Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it Was Right

Over the last 36 hours, much of the cable-verse has been unremarkably predictable. MSNBC grieves, Newsmax and Fox gloat, and CNN searches to strike a moderate tune, whatever that might be.

Each media entity is frantically and fanatically preaching to its choir. That’s what their audience wants and believes. That’s where their commercial success lies.

While I seriously doubt there has been any audience transference from its well-entrenched political ideology of choice, therein lies the problem.

They are squandering our future, and we are succumbing to their pabulum. Former New Mexico Governor and US Ambassador Bill Richardson promoted collaboration and compromise, “We cannot accomplish all that we need to do without working together.”

Instead, too many of us hear a story and mutter, “Geez, what a bitch!” Or dismiss some politician or businessman bemoaning, “What a rich bastard they are, what do they know about…?”
We pit one another against each other for short-term political gain. Congressperson Majorie Taylor Greene has announced her intention to hold hearings on the leftist-leaning PBS for insinuating that Elon Musk’s raised salute was an endorsement of either fascism or Nazism. Hearings? Really?

To quote one of America’s great orators, Bugs Bunny, “Heh. What a maroon!”

See, I did it there!

But I must also recognize that on the other side of the aisle, statements by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez routinely boil the blood of many conservatives.

We are seduced and reduced to embracing (liking?) a diet of bromides and broadsides from one side to the other and back again. We toss around words like liberty and freedom and define them solely and judgmentally in our terms… and if you disagree, you’re disloyal, un-American, and wrong.

Ronald Reagan reminded us to be more careful with what we say and what’s at stake. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

We expect MSNBC to interview guests aligned with a left-of-center ideology, just as Newsmax or Fox celebrates the right. Name-calling predominates the headlines. Guests appear especially for their vitriol and the cleverness that predominate the airwaves.

Are media power brokers and gatekeepers so committed to being an echo chamber of their audience’s ideologies and so terrified of losing market share that they cannot present another idea?

Dare we suggest we deserve better?

Anchors and hosts giggle, make snarky editorial remarks, and castigate anyone who disagrees with their political line. Listen to the adjectives. Count the adverbs.

Admittedly, it’s so easy to sit in judgment. And the view ain’t bad either!

It is as unreasonable as it is unlikely that the media will change, and certainly not willingly, if ever. They will continue to pander to their perceptions of this divided and discordant mob of viewers.

Audiences respond to two distinct emotions. Anger and fear. Only. The more that fear is stoked, the angrier audiences become. The more that anger intensifies, the fear grows more profound.

What’s wrong with challenging audiences – not from opposite poles – but from a single theme articulated by Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it (Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce), “We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”

Would you listen and watch? Or is that theme too frightening for you? Is there any media company or talent with courage which is willing to try?

I, for one, would be proud to produce a show like that.

From CNN’s Reliable Sources – Media & Trump Day 1

AN insightful window in to how people see their news coverage

Sun Zhu was right…

The following post is making the rounds…

“Help make history, Boycott Inauguration Day, by turning your TV off at 12 o’clock ET on January 20. Make this inauguration the least-watched live event in the history of television. What an incredible message to the new administration. And for someone who loves to talk about crowd size, this is not going to make him very happy. It will put him on notice That we, the people, also have power! What a wonderful way to make Martin Luther King proud with an old-school approach to change. So tell your friends and tell your friends to tell their friends. Don’t presume people are not going to watch let’s make sure everyone doesn’t. Turn the TV to PBS so all the civil rights documentaries will get the ratings.”

My response is, what absolute poppycock.

In the days of Neilsen ratings, when that was all that was available, measuring a TV audience was the prime way to gauge a media event. That was then. It’s not today.

This week’s Trump inauguration will be available to a global audience on television, cable, audio, social media, and countless internet streams. It is potentially going to be the most watched inauguration simply in terms of its distribution and availability.
The TV numbers will be a pittance.

So – you don’t want to watch? Good on you.

Good luck to you.

And PBS should be so lucky to see a surge in their ratings.

Does anyone think that the sycophants who surround this president would ever be so bold as to tell that narcissist about a campaign to boycott his remarks?

Take it a second step, if told, would he care? How would we know?

On a larger plane, I find it risible to think the next 4 years will be better tolerated by being an ostrich. For anyone who disagreed with the President-elect or voted for his opposition, I might offer, “Get over it.”

Mr. Trump won, perhaps not with the mandate he has claimed, but with sufficient numbers in the popular vote and with a Congress prepped to do his bidding.

Is the answer not to watch, listen, or react to them too? For 4 years?

As for the line, “What a wonderful way to make Martin Luther King proud with an old-school approach to change” the perpetrator of this campaign forgets that Dr. King was all about publicity for the cause of racial justice. And more, he was a fighter… lest you forget the arrests, injuries, and deaths suffered by those who chose to stand by him. “Old-school approach…” seems like looking at history through a colored lens that has been distorted by memories of a gentler day.

