Preview

Returning to the issue of Republicans who continue to lie about the 2020 election on network television news programs—and in doing so, undermine the foundations of our democracy in the process—the AP has a new story here on former journalist, now Daily Show producer Matt Negrin’s heroic campaign to try to hold these programs accountable. In my view, the calculation ought to be a simple one: If someone is going to come on your program to lie, and you, the host, are not willing to say, “Thank you, but that’s a lie. Why do you feel a need to lie to our viewers?” and then follow this up with “OK, we know you are willing to lie about what is literally the most important issue in our political lives; how can you ask us to believe anything you’d say about anything else?”—then you may as well not bother to have the interview at all.

This won’t happen, of course, because it’s not nice. Niceness—or likeability, as measured in Q ratings—is the statistic that matters for TV interviewers. It is Joe Louis to the truth’s “Bum of the Month Club”—a knockout blow to the concern for facts. Note that former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno tells the AP, “It’s not a question of banning them [the liars]. You just don’t want them on the air because they’re not going to be a good guest.” What Sesno means by “good guest” is someone who plays along with the format and, on a good day, says something that might end up trending on Twitter. He does not mean “honestly inform our viewers about what is actually true in the world so that they might properly exercise their rights as citizens of a democratic republic.” Were a producer to object to a guest on that basis, his colleagues would laugh him out of the room. Note that no network honchos were quoted in this piece. Note also that most of the corporations that said they would no longer fund election-deniers after the insurrection of January 6—the very same ones that in some cases sponsor some of these programs—have quietly dropped that policy. The vast majority of Republicans now believe Trump’s election lie, and so do a number of independents. And why shouldn’t they? They’ve heard it repeated over and over, and most often, I’m guessing, with little or no pushback. Remember this interview, for instance? Another truth TKO at the hands of election liar and Republican Minority Whip Steve Scalise.

The Republican campaign to destroy our democracy is the most important of the myriad emergencies that face our political system today, but these lies are just the most visible tip of an iceberg that is now piercing into virtually every aspect of the way political news is reported and received in this country. On Wednesday morning, for instance, the Politico Playbook authors sent out the news that “More than six in 10 Republicans (63%) oppose critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools, vs. 13% of Democrats and 38% of independents in opposition.” They did not bother to mention that pretty much no K-12 school in America teaches critical race theory. If your child is learning it in school, well then, mazel tov (or perhaps condolences) on having a future attorney in the family. (We also note the authors’ screaming headline that Monica Lewinsky attended a party; this on the day after the Republicans filibustered a voting rights bill in the Senate that had been the only chance of ensuring reasonably fair elections in 2022 and 2024.)

And speaking of Tucker Carlson, remember this quote from Ben Smith’s Monday column (and be sure to click on it for the visual): “If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you.” It was spoken by a journalist who declined to be identified. If Ben had called me, I’d have been happy to say it on the record.

We just had a Democratic primary election in New York City. There’s been a great deal of attention paid to ranked-choice voting, which I think worked out quite well so long as you didn’t overthink it and just listed your favorites in order. What the need to pick a bunch of different candidates did do, however, was make endorsements more important than ever. The New York Times’ Garcia endorsement made her a credible candidate overnight. It also may have elected the excellent progressives Brad Lander for comptroller and Alvin Bragg for DA.

This gets me to one of my pet causes. Media institutions should only endorse in local races, where the media matter, not national ones, where they don’t. Casual news consumers do not distinguish between the “news” side and editorial. They assume, understandably, that if the Times endorses only Democrats for president, then it’s a “liberal” newspaper that slants its news coverage to benefit Democrats and liberals (and maybe even socialists). This leads to “working the refs” attacks on media institutions that, whether consciously or not, respond by bending over backwards to be extra-sympathetic to right-wingers in their news coverage, in order to demonstrate that the charge is false. What’s more, people don’t need an endorsement in a presidential race to pick a candidate. The entire exercise is Kabuki theater designed to pump up the egos of everyone concerned. The cost to the institution’s credibility, however, does not begin to justify the bragging rights they enjoy with their friends and families.

The week has been filled up with tributes to the late Janet Malcolm and the 58 years (!) she spent writing for The New Yorker. She was a rare combination of intellectual, investigator, and a writer of supple, sometimes poetic prose. I loved this quote from Jordan Ellenberg when asked by the Times Book Review, “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?” His entire response: “Not Janet Malcolm—the idea of being observed by her pitiless gaze is too terrifying.”

Many tributes focused on the work that made her simultaneously famous and infamous: lengthy articles that became the books The Journalist and the Murderer, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and In the Freud Archives. (Her admiration for the Gossip Girl novels, less so.) But the Malcolm piece that blew me away was one that gets no mention anywhere. It was a 1990 profile of Daniel Kumermann, a Prague-based former foreign-affairs journalist, who signed the human rights declaration Charter 77 in 1978 and consequently spent his next 12 years in that city as a window-washer.

I had met Daniel in Prague in 1986 when I was bumming around Eastern Europe with a backpack and a Eurail pass. He sought me out in the city’s synagogue, to which I had gone in order to sit in what had been (and was still marked as) Franz Kafka’s father’s seat. Though older than I was, Daniel was perhaps the youngest practicing Jew in Prague and a big Philip Roth fan. We spent a couple of memorable days together. I agreed to smuggle out some samizdat literature for him, which scared the shit out of me at the border checkpoint. Daniel was a wonderful raconteur and guide to the city, and I left him with both sadness for his plight and admiration for the stoicism with which he bore it. But when I read Malcolm’s profile, I realized I would never, ever be the kind of journalist she was. Her descriptions were so precise and complex; she saw so many things about him, his life, and his city that had barely registered in my consciousness until I read them on the page. I remain in awe of both her perspicacity and generosity in this piece, and in so much else of what she published, regardless of whether I agreed with her conclusions.

I saw Daniel years later when he visited Washington. I was eager to hear from him what “freedom”—with all its disappointments—felt like after he had worked so hard to achieve it. Damned if I can remember what he said, but in a wonderful denouement to this story, the next time I heard his name, it was because President Havel had appointed the window-washer to be the Czech ambassador to Israel.

Our country is opening up again, you may have heard. I crazily went to the very last concert at Madison Square Garden just as the pandemic was starting to strike. (My building had the first case in the city.) The occasion was the 50th anniversary show of what remained of the Allman Brothers on March 10, where we all obsessively wiped off our seats and washed our hands during the three-hour 20-minute show. Last week, I got to experience its reopening at a wonderful, Juneteenth-inspired show by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, sponsored by the City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage program. Wynton Marsalis and company played Sonny Rollins’s five-part “Freedom Suite” and followed it up with Charles Mingus’s “Freedom.” They also threw in a generous helping of Ellingtonia. To be honest, I was expecting to be annoyed at this show, because whenever I’ve gone to free shows in the park, most people paid little attention to the music and made it impossible for me to do so. This show, however, had assigned seating and (reasonably) comfortable chairs laid out, and the crowd was just as quiet, attentive, and appreciative as they’d be at Lincoln Center. It was a beautiful night, and we were all thrilled to be there, saluting, enjoying, and appreciating our great city and the personalities and institutions that help make it so. Here is an excerpt from Marsalis’s recent composition “The Democracy Suite.” Here is a column I wrote about jazz criticism, featuring an interview I did with Wynton, back in 1997 on the occasion of his having received the Pulitzer Prize for music. I found it on the Jazz@LC website.

Finally, here is an interview I did last week with the website Frank News, which is aimed at youngish people, about the sad state of the journalism profession today.