Posts about clinton

Thank you, Secretary Clinton

May 27, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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Friday at Radcliffe — in a tent wonderfully filled with 80 or 90 percent women, from the class of ’41 on— I had the privilege of seeing Hillary Clinton receive the Radcliffe Medal. I left ever-more impressed with her wisdom, experience, and civility — with her leadership — and, of course, ever-more depressed that what should be is not what is.

As a journalist and journalism teacher, I was grateful for her defense of my field in the face of the right’s attacks on it and in spite of its certain role in her defeat. “Defend the press,” Clinton urged. “And believe me, that’s not easy for me to say all the time. But I know well that in the absence of a free and vigorous press our democracy is not going to survive.” While the press itself is busy tying itself in knots debating whether to call a lie a lie (isn’t that our single most important job?) she did not mince truth: “It’s not just Fox, it’s now Sinclair. They are essentially delivering propaganda.… We need more outlets for reliable information.” [Disclosure: I donated to and volunteered for the Clinton campaign many weekends in Bethlehem, Pa.]

It is striking how Clinton manages to paint a picture of the nation that is more honest and accurate — and yet, surprisingly, more empathetic and hopeful — than I see painted by my colleagues in the news these days. I can do no better than to quote her admonition at length. Please listen:

Our country is dangerously polarized. We have sorted ourselves into opposing camps…. The divides on race and religion are starker than ever before and as the middle shrank, partisan animosity grew….

Now I don’t want to get political, but I want to say this is not just — just — a both-sides problem. The radicalization of American politics has not been symmetrical. There are forces — and leaders — in our country who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric, who stoke fear of change, who see the world in zero-sum terms so that if others are gaining then everyone else must be losing. That is a recipe for polarization and conflict.

I do believe that healing our country will take radical empathy, reaching across the divides of race, class, but mostly politics to try to see the world through the eyes of people very different from ourselves, and to try to return to rational debate, to find a way to disagree without being disagreeable, to recapture a sense of common humanity.

When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask: ‘Am I better off than I was four years ago?’ We should also ask: ‘Are we all better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?’ And empathy should not only be at the center of our individual lives, our families, and our communities but at the center of our public life, our policies, and our politics. I know we don’t think of politics and empathy going hand-in-hand these days, but they can and they must.

As Madeleine [Albright] writes in her new book: This generosity of spirit, this caring about others and the proposition that we are all created equal is the single most effective antidote to the self-centered moral numbness that allows fascism to thrive….

Right now we are living through a crisis in our democracy. There certainly are not tanks in the street. But what’s happening goes to the heart of who we are as a nation. And I say this not as a Democrat who lost an election but as an American afraid of losing a country.

There are certain things that are so essential they must transcend politics. Waging a war on the rule of law and a free press, delegitimizing elections, perpetuating corruption, and rejecting the idea that our leaders should be public servants, undermining our national unity, and attacking truth and reason — these should alarm us all, whether we’re Republicans, Democrats, independents, vegetarians, whoever we might be.

And attempting to erase the line between fact and fiction, truth and an alternative reality, is a core feature of authoritarianism. The goal is to make us question logic and reason and sow mistrust, toward exactly the people I think we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ultimately ourselves.

So how do we build democratic resilience? It does begin with standing up for the truth, facts, and reason, not only in the classroom and on campus but every day in our lives. And it means speaking out about the vital role of higher education in our society to create opportunity and equity. It means calling out actual fake news when we see it and supporting brave journalism and reporting — and, yes, subscribing to a newspaper; remember those? Most of all, as obvious as it seems, it means voting….

And finally, that’s why I am so optimistic about the future, because of how unbelievably tough we are proving to be. I’ve encountered many people in recent months who give me hope: the students in Parkland, now the students in Santa Fe, many people in communities who have responded with courage and resolve…. And I find hope in the many women — and men — who are dismantling the notion that women should have to endure harassment and violence as a part of life….

