphatically not fair and balanced. They brought fixed principles, which they thought of as American and democratic, to their subjects and reported what they observed through a moral lens. Their journalistic employers let them get away with discarding any pretense of objectivity because, I think, the wide world to which they introduced Americans seemed so exotic. How could you be "objective" when writing about a mystic like Gandhi and monsters like Hitler and Stalin? 

We do not, I think, see their like today. Reporters and pundits are required to nod to "one the one hand, on the other hand." We could use more of such free spirits; if we're to preserve American democracy, we need them.

We need truth. We need truth tellers.

The Swedish committee which awards the Nobel Peace Prize annually chose two brave journalists as this year's winners. Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia both risk their lives in order to publish factual news which their violent rulers hate and fear.

Here's a short clip of Ressa explaining why she chooses her dangerous vocation.

If you don't have facts, you can't have truth. If you don't have truth, you can't have trust. If you don't have any of these three, democracy as we know it is dead.

Journalism's current diner genre

A long, largely sympathetic, feature in the Washington Post is number 1 at the moment among the most read stories. Once again, this is journalism treating human subjects as specimens in an exotic zoo. Remember all those reporters braving diners in Ohio after the 2016 election?

The reporter found an aggrieved right wing thug who lost his job after being an asshole to a freelance journalist with a camera at a protest in D.C. in November. Enterprising anti-fascist internet sleuths saw the pictures and managed to get him fired from his job as a iron-worker. His wife, not a participant in the scuffle, also lost her job, perhaps because the publicity over his loutish behavior -- or perhaps because Walmart was penalizing her for absences with a bad back. 

The right wingers are aggressive Trumpists; the anti-fascists are -- well -- anti-fascists. Hey, in many corners of this big country, there's that level of conflict between neighbors. We the people have very different visions of a good society and some of us act out for our choices, more and less peaceably. It's all amplified by media that spread passions far and wide. The conflict is over real, vital, moral and material futures.

But the Post completely fails to contextualize its dramatic story of an encounter between visions until this 13th paragraph -- the essential backstory to its gripping cartoon characters:

Conservatives typically portray militant antifascists as the far-left equivalent of violent armed groups on the hard right, but right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipse those from the far left and cause more deaths, a Washington Post analysis showed. The FBI regards far-right extremists as the most active and lethal domestic terror threat. 

That's the story in a nutshell -- the rest is under-examined color commentary. Evidently we can't resist giving the aggrieved terrorist genre plenty of clicks.

Motivated reasoning

It turns out our spooks (the so-called "intelligence community") aren't so sure after all that the story which many of us passed on last year about Russia offering bounties for kills of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was really true.

So says Charlie Savage, a reliable security issues reporter on the forever wars: 

... the administration stopped short of inflicting sanctions on any Russian officials over the suspected bounties, making clear that the available evidence about what happened — primarily what Afghan detainees told interrogators — continues to fall short of definitively proving the C.I.A.’s assessment that Russia likely paid money to reward attacks.

The intelligence community, a senior administration official told reporters, “assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019, and perhaps earlier, including through financial incentives and compensation.”

Naturally Joe Biden, many Democrats, and partisans like me were easily convinced by the idea. Trump had some kind of suck-up relationship with Putin. He had never been known to show any care for anyone's well-being but his own. Plus, for those of us who'd made an effort to understand the Afghanistan morass, it didn't seem far-fetched to wonder whether Russia might simply be replicating a tactic our own CIA had used while egging on jihadist fighters against Russian occupation in the 1980s.

It was all too neat and too convincing. 

Jeff Schogol who reports for military readers explains:

As the Democratic presidential candidate, Biden repeatedly hammered Trump for not taking action about the intelligence on the bounties, accusing Trump of failing in his responsibilities as commander in chief.

... But defense officials consistently told lawmakers and others that the Russian bounty reports could not be corroborated. In December, Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. head of U.S. Central Command, said in an interview that intelligence officials had been unable to prove the information about the alleged bounties.

“I relentlessly query my intelligence people on this,” McKenzie told Katie Bo Williams, who was a Defense One reporter at the time. “We just don’t see it — but it’s not because we’re not looking at it. We’re looking at it very hard.”

Now it appears the Biden administration doesn’t see it either.

