As the St. Louis Metro Chapter of the League of Women Voters once again did its heavy lifting to bring political awareness to the citizens of St. Louis, the local media once again snoozed. This past Saturday evening, June 2, the League hosted a forum for the Democratic candidates for Congress from Missouri’s Second Congressional District.

All five candidates (Bill Haas, Robert Hazel, John Messmer, Mark Osmack and Cort VanOstran) showed up and provided largely direct responses to questions from the audience, filtered through the League staff to ensure a balance in the topics discussed. The audience at the Ethical Society topped one hundred and politely listened as the candidates responded to the thoughtful questions.

In many ways, the forum was a model for democracy. Candidates were present and an engaged audience heard responses to a range of questions. But how did the other 750,000 citizens of the district benefit from the program? Social media might have doubled the outreach of the event and then there is word of mouth. So, to be generous, perhaps five hundred would-be constituents of these candidates have some awareness of what happened in an event that represented democracy at its best.

But nowhere to be seen was the St. Louis media. They are the springboard to public awareness of relevant public issues and who among us is trying to solve our problems. But, apparently, they had more important stories to cover:

1. The Louis Post-Dispatch had room for “Teacher charged for allegedly feeding puppy to snapping turtle,” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.
2. KSDK – Channel 5 had “’I just broke down’ – Woman asking for help finding dog stolen during carjacking” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.
3. KMOV – Channel 4 covered from Australia, “Hotel valet has lucky escape, but Porsche gets crunched,” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.
4. Fox2Now – Channel 2 covered “Dog dies during Delta Air Lines layover in Michigan,” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.

St. Louis media has a history of being asleep at the switch as candidates for public office work to communicate their message to the public. It can be argued that their dereliction of duty has had very harmful results.

In 2004, Jeff Smith was running for Congress in Missouri’s Third Congressional District in a field of over a dozen candidates. His grass-roots campaign made him the primary challenger to State Rep. Russ Carnahan of the Carnahan Dynasty in Missouri. Smith had important information that Carnahan ranked near the bottom of Missouri legislators in showing up for votes in Jefferson City. He made the media aware of this information, but they just sat on it. In an act of frustration, Smith took a different path that involved a minor violation of a Federal Elections Commission Regulation. In a complicated story, he wound up going to federal prison for a year. It likely would have never happened with a responsible press in St. Louis – a press that never apologized for its oversight.

Current incumbent in Missouri’s Second District, Ann Wagner, has failed to appear at League of Women Voters forums in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Democrats, Libertarians and Green Party candidates have had lively discussions, but the incumbent would not appear to defend herself. Not a peep from the mainstream media of St. Louis.

The Post-Dispatch has repeatedly deplored the role of big money in politics. But they are collaborators with a system that makes it very difficult for a candidate who does not raise large sums of money to compete on a level playing field. Why? Because, (a) they rarely report anything about candidates who do not raise large sums of money, even if these candidates may have the most viable positions on issues, (b) when they take time to handicap races, it is generally based on money raised rather than anything having to do with issues, and (c) because the MSM does not cover these races, candidates need to raise more money to get their word out. Raising money always means that some voters become more important than others, and that undermines democracy.

We have some very good Democratic candidates in Missouri’s Second Congressional District. It is up to the mainstream media to let voters know about them, and to do so in a way that minimizes the need of the candidates to engage in more money-grubbing.

To our media: please don’t just comment the state of our democracy; be a greater part of the solutions.

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In an editorial titled, “Trump’s new beginning,” on Nov. 11, 2016, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board advises people who are frightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency to “Get over it.” That advice is highly inappropriate, coming from a newspaper editorial board, and in response, I’ve sent a version of this post as a letter to the editor. It was published this morning..

The Post-Dispatch stated in this very editorial, that “This newspaper, like every major metropolitan daily in the country, had strongly opposed the notion of a Trump presidency.”

Why then would the Post-Dispatch suddenly reverse course just days after the election? I would hope that the Post-Dispatch itself would not simply “get over it,” and would, instead, take on its proper role of closely monitoring and reporting honestly on the actions and policies of the man whom it warned against during the presidential campaign.

