The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by Terry Anderson of the Cartoonist Rights Network International to discuss the state of political cartooning in the United States and around the world during a time of political transition and the ongoing seismic disruption in the print media ecosystem that supported the profession throughout the previous century.
Media organizations are reporting high levels of cancellations of newspapers and other news products in the week of the election of Donald Trump, as liberal Democrats depressed by the results decide to check out rather than to fight a man that they described as an existential threat to democracy.
Two major newspapers owned by billionaires with business interests tied to the government, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, prompted reader anger when they nullified their intention to endorse Kamala shortly before the election. More than 250,000 people canceled their Post subscriptions.
The non-endorsement scandals are the latest manifestation of Americans’ longstanding distrust of the news media upon which democracy depends in order to function.
In the 1970s, when the media went after Nixon, Watergate and the Vietnam War, 70% of people told Gallup they trusted the media. Now, just 31% express a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
Why so much distrust? What are the different reasons people with different politics cite for their feelings?
What and how can media organizations and reporters do to restore trust?
Watch the Video Version: here.
Echoing Biden, Kamala Harris seems determined to go as long as possible into the general election without holding a press conference or granting a real interview to a journalist willing to challenge her deflecting answers to questions. Can she, like Biden, make it all the way through the presidency without any substantial interaction with the press?
Political cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) debate the week in news and culture as friendly adversaries to bring you spirited debate and smart insight.
First up: The Israel-Hamas War seems to be entering some sort of tipping point in terms of international public opinion. As the International Criminal Court weighs issuing an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his government’s policy of blockade and mass starvation in Gaza and student protests over America’s support of Israel spread from Columbia University to college and university campuses around the nation, the disturbing discovery of a pair of mass graves containing the bodies of hospital patients and personnel apparently summarily executed in areas under IDF control prompt Scott to say that, if this is confirmed to be an Israeli war crime, he would be done with Israel after supporting the Jewish state for many years.
Second: The US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case with ramifications both for Donald Trump’s January 6th insurrection case and the separation of powers under the US Constitution. The court is asked to answer the question of whether a president enjoys absolute immunity for acts committed while in office, whether immunity might be partial, and whether it’s possible to separate those acts committed as an individual from those performed as an officeholder. At stake: the nature of the nation’s top political job.
Finally: In an act that appears to reek of cynicism, the Biden Administration has paused a long-planned ban on menthol-flavored tobacco products, which are popular among Black Americans, because of concerns that Black voters might be annoyed at the President when they go to the polls this November. Vote for us before you die, please.
Watch the Video Version: here.
Media silos have come down to this: each party’s cable TV news network ignores stories that are inconvenient to their party, while amplifying those that are damaging to the opposition.
What is the job of the news media? To report the news. Everyone agrees about that. But some well-intentioned self-imposed ethical guidelines that members of the news media take for granted are getting in the way of the industry’s fundamental mission: telling everything they know to a public whose right to know is sacred.
You know journalists have lost their way when they cheer the arrest and potential extradition to the U.S. of WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Any of us could be next; we should be circling the wagons. Yet they insist on focusing on such inanities as Assange’s personality, his “arrogance,” even his cat. Some even approve.
The other day NPR’s “Morning Edition” covered the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Everyone over age 40 remembers what happened: suffering from depression, chronic pain and opiate addiction, the singer put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off.
It’s one of the most famous suicides ever. NPR chose to be coy about it, mostly referring to Cobain’s “death” rather than his “suicide.”
Airbrushing well-known reality is silly. But, like most American media outlets, NPR was merely following the World Health Organization’s published guidelines on covering suicide. According to experts news accounts of suicide can feed a phenomenon called “suicide contagion” wherein people in emotional crisis are inspired by stories to see taking their own lives as a solution to their problems. As Time magazine wrote recently, “the more vivid the depiction of a death… the more it may contribute to suicide contagion.” Editors and producers are encouraged to avoid detailed descriptions of how victims of suicide did it, what their last note said, etc.
