Jack Was Right
Jack Nicholson was right. You can’t handle the truth. By you I mean the American people. While politicians say over and over that they trust the voters, what they really mean is that they don’t and they think people are stupid. There’s evidence that they are not wrong. Americans have a history of being taken for a ride, especially by charismatic leaders who offer up simple solutions to complex problems. While there is some merit to the concept of Occam’s razor, it doesn’t always work with things like homelessness, war and healthcare.
Today’s New York Times opinion piece about Trump’s use of the term ‘fake news’ is interesting in that it shows how it has led a group of other world ‘leaders’ to use the same phrase in the past few years. This is not new, having been coined Lügenpresse (lying press) by the Nazi’s half a century ago. And to this day, there are still people who believe that the Holocaust never happened. Mind blowing. Don’t like what some says about you call them a liar. It’s the standard reply of many six year olds.
But too many people believe that media en mass are all slanted, and tell lies. This is dangerous. All people should be suspicious of the information they get nowadays, but for a different reason. That’s because now, more than ever before, there are people or organizations who’s sole purpose is to misinform, promote alternative facts and to mislead people to buy or vote for something based on those lies. This is very dangerous.
Read the piece here and semper cave: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/30/opinion/editorials/fake-news.html
When you point…
President Trump has been unlike any POTUS before, especially when it comes to self promotion. He took that to yet another level yesterday during the daily White House COVID19 press briefing when he showed a nearly four minute video which many observed to be a promotional stunt of his ‘accomplishments’ during the pandemic. Apparently produced at taxpayer expense, the video defends Trump’s actions in response to the widespread claims that his inaction early on led to the U.S. leading the world with COVID19 cases and deaths.
Several network news outlets cut away from the briefing once it became clear that the video was an unconventional campaign stunt. But it’s important to see how the administration is making claims and using this time to promote a brand instead of finding solutions to this once in a lifetime meltdown.
A link to the NBC feed of the briefing is below. You can watch the first few minutes to get a feel for how the briefing got started. The video is at 14:15 minutes in – watch the President’s introduction and if you like, watch the Q&A afterward. That portion, which has been mentioned as the greatest meltdown by a President in modern times, is what happens when someone is more interested in their own reputation above all else.
This reminds me of an old saying: When you point, three fingers point back at you…
@realdonaldtrump, @COVID19, @POTUS
One degree of separation
Today’s LA Times has a piece by George Skelton about the TV ad Ron Reagan Jr. did a few years back for The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group of 32,000 atheists who believe in the separation of church and state. In the ad, Reagan says that keeping the separation is what the Framers had in mind and his last line seals the deal.
The article today mentions that Reagan’s dad, the 40th President, made various attempts to coax his son into going to church with the family, to no avail. Junior says that the similarities between the Santa story and the god story were to much for him to believe.
The Reagans, who would weekend at their Pacific Palisades home, would attend the Bel Air Presbyterian church, officiated by the Reverend Donn Moomaw.
His son Dan was a young student athlete at my school when I moved to Los Angeles and we became fast friends. And competitors. In the big year end football game at Emerson Jr. High, Dan was the opposing QB and we had a heck of a game. I think we won, but I wasn’t there at the end as a large lineman stepped on my leg sufficient to tear all the tendons in my ankle – I had to wear a hard cast and use crutches for six weeks, knocking me out of the game.
Dan’s dad Donn delivers the invocation at Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration in January 20, 1981. I agree with Skelton’s appraisal of it being among my favorite TV ads ever produced. The last line, which was improvised by Reagan to fill the last few seconds of a 30 second spot, is brave and priceless.
Read the LA Times piece here: http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=1722b7e5-6e66-4343-8542-8d1054609ab5
See the ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7INIhD9P0Pw
Sound Familiar?
Tonight on PBS’s America Experience is a biopic about Joe McCarthy, the ‘junior’ senator from Wisconsin, who to a large degree brought paranoia into the American consciousness in the 1950s. According to an LA Times preview of the show, McCarthy was a smart man who started off as a Democrat, who then turned Republican; who lied about his time in the service and injuries he incurred and who brought great suffering to many Americans in his witch hunt series of Senate hearings on Un-American activities.
In the end, he lost the hearts and minds of the people and was censured by Congress, then passed at age 48. He was one of the most divisive Americans of the 20th Century.
The show is timely because we have a similar character casting aspersions today, making people both paranoid, upset and divisive without just cause. Sound familiar?
What’s interesting is that McCarthy and President Trump have something else in common – they both used the counsel of attorney Roy Cohen, the notorious bully who advised McCarthy in the 1950s and taught Trump that the best defense is a merciless offense. Cohen died in 1986, but not before acting as role model to The Donald as he was growing his real estate empire.
Read the LA Times preview of McCarthy here: https://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?edid=80be46da-33e1-4a93-93b6-0f8f00b86c5a
Not a gold standard for journalistic integrity
Duncan Hunter, the embattled Republican Representative for Alpine, CA has changed his tune and has agreed to plead guilty to charges of misuse of campaign funds. Originally, Hunter said he was the subject of a witch hunt, but as evidence and pressure mounted, he saw the light and changed his tune.
KUSI, the last horse in the San Diego’s television news broadcast race, arranged for an on-air interview with Hunter before he pleaded guilty, but agreed to ask only questions suggested by Hunter’s handlers. This is a journalistic no-no, yet the station stands by its decision. A spokesman for Hunter, defending the station’s tactic, called KUSI the “gold standard for journalistic integrity.” It’s not and is another example of how quality journalism is losing ground to partisan disinformation masquerading as news. The McKinnon family, owners of the TV station, are well known GOP donors/supporters.