Everyone—especially those voters who cast their ballots for Trump because he promised to improve their circumstances—needs to be very vigilant regarding the dangerous ideas he and his advisers espouse,  to hold him accountable for his actions and his words, and to cry foul as often as is necessary.  [As I write this, the Trump transition team is announcing that alt-right radical Steve Bannon has been chosen as senior adviser and strategist in the Trump administration. That’s reason for concern right there, and we’re only four days into the transition. What’s next?]

Admonishing readers to be quiet, to not protest, and to unite behind a man whom the editorial board previously characterized as temperamentally unqualified, is a violation of the mission of the press.

We need newspapers like the Post-Dispatch to be watchdogs, not lapdogs.

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Whenever I think my progressive values might need a reality check, all I have to do is go to the online version of my local daily newspaper and read some of the comments readers post about various articles.

I should know not to do this. My blood pressure has been high recently, and this can’t help. But many of the people who post about articles (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch calls some of them “top commenters” and rewards them with a star) have such a different world view than I do that it’s become almost my dirty little secret that I check in on them periodically.

My latest foray into this journalistic underbelly occurred when I read an online article headlined “St. Charles County parents sentenced to 7 years in prison for caging autistic son.”  The article described how Terry and Victoria Smith, who were convicted of child endangerment after their severely autistic six-year-old son was discovered in a crib/cage in their basement, received the maximum sentence allowed. They were also fined $500 each.

Never mind that the Smiths have five other children at home. Never mind that the family physician testified that all of the children were well cared for. Never mind that no one cared enough to help this family and provide an appropriate safe bed for their child. Never mind that the parents have never been in trouble with the law before.

Early posters on the “commentverse” went into gear immediately. Some samples: “These parents are horrible, horrible people.” “Get these two nut jobs out of parenting business.” “Not long enough.” “Should have been 70 years.” “These people should not get the chance to be free ever again.” “This is what the parents deserve.”

There are so many disturbing things about this that it’s hard to know where to start. First, with the sentence: six little children will be separated from their parents and from each other for a very long time. It will cost the state of Missouri much more to provide for these kids in foster care than it would have cost to provide some help for the family. And when the parents get out of prison, they will be felons. Good luck getting a job with that on your record.

Wouldn’t it have been smarter, kinder and more economical to provide some help for this family? The parents are probably not stupid, they were probably completely overwhelmed by the needs of their children and their inability to provide for them.

Second, about the comments: I realize that with this piece I, too, am commenting on the article (Occasional Planet does not need to give me a star). Those who share my views, and those who don’t, can respond. I can take being called a bleeding-heart liberal, or worse. What I have difficulty with is the level of hate and venom many of the Post commenters directed toward this family.

For those who think seven years in prison for two people who made one serious parenting mistake is an appropriate sentence, I have a suggestion: do something to help one of the Smith children while their parents are away. They are the ones who will be paying the penalty for this decision, which masquerades as justice in St. Charles County, Missouri.

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As a longtime subscriber to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I’m happy to see that the newspaper has removed George Will from its op-ed page. The move came in response to Will’s recent article declaring that campus-rape victims  claim “a coveted status that confers privileges.”

Messenger offered further explanation in a  a chat with the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple Blog:

Messenger said that the apology was the first note of contrition that the paper had passed along to its readers. The two-week lag, says Messenger, gave him space to assess the column: “Sometimes thoughtful analysis takes some time,” says Messenger. “Seeing the reaction and intensity of the hurt in some of social media and the reaction of women I know and talking to people who really were offended by the thought that sexual assault victims would seek some special victimhood — it helped seeing that response and it informed my opinion.

Negative backlash to the Will column came from readers in the St. Louis area, as well as from national sites and commentators. “Women readers in particular — many of them were offended,” says Messenger.

I applaud the decision. Will–who, by comparison to more contemporary, right-wing flamethrowers–has sometimes seemed to be a somewhat reasonable Republican, has nevertheless always been a sanctimonious prick. This time, he went too far, making absolute judgments about people and situations he clearly knows nothing about. The decision to can him was not an act of political correctness, it was the right thing to do.

The Post-Dispatch has decided to replace Will with Michael Gerson, a conservative Republican who was one of George W. Bush’s top speechwriters.

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It’s hard enough to come to terms with sexual assault—the inevitable cycle of self-blame, self-loathing, abhorrence for the attacker, fear and paranoia, nagging doubts, and plenty of misery—without having longtime Washington Post columnist George Will (or others like him) proclaim that being a sexual assault survivor is actually a coveted title because it comes with “privileges.”

