What Fame is For

From https://www.abeautifulday.movie/, Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and Matthew Rhys as Tom Junod.

In “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” Esquire magazine writer Tom Junod (Matthew Rhys) asks public TV children’s show host Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) about fame.

“Fame is a four-letter word,” Fred says. And it all depends on what you do with it. What he did with it was to help the people around him, and you can't watch this movie without wishing it were so for other famous TV figures.

The sweet story of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” did draw me in. I was a bit old for the TV show, but saw it in snippets when I was growing up.

It was never my favorite. The pace was too slow for me, but then again, I was too old for the show.

Mr. Rogers had a way of talking to younger viewers at their level, and from all I’ve heard, not knowing the man, it came from a genuine desire to help children navigate this life.

Hanks is a good choice to play Rogers. He doesn’t imitate too much, but does remind one of the actual Fred Rogers.

The movie makes real life and the Land of Make Believe a bit similar, showing a toy New York. My wife and I both laughed when a toy plane touched down with realistic noises. But that fit, somehow. The idealized version of reality was the world as seen through the lens of the TV show.

And it was a cool movie, partly because it showed what a TV studio looks like and functions. You do feel a bit sorry for the whole crew who has to wait it out while Fred Rogers is being so nice to someone.

If you grew up at all with Mr. Rogers, I think you’ll love this movie. If you like writing and journalism, it’s not a bad portrayal of how life and reporting can interact.

And it will leave you feeling a bit better about this mortal existence. That’s about all a kid’s TV show or movie about it could do, I suppose.

And the Music Winner for Now is YouTube

What music site do you prefer?

I listen to Pandora on some computers, because it’s convenient to sign into on many devices. I have Spotify installed on my office computer at home.

I kind of like Spotify because it suggests interesting new music to me. I’m sure I never heard “Hole” before Spotify suggested Malibu, and although I consider it a bit of a guilty pleasure, that’s still a pleasure.

But when I’m working at some mundane task that doesn’t require much attention, I’m likely to just launch a list suggested by YouTube. Yeah, I know, I’m being controlled by the Overlords at Google, and I get exposed to the maximum number of ads that way, but still, YouTube just seems to make the best guesses about what I might like. I think Phoebe Bridgers and The Big Moon both came onto my radar through the magical algorithms of Google.

Facebook, you think you know me, and you probably do. But my robot overlords really control me through Google and YouTube.

Anyway, when I want a break from the disaster that is the Trump impeachment reality TV show, here are some recent songs that have been the background of my life:

First, Phoebe with “Motion Sicnekss.” I often find that live recordings by radio stations—often public ones—gives me the best versions of songs, and while I like her official music video, I think this version is better:


Next, Tessa Violet, because who doesn’t need some Tessa now and then? And she has a new album. Hmmm. Christmas is coming. I like all of the songs I’ve heard from the album, this one in particular:


Third, The Big Moon, because, why not? I used one of their videos on a recent post on my bike blog, and here is another of their songs accompanied by another whimsical video:


Fourth, Taylor Swift, of all people. I have to be in a mood to listen to Taylor, she’s rarely my first choice, but when I want some pop, there she is. Both the banter and the music are entertaining in this NPR concert, and if you don’t watch NPR tiny desk concerts, there’s a whole new world of time suck on YouTube waiting for you:


Last, guiltiest of guilty pleasures. No, I am not a big Courtney Love fan, but in truth several of her songs are catchy:


All of my choices are women. Hmmmm. Men are welcome to sing, too, but I guess I'm liking listening to women. Must be the antidote to Trump.

Spotlight on a Film that Gets Journalism Right

Brian d’Arcy James and Rachel McAdams in Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight. Photograph: Allstar/Open Road Films—from The Guardian.com. I like how they hold pens and use notebooks--a small thing, but that's what a reporter would look like during an interview.

 Last week, students in my media law and ethics class got to snack on pretzels and enjoy one of those rare classes where Joe didn’t spend too much time talking. We watched most of the 2015 movie “Spotlight.”

