Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s an oft-cited quote, but one that is easily forgotten. It seems that the mainstream media is doing to Joe Biden what they did to Jimmy Carter. They are holding Biden to a standard of perfection, rather than what it is reasonable to expect of a well-intentioned human being.

The same holds true for many of the American people. Democrats and Independents alike are characterizing Biden’s first year in the presidency as a failure. This, despite the fact that he has returned civility and level-headedness to the White House and the American economy is rebounding.

When Biden assumed office, he had a favorable rating of over 60%. As he convinced Congress to pass the American Rescue Plan, his popularity remained high. But things changed in August. He decided that he would follow through on Donald Trump’s commitment to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan the end of the year.

Things did not go smoothly. The military of the Afghani government was of little assistance in helping American and other foreign troops and civilians leave the country. This was in spite of the nearly twenty years of training that they had received from the allies.

The final departure was chaotic and involved casualties. Regrettably, that is most of what the media currently reports.

It seems that most of the media quickly forgot what Joe Biden said when he announced that the United States would be withdrawing from Afghanistan. He reminded the press, the American people and the world that he was the fourth president who had presided over America’s presence in Afghanistan. He did not want to hand it over to a fifth president.

Equally important is that Biden was able to leave Afghanistan without declaring victory. Since Vietnam, the United States has been mired in numerous wars where it had little or no chance of actually winning, but that was never officially stated.

Lyndon Johnson was remarkably effective and popular with his civil rights legislation and Great Society. But as the number of troops in Vietnam escalated on his watch from 50,000 to over 500,000, he thoroughly undermined his credibility and effectiveness. He left office partially disgraced and he turned the war over to his successor, Richard Nixon, who was equally ineffective in extricating the United States.

After Nine-Eleven, President George W. Bush led America into Afghanistan. There was a justifiable reason for doing so because the Saudi mastermind of the attacks on the United States, Osama bin Laden, was hiding out in Afghanistan. The United States wanted to bring him to justice.

Bin Laden was finally killed in 2011 in the administration of Barack Obama. But the U.S. did not leave Afghanistan.

Back in 2003, Bush had invaded Iraq for no reason related to Nine-Eleven. He said that there were weapons of mass destruction there, but they were never found. Nonetheless, Bush declared victory. America still has a military presence in Iraq.

By pulling out of Afghanistan, Joe Biden did what Nixon, Bush, Obama and Trump could not do. Yet, when it comes to assessing what he did in Afghanistan, so often he is remembered in the press as Susan B. Glasser did in The New Yorker, “The twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan concluded with an embarrassing and botched American retreat.”

There is not a single American president who has accomplished acts of greatness who did not also make mistakes, serious mistakes, along the way. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he had also spoken about the best solution to the Negro problem in the United States would be to send them back to Africa.

Woodrow Wilson was the “father” of the League of Nations, but his lack of skill with the U.S. Senate resulted in America not joining.

Franklin Roosevelt shepherded America out of the Depression and through World War II, but was harsh about letting European Jews into the United States and largely tone deaf about racial issues in the U.S.

When a calamity happens on a president’s watch, it not always his or her fault. Jimmy Carter chose to try a military rescue of American hostages in Tehran, Iran, but mechanical problems resulted in helicopters and planes malfunctioning. He paid a terrible price for malfunctions over which he had no control.

Joe Biden did not want America do leave Afghanistan in the way it did. He did not want the Delta variant of COVID to hit the United States in the summer nor the Omicron variant in the winter. It is terribly unfair to blame him for these, but many in the media do so.

Right now, Joe Biden and the Democratic party are what stand between us and a possible destruction of our Democracy by Trumpsters. Give the man a break. All of us, including those in the media, make mistakes or have misfortune fall upon us. Let’s show some tolerance and forgiveness.

The post Biden deserves more than he’s getting from Mainstream Media appeared first on Occasional Planet.

President Joe Biden did something that his three predecessors failed to do during their nearly twenty years of presiding over America’s longest war. Biden leveled with the American people and told them that the war that they were fighting in Afghanistan was one which they were not going to win. That was Truth to Power, something that rarely comes from the mouth of someone in Power. He said that he was taking action to forthwith remove American troops, contractors and support personnel from Afghanistan.

It was time for a president to acknowledge to American and global citizens that if there had been a good time for the United States to extricate itself from Afghanistan, it would have been shortly after air strikes flattened key Al Qaeda positions in 2002-2003. Since then, any chance of “winning” the war had long since passed. No matter how many corners could be turned in the future, America and its allies were not going to win a war in Afghanistan.

Biden’s willingness to say that the United States was leaving Afghanistan; his courage to follow through on this pledge indicate how remarkable both he and his actions have been. This is particularly so in comparison to American presidents of the recent past.

Biden’s courage to take responsibility for a final resolution of this chapter of American conflict with Afghanistan is the headline. It should remain that way for weeks, months, even years to come. It is difficult to think of any action by any American president since the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson chose to fight for human and economic rights for minorities and poor white people in America that matched what Biden did.

