Posts about donald trump

Trump & the Press: A Murder-Suicide Pact

February 19, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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The press will destroy Trump and Trump will destroy the press.

Consider that trust in media began falling in the ’70s, coincident with what we believe was our zenith: Watergate. We brought down a President. A Republican President.

Now the press is the nation’s last, best hope to bring down a compromised, corrupt, bigoted, narcissistic, likely insane, incompetent, and possibly dangerous President. A Republican President. Donald Trump.

If the press does what Congress is so far unwilling to do — investigate him — then these two Republican presidencies will bookend the beginning of the end and the end of the end of American mass media. Any last, small hope that anyone on the right would ever again trust, listen to, and be informed by the press will disappear. It doesn’t matter if we are correct or righteous. We won’t be heard. Mass media dies, as does the notion of the mass.

Therein lies the final Trump paradox: In failing, he would succeed in killing the press. And his final projection: The enemy of the people convinces the people that we are the enemy.

The press that survives, the liberal press, will end up with more prizes and subscriptions, oh joy, but with little hope of guiding or informing the nation’s conversation. Say The New York Times reaches its audacious dreamof 10 million paying subscribers. So what? That’s 3% of the U.S. population (and some number of those subscribers will be from elsewhere). And they said that blogs were echo chambers. We in liberal media will be speaking to ourselves — or, being liberal, more likely arguing with ourselves.

No number of empathetic articles that try to understand and reflect the worldview of the angry core of America will do a damned bit of good getting them to read, trust, and learn from The New York Times. My own dear parents will not read The New York Times. They are left to be <cough> informed by Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge, RT, and worse.

Last week, Jim Rutenberg and David Leonhardt of The Times wrote tough columns about turmoil in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal over journalists’ fears that they find themselves working for an agent of Trump. They missed the longer story: What we are living through right now was the brainchild of Rupert Murdoch. It started in 1976 (note the timeline of trust above) when he bought the New York Post to be, in his words, his bully pulpit — and he added new meaning to that phrase. Yes, Rush Limbaugh and his like came along in the next decade to turn American radio into a vehicle for spreading fear, hate, and conspiracy. But it was in the following decade, in 1996, when Murdoch started Fox News, adding new, ironic meaning to another phrase: “fair and balanced.” He and his henchman, Roger Ailes, used every technique, conceit, and cliché of American television news to co-opt the form and forward his worldview, agenda, and war.

Murdoch could have resurrected the ideological diversity that was lost in the American press when broadcast TV culled newspapers in competitive markets and the survivors took on the impossible veil of objectivity. Instead, he made the rest of the press into the enemy: not us “and” them but us “or” them; not “let us give you another perspective” but “their perspective is bad.”

What’s a liberal journo to do? We are stuck in endless paradoxical loops. If we do our job and catch the President in a lie, we are labeled liars. When we counteract fake news with real news, everything becomes fake news. If I get angry about being attacked by angry white men I end up becoming an angry white man. Liberals tell us to be nice to conservatives to win them over but then they only mock us for being weak. Snowflakes. Cucks. Liberal tears.

I commend to your reading this essay by Dale Beran explaining the ultimate political irony of our day: The alt-right is made up of losers and when we call them losers they win. So we can’t win. “Trump is Pepe. Trump is loserdom embraced,” Beran explains. “Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is a perfect description of their mother’s basement with a terminal to an endless array of escapist fantasy worlds.”

How do you argue with that worldview? How do you inform it? How do you win somebody over when all they want is enemies? (Watch this at your own peril.) You probably can’t. There are some chunks of America that likely need to be written off because they have fenced themselves off from reasonable, fact-based, intellectually honest, civil debate and now wallow in hate. Is that condescending of me to say? No, it’s pragmatic. Realjournalismus.

So then am I giving up on journalism and democracy? No, damnit, not yet. I am giving up on mass media. The internet wounded it; Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump finally killed it.

So now what? Now we reinvent journalism. Now we learn how to serve communities, listening to them to reflect their worldviews and gain their trust so we can inform them. Now we give up on the belief that we are entitled to act as gatekeeper and to set the agenda as well as the prices of information and advertising. Now we must learn to work well with others. Now we must bring diversity not just to our surviving newsrooms — which we must — but to the larger news ecosystem, building new, sustainable news services and businesses to listen to, understand, empathize with, and meet the needs of many communities.

Our goal is not to herd all the lost sheep back into our fence. I will disagree with those who say that we must grinfuck to Trump voters to woo them to our side of the ballot. No, we must stay angry and incredulous that they — the fanatical core of them — brought us Trump, and we prove our worth by fixing that. I say there is no hope of convincing frogs and eggs in our Twitter feeds; let’s not waste our time. Instead, our goal is to bring out the people who regretted their vote; there must be some. Far more important, our goal is to bring out the people who did not vote, who were not sufficiently informed of the risk of their inaction and thus not motivated to act. We can do that. Journalism can. That is why journalism exists, for civic engagement. (This is why starting Social Journalism at CUNY was a revolutionary act.)

Start, for example, with the many communities who are lumped together as Latino Americans. Meet them not as a demographic bucket imagined by Anglo Americans and marketers but as distinct groups of people who have distinct needs and interests. (This is why I am proud that CUNY started a bilingual journalism program.) Do the same with so many other underserved and these days abused communities: immigrants, Muslims, LGBT communities, people who will lose health insurance … communities organized not just around identity but also around need.