These days are not gentle, dear reader.

If one disagrees with policies or positions, it’s far braver to speak up than to remain mute. If you think the country is on the wrong path, then speak up and be heard.
Sun Zhu tells us the path to victory begins with ourselves.“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Is the media pimping the confirmation hearings for the Mar-a-lago casting couch?

It is not much of a stretch to consider the Senate confirmation hearings for President-elect Trump’s cabinet as much more than a show-and-tell, superficial and unsatisfying peek-a-boo into the nominees’ character.

While it’s not a new phenomenon, the same vomit of words is heard at so many confirmation hearings as, in this case, GOP Senators spread their lips and gush platitudes of praise. At the same time, their Democratic counterparts swallow hard as they choke back words of doubt with so much regret for their losses last November.

It’s equally tough to envision the nominees as anything more than pawns in this current, Republican drama featuring a live, on-camera ritualistic dance aimed at an audience of one. The Senators are prostituting themselves in, what seems to me to be, a dance of fielty to the high prince of Palm Beach.

To quote the American comedian and satirist Will Rogers, “Senators are a never-ending source of amusement, amazement, and discouragement.”

Are the networks live broadcasts anything more than pimping for the President? One could and should argue, “No. The public should see for itself and note the character and tenor of the nominees.” But the fact that so many hours are offered free of charge and without obligation or an equal amount of time without balance is a concern.

Whether you support the nominations or have doubts is a private matter.

But what is public is this Senatorial progression of posturing themselves with obsequious, scripted mission statements and softball questions, aimed more at impressing or currying favor with Mr. Trump than eliciting real knowledge or a response from the witness.

Is it a question of what’s best for the American people? (The Senator’s job). Or is it a question of what can they say to be quoted on Fox to be noticed, appreciated, thanked, and soon rewarded?

Have we learned much of anything that wasn’t already prepared, shared, and promoted before the gavel fell opening the first session?

Aren’t we being treated to a regurgitation of message points crafted by speech writers? What a pitiful diet they are asking us to ingest.
And can’t you imagine these sycophants congratulating their bosses as they come off the dais — “What a good job you did.” And, “You sure looked great performing on camera at the microphone.” And, “We’ll be sure to send the clips from C-Span to the local stations in your state for rebroadcast on tonight’s evening news. The folks at home will love seeing you.”

I’ve noticed several Senators who have promoted their pleasure that the new secretary of defense will restore the military to its bygone glory. Forgive me, but is the military in tatters? There seem to be plenty of ships, and soldiers, and tanks, and even a new Space Force — isn’t that enough? This message may play well with old geezers down at the VFW hall, but what about the rest of us? Do these same Senators think any future war will really be fought primarily with boots on the ground? 
The hearings are not offering much more than an echo chamber.

The hearings are a reminder of P.T. Barnum’s assessment of the public, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

One would hope.

There is not much to see and learn here… there was an opportunity for better, but it seems that in the current politicized and fragmented world, any such hope has been dashed on the jagged shoals of reality.

The Senate hearings remind me of another Will Roger’s recommendation.
“After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring.
He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you’re full of bull, keep your mouth shut.”

“Stupid Is As Stupid Does” – A Modest Proposal to Everyone Hell Bent on Punishing California

While facts (real or alternative) rarely seem to matter either to Trump or the GOP… maybe their proposal to punish California for its flagrant disregard of sound forest management is ripe for implementation.

Or maybe just ripe? Why do so many GOP legislators in Washington want to punish Californians in exchange for any mercy or money?

{Let’s remember that according to AI, the Federal government owns 56-70% of California’s forest lands. Private ownership accounts for 40%, leaving the state responsible for just 3%.}

It is high time for a little responsible forest money management.

Starting immediately…

To hell with California’s smelts. Screw the waterfowl. Damn dams are inconvenient, and besides a good dam break and resulting flood is good to clear out slums in decrepit, declining, sanctuary-declared, leftist democrat-led cities and towns. California – the world’s 5th largest economy – needs to get a fiscal haircut and stern reprimand.

Nationally too, there has been too much waste… proverbial pork… bridges to nowhere…

From now on, there will be no federal aid for hurricane relief in the Gulf States. No hurricane is a surprise… many are charted with Sharpies, so we all know where in advance they will strike.

Lava flows in Hawaii? Ha! Eruptions can be largely predicted and lava moves slowly. If someone cannot get out of the way, it’s their fault.

Earthquakes too… a little rattle and roll is good for enhancing your rhythm.

As far as Tornado Alley is concerned, a good readjustment of topsoil is good for everyone. While the Dust Bowl is an ancient memory, moving a chunk of Kansas to Illinois seems reasonable, and less expensive than by truck or rail cars.