It’s a sobering film to watch at a Catholic university. But it’s a great film, in my opinion. NPR liked it, too.
 The all-star cast does a great job of creating the feel of journalism as it actually is, something that is very rarely seen in movies. These people aren’t glamorous or rich—they are inquisitive, intelligent writers who are feeling around in the dark, trying to find the story. They don’t know what the story is when they start.

And the people they are dealing with are not simple, either. There are multiple points of view, multiple levels of deception and truth telling.

As I re-watched the film with students, I was struck by the many memorable lines in the film:

Liev Schreiber, playing the new editor of “The Boston Globe” Marty Baron, introduces us to some journalism jargon, noting an opinion column about an abuse speech. “What’s the follow on that?”

That a priest would abuse so many kids “strikes me as an essential story for a local paper,” he adds. One overt key lesson of the movie, to me, is the importance of the kind of journalism that the Spotlight team at the Globe represents and that sadly is passing away as American journalism contracts.

But on to the memorable quotes from the movie. Stanley Tucci, as lawyer Mitchell Garabedian, is conversing with a Globe reporter and notes the system of secrecy that existed in the Archdiocese of Boston. “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” he says.

The class I was teaching lasts an hour and 50 minutes, and the movie is a bit over two hours long. I put a DVD on reserve in the library, and students are required to finish the movie, and write an essay answering some discussion questions I posted.

The class movie viewing was last week. Papers are due Thursday. I’m excited to read what students think. The movie, I hope, will pack some impact with them.

And at least they got to see one movie with actors and actress who actually look and act like the journalists I worked with during my newspaper career.

Boonville Daily News, circa 1985. JK. Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery and Brian D'Arcy James are members of the Boston Globe investigation team that uncovers a sex-abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church in the film, Spotlight. Kerry Hayes/Open Road Films—from NPR.org.

The Beer Can Sign That Delineates Iowa’s Divide

Carson King held up a sign at the Iowa-Iowa State Football game asking for beer money, and like seismic forces beneath the earth’s crust pushing tectonic plate against plate, a Des Moines Register story suddenly caused a major media quake.

The fault line was already there. It’s easy to blame President Trump and his nasty “fake news” rhetoric, but his message resonates for some of Iowans. And on the King story, Iowa has gone beyond crazy.

Image downloaded from KCRG.com, credited there to KCCI. Carson and his sign.

The Des Moines Register, in the wake of King’s beer sign and online fund-raising drawing oodles of money for the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital, reported on some racist tweets King wrote as a teen. To his credit, King didn’t shy away from the truth, admitted he had sent tweets he now considered shameful, and apologized.

But there is a growing anti-journalism cultural strain that has been building up energy for years. The King saga, for some reason, unleashed an unholy upheaval that threatens to level the media landscape in its wake.

Well, good, some would say. Those nasty liberal Des Moines Register libtards are getting what they deserve. Who needs a newspaper—indeed who reads a newspaper—anyway?

I don’t think it was coincidental that Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds quickly joined team King. Republicans in the state, even before the fake-news-in-chief became president, have been divorcing themselves from traditional media coverage—refusing newspaper invitations to speak with editorial boards, not returning candidate questionnaires, never acknowledging that there is any legitimate or important role for traditional news media.

Image by Rod Boshart of the Gazette, King and Reynolds.

And after the economic recession of 2008, newspapers have been in a constant state of turmoil and retrenching. One can hope that the internet will allow more growth of viable alternatives for news, but sadly, the economic model of the online world heavily favors the giant corporations running the show and not the ink-jet-printer-stained wretches producing the content.

Anyway, the King story took on a wild life of its own. In its wake, for reasons that honestly make little sense to me, the entire staff of RAGBRAI resigned and have started an alternative Iowa Ride. Yes, I know, the Register would not let the director of RAGBRAI speak freely—but that’s not an unusual action for a corporation, media or not, in the midst of a crisis.