To be clear, this does not mean that the last mass-media companies can abandon these communities to media ghettos. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, every newspaper company, and every broadcast company must work much harder to bring diversity into their newsrooms and executive ranks to do their jobs better. (One last plug for CUNY: This is why we work so hard to recruit a diverse student body.) We can improve mass media. But I don’t think we can fix it as it is — that is, return it to its lost scale. And I don’t think that mass media can fix the mess we are in.

So I would advise media companies old and new to invent and invest in new services to serve new communities. If I wanted to save a struggling mass-media company — think: Time Inc. — I would start scores of new services, building new and valued relationships with new communities.

And, yes, I would start a new service for conservative America. I would hire the best conservative journalists I could find not just to write commentary but to report from a different worldview (if anyone can define conservatism these days). I would underwrite scholarships at journalism schools (I promised to stop plugging mine) to recruit students from towns wracked by unemployment, from evangelical colleges, from the military. I would take advantage of a tremendous business opportunity to fight back against Murdoch’s and Trump’s destruction of the American press in the full belief that there are enough people in this nation on the right who want facts, who want to be informed, who will listen to their own uncomfortable truths. I would welcome that diversity, too.

Finally, I would stop listening to the entitled whinging of journalists about the state of their business. Yes, Murdoch fired a first bullet and Trump hammered a last nail but we bear the most responsibility for abandoning large swaths of America and for refusing to change. I disagree with Adrienne LaFrance that Mark Zuckerberg is out to “destroy journalism.” His manifestoabout the future of communities and an informed society shows we have much to learn from him. “Online communities are a bright spot,” he writes, ever the optimist. “Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something Facebook may be uniquely suited to do.”

OK, but I will also push him, too. Facebook, Twitter, and all the platforms should invest their considerable intelligence, imagination, and resources in helping reinvent journalism for this age. New tools bring new opportunities and new responsibilities. I would like to see Facebook help news companies understand how to serve communities and how to reimagine how we inform citizens’ conversations where they occur. I wish that Facebook would find more ways to introduce us to new people who can tell their stories in safe spaces where we can come to learn about each other. I would like Facebook and media to collaborate convening communities in conflict to informed and productive discourse. I would like to see Twitter finally address its and perhaps society’s key problem: Can we be open and also civil? I hope Google will be more transparent about those who would manipulate it and thus us. I hope they all help us invent new business models that no longer reward just clickbait and fame, cats and Kardashians, sensationalism and polarization (Zuckerberg’s words). The platforms should spend less effort trying to help journalism as it is — except insofar as it buys us time for innovation — but instead support journalism as it can be.

Let Donald Trump kill the mass media that made him President. Let his ego and his hate suck all his attention and hostility from its last dying embers. Let his election be the last gasp, the nadir of this dying institution. Then let the rest of us — God willing a comfortable majority in this already-great nation — find a path to resume a civil and informed conversation about our shared future.

Empathetic journalism for the right

October 13, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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empathy-dogs

I’ve said — to the horror of surprisingly few journalists I know — that the mere fact of Donald Trump’s candidacy is evidence of the failure of journalism to perform its prime function: informing the public.

Here I want to ask what we could do about that. I’ll explore ways to better reflect and inform the worldview of the petri dish that bred Trump: the angry, underemployed, conservative, white man. I’ll argue that the answer begins with empathy — empathy not with Trump’s racism, misogyny, and hatred, of course, but with the real lives of at least some of the people who are considering voting for him.

Of course, it’s true — and I want to underscore this — that many unreflected and under-served communities deserve to be addressed ahead of angry white men: African-Americans of many ages and locales, Latinos of many diasporas, the disabled of many needs, LGBTQ people, women, youth. But none of those communities fostered the movement of Trumpism, which — no matter the electoral outcome — will continue to fester after November. They have spawned a civic emergency. The phenomenon must be confronted. Decent Americans of the right need to be better informed, for ignorance breeds hate. The first step to doing that is not lecturing but listening.

I’ll explore four paths: (1) reflecting communities, (2) diversifying media, (3) serving people, and (4) convening communities. My thinking here is greatly influenced by what I have learned from teaching Social Journalism alongside Carrie Brown at CUNY.

Reflect communities: I wrote recently that as an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter, I now know better what it feels like to find myself not reflected in media. I’ll repeat that my experience is, of course, trivial next to that of minorities and under-served communities who should have received more attention for generations. But this moment has helped me better understand how journalism also failed conservatives by not reflecting their worldview, circumstances, needs, and goals. Because media demonstrated that we did not hear, care about, or understand them, they did not trust the rest of what we had to tell them. Because we did not better reflect their lives, we could not help other communities and political leaders understand, empathize with, and grapple with their needs.

In Social Journalism, I have come to call this task externally focused journalism: We tell your story to the rest of society so others can understand and take into account your needs in negotiating policy and politics. That is what journalism has always done and will continue to do. It is helpful. However, externally focused journalism also can be exploitative: the journalist helicopters in to grab a good but random story and then leaves with no assurance of change. This is why I also emphasize the need for internally focused journalism; I will get to that below.

