Citizen Cartwright

Why ‘Trump voters love him more than before’

This is the online headline of a New York Times opinion article involving four of its conservative columnists — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French and Bret Stephens.

 

They were asked why more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a recent NBC News poll (90 percent of Republicans like his performance; 4 percent of Democrats do).

 

Here are some excerpts:

 

David Brooks says: “Sixty percent believe ‘the system is broken.’ Sixty-nine percent believe the ‘political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.’… They get this from media consumption. ... If those are your priors, then you’re going to be happy with a president who wields a wrecking ball.”

 

“Trump policies are not 100 percent wrong; they are just overreactions. Destroying an agency rather than fixing what is wrong and saving what is right.”

 

“As a matter of principle, Democrats should be screaming bloody murder about Trump’s threat to the Constitution. As a matter of political tactics, I think they’re better off emphasizing Trumpian incompetence. Determining the constitutionality of some act requires a law degree, but incompetence is something we all recognize — and there is a lot of it.”

 

Bret Stephens: “The sort of inside-the-Beltway moves that feel like political earthquakes to a certain kind of Washington insider leave Trump voters somewhere between indifferent and pleased.”

 

Ross Douthat: “This sense of things may change as Trump pushes the envelope of presidential power or as the right embraces its own forms of censoriousness. Indeed, already you can see some factions that aligned with Trump because they were anti-woke start to break away or critique MAGA excesses.”

 

David French: “There’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans (sadly!) want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the ‘deep state’ or RINOs.”

 

“Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms.”

 

“If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, ‘woke’ programs funded by USAID. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.”

 

“I sincerely doubt that most Republicans think or believe that Trump has done anything illegal so far. Right-wing media is full of legal talking heads telling their loyal audiences that the various district judges are lawless. The right is even attacking Amy Coney Barrett, calling her a grifter or a RINO for exercising her independent judgment.”

“That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.”

 

“If the economy tanks, MAGA will stay with Trump, but we know from the 2020 election that enough voters will step off the Trump train to swing the balance of power back to the Democrats.”

Margaret Sullivan: AP shows ‘what courage looks like’

The Associated Press has “stuck to its guns under attack from the Trump White House,” Sullivan says in her Substack newsletter. 

 

Associated Press reporters and photographers are being denied access to White House briefings and no longer allowed to travel with President Trump. 

 

“When Trump unilaterally decided that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the Gulf of America, a lot of news organizations and other institutions — including Google and Apple — simply went along,” Sullivan says.

 

“The AP, because it has a vast international audience, declined to do so. In their stories, at least for the first reference, they continue to use Gulf of Mexico, while acknowledging the Trump preference when appropriate. They chose not to update their style book, which many journalists use as a kind of professional Bible, to accommodate the change. They did this not to pick a fight with the president, but for solid reasons having to do with serving their audience.”

 

“AP is suing the White House on First Amendment and due process grounds,” Sullivan says. “Other news organizations and Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute are showing support with legal filings.”

 

Sullivan doesn’t have a paywall on her newsletter, so you can read the rest.

 

But I want to mention something else about AP. You’ve likely noticed that most of the articles I run in the “in the news” section of this blog are from AP.

 

And, in fact, that’s mainly because AP does have an international audience. To serve its large and diverse audience, it sticks to the facts, explains what’s happening clearly, and provides context.

 

When young people tell me they don’t know what to believe, I suggest reading AP and Reuters because of their quality and lack of a paywall. But when I decide whether to run the AP or Reuters version of a news story, I usually end up choosing AP because of greater clarity or context.

Oh, Jeff

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said on Wednesday that the newspaper’s opinions section now would be focused on “personal liberties and free markets” and won’t publish anything that opposes those ideas. With the shift, opinions editor David Shipley resigned, reports The Washington Post.

 

Shipley told Bezos that the new approach would violate the Post's pledge to hold power to account, NPR reports.

 

The announcement led to immediate and public pushback from members of The Post’s opinion and news staff, says The New York Times:

 

“Jeff Stein, The Post’s chief economics reporter, called it a 'massive encroachment' on The Post’s opinion staff that made clear 'dissenting views will not be published or tolerated there. I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know,' Mr. Stein wrote on X.”

 

As I type this at 6 a.m., the Post article has 8,510 comments. An AI-generated summary of the comments says: “The comments express significant dissatisfaction with The Washington Post's new focus on 'personal liberties and free markets' in its opinion section. Many readers perceive this shift as a move towards a more conservative, right-wing stance, aligning with corporate and political interests, particularly those of Jeff Bezos. This has led to numerous subscription cancellations, with readers lamenting the perceived loss of journalistic integrity and diversity of opinion that they valued in the past.”

 

“Jeff Bezos is muzzling the Washington Post’s opinion section. That’s a death knell” is the headline of Margaret Sullivan’s column in The Guardian.

 

“Bezos set out to save the Washington Post from financial ruin when he bought it, and, for a time, he did that and more. But the best thing he could do now would be to sell it to someone who understands the stewardship of a national treasure,” she says.

