Post-election mysteries

Kamala Harris in Reno, Nev., a few days before the election. (Photo by Brycia James)

Questions for America
 that I cannot answer

Four years ago, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, my wife Bonnie Schupp was deeply worried. "I don't want Trump to be the last president in my lifetime," she told me.

 Election night was tense, the result too close for comfort -- and the accelerant for Donald Trump's "Big Lie" alleging rigging.

 We had for weeks watched Bill Maher's HBO show, "Real Time," in which the comedian/social critic repeatedly warned that Trump would not leave office willingly. Then, like prophecy, came the January 6 insurrection -- a riot and invasion of the Capitol which Bonnie and I watched, transfixed and horrified. 

I assured her that the attack would not change the result, that Joe Biden would be inaugurated as scheduled two weeks hence. Days before the inauguration, Bonnie found out she had aggressive pancreatic cancer. 

We watched the inauguration together. Though she knew her own time remaining was limited, Bonnie was relieved for the future of others and the nation she loved that Biden was president. She died two months later. 

Four years down the road, it is my turn to worry. No, I'm not on the edge of death. But I'm anfew months older than Trump. His health status (both physical and mental) has always been a mystery couched in vague assurances, but I've had some challenges of late. Like a brush with mortality just two months ago. And I had hopes, as Bonnie did, that Trump would not be the last president in my lifetime.

 Now it seems he might be, assuming Trump has four years without an intervention of fate and I don't. And I fear for the future of the nation that I love, but now have a harder time understanding.

 I've read numerous stories and heard TV pundits in the election aftermath assessing reasons for the failed Kamala Harris campaign. 

The economy? She offered proposals to help families and vowed to take on companies for price-gouging. Trump blamed her for not fixing the economy during her four years as vice president. Not that she had the power to fix the inflation of higher consumer prices, mostly the result of initial shortages during the pandemic and the simply relationship of supply and demand.

 He harped on America as a failing nation, claimed only he could fix it, and tariffs were the answer -- despite the warnings of experts that tariffs amount to a tax on consumers through higher prices and would fuel a new inflationary spiral. All this nonsense when unemployment was at a record low, wages higher, interest rates finally dropping and the stock market at a record high. America is hardly failing economically.

 Illegal immigration as an invasion of criminals was a constant theme, and inevitably the few recent cases of undocumented aliens linked to murders -- including one if Maryland -- served Trump's purposes for political exploitation. And even when the House and Senate had reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation to deal with uncontrolled border crossings, Trump got his legislative sycophants to kill it. He needed the issue to remain as uncontrolled as the border. 

Trump as the problem-solver? How many times has he been asked for his promised plan to "fix healthcare" to replace the Affordable Care Act? In four years as president, there was none -- only a Republican attempt to scuttle the ACA that was foiled by the late Sen. John McCain.

 Or for many voters, was it simply the fact that Trump's opponent was a woman of color? They were just looking for excuses to vote for him? 

More than a dozen former key aides in his presidency urged Americans to vote for Harris, saying Trump was a danger to the nation. A fascist, even. Others in his administration or took part in schemes to subvert the Constitution were convicted of crimes, imprisoned, disbarred. But Trump himself, the crime boss, despite his New York state conviction on fraud charges, will not lose a day of his freedom and doubtless as president will scuttle all federal cases against him.

 How could more than half of the participating electorate vote for him? I cannot fathom it. President-elect yet again, four years after his defeat by Biden, despite his innumerable faults and failures as a human being and from 2017 to 2021 in office. What voters chose to ignore, forgive or forget is astonishing, but inevitably offers a clue to their psyche.

 I am left to ask how anyone who lost a family member to Covid could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's lies and ignorance in his public response to the pandemic and undermining of public health science. More than a million Americans died. He at one point voiced the idea of people injecting bleach as a cure, among other preposterous suggestions, as he undermined the work of experts studying the virus and their push for wide acceptance of the quickly-developed vaccines to help contain it.

 I am left to ask how any military veteran could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump deriding the courage and sacrifice of the nation's defenders. among other insults. "Suckers and losers," he said in minimizing visits to the American cemeteries in France where many lost in World War II are buried. Or his stated suggestion of using the nation's military to deal with Americans exercising their free speech right of protest. (All this from an obvious draft dodger in the Vietnam war era whose alleged bone spurs must have been miraculously cured.)