If you want to better understand the rocky soil that fertilized Trump, I recommend reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a highly personal tale that also explains the context of declining hope for a large class deep inside America. At the same time, to understand what necessitated #BlackLivesMatter, I recommend Between the World and Me by my former CUNY J-school colleague Ta-Nahisi Coates.

These books are credible, eloquent, and effective because they spring from experience. They demonstrate why American newsrooms must diversify their staffs. But it’s not as if every slice of the nation will be represented in every newsroom. So it is vital that we also teach journalists how to seek out, listen to, and empathize with people who are not like them. That, we’ve learned, is the essence of Social Journalism: taking a caring heart and an anthropologist’s cool eye and ear to observe and listen to a community’s situation so we can improve the connections that community has with others and improve the relationship of the journalist to the community — to say: “I want to understand you.”

As an example of such journalism, I commend to you New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein’s recent story: Torn Over Donald Trump and Cut Off by Culture Wars, Evangelicals Despair. As Slate says, it is written with gentle empathy. I don’t agree with the stands against gay marriage taken by the people in the story. I don’t need to. Thanks to Goodstein’s story, I can at least understand their world a bit better. Assignment editors should have been devoting journalistic resource to just such stories during this election, and to reporting on the issues that matter to many communities across this land. That would have given us all a better understanding of what is at stake in the political struggle over the nation’s future. It would have been a better use of resource than predicting the horse race day after day.

To see how true to life Goodstein’s story was, I called one of her sources, Pastor Ryan Jorgenson, who emphasized to me that her reporting and the story were effective and empathetic. He had only three additional observations: First, his parishioners noted that the Times headline — “Evangelicals Despair” — is oxymornic; if you understand evangelicals, they said, you would know that because of their faith they do not despair. Second, though Jorgenson said the photographer shot the life of the church, the photo editor in New York selected only photos that reflected the headline — despair. Third, though he was glad that the story quoted him saying Jesus’ name, Jorgenson was disappointed though unsurprised that it did not quote scripture as the best explanation of evangelical thinking. (“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.” 2 Corinthians 4:8.) When was the last time you saw the Bible — or the Koran — quoted in media? Note well that it is the structure of news organizations — namely, editing — that can separate the journalism from the community it would cover. Our processes interfere with empathy.

When this election is over and when we enter into a post mortem for the truth, we need to examine how existing media can better reflect the many diverse communities that make up America: their lives, worldviews, concerns, needs, goals. But that will take us only so far.

Diversify media: Not only must newsrooms be diversified but the landscape of media should be diversified. There is not enough — there is almost no — major conservative media that is responsible, fact-based, and journalistic. We in liberal media — and, yes, for God’s sake, let us be honest enough to confess that media are liberal — left a vacuum that was readily and eagerly filled by the far and alt right, by political movements masquerading as media: Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge, et al. Fox News just turned 20 years old; see what it has done to civil discourse and democracy in a generation.

The closest thing the right has to a responsible major media outlet is the Wall Street Journal but it’s still a business newspaper, its coverage is locked behind a pay wall for the well to do (not many Trump voters), and it is owned by the proprietor of Fox News and the New York Post. No, it won’t do.

So I have an odd suggestion: liberal media and liberal funders should invest in responsible conservative news outlets staffed by journalists and commentators who share a conservative worldview: an intelligent and reasonable Fox News, a right-of-center New York Times, an American Telegraph, and a civil and honest Rush Limbaugh.

The idea of “balance” in any one media outlet has turned out to be as deceiving and bankrupt as the idea of “objectivity” — indeed, worse, for false balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air and the damaging, uninformative scourge of the “surrogate” in this election. After helping tomanufacture the Trump phenomenon, CNN actually believes hiring Corey Lewandowski provides balance. That’s not about informing the public. That’s not about journalism. That’s about producing entertainment.

No, there needs to be balance in the ecosystem of news: different perspectives, experiences, and worldviews represented and served by their own outlets. What enables each of these entities to work legitimately under the banner of journalism? Intellectual honesty: the willingness to share uncomfortable truths; an ethic built on facts; a mission to inform.

Yes, I had hoped that blogs, my beloved blogs, would provide an outlet for such diversity of viewpoint. To an extent, they have and I still celebrate that. But this, too, is not nearly enough.

Keep in mind that if reasonable people do not start media to serve reasonable conservatives, the market will be dominated not just by the present noxious media movements but soon possibly by one even worse: The Trump News Channel. Beware!

Why bother? you ask. Surely I don’t think that we are going to be able to turn all of Trump’s 40-odd million voters into informed, reasonable neighbors who now see the error of his ways. No, I don’t. But if we could better inform a quarter, a tenth of them, imagine the benefit. When decent and smart conservatives set about the task of detrumpification and rebuilding their party and movement from the ashes, where can they turn? Today, all they have is a news hell. That is what we have left them. We have a responsibility to serve them.

Serve people: What does journalism serving people mean? It doesn’t mean talking to or about them. That is externally focused journalism. Journalism as service means helping people improve their lives and communities by serving their information needs so they can solve their problems and meet their goals. That is internally focused journalism.

For the sake of example, let’s take one adjective from my earlier characterization of Trump’s angry, underemployed, conservative, white, male constituency. Take “underemployed.” How could journalism better serve people — any people — who need jobs?