However, as well received as Biden’s decision has been by most of the American people, there has not been a concurrent “trickle down” of support reaching many of the fine men and women in the American media.

No sooner had President Biden delivered his remarkable speech on August 16 than MSNBC cable journalists Nicolle Wallace and Brian Williams agreed that “95% of the American people will love the speech, and 95% of the press will hate it.” Kudos to them for being so spot on and brutally honest about their colleagues in the media.

The response of most of the media to the Biden speeches in many ways reflects the theater of the absurd. Prior to the speeches, if you could have gathered leading media commentators around in an informal gathering and asked them what they would suggest that the United States do about Afghanistan, it almost a sure bet that most would have said that the United States has to get out of Afghanistan. They might further add that the U.S. has to analyze the wars in which it has engaged since its last “victory” in 1945 in World War II and learn how to avoid going to wars which have “loser” written all over them. Finally, should the U.S. once again become involved in a war in which it has no way out other than formally or informally turning tail and leaving, it needs to rehearse Biden’s script on how to say “enough is enough.”

Members of the media seem to suffer from the same malady as other well-educated people who take their particular profession too seriously. Journalists lock themselves into the norms and standards of their profession and remove themselves from the grounding that comes from seeing oneself first as a human being and a reporter second.

No sooner had Biden delivered his seminal speech than they criticized the president with nit-picky questions and comments about the American extrication. There is legitimate grounding to many of their questions, particularly about the strategy and logistics of the final days in Kabul. However, the tone expressed by many of the journalists is snarky and absent of praise for the bold and thoughtful actions taken by Biden.

This is not to imply that no critical questions should be allowed in a press conference when journalists speak “Truth to Power” as clearly as Joe Biden did. Biden spoke the “Truth” about America’s presence in Afghanistan. He may have overlooked some of the smaller “truths” about the difficulties that American forces were facing in the final extrication.

For example, when he stated that there was no way for him and his advisors to know that the Taliban might be able to seize the capital city of Kabul and the area surrounding the Hamid Karzai Airport, that simply does not jibe with the on-the-ground reporting that we have seen and the video that accompanies it. When Biden was not straight about events that both the media and citizens could clearly see, then it undermined the credibility of his assertions about the wisdom of terminating the presence of American troops in Afghanistan immediately.

Media tends to consistently give itself a free pass. This is unfair for so many reasons. When vitriol is directed at Joe Biden as if he were Donald Trump, then the media’s checks and balances on Trump are undermined. The way for the media to enhance its credibility, and to gain more support from the American people, is for journalists to operate as human beings first and reporters second. We tend to admire politicians who speak to us as if they were across the table from us in our kitchen; the same holds true for journalists. The media is the lens through which we learn so much about what is going on in the world, our country, our regions and our localities. No need for grandstanding; just some low-drama honesty and truthfulness.

The post When a President Hits a Home Run, don’t criticize him for wearing the wrong color shoelaces. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As police move in to destroy the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, it’s worth reflecting on what conservatism is.

British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott likened his creed to a voyage at sea, in which the ship of state has “neither starting-place nor appointed destination…the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel,” he wrote in Rationalism in Politics. It’s an idea not without merit or appeal: The point of politics, it holds, is to keep things functional and well-governed, not to leap desperately towards a utopian society.

Unfortunately, Oakeshott’s metaphor is not what conservatism is.

In 2017’s inaugural address, President Trump said that “Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” Trump promised to reverse these trends, and bring the jobs back. The Republican Party, he promised, was now the party of the American worker.

That’s not what conservatism is, either. So, it’s no surprise that Trump’s administration acts like the Bush II clique on methamphetamine.

On May 25th, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis policeman, killed African-American local George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for close to nine minutes. Floyd’s crime had been to potentially use a counterfeit $20 bill. There are accusations that Floyd might have been drunk or high. None of this matters, of course; he’s dead.

That’s what conservatism is. The defense of the social order at all costs.

Interestingly, unlike past police killings, the president ostensibly disapproved of Floyd’s murder. He’s a “New Republican”, remember. But in practice, this meant nothing. When protests started, he immediately blamed the protestors for things getting out of hand, despite the violence being largely perpetrated by police. He even threatened to send in the US Army, a move that would blatantly violate posse comitatus.

In the early 2000s, conservatism–excuse me, neoconservatism–was mainly focused on implementing austerity and fostering the War on Terror abroad. After the election of Barack Obama, we saw right-wing discourse shift in a libertarian direction. Sales of Ayn Rand’s novels skyrocketed. One would think this would change policy; it did not. When Trump came to power, all pretense of small government was dropped by the man who said he would “bomb the s— out of ISIS.”

One can be forgiven for thinking that things haven’t changed much.