My neighbor's lawn

 I am left to ask how any police officer could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump inciting the crowd he summoned to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and failing to intervene as a mob's ensuing attack on the Capitol injured 140 police officers and contributed to the deaths of several. Close to a thousand people eventually were convicted on criminal charges related to the attack. Trump has called them patriots and vowed to pardon the many who are now serving prison terms. (In my own neighborhood in Pasadena, Maryland, a police officer who brings home his county patrol car after work flies a Trump "no more bullshit" flag outside his house and has a line of lawn signs adjacent to his driveway declaring he was voting for law and order, and for "felon and hillbilly.")

 I am left to ask how any good union member could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's blatant contempt for organized labor (and forget, by comparison, the incumbent Democratic president joining auto workers on their picket line during their strike in battling for a fair contract).

 I am left to ask how so many American voters could ignore, forgive or forget the incessant lies of Trump, his obvious lack of empathy for anyone other than himself and his family, his personal greed, his theft from charity, his con-man frauds, his racism and xenophobia, his abuse of women, and his crimes -- indicted by grand juries in multiple states, convicted in New York, and proving through millions spent on lawyers to delay justice that laws and the Constitution at the bedrock of America for more than two centuries do not apply to all.

 And I am left to wonder how those voters will perceive the results of their choice four years hence. I might not last that long, but suspect they will find themselves paying the piper. To say nothing of the likely global damage that may never be undone.

Saving The Baltimore Sun

Could a nonprofit
ride to the rescue
of its own creator?

I've been watching my blog Statcounter reports of late, fascinated with the flow of visitors to The Real Muck since its public flogging of The Baltimore Sun began two weeks ago over the insulting treatment of dedicated employees in the firing of nearly a third of the newsroom staff.

The links to my accounts of the newspaper’s death spiral from more than a dozen blogs and Web sites brought readers by the thousands – so many that I could hardly keep up with watching where the visitors came from, the links that brought them, and which of my links they followed to other information and opinion sources.

But now that the shock value has worn off and the numbers are dropping into the very low hundreds, my eye caught an interesting digital footprint this week – of a visitor from the Abell Foundation. And Statcounter reported three previous visits from the same computer there.

I hope for another – for today’s entry – because of the Abell Foundation’s history, and a longshot hope in some quarters that it could factor in an eventual purchase of The Baltimore Sun that would return the nearly 172-year-old newspaper to local ownership, perhaps even a nonprofit.

You’d have to think that the price for buying The Sun is dropping, seeing as how its owner – Chicago-based Tribune Co. – is in bankruptcy and, while supposedly reorganizing under protection from creditors, is running its print media properties across the country into the ground.

What would it take to save this newspaper, here in Baltimore? Once upon a time (1986), Times Mirror Corp. valued it at about $400 million – paying some $600 million to the A.S. Abell Co. for The Sun and related properties, then selling off WMAR-TV for $200 million to comply with federal regulations on media cross-ownership.

The privately-held Abell company, largely owned by a small core of families, had created the A.S. Abell Co. Foundation in 1953 – launching it with an initial company contribution of $100,000. It grew, of course, but the sale of the company in 1986 had an enormous impact on the scope of what was renamed the Abell Foundation --- its assets multiplying tenfold to about $112 million, according to its own history (http://www.abell.org/aboutthefoundation/history.html).

What could be more appropriate than the Abell Foundation reclaiming the company that gave it birth, or at least playing a supporting role in its rescue from midwestern marauders.

And as I said in a radio panel discussion last week, if the Abell Foundation is looking around for donors to such a cause, I pledge $1,000 (from my personal ‘fortune’ as a Tribune retiree) – and would work for the newspaper six months for free to help out in the transition. (Then it's back to my seven-day weekends.)

The Sun was acquired by Tribune in its multibillion-dollar Times Mirror merger/takeover nine years ago, and then investor Sam Zell took the company private in an $8.2 billion deal a year and a half ago with a resulting debt burden that figured in the bankruptcy.

So, Sam – what would it take for a buyer to acquire The Baltimore Sun from Tribune? Clearly it’s worth a lot less than $400 million, now that Tribune has overseen substantial reductions in revenue and circulation through a combination of bad management, rapid growth of the Internet as an information source, industry-wide failures to adapt to that digital revolution, and now a global recession.

And you can hardly add ‘goodwill’ to the price – that’s pretty much been squandered. You and your yes-men flunkies treat its employees like chattel, and disserve readers by eliminating from the daily newspaper reason after reason why anyone would want to buy it.

Stock tables? Who needs them? And kill the business section while you’re at it.

National and world news? Who cares. Bury it inside. Makes it easier to import it all from Chicago in news modules, and run whatever fits.