In the old days, we in the news business exploited unemployment by charging high rates to advertise jobs. We considered this a good because it supported journalism. But once my friend Craig Newmark came along as — in his description — a philanthropist of classified ads and more importantly once the net killed the middleman, newspapers’ jobs classified business (which could earn any one metro paper in the U.S. upwards of $30 to $50 million a year) collapsed.

Now I would suggest that a news operation should create a data base ofevery job available — for free. Let’s not just post short, uninformative ads (which said so little because we charged so much). No, collect data about every job and every job requirement: what skills are needed and what prior jobs people held to prepare them for posts like these. Let’s create a matching service that collects job-seekers’ skills and qualifications. Let’s create a service that helps the unemployed see what skills they need to get jobs. Let’s consider creating online education to help people build skills; that is one way we can make money.

Do media have the power to solve unemployment? No, of course not. But we can help. That should be our goal always: to contribute to solutions. The real benefit of doing this is that we can build trust. We can show that we do have the interests of the underemployed at heart. Then perhaps we can begin to have discussions with them based on facts over emotions. They might listen when we show them that their competition for work may not be immigrants but technology. We can have an informed discussion about the jobs that would be lost if foreign trade were curtailed. Maybe then they’d be more informed and less prey to the fear-mongering, bigoted, xenophobic likes of Trump, Breitbart, and Drudge.

Convene communities: At a news editors’ convention in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I helped run an exercise in so-called human-centered design. After listening to some folks from gentrifying neighborhoods in the city, the editors in the room could clearly see something that was missing: conversation among the communities there. They could also clearly see the need and opportunity: convening those communities into dialogue.

Let’s say that we have diverse newsrooms that do a better job of reflecting communities’ concerns. Let’s say we have a more diverse media ecosystem that better serves many communities. Let’s say that media outlets do a better job of serving their communities and building trusted relationships with them. All this does only so much good if communities become more isolated.

Our next job in media is to convene communities into conversation. I’ve learned this in our Social Journalism classes at CUNY, where our students have taught me that serving a community also means connecting that community with others.

Thus media should convene and inform conversations among whites and blacks, young African-American men and police, immigrants and the native-born, evangelicals and liberals, consumers and corporations, left and right.

A week ago on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd teased a conversation between Michael Moore and Glenn Beck. Oh, no, I thought: here comes the ultimate cable-news war segment, the return of Crossfire — war! But no, it was the opposite. The segment was thoughtful, even peaceful. Michael Moore lamented the large swaths of America who believe they are unheard (see above). Then Glenn Beck appeared — separately — saying he didn’t necessarily want a record of agreeing with the prior guest he would not name, but he did agree with Michael Moore about the frustration of the unheard Americans. Watch. Here we saw a moment of bridge-building. That, too, is a responsible media’s job.

I’m pursuing this because I’m suffering an existential crisis as a journalist, ashamed of the role my profession and industry have played as Trump’s publicity agents, worried about the record-low measures of trust in American journalism, and most of all deeply disappointed by the only measure of journalism’s impact that matters: whether the public is informed.

We must begin by confessing the problem — and indeed the emergency. I recently attended two journalism conferences — one for the old newspaper industry, the other for the newer digital news industry — and neither tore open the agenda to grapple with this civic and journalistic emergency. In media, I see many specimens of its denial of responsibility.

I do not think we can just make incremental fixes to our old ways — a little more investigation, a little less sexism, a tad more intelligence, another dash of honesty (finally calling lies lies). We must fundamentally reinvent journalism: its relationship with the communities it serves, the forms it takes, the business models that support it.

Where to we start? Not with story ideas and pitches, not by assigning a reporter to a new beat, not by allocating space in a paper to more stories — all the things we used to do. I would start by sending a team made up of the smartest and most open-minded people from editorial, technology-design-data, and business (because this needs to be sustainable) to spend time with the community they will serve. I’d give them strict instructions: Listen. Observe. Don’t talk. Don’t test your ideas. Don’t interview them to get quotes. Just watch and listen. Learn about their problems and goals. Find out how they try to accomplish those goals now and what frustrates them. Ask what they believe they need to know. Listen for where they’re confused, wrong, worried, and curious. Empathize. Don’t come back until you can give me insights about their lives and needs. Bring me evidence of what you find out. Then build a new journalism around them.

If we can do this — better informing and building trust even with Trump’s community — we can do the same for any community.

How Trump’s mere existence delegitimizes Clinton’s candidacy and presidency — and what we must do about that

October 9, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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I can hear it now, starting on Nov. 9:

Hillary Clinton isn’t really the President. She got elected only because she ran against Donald Trump, the worst candidate in history. She didn’t destroy him; he destroyed himself. Nobody wanted to vote for her. They had to vote for her.

This is a direct extension of the media narrative we hear now about Clinton: that no one trusts her, no one likes her. That is a media lie, a manipulation, and the result of lazy journalism: When was the last time you heard the voices of the millions of enthusiastic Clinton voters reflected in media? This is how media will be accessories to the Trump, alt right, and GOP crime of attempting to delegitimize another American Presidency.

Media already began the process by abnormalizing Clinton. You’ve heard this:

Yes, Donald Trump is a misogynist and has admitted committing sexual assault and he is a bigot who has attacked Mexicans as rapists and murderers and Muslims as terrorists and he has defamed African-American communities as hells ruled by crime and drug-dealing. But in our next segment, we will tell you for the thousandth time about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Yes, Donald Trump’s foundation is a sham that he uses to settle his personal debts and enrich his ego, and he defaults on his promises to charities and causes. But when we come back, we will cast aspersions on Hillary and Bill Clinton’s foundation, even though we have no journalistic evidence of wrongdoing, even though the Clinton foundation does immense good work saving lives and helping people, and even though we in media won’t tell you about all that good work.