Why was the King story the trigger for this quake? I think it has something to do with a certain disdain for modern times that defines a kind of building cultural backlash. Iowans used to be known for being literate, well-educated and tolerant. That was then—maybe the 1970s or so. Now, we’ve underfunded our public schools for decades, trashed higher education and become more suspicious of newcomers and outsiders. In too many cities and towns, among too many white Iowans, casual racism is common and expected to be excused, especially if it comes from the young.

And we, good white Iowans, don’t like them darn liberals shaking their nanny state fingers at us and telling us we have to tolerate Mexicans and blacks and homos and all those others who don’t, by God, respect the imagined glory of rural America.

I think Gazette columnist Lyz Lenz says it well in a column posted this week entitled “We are missing the point.” She writes:

 “It’s telling how many white Iowans have mumbled to themselves about their own social media history, as if it was somehow a rite of passage to be occasionally racist in your past. It’s not, actually. Nor should it be. But we tell on ourselves with what we fear: We don’t fear racism, we fear being discovered for it. We fear the reporter asking about our misdeeds more than we fear actually doing them.”

The other thread of this odd saga is that people want their heroes unstained by reality. They want Carson King cheered, and nobody to look too closely or ask too many questions. This, for instance, is verbatim a comment on the RAGBRAI web site following the latest bicycle ride blow to the Register:

“Hey Des Moines Register, don’t bother trying to have your ride this year. Anyone can see how badly you’ve handled this situation and every move you make digs your hole deeper. There is no recovering from this disaster. After 11 RAGBRAI’s, I’ll be proudly supporting Iowa’s Ride and the people who stood up to your liberal censorship. To recap, your actions so far have been to drag a young man’s name through the mud (all while he was donating $3 million to a children’s hospital), drop a bomb into what was, arguably the feel good story of 2019, ruin the reputation and career of a reporter doing your bidding and now, ruin the greatest cross state ride in history. I hope the idiotic editors who chose to run that crap are happy.”

Well. I doubt that they’re happy. Carson King got a day named after him, and frankly seems to have behaved far more rationally than the crowd of King minions. And I don’t know how editors, in deciding how to handle the King story, could have or should have anticipated the bomb that the RAGBRAI staff had in store.

And so it goes. I do not think the Register showed good judgement in how it handled the original story—and I am also not so proud that the reporter, who himself was guilty of iffy past posts, was separated so quickly from the paper. But the Register’s story, even if it was badly done, was factual. The response to one editorial misstep has been beyond overboard—it’s a nuclear response to a spitball.

The Register doesn’t need to be burned to the ground, nor do its editors or reporters need to be threatened.

Right now, our nation is lurching towards a Constitutional crisis. And the election of 2020, already well underway in Iowa, is shaping up to be more bitter and divisive than the rhetorical blood bath of 2016.

And we Iowans are most outraged that Iowa’s largest newspaper would dare to actually research the social media history of a suddenly prominent person.

It’s not the only sign, if additional ones were needed, of how anti-media this once savvy state has become. Take the recent case of The Carroll Times Herald, a once daily paper that is now published twice a week. Last year, that paper investigated a local police officer and found that he, a married man, was having inappropriate romantic relations with local teenage girls. The girls were not underage, so the law was not broken, but the officer involved resigned and admitted in court afterwards that the relationships, which led to vandalism committed by jealous young girlfriends, were not appropriate.

And yet, the officer sued the paper for libel. The paper won. The judge issued a 10-page ruling that basically said the paper’s original stories were true. See the Washington Post’s story. Their image, below, had this caption: Douglas Burns, the Carroll Times Herald's co-owner, pictured at a newsstand. (Provided by Douglas Burns)

Picture from the Washington Post.

The prize for journalistic accuracy? Crushing debt for a small local business that has had to set up online fund raising in an effort to stay afloat.

The price of truth telling is getting higher, these days. Unlike the Register, the Times Herald, as far as I can see, didn’t engage in iffy editorial judgements—it acted as a good local newspaper should, as the watchdog for its community, pointing out the ill deeds of a local official.

