Back in 2016, I was participating in some wide-ranging discussion on Twitter with a mix of national and local journalists when the topic turned to Hamilton. The musical. And Nevada.
Said one national reporter whose work I used to read often: “Do people in Nevada even know what Hamilton is?”
I looked up. Trying to see the sound waves created by my daughters’ voices, on the second floor, which at that moment were wafting “Satisfied” throughout the house.
“Well, golly no,” I answered. “Us hicks in the sticks don’t even listen to music, much less that thee-A-tur stuff.”
His was chastened. His answer was something like, “Well, how would I know. I’ve never been to Nevada.”
Right. That’s the point.
Not long after, Trump “shocked” national reporters when he beat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college and became president.
And reporters like this guy flocked to every diner in every small town in every state that wasn’t on the East Coast to find “real people” and figure out why they voted for Trump.
Those real people, of course, were out there the entire time. Journalist and filmmaker Michael Moore was in Michigan talking to people. And listening to them. He predicted Trump was going to win.
Journalists still see Moore as some sort of guru prognosticator. But here’s his secret: he does not cloister himself away from the hoi polloi. He IS the hoi polloi. He lives in Michigan. He talks to people. And they talk to him.
Sarah Kendzior was also not surprised by Trump’s election. She had already published “The View From Flyover Country” as an ebook earlier in 2016. She was tweeting all over the place - warning about Trump, how he was showing an authoritarianism that jibed with other dictators whom Kendzior had previously studied.
She was ignored. Probably because she lives in St. Louis, not New York or D.C. Until he won. And then her piece in The Correspondent asking people to write down who they were and what they believed in, and then keep track before they lost themselves, went viral.
Long before the 2016 election, peoples lives had been devastated as companies moved manufacturing and even customer service overseas. NAFTA, which Bill Clinton had put in place, had a profound effect on small towns whose one employer left them high and dry.
Clinton also pushed through financial reform, beating Glass-Steagall, which had kept our economy stable for 60 years, into dust. Thus opening the door for financial whiz kids to take pieces of mortgages, package those pieces together and create something to sell that actually had no value.
The resulting banking meltdown and the recession of 2008 hit people hard. And many of us watched in astonishment as two presidents and their economic advisors rushed to bail out Wall Street, but had to be reminded that Main Street even existed.
In 2009, national political reporters wrote about the proposed $700 billion bailout as if it was a game. They went on and on about who in Congress would vote for it. They ignored economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman who argued it wasn’t enough. Even Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, argued that less than $1.2 trillion would not kickstart the economy. But, as reported by Ron Suskind in his book, “Confidence Men,” then chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel nixed it as politically impossible.
Emanuel was wrong. Emanuel was wrong about a lot of things, but looking at the recession as a political calculation was most definitely wrong. The meager bailout made the recession drag on, and working-class people felt the effects way longer than folks in New York or D.C.
National reporters wrote about the numbers, when the statistics were released on their regular schedules. But they didn’t write about the people those numbers represented.
Those people, though, were angry. And ushered Trump into office.
Which brings me to the news of last week - the stories about sexual assault in Christian fundamentalist communities that were trending because of the “Shiny, Happy People” documentary on the Duggars.
For those who haven’t seen it, the doc not only digs into Josh Duggars’ misdeeds and how they were covered up, but also the culture of Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), where tolerance of sexual abuse was a way of life. Quite literally.
Then Nancy French wrote a thread on the Kanakuk camp in the Ozarks with links to stories she and her husband, David French, had written in the last few years about the various sexual predators who worked at the camp over decades. That includes this piece on Pete Newman, who’s been in prison since 2010, serving two life terms plus 30 years. Newman pled guilty to seven counts of sexually abusing boys, but people familiar with the camp - including survivors of Newman’s abuse who were not part of his guilty plea - say the number of boys he sexually assaulted in his 14 years at the camp could be in the hundreds.
This should have been a national story in 2010, when Newman was arrested and pled guilty. But it was happening in the middle of “hick country” in Missouri, and none of the people who would have reported for a national publication lived there, or even near there.
