What I’m Reading Wednesdays
I read a lot. People who are well known. People who are less known. Almost all of it is interesting. And I want to share. So every Wednesday, I will share a summary about three things I’m reading, and a personal story.
Pop Culture IS News
We’re starting with someone I wrote about a couple of years ago. Stacy Lee Kong writes Friday Things, which looks at pop culture through a news lens. This is the kind of thing we did at PerformInk. Pop culture not only tells us who we are, but shapes who we are. And journalists see it as “mere entertainment” at their peril.
This week, Kong looks at the glowing reviews for Ezra Miller in The Flash, and asks how we can be OK with a man who has been credibly accused of grooming and sexual assault - including a temporary restraining order from a 12-year-old child.
“…what an artist believes about the world, how they treat other people and what they believe they’re entitled to informs their creative decisions…” Kong writes.
She mentions Woody Allen - whose films were interwoven to different extents with the old men/young girls theme. But she also talks about Lous C.K., who actually told masturbation jokes on stage.
I will add that the same goes for journalists. What we believe informs what stories we do and how we approach them. It wasn’t surprising to me that half of the men implicated in MeToo in 2017 were journalists. Their work showed it before the accusations came to light.
Both Sidesing Hostages and Hostage Takers
Thank god Dan Froomkin wrote this piece, because my blood pressure was already spiking when I saw the headlines.
Froomkin focuses on this headline from the Times: “Biden Faces His First Big Choice on Debt Limit,” which posits that unless Biden negotiates with the MAGA minority who are holding the threat of financial ruin to the head of the economy, we are “barreling toward default.”
Froomkin notes that “the nation is not ‘barreling toward default,’ nor is it ‘careening,’ or even ‘drifting’ there. It is being pushed there by Republicans.”
Once again, journalists putting themselves in the middle of “both sides” is problematic. In a normal democracy, it means that journalists are not looking at issues and talking to a wide variety of people. They are only talking to two sides - the sides that have the loudest voices and the most money. Of course, when journalism elevates the loud voices, the quiet ones tend to shut down. So we make the problem worse.
In a non-functioning democracy, which we are in now, the entrenched sides aren’t just yelling their disagreement - one side is simply lying, and they are lying with the intent to end democracy itself. To put oneself between lies and truth is not “balanced.” It’s actually decidedly unbalanced.
In democracy, the motto is, “You win some, you lose some.” For the cancer that has metastasized the Republican Party, the motto is, “We lose, then we threaten to burn it all down until they concede.”
Pointing this out is a large part of what journalists are supposed to do. Many of us are failing.
Weak Institutions and the Rise of the Far Right
Now that I’ve slammed the New York Times, I’m going to hold up Amanda Taub’s latest piece in The Interpreter newsletter. Taub, in a conversation with London School of Economics political scientist Pavithra Suryanarayan posited something that surprised me - the relationship between weakening systems outside and within government, and the rise of far right populism.
I mean, yes, I do know that the Weimar Republic was weak, but I didn’t see it as the cause of the rise of the Nazi party.
Suryanarayan says the opposite - that the weakness of a party or other institution is what allows extremists to take over. She says a political party’s “one job… is to keep the extreme out of institutions.” Republicans have failed miserably at that.
I have tended to think over the years that Republicans have been playing with fire in that regard - that they stoked anger that party leaders really didn’t believe, and that they ultimately couldn’t control.
Taub posits another reason, which I hadn’t even thought of:
“The Republican Party was in an important respect undermined by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, political scientists say. The court’s ruling, that the government may not ban political spending by corporations, had the effect of steering money to PACs rather than the party itself. And the legacy of the Iraq war, along with the party’s defeats in national elections in 2008 and 2012, contributed to a leadership collapse.”
That opened the door for FOX and social media to further undermine respect for the Republican leaders, and that lack of respect led to the party’s inability to cull the field in 2016, which allowed Donald Trump to gain traction.
This one I’m gonna keep thinking about. But it’s definitely worth a read.
“Nighthawks” Down
My twin daughters are college students. One of them had to analyze a famous piece of 20th century art. She chose Nighthawks.
She sees the tension that critics have remarked upon for decades. Tension and loneliness. But she also sees something more ominous - the calm before the storm, when the guy with his back to us pulls out his gun and kills the other three. Her professor was thrown by her interpretation. So was I. But we both understood it immediately.
Welcome to the mass shooting generation.
How are you looking at the world, or iconic representations, differently now in our more violent and more aware culture? What conversations are you having with your kids? Comment below or on Substack Notes. And give this column a share on your favorite social media.