What I'm Reading Wednesdays: Joyce Vance Wants to Scare the Living Hell Out of Us
Three things I'm reading and a personal story.
Sometimes you just get terrified.
You can be an attorney, a journalist, a business person. Going about your business. Writing your Substack. And suddenly everything you’re seeing comes into utter clarity and you feel the need to sound the alarm bell. Loudly.
That’s what Joyce Vance did on Sunday, with her usual, “The Week Ahead” column. Which was not usual at all.
“It can be hard to focus on just one thing or, frankly, to look at several different things and understand their connectivity in the moment when they’re happening,” Vance wrote.
Then she used the boiling frogs analogy - which I have written about.
The first indication that the water is getting warmer is the ridiculous punditry about Joe Biden’s age. Trump, Vance notes, is just four years younger, “and, well, you can draw your own conclusions about their respective health and mental capacity.”
It’s not just that the right-wing media is hammering this storyline. But so-called “objective” media is, too.
And this is showing in a poll released Sunday that showed Biden’s low approval rating, and people worried about his age.
Vance also did some dirty work that most of us can’t make ourselves do - she went to Trump’s website, where he basically lays out that if he is elected again, the U.S. will become a fascist country.
I won’t repeat her entire column. Go read it. It’s worth it. And necessary.
While we’re on the point of age and fitness, let me remind you of the time when Trump - twice - tweeted, out of the blue, that he had not had a mini stroke in 2019.
And remember, that same year, at West Point, when he had trouble walking down a ramp, and couldn’t seem to get a glass of water to his mouth with one hand?
Washington Post and the Death of a Palestinian Journalist
When I write about big, mainstream national papers, I often am lamenting the bent toward “both-sideism” and bias cloaked in “objectivity.” But often - and often in the Washington Post, to be honest - I see journalism that exemplifies going beyond the controversy of the day and calling out unchecked power.
This one came in a WaPo story on Israeli inaction when its forces are involved in killing journalists. This reporting comes after a damning report detailing the inaction. But Steve Hendrix, WaPo’s Jerusalem bureau chief, doesn’t hedge and hide behind the report.
“Despite the international uproar it provoked,” Hendrix writes, “[Palestinian journalist] Abu Akleh’s slaying has settled into a case study of Israel’s ability to sidestep accountability.”
Hendrix goes on:
“Even if the killings were not intentional — as the IDF has said in the case of Abu Akleh — the military still has an obligation to safeguard reporters, who are considered civilians and noncombatants under international law. Most of the reporters killed — at least 13, according to the report — were clearly identifiable as journalists.”
This is his statement. It is a truth - and part of international law - that the military has an obligation to safeguard reporters. He did not say, “The authors of the report pointed out…” He simply stated the truth.
It is astonishing to me that this should stick out as something different in journalism. But it does.
Greedflation
You will quite frequently see me pointing to Zach Silk and Civic Ventures as a Substack I think is quite valuable. It comes out every Thursday, and the column from April 27 was especially clear and alarming.
Silk pointed out that corporate earnings calls came in, and they showed, “in many sectors, profit margins are up while sales volume is down. In other words, corporations are charging people more, simply because they can.”
Pepsico had a 14% growth in revenue last quarter, even though sales were flat. Chipotle had 15.5% growth - even though prices for ingredients went down.
And he notes how car dealers took advantage of the pandemic to jack up prices. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, Silk writes, “now estimates that this profiteering by car dealers alone contributed up to a half a percentage point to the 16% of total higher prices American consumers paid during the pandemic.”
Go subscribe. This is worth the weekly read.
A Personal Story
Many years ago, when I was starting my career as a journalist, I had the opportunity to go to a national press conference held by Michael Dukakis. I was living in Massachusetts. Dukakis was governor. And he was running for president. I’m not sure what Dukakis wanted to talk about, but I know the gaggle of press I found myself part of didn’t care. They wanted to talk about one thing: the Pledge of Allegiance.
For those of you don’t remember, or were not sentient in 1988, let me recap - or cap, as it were.
During the Republican National Convention, George H.W. Bush and his team surfaced a veto Dukakis exercised in 1977 that would have required teachers to lead their classes in the pledge. Dukakis checked with Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court and his Attorney General, who both advised him it was unconstitutional, based on a 1943 Supreme Court decision. Teachers could lead if they wanted to, or not. Students could say the pledge, or not. The point is, nobody was being forced.
"If the vice president is saying that if he were president, and the United States Supreme Court said a law was unconstitutional and the attorney general said the law was unconstitutional, and he'd sign it anyway, then that raises very serious questions about what it means to take the oath of office,” Dukakis told reporters. "The highest form of patriotism is a dedication and a commitment to the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law."
First… holy crap, this was 1988 and Republicans were already stoking nationalist fervor in opposition to the Constitution.
But journalists were also eating it up. They didn’t ask about immigration. They didn’t ask about the deficit, which had ballooned under Reagan. They didn’t ask about the AIDS crisis. They asked about the pledge. Every. Single. Person. In. The. Room. Except me. I wanted to ask a question about the burgeoning tech industry in Massachusetts. I never got a chance to even open my mouth.
Some weeks later, I was at home watching Dukakis talking to another press gaggle. ABC’s Sam Donaldson asked about the pledge again, and Dukakis answered with, “Sam, I’m not going to underestimate the intelligence of the American people.” My head shot up and I said out loud: He’s going to lose.
It’s not that Americans are dumb. It’s that the press doesn’t care about making them smarter. The pledge issue should have been a non-starter. It’s unconstitutional (the veto was actually overridden, but the law was never enforced). That should have been the end of it. I accept that media manipulation is part of running for president. But I don’t accept that journalists have to so enthusiastically participate. Or participate at all, actually.