Tag: first amendment

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Sexuality and Gender No Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

I am asking myself two questions in the wake of Tuesday’s election results.

1. Why did so many people stay home? Why, despite a bazillion new registrations, despite enormous enthusiasm at every public appearance, despite a roster of endorsements the like of which I’ve never seen before did 13 million fewer people vote for Harris then did for Biden 4 years ago?

2. And why did 72 million people vote for a convicted felon who tells thousands of demonstrable lies, who based his entire campaign on hatred, othering, retribution, and the promise of fascism, and who was increasingly incoherent, physically exhausted, and obviously mentally unstable as the campaign went on?

I have a ton of respect for journalists. I trained to be one. But under the rubric of “journalistic objectivity” and pressure from owners who are more interested in ratings than reality, they had a lot of constraints covering this election. And thus I think at least part of the answer lies in a third question: why did the mainstream media consistently have a double standard of coverage: refusing to hold Trump accountable as they were doing first with Biden and then with Harris?

First, they went after Biden, even before his disastrous debate with Trump. “Isn’t he too old?” “What about inflation?” I even remember a shockingly biased Washington Post newsletter with a graph comparing Biden’s age at the end of a second term to Trump’s age at the beginning of one. So suddenly the three and a half year age gap looked like seven and a half years. Wtf?

And then after the debate, enormous pressure for Biden to step down. I do think he had become compromised and stepping down was the right decision. It was pretty clear within a couple of weeks that the debate was not a one-off (as it had first appeared) but a pattern that was emerging more frequently. He wasn’t up to the job for another 4 years and to his credit, and unlike his opponent, he stepped away to make room for a younger generation.

But then came the attacks on his replacement. “Why won’t she meet with us?” “How come they aren’t going to run the primaries again?” “Why doesn’t she release policy statements?” “Does she have the gravitas to be president?”

That would have been fine if they were asking the same questions of Trump. Not only were they not pressuring him to go into details on policy, but they accepted his softball interviews in front of Trump-supporting audiences venues like Fox News as an adequate substitute for actual journalistic interviews.

More worrisome was the normalization of Trump as a legitimate candidate. Where were they when it was time to question Trump’s gravitas—or his competence? As Harris herself noted, he is “an unserious man” in a position to do serious damage. The cadre of media that was so quick to jump on every little stammer of Biden’s not only tried to paper over Trump’s increasingly incoherent and delusional speeches, even on several occasions translating the nonsense into what he might have said if he had been talking in comprehensible English. They also papered over the genuine threats to democracy in the vague policy outlines he did provide and the much more detailed proposals from the project 2025 blueprint. His lack of gravitas showed again as he lackadaisically attempted to disavow in the face of evidence that his fingerprints and those of people close to him were all over it. And Vance? Vance has so little gravitas after just two years in the Senate that he whined the one time in his debate that he was fact-checked—after making up completely false and very damaging lies about immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, as he himself admitted later.

There wasn’t even much hand wringing when Trump skipped out on future debates after Harris wiped the floor with him in their sole formal pairing. And then he skipped out on promised interviews with real media, who acquiesced.

And there was surprisingly little examination of his character until just a few weeks before the election. Where was the focus on his 34 criminal convictions, his liability in civil court for raping and defaming, the other 60 or so criminal felony counts that didn’t get to go to trial and now probably never will, the literally tens of thousands of lies he told before, during, and since his term in office, his authoritarian tendencies, his blatant narcissism and personal cruelty, and his totally transactional view of the world in which everything has to be a way for him to make money, gain status or power, and/or build his personal brand or else he is not interested. That this sociopath was treated as a normal candidate will be a shame on the media for decades to come.

And then there is Fox! I used to be a free speech absolutist. But free speech absolutism only works when there is a common core of decency that everyone respects, some minimum standards for reporting. The filth that was spewed by their commentators, the disgusting and completely false advertisements they were airing, and the way they shielded their audience from any negative news about Trump should disqualify them from any legitimate role as press. This of course is not new and has been going on since it was founded—but it has now reached extremes and probably has a lot to do with why certain sectors of the population voted for Trump against their own interests.

I happened to be at a restaurant one night that was airing a baseball playoff on Fox. They showed one Trump commercial accusing Harris of immigration positions she has never taken and policies that did not exist. I happen to know a thing or two about immigration issues. It has been the focus of my activism since spring 2019. This ad was so blatantly false that it made me wonder why it is even legal to air it. After all, a candidate who is attacked has no way to respond. Those messages go out into the ether unchallenged, whether or not they’re based in fact. Only when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in the Reagan era did Fox become even possible. And maybe it’s time for real-time fact checking to be standard operating procedure for any political debate.

We don’t have room in this article to explore WHY this biased coverage happened. But unconscious OR conscious othering (ageism, racism, sexism, bias against physical disabilities such as Biden’s stutter) just might have been a factor, don’tcha think?