Elections lawyer Marc Elias on what ‘we can all do to protect democracy’

As President Trump “floods the zone” with “too much news,” as the Columbia Journalism Review puts it, I’m continuing to spend huge amounts of time trying to sort out what’s real from what are empty threats, or whatever. 

 

Another request of you, dear readers: Please send me items you come across on lawsuits being filed in response to executive orders as well as on ways citizens can help those who are being harmed by the new administration’s policies.

 

Meanwhile, here, from Marc Elias, who’s credited with supervising many of the court cases in response to Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, are suggestions of what citizens can do to protect democracy now. 

Focusing on what’s actually happening

News outlets need to provide content for their websites and their print pages, so much of the “news” turns out to be about what “could” happen.

 

But there’s no point stressing ourselves with speculation about what might happen. Let’s deal with whatever comes when it actually does. As Mark Twain supposedly said, “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

 

A New York Times analysis says that in his executive actions, President Trump has “revived disputed claims of broad presidential authority from his first term — and made some new ones. Court battles seem likely.” So let’s not get ahead of that process.

 

I’ve finally broken down and subscribed to Foreign Affairs, published by The Council on Foreign Relations. This morning, there’s an article by Russell Muirhead, a professor of democracy and politics at Dartmouth, and Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of ethics in politics and government emerita at Harvard. They’ve recently published a book titled “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.”

 

They say: “As subject-specific experts are replaced by flatterers, the government’s ability to achieve lasting, large-scale results shrinks. As process is shunted aside in favor of one person’s will, the state’s ability to gather accurate information and make effective judgments corrodes; its capacity to design, refine, and implement policy disappears. Ultimately, ungoverning makes the strongman weak.”

 

When you come across actual news that I miss, please send it to me.

Beginning 2025 with gladness

Blogger Maria Popova has put together “a little reservoir of gladness” to start the year.

 

Among her “gladnesses”:

 

“Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.”

 

And “Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.”

ABC News succumbed to Trump’s pressure; will others?

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

There’s a theme emerging in some of the news recently. It began just before the election, when owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both killed plans by their editorial boards to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be president.

 

Since Donald Trump was elected, more stories have followed the same theme:

— Several tech CEOs have made $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee.

— Tech leaders also have made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago

— And the tech bro who got there first with the most, Elon Musk, may already be seeing return on his investment: According to Reuters, the Trump transition team plans to kill a regulation requiring the reporting of accidents involving self-driving vehicles — most of which involve cars by Musk’s Tesla.

— This follows Trump’s announced plan to nominate Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire with close ties to Musk and SpaceX, to head NASA.

 

Of course, where there are carrots, there are sticks: The Senate had a press protection bill pending that had passed the House with bipartisan support; it would have barred the federal government from compelling reporters to reveal confidential information, such as sources. Trump announced his opposition, and Senate Republicans blocked floor action.

 

Most notable of all was the decision by ABC News, revealed last weekend, to settle a libel suit filed by Trump. The decision is striking, given the difficulty facing public figures under U.S. law to win such suits in the absence of particularly egregious behavior.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written frequently about authoritarianism, calls it “obeying in advance.”

Margaret Sullivan commented:

“ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement.

“As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual,” she said. “News organizations generally don’t settle ‘because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.’”

“Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect,” Sullivan said. “As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as ‘part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.’”

“Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing.”

Brian Stelter of CNN noted: “The president-elect has a long history of litigation, with numerous unsuccessful cases against news outlets in the past. Some media law experts believed ABC had a good chance of beating him at trial, given the inherent challenge of proving Stephanopoulos acted with ‘actual malice.’ But trials also add uncertainty and a risk of severe reputational damage – factors that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is now avoiding.”

 

Journalist Parker Molloy, writing in Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2025, argued that acquiescence won’t spare journalism organizations: 

“The bitter irony is that this voluntary surrender won’t protect these outlets from Trump’s attacks. He’ll continue using them as punching bags to rally his base, even as they bend over backwards to appear ‘fair’ to his administration. But their owners calculate that performative criticism is preferable to actual accountability journalism that might threaten their bottom lines.

“For those who remember post-9/11 journalism, this feels eerily familiar,” Molloy said. “But at least then, the press could claim they were caught off guard by an unprecedented national crisis. This time, they’re choosing compliance with eyes wide open, trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table.

 

“The question isn’t whether mainstream media will hold Trump accountable in his second term — they’ve already decided not to try. The question is whether enough independent voices can survive to fill the vacuum they’re leaving behind.”

 

Molloy’s prediction for 2025 is coming true early. The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump and his allies were threatening more lawsuits.

 

In fact, on Monday, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, seeking “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up by 3 percentage points in Iowa.

 

According to Semafor, “news organizations are bracing” for more attacks:

“In an email shared with Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel told staff that the news organization anticipates the new administration will attempt to force reporters to out their sources, will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation, and could charge journalists with crimes using the Espionage Act,” Max Tani wrote.

One analysis suggests that voters elected Trump due in part to their revulsion at the “elites” — a category that, for many, includes legacy media. Trump and his billionaire allies — populists, apparently — are seizing that opportunity, wielding their wealth to intimidate and isolate news organizations. ABC News acquiesced, essentially waiving the protection of the First Amendment.

