News bits: Local newspapers under stress; Effects of loss of local newspapers; Climate change education

A NYT article discusses local government officials punishing local newspapers for printing unflattering content about how local government works or fails to work. This exemplifies the inherent conflict between powerful special interests including governments, big businesses and religious organizations on one side, and the usually far less powerful newspapers and the public interest on the other. The two sides are often or usually at odds. The big guys seem to usually get most or all of what they want. The NYT writes: 

Two of the most powerful women in the village of Delhi in central New York sat face to face in a brick building on Main Street for what would become a fight over the First Amendment.

It was the fall of 2019. Tina Molé, the top elected official in Delaware County, was demanding that Kim Shepard, the publisher of The Reporter, the local newspaper, “do something” about what Ms. Molé saw as the paper’s unfair coverage of the county government.

Ms. Shepard stood her ground. Not long after, Ms. Molé struck where it would hurt The Reporter the most: its finances. The county stripped the newspaper of a lucrative contract to print public notices, subsequently informing The Reporter that the decision was partly based on “the manner in which your paper reports county business.”

The move cost The Reporter about $13,000 a year in revenue — a significant blow to a newspaper with barely 4,000 subscribers.  

In recent years, newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey and California, as well as New York, have been stripped of their contracts for public notices after publishing articles critical of their local governments. Some states, like Florida, are going even further, revoking the requirement that such notices have to appear in newspapers.  

The trend is the latest example of how public officials and wealthy individuals are waging war on news organizations that cover them aggressively.

In Germaine's ideal world, local governments would not be able to attack newspapers like this. Doing so injures the public interest. Attacks like this are inherently anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and pro-corruption. 

Q: Does it injure the public interest and is inherently anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and/or pro-corruption for local governments to financially attack local newspapers?

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Social science research: There has been a lot of research directed to finding and quantifying effects of the loss of local newspapers in the areas they serve and the people they inform. A June 2022 article by Northwestern University comments on the effects of local newspaper loss:

The United States continues to lose newspapers at a rate of two per week, further dividing the nation into wealthier, faster growing communities with access to local news, and struggling areas without.

Between the pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022, more than 360 newspapers closed, the report by Medill’s Local News Initiative found. Since 2005, the country has lost more than one-fourth of its newspapers and is on track to lose a third by 2025.

Most of the communities that have lost newspapers do not get a print or digital replacement, leaving 70 million residents — or a fifth of the country’s population — either living in an area with no local news organizations, or one at risk, with only one local news outlet and very limited access to critical news and information that can inform their everyday decisions and sustain grassroots democracy. About 7 percent of the nation’s counties, or 211, now have no local newspaper.

“This is a crisis for our democracy and our society, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, visiting professor at Medill and the principal author of the report. “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain print or digital news organizations.”

Recent research shows that, in communities without a strong print or digital news organization, voter participation declines and corruption increases, Abernathy said, contributing to the spread of misinformation, political polarization and reduced trust in media.

Pew Trust magazine wrote in 2020:

This growing dearth of local news outlets is leading researchers to call the places that have lost papers “news deserts,” and academic studies are finding a correlation between less local news and decreased civic participation in those places.

The Pew Research Center has been watching these trends. It recently reported that in 2018, the last year for which cumulative data were available, overall newspaper circulation in the U.S. shrank 8 percent and industry revenues dropped 13 percent—continuing a spiral that began in the mid-2000s. The center also calculated that between 2004 and 2018, newspaper newsroom employment dropped by almost half— 47 percent.

Qs: Does it injure the public interest and is inherently anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and/or pro-corruption for local governments to financially attack local newspapers?

Should state or federal governments prop up professional local newspapers, or should they be left to the impulses of capitalism and free markets running wild and butt naked (unregulated)?

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Climate change education in public schools, or lack thereof: A NYT opinion piece discusses the situation:

This is the message, too, of the new middle-grade edition of Douglas W. Tallamy’s “Nature’s Best Hope,” a best-selling approach to conservation that begins at home. “Over the years, human beings have shown that we’re very good at destroying habitats. Now we have to show that we’re smart enough and thoughtful enough and caring enough to restore what we have ruined,” Mr. Tallamy tells young readers. “I believe we can do it, if you help.”