Nor’easters in New England? Not a worry. Just think of lobsters clawing their way as they relocate to higher ground in Penobscot Bay. They have 10 legs. Use them. No transportation subsidies for them.

Certainly, we have to stop reimbursing Springfield, Ohio residents for the loss of their pets; even if they were delicious.

Isn’t chicken the new white meat anyway… or was that more pork?

And let’s not forget about Alaska… high time to stop spending money on binoculars for a better glimpse of Russia from our windows.

Montana? Sorry… no money for you for errant Chinese spy balloons falling from the sky, even if that carnage might cause the buffalo to stampede. Bison meat… certainly exportable to global markets without government trade sanctions is good too.

And farm subsidies are a thing of the past.

And pork… government pork? Nope… it’s your bacon in the fire from now on.

FEMA? Cast off into the dustbin of history.

I think it is wonderful that Congress is finally stepping up to put some much-needed and long-overdue fiscal controls on flagrant emergency spending to help American citizens.
It’s high time to put a stop to this financial drip, a leakage that is undermining the inherent strengths of the states and allowing good Americans to rely on handouts in emergencies, even when all else has been lost.

The wildfires in LA are the proverbial (flammable) straw that broke the camel’s back.

And we should punish nature too when Mom doesn’t provide enough rain.
Let’s cloud-seed the skies… until the heavens burst, and who cares about flooding in Missouri, Iowa, or along the Mississippi?

The reappearance of, “Stupid is as Stupid Does” reportedly dates to 1862
Anthony Trollop used it in 1882.
Forrest Gump popularized it in 1994.
Thank goodness Congress has restored it to our lexicon by its actions in 2025.

Why don’t the American media and Op-ed writers see this as clearly as I do?

Jonathan Swift surely would approve of all this.

Media Mayhem – The LA fires bring out the best and worst in reporting

This week’s fires in and around Los Angeles resemble an apocalypse.

Families lost loved ones; thousands more lost property accumulated over a lifetime.

The media coverage has been extensive on land and in the air. Anchors have raced from the safety and comfort of New York studios to appear earnestly reporting on the fire line.

 Snarky tabloid stories poked at anchors who tailored their Nomex fire retardant suits to appear fitted (more dashing?). In a holocaust, I suppose some news heavyweights think it best to look good while reporting on other’s suffering… before returning to the comfort of 4-star hotels for the night.

As my friend and colleague Bob Sirkin posed in an email today, “I am tired of watching network anchors trying to squeeze out the very last drops of emotion from victims. How much more do you want to ask the same banal questions to people who are left with nothing?”

The So California fires are a tragedy of unfathomable scope. Of course.

But dare we compare this natural destruction to human-caused misery in Gaza, the Ukraine, and Russia where cities have been leveled, buildings pancaked on residents asleep in their beds, and debris fields stretch for miles and miles – entire communities obliterated back to the stone age?

The media coverage and public interest in these stories has largely waned. Field reporters file stories about a horrific bombing or a gun battle, characterized by the news term “bang-bang.” But the rest of the story – about people…the losses they have sustained is largely sanitized from US media.

It’s absolutely as tragic, but if I may suggest, few if any of these victims likely have Go-Fund-Me pages.

The old bromide that all news is local is true, and the fires in California have greater resonance to fellow Americans than something happening thousands of miles away in a foreign country to people who are not “us.”

I get it.

Soon the fires will be contained. Even this weekend there will be less coverage as audiences over Saturday and Sunday decline and the newspapers shrink their page count. Anchors will return to their studios, where it is less expensive to sustain coverage.

The audience will tell pollsters that they’ve had enough, or feel overwhelmed, or worse yet, that the devastation is all beginning to look the same. And we’ll largely move on.

Newsroom cynics used to keep tally of what scope of devastation warranted network television news interest… hundreds of thousands of victims in a sub-continent typhoon barely earned a mention. Several thousand war casualties in Africa or several hundred killed in a South American earthquake might earn a flicker of acknowledgment. Scores in a domestic tragedy certainly earned a slot in the news window… but then, so too did a 2 car accident in New York’s Times Square so long as it was reported in the New York Post or Times.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective after all.

PASTEURIZING MEDIA

Countering “media fallout”

{{This was written by my friend, teacher, and colleague Marty Perlmutter and first appeared on his substack today.It is thought provoking, and I felt worth sharing

Marshall McLuhan had a central idea he termed “media fallout.” He knew the only way to avoid the mind-manipulation of media was awareness of how these modes of consciousness envelopment work on our brains. In the absence of awareness, you have media fallout. He explained this to advertising and broadcast executives of the time — half a century ago. He said that he felt a lot like Louis Pasteur in 1860. He was aware of pervasive and invisible forces that caused disease and spread infection. But all around were individuals, doctors along with patients, oblivious to imperceptible but all-too-real microbes that were killing them.

