Preview

First, a PSA: You can now find a complete archive of more than 22,000 of Terry Gross’s invaluable interviews on WHYY’s Fresh Air stretching back 40 years here, and I literally cannot think of a better or more entertaining way to educate yourself about whatever important issue or famous person might interest you. (If you listen to Terry with, say, David Letterman from 1981, you’ll find it is also a fun time capsule.) I imagine if you went through the entire archive, you might not know as many facts about the world as my new hero, Matt Amodio, but you might know almost all you need to know to be a well-informed citizen.

My crush on Terry began in September 1992, when she interviewed me for my first book, Sound and Fury. I admit to having just listened to it, here. What strikes me now is just how meager and relatively manageable were the problems with America’s mass media back then, There was no Fox News, no Facebook, no Breitbart, barely any Rush Limbaugh, and the word “Trump” was confined to the gossip pages of New York City tabloids, with stories based on lies passed along by the fictional PR flack “John Barron.”

My book was a portrait of what I therein dubbed the “punditocracy”—a word I am proud to say has, since 2004, appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the stories I tried to tell was the manner in which the values of Washington’s insider class were spread throughout the media by virtue of the punditocracy’s prominence in local newspapers and the broadcasts of the roundtable shows such as the network’s Sunday broadcasts and “pundit sitcoms,” like The McLaughlin Group, often on local NBC stations, and Agronsky and Company on PBS.

More changes have taken place since then than I can even begin to enumerate in this space, but almost all of them have served to ensure that “everyday people” have to work harder and harder if they want access to reliable information about what’s going on in their communities and their country. FiveThirtyEight notes that “[f]rom 2000 to 2018, weekday newspaper circulation fell from 55.8 million households to an estimated 28.6 million; between 2008 and 2019, newsroom employment fell by 51 percent; and since 2004, more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed across the nation.”

Writing in The Atlantic, Elaine Godfrey recently published a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of the decimation of a local Iowa newspaper by Gannett, which merged with the media corporation GateHouse in 2019, and now owns one-sixth of America’s newspapers. As Godfrey notes by way of introduction, “By now, we know what happens when a community loses its newspaper. People tend to participate less often in municipal elections, and those elections are less competitive. Corruption goes unchecked, and costs sometimes go up for town governments. Disinformation becomes the norm, as people start to get their facts mainly from social media.” The results are almost always that “the most important stories … will go uncovered: political corruption, school-board scandals, zoning-board hearings, police misconduct.”

The political impact of these losses goes beyond the local. “In the absence of local coverage, all news becomes national news,” she notes. “Instead of reading about local policy decisions, people read about the blacklisting of Dr. Seuss books. Instead of learning about their own local candidates, they consume angry takes about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tom Courtney, a Democrat and four-term former state senator from Burlington [Iowa], made more than 10,000 phone calls to voters during his 2020 run for office. In those calls, he heard something he never had before: “‘People that live in small-town rural Iowa [said] they wouldn’t vote for me or any Democrat because I’m in the same party as AOC,’” he told Godfrey. “‘Where did they get that? Not local news!’ Courtney lost in November.”

It’s not much of a stretch to connect two stories on the Times home page this past Tuesday morning: “Democrats Lost the Most in Midwestern ‘Factory Towns,’ Report Says” and “Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections.” Unfortunately, in neither story do the Times reporters identify the role that deliberate media misinformation plays in enabling the Republican Party’s destruction of democratic norms on behalf of Trump and company’s open coup-plotting for the 2024 election.

Last week, I wrote about the outsized role played by Facebook as a purveyor of dangerous misinformation, abjuring the role that traditional news organizations once played in helping people determine what’s true and what’s not. The shocker identified in the 2020 study quoted in this article is that on Facebook, “those self-identified as extremely conservative—7 on a scale of 1 to 7—accounted for the most fake news shared, at 26%. In the Twitter sample, 32% of fake news shares came from those who scored a 7,” significantly more than those who identified as extremely liberal, and in far greater numbers when it comes to shared articles, though the article—and to be fair, the study—attempts to put an inappropriate “both sides” gloss on the study’s findings.

One aspect of the “news desert/misinformation flood” that seeks to further undermine our democracy and does not get nearly the attention it should is the manner in which “local ‘fake news’ websites spread ‘conservative propaganda’ in the US.” This effort, as this Guardian report explains, is led by “Locality Labs, a shadowy, controversial company that purports to be a local news organization,” but in reality is “part of a nationwide rightwing lobbying effort masquerading as journalism.” The firm “operates scores of sites across Illinois, Michigan, Maryland and Wisconsin, often sharing content. In Michigan alone, the Lansing State Journal reported, almost 40 sites opened in one fell swoop.” The company’s websites mimic those of the newspapers whose (relatively) truthful reporting they are seeking to undermine. The company’s outlets come from the same cookie cutter: “The Great Lakes Wire is similar to the Ann Arbor Times, which bears a striking resemblance to the DuPage Policy Journal and the Prairie State Wire.” But they don’t just resemble one another: “Each has the look of a local news organization, with information on gas prices and local businesses.” Some contain (usually) buried information identifying their sponsor; many do not. But “[w] hat the sites all have in common is praising Republican politicians, and denigrating Democratic ones.”

Tucker Carlson recently visited with Victor Orban, the destroyer of Hungarian democracy whose party, Fidesz, ran an anti-Semitic campaign that all but pretended Orban was actually running against the liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The Times recently ran a piece reporting that Orban has “spent millions on lobbying, support for think tanks and cultivating allies in Washington.” Now I learn from Andrew Lawrence on Twitter, that Tucker Carlson announced he has an hour-long special coming in December on how Jewish billionaire George Soros is “harming civilizations around the world.” The Hungarian-born Soros, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, has long been a Carlson target: “If you’re wondering why so many people are being robbed, raped and killed in American cities right now,” he remarked on an episode last year, “George Soros is part of the reason for that.” I’ve written many columns about the anti-Semitism that lies at the heart of conservatives’ anti-Soros campaign, one that has been embraced by not only top Republicans, but also a number of right-wing Jews—most prominently, ex–Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Here is a column on the subject from 2017.

Oh, and you can apparently thank AT&T for OAN (and Reuters for that story, here).

Have I made you sad? Let 200 or so Belgians lift your spirits. Not enough, you say? Here’s some other guy singing that same song. Check out the star turn around 4:40.

You may have noticed that that Springsteen fellow turned 72 on September 23. He was sweetly celebrated in McSweeney’s with tributes here, here, here, here, here, here, and my personal favorite, here. I cannot let mention of that date pass, however, with noting that Bruce shares a birthday with John Coltrane. His many versions of this song constitute a few of my favorite things.

Finally, I was among an extremely enthusiastic crowd Wednesday night at the Beacon Theatre where a remarkably still nimble-fingered (at 80) Jorma Kaukonen warmed up the Tedeschi Trucks Band with a solo acoustic set and then joined them for “Don’t Think Twice” and “Key to the Highway.” I can’t remember the last time I saw a warm-up act leave with a prolonged standing ovation. As you were likely not there, here is TTB, joined by the excellent Trey Anastasio on guitar, playing “Layla,” from the recently released live recording of an entire Derek and the Dominos classic album, starring the world’s greatest anti-vaxxing guitar god, together with the late, great Duane Allman, whom you can hear on the original, here. Trucks, who in the estimation of those of us at Altercation is currently the world’s greatest guitarist of any kind, sort of replaced Duane in the Allman Brothers, and, as part of the band’s 40th anniversary celebration, played “Layla” with said anti-vaxxer, here, also at the Beacon in 2009.