So, here we are, far closer to a new Congressional election than we are to the last national vote for President, and it’s long past the time to look around and see just how things have changed since Donald Trump was elected and the Republican Party had firm control of every branch of government.
Certainly, we can’t count on our local newspapers or cable television to do that kind of long, complex and expensive analysis. They are no longer up to the job, because it would mean having to pay reporters and researchers and even data entry people, and small media outlets just don’t have the money for that kind of staff. Still, a few national papers are trying to tackle it.
If you feel generous, give them a B for effort. But, in a lot of small media markets - which is the only source of news for a lot of our nation - we have substituted cheap opinion for actual news coverage. That barely gets a C.
It’s mostly our fault, of course. Our newspapers and our television networks were once more than capable of throwing a bright spotlight on the problems of our society, and the directions our nation was taking. And, mostly, we threw it away.
Don’t believe me? Then I have just one word for you - ratings. Yep, after a lot of us stopped watching all those long and boring documentaries, the networks and the local stations discovered that just two or three people behind a desk reading the headlines held the attention of an audience just as well as a whole team of reporters in the field.
It just looks like news. And, in a way, it is. How do you know they are going for image over substance? Ever see an ugly weather reporter? Or an elderly one?
So, cheap is precisely the word I want to use. You don’t have to pay reporters to work for weeks or months on a single story. And it costs a lot less to buy two or three opinion pieces a week from some nationally syndicated commentator than to have a full-time reporter looking at how local issues mesh with national and international trends.
And, That's My Problem
Why does that bother me? Well, a one-size-fits-all commentary doesn’t begin to touch on all the facts that should be important to different people. Is an agreement on soybean imports in Russia good or bad for Indiana? Do intellectual property violations in the Middle East mean anything at all to North Carolina? Does the fact that my grass seed spray may come from China mean anything to the people in New Mexico?
Local reporters might figure that out, if they had the time and the space to write about it. But, it really is easier to just run one opinion piece from the left or the right and pretend the newspapers are doing their job. Or, more to the point, that readers are doing their job of demanding the information they need.
On television, all we seem to worry about is ratings, and advertisers are more than happy to pay the salaries of big name commentators. A year ago, Forbes estimated Sean Hannity’s annual salary at $29 million, while Rachel Maddow made about $7 million.
But, neither of them go out and report on the tough “how are we doing” questions. They mostly comment on news reported by others. (To be fair, Rachel’s staff regularly breaks some interesting news, and Hannity gets to talk with Donald Trump.)
This would be a good place to point out that Walter Cronkite - one of my heroes of journalism - went to Vietnam himself to report on the war. The first time, he reported what the military said - that we were winning a long and bloody struggle. The last time, after the Tet offensive, he told his audience that it was a war we could not win.
Lyndon Johnson - who bitterly fought not to be the first President to lose a war - reflected that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost middle America.
Now, we can only ask “where’s Walter?'
A Tip Of The Hat To Just One Person
Today, the only place where I regularly see someone in the media taking the time to look at the complex “how are we doing” questions - one issue at a time - is Wyatt Cenac. If you aren’t familiar with this work, go find it, then go watch. It’s well worth the time.
So, being cheap myself - after all, you read this for nothing, and you get what you pay for - I will offer some opinions on just how much we have changed in the time the Trump administration has been running our nation. You may find some surprises.
First surprise, not very much has changed. What has happened is that things have become more visible. A lot more visible. to those who do the hard work of really looking. The rich are getting richer. The powerful are getting more powerful. The social fabric is fraying just a little bit more each month.
Of course, a lot of people are still in denial. And there is an old saying about willful denial. It starts “Where there is no vision...”
“What should we all be seeing?” you ask. Well, I would start with the corrupting influence of absolute power. Remember when Republicans in Congress refused to appoint a Supreme Court justice nominated by President Obama? Well, what happened? Not much.
The Democrats in Congress took the high road of making loud speeches and not actually doing much of anything - lest they be blamed by the GOP for being obstructionists - and so we got Neal Gorsich.
And, what did we get with him? Well, he recently voted with a 5-4 Supreme Court majority on an arbitration issue, which is a really big deal. Now, the law says that if a company with 500 workers does something wrong like not paying them what they should be paid under their contract, they can sue.
But, if the company first demanded its workers must agree to arbitration instead of going to court as a condition of employment - and more and more companies are doing this every month - those 500 workers must each go out and hire a lawyer to press their case. If they all did it, the cases would fill up court calendars for years.
Ah, but fear not. Most workers probably can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and most lawyers would not take an individual worker’s case that pays so little. And, arbitration often favors employers, not employees.
See, nothing changed. And, a lot did. The same way that the nation’s ever-growing loss of union jobs - and we are talking about something happening over decades - has no real effect on our daily lives. Only on how much people earn, and how the middle class is shrinking. Just the way it was shrinking last week, and last month, and last year. Try to do a story on that in a two minute news clip.
One Story You've Probably Already Seen
Then there was the story on TV the other day about Harley-Davidson closing down one plant and shifting some jobs to another one. A win of about 300 jobs for Pennsylvania, and a loss, overall, of about 800 jobs for Harley-Davidson workers. The TV reporter went to the plant that was closing and interviewed one worker, who said he was not happy, but that he still believed in President Trump. Balanced coverage, I guess. He never said why.
So, Harley ends up with millions in tax breaks, which it uses to buy back stock and increase the value of the company to its shareholders, and the workers lose their jobs. Harley explained it was only moving jobs to Thailand to meet regional demand, and had nothing to do with their tax break.
The public debate that followed focused on Trump’s massive tax cuts and proposed tariffs, but the decision by Harley to close its factory was made long before Trump was elected, and mostly involved the declining market for big motorcycles in the U.S.
Read that in your papers? I did, but it took some searching to find that news. Different pieces of the story in different papers. See it on TV? Well, why not? Extra credit question. Was the soon to be unemployed Harley worker right to stay fast to his faith in Donald Trump?
Feel free to submit a written response, but it has to be thoughtful - which means no cursing - and it must be at least three full pages long, so I know you put some effort into it. Tweets need not apply.
What else haven’t we been reading about? Well, chaos has become the norm in Washington. And it hasn’t.
Certainly our foreign policy seems to be a bit confused. We are out of treaties, then we are in treaties, then we are out of them again. We are taking strong steps to protect our industries from foreign competition, then we are weakening the strong steps, even before they have been taken. But, we still have our phones made in China. I just hope the Army and the Navy aren’t using them.
That’s because those phones may be able to spy on us even when they are not being used. I think.
Maybe I’ll find a long story on it in the Post. The New York Post or the Washington Post. Or the Wall Street Journal, which more people should actually read once in a while.
Just pick your side and watch it faithfully. See, nothing much has changed.
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