In the 1920s and 30s, when the ruling classes of Europe–the bourgeoisie, the militaries, the clergy–realized they couldn’t beat the Left at the ballot box, they installed fascists, the “New Right”, rather than lose a fraction of their power. In Italy, the king chose to give Mussolini the job after his March on Rome; in Germany, conservative president Paul Von Hindenburg decided to make Hitler chancellor after the Nazis won a plurality of the votes. In Spain, the military, disgusted at the reforms of the left-leaning Second Republic, decided to overthrow the government rather than participate in democratic politics. “LAW & ORDER”, as the president puts it, was more important to conservatives, and some right-wing liberals, than democracy.

This social order in America is of course tied to race. Black people must periodically be reminded of their lack of worth via state violence. These killings make a lot more sense if one views it that way.

This suppression must of course be accompanied by whitewashing in the press if the suppression is to be effective. American freedom of the press’s dark side is the egregious lies the capitalists have told via that same press: William Randolph Hearst’s lie about the USS Maine led directly to the Spanish-American War. During the Russian Revolution, American papers claimed that Bolsheviks were “nationalizing women” to be collectively raped by Red soldiers; it was a fabrication. When socialist novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in the 1930s, Hollywood studios, afraid of losing an iota of profit, hired actors to play Russian caricatures and filmed them saying they’d vote for Sinclair. They filmed hobos and claimed thousands of miscreants were swarming across the California border to get Sinclair’s nonexistent handouts.

The Right’s media infrastructure hasn’t changed, and in 2020 it can still be found lying about the threats to the system. Take the CHOP in Seattle, formerly known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone). Fox News reported a Monty Python reference joke as fact, claiming that a local leader of the protest had become a “Warlord”. In another instance, they posted edited images to portray CHOP as a chaotic hellscape. Actual first-hand reports describe CHOP as a refuge with water, masks, produce, and other necessities freely available for all. The streets and walls are decorated with gigantic, collective works of art, not the entrails of shopkeepers.

In the case of black America, our press is just as likely to fail in what it doesn’t report. Activists have pointed out during this latest round of anti-brutality protests that we only know of the police brutality we see, that we capture on phones. Consider Rahm Emmanuel’s cover-up of a police shooting. Consider the existence of secret police torture chambers in that same mayor’s city. Consider that a black man was found hanging from a tree in Los Angeles and the police declared it a suicide. There have been half a dozen of these hangings over the last few weeks.

Some viewers who saw HBO’s excellent Watchmen show thought that its depiction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots was part of the comic book franchise’s alternate history. That’s because the horrific event–in which hundreds of black Tulsans were killed by white irregulars, some even flying planes–was suppressed in textbooks for decades. The event was a suppression of a threat to the status quo — the so-called “Black Wall Street” — and the knowledge of such a brutal suppression had to be hidden.

These brutalities — war, racism, beatings, killings, secret police, and the subsequent cover-ups, lying, and suppression of history — are what it takes to keep Michael Oakeshott’s ship of state at an “even keel”. Therefore, draw no distinction between Trump, racist cops, and “honorable” conservatives like George W. Bush, recently rehabilitated by the liberal media. For their mission is to keep the empire and its institutions from changing, and that mission is the true nature of conservatism.

The post George Floyd’s Death Proves There is No “New Right” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Something I’m calling “identity journalism” has taken over the Democratic primary debates in 2019. Watching the third in a series of who-knows-how-many “debates” among the many contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, I became aware of something disturbing: The debate moderators—on-air anchors and reporters from ABC News—sorted themselves out into ethnicities and based many of their questions on those identities. Here’s how it played out:

The four moderators were ABC​ News’​ George Stephanopoulos, David Muir, Linsey Davis and Univision’s Jorge Ramos. As the debate [and I use that term very loosely] progressed, Linsey Davis—the African-American moderator—asked the “black questions” about racial inequality, the rise of white supremacy, and institutional racism in America. Jorge Ramos, the Latino moderator, asked the “Hispanic” questions about the candidates’ views on immigration and on Trump’s actions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Stephanopoulous and Muir asked questions that were more “universal,”—the subtext of which is that white is the default, the standard, the non-ethnic.

I don’t know if they talked this strategy over when planning the debate, but it makes me uncomfortable to realize that, apparently, only the black moderator can ask the racial questions, only the Latino moderator can ask the immigration questions, and only the white moderators can ask the “non-ethnic” questions. It’s journalistic stereotyping, and it makes me queasy to watch it.

There’s a similar stratification among candidates and the questions they’re expected to address. Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, almost inevitably through the debates so far, get the racial inequality questions first. They’re people of color so, of course, in the minds of the moderators, they’re the experts on these issues. I’d venture to say that Elizabeth Warren has not been asked very many questions about racial relations, but I’d have to review all of the transcripts to confirm that assertion.

Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro get the immigration questions. Pete Buttigieg gets the “LGBTQ” questions—and gets a special dispensation to answer “racial” questions because of unrest in South Bend, Indiana, where he is mayor. Sanders, Warren, Biden and Klobuchar get the “white people” questions about healthcare, foreign affairs and taxes, and are left on the sidelines of the “ethnic” issues. I’d like to hear more from them about their views on immigration, gun violence and racial issues, and I’d like to hear more from the others about their views on the more “generic” issues. That may happen, but only, I’m afraid when the field has narrowed considerably.