Because balance.

Of course, at the same time, media normalized Donald Trump, giving him attention that was wildly disproportionate to his popularity at the beginning of the campaign — making his campaign a reality — and later refusing to call ignorant ignorant and evil evil. NPR won’t call Trump a liar because that is a “volatile” word. Media fell over itself praising The New York Times for calling his lies lies; why did we not expect that all along? Media knew he was a misogynist, a sexist pig, yet they had to wait for the Clinton campaign to do their reporting for them to break into their narrative with incidents that told the story. Media have seen his racism again and again but refuse to call him a bigot. That, too, would be too volatile.

So in their effort to find balance — as Jay Rosen points out, in their effort to cope with the asymmetry of this campaign (and years of political imbalance leading up to this) — media raised up Donald Trump to the nearest definition of normal they could muster and they pulled Hillary Clinton down to as near as his level of mistrust and mendacity as they could get away with because that serves the dynamics that drive their business: conflict and suspense.

And along the way, I keep hearing media doing the democratically irresponsible: suppressing voter turnout by predicting it. (That supports their narrative: Nobody trust, likes, or cares.) And now leaders of the GOP are giving their own reprehensible civics lesson: At last, at long last, some of them are repudiating Donald Trump — not because he has been a racist to Latinos, Muslims, and African-Americans, not because he is a misogynist, not because he lies, not because he is ignorant, not because he is dangerous, but because he finally crossed the White Woman Line. Yet those same politicians now legitimize the idea of not voting for President. That also delegitimizes the victor, Hillary Clinton. You’ll hear this, too:

Well, we didn’t vote for her. We didn’t have anyone to vote for. So we’re not going to work with her. We’re going to continue what we’ve done for a generation: only working against her, only blocking anything she proposes to do. For we will never let her win, not the White House, not a single battle, not so much as a bill.

This is why it is critical that we defeat not only Donald Trump but also the party that put him where he is and the politicians who were his accessories. Every politician who supported him — no matter whether that support is now withdrawn — has the stench of Trump and the alt right on them and that cannot be washed away with a press release and a tweet. The party that fertilized the fetid ground that spawned Trump with its years of insurgent obstruction must be held to account for not caring to defend Latinos, Muslims, and blacks, let alone our military— and responsible government — but only white women.

We do need balance in a democracy or else there can be no dialog and legitimacy of negotiated compromise. We need for conservatives to be represented in the political process and heard in media. We need a new conservative movement to rise from the ashes of the fire that not just Trump but a generation of GOP leaders and right-wing media set. We on the left should support the rebuilding of a responsible, loyal opposition. I am writing another post with a call to build responsible conservative media as well, to fill the vacuum that liberal — yes, liberal — media left, which was exploited by political movements masquerading as media: Fox News (now 20 years ago — everything I lament here is the fruit of their labor) and its foster children Breitbart and Drudge.

Consider this: In losing, Trump and the disgusting movement behind him will win. Their goal is to bring down institutions and they have already succeeded. They have destroyed the Republican Party. They will continue to delegitimize the Democratic Party and its victory. They will thus delegitimize government. They have lowered the quality of political discourse in this country to their level. Yes, they have won.

That is why it is so vital that we take back our victory from them. That is why I am going to Pennsylvania every chance I get to register voters. That is why you must vote and push every sane and civilized family member, friend, neighbor, and coworker to vote. That is why every fellow Hillary Clinton supporter out there must loudly proclaim her or his support. That is why we must defeat every politician who cynically supported Trump — whether or not they then cynically withdrew that support. That is why we must recapture the American dream from the Trump nightmare.

My friend Rafat Ali — an immigrant, an entrepreneur, an American citizen, a voter — just posted this quote by Bertolt Brecht from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941):

“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Rejoice in her victory. But do not allow the bastard’s fathers to snatch victory from their defeat.

Apology to Mexico

September 1, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’m honored that my friends at El Universal in Mexico City published a brief opinion piece I wrote for them apologizing to Mexicans for sending them Donald Trump.

Here’s the English text:

 

To my Mexican friends,

I am sorry as an American that we have sent you Donald Trump. Please know that in the end, he speaks for few Americans — too few, God willing, for him to be elected our President. He is merely an aberration of the moment, a fluke, a freak, a phenomenon we can only hope will never be repeated. But in the meantime, your president invites him and you must suffer his company. I apologize.

The blame for Trump rests on many shoulders. There is, of course, Trump’s adopted political party, the Republicans, who for years has tried to reduce government by blocking its legitimate work. They have become the party of anger, finding scapegoats for every problem — most of all, President Obama but also strangers, namely immigrants and Muslims. They became the party of pessimism, declaring that America is falling into deep decline, even as the Obama Administration made great progress in fixing the problems it inherited: the economy, jobs, and wars, most notably. Thus the Republicans created a breeding ground for Trump, someone who would harness the emotions of a certain slice of America.