In a column on June 6, Will accused the “epidemic of rape” of being a result of “hookup culture” and a “cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults” and therefore not an epidemic of sexual assault, but of “sexual assault” (his quotation marks, not mine). Will continues by condemning the Obama administration for propagating what he considers the false statistic that 20 percent of women are sexually assaulted in college, and only 12 percent are reported. (He claims that the two statistics cannot coexist). He thus concludes these statistics are a result of overzealous claims of sexual assault that aren’t actually assault (he claims that, without a “preponderance of evidence” suggesting “forcible sexual penetration,” it is not assault) but just trumped up charges based on “nonconsensual touching.”.

Will focuses his invective on instances of campus rape and claims that new policies are “begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a ‘safe,’ ‘supportive,’ ‘unthreatening’ environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.”

He concludes by saying that the Obama administration and the academic system are using campus rape as a straw man—fixing a problem that’s not actually there:

Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates. What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.

Will concludes that ”victimhood [is] a coveted status that confers privileges.”

Will focuses almost entirely on campus rape, so I will too, as I muddle through. In countless stories of campus rapes, the horrors don’t end when the rape does: They continue through the insinuating questioning of the victim (what were you wearing? were you drinking? what did you say?) and detailed recounting of the rape (over and over and over again), and the inevitable stigma of being the one who cried rape, the one who was too weak to fight back, the one who used rape as an excuse to cover up indiscretions, the one who secretly wanted it but won’t admit it, the one who might accuse you of rape if you get on her bad side. And then there’s the ever-present threat of STDs or pregnancy. Yup, privileges.

If you don’t believe me, see this very personal and moving story proving just how very wrong Will is: I was raped and I stayed silent about my coveted status.

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Sometimes progressives don’t agree with conservatives, and the gist of the differences are about policy issues. Other times, one or perhaps both sides of a disagreement have a visceral dislike for the other side. In such situations, rationality seems to be thrown out the window in favor of demonizing the other side.

There is a third way to look at the disagreement: for either the “combatants” or an outside observer to try to figure out what’s going on psychologically. More and more “neutral” observers see Democrats as fairly reasonable and with a healthy dose of compassion. It is Republicans who are difficult to understand. It’s come to a point where we now have a cottage industry studying the Republican brain.

Chris Mooney, who studies science in politics, has written a book on “The Republican Brain.” Among other things, he contends that many Republicans have difficulty dealing with science as well as the use of logic to process facts. While some are kind in their personal lives, they seem to have almost complete disdain for compassion in the public arena.

There is a Calvinistic thread running through many Republicans in which the rich are rich because they deserve to be so, and the poor are poor because they are not among the “elected.” Very few Republicans are theological Calvinists, but psychologically, they are comfortable with the division of the “deserving rich” and the “depraved poor.”

In a recent letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled “The pope, the president, and the Post-Dispatch,” Paul E. Schroeder of Maryland Heights, MO writes:

Barack Obama, Pope Francis and the Post-Dispatch have dropped their faked compassion for the downtrodden and revealed what we already knew. They are the progressive socialist elite who know what’s best for each of us.

Pope Francis’ distortion of Scripture is only surpassed by Barack Obama’s corruption of the Constitution. Both men describe a world in which mankind would be wards of the state, relegated to only what the state allowed. Men and women would no longer be in charge of their own destinies because they are not capable of making the right choices.

The history of man and the history of our country do not align with anything of what either of these two arrogant leaders proclaim. The travesty that Pope Francis foists upon the faithful in the Catholic Church goes beyond misinterpretation. Jesus never suggested that the government mandate compassion. The essence of mankind is the freedom of conscience to freely make decisions — to be compassionate or not. There is no love if there is no choice.

Pope Francis would have all Catholics throw their wallets into the offering plate and then by his supreme judgment decide who should receive what. Similarly, Barack Obama would heavily tax those who have been successful and with those confiscated funds, redistribute others’ wealth to his cronies, with a few crumbs possibly left over for the needy.

God endowed every man and woman with certain inalienable rights that no pope nor president can steal from them. The socialist agenda of this president, this pope and this newspaper will certainly leave its scar upon this community and this nation.