I want to note, also, that the candidates themselves have aided and abetted this stereotyping by staking out territories that distinguish them from the unwieldy pack of nearly two dozen people who initially sought the Democratic nomination. Kirsten Gillibrand billed herself as the feminist candidate. Tulsi Gabbard was the more conservative military veteran candidate. Tim Ryan identified himself as the working person’s champion. Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper and Steve Bullock positioned themselves as the get-it-done governors.

But as the field has begun to shrink, not only are candidates disappearing, so is attention to their self-proclaimed territories fading. With no governor on the debate stage, moderators don’t ask questions about the nuts-and-bolts of governing. In the absence of Kirsten Gillibrand, moderators at the third debate didn’t ask a single question about reproductive rights or Me-Too issues. Unions? Workers? The middle class? No Tim Ryan, so no working-guy questions. And if you’d like to hear candidates’ views on what to do about poverty in America’s “booming economy,” fuhgettaboutit: There’s not a “poor person’s candidate” in sight, so who’s going to bother to ask about that?

We are in desperate times. We need real political debate—not the made-for-tv, 60-second answer, try-to-spark-a-feud, issue-stereotyped game show that we are currently seeing.

The post Identity journalism pollutes the Democratic debate stage appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I have to share some thoughts about how we are being manipulated into repeating the falsehood that our military men and women are “fighting to protect our freedom.” Everywhere you look, we are forced to see and hear this over and over… at ballgames, big ads in the paper, fundraisers for military families, etc. The fact is that humans have been fighting for power and over resources since the first caveman hit his neighbor over the head with a club in order to steal his food.

The post Fighting to protect our freedom? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Consider two anecdotes:

The First: Recently I tried to get into the mind of a Trump supporter that had posted a status about the liberal media and their unfair treatment of the president. I had a logical path to lead this person on, thinking I had a silver bullet: we both agree there is bias in journalism. But if journalism is truly degenerate these days, why and when did it happen? I argued that the degeneracy of the press could be traced to Reagan-era media consolidation and privatization, which caused the rise of news-as-entertainment. Outlets like MSNBC and Huffington Post, I said, were merely marketed to liberals; they did not represent substantive left-wing thought. And Fox News is worse, peddling outright lies like the “Puppermaster” fantasy of George Soros, or the birther myth. So you shouldn’t blame Rachel Maddow for liberal “fake news”; Reagan, Milton Friedman, and Roger Ailes are the real culprits. Checkmate, or so I thought.

Nope, he said. The problem isn’t capitalism’s inevitable drive towards marketizing everything. The problem is liberal cynicism, “the media”, broadly construed, lying in order to bring down a man they considered a Nazi. My pro-Trump acquaintance acknowledged that the liberal media thought it was doing the right thing by demonizing Trump. But he was certain they were motivated by pure, hateful ideology.

The Second: R.L. Stephens recently came out with an amazing critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me. Coates’ critically acclaimed book is a long-form essay on how he sees racism in the United States and the world. What Stephens takes issue with is Coates’ framing of racism as a force of nature, not a historical, class-based process: “One cannot subpoena an earthquake”, Coates writes. He proposes no solution, positing essentially that white people must self-reflect to the point where they are “woke” enough not to be racist. Stephens, on the other hand, writes that

The racialized tragedies faced daily by the masses require us to embrace class struggle, not       Coates’s demobilizing metaphysical maxims about how white people “must ultimately stop     themselves”…the only way to defeat racism was to fight it, every step of the way.

What tied these two incidents together in my mind was the implicit or explicit rejection of material causes for events. The pro-Trump guy from above could not fathom that the ideology he hated had its roots in capitalism, the economic system he loved; Ta-Nehisi Coates chooses to describe racism as an almost mystical force rather than the product of early capitalism’s desire for free labor and its many ramifications. Neither seems to be able to tie their abstract problems to the concrete reality of economic and social life, or propose a decent plan for dealing with said problems.

This fairy-tale of wicked ideologues is increasingly common across the discourse. At its root is a rejection of materialism and material conditions. Rather than acknowledge that ideology has its roots in history and economics, and is not simply the result of cabals of like-minded individuals enforcing their will upon the world.

The philosopher Hegel insisted that ideas and clashing ideologies propelled history forward; Marx and Engels said famously that they “found Hegel on his head” and “flipped him over”. In other words, materialism here refers not to avarice or selfishness but to an analytical frame that views history as the result of economic and material forces, not a battle of ideas.

Ideology, particularly American reactionism, is rooted in material conditions: many fundamentalist Christian strains grew out of rejection of the New Deal; the adding of “under god” to the pledge of allegiance was aimed at countering godless communism (thought the pledge itself was written by socialist Francis Bellamy; modern conservatives use abortion as a wedge issue to divide Left-leaning voters. In each case ideology served a particular function for the ruling class, strengthening and consolidating their sway on society.