News media deserve a large share of the blame for Trump. First, they treated him as a carnival attraction, a funny clown who would attract audiences to their networks and pages. The heads of CNN and CBS rubbed their hands in greedy glee at how good Trump was for their businesses, which are still built on attracting masses with show business, rather than serving citizens with reliable information. My journalistic colleagues didn’t see the danger ahead and so they didn’t warn the public until it was too late, until Trump stood a step from the White House. Media have become his willing accomplices, treating his offensive and insane pronouncements — for example, that a wall blocking Mexico will solve our problems, that Hillary Clinton is a bigot — as serious topics that should be discussed for hours on end rather than disproven, ridiculed, and dismissed with facts and reason.

Journalism also failed badly at reflecting the concerns and problems of Trump’s core: underemployed, angry white men from the center of the nation. If media had done a better job of reporting — and then informing — their worldviews, I wonder whether Trump and his promoters would have found fertile soil for their divisiveness, fear, ignorance, and bigotry. If my party, the Democrats, had done a better job of hearing and addressing their concerns, could they also have blunted Trump’s appeal?

I believe we are seeing the last gasp of the myth of the American melting pot. When I grew up, we were taught to believe in assimilation: that every American would end up sounding if not looking alike. That is the presumption of the mass (though I believe that in the suffering of publishing and broadcasting in the internet age, we are witnessing the death of the mass-media business model and will also witness the end of the idea of the mass). Rule by the majority looks good when the majority looks like you; what Trump’s troops fear is they will soon be in the minority.

Today, living in New York and teaching at its City University, which values diversity, I have learned instead how much richer America is for the many distinct identities and backgrounds that make up this nation. We are, of course, better because Mexican Americans have brought their culture, worldview, heritage, and language to the United States. We are better for having doors, not walls. Though today, many of you might wish you had a wall to keep Trump out.

Americans — myself included — still struggle to learn the lesson of diversity, to see the value that Mexicans, Latin Americans of many nations, and people from all around the world bring to our culture, economy, language, and daily life. In that sense, Trump is the fault of all of us, for we have not quickly enough embraced the value of embracing people we thought of as strangers.

 

 

The News and its New Silent Majority: Clinton Supporters

August 30, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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hillary hat

This election, I’ve been trying an experiment, judging journalism from a different perspective, from the outside, as a member of a community and a partisan. I don’t like what I’m learning about my profession.

We journalists tend to separate ourselves from the public we serve. We call ourselves objective, to distinguish us from the opinionated masses and to enable us to rise above their fray. We fancy ourselves observers, not actors, in the dramas we chronicle. I’ve argued that we must end that separation and learn to empathize with the needs and goals of the communities we serve, even considering ourselves members of those communities. Thus, social journalism. But in this argument, the journalist is still the journalist.

Then I found myself in a position to look at the field not as a journalist but as an involved participant in a community. That community: Hillary Clinton supporters.

I haven’t been a reporter or editor in years. I have been a loudly opinionated blogger since 2001, transparent about my political views and votes. I made it clear eight years ago that I voted for Clinton and then for Barack Obama. So there’s no surprise in telling you that I would vote for Clinton now. But this time, I decided to become politically involved. I bought my Hillary hat, went to a few campaign events, contributed to the campaign, made my support abundantly clear on social media, and a week ago volunteered at the Clinton office in West Philly, registering voters, driving others doing the same, and briefly canvassing a neighborhood so I could talk with voters. These are things journalists have never been allowed to do. Some people tell me every day on Twitter that I should not be allowed to do these things now. I disagree.

I have my reasons:

First, #ImWithHer. Full stop. I want to be clear that I am enthusiastic about Clinton’s candidacy. I am not voting for her as the lesser of evils. I am not just voting against Donald Trump. I am not voting for her in spite of all the reasons media give not to do so. I am voting for Hillary Clinton because I respect and trust her intelligence, experience, policies, and good will. I tweeted 25 reasons (and counting) #WhyImWithHer.

Other community members’ reasons #WhyImWithHer at Clinton’s West Philly campaign office

Second, I am voting against Trump and actively opposing him because I see a moral imperative to do so. As Jay Rosen said in my dotNYC podcast, Trump’s candidacy approaches a civic emergency. As Univision’s Jorge Ramos said in Time: “It doesn’t matter who you are — a journalist, a politician or a voter — we’ll all be judged by how we responded to Donald Trump…. And neutrality is not an option.” This is my generation’s “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” Still, I’m not hiding behind any Trump exception to the journalistic canon, arguing that this year is special. If Clinton were running against a reasonable, human, patriotic, unbigoted, smart, articulate, decent, mature, experienced opponent, I’d still be her passionate, open supporter.

My third reason — a fringe benefit of sorts — is that I’ve wanted a better understanding of journalism from the public’s perspective and I finally saw I could not do that unless the coverage mattered to me, unless I took it personally. I also realized that this meant I could no longer claim to be standing removed, as the disinterested critic. Some years ago, when I spoke on a panel at the Online News Association, an editor came to the mic complaining about my use of the term “citizen journalism.” She cried (choking back real tears): “I’m a citizen, too.” Then act like a citizen, I said; be a part of your community. Many years later, I decided to take my advice.

As I consume the news in my role as a citizen, not media critic or journalist, I find myself constantly aggravated — not just by Fox News but also by CNN and the Associated Press, often by MSNBC and NPR, and occasionally by The New York Times and The Washington Post. My lessons so far from this:

Journalism is a lousy mirror.