Proximity, and a willingness to write off people who aren’t like them, is part of the reason national journalists missed this story. (Let’s be clear, at the time, David French was one of them, and he didn’t catch this story till 2020.)
The other reason, though, is that we don’t report bad things about Christianity. It is verboten. Because journalists will be attacked. And called liberal. By the same people who, this week, are saying that Trump’s indictment in Miami is a political stunt.
When Pat Robertson, who died this week at the age of 93, said Hurricane Katrina was god’s punishment for abortion, we all laughed. We didn’t look at that and say, “Where does that come from? How widespread is that belief? And who does it affect?”
Journalists don’t like being called liberal or partisan. Which is one of the reasons we avoid writing critically about Evangelical leaders like Robertson or Paige Patterson, who told a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that it “was a good thing” she was raped multiple times, at gunpoint, by a male student, because god would lead her to a good husband who didn’t care if she wasn’t a virgin.
These stories about Patterson blaming women and protecting rapists date back as far as 2003, according to Baptist News.
Trump was elected partly because journalists were blind to people whose lives were tossed and turned by the political decisions of the last couple of decades. But they were also blind to the cultural overtones that were underpinning the base of Trump’s supporters - overtones that said women were vessels, designed to serve their husbands.
Overtones that were totally the main storyline of the Duggars’ TV show on TLC.
Seriously, they might as well have called the show, “Groomers.” And yet, how many times was the family on the Today Show?
As it is with many Evangelical leaders who are now in jail for sexual deviance, Josh Duggar’s molestation was known - for years - before he was finally caught with child (the documentary insinuates baby) porn.
The sexual abuse by Pete Newman at Kanakuk camp had been going on, in the open, for the more than a decade. Parents complained. Campers complained. They weren’t taken seriously.
Journalists didn’t even see them. And if they had, they would have just written them off.
Another great piece by Carrie Kaufman on journalism, and I am inspired to rewrite here some of what I said in posting it on Facebook and to indulge in my usual redundancy and triviality.
First, the trivia: Variety once had the great headline about rural theatergoers objecting to films aimed at them: Hicks Nix Sticks Pix. Cagney explained it playing the great Jewish composer, George M. Cohen.
Also, one of the great examples of this kind of thinking involved Dorothy Kilgallen, the legendary New York columnist, who warned that the "hicks from the sticks" were invading the city and to get out while you could. That night, Flatt and Scruggs performed at Carnegie Hall. Lester said, "There was a whole hall full of people who didn't get the message." And during the show, this New York City audience started chanting for them to sing the theme for Martha White Flour. Did anybody learn anything? Of course not.
Anyway, now to add to what Carrie said. First, Anthony Lewis came home from London to be a New York Times columnist and planned to live in DC. He spent a week there and went to Boston to live, saying he knew he couldn't write an honest column if he lived there. That has proved true 99.9% of the time with DC columnists. And no one ever said Lewis was anything but wide open in his beliefs.
Also, Turner Catledge, who covered Capitol Hill, among other DC hangouts, for The Times and eventually became the paper's executive editor, gave an order that if Congress passed a tax bill, he wanted it in the lede or second paragraph what it meant to the individual--how much money it would cost or save. He also provided the staff with examples of the opposite kind of reporting, and let it leak that they were all stories HE had written. They have regressed. Badly. And dangerously.
But let me get personal. Six years ago, I disappeared from Mr. Zuckerberg's little propaganda machine for a few months after one of my comments led one of those free market, First Amendment absolutist republicans to demand my firing because I exercised my free speech rights. At that time, The Times and other pillars of journalism were doing the stories Carrie mentions, and that The New York Times Pitchbot so perfectly satirizes: Just yesterday, "In this Ohio diner, it was a tradition: a few Diet Cokes, some well-done steak with ketchup, then pull out the nuclear secrets and show them to Kid Rock. But now the woke mob is taking all of that away." Eventually, I wrote to several editors and asked why they don't do stories on, say, educators being accused of preaching communist ideology in the classroom, without anything remotely approaching proof, because they disagreed with republicans in public forums or even if they said nothing. The answer is quite simple: The L word for the national media is not liberal. It is lazy. And their laziness is abetting treason.