This is all crucial information for children who live in a country where only one state — New Jersey — includes the study of climate change at all grade levels, and where the science standards for middle-school students in more than 40 states include only a single reference to climate change. In hurricane-plagued Florida, middle-school science standards make no reference to climate change at all. 

Maybe it seems a little excessive for someone to bring home an armload of environmental books meant for her neighbors’ children to read, but to me it felt like an exercise in hope.

As I read those books, it dawned on me that picture-book authors and illustrators are laying the groundwork for a better climate future by tapping into children’s inborn compassion, curiosity and sense of justice. These books explain how important it is for everyone to help, kids included, and they give the adults no place to hide. If a child can care so much, shouldn’t we care, too?

Q: Is it reasonable to think that the reason that climate change science isn't taught much or at all in most public schools is due mostly, say ~90%, to these two influences: 

1. The pro-pollution business community (oil, gas, coal and chemical companies) and its massive, well-funded, decades-long anti-climate change propaganda war and the irrational public distrust of science it has intentionally fomented; and

2. Authoritarian radical right anti-government, brass knuckles corrupted capitalist politicians armed with their rigid authoritarian, pro-business, no-compromise ideology? 

Or, is public judgment,** ignorance and/or apathy also a major factor(s)?[1] 

** What if the public's judgment is significantly clouded by the anti-climate change propaganda war the pro-pollution business community continues to fight to this day. 

Footnote: 

1. Pew Research wrote this in April 2023: 

6 Climate change is a lower priority for Americans than other national issues. 

While a majority of Americans view climate change as a major threat, it is a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing health care costs.

Overall, 37% of Americans say addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress in 2023, and another 34% say it’s an important but lower priority. This ranks climate change 17th out of 21 national issues included in a Center survey from January.

As with views of the threat that climate change poses, there’s a striking contrast between how Republicans and Democrats prioritize the issue. For Democrats, it falls in the top half of priority issues, and 59% call it a top priority. By comparison, among Republicans, it ranks second to last, and just 13% describe it as a top priority.

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Merrick Garland intentionally tried to protect DJT from culpability for his 1/6 coup attempt: The WaPo writes:

In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

Instead of restoring trust in the DoJ, this leads me to have even less trust in it. What other elite criminals and their crimes has the DoJ quashed?

This is more evidence that we have a two-tiered system of law enforcement and justice. The rich and powerful tend to get more leniency, benefits of doubt, and flat out free passes for most of their crimes, including serious ones. 

We have all heard the howls of self-righteous moral outrage from radical right Republican Party elites and their propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux Lies. Most Republicans in congress publicly claim that the DoJ is partisan, "weaponized" and corrupted for indicting DJT. This is more evidence that the howls of outrage are just insulting, cynical lies. The weaponization isn't against criminals and traitors like DJT. It is weaponized against non-elites and it protects criminals and traitors like DJT.

An Explanation of the MAGA Mindset?

I found this BigThink article very interesting.  It’s long but there is an audio link if you want to just sit back and listen to it.  It explains how people interpret reality differently, based on an inner voice interpreter and associated brain functioning.  For what it’s worth, it might help us in understanding the MAGA mind, or even our own mind, for that matter.

Link here for full article.

If tl;dr, just skip to “the punchline” and wing it. 😉

Some of the more interesting phrases and sentences that stood out to me:

• The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.
• …it is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought.
• …99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.
• …but since the left brain didn’t have access to these requests, it made up an answer and believed it rather than saying, “I don’t know why I just did that.”
• The left brain was simply making up interpretations, or stories, for events that were happening in a way that made sense to that side of the brain, or as if it had directed the action. Neither of these explanations was true, but that was unimportant to the interpretive mind, which was convinced that its explanations were the correct ones.
• Over the last 40 years, several additional studies have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning.
• The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.
• Most of us live our lives under the direction of the interpreter, and that makes the mind our master, and we are not even aware of this. … While it is clear that these experiences are happening to us, we somehow retain the idea that we are still in charge of it all.