So, yes, I know there are many fights to fight, and more seem to arise every day. And it will take work to keep up the pressure and to stay vigilant. We can neither close our eyes nor numb our hearts or throw up our hands and say, someone else take over from here.

But there has not been a time — certainly in fifty years, and maybe not even for longer than that — where our country depends on every citizen believing in the power of your actions, even when that power is invisible, and your efforts feel like you are in an uphill battle, and voting even when your side loses. It comes down to be a matter, really, of infinite faith. So pace ourselves. Lean on each other. Look for the good wherever we can. Celebrate the heroes. Encourage the children. Find ways to disagree respectfully. Be ready to lose some fights. But don’t quit. As John McCain recently reminded us, no just cause is futile, even if it’s lost. What matters is that we keep going.

I could not help feeling that she is leading a government in exile. Like de Gaulle issuing messages on the wireless, she had one for civil servants trapped in an uncivil administration: “I hope people in government who are not political appointees will stay as long as they can.” She is defending our nation against an attack from within: “It’s not been an easy time for more than half our country since the 2016 election. And I still think that understanding what happened in that weird and wild election will help us defend our democracy in the future.” Yes, Mr. Mueller, do your work.

What was striking in hearing about and watching Clinton was that it reminds us what it is like to have a human in politics. No matter how the press portrayed her, she’s charming and funny. She talked about her father forbidding her to attend Radcliffe on his dime because he’d heard it was filled with beatniks. She talked about trying to go incognito and how hard that is with Secret Service in tow: One night while Clinton was walking in Washington a woman on a bike stopped to whisper: “I have to tell you, there’s a man following you.”

I was also impressed with how she never shrinks from the toughest fight. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey asked Clinton what company she’d want to head. She didn’t hesitate, even for a beat. “Facebook,” she replied. Why? “It is the biggest news platform in the world.” This is why I hope someday to be able to talk with her in front of our CUNY journalism students about her view of political coverage and how to fix it.

After her talk, given the chance — what the heck? — I joined the scrum of fans just to shake her hand and thank her. For what? For fighting for us.

Here’s video of the address I transcribed above:

And here is her discussion with Healey:

‘Change’ is bullshit

September 27, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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I ended up voting for Barack Obama, but while he was in a race against Hillary Clinton his campaign slogan drove me to distraction. “Change we can believe in.” What change exactly?

This morning Joe Scarborough said the first debate of this campaign didn’t alter the situation in this election. He said this is still a race of the experienced candidate against the change candidate. Now Donald Trump=change.

Clinton is forever boxed into the position of running against “change.” Now it is not only Trump but also, ironically, Obama who corners her there because she wisely wants to run on and continue Obama’s legacy with his coalition; she can’t change too much. Still, she can address this problem by cataloging the changes she will make; there are many.

But “change” is the wrong word. “Change” is bullshit. “Change” is an empty word, a vague promise. Obama promised “change” and it was a vessel into which his supporters poured their dreams. The most progressive among them were disappointed in the early years of his administration because he did not quickly accomplish all they had wished for. I was not disappointed, for I had more realistic expectations of change.

The proper word is not “change” but “progress.” But that word has its own set of expectations and cooties thanks to the far left and right, respectively. So call it “improvement.” Hillary Clinton will work to improve health care,college costs, infrastructure, criminal justice, mental health, national security, the environment, taxation, campaign finance, the status of womenand minorities….

Donald Trump does not promise change. He promises regression, returning to some squandered glory of the hegemony his supporters have lost because of change they could not control, change they resent, change that shares what they think of as their jobs, power, and birthright with others, with outsiders. Trump is not promising to change. He is promising to stop change.

Of course, change is occurring without the intervention of any candidate. Change is the constant. Change brings us choices: opportunities and perils. That is what a leader must concern herself with.