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, censorship, Customer Service as Marketing, Democracy, Environment, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“The Post” lives up to the hype. It takes a very cerebral story and builds it into high drama, spurred by strong performances from Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham) and Tom Hanks (editor Ben Bradlee).Trailers for "The Post are widely available

The overall message, about the power of the free press, and the need for the press to defend its Fist Amendment freedom, despite the whims of a paranoid and dictatorial president (Nixon, in this case—a different example today).

It tracks Daniel Ellsberg’s smuggling out massive quantities of classified documents from the Rand Corporation, where he worked, and releasing them first to the New York Times, and then to the Washington Post. The movie also dramatizes the frenetic effort throughout the newsroom to absorb the information and turn it into stories on very tight deadlines, not even knowing if the presses would run, while the Times suffered under the first pre-publication censorship of journalism in the history of the United States. Known as “The Pentagon Papers,” these documents proved that US high officials knew by the early 1960s that the war was unwinnable, and that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all lied to the American people about it.

And it covers the legal battle: the government’s attempt to shut them down and the papers going all the way to the Supreme Court to secure their rights. The timing of these events happened to threaten The Post’s long-awaited IPO, which adds to the drama and the sense of what’s at stake for Graham, Bradlee, and their journalists.

BTW, just as the movie gives lessons on how to survive a paranoid, media-hating president facing serious doubts about his honesty, the Nixon link above focuses on some very interesting parallels between his presidency and that of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. However, let’s remember the differences. Nixon had a very impressive record on the environment—I describe him as the president with America’s second-most environmentalist track record (behind Obama but ahead of both Jimmy Carter and Teddy Roosevelt) also, despite the Vietnam war, did much to break down the barriers between the US and both the Soviet Union and China.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, language, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , , , , , , ,
Just as Left and Right joined forces a few years ago to protect Net Neutrality (the right to an open Internet without tollbooths and bandwidth restrictions for those who are not part of big cable or news empires), so we must come together to protect our precious freedom of the press.
Someone commented on a post from one of my right-wing acquaintances that they thought DT was being humorous when he threatened CNN journalists. Here’s my response:
Making thinly veiled threats to beat up journalists is NOT humor. If you don’t see the need to protect press freedom and other First Amendment rights, you are wearing blinders. And your liberties will be trampled just as much as ours on the “other side.” Laughing off threatening behavior as “humor” is creating a culture where the behavior is permissible and excused. Put your glasses back on! We should be able to join across sides to protect First Amendment freedoms.
Another right-wing acquaintance posted on his own page,
If he can destroy the out of control reckless American MSM and force them to recalibrate their models and become honest, unbiased journalistic organizations instead of hacks (and that goes for FOX News), then he will go down as the greatest President of all time.
I responded:
If you want unbiased MSM, start by reintroducing the Fairness Doctrine. Eliminating that began a long slide away from honesty and toward bias. And despite flawed reporting, I still am thankful every day that we have a free press—sand very worried when DT attempts to create a culture where beating up journalists is OK. That’s right out of the Hitler playbook. Without primary sources in the MSM, bloggers with minimal research skills would have no platform.
No sooner had I posted these comments when I scrolled down in my feed and found a chronology of Nazi suppression of press freedom, starting with Hitler’s threats to press freedom in Mein Kampf. The parallels are disturbingly chilling. Please go read the link. I will wait.
Statue of Thomas Jefferson. Photo by Thad Zajdowicz, FreeImages.com
Statue of Thomas Jefferson. Photo by Thad Zajdowicz, FreeImages.com

Thomas Jefferson, whose politics today would be described as Libertarian-Conservative, came back to the theme of the importance of free press over and over again. Here’s a whole page of Jefferson’s quotes on press freedom. His most famous is right at the top:

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

Another quote on that page speaks directly to the issue of fake news, and how much of that originates in government:
The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.
Why am I not seeing an outcry on the right as the country takes a sharp turn toward thuggish fascism? Their news channels will be restricted and attacked just as much as ours. Look what he said and continues to say about his one-time cheerleaders at Morning Joe.
This is important, folks. Do not let this petty tyrant erode our freedoms. It CAN happen here. Don’t let it.
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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

On Monday, the US Electoral College will be officially deciding whether Donald Trump will be president of the United States.

Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Alexander Hamilton had several reasons for proposing this convoluted structure. Some of them were not so noble, like giving more power to slave states. But one is worth noting: providing a check against the office going to someone unfit to hold it.

And just because that body has never found a winner unfit doesn’t mean it can’t. This time, there are a whole bunch of reasons why it might want to exercise that power. Some of them are about his complex financial empire, some about his personal actions—and some about the questionable integrity of this year’s voting process. Any one of these should be enough to say, “Hey, wait a minute, this is not OK.” Here are ten among many.