Science supports the Eastern view (aka “the punchline”)

• So, for the first time in history, the findings of scientists in the West strongly support, in many cases without meaning to, one of the most fundamental insights of the East: that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing. 

Questions:

1. Does this article help explain the MAGA mindset?
2. Did you find this article a good explanation for how the subjective reality of the inner voice has the power to negate objective reality for the MAGA voter?
3. If 99.9% of everything you do is for the self, does that leave only .1% room for selflessness?  In other words, other than a fraction of 1%, is it virtually impossible to be selfless?
4. If we are all controlled by that inner voice, what does that say about free will?  Chalk up another hash mark against it?

Op-Ed Making America hate again

 It’s difficult these days for a political columnist to avoid writing about Don the john Trump. Less mentioned, but as important, is to figure out why it is that millions of people seem still to adore the guy.

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Anyone, in any country, at any time on planet Earth, might be excused for lying, cheating and stealing to save his own skin. But to lie, cheat and steal, and induce one’s underlings to tap dance to the same tune, then throw them to the sharks, is, to me, the opposite of what America pretends to be about. Or did, once.

Remember how it used to be bad to be a Sore Loser?

To whine and moan, like a crybaby?

To blame your brother, when everyone knows you did it?

To hate your neighbor?

Remember how it used to be bad to be a braggart?

To strut about and mock your weaker peers? And grind your boot into their noses?

To claim you did things you never did, and deny what you did do?

To sulk after you were caught red-handed?

Remember how it used to be un-American to refuse to stand up and take your medicine?

Nathan Hale said: “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.”

He did not say: “I regret my country has no more money and lives to give to me.”

Men on the gallows have demonstrated more courage and honesty than Little Whiny Donnie has ever shown in his life.

My favorite words from a man on his way to the chopping block were Sir Walter Ralegh’s, on Oct. 29, 1618. He was beheaded on false charges by order of King Charles of England (who was in the pay of the king of France — the very charge of which he accused Sir Walter). On his way to the block, Sir Walter espied an elderly man in the crowd. Sir Walter asked why the old man was there.

“I have come to see you die, Sir,” the old man replied.

Whereupon Sir Walter removed his wig and gave it to the old-timer, saying that the old man could make better use of it than Sir Walter ever would.

There walked a man.

Anyone who reads the indictments against Don the john Trump must be struck not just by how often he lies, cheats and steals, but how often he induces other people to lie, cheat and steal for him, then tosses them aside like used Kleenex.

That, to me, and to anyone who calls himself an American, is a grievous sin: to sell out your friends for your own advancement.

But Little Donnie doesn’t know how to be a friend. And that, my friends, is un-American.

Then there’s the matter of sexual abuse. People in my generation (Baby Boomers) were taught to respect women — or at least try, or pretend to — not abuse them just because we could, with our superior strength.

Truth to tell, millions of us did not always follow that rule. But at least, in those days, boys who bragged about it were not admired, except by their fellow idiots and rapists.

Many of us, however, tried to abide by our mothers’ rules: Stand up when a lady enters the room. Hold open the door for her and let her go first. Do not swear or use crude language in the presence of a lady. Stand up when a lady leaves the room. Show some respect.

With all the right-wing bullshit we hear today about “traditional values,” where do those values come in?

“When you’re a star … you can grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Sigh.

Yeah, you can, I guess, these days, in the Republican Party.

https://www.courthousenews.com/making-america-hate-again/

Mini bits: The missing informant; The missing tapes; Capitalists hate labor unions; Etc.

From the Post-Truth Politics Files: Newsweek writes about an informant that Republican elites have been saying has rock solid evidence that proves, proves mind you, Joe and Hunter are bribe-taking, communist sleazeball criminals:

Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, has admitted no one had had any contact for three years with an alleged key source in its investigation into the Biden family business dealings.