I don’t see myself in any of the coverage of the campaign. All I ever hear from media is that nobody likes or trusts the one candidate who has an 89 percent chance of winning the presidency. In media, I never hear from voters like me who are enthusiastic supporters. I never see reporters wading among eager backers at Clinton rallies to ask them how much they like her and why. I don’t even hear her surrogates (what a ridiculous beltway/TV invention that is, by the way) asked about their support of Clinton, only their defense of her. In media, I never hear echoes of the voices I heard last week when I met people on the porches of West Philly, who told me their families were all in to vote for Hillary. (Only when I continued the conversation did they also agree we must defeat Trump. Like me, they are voting for, not against. )

I’ve been able to use Twitter to call journalists on this failing. When The Post’s Post’s Chris Cillizza labeled Clinton a “deeply flawed” candidate on CNN once too often, I tweeted a challenge and, to his credit, Cillizza answered. He said polls show that two-thirds of Americans don’t trust her. But compared to whom? Four-fifths of Americans don’t trust journalists. When media keep hammering again and again how untrusted Clinton is, couldn’t that become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

This is why the great James Carey despised the reductionist impact of public opinion polls on democracy and the press:

[P]ublic opinion no longer refers to opinions being expressed in public and then recorded in the press. Public opinion is formed by the press and modeled by the public opinion industry and the apparatus of polling. Today, to get ahead of the story, polling (the word, interestingly enough, from the old synonym for voting) is an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to prevent an authentic public opinion from forming. With the rise of the polling industry our entire understanding of the public went into eclipse.

This is also why I am fascinated by the death of the mass-media business model, the consequent death of the idea of the mass, and the impact this has on institutions — the press, government, politics, advertising, brands, schools— which depend on speaking to and swaying the mass. The mass is dead. Long live communities.

My community of Hillary Clinton supporters is unheard and unseen. But that’s by no means the best example of journalism’s faulty mirror. Because of this election, we now know that the media has done a terrible job of reflecting the concerns and goals of underemployed, angry white men in the heartland. If media had done a better job of reporting — and then informing — their worldviews, would there have been an opening for them to be recruited by Trump and the forces of the so-called alt right?

Far more important than either of those examples, of course, is the experience of minorities in this country: African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, too often women, and too many others who are unseen in media. A few weeks ago, I spoke with a journalist planning to write about how the internet is destroying the truth. The unsaid assumption in his thesis is that we used to have the truth, when the truth came from media. But whose truth was that? The truth presented by mass media was but one view of the world and did not reflect so many diverse worldviews because the people making it were — and still are — not diverse. That is one reason why so many do not trust journalists. (Note that people trust presidents more.)

In this election, I am not a mass. I am not a poll number. I am not a color on a map. Neither am I a journalist. I am a member of a community I cannot see and hear in media. I am frustrated.

The news chases squirrels, calls them rabid, and shoots them.

Every damned day, news organizations scan the horizon for any distraction they could call a scandal — squirrel! — and, finding none, they just dredge up yesterday’s road kill and repeat it all again, over and over, asking the same questions that are so obvious as to be rhetorical but that nonetheless fill hours of airtime.

Is Hillary Clinton a bigot because Donald Trump says so? they ask. Did TV’s anchors even consider what an insult that is to the 91 percent of African American voters who support her vs. 1 percent for Trump? Can’t our commentators see Trump’s trick: that he projects onto Clinton every failing of his own? He is crooked, so he calls her crooked; he is unhinged, so he calls her unhinged; he is a bigot so he first calls her a bigot. But the press treats each new attack as news to be debated. Seriously?

I know I’ll get scorned for this, but I say Clinton’s email scandal isn’t a scandal. It was a mistake. Yes, I believe that she never knowingly sent classified information. Of course, she didn’t. In any case, where her email sat is less important than every issue facing the American electorate.

I’ll get trolled for this, too, but the Clinton Foundation story isn’t a scandaleither. The Foundation does good work, and as James Carville says, someone will be going to hell for cutting off that good work. The Associated Press’ recent effort to find its scrap of squirrel meat in this story was an appalling example of journalism corrupted by the hunt for traffic. It is fine and necessary to ask the questions the AP asked but then, finding no quid pro quo, no smoking gun, why still report the innuendo of the question? I am utterly unconvinced by AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll’s defense of it. Of course, Secretary Clinton met with Melinda Gates and Muhammad Yunus; people line up to meet both of them every year at Davos because they are important people who do important work and, like the Clintons, they both raise and donate funds and find partners to help meet their worthy goals. That’s how the world works. I’d have thought world-wise journalists would be wiser about that. Amazing how they can turn off their sophistication when convenient.

The problems with chasing these squirrels:

  1. Balance: These faux scandals become tokens in journalists’ well-documented insistence on finding balance. Let’s spend one block of our show talking about how Donald Trump demonizes Mexicans and Muslims and — because we need something to “balance” that — let’s spend the next block repeating the same, year-old allegations about Hillary’s damned emails. The hunt for balance is especially cynical this year, as any attempt to give balanced coverage to an unbalanced candidate can only mislead.
  2. Savvy: Journalists use these stories and their impact to try to feed their political savvy, as Jay Rosen has pointed out for years. They want to sound like — no, they want to be — insiders who can predict every political outcome. I’ve been particularly struck this season how both commentators and reporters talk about what a candidate “should” do to win. When was that the reporter’s job, to advise on political strategy for politicians? Do they want to declare themselves partisans? Then they need to declare sides.
  3. Distraction: The real problem, of course, is that these squirrels keep journalism from doing its real job, which is to say….