Clinton is a realist. She is experienced. She has policies and plans. All those proper qualifications for the highest office in the land become handicaps in a media environment that values instead slogans, performance, conflict, entertainment, and personality over substance. “Make American great again.”

After Scarborough spoke this morning, Chuck Todd complained that after last night’s debate voters don’t know much more about the candidates’ policies. First, that’s wrong. Clinton tried to cram specific policy proposals into her few uninterrupted minutes and for the rest she gave her web address; plenty there. Trump refused to and could not be pushed to be specific about the plans he does not have. If voters do not know what each candidate will do and is capable of doing the fault lies at the feet of the media. It is our job to inform the public. The public is ill-informed. Donald Trump’s presence on that stage last night is the evidence. He promises nothing but change. And we let him get away with it.

Specimens of Old Journalism

August 29, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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Here is AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll defending what I believe were a seriously flawed story and tweet about some of Clinton Foundation donors Hillary Clinton happened to meet with while Secretary of State.

I bring this clip to you because it contains — as my friend Jay Rosen would say — specimens for study, two specimens revealing the difficulty classical journalism has adapting to a new media ecosystem today.

CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter recounts the difficulties the AP had getting Clinton’s meeting records and then asks his audience: “Did they just want to show they had done the work, did they just want to show they had found something, even if it didn’t amount to much?”
Carroll’s answer: “We didn’t say it amounted to the end of the world. We said this is an important and interesting thing that people should know about.”

Editors love to tout news judgment as a key value that journalists add to the flow of information in society. What is the AP’s news judgment here? How important is this story? Somewhere between interesting and the end of the world: You decide.

Stelter shows Carroll how Donald Trump & Co. were exploiting especially the AP’s deceptive tweet promoting this story.

Her answer: “All of us can’t be held responsible for the way that everybody thinks about and responds to and talks about the coverage…. Our responsibility is to give them fair and balanced and rock-solid reporting and let them agree with it, disagree with it, talk about it, think what they might about it.”

Right there is a specimen of a common old journalistic belief: We just report the facts; we have no view; we don’t have a role in what those facts mean or do. I call this the Wernher von Braun Rule:

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

Carroll also says: “I think the issue with conflict of interest is not the actual quid pro quo. It’s the proximity. It’s the impression that people have of maybe they got the meeting because they donated, maybe they didn’t.”

In other words, the AP found no evidence of quid pro quo, no smoking gun, nothing here that was wrong, no rock-solid reason to cast aspersions, no real conclusion. But they went with the story anyway because of the impression people might have — an impression the AP’s story gives them. Yet remember that Carroll says she “can’t be held responsible for the way that everybody thinks about and responds to” this story. Does not compute.

We most certainly need to look at the impact our work has, not only in how interested parties exploit it, not only in how the public interprets it, but also in how effective it is in performing our key job: informing the public. Was the public better informed after this story? Did this story give people the information they needed to decide how to vote for President? I would say no. As Stelter said, the AP took what it could get with its Freedom of Information request and tried to make an article out of it. Because that’s what we do. We make articles.
That leads us to our second specimen: the tweet and Carroll’s discussion of it.

The key problem here is that the AP is discussing only 154 meetings out of more than 1,700 Clinton held as Secretary of State, according to her campaign manager. Thus the AP’s math — that 85 of the 154 meetings, or more than half, were with foundation donors — is wrong, deceptive, and irresponsible. The real proportion is more like 5 percent.

On Reliable Sources, Carroll says the tweet linked to the full story. I can’t find anything to click on in that tweet, can you?

When Stelter challenges her about the tweet’s accuracy, Carroll says: “I would say that we’re a lot better at breaking stories and covering news and gathering video and taking photos than we are at tweets. This one could have used some more precision.”

Does that mean you regret it? Stelter asks.

“No, if we felt it was wrong we would have taken it down…. I think it was sloppy. Maybe going forward we would need to work on more on our precision on our tweets.”