Comer appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show Thursday to give an update to the Republican inquiry into allegations Joe Biden took part in "influence peddling," while vice president in the Obama administration. The serving president is also accused of engaging in corrupt foreign business dealing with his son Hunter Biden and Ukrainian energy company Burisma. However, the investigation has so far not revealed any real evidence to back up the claims.

Oops, apparently the informant has disappeared. Nonetheless, Joe and Hunter are bribe-taking communist sleazeball criminals even without proof.

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More from the Post-Truth Politics Files: The Daily Beast writes about recordings that Republican elites have been saying has rock solid evidence that proves, proves mind you, Joe and Hunter are bribe-taking, communist sleazeball criminals: 

Republicans Admit They ‘Don’t Know’ if Biden 

Bribery Tapes ‘Really Exist’

.... Republicans and right-wing media have been running wild with unsubstantiated claims about a foreign bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden.

The story really grew legs in the conservative media ecosphere this week when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) hyped up the potential existence of “audio tapes” proving Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian energy company while he was vice president.

At the same time, despite his colleagues being forced to admit there may not be any recordings, Grassley has expressed hope that Trump is proud of him for pushing so hard for a Biden probe. “Well I hope he thinks I’m doing good work,” Grassley said on a conservative podcast on Wednesday. “I’d like to have him think that of my oversight work.”

Grassley the Sniveling Groveller wants DJT's approval for doing good oversight work. So far, Grassley's oversight work has turned up nothing. However, nothing alone is suspicious and Joe and Hunter need to be locked up. Right?

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Employees get fired: The WaPo writes about Starbucks baristas who openly work to unionize and then get fired for doing so:

For months, Lexi Rizzo had clocked in before dawn convinced that the company where she had worked for nearly eight years was determined to fire her. And Rizzo thought she knew why: She was one of 49 baristas from across Buffalo who sent a letter to the company’s chief executive in August 2021 informing him that they were seeking to form a union.

Today there are about 320 unionized Starbucks stores in the United States — a rare bright spot for the shrinking labor movement. But the gains have come at a price, union officials said. Only 13 of the workers who signed the original Buffalo organizing letter are still with the company.

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COVID update: The Hill writes: 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told vaccine manufacturers on Friday their fall COVID-19 update should target the XBB.1.5 strain of omicron. That variant is currently responsible for about 40 percent of all infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Vaccine companies have been working on XBB-specific vaccines, so they will be ready by the end of the summer.

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Obama disputes racism with Tim Scott: Consider the arguments that Scott lays out to attack Democrats. This kind of reasoning is at the heart of American radical right political thinking. The Hill writes:

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) took a jab at former President Obama this week after the Democrat criticized the declared 2024 GOP presidential contender over his remarks about race and racial progress in the country.

“Let us not forget we are a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. Democrats deny our progress to protect their power. The Left wants you to believe faith in America is a fraud and progress in our nation is a myth,” Scott said in a statement Thursday.

“The truth of MY life disproves the lies of the radical Left. We live in a country where little Black and Brown boys and girls can be President of the United States. The truth is – we’ve had one and the good news is – we will have another,” he added.

Worth noting is (1) the argument that if one minority person can succeed, all of them can and that proves, proves mind you, great progress, implying racism is completely gone or trivial at worst, (2) Democrats deny social progress to protect their power, (3) his silence about some bigoted Republican policies, e.g., voting laws that target racial minorities to limit their influence, and (4) referring to the radical left.

Item 1 is bullshit-based lie that proves nothing. One story about one person does not tell the whole story. Racism in America is far more complex than Mr. Scott alone. Regarding 2, I don't recall most Dems denying progress. Most acknowledge both progress and significant remaining racism-based problems, e.g., in law enforcement, housing and employment. Item 3 is telling. It is a lie of omission. All that minority Republicans can do these days in the face of GOP policy is employ the KYMS tactic (keep your mouth shut). Finally, item 4 is a standard radical right lie employed as a misdirection to distract from the fact that the Dem Party and its power is dominated by center and center-right politicians. In terms of political power, the "radical left" is not a major player. Scott's insinuation of radical left power is a both a lie and a slander.