The good news is our forefathers foresaw the possibilities of corruption, even at the highest levels of leadership. We will survive this ordeal via future elections, but our children will now bear the enormous weight of intentional fiscal sabotage and social delusion designed to make families irrelevant.

In his first sentence, Mr. Schroeder condemns President Barack Obama, the Pope and the Post-Dispatch for their “faked compassion” for the downtrodden. I’m not quite sure what he means. What is “faked compassion?” Perhaps it is “talking the talk” of compassion but not “walking the walk.” But President Obama has not only spoken about income inequality in the U.S. and around the world, he has consistently proposed legislation to help those who economically deprived. Pope Francis has literally walked with the poor (something President Obama also did as a community organizer). The Post-Dispatch is generally guided by the words of founder Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1907 wrote that the Post-Dispatch will always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor.

Schroeder goes on to say, “God endowed every man and woman with certain inalienable rights that no pope nor president can steal from them.” But those rights lose marginal value if someone cannot put food in his or her mouth or provide shelter for his or her family.

So what can we do about conservatives who seem to demonize public compassion and shroud their opinions in a cloak of certainty that sometimes in frightening? The answer is not that we can do nothing. You can look in The Republican Brain for some answers, and I’ll just propose one here. Let our schools be much more compassionate, with far less homework and testing. Let them being settings where students and teachers  can enjoy learning and seek ways to use it to better serve themselves as well as society at large. It’s not the whole answer, but it’s a good place to start.

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In a very thoughtful, eloquent and balanced editorial published on Sunday, October 7, 2012, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called for voters to re-elect President Obama on Nov. 6. Calling President Obama “a serious man,” the Post-Dispatch lauded his positive vision for the country and outlined his first-term achievements. Here are some excerpts:

Mr. Obama sees an America where the common good is as important as the individual good. That is the vision on which the nation was founded. It is the vision that has seen America through its darkest days and illuminated its best days. It is the vision that underlies the president’s greatest achievement, the Affordable Care Act. Twenty years from now, it will be hard to find anyone who remembers being opposed to Obamacare.

The editorial reminds readers that President Obama inherited an economy devastated by disastrous economic policies promoted by the George W. Bush administration, and that while recovery has been slower than hoped for, it would be unrealistic to expect a total turnaround in just four years.

To expect Barack Obama to have repaired, in four years, what took 30 years to undermine, is simply absurd. He might have gotten further had he not been saddled with an opposition party, funded by plutocrats, that sneers at the word compromise. But even if Mr. Obama had had Franklin Roosevelt’s majorities, the economy would still be in peril.

The endorsement does not come without some criticism, and the Post-Dispatch also lists some of the disappointments even President Obama’s staunchest supporters have felt:

Mr. Obama has not been everything we expected. In his first weeks in office, Democrats ran amok with part of his economic stimulus package. His mortgage relief program was insufficient. Together with his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, the president has been too deferential to the financial industry. The president should have moved to nationalize troubled banks instead of structuring the bailout to their benefit. Regulatory agencies and the Justice Department were unable to bring financial crooks to heel.

We had hoped that Mr. Obama would staff the executive branch with the best and the brightest. There have been stars, but there have been egregious failures, too. The “Fast and Furious” operation at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was a disgrace. The vastly expensive and unaccountable intelligence and Homeland Security agencies need stronger oversight. The now-renamed Minerals Management Service could have used some best-and-brightest inspectors before the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

But even given these factors, the Post-Dispatch reminds readers that the alternative to President Obama–Mitt Romney– is a candidate whose beliefs appear to change with the wind,  a person who has voiced disdain for people who are economically disadvantaged, and a politician whose policies are virtually identical to those that caused the economic downturn.

Mr. Romney apparently will say anything that will help him win an election. As a president, he might well govern as a pragmatic chief executive, or he might sell himself to the plutocrats and the crazies who have taken over his party. He is asking Americans to take a lot on faith — there’s nothing to see in his tax returns; he can cut taxes and whack away debt while trimming deductions he will not specify.

The editorial ends by describing the choice facing voters in the 2012 presidential election:

The question for voters is actually very simple. The nation has wrestled with it since its founding: Will this be government for the many or the few?

Choose the many. Choose Barack Obama.

 

[Image credit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

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