Thus she is saying that sloppy imprecision is good enough for Twitter. Nail that to the museum wall.

Stelter confronts her with another tweet that ignores Donald Trump’s exploitation of a tragedy for his political ends:

“It was clumsy,” Carroll admits. “We’re better at news-gathering than we are at promotion.”
In Carroll’s view, then, Twitter is merely an advertising vehicle, a means of promoting the AP’s real work: articles. She does not see it — or, one presumes, the rest of social media — as another form of reporting, another means of informing the public.

What have we learned about classical journalism in this age? We see that classical journalists think it is their job to make good stories. I would argue that our job is to inform the public. Classical journalists say their work ends when they produce their stories — they aren’t responsible for what comes next. I say we should always ask why we are are reporting what we are reporting and what our impact will be. At least at the AP, classical journalists say they want to get readers to their stories. I say it is our job to take journalism — reporting, investigation, facts, context, explanation, impact — to the public, wherever they are, in whatever form necessary. Even on Twitter.

Kathleen Carroll is stepping down as the AP’s editor soon. I honestly feel sympathy for her having to end her tenure with this, trying to defend old journalism in a new world.

On Twitter — where I don’t just promote my articles, I have informative conversations — Raju Narisetti responded to my tweet containing one of Carroll’s quotes on CNN with this:

I agree. But this also should make the AP ask what kind of executive editor it needs next, an editor who can rethink what the Associated Press’ job is in an age when we can inform each other (we are becoming our own wire service), when the AP can inform people in so many new ways, when bad actors can use the AP’s reporting for their ends, when the standards of journalism — bringing facts, correction, understanding, context, investigation and other classical journalistic values — are more needed than ever.

They kill horses, don’t they?

May 5, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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World News Tonight tonight had Jake Tapper acting as if he had a big exclusive investigative report: Hillary Clinton is now rich! And she’s a liberal! Irony? He thinks so. Uh, what about Franklin Roosevelt? John F. Kennedy? John Edwards for that matter? Another nonstory. Another attack on Hillary for the sake of it. It was followed by a softball to Obama. Bias? No, no bias. What makes you say, that, Jeff?

The Kos war

April 30, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Jim Wolcott (fellow Hillary voter) dissects the feud — schism, actually — at Daily Kos and within the Democratic Party. Note well that the nasties in this story are the followers of Mr. Getalong.

The rancor was disproportionate in intensity and extravagant in invective, a fervor worthy of ancestral foes. Months-old grievances seethed and erupted as if they had been bubbling for centuries in a lake of bad blood. . . .

What chafed Hillary supporters was how many supposed liberal outposts chimed in with this chorus of abuse, from the op-ed pages of The New York Times (where only Paul Krugman seemed to have a kind word as Maureen Dowd kept reminding readers of Monica Lewinsky’s lipstick traces on the Clinton saga, and Gail Collins seemed to be putting on some sort of puppet show) to the studios of Air America (where hosts Randi Rhodes–who was suspended, then resigned, after calling Clinton a “whore” at a public appearance–and Thom Hartmann kept the hostility percolating), to progressive Internet mother ships such as Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post, where even a notable progressive such as Barbara Ehrenreich tried to tar Hillary with fascist associations. (The majority of Huffpo’s high-profile contributors were so over the rainbow about Obama that it was as if they had found rapture in the poppy fields and were rolling around on their backs like ladybugs.)

And quoting Kos himself over the departure/boycott of Hillary voters from his shrine:

“Clinton and her shrinking band of paranoid holdouts wail and scream about all those evil people who have ‘turned’ on Clinton and are no longer ‘honest power brokers’ or ‘respectable voices’ or whatnot, wearing blinders to reality, talking about silly little ‘strikes’ when in reality, Clinton is planning a far more drastic, destructive and debilitating civil war.”

Obama may paint himself as Mr. Nice Guy but he certainly has a nasty bunch of friends.