My pro-Trump friend realized that a “liberal media” exists, but couldn’t conceptualize that it’s societal function might be to serve as the liberal wing of a capitalist state, and to make its owners money. Coates details in exquisite language the abject misery inflicted upon black Americans, but seems to provide nebulous solutions: White Americans should engage in rigorous self-criticism, but interracial mass politics is off the table, or ignored.

When presented with irrational ideological conclusions, the answer is not to respond with more dogma. Rather, presenting material conditions and solutions may dispel the smoke of vicious belief. That is the thesis of the Sanders crowd: Clinton ran on the phrase, “they go low, we go high” to indicate a campaign centered on national honor and decorum; they should have said, “when they go low, we provide material solutions to your problems, like free healthcare, education, an end to corporate dominance, and the empowerment of the working class”. To be fair, Clinton’s slogan was probably more attractive than mine.

But we’ve lost that frame of analysis. Postmodernism, and the overwhelming onslaught of modern mass media have us looking at Twitter and Facebook for the reasons behind things. This means my pro-Trump friend thinks posting about liberal bias is a crucial part of politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to think that cultural critiques of racism and endless talk of “bodies” is a crucial part of anti-racist struggle. Not to suggest that Coates is equally incorrect: He’s a great writer with an eloquence I envy, and I think that Between The World And Me has given a lot of people a lot to think about. But I see a common thread of politics and the struggle for justice reduced to analysis of culture.

It seems likely that center-left liberals and far-right conservatives both subscribe to Milo Yiannopolis’ thesis: Politics is downstream of culture.

The first step in defeating Trump and company is to understand that they are not evil for the sake of it, and they are not evil because of their uncouthness. They are evil because they are the result of a decades-long movement on the right towards a brutal variant of state capitalism and xenophobia.

The defeat of the right-wing ideologues currently running the country will not come when we “stand together”, “learn to love one another”, or any such amorphous truism. It will come when millions of working- and middle-class Americans band together to enact a specific progressive agenda.

The post Material Conditions First! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I have a very vivid memory of being in a meeting hall in St. Louis in late 2007 as Obama organizers were recruiting supporters to go up to Iowa and knock on doors prior to the Iowa Caucuses the following January. The room was full of excitement, something that I did not particularly share. Part of it was that I did not want the physical discomfort of December and January in Iowa (the wimp factor). But an equal deterrent for me to volunteer was that I just did not believe that this was the way in which politics should happen.

I mean, what is the difference between citizens going door-to-door and asking voters to see it their way and the old Fuller Brush guy in the 1950s who would go door-to-door trying to convince people to buy one of his brooms? You might argue that voting is more important, and I would agree with that. But if it is so important, why do we leave our decisions to the whims of whether or not someone knocks on our door or not to try to talk us into supporting his/her candidate?

For those who really care about the future of our country, and the world, we study politics by reading up on the issues and the candidates. Ever since the 1950s, we have been able to receive considerable information through the air waves on television. Since the 1980s it has been from cable TV and more recently we have come to rely almost entirely on the internet.

But it’s not just politics that we learn about this way, it virtually everything that we don’t learn in a class or from someone who we already know, or from just taking some “think time” for ourselves. Whether we’re trying to figure out how to bake a cake or how to plan a vacation to another country, we don’t wait for someone to knock on our door and tell us what to do. When it comes to getting political information, look at the results of a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center on how Millenials and Baby Boomers get their political news:

On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that “ground games” work in politics, particularly in Iowa where only the most committed voters bundle up and go out on a cold winter’s night to attend a political caucus in their area. It’s quite possible that had Barack Obama not received the jump start that he did by winning Iowa in 2008, in large part because of his team of canvassers, he would not be our president and we might be wrapping up eight years of a Hillary Clinton Administration.

What the Obama team knew in 2008, as many other campaigns have known before and since is that many American voters are malleable and pliable prior to an election. Often times they really are not aware of who the candidates are and for what office they are running. They are as susceptible to a door-knocker as young children are to a stranger who offers to give them a ride home.

This is where Trump comes in. He presently does not have much of a ground game in Iowa as we approach the February 1 date of the 2016 caucuses. But does he really need a significant ground game? He is all over the television, the radio and the newspapers. He’s equally omnipresent on social media. He gets so much attention that he hardly has to advertise his presence or his ideas.

When I wonder why he has received such media attention, I remember that when he announced his candidacy, when of the foremost on-line newspapers, the Huffington Post, said that they would not cover him in their news section; only in their entertainment section. Great idea, but guess what? It didn’t work and for months now he has been front and center in their news. But the Huffington Post was right to consider has candidacy to be entertainment.

Trump has brought his own campaign so much visibility that he largely makes a ground game meaningful. What conclusions can we draw from this?