Maryland section? Kill it. Put local news on the front page – only local news, unless you can find a Chicago module if anything really important happens like another war, or Mount Hood erupting.

Sports? Shrink it to a tabloid with half the space. Oops. That didn’t work. Must have had too many complaints. So make the section look larger, but still have half the space.

TV schedules? Kill the magazine, and create an unreadable Sunday section for the listings. Comics? Kill most of them. Sunday comics? Shrink what’s left, and make them unreadable in the back of the TV section.

Features section? Shrink it, eliminate it whenever possible.

Typefaces? Design style? Throw them out, and make The Sun look like all the other Tribune newspapers. And say the reason you did it was to improve readability. Not true? Who cares. Tell them anyway.

Oh, and don’t forget -- fire the writers, fire the columnists, fire the editors, fire the photographers, fire the page designers, fire the artists, fire the editorial writers, fire the infrastructure… fire the… fire… fire… fire… who?

Hmmm. Surely they can find someone who’s really to blame.

A reporter with real heart

My friend and former colleague, Sara Neufeld, who covered the Baltimore schools beat with distinction and reached out to the community through blogging about city education at baltimoresun.com, announced on her blog today she is volunteering to leave -- in order to save the job of a less senior colleague.

Her blog entry begins:


This is a hard post to write, but as a reporter (for the next five days, at least), I mustn't bury the lead: I volunteered today to be laid off by The Sun.

After the 61 layoffs in our newsroom two weeks ago, former reporters laid off from other job classifications (i.e., columnists, copy editors) have the option of going back into the reporting lineup. As a result of that "bumping," some of the reporters with low seniority are being laid off this week, including a friend with many more personal responsibilities than I have. That friend's situation inspired me to offer my job, but I think it will also be the right move for me personally, sorry as I am to leave the Baltimore schools beat that I've come to care so much about.

And this blog...

Read the full account at: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/education/blog/2009/05/sara_neufeld_baltimore_sun.html#more




Noted in passing

Tribune Co. received permission Tuesday from a federal bankruptcy judge to pay more than $13 million in bonuses to almost 700 employees for their work last year – but because of constraints in the law, not to pay more than $2 million in severance payments to more than 60 employees laid off shortly before the company filed for bankruptcy protection, Associated Press reported.

“Judge Kevin Carey authorized the bonus payments after Tribune chief financial officer Chandler Bigelow III testified that the bonuses are critical to keeping key managers motivated as Tribune tries to adjust to a tough economic climate for media companies,” AP reported.

“We need to motivate and incentivize the key people who will implement change," Bigelow said. "These are really good people we're talking about. They're the best and the brightest of the company."

If anyone finds a list of Tribune’s “best” and “ brightest" needing that additional monetary motivation and incentives to do their jobs, please send me the link. I have a list of many of the real best and brightest at The Baltimore Sun, and their reward: Fired without notice, with extra security guards called in to make sure they didn’t steal anything on their way out the door.

Open Letter to Tim Ryan

A friend and former colleague, Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, emailed a letter Wednesday to triple-threat Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan and top editor J. Montgomery Cook, and gave permission to The Real Muck to share it:

Dear Mr. Ryan and Mr. Cook --

I am writing this letter with more sadness and regret than you can probably imagine.

I was a reporter and editor for the Baltimore Sun for nearly 19 years, during which I had various adventures, many enjoyable, some not, some fairly dangerous. I did not agree with every decision the Sun's management made in those years. But there was not a day or a moment that I was not grateful to be working for an honorable newspaper, whose owners recognized their responsibility to readers and their community as well as to their own profit and who expected me and my colleagues and our editors to do our jobs honestly and thoroughly with no agenda except to find and tell the truth in whatever story we were covering.

In our worst nightmares none of us could have imagined how badly the present owners and managers have damaged that tradition. Nor could we have conceived that any Sun executives would treat any employees the way you and those under your direction treated the men and women whose jobs you eliminated last month.

No doubt you will blame business conditions for the drastic shrinkage of the paper and loss of journalistic quality. That can be debated elsewhere. But business conditions didn't require canning people without notice in the middle of covering or editing a story, or letting them find out when they couldn't log onto their computers, then shoving them out the door under the eyes of security guards without time to absorb the event or for an appropriate goodby to colleagues. There is no possible business reason for those practices. The only reason is a thuggish indifference to common decency and human dignity.

