Spencer Critchley

Journalism

Whatever Happened to Sharia Law? And Other Questions for Right Wing Media Fans

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Whatever happened to declaring Sharia law? Obama’s almost done, and it’s really beginning to look like he may not get around to it.

And how is he going to fit in taking our guns away? Jan. 20 will be here before you know it; he’s really gonna have to hustle.

Now that I think of it, where are the death panels? We were guaranteed death panels as part of Obamacare. So far they can’t seem to get organized.

Whatever happened to Sharia law?

And when do we get going on the runaway inflation? It’s been stuck at historically low levels since 2008.

And the soaring unemployment? That hasn’t showed up either — instead we got the longest job creation streak in history, unemployment cut in half, and now wages are rising. Sheesh.

And the New Black Panthers? Two of them showed up outside a polling place in Philadelphia for a few hours in 2008, and that was that. They were supposed to be running the White House with help from the Muslim Brotherhood — what the heck happened there?

Has Common Core made any progress in turning all our kids gay?

When exactly do we get taken over by the UN?

Anyone seen the FEMA concentration camps?

And how come the US Army hasn’t got around to invading Texas? When do we use all those tunnels under Walmarts? Talk about a snafu.

You know, as hard as it is to imagine…

It’s almost like the right wing media was full of it.

Should Real News Be a Utility, Like Water and Electricity?

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Like people in towns across America, I’m watching my local newspapers die.

Every few months, it seems, they lay off more staff, while announcing a new digital initiative that’s somehow supposed to make up for the fact that they just can’t afford to report the news any more.

No one wants to pay for it.

After all, look at all the “content” we can get for free, much of which looks like news.

The trouble is, though, so much of it isn’t. Real news can’t be created by digital magic. It requires the time-consuming work of humans — trained ones — digging into what’s going on, weighing competing versions of the truth, and giving the rest of us their best version.

It’s never perfect, and sometimes it’s very far short of that. But it’s so much better than any alternative. Democracy literally depends on it, as Thomas Jefferson said:

The way to prevent [errors] of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and 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…

Do not be too severe upon the people’s errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I and Congress and assemblies, judges, and governors, shall all become wolves.

“What are you going to do about it?” Thomas Nast cartoon showing Tammany Hall as a tiger consuming democracy.
“What are you going to do about it?” Thomas Nast cartoon showing Tammany Hall as a tiger consuming democracy.

But in our modern, digital world, news doesn’t pay, and so, especially at the local level, it’s going away.

That could be seen as good news for people like me, whose job it is to try to get stories into the media. With fewer reporters in the way, that’s getting easier all the time. More and more papers will run a well-written press release unedited.

But I hate it. I don’t want an easier job, if it comes at the expense of a functioning democracy.

To save democracy, we must save news. We can start with local news, which is what matters most to most people (nationally, we have some government funding of public broadcasting, but it’s unlikely we’ll see that expand any time soon).

I have an idea: why not make local news a utility? Charge a small user fee to all the people in a city or county who benefit from more honest institutions – and that’s everybody, of course. The money collected would fund an independent news utility, charged with doing what healthy newspapers always did: holding the powerful accountable.

If this only funded one such organization per locality, that wouldn’t be as good as what we used to have: cities often had several daily papers. But it would be a lot better than what we’re heading towards in city after city — no newspaper worthy of the name.

What about TV news? That business is struggling too, but it’s still better off than newspapers are. And as TV has traditionally done with newspapers, it could leverage the original reporting done by the news utility.

We can’t do without clean water or reliable electricity. Maybe it’s finally time to recognize that the same is true of accurate information.

Skip the Gut Check, Democrats: The Problem Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Following a shock loss to what looked like the worst presidential candidate in history, many Democrats are agonizing over what policies they need to change in order to win back voters.

They needn’t bother: policy has almost nothing to do with it. Democrats can go left, right, more populist, less populist, or stay put.

Because for policies to make a difference, voters have to know what they are. And in every election, Republicans begin with a big gimme: millions of people are voting for and against things that don’t exist.

We’ve heard a lot over the years about the right-wing media bubble, and, more recently, the plague of fake news in social media feeds.

But for some reason, most analysts — and many Democratic politicians — seem to assume all this misinformation magically disappears in the voting booth. Most of the post-election debate seems to be about substantive factors that supposedly explain why otherwise reasonable people voted for Trump, like economic anxiety, fear of terrorism, or resentment of elitism. It’s like we have a rational investors theory of voter behavior.

But missing from the discussion is the big bloc of voters who were simply making a mistake, based on bad facts.

Consider just some of the reasons some people cite for rejecting the Obama legacy that Hillary Clinton ran on: “soaring deficits,” “job-killing economic policies,” “uncontrolled borders,” and “rising crime.”

None of these things is real.

Graph showing dramatic decline of violent crime since 1992.

  1. “Soaring deficits.” Actually, the deficit under President Obama has plummeted in every fiscal year except the most recent one. But in 2013, according to Pew, only 12 percent of Republicans knew the truth, and only 29 percent of Democrats – misinformation is leaky. The debt has in fact gone up, but that’s inevitable all the while you’re reducing deficits until you get them to zero, like Bill Clinton did.
  2. “Job-killing economic policies.” In fact, Obama holds the record for uninterrupted job growth, with more than 15 million jobs created to date, and has cut unemployment in half from its 2010 peak. But a 2015 Bloomberg survey found that 53 percent of Republicans believe unemployment has gotten worse. No doubt many are also unaware that corporate profits have set new records, the S&P 500 is up more than two and a half times, and inflation has been less than half the post World War II average, among other good economic news.
  3. ”Uncontrolled borders.” The truth is that illegal immigration has declined under Obama, while border enforcement, including deportations of criminals, has greatly increased. Meanwhile the data show that first generation immigrants, including ones here illegally from Mexico, commit less crime than native born Americans. But Pew found that 50 percent of Trump supporters believe undocumented immigrants are a serious crime threat that calls for more border security.
  4. “Rising crime.” In the real world, violent crime has been falling steadily since 1992. It’s now at the lowest level since 1970. But 79 percent of Republicans (65 percent of Democrats) think it’s rising, according to Gallup.