1. Trump’s has engraved his identity into many Iowa voters simply by being himself and letting all forms of media carry the message for him, for free.
2. It’s possible that in the future other candidates would be able to forego a ground game in Iowa, if they are stupendous entertainers like Trump.
3. My wish that voters do not need “door-knockers” because they are independent informed about the candidates will probably not come true any time soon.

Is there any way in which we could create a “hybrid experience” in which candidates who are more thoughtful and responsible than Trump could independently become as well-known to voters? I don’t think this will happen in the near future. But let us not let the Trump phenomena pass without thinking how much better our political process would be if voters really knew a great deal about candidates.

The post Why a progressive would not mind seeing Trump win Iowa appeared first on Occasional Planet.

There’s a lot more to Ferguson, Missouri than what we’ve seen in the media. After Michael Brown was killed by a Ferguson cop, and during the uprising sparked by his death, the media swooped in: West Florissant Avenue and nearby streets became clogged with satellite trucks, police vehicles, miked-up reporters and every imaginable configuration of video recording devices—all chasing [literally] after the next police-citizen confrontation, flare-up, arrest or purported act of vandalism/looting.

But what we saw was not the full story. As has been the case ever since reporters helped stage anti-US demonstrations in Tehran in 1979–while most of that city was operating business-as-usual—what we saw of Ferguson was only a sliver of the bigger picture.

From what you were seeing on CNN and other media outlets in August 2014, you might have thought that Ferguson was burning—all of it—that the whole community was in rebellion, and even that Ferguson was just another rundown, down-on-its-luck African-American ghetto.

None of those impressions are true.

Last week, I learned just how untrue they are. [Yes, I admit that I am rather late to this party. I live just 15 minutes away, but over the many years that I have lived in my cushy, suburban St. Louis neighborhood, I’ve spent almost no time at all in the Ferguson area. ]

Last week, as part of a summer “active-citizenship, urban-discovery” program for high-school students, I organized a bus tour of the Ferguson area. We engaged a high-profile, Ferguson activist—Patricia Bynes—to be our guide. What she showed us and told us was eye-opening.

But before I share what she said, I want to note that our intent was not to be gawkers seeking “riot-porn.” We asked Bynes whether what we were planning was okay: Would we be trampling on neighborhood sensitivities? Would our presence be offensive? She assured us that we were within the bounds of propriety, because, she noted, people need to understand Ferguson. Also, she said, the issues raised by Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer were not just Ferguson issues. These are everybody’s issues—society’s issues—and Ferguson is just a nearby example from which we can all learn.

And so, we boarded the bus and headed for North St. Louis County.

Along the way, Bynes pointed out many speed traps set by tiny, municipal police departments as a way of bringing in revenue to their otherwise cash-strapped city coffers. She also brought our attention to a dozen-or-so “Welcome to…” signs that exemplify the 90+ small municipalities that exist within the boundaries of St. Louis County and that contribute to many of the problems showcased by Ferguson.

Then, we arrived at West Florissant Avenue, the scene of the August 2014 uprising. And that’s when the myth-busting began. Here are a few of the surprising insights Bynes shared with us:

Graffiti: plus or minus?
We pulled over next to a boarded-up restaurant. It was covered with artful graffiti. Bynes explained that, in the view of some Ferguson residents and business-owners, the graffiti make the area look like a cliché—rundown, forlorn and hopeless. Others see graffiti as urban art—reflecting emerging, creative energy. And still others see the graffiti as rebellion against the status quo—a symbol that deserves to be preserved as a kind of “never forget” statement about what has happened in the Ferguson area. According to Bynes, the value and fate of Ferguson graffiti remains an unresolved issue.

“I love Ferguson”
Driving though Ferguson neighborhoods beyond the infamous Canfield Avenue where Michael Brown died, we saw many yard signs proclaiming “I love Ferguson.” Even these seemingly innocuous signs are controversial, said Bynes. For some, the sentiment is straight up: They love Ferguson, warts and all, and they’re standing by their city and with their city, sticking around to help correct injustices and make it a better place. But for others, the signs mean something else, said Bynes: “For some people, ‘I love Ferguson’ has a meaning that’s more like ‘I want my country back.’

Beyond Canfield, but not far away

Our bus tour taught us that Ferguson is not the burned-out, majority African-American ghetto we “saw” on CNN. We passed through many leafy neighborhoods, replete with spacious Colonial-style homes, large lots and manicured lawns and gardens. We could have been in Webster Groves, or some other well-kept, majority-white, suburban neighborhood with the occasional horse stable sprinkled in.

We also visited January-Wabash Park—a well-maintained park operated by the City of Ferguson. Watching the news coverage of the post-Michael Brown “troubles,” you’d probably never guess that Ferguson contains a well-maintained park with rolling lawns, a large fishing lake, and a big public swimming pool. Unfortunately, most of the media didn’t bother to travel even a few blocks from West Florissant and Canfield to see [and show us] the pretty parts of Ferguson, to get a grasp of the anger-creating economic disparities of the area, or to see the context surrounding the Michael Brown protests.