Journalism does not inform.

If journalism as a whole had done its job informing the electorate in the U.K., I believe there would not have been Brexit. If journalism had informed and educated the American electorate, I am confident there would have been no room for Trump to spread his virus of ignorance, lies, and bigotry. It is patently clear that journalism is doing a terrible job informing the public. Judge the results.

This is what depresses me most and makes me realize more than ever that we must rethink and reinvent the very core of journalism, its relationship with the public, its forms, and its business models. For it’s the business model that makes Les Moonves at CBS and Jeff Zucker at CNN rub their greedy little hands in glee at the audience and revenue the Trump Circus brings them. It’s the business model that has newsrooms chasing rabid squirrels and outrageous Trumpisms to get more volume, less value. It’s the form of journalism — the scoop, the exclu, the provocative TV yelling match, the savvy political roundtable— that brings out our worst in political opportunism and sensationalism, leaving no room for substance. And because we in journalism separate ourselves from the public we serve — sitting above them, in judgment — we try to argue that it’s not our fault if they’re not informed. Because of that separation, we cannot credibly contend that we know what the public’s concerns are; we’re not good at listening. And because of that separation, we still expect people to come to us for the news, when we should be going to them wherever they are.

Imagine if even a fraction of the time we see wasted on cable news were devoted to educating the public about the issues and realities of immigration, refugees, criminal justice, the economy, infrastructure, education, health care costs, entitlement costs, security, the environment, taxes, jobs…. When was the last time you saw TV news do that? How much of any news organization’s work is devoted to doing this, to informing the electorate? Shouldn’t we ask before assigning every story and booking every TV discussion: How will this help the public better decide how to vote?

Journalism is failing the nation. This election is the proof.

Since I’ve declared myself a member of the community of Clinton supporters, I also have standing to criticize the campaign. If the campaign were run more as a grass-roots effort — à la Dean, Obama, Sanders — then it would be easier for the journalists to find and report on the enthusiasm I have seen myself. I can now speak from first-hand experience about how difficult it is to get involved in the campaign in person and online.

If the candidate did a better job addressing the damned email story from the start, maybe — maybe — we wouldn’t be bombarded with it every day.

If the foundation and family were more aggressive in sharing news of what the foundation does then it would be less of a target for squirrel hunters and more of a character statement in her favor.

If the candidate gave more interviews, there’d be less whining among the journalists about her not having a press conference (not that press conferences ever do a great job of informing; interviews are better because they allow for followup).

And — this is going to sound trivial but I mean it — if the campaign didn’t take a full month to ship the Clinton-Kaine bumperstickers, then we’d be seeing them on more cars and it would be more apparent to the journalists that there is a community of Clinton supporters out here.

As I was writing this, I spoke with one of my deans and he pointed out that all my complaints have been the fodder of academic critics of journalism for decades. They are outsiders. It has helped me to be the outsider so I could judge journalism as a user. That these problems continue and perhaps get worse as news companies get more desperate (“We need more traffic! Throw more squirrels on the fire! We need to save money! Fire more reporters!”) is only cause for deeper professional angst.

What could save journalism from uselessness and society from the consequent stupidity and ruin? We bloggers thought we would topple the gatekeepers. Blogs did allow more voices to be heard and social media did enable debate. Then again, blogs led in a straight line to Breitbart and Twitter to Trump and we know where those lines crossed. And as I noted in my Gawker death notice last week, the death of the mass-media business model might mean the death of blogs, too.

What stops me from quitting and sustaining myself on road kill or PR? My students. I tell them they must reinvent journalism. When I spoke with our incoming class last week, I came away inspired by their innovation (in a design exercise, none of them invented a magazine or a web-site filled with long-form writing) and their aspirations (I will once again quote the definition of journalism from student Kate Ryan: “It is a means to inform the public and, in doing so, cultivate an educated, empathetic, and engaged society”).

Does our political journalism inform and cultivate an educated, empathetic, engaged society? It fails on all counts, wouldn’t you agree? Could it ever do all that? Ever the optimist, I will say yes. It must. But we have to throw out our well-worn reflexes and assumptions and start over. Do we need to destroy the news to save it? People think that’s what I’ve been saying for years, but I wasn’t. Until now.

We must create a journalism that mirrors the many and diverse communities and concerns in societies and convenes these communities in dialog so they can foster empathy and understanding. We must create a journalism that educates the public about the issues that matter to each other (so we must start by asking them what matters, not assuming we know). We must create a journalism that does not reduce people to numbers and colors but instead invites them into a substantive, intelligent, fruitful, and civil discussion as individuals and members of communities, not a mass. We have so many new tools to do all that. That’s what I tell my students; they are our last, best hope.

In the meantime, be forewarned: I’ll keep tweeting my support for Clinton and my disgust at Trump. I’ll put my new bumper sticker on the car and wear my Hillary hat. But I won’t go this far:

https://www.momentaryink.com/product/im-with-her-red/


https://www.momentaryink.com/product/im-with-her-red/