And for that, it joins the Register in being at risk.

Too many of us have allowed a cancerous anti-fact and anti-news attitude to take hold in this once proud state. The most obvious tumor is the giant orange one in the White House, but his ignorant rants about fake news are just the outward manifestation of a deeper, darker cultural trend.

Trash the newspaper. Hate the messenger. Defend the “good” white Iowans. Look to the pastoral past, not the uncertain future. Defund education. Forget controlling pollution. Quit telling us this perfect place is at risk due to climate change or racism or other large demographic and economic trends that we don’t clearly and easily understand as our education system slips to third rate, our lawmakers forgo public discussion of key laws and our newspapers, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly in a beer-fueled football induced earthquake, pass away.

I hope it’s not goodbye to sane, sensible, live-and-let-live Iowa. But I fear our knee-jerk online reactions, full of fury and feelings and fear of facts, are not signs that we are on the mend yet.

Gas Lighting Becomes the Nation’s Sport

Portrait of Donald Trump from Wikimedia Commons by DonkeyHotey: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_-_Portrait_(19209678533).jpg

I have seen way too many comments from Republicans claiming the transcript of President Trump’s disastrous phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “nothing burger.”

How depressing. An incompetent U.S. president unleashes a confusing word salad in which two things still manage to be abundantly clear: 1) Donald Trump is delusional about kooky right-wing conspiracies—he displays an increasingly erratic and dangerous lack of grip on reality, and 2) Brazenly and openly, he abused the powers of his office to try to get a foreign power to influence the next U.S. presidential election.

Russian collusion in 2016—not proven, but likely. That Russia interfered in 2016, proven beyond doubt. And here comes Donald Trump in 2019, calling a fellow TV star who become president in this crazy era, acting treasonous.

There, I said it: The T word. Trump the traitor. And you know how we used to treat traitors when we were smarter, right?

No, I don’t want an act of violence against the president, so don’t refer me to the Secret Service. I’m echoing his own inappropriate words, which he used on the whistle blower who blew the lid off this latest Trump scandal.

And, let’s consider this. Regardless of what you think of the whistle blower and their potential political motives, they filed a report in the system and let the U.S. government investigate. It was not the whistle blower who attempted to go outside of the law to draw in a foreign nation to further personal political gain.

The traitor in this tale is the addle-brained old man who has such a hypnotic hold on the Republican party that even now the senior senator from my state has attacked Democrats for looking into this scandal.

I read the transcript, too. Instead of a nothing burger, it’s 100 percent pure Angus bullshit. True, I’m not a lawyer and may need some help understating the legal ramifications, but besides appearing, as he usually does, incapable of normal human speech, let’s just review how much wrong burger there was from Trump and his criminal gang in the White House before and after this call:

• Trump puts a hold on military aid to Ukraine, a democracy threatened by an anti-democratic Russia. He then calls the president of said country and, when asked about the aid, immediately launches into his personal political agenda. None of the moves our president has made here make any policy sense in terms of his doing the job the minority of voters elected him to do. There is no hint in the call that Trump was trying to advance a government interest on behalf of the U.S. In this whole scheme, it was clearly Trump pushing Trump, the country be damned.

• Trump desperately seeks any dirt he can on Joe Biden through Joe Biden’s son’s connections to Ukraine. This is not a new story, and the true “nothing burger” is that there is, at this point, no apparent reason to investigate Hunter Biden. One odd attribute of Trump is that he projects his flaws onto his opponents—corrupt politician who makes shady deals on behalf of a sleazy family? His name isn’t “Biden,” it’s “Trump.” When Trump howls at the moon and invents crazy nicknames, so often it’s such a weird mirror of his own flaws.

• Trump’s minions spring into Keystone Cops action after the call. It’s hot, let’s classify with the deepest secrets! A complaint is filed that by law triggers a report to Congress, let’s ignore the law! When the heat gets too hot, an edited transcript will show what a great call it was! When the transcript lands like a javelin missile and suddenly impeachment is in the air, lets get our talking points in order—and email them to Nancy Pelosi!