I'm not happy to have joined the bandwagon on this one -- or any one. 

Weasel words

This is not the most important vexation in this moment, but this New York Times headline provoked me.

Either the Native American population dependent on the hospital were abandoned by the overlords of the U.S. Indian Health Service or that population is in the grip of a delusion. Which is it, Times? 

If you don't have an answer, you don't have a story. I wouldn't ask this of some amateur blog -- but the "newspaper of record" ...

I can understand why people think Trump should have won

How could it be that the election we have just survived was as close as it seemed? (It wasn't actually very close in truth; Biden won by about 6 million popular votes, but the crazy Electoral College system made the contest seem closer than it was.) This chart from Kevin Drum points me to one reality. 

For middle income people in this country, the four Trump years were pretty good. After the long trough that economic life was mired in during much of Obama times, by 2016 income was finally inching up. If you weren't alienated by Trump's misogyny, racism, corruption, cruelty, and generally embarrassing lunacy, what wasn't to like?

As better pundits sometime point out, presidents are only marginally responsible for good economic times. Events beyond their control can throw economic life into a tailspin -- note the chart doesn't include what has happened to median income since the pandemic. We won't fully know for awhile yet how bad a hit most people have taken. 

Meanwhile, whatever else pollsters missed, they always showed that people gave Trump good marks for "the economy." 

I've seen a suggestion somewhere (and am embarrassed to have lost the citation), that political journalists are scarred by their own position as precarious survivors in a dying industry. The thing we called "the economy" doesn't look good to them, as media outlets consolidate and jobs in their profession disappear. So it was hard for them to fathom that for many people, especially white mid-career and older ones, good times were back.

It's going to be very hard for Joe Biden and the Dems to promote economic health (equitable and greenish, we hope) if a Republican Senate can block every move. All the more reason to try to elect the two Democratic challengers in the run-off on January 5 in Georgia. I'll start back on the phones this week. Want to join me?

Why the Black vote is different

The polling postmortems of 2020 are going to be long and tough. At this early moment, pollsters seem to be suggesting that Donald Trump has successfully trained or deepened the instinct among his most rabid (largely white and rural) base not to answer the telephone. Well, maybe. If so, and this habit endures, not only will journalistic polling be left in the dark, but also internal campaign polling on which candidates make decisions about resources.

Then there's the polling of non-white citizens. We are nowhere close to understanding the behavior of the various segments of the Latinx electorate; we should wait for more depth of analysis. I've been attending to Latinx polling since 1994 and all I know is that polling among Latinx communities ALWAYS stinks. And it doesn't seem to improve much.

What I want to do here is pass along a very clear, insightful, Twitter thread from Nicole Hannah-Jones (Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones) which explains to journalists how to think about Black voting patterns. Hannah-Jones is the prime mover behind the New York Times 1619 Project, that magisterial exploration of how Black USA came to be. She's got a lot to say:

Again we see how expertise in race, racism, racial history is an essential but underdeveloped journalistic skill. That Latinos, Asian & white votes are split is NOT surprising. It is the uniformity of the Black vote that is exceptional & it stems from a singular racial experience.

Black Americans, because of a history of chattel slavery and racial apartheid, have been forced into a monolithic vote even as they hold diverse political views. That's [because] every aspect of Black Americans' lives was legally and socially constrained by their designation as Black.

A Black doctor, a Black immigrant, a Black Northerner, a Black evangelical all were barred from schools, jobs, housing, libraries, parks, voting, by law, by custom, by policy. Their individual attributes were literally irrelevant. Their citizenship and rights always contested.

This was true until a half century ago! I am part of the first generation of Black Americans in the history of this country for whom it was not illegal to deny me marriage rights, housing, education and employment simply because my ancestors had once been enslaved.

Thus, Black Americans have a shared history and shared racial experience that is singular in its uniformity, and Black Americans have always had to vote their civil and human rights over any other concerns or political issues. That is a different experience from other groups.

We tend to cover elections, our country overall, as if every group who is not white experiences racism, racial inequality and race the same, but there is a distinct experience of being the people on which the established racial hierarchy was built. We need more sophistication here.

Yes, please.

Dumb election punditry

It would be hard to imagine a sillier headline or a sillier premise.