  1. Refusal to divest of investments that could influence policy
  2. Unlike every major party presidential candidate in decades, refusal to disclose his taxes
  3. Probable intervention by a foreign government (Russia), according to the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)—and the request by some Electors for a briefing on this
  4. His opponent winning the popular vote by an astounding 2,833,224 votes
  5. Trump has been named in at least 169 separate lawsuits—for fraud, antitrust violations, discrimination, and sexual harassment (among other issues). One is especially worth highlighting: A consolidated fraud case (including two class action suits plus one filed by New York State’s Attorney General that Trump settled for $25 million alleged that his Trump University was a scam
  6. Interference in legitimate recount efforts in three states where exit polls showed a Democratic victory but the state was called for Trump
  7. Refusal to accept intelligence briefings, a daily part of every president’s morning since forever
  8. Threats to the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, press, and assembly
  9. Threats and incitements to violence against a vast range of people, from Hillary Clinton to an 18-year-old college student
  10. Insults both to whole classes of Americans and to individuals who disagreed with him

This, unfortunately, isn’t even the whole story. I haven’t discussed the ludicrous lack of government experience among his Cabinet picks…his own inexperience in any government position…the consistent lying…the well-documented cheating of vendors…the lease he has with the federal government for his new Washington, DC hotel which bars any government employee…his insistence on remaining Executive Producer of Apprentice, as if running the country were a side hustle…the extremist agenda he has embraced…his refusal to meaningfully condemn the hundreds of hate crimes in the aftermath of the election…and on and on it goes.

I hope the Electors in the Electoral College do their patriotic duty, and (in the words made famous by Nancy Reagan) “just say no.”

Note: dozens of petitions to the Electoral College are circulating. Here’s one I like. It allows you to write your own letter (be polite!)

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Diversity, Peace and War, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Today marks the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington, and of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Right-wing extremists Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will dishonor King’s memory by having a rally on the same site, opposed to all the values King held dear.

I’m okay with that, actually. I’d never go, other than to hold a counterprotest sign—but I believe strongly in the 1st Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. As did King, by the way.

I think Beck and Palin are despicable. I also think they have every right to hold their gathering of the lunatic fringe. And I’m aware that I’ve taken plenty of stands over my career for which others would paint me as “lunatic fringe.” Some of them are now mainstream, such as aiming for zero waste, repurposing rooftop space into food and energy collectors, and getting the heck off fossil and nuclear power sources—but they sure weren’t 30 or 40 years ago. I would not have granted then, and don’t grant now, the right of others to tell me how to think, and I don’t claim that same privilege against others whom I disagree with. The right to try to convince them, certainly—but NEVER to dictate what is or is not acceptable thought.

I remember holding a lone protest in front of the local courthouse when the U.S. bombed Lybia. The first day, I got a lot of middle fingers and angry shouts. By the second day, a few people had joined me. On the third day, with a larger crowd, we were getting mostly thumbs ups and supportive honks. It was hard, on that first day. But I remembered my favorite Abraham Lincoln quote, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest.” Taking an unpopular position didn’t take the burden off me to take a stand.

And some of my positions are still out of the mainstream—so far. One such is that a Muslim group has every right to practice that other First Amendment right, freedom of worship—even two blocks from Ground Zero. As Keith Olbermann pointed out recently, there’s already been an Islamic center coexisting in that neighborhood since before the World Trade Center was even built. But even if there weren’t, this country was founded on the principle that people can peaceably assemble, worship the God of our choice (or no God, if we choose), and say what we want to say even if it makes others unhappy. That’s what made us the shining light of Democracy for the world, the example that so many other nations wanted to follow. Those are American values that I hold dear. And I predict that they will once again return to the mainstream of an America that seems to have forgotten its proud heritage.

It means the right to build an Islamic Center—a gathering place for peaceful worship and community activities—on an abandoned site a few blocks from Ground Zero, and it means that Beck and Palin are appropriately permitted for their disgusting festival of intolerance. The appropriate reaction is boycott or counterprotest, not an attempt to silence those we disagree with.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Ethics in Government, Protests and Crackdowns Tagged with , , , , ,

Last time I checked, there’s something here in the United States of America called the First Amendment that protects the right to speak and write.

Somehow, that right did not extend to Elliot Madison, a New York City activist who was arrested in Pittsburgh on the first day of the G20 summit for—get this!—tweeting that the police had ordered protesters in a certain area to disperse.

A week later, his house in New York was raided and all sorts of personal possessions belonging to him and his housemates (who were kept handcuffed at the scene for 16 hours) were seized.

Democracy Now ran a long interview with Madison and his lawyer this morning. It should be must-reading for anyone concerned about civil liberties. This is as bad as the abrogations of rights that happened to US citizens under the Bush administration (at the various national party conventions, for instance).

Lots more on this story in the New York Times and elsewhere.

We MUST NOT ALLOW the continued criminalization and marginalization of dissent!

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