There are lots of other examples, like the fantasies that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, climate change is a Chinese hoax, or Hillary deliberately let our people die in Benghazi.

Millions of Americans have been convinced of such things. In other words, millions of Americans are casting misguided votes.

If ballots were being altered, that would be a big story. In effect, they are.

As Obama told Bill Maher recently, “If I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either.”

What to do? Obama provides a clue here too.

Because despite facing the same reality handicap, he won twice.

That means he was able to connect with some voters who otherwise would have voted against him based on faulty information (it goes without saying that some who did so were well-informed and just honestly disagreed with him).

How? By out-communicating the opposition.

People believe falsehoods because they feel true – Trump gets away with all his whoppers because they sound (and probably are) so authentically unfiltered.

What makes Obama a great communicator is that he can make the truth feel true: he connects the head and the gut.

And that’s the gut check Democrats need.

Branding Bannon: How to Protest a White Nationalist in the White House

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(Also published at Huffington Post.) Democrats in Washington have registered strong objections to Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as his senior White House adviser.

Will their protests make any difference? So far, it looks like no: as the minority in both houses, Democrats have little leverage, and media attention is already fading.

But here’s something that might work, and it borrows a page from Trump’s own playbook: brand Bannon.

Democrats, and everyone who cares about equality, should give him a new name: White Nationalist Steve Bannon.

And pledge never to refer to him as anything else.

This idea is of course similar to Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” — but with an important difference: it’s not an unsupported slur, it’s a simple statement of fact.

Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News has become a hub for the bigots of the white nationalist alt-right, running stories such as this one:

Headline and image of confederate flag from Breitbart news story praising the Confederacy
A Breitbart News story repeated the racist lie that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery.

Some people who know Bannon — sorry, I mean White Nationalist Steve Bannon — claim that he personally is not a bigot (though his ex-wife, among others, disagrees).

I might say that’s a distinction without a difference — but what White Nationalist Steve Bannon does is actually worse than just being a garden variety bigot. Most bigots are ignorant. White Nationalist Steve Bannon, an alum of Harvard, Goldman Sachs, and the U.S. Navy officer corps, knows exactly what he’s doing.

Imagine what he could do in the White House.

The great thing about always and only saying “White Nationalist Steve Bannon” is that it’s a protest that would meet him every time he appears anywhere, and need never end.

Unless, let’s hope, his term in government ends, hopefully before it starts.

Debunking The Media’s Top Excuse for Giving Trump Billions in Free Publicity

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[Also published at Huffington Post.] He’s a genius at exploiting the media, if at nothing else: Donald Trump’s rise has been fueled by almost unbelievable amounts of free coverage — well over $2 billion worth so far.

Many have complained that this makes the media, hungry for Trump-driven ratings, complicit in the elevation of a dangerously unqualified reality show star to the near-summit of political power.

There’s standard media response, though: Trump gets more coverage simply because he’s more available. It was repeated Sunday by Face the Nation‘s John Dickerson in The New York Times Magazine:

If the others don’t want to talk, then that’s on them. In a lot of cases, Trump was the only one who would talk on any given Sunday. Talking to the press is not always good. Donald Trump seems to think it is, but most of his opponents didn’t. He was getting more airtime, but he was also the only one who was as available as he was.

Seems reasonable, and I accept that Dickerson, a fine journalist, believes it’s true.

But I think he’s kidding himself, along with all the others who make this claim.

I’ve helped book interviews for three presidential campaigns. I can tell you what happens — under normal circumstances — when one candidate is more available than another. That candidate gets turned away, in the name of media balance.

On the 2008 Obama campaign, for example, our interview-booking operation was far better than John McCain’s. Every day, we offered opportunities with the principals (the presidential and vice presidential candidates) and their spouses, and/or with high level surrogates, such as governors, members of Congress, and celebrities. We booked a lot of them, but we also were frequently told, “Sorry, we have to say no because the other side isn’t making anyone available, and we can’t look like we’re favoring you.”

That’s the normal state of affairs. What’s been happening with Trump is not normal.

And the only explanation that seems credible is the obvious one: Trump, thanks to his very outrageousness, is ratings gold. Turning him down would mean throwing away a fortune. Consider what he’s done for CNN:

When CNN President Jeff Zucker saw the ratings for Fox News’s first Republican debate last August — a staggering 24 million viewers — he immediately called up his head of advertising sales and told her to raise prices, by a lot…

Since the start of the year, when the primary season began in earnest, CNN’s prime-time audience has more than doubled to 435,000 viewers a night in its target demographic of 25- to 54-year-olds, according to Nielsen…

Mr. Zucker acknowledges that CNN has been criticized for the ample airtime it has devoted to Mr. Trump, but he dismisses most of that as coming from those who “just don’t like Donald Trump.”

“To his credit, he has been willing to submit to interviews, town halls, or whatever, in a way that I still don’t understand why many of the others weren’t willing to do,” he said.

I accept that Zucker believes this explanation just as much as CBS’s Dickerson does. But we’re talking about an industry where, in business terms, ratings are everything: deciding the fates of networks, and the careers of individual employees. Well-intentioned people can lose site of what’s really going on, even when — or especially when — they’re surrounded by the evidence.

They’re like the young fish in the parable: An old fish swims up to them and asks, “How’s the water?”

“What’s water?” they reply.