The near-universal dismay within the industry at ABC News’ decision may be mere bravado. Or it may indicate not every media enterprise will be so compliant. The quality of our democracy hinges on those decisions.

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Paul Krugman’s final NYTimes column, on ‘finding hope in an age of resentment’

The Nobel-prize-winning economist and author of 27 books, who’s retiring from The New York Times, reflects on what's changed since he began writing his opinion column in 2000. 

 

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

 

“Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

 

For example, “the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.”

 

“And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status. But now they and some of their products face disillusionment and worse; Australia has even banned social media use by children under 16.”

 

“These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

 

“So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

 

“We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.”

Grateful

This Thanksgiving, as always, I’m grateful for you, dear readers.

 

And, as I’ve said before, I’m specifically grateful to the reader who alerted us to the good news aggregators at Australia’s Fix the News.

 

Fix the News founder Angus Hervey, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, wrote in a long essay in response to our U.S. election results, which I ran on Nov. 15:

 

"For the first time since I can remember, I'm not sure the good guys are going to win.

 

"I find myself returning to the lessons of South Africa. That change happened, not because it was inevitable, but because people made it inevitable. Each step forward mattered and people kept on believing in the right thing, even when that belief seemed foolish. In the end the impossible happened not because history ordained it, but because ordinary people kept pushing against the darkness until finally, impossibly, the light broke through.”

 

He said Fix the News will be writing “stories about how progress happens not through some invisible hand of history, but through the visible hands of people who refuse to give up on it.”

 

I emailed Hervey to let him know how much his work means to us here, while, as he put it in his essay, "every media outlet in the world” is "shrieking about Trump,” one way or the other.

 

He emailed back saying he appreciates the encouragement he’s gotten in response to his essay and that he’s feeling "more resolute than ever about the mission of Fix the News.”

 

As Stephen Hawking said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.” And blogger Maria Popova pointed out that we’re early in our evolution, so it’s to be expected that we mess things up a lot.

 

I’m grateful for the feeling of belonging and empowerment I get from our global connection to Hervey and others as we all stumble forward as best we can.

The election: Legacy media is told, again, 'They’re just not that into you'

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

In a better world, there would be a period of quiet, of licking wounds, of taking stock, after the shock suffered by both Democrats and legacy media in the presidential election. But in this world, the world we’ve created, the demand for content — always fresh, yet always familiar — is unrelenting. Thus we are subjected to opinions without supporting facts, recriminations without self-reflection, certainty where none exists — and simple explanations for the collective decision of more than 153 million people.

“Devastated Democrats play the blame game,” reads a New York Times headline.

“Where Harris’ campaign went wrong,” CNN was prepared to tell us — on Nov. 6, the day after the election.

“This is all Biden’s fault,” the headline reads on a New York Times op-ed piece by the journalist Josh Barro, who at least took till Nov. 9 to have it all figured out.

Talking heads gonna talk. Pontificators gotta pontificate. Our content-generation enterprises had airtime and screens to fill. And for members of the media, the Democratic defeat was a target-rich environment.

Pundits also scratched their heads at the failure of the public to heed their warnings about Donald Trump, but that didn’t seem to open the floodgates of self-reflection in the most influential newsrooms.

 
New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller had a thoughtful piece about the way the flow of information had changed, a change that the Trump campaign understood and Harris’ didn’t. He concluded: “In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors.

 
“This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows—and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that conclusion. Here’s what jumps out at me: While Heller poses “ambient information” as a puzzle for Democrats to solve, he makes no mention of journalists. 

 
But aren’t we are all living in an age of babel? The clash of ideas in the public sphere — for which journalism provides a stage — is no longer an intellectual contest. The truth may set you free, but if it can’t garner market share, it’s not winning the day. Election coverage with a primary goal of serving citizens would look very different from coverage with a need to make as much money as possible off the election.

Also, I wonder: How is any of this considered new? Newsrooms have been coping — unsuccessfully — with ambient information for years. A lot of news is now free. Journalism enterprises are struggling against free.  

 

Poynter reporter Angela Fu wrote last December:

“The U.S. has lost more than 130 newspapers — or 2.5 a week — this year, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Since 2005, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists.

“‘A lot of news consumption is happening on social media and even from search,’ said Pew Research Center senior researcher Elisa Shearer. ‘You’re less likely to be getting something directly from a news outlet when you’re getting it in that way.’”

As we’ve discussed repeatedly, the business model on which newspapers were based for more than a century has collapsed, newsrooms have contracted, quality plummeted. News is everywhere in the air, plenty for the average consumer, and it doesn’t cost a thing.

Newsrooms have had a tendency to view the business model as a thing apart — someone else’s problem to solve — while they stayed focused on the important thing: their journalism, writing and editing narratives about the world.

 
But it’s not enough to believe that news is important. The product no longer meets the consumer need. Whatever else it was, the 2024 election was yet another reminder for legacy media that “they’re just not that into you.”

 

 

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.