Read the SD Union Tribune’s story about this stunt here: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2019-12-06/kusis-duncan-hunter-interview-was-limited-to-questions-suggested-by-his-staff
Memories in Metal
Humans are fond of remembering things from the past via physical representation. I am not immune to this trait. Yesterday, I cut the last part of my past with media when I exchanged my vanity license plate for a more generic version.
The WKLY RAG plate I acquired in 2002 was a play on words, fit nicely on the frame and brought a bit humor to an often humorless enterprise. Only a few people seemed to understand the meaning but that didn’t matter.
The art was created by Robert Wyland, known for his ocean themed works. Apparently, he was in a disagreement with the Department of Motor Vehicles a while back so they’ve discontinued using his art, replacing it with a similar but inferior work.
That plate traveled more than 300,000 miles with me throughout Southern California for seventeen years, a little less than half my time in the business. It saw many things, the good and bad, the slow of traffic and the late of night. Like it’s owner, it too shows a bit of wear which we will call patina. It reminds me of many things, some of which I will now let go of and move on. And so, I have asked it to do the same…
About World Press Day
If you missed World Press Day last Friday, there’s still time to give it some thought. It was established by the United Nations General Assembly to recognize the importance of a free press throughout the world. Americans enjoy among the most free of press, which has both positive and negative consequences. But in many countries, journalists face a serious threat of imprisonment and bodily harm for trying to tell the truth.
Here in the U.S., the free press has taken a step backwards of late in part due to the words and thoughts of the president and some in his administration who call journalists the ‘enemy of the people.’ This is not an original thought, as Richard Nixon said the same nearly fifty years ago. Violence against journalists raised its ugly head nearly one year ago in when the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland were entered by an angry person who killed five newspaper employees. This is relatively rare in this country but is more common in other parts of the world. For instance, the offices of Zeta newspaper in Tijuana, Mexico, just 19 miles from downtown San Diego, has seen two of its founders murdered for exposing corruption and publishing unflattering stories about the local drug cartel.
According to its Wikipedia listing, Zeta was founded in 1980 by Jesús Blancornelas, known as “the spiritual godfather of modern Mexican journalism” along with Héctor Félix Miranda and Francisco Ortiz Franco. The magazine regularly runs exposés on corruption in local and federal governments as well as on organized crime and drug trafficking, resulting in numerous threats and attacks against its staff. Félix was murdered in 1988 by bodyguards of politician Jorge Hank Rhon, while Ortiz was assassinated in 2004, apparently for his coverage of the Tijuana Cartel.
This is but one of many examples of journalists being targeted for doing their jobs. In some countries, journalists are in jail or have disappeared for doing theirs. This reminds me of the Thomas Jefferson quote which says in part “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”
So while we might not agree with what journalists say, we should all understand the value of a free press and its role in our democratic society. Because anything that has no checks and balances is not sustainable.
A few clips worth watching:
Wolf Blitzer on World Press Day: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/wolf-blitzer-speaks-out-on-world-press-freedom-day-journalists-are-not-your-enemy-were-just-like-you/
Why the New York Times is taking down its pay wall for three days: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/reader-center/world-press-freedom-day.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Reader%20Center
Historian Ron Chernow’s keynote speech video at the 2019 White House Correspondents Dinner (29 minutes but a great history lesson): https://www.nbcnews.com/video/white-house-correspondents-dinner-2019-full-speech-ron-chernow-1510465603900
Hail Cesar!
Cesar Chavez was perhaps the last of the hard-core white hat activists in this country. Having died in 1993, he fought for farm worker’s rights in California and throughout the country. He was deeply religious, a vegan and founded the United Farm Workers with Oxnard’s Dolores Huerta. I admire Chavez’s non-violent approach to protest and the sacrifice of his ‘spiritual fasts’ to raise awareness of the cause. Imagine not eating food for three weeks because of something you believe in…
Sunday was Cesar Chavez Day and the only mention I saw of it was the full-page ad in the LA Times, placed by El Pollo Loco. In it, the company remembers Chavez’s work and says that this week, over 600 of their restaurants staff and customers will participate in a mission to restore and beautify Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles.
We need more people like Cesar Chavez and fewer reasons to protest inequality in this world.
The Enemy is (sometimes) Us
In Sunday’s LA Times there is a full-page ad for an Academy Award nominated short film entitled A Night at the Garden. No, it’s not a comedy featuring millennial actors doing silly stunts after an evening of imbibing too much. It’s a reminder of an event on February 20, 1939 where 20,000 Americans packed into New York’s Madison Square Garden to pledge allegiance to a wicked form of White Power nationalism, under a flag featuring a swastika. The Heil Hitler salutes, hate and fear speech and the dogmatic robot-ism of the attendees all echo what was happening in Germany at the time. Especially chilling is the sequence where a man rushes the stage and is smothered by security, being beaten as a child dances with glee on stage behind him.
While incomplete in its brevity, this document stands witness to something that most Americans would bet couldn’t have happened at the time and is a reminder that something similar could happen in the present.
See the short film here: http://www.ANightAtTheGarden.com
Bezos the Barbarian
it’s not often when a civilian takes on a huge media company who is trying to blackmail him. But Jeff Bezos is no ordinary person. As the world’s richest man and a fighter in more than one way, he’s taking on AMI, publishers of low rent journalistic wannabe like The National Inquirer, US magazine and the like.
They threatened to publish embarrassing photos of Bezos and he decided to fight back and publish details about their threats and tactics in a blog post first. He did so on the website Medium.com on Thursday.
As as they say, the best defense is a good offense, Read his blog post here:
Media Medusa 