Reducing the suicide rate is a laudable goal. But journalists’ job is to report and analyze the news, not to reduce mortality. What’s next, refusing to mention hamburgers in the news because they contribute to arteriosclerosis? Cars because they kill people (and in vast numbers)? While we’re at it let’s censor war correspondence on the grounds that battle stories glorify militarism and thus prompt more wars!
Lying to readers is the worst sin a newspaper can commit. That includes lies of omission: readers pay for and have every right to expect the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from a product that promises exactly that. Playing cute by omitting important, relevant facts from the news, as in the Cobain story, seriously undermines the media’s credibility. That goes double when listeners and viewers know what really happened and realize they’re being treated like children by self-appointed nannies.
Moreover, self-censorship can destroy a story. Cobain’s death by suicide was a shocking where-were-you moment and a defining cultural experience for Generation X. I don’t see how Millennials could understand that from the NPR account. It wasn’t merely the fact that the lead singer of Nirvana had died. The way he died was central.
Another way the media loses credibility while trying to do the right thing is adhering to the widely accepted belief among corporate news outlets that they are somehow responsible for protecting national security. When the press receives classified government materials from a leaker or whistleblower they often contact the relevant agency to authenticate the documents and/or to allow them to suggest redactions. If you watched “The Post” you saw the Washington Post contact the Nixon Administration to give the White House a chance to argue why they shouldn’t publish the Pentagon Papers.
Media outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times shared the Edward Snowden files with the NSA and CIA so they could expunge information like the names of undercover intelligence operatives and suggest redactions. Even The Intercept (formerly a left-leaning media group) did this, to grievous effect: they foolishly shared leaked CIA documents with the feds, who used their analysis to track a whistleblower named Reality Winner. She is in prison.
During the Gulf War Geraldo Rivera got in trouble for drawing a map showing troop movements in the sand. The Pentagon threw him out of Iraq and many reporters agreed.
They were wrong. Journalists are not government employees. They’re solely responsible to news consumers, not the military or intelligence agencies who failed to safeguard their own secrets. Why shouldn’t a reporter report what they know, whatever they find out, whatever it is, if it’s news—no matter how sensitive? If the New York Times had gotten the D-Day plans a week ahead of time, they didn’t owe the War Department a phone call. They should have published, consequences be damned.
As the D-day example shows, respecting the public’s right to know is hard. Good people can die as a result. Wars may be lost. But for someone dedicated to journalism it’s an easy call. Either you’re a journalist or you’re nothing more than a low-rent liar and propagandist for the government.
Self-censorship often takes the form of policing newsworthy content for tastefulness. After Vice President Dick Cheney told a senator—on the floor of the senate!—to go have sex with himself, respectable media organizations dashed out the f— or otherwise danced around the nefarious fricative (as I am doing here because this column is syndicated). So dumb.
Everyone knows what Cheney said. No one could deny it was news. So print it.
Then there are the “tasteless” photos that are routinely withheld from printed pages and TV screens in the United States: sexual images like Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” and gruesome pictures of crime victims. America’s namby-pambyness is an outlier. In Latin America, photos of 9/11 jumpers ran on the front pages of major newspapers. But in the U.S., seventeen years later, the images are still scrubbed from public view. Even a sculpture based on those photos was removed from public viewing as too controversial.
It’s not like we don’t know these images exist. We saw them in live coverage on 9/11. Those who didn’t watch them then have heard about it. The media has decided that we’re too sensitive to see our own history. Even if you agree with their editorial decision, doesn’t it make you wonder what else they’re keeping from us?
Images of 9/11 jumpers underscored the horror of the day. Censorship doesn’t respect the dead. It whitewashes their agony.
The counterfactual argument, like airing ISIS snuff videos that might encourage the creation of more such imagery, is powerful. Even with such disgusting material, though, we should err on the side of the news and the public’s right to know. The alternative, the nanny media we have now, cannot be trusted and feeds into the demagogic framing of “fake news.”
(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Since the newspapers that generate over 90% of the news began tanking in the 1990s, we have repeatedly been told that some magic bullet, usually technological but not always, was going to save the industry.
There’s something bizarrely inane about so-called news reports whose content consists entirely of stating that someone tweeted something. Tweets aren’t news. They’re tweets. And tweets don’t need to be reported. They are their own micro-reports.