Empathetic journalism

Let's celebrate -- and support -- the Mission's hyper-local news source. We are very fortunate in this resource.

May you live long and prosper, Ms. Drew!

That invaluable chronicler of Washington doings, Elizabeth Drew, turned 84 last week. She's still kicking.

If you were around during Watergate, Drew's long, careful accounts of Richard Nixon's disgrace in the New Yorker as A Reporter in Washington [paywall to archives] were the stuff of contemporary history. She was so measured, so detailed, that the confusing dramatics of the day seemed to evaporate in her telling -- only to re-emerge as a clear witness to the vitality of the Republic.

Early in the Trump administration in the winter of 2107, Ezra Klein interviewed Drew on his podcast. I remember being awed by her confidence that the institutions would prove stronger than the Trumpian bull let loose in the china shop of the presidency.

Last week, Drew brought her readers up-to-date on how she sees current political developments. As always, she's more quietly firm than alarmist. She still believes in the democratic (small "d") capacity of the people. And she has advice for today's Democrats. As she said on Twitter: "The great danger of playing today's politics [is] forgetting that it's making history."

... the great danger is that the legacy of this period will be that Mr. Trump got caught doing one bad thing rather than that he abused power across the board and wantonly violated the Constitution. The public is more than capable of understanding, among other things, that the president may have exploited his office to enrich himself, blatantly flouting the Constitution’s emoluments clause. ... I worry about the precedent set by focusing solely on Ukraine, an implicit view that other behavior — constant lying, redirecting government funds against Congress’s wishes (such as building a phantasmagorical wall), sloppiness with government secrets, using the military for political purposes, encouraging violence against the press, and still more — was acceptable.

All because of the schedule? History is unlikely to remember the schedule.

Don't cross this old lady!

A techno-optimist take on the disinformation explosion

One day I read that our overwhelming internet-obsessed culture is upending community ties or even undermining civilization. The next day I find myself in discussions of whether political campaigns' manipulation of our oh-so-fully-mined personal data -- think not only Facebook, but also Cambridge Analytica -- is sabotaging democracy. And then there are "fake news," and multiplying conspiracy theories, and "deep fakes," and inflammatory bots to worry about.

And then I remember a little history. In the 15th century, the strand of human civilization which Europeans imported to the Americas and from which this country springs underwent a technological disruption no less gargantuan than that we're experiencing driven by global cyber technology. The combination of the movable type printing press, access to ancient languages and learning imported from the Islamic east, and translation of the Bible into local languages broke up Christendom. The Protestant Reformation was literally revolutionary; over time all this made possible both capitalism and the envisioning of an individual possessed of "human rights". All these changes spread like wildfire across Europe, a continent then without borders as the nation-state had not yet been invented; that too was another product of the underlying technological revolution.

Quite a lot to follow on what seems a pretty simple invention, isn't it? And it's worth recalling that the civilization that sprang from it led also to a string of human atrocities -- most immediately the Thirty Years War which rivaled in barbarism the European wars of the 20th century, mercantile imperialism and the slave trade, and the horrors of unconstrained industrialization.

All of which I remember when I hear predictions of technological doom: the human animal has concocted, survived (barely), and thrived on technological invention before -- and probably will do the same in the global cyber-civilization.

I say to myself: we're clever beasts -- we'll figure it out.

All this is introduction to a fascinating article which describes how journalists, pooling tech-sourced information, have figured out how to make visible what bureaucrats and tyrants would prefer to hide:

Financial constraints have led many news organizations to downsize, leaving large gaps in foreign coverage and hollowing out investigative reporting. State and non-state actors that used to court foreign correspondents in the hopes of favorable coverage are now using the Internet to control their own narratives. Many see journalists as a nuisance or a threat. Social media chatter from foreign crises reaches audiences before it has been verified or contextualized. The pace and volume of this deluge have persuaded some newsrooms that sending journalists abroad is a fool’s errand.

With public trust in facts receding, competing narratives have come to dominate. News coverage has devolved, on one hand, into partisan hackery and, on the other, into a forced balance of “both-sides-ism.” Amid all this disarray, open-source journalism is restoring the primacy of facts and placing new emphasis on verification. It is also using digital media to cover parts of the world made inaccessible by war or distance.