And then there are Trump’s Tweets this week. President Trump has been singing like a canary, and it’s not pretty. Besides inappropriately attacking a 16-year-old girl who is a climate activist, he is suddenly ranting in all caps in a fire hose of nonsense. He’s injured, he’s hurt, he’s screaming—and he appears to be unhinged. This crazy Twitter twit is the President of the United States, who claimed in 2016 that it was so easy to act presidential. Still waiting.

Yikes. Nothing burger? More like tons of crazy burger.

Dear Chuck and Joni: I know politics is hard, but how far will you go for political advantage? Are you really willing to put all of our political norms at risk—to burn down the house rather than have new tenants move in? And how in the name of any sane universe can the problem that you see in this mess be that Democrats don’t like Trump?

Where is your duty to the republic, to law, to the Constitution?

If you want to be a true patriot now, then it is time to clearly articulate that what Trump has done this fortnight is out of bounds, so far beyond a Sharpie tumor on a weather map that it’s time for you to face the facts and to tell the truth.

You’re not just the Republican senators from Iowa. You are United States senators from Iowa, sworn to uphold the Constitution. For all our sakes, stop the nonsense and do some upholding.

This is clearly beyond a nothing burger. I did read the Mueller Report, and it wasn’t as empty as some seem to think and portray—there were impeachable offenses there, too. Be that as it may, maybe people of good heart can disagree on that report.

But the call to Ukraine? To say there’s nothing there is to gaslight us. We can read it and see it. Don’t try to say it’s OK. It’s clearly not in the neighborhood of OK. Don’t turn away from it. This is our president trying to get a foreign leader to dig up political dirt for him on a candidate for his office. You must, if you care about the country, call Trump out.

Ingrid Bergman from "Gaslight."
Public domain publicity image.

Trump is making it clearer day by scandalous day that he needs to be ousted from the oval office—either by voters or by the Senate acting as a jury.

And at this point, it’s beyond a doubt that there is a case to be made to impeach Donald Trump.

Maybe in the end, you would conclude, based on the testimony presented, that it’s not a case worth convicting Donald Trump on, but the recent events have opened a required path. An investigation here is necessary, and you must support that point if you are truly going to be a patriot. Let the committees meet and call witnesses and stop hassling about whether the House needs to consider impeachment.

It must. Not for partisan points, but because the Constitution and its norms and our continued republic requires it.

So, Sen. Grassley: Near the end of your long public service, will you be remembered as a clear thinker with a backbone who spoke the truth, or as another of the sycophants who has climbed aboard the gaslight express? Are you willing to stand up for what you know to be true?

And Sen. Ernst—where is that spunky Iowa girl who was going to make corrupt politicians squeal? You wore our nation’s uniform to defend it. More than when you were serving in that uniform, your nation needs you now. It’s time for you to stand up for the truth, which means confronting your party and an errant President. It’s your duty. No gaslighting. You know it.

God save the republic. Because Iowa Republicans don’t seem to be interested in that job.

Well, Why Didn’t Tom Just Call the Cops?

;
“Downton Abbey” probably isn’t a great movie. There are some plot holes. I can’t help but wonder why Tom ended up rescuing the king when he could have just gone to the cops earlier? The running-parade scene seemed strange and turned ridiculous.

Whatever. The dowager was in rare form, Mary was the ice queen as usual, and the servants were at war with other servants. There was pointless intrigue and plots.

And a gay dance in Yorkshire.

While it may not have been a great film, I was totally engrossed. It was lush and silly and satisfying. It started with train wheels, and moved on to gorgeous old cars. For a while, it was the late 1920s, a king had not abdicated after running off with an American, a fascist had not risen yet in Germany and the stock market has not yet crashed.

It might have been interesting to move the characters ahead say a dozen years and have them cope with the onset of another great war, but then again, the children would be teens then, and a whole new cast of characters would have to be introduced.