The “community” center
Buried deep in one of those leafy neighborhoods is the new Ferguson Community Center—a repurposed parochial school. Bynes made sure that we drove by it as part of our tour. You see, it looks like a nice place, she said, but if you don’t have a car, forget about going there. St. Louis’ Metro bus system doesn’t have a route that goes down that street. The nearest bus stop is about a mile away. It’s hard to call something a community center when a large portion of the community can’t get to it. It’s within two miles of Canfield, but it might as well be on a different planet.

Ground zero
Bynes also made sure that we visited Canfield Avenue,at the exact spot where Michael Brown died. We gathered around the recently installed memorial—a hand-drawn golden dove embedded in a section of sidewalk. The in-ground sculpture replaces the previous, unofficial agglomeration of teddy bears, flowers and notes piled up around a lamppost. We noticed the recently repaved section of Canfield Avenue: the place where Michael Brown’s body lay for four-and-a-half hours after he was killed. [His mother requested the repaving, Bynes explained.]

We could see that this was a special place—and Bynes treated it as such, talking to us in a hushed voice, and refraining from expressing anger or political opinions as we stood there. We were in someone else’s neighborhood—a neighborhood of people who have been traumatized by seeing Michael Brown killed essentially in their front yards.

She also noted that, since Brown’s death, people having been moving out of Canfield apartments in droves, some simply abandoning their apartments, even if they have to pay rent in two places. It’s just too traumatic and haunting to live there, she said.

I don’t know what our group of 15 teenagers took away from this experience, but judging from the earnest, insightful questions they asked, I’m guessing that there were probably some very interesting dinner-table discussions that night. I know that I’ll never think of Ferguson in the same media-distorted way again. And I’ll certainly be looking at future coverage of Ferguson and other “hot spots” with a lot more skepticism and desire for context.

Cost to charter the bus: $335. Experience: Priceless.

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The ACA [Obamacare] is alive and growing—and Year 2 of enrollment is going quite well, but you’d never know that if you get your news from the usual suspects: Mainstream media outlets have, essentially, put this story on blackout.

In October 2013, when the Affordable Care Act starting taking enrollments, everyone jumped all over the faulty healthcare.gov website and predicted disaster for the program. The reports of website screw-ups were right. But the predictions of catastrophic failure of the program were all wrong. And, by the end of the first open enrollment period, more than 7 million people had signed up, reducing the nation’s uninsured rate significantly.

According to Politico:

A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that 9.5 million fewer adults are uninsured now than at the beginning of the [first year ] Obamacare enrollment season. The Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey found a similar drop, with 8 million adults gaining coverage. And Gallup-Healthways survey reported that the uninsured rate has fallen to 13.4 percent of adults, the lowest level since it began tracking health coverage in 2008.

This year, open enrollment began on November 15, and, in contrast to Year 1, it’s going smoothly. Nearly 30 days into Year two, 1.3 million have signed up–of which about half are new enrollees. [Check out ACAsignups.com for in-depth, independent reporting and daily updates.] No major problems, nothing for ACA opponents to crow and gloat about. So, no news reports, even though anniversaries and one-year look-backs are standard news hooks, and even though the contrast with Year 1 is a legitimate story.

This year, there’s no disaster, no right-wing talking points—just success. Nobody is feeding anti-Obamacare press releases to the media, nobody’s trumping up failure stories to run on Fox News. So, the mainstream media is yawning. Apparently, the success of a program pushed by President Obama—and beneficial to millions of Americans—is not a news story.

The absence of reporting on this year’s ACA enrollments is indicative of a couple of things, I think. First, it demonstrates how much influence the Republican propaganda machine has had on mainstream news: With no major anti-ACA propaganda push this year, there’s simply no news. Hmmm.

Second—and this is the positive part of the story—the lack of reporting on the successful second-year rollout may simply indicate that Obamacare is quickly becoming a fact of life in this country—accepted by millions of people, viewed as a beneficial government program, and becoming more popular as people understand how it works and what it can do for them and their families. I still contend, though, that this phenomenon is, in itself, a news story that merits attention,

I can see why the media has lost interest—it doesn’t bleed, and it’s working. Ho hum, I guess.

The only ACA storyline that continues to be of interest to the media is the frivolous Supreme Court case—spitefully filed by the Republican Party—that pounces on a drafting error in the law, regarding federal subsidies for ACA enrollees. Unfortunately, the media is not reporting the case as the mean-spirited, who-cares-if-millions-of-people-suffer, purely political, anti-Obama maneuver that it is. It will be news because it’s nasty and confrontational, and because the right-wing will make it easy to report by supplying talking points that can be read verbatim.

It’s a sad and shameful state of affairs.