To become conscious of how balkanized, corrupted, disinforming and ever-more-pathetic media are shaping our minds and behaviors requires a quantum leap in awareness of invisible forces. Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News are the easiest of the “cavorting beasties” (as the inventor of the microscope termed single-cell organisms) to detect, and begin to disinfect. Social media, fragmented attention, cell phone dopamine addiction — these will take more time to elucidate and defang.

Our plight seems more fraught than simply entertaining ourselves to death. As McLuhan taught, what we’re not aware of will have its way with our delicate cerebra. A lot of what we’re dealing with now barely makes it to the cortex. This is the age of the medulla oblongata, the brain stem where fear and rage abide. While we are distracted, addicted, disinformed and terrorized, what hope is there that we’ll grok how this enveloping miasma operates?

Another teaching gives me hope. A peerless penetrator of the loom of passions and persuasions, Friedrich Nietzsche, taught, “Understanding stops action.” When you comprehend how something triggers you, when you grasp the roots of your convictions, there’s no heat, no drive to act. There is only a tranquility that passeth manipulation.

So spread the word: Cavorting beasties are abroad in the land. We cannot see or sense this stuff til we surface the mechanisms by which they reach into us. By slowly becoming aware of how these forces massage our senses, impact our feeling and thinking, we can disabuse ourselves of thralldom and become, truly and at last, free.

Good God! Can the Democrats Be Any Less Inspiring In Their Selection of Party Leadership?

Bland. Milk toast. Banal. White bread. Safe – in an era which demands thoughtful, novel and strong leadership shouldn’t there be another option?

The two front-runners for leadership of the Democratic National Committee seem to be two sides of the same-old, hackneyed coin which was battered and bruised in the November 24 election… a tarnished token which shows little spark, energy or life since.

Quoting Sunday’s 12.5.25 NYTimes, “The two candidates who have emerged as front-runners to become D.N.C. chair, Ken Martin of Minnesota and Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, are both middle-aged white men from the upper Midwest and chair of their state parties whose politics are well within the Democratic mainstream.”

I’m sorry, was that a typo? Didn’t they mean to write mausoleum?

My concern has nothing to do with DEI or political correctness. Still, rather, I am just surprised that the party is choosing to act more like an ostrich in defeat than a righteous, rigorous contestant who wants another crack at the champ who just flattened them at the ballot box. (If you’ll forgive the tortured mixed metaphors).

Washington beltway wags often speak of the best and the brightest minds populating the halls of power. (Of course, look where that got us in the Vietnam era). But I do wonder if this is really the best to be mustered for what is surely among the most difficult and seemingly unattractive jobs in DC?

All I can hear echoing is “4 More Years” – a disconcerting call considering the disarray in the Democratic Party hierarchy and populace.

Or maybe I am just a ~~realist~~ pessimist?

Why we need long-form, investigative journalism

A mole infiltrated the highest ranks of American militias. Here’s what he found.

ProPublica

It’s so ‘easy’ to hate some one or some group, to have an almost visceral distaste and hate, but it is so much more difficult to understand them… to really, really understand beyond that intuitive or instinctive disagreement.

What makes them tick? How did they form their ideology? What fuels and fosters their suspicions. For those who we disagree with, we shake our heads in amazement that they can be “so wrong.”

This ProPublica required time and guts to research, check, double check and write. For the mole, it required a whole lot of chutzpah.

The resulting work is well worth our attention.

Vigilantism Against the Media… Maybe the media should correct the narrative?

The recent attack on a news reporter in Colorado by a man screaming epithets at him for not appearing to be a white, Anglo-Saxon American really should not surprise anyone.

What’s perhaps more surprising is how these racial or ethnic attacks have been perpetuated (and tolerated?) in this burgeoning era of “I hate anyone who doesn’t agree with or look like me.” When did Trump’s America become a battlecry for racial hate?

What prompts anyone to think they are doing a civilized act by randomly chasing another human being and beating them for their looks or a presumption of their inherent evil? Who gets to decide this? What sort of person animal has that chutzpah?

We can wring our hands over recent political diatribes glorifying vigilantism. We can decry bravado which promotes the superiority of some and the inferiority of others whom we dislike (or fear), but when did vigilantism become acceptable?

The media is the fall guy for a host of problems, real and manufactured. The media is allowing itself to be pilloried. The adults (owners, publishers, editors, statesmen) in the media must speak up as influencers, critically and urgently to set the record straight about the generally outstanding job being performed every day.

Audiences must not be allowed to randomly assume or equate cable talk-TV with responsible reporting; audiences must be corrected when they make assumptions or fall for a diet of propaganda; knowledge stems from bonafide news (sourced, double-checked, and most important of all: presented without emotion or adverbs). Noise is not to be confused with “news.”

At least that is what I believe and taught my students.