... Part of open-source journalism’s new-found cachet comes from its methodological sophistication, but much of its credibility derives from its transparency. ... This is the closest that journalism has come to a scientific method: the transparency allows the process to be replicated, the underlying data to be examined, and the conclusions to be tested by others. This is worlds apart from the journalism of assertion that demands trust in expert authority.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad explains exhaustively how the successes of these tech-enabled open source collaborations spawned the organization Bellingcat which in turn penetrated the fog of war to bring truthful news from suffering Syria and many other hidden stories.

Just maybe, the same disruptive technologies that so enable "fake news" can be used to reestablish the authority of facts. Certainly smart journalists are trying. Just maybe, we'll figure it out.

UPDATE:  Elliot Higgins whose work is described in this article evaluated U.S. evidentiary claims of Iranian attacks on Gulf of Oman shipping in the NY Times. You can follow his method yourself in the day's news.

Where's the money for journalism to come from?

As anyone who has been reading journalists knows, US journalism has been suffering huge hits to reportorial muscle as thousand of people have lately been laid off by remnant print outlets like Gannett newspapers and online power houses like BuzzFeed and HuffPost.

People who want journalism to survive as a component of a healthy democracy and society have been struggling to come up with a sustainable new model. It must pay for serious news now that the local and regional advertising monopolies that were once your daily newspaper have been displaced by the internet.

I'm among those who worry that too many outlets will reinvent the tack taken by progressive social movements losing their steam in the 1980s and 1990s. Many tried to transform vigorous insurgent entities into plausibly "charitable" non-profit organizations in order to be attractive to institutional funders. That is, they/we went shopping for grants. They shied away from "politics" -- the contest for actual power. This reinforced a bias that the nitty-gritty pulling and hauling of local democracy was somehow dirty. This turn kept a semblance of grassroots activity alive, but, by professionalizing it, distanced it from the people who ought to have wanted and needed it most. The internet has to some extent brought back small donor fundraising and that has helped revive a more disruptive politics.

Josh Marshall, who runs a struggling small journalism business at Talking Points Memo, writes thoughtfully about the siren attraction of non-profit status. I've added some emphasis.

A more complicated question to me is non-profit support. To me the first cardinal point is that we should have a diverse news ecosystem – so a lot of different models is key. I think we all agree that Pro-Publica, which I see as the archetype nonprofit news operation, has become simply irreplaceable. But I do not think that’s a general model. The kind of deep diving PP does is very congenial to the nonprofit model.

I have some experience in the pre-PP nonprofit journalism sector. There’s a lot of great stuff. But one key problem is that you tend to follow your funders. I don’t mean that in a corrupt or mercenary sense. I mean that the funder wants to see this kind of stuff or that kind of stuff so that’s what you do.

That means their audience is fundamentally the foundations. That’s a problem. Because the customer and the audience should be the reader. I am not saying this is an unworkable problem. Again, a huge amount of great journalism is produced this way. So I am all for a vital nonprofit journalism sector, as opposed to my deep skepticism of government funding. I just don’t think it works as the dominant or majority model. You want your business to be fundamentally tied to your readers.

Marshall's model is to combine what amounts to small dollar fundraising (tiered subs) with some advertising and a lot of experimentation with various journalism delivery vehicles. So far this is working for TPM.

Another model of funding journalism is to depend on our oligarchs for funding. Think Jeff Bezos acquiring the Washington Post; Marc Benioff buying up Time magazine. (That one is a hoot for those of us who remember the Henry Luce publication.) Even the ascendancy of the younger generation of the Sulzberger family at the New York Times fits this pattern. Meanwhile the Mercers of hedge fund infamy have Brietbart. As much a feudal throwback as all this seems, it is how historically enterprises that didn't turn a profit have been funded: there would have been no great works of Michelangelo without the Medicis.

Marshall's experiment seems as promising as any, though there are probably limits to its scale. He does seem an incubator of journalism and journalists, an honorable role.

We are left to ask: do we want the thing that journalists do? If so, we have to support and more frequently pay for it.

On informing citizens

Linda Greenhouse, the long-serving New York Times Supreme Court reporter who has been contributing sporadic opinion columns since retirement in 2008, has turned several lectures she gave at Harvard into a pleasant little book: Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between.