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Make no mistake about it. We’re now approaching thirty years of serious scientific data gathering on climate change. And the consensus among scientists in the field across the globe is clear and unequivocal. Yet many Americans remain confused about the facts. That should come as no surprise, as the decidedly confused (and confusing) reporting by American media on the facts, the causes, and the future of climate change has been mostly sabotaged by corporations with a vested interest in denying the scientific consensus and creating doubt on the subject. For too many years, the fossil-fuel industry and members of Congress, whose campaign coffers are filled with the industry’s largesse and whose after-politics lives have seen many of them move seamlessly into cushy jobs in the industry, have successfully gamed journalism’s traditional commitment to reporting that is “objective” and “balanced.”

The good news is that a few media outlets are not only calling out the confuseniks and fringe deniers but are also taking steps to shut the game down.

Here’s what’s happening. In the past two years various media outlets have been engaged in some quiet but serious soul searching. 2013 and 2014 have emerged as watershed years for a growing number of news agencies that are taking a hard look at how they cover issues related to climate change. Staffs have been re-evaluating their responsibilities as serious journalists to readers and viewers. Editors, from the top down, are rethinking and revising their best-practices guidelines.

At the core of this soul searching is a discussion of the most fundamental journalistic tenets of objectivity and balanced coverage. In journalistic parlance, “objectivity” implies that when journalists gather the facts and report the story. they set aside their own pre-set beliefs. “Balanced” implies that all sides are presented in a way such that the reader, the viewer, or the listener is exposed to more than just one side of the story.

The prickly question for journalists and media outlets in terms of climate-change reporting has been whether or not “balanced” reporting requires devoting equal time and space to those denying the science—what we usually refer to as facts—when 97 percent of climate scientists have demonstrated through fact-based studies that global warming is a scientific reality. Fully aware of the subtleties and traps inherent in the concept of “balanced” reporting and sensitive to charges of censorship, most of the media outlets that have gone out on a limb to revise their best-practices policies in terms of climate coverage reiterate that their primary responsibility in all reporting is not to support one side of the debate or the other but to guarantee the accuracy of facts and information in print, online, and on television.

Policies at media outlets on accepting or rejecting content concerning false or misleading information on climate change varies. For example, in 2013 Nathan Allen, reddit’s then-moderator of the online forum, announced that all submissions concerning climate change to the social networking and news website be sourced solely from reputable, peer-reviewed journals.

In the same year, The Los Angeles Times announced that, since it views its primary responsibility to keep errors of fact from appearing on the pages of its letters to the editor, letters based on false claims by climate-change deniers and skeptics would no longer be welcome.

The Sydney Morning Herald took a slightly more nuanced approach. When the paper published its policy on letters to the editor on global warming, the editors stated clearly that they did not intend to officially ban climate skeptics from sharing their opinions, but stated that the publication would no longer allow misrepresentation of facts.

In 2013 as well, Popular Science surprised the online community when the publication withdrew from the controversy altogether by disabling all commenting on their online website – not just commenting on climate change. Suzanne LaBarre, the website’s content editor, observed that comments on a range of topics (not just climate change) were “undermining scientifically sound” information. She went on to explain to readers that lacking the time or money to moderate the comments, the publication made the difficult decision to eliminate the commenting section altogether.

This year, a venerable institution called The BBC Trust waded into the controversy. We should all stand up and applaud the BBC’s integrity in finally taking the lead on the meaning and implications of false editorial balance. After an exhaustive study of BBC News broadcasts on climate change, trustees of The BBC Trust acknowledged that many of their journalists had fallen into the trap of equating the conclusions of peer-reviewed scientific studies with the opinions of non-qualified skeptics and deniers. The Trust’s report recommended a sea change in coverage by giving “greater emphasis to the weight of scientific consensus rather than continuing to try to provide pseudo-balance.” To that end, it’s been reported that two hundred BBC journalists have participated in re-education seminars and workshops to improve fact-based coverage. The recommendations of the BBC report are unequivocal:

The Trust wishes to emphasize the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences. . . . Science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given.

Here in the U.S., the Union of Concerned Scientists shares that view. Being scientists, the organization decided to gather the facts about climate-change coverage in the media. In 2013, the organization undertook a study called “The Science of Spin.” The report looks at climate coverage at the three most widely watched cable news networks: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The report’s findings clearly show how American media, journalists, and media watchdogs have their work cut out for them.

Their objective findings reveal that Fox News has the least accurate reporting on climate science, with fully 72% of its climate-related segments containing misleading statements. Of those, more than half occurred on one program, “The Five.”

CNN fared a bit better. 30% of CNN’s segments featured misleading statements. Most occurred during debates between guests who accepted established climate science and guests who disputed the findings.

MSNBC proved to have the most accurate coverage. Even so, 8% of news segments on MSNBC contained misleading statements. Interestingly, the inaccuracies were all similar. They overstated rather than understated the effects of climate change, particularly the link between climate change and extreme weather—such as tornadoes.

With numbers like the above reflecting serious gaps of accuracy in television news coverage of climate change and the fact that 55% of Americans report television as their main source of news, is it any wonder that confusion reigns?

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