Well, if you were fan of the TV show, you’ve been summoned. Seeing the grand house on the big screen is totally worth it. Although you may wonder a bit about Tom, who always seems to get stuck in the oddest of the plot twists. They had to manufacture another relative out of nothing, just for him.

Still, my wife and I enjoyed two hours of total escape this Saturday and that's something. Silly British posh soap opera, I have missed you.

How to keep the republic strong in a social media era

Painting n the U.S. Capitol, by Howard Chandler Christy, in 1940, depicting signing of the Constitution.

As he was leaving a meeting of the constitutional convention in 1787, which was debating in secret over a new government blueprint for the infant United States of America, the elderly Benjamin Franklin, so the story goes, was accosted by a Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia.

“Well doctor,” she asked. “Are we to have a monarchy or a republic?”

Benjamin Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis.

The ever-quotable Franklin immediately replied:

“A republic. If you can keep it.”

At the time, the convention was riven by partisanship. Two political factions battled for power—the federalists, commercial and urban groups who thought a strong central government was the key to economic prosperity; and the anti-federalists, rural landowners who worried that a strong central government might threaten individual liberty.

To get the Constitution ratified, the federalists struck a bipartisan deal. One of the first orders of business for the new Congress of the United States would be to propose a list of constitutional amendments to spell out guarantees of individual liberty, a so-called Bill of Rights.

Today we recognize the first of those 10 amendments as having been crucial in our history to our republic’s public life. And the language of that First Amendment has never been more relevant:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Bill of Rights original text. There were 12 amendments proposed, the first two were not ratified. What we call the First Amendment today was the Third Amendment in the proposal.

Why freedom of the speech and of the press? Well, in the 1700s, the founders were familiar with a radical British political theory that included the ideal of a “marketplace of ideas,” that an educated public with open access to information unfiltered by government authority should be able to discern truth from falsehood and make rational political choices.

And the Constitution that the founders wrote, a flawed document built on political compromises, still lurches along. It spawned a vibrant republic.

Well done, Ben and company. Except …

It’s no secret that the news media in this country is in upheaval. Fewer staff members toil in local newsrooms. At the same time, disinformation spreads quickly via the internet.

The founders who imagined a marketplace of ideas didn’t contemplate algorithms on social media sites that would measure our clicks and preferences and serve us each an echo chamber of our own prejudices. Nor did they contemplate a president governing via Twitter, calling journalists “enemies of the people.”

In Iowa, we get a front-row seat early in each presidential season. For us, the campaign of 2020 has been underway for months.

More than 200 years ago, the founders of this republic recognized that a free press was a necessary condition to have a self-governing, democratic republic. Today, with staffs of newsrooms shrinking, trolls stalking our twitter world, and crazy theories finding an equal footing with truth in the cyber universe, it’s becoming more of a challenge to have faith in the marketplace of ideas.

 What is the role of news media in the election of 2020? How are the ideals of freedom speech and of the press still relevant to our ongoing effort to maintain our republic? In an era when media are called “enemies” and “fake news,” whose information can you trust?

On Constitution Day 2019, Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. in Betty Cherry Heritage Hall, Mount Mercy University will host a panel discussion on how our First Amendment freedoms interact with the 2020 election campaign.

I and another MMU faculty member, Dr. Richard Barrett, assistant professor of political science, will be joined by several media figures—including Zack Kucharski, executive editor of The Gazette; and Lyle Muller, retired editor of Iowa Watch—to discuss these issues.

I hope you can join us and help us talk about these big issues as jointly we strive to keep our republic.

Note: The preceding was published by "The Gazette" in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sept. 15, 2019, as a guest column on page 4D. The only editing I could find that they did to my text was to add "strong" to the headline and to insert a paragraph mark at the end--the sentence "I hope you can join us" was part of the previous paragraph in my draft. I present the text here as it was published in "The Gazette." Most images in this post are from Wikimedia Commons, except my image of the column and an image of a poster created by the Marketing and Communication office at Mount Mercy University.

Poster on campus. More information on the MMU web site.