In her view, journalistic professionalism has, in the craft's most exalted reaches such as the paper she worked for, been interpreted to require the muzzling of the reporter as a citizen. Anyone who read her reporting would know that Greenhouse believes women should have a legal right to abortion and that torture inherently violates national and international law. Yet when she said as much aloud, casually, in speeches on other topics, she met with intense criticism from media critics. Being a tough woman, she simply pushed on and did her job as she understood it. She was good enough at it that she got away with this uncompromising steadfastness.

The crisis of journalism's business model and the Trump ascendency have forced elite institutions to reexamine their goals and standards. We're in a new day when the "paper of record" announces forthrightly that the President is a liar. "Objectivity" -- he said, she said reporting -- has been fully unmasked as "a management tool to control the behavior of the newspaper's employees." Careful balancing of unequal "facts" both fails the reader and won't deflect criticism anyway. Unexamined stenography of the emissions of those with the most potent microphones serves no one (except maybe the loudmouths). She envisions more fruitful use of journalistic energy.

Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, publisher of the Times from 1935 to 1961 captured the newspaper's credo of impartiality with a saying: "We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat." Maybe that attitude was adequate in Sulzberger's day. Maybe it still is for sophisticated New York Times readers who take the time to sort through the cacophony of media voices retailing mutually exclusive versions of the truth. But surely we know now, in what has come to be called the post-truth age, that simply reporting which way the cat is jumping falls short if the goal of journalism is to empower readers to sort through the noise and come to their own informed conclusions. For that, they need context: not just what happened a minute ago, but what led up to that minute, why it happened, and what might come next.

That sounds obvious enough, but I was well into my three decades of covering the Supreme Court before I thought consciously of this kind of reader empowerment as a goal -- in fact the highest goal -- of journalism. ...

Today the internet provides access to raw information to anyone who will do the digging; the best of reporting, fair and accurate but without false "objectivity," can help us understand what to make of it all.

This graceful short book is well worth a couple of hours to read and ponder.

This is serious

Since the New York Times in its wisdom has seen fit to give space to one of our contemporary neo-Nazis, allowing a young fascist to project himself as just another warm, fuzzy American boy in the heart land, it seems time for this. [No link to the NYT on this one; they can promote their own click bait.]
If you want to know how the NYT screed reads, try "Nazis Are Just Like You and Me, Except They're Nazis" from the brilliant James Hamblin.

And to go deeper, there's this: "The Making of an American Nazi."

Among the white supremacists in Charlottesville

You probably don't want to watch this. I didn't either. However, you probably should. It is one of the most courageous, intelligent efforts at journalism I've seen in a long while.

Our home-grown fascists and white supremacists feel they don't get a fair chance to tell their own story. Elle Reeve from VICE News gave them just that amid the horror that was Charlottesville. I could say much about people who condemn themselves, but again, I urge you to watch yourself.

One comment: one of the "white nationalists" complains that those other people, those people struggling against oppression who stand in his way, have something his mob lacks -- community, a joy in being together. His purpose in showing up with his tiki torches and guns is to try to build this. Dude, that's not how it works. When we who believe in freedom manage some joyous community, it's because somewhere along the line we figured out we must "love one another or die" as W.H. Auden wrote when the Nazi invasion of Poland plunged Europe and the world into overt barbarism. That's a sentiment that testosterone-intoxicated, whiny white males have trouble finding and sustaining. Absent complete social collapse or an effective Hitler, the crabs in the barrel usually eat each other.

The story as told here absolutely condemns the failure of Charlottesville and state of Virginia do their most elementary job. The white supremacists announced they were coming to provoke. It was the job of law enforcement and whatever back-up was needed to keep the provocateurs separated from the counter-protesters. The authorities seemed literally caught with the their pants down, without the proper protective gear for a predictable confrontation.

For democracy to survive, the state must maintain a monopoly of force and be shamed by the majority of citizens into exercising that monopoly evenhandedly. That's certainly not where we are now, as any of us who have been working to end police shootings and other abuses in our communities are all too aware.

Police in the video don't look as if they even tried. That's more scary than even the bully boys waving metaphorical dicks and actual arsenals.

Trump's own medicine

The New York Times has done something unexpectedly smart in its coverage of the Orange Cheato. Instead of turning to the prestigious (and pretentious) big guns of Washington journalism, they gave the White House job to reporters seasoned by covering local New York City politics and scandal. The fit is a good one.

