Archive: Year: 2022

How Ben Smith got played by Tucker Carlson at the Semafor-Knight event this morning“This is why you are considered correctly a propagandist and not a journalist.” No, that wasn’t Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semafor, a new global news site, admonishing Tucker Carlson, the lead anchor for Fox News, during a “pre-launch” event held in Washington, DC this morning to explore the future of news. It was Carlson, who is a much more practiced cable pugilist than Smith, putting him down midway through their conversation. Sadly, and exactly as many of us expected, Carlson used the platform offered him by Semafor and its co-sponsor, the Knight Foundation, to do what he does every night: twist facts and arguments to make his...

By sponsoring a journalism event featuring Tucker Carlson, the philanthropy is mistaking openness for strengthening democracy.Tucker Carlson, Alberto Imbarguen, Ben Smith; strange bedfellows“A well-functioning democracy depends on healthy and trusted public and private institutions; an economy that provides broad-based opportunity and prosperity; tolerance and respect for one another and our differences; and a vibrant civic life.”Those are the first words from the Knight Foundation on a post published November 9, 2020, introducing a collection of essays on “Democracy and Civic Life: What is the Long Game for Philanthropy?”In their own introduction to the collection, Knight Foundation President/CEO Alberto Imbarguen and Vice President/Chief Program Officer Sam Gill wrote, “Rebuilding and reforming our democracy will require interventions that respond to both our...

Learning a lesson from religion that could be applied to politicsPhoto by Duy Pham on UnsplashAccording to a recent story in eJewishPhilanthropy.com, a new rabbi is coming to Martha’s Vineyard. His name is Tzvi Alperowitz. He is 25 years old, and with his wife Hadassah, they are parents of a newborn. Also, with the help of local benefactors led by a philanthropist named Terry Kassel, they are buying a house on the island, where the median price of a home has skyrocketed since the pandemic to $1.3 million. Kassel, who is reportedly the longtime girlfriend of rightwing billionaire Paul Singer, is “helping fund [Alperowitz’s] nascent operation, whose $600,000 budget for this year includes the cost of a down payment,” according to eJewishPhilanthropy.A...

New energies are flowing into the abortion rights fight, but it remains to be seen if organizers can marshal them into effective changeMarc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons“I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”That was a young organizer named Nicholas von Hoffman (who later became a journalist) describing the overflow crowd that came to a community meeting in Woodlawn, Chicago in May of 1961 to listen to a group of Freedom Riders speak about their experiences in Mississippi organizing for civil rights. He...

They’re negotiating from weakness because their side hasn’t invested in base-buildingPhoto by Maria Lysenko on UnsplashTwo paragraphs from a story in yesterday’s Washington Post analyzing the bipartisan gun legislation now inching its way through Congress have stuck with me.The first reads:The Senate’s compromise gun bill emerged from asymmetrical negotiations in which the top Democratic negotiator always predicted he wouldn’t get everything he wanted, while the top Republican always promised the bill wouldn’t have anything he didn’t want.This is true. From the first days after the Uvalde school shooting, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut (the home state of the Sandy Hook massacre), has downplayed expectations of sweeping reform, reminding listeners that “I’ve been part of many failed negotiations in the past.”...

It turns out that old-fashioned Congressional oversight, the kind we haven’t seen in a long time, can move public opinion.Why bother holding hearings investigating Donald Trump? It’s not going to change any minds.That’s an argument I hear a lot, especially from Democrats. They look across the aisle and see 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020, and they wonder how exposing his unfitness for office now could matter after everything that was manifest while he was in power. They look at how the vast bulk of Republicans support his false claim that the election was rigged or stolen, and they wonder what difference investigations could make.Well, I have news. It turns out that old-fashioned Congressional oversight, the kind that...

Conspiracies to commit high crimes always involve layers of law-breaking and secrecy; what we never know is what will come out and when.Oliver North on the day of his indictment, March 16, 1988. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)If you aren’t planning to watch the January 6th Select Committee’s hearings, which start tonight at 8:00pm EST, because you think all the news they may generate has already been leaked, digested and regurgitated, let me share a little story about how politics can surprise you.In the fall of 1986, I was a young editorial staffer at The Nation magazine, an outpost of left-wing dissent at the height of the Reagan years in America. Reagan’s 1980 election defeat of President Jimmy Carter heralded...

Pundits are turning Chesa Boudin’s recall into a bellwether, but news from a big Midwest city election suggests otherwise.Chesa Boudin, Kimberly GrahamYesterday, a progressive district attorney in a big west coast city was recalled by a 60% to 40% margin.Yesterday, a progressive candidate for district attorney in a big midwestern city won the Democratic primary, beating two other rivals by more than 15% and making her a likely shoo-in this fall.Today, political reporters and pundits are making much of the first story, arguing that it demonstrates a clear trend that started with Eric Adams’ victory in the New York City mayoral race last year, that core Democratic voters are rejecting progressive approaches to crime and incarceration. In New York Magazine, Ross...

How crisis entrepreneurs like Alex Jones and demagogues like Donald Trump keep poisoning American hearts and mindsI just finished reading Elizabeth Williamson’s new book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, and it really has hit me hard. The book is a tour-de-force dissection of the rise of crisis entrepreneurs like Alex Jones of Infowars, who, along with a lesser army of self-styled debunkers, gun nuts, and freaked-out young suburban moms, decided that the 2012 massacre of 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, had to be fake, or a government plot to drive the public toward drastic gun control, or both. As Williamson notes, while Americans have a long history of skepticism bordering on conspiracism,...

Congress, the Supreme Court and the streets are on a collision course.An actual dumpster fire during George Floyd protests at Lafayette Square, May 30, 2020 (photo by Rosa Pineda)I have a bad feeling about June. Here’s what’s on the political calendar:The January 6th Select Committee will be holding six televised hearings, starting Thursday June 9th at 8pm, assuming the leaked information that the Guardian reported is accurate. The bipartisan committee’s findings are likely to be explosive, as they are expected to show that Trump and his MAGA allies planned, promoted and paid for a criminal conspiracy to overturn an election they lost.It’s rare for us to hear Democrats calling out Republicans so directly — most of the time they seem to hold back...