The wrecking crew in Chicago and your leadership have bankrupted the Sun in more than the legal and financial sense. You are also intellectually bankrupt and morally bankrupt, bankrupt of principles, bankrupt of social conscience, bankrupt of basic decency. Not to mention bankrupt of any idea of what good journalism is and why it matters. I am sure that nearly all present and former employees share my feeling that only new ownership, as soon as possible, has any hope of restoring the serious purpose and public responsibility the Sun once had. If and when there is a change, no doubt many would be happy to see you booted out of the building with the same contempt you showed those you terminated earlier this month. But that will not really even the score, for this reason: You will deserve that contempt. The good journalists you kicked out the door did not.

Sincerely

Arnold R. Isaacs

Thanks for all the comments

Responses at this site and through emails to Muck postings continue to amaze and delight.

From Tim Windsor, on the newspaper’s explanation for its typeface changes:

Not to minimize the pain and suffering of the 61 newly-former Sun employees, but to me the low point of the past several weeks was the obvious dissembling of the reader's note you quote above. There were many ways to acknowledge the change; saying it was for readability was an unnecessary lie. All a news organization has is its reputation for truth. Beyond that clear line lies Pravda and the house organs of a dozen Banana Republics.

From ‘anonymous’:

Didn't The Sun pay a bazillion dollars to have someone create the "Mencken" font used "exclusively" by the paper? Seems to me at that time the Mencken font was praised for it's "readability."

From Len Lazarick, of the recently defunct Baltimore Examiner, who wrote just before the ‘Sun lies’ posting here:

This was much like the explanation when they trimmed the page size and told readers something like "this will make the paper easier to carry."

How can you have any credibility as a newspaper when you can't speak the truth to your own readers?

TV worth watching

Friends Laura Lippman and David Simon are heading to Los Angeles for television appearances later this week.

Laura, a former Sun reporter who has produced some 17 books of fiction (most of them in the mystery genre), is scheduled for an appearance Thursday night on CBS’ Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Not familiar with her? Visit http://www.lauralippman.com/. Not familiar with Ferguson? You go to bed too early.

David, a writer, TV producer and former Sun reporter best known as creator of the HBO series ‘The Wire,’ is among the guests Friday night on HBO’s ‘Real Time With Bill Maher.’ David testified last week at a Senate committee hearing on “The Future of Journalism.” If you haven’t seen the transcript already, here’s a link: http://commerce.senate.gov/public/_files/DavidSimonTestimonyFutureofJournalism.pdf

"Religulous" overkill

Movies, continued:

If you like Bill Maher, you’ll be forgiving enough to like his new movie tirade “Religulous” – a little.

As unfair as it is amusing, “Religulous” is pretty much an equal-opportunity attack on major religions of world, and a few of the minor ones, by a comic zealot proclaiming his own devotion – to doubt.

I, too, am a doubter. But I admire people who have and live by their beliefs, so long as they don’t attempt to impose them on others – particularly through government.

Mutual respect works for me. But it doesn’t really work for Maher. He harshly takes on Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons and Muslims – oh, and not to leave out Scientology (ridiculed without even a mention that it was invented by a hack science fiction writer).

But, I must add, there were plenty of laughs before the punchline, which is the Apocalypse – whether the work of God, or a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of true believers. There were plenty of images of mushroom clouds.

The theater was packed Wednesday night for the Baltimore preview (it opens Friday), including all three rows set aside for reviewers (and their dates). Maher attracts crowds with controversy. But my prediction is that “Religulous” will have a quick Exodus to Blockbuster, perhaps slowed a week or two if protesters bother to turn up outside theaters and thereby generate publicity.

One person seemed annoyed enough to leave the preview screening amid the lampooning of Judaism. I thought maybe he just had to pee, but didn’t notice him returning.

Muslims won’t be very happy, either. One hopes the most extreme among them don’t throw a fatwa fit over it.

Best performance goes to the actor playing Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, who held up well to Maher’s questioning – even offering a metaphor to the comedian’s disbelief of a Holy Trinity, likening it to the three forms of water as solid, liquid and vapor.
That is followed by the scene of tackily-dressed Florida tourists sitting on benches and enjoying the brutal and bloody crucifixion reenactment. (The attraction’s Web site is hoot unto itself at http://www.holylandexperience.com/. )

A shame the movie was made pre-Palin. She would have fit right in. But she’s getting plenty of attention on Maher’s weekly “Real Time” show on HBO.


Upcoming

The Great Debate is still on, and I cancelled plans for yet another movie when a TV-less friend suggested coming over Thursday night with his girlfriend and making a party of it.
And I hope you’ll be reading my take on Biden-Palin soon after.