Glenn Thrush came up from public high school and college in Brooklyn via covering New York mayors for Newsday. He finds insight and the right tone in stories like this.

WASHINGTON — President Trump was determined to leave his mark on Washington quickly. Now the city is leaving its bruising mark on him, with the same astonishing swiftness that has been a hallmark of his lightning-strike political career.

Mr. Trump has worn out opponents, journalists, members of Congress, foreign leaders, his staff — and now himself — with a breakneck barrage of executive actions, policy proposals and reversals, taunts, boasts and drowsy-hour Twitter assaults, all meant to disrupt American politics as usual.

... Ten days of shocks, kicking off with Mr. Trump’s surprise ouster of James B. Comey on May 9 and continuing through the revelation on Friday that the president had called the F.B.I. chief a “nut job” in front of Russian officials, have left the West Wing reeling.

... What unnerves Mr. Trump and his staff the most is the eerily familiar tempo of these disclosures. It is as if some unseen adversary has copied Mr. Trump’s own velocity and ferocity in an attempt to destroy him, several people close to the president said. Sources are shuttling all kinds of information about Mr. Trump to reporters at a pace the White House cannot match.

... So far, Mr. Trump, who lives by a hammerhead shark’s swim-or-die credo, has shown no signs of slowing down.

I like the image of Washington combining without conscious conspiracy to burn the guy out. Can the various elements of the regular order keep throwing stuff at Trump from all directions? We small fry out in the boonies can certainly keep up our good work of resistance. Let's create more friction.

Tools for resistance: on the lookout for fake news

In the time of Trump, the rest of us don't need to be passing around conspiracy theories. As smart media reporters have explained, the point of Trump's and his handlers' lies is not to replace truth with their falsehoods, but to persuade as many as possible of us that "everything is a lie."

This works better in a campaign than in governing. Reality bites in the real world. Running hard up against reality -- families broken by deportation, lost health insurance coverage, shuttered food stamp offices -- makes for painful encounters with undisguised truth.

Still, we can work not to play along with the disinformation environment. Let's leave the false stories to the other guys and strive to be sure that we are aren't buying into tales that just aren't so.

Several points:

• If a headline grabs your attention -- and particularly if it is something that feeds your political assumptions -- CHECK around a little. Do you know the publication/site that it came from? Is any other well known source also reporting the story? The big newspapers and CNN have lots of faults, but they don't (usually, though occasionally they'll print a conspiracy fable-maker) run with completely unverified rumors. If something seems just too juicy, or too prejudicial, or too satisfying, to be true, it might be false, even in the age of Trump.

• When you make yourself a source of information (say you write a blog), think hard about how you "know" what you "know." The American Press Institute describes an instructive, easily understood, "hierarchy of accuracy" that journalists can use before deciding to spread something around.

  Some facts, quotes, assertions and color are more reliable than others.
  
  The stuff that comes from an eyewitness is better than that which is second-hand.
  
  The stuff that you know for yourself is better than the stuff someone else supposedly checked out … or did they? ... Beware of the idea that you have to post a story because it’s “out there” — floating around.

• Get help. Check out media reporter Craig Silverman's reports on fake news at Buzzfeed. For example, A Trump Official Did Not Say “It’s Better For Our Budget If Cancer Patients Die More Quickly.” Silverman writes a newsletter about this topic. Subscribe here.

• Learn from others who are wrestling with evaluating stories for accuracy. Amnesty International has launched an international Digital Verification Corps working to

  blow the whistle on inauthentic materials depicting human rights violations. But equally important is our work at using advanced digital methods to curate reliable multimedia data that can be used to demand accountability for human rights atrocities. The relevance of this work cannot be overstated, especially in an era where everyone with a cell phone camera is a potential news reporter.

  This is an inspiring project.

• Even more inspiring, given the hard circumstances under which they work, is Stop Fake, a Ukrainian NGO striving to combat a deluge of disinformation from nearby, hostile Russia. Their catalogue of tools includes such articles as How to Spot Visualization Lies (misleading statistical presentations and infographics) and How to Save Online Evidence and Why It Matters.

WNYC's On The Media podcast pointed me to many of these references; Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield provide a regular reality check. #trypod