RIP, the profession of journalism.

The worst part of taking a week off from blogging last weekend is that I had a great topic for a post but no oomph to write it. So I'm gonna write it this week, even though it's old news by now. Then I'll put a little bit of new news at the end.

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The day the news broke early this month that the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, had sent his minions to decimate the remaining staff, leaving one of the nation's greatest newspapers a hollowed-out shell, I had a conversation online about it with a good friend. It started me thinking about the history of journalism, and specifically how very short a time it has been a respectable profession. Because it was respectable, for a hundred years or so. Now it's devolving into what it was before the muckrakers helped turn it into the Fourth Estate.

When the movie version of All the President's Men was released in the spring of 1976, I was in my freshman year of college. I'd pretty recently (after spending a semester discovering that I did not have what it took to be a professional musician) declared journalism as my major, and the movie sure made it seem like it had been the right decision. Discovering the grain of a big story, pursuing the facts to the truth, bringing down bad actors in the highest of high places -- that was the sort of thing I could see myself doing, or at least the sort of thing I wanted to be associated with. Now, with 50 years of hindsight, it's clear to me that Watergate was pretty much journalism's pinnacle. And it's been coasting downhill ever since. 

My memory of the journalism history course I took that semester is hazy, but I recall that while the press played a role in the Founding Fathers spreading their views throughout the colonies, journalism ethics weren't yet a thing. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher and sorta-kinda reporter, but he wasn't always honest about when he was fictionalizing details; he reported his own famous experiment involving a kite and a key in the third person, as if somebody else had done it. That sort of thing would never fly today (pardon the pun). 

The profession of journalism began to hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when muckraking reporters dug into corruption in political and corporate institutions of the time. A couple of famous muckrakers come to mind: Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to an insane asylum in New York City to find out how deplorable the conditions there were; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed corruption in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The work of these and other reporters, though often melodramatic, caused enough of a stir that laws were passed to relieve some of the worst conditions.

Alongside these crusaders ran an attempt to set an informal code of ethics for journalists. Among the standards was that journalists should be objective. Everybody's got an opinion, but a journalist's should not be readily discernible from his or her work; a reporter should be fair to all sides. Also, a reporter should never make the story about him or her (which is why Ben Franklin would have gotten into trouble if he'd been writing 150 years later).

That all worked fine, more or less, until the moneyed classes realized they could buy up the papers (and the radio stations and TV stations) and exert pressure on the journalists who worked there to bury stories that would hurt business. Journalistic independence has been eroding ever since.

In a column in Slate published on February 5th, Alex Kirshner talked about Bezos' gutting of the Post as almost inevitable. He says the cause of the Post's death is "that one of the richest people in human history staged a controlled burn to turn it into ash. Bezos wanted the Post to die, because a vigorous, well-resourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his own bottom line." Kirshner makes the point that the paper's net worth is little more than a rounding error in Bezos' vast wealth, and reporting that angers the Trump administration can have a big impact on Bezos' other companies, particularly when we're talking about federal contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin: "Bezos' external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside."

We can see a similar thing happening at CBS, the former home of famed journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, where the new owner's attempts to placate Trump prompted Anderson Cooper to resign from his 60 Minutes gig just this week.

Journalism has been descending toward infotainment for decades, but real reporting has always coexisted with the fluffy stuff. I assumed it always would. Now I begin to think it won't. 

RIP, the profession of journalism, 1900-2026. It's been a good run. 

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This weekend, Trump made a cockamamie post on his social media outlet that the US was sending a "hospital boat" to Greenland to provide medical care to Greenlanders. I could not make heads or tails of his rambling until I did a little research. It looks like what set him off was a humanitarian incident in which a sailor aboard a US Navy submarine took ill while the boat was off the coast of Greenland and was airlifted to a hospital in Nuuk for treatment. Greenland reportedly has six hospitals for its population of fewer than 60,000 people and, like the rest of the civilized world, has free, universal healthcare. So the prime minister of Greenland says they don't need our help. Besides, both of our hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, are in drydock for repairs, so neither one of them will be steaming toward Greenland any time soon.

Trump also mentioned the governor of Louisiana, who I guess he promoted to "special envoy" to Greenland back in December to help negotiate whatever Trump thinks he can get out of Greenland's government, which is not going to be ownership of the island. Or a Nobel Peace Prize, either.

The whole thing is a fantasy from Trump's fevered brain. But what pissed me off -- and what every US sailor should also be pissed off about -- is that the commander-in-chief of our military does not know the difference between a ship and a boat. I know the difference because a) I was married to a sailor, and b) I covered the Sixth Fleet when I worked as a reporter in Norfolk, VA. A boat is small enough to fit on a ship. A submarine is a boat; our floating hospitals are ships.

If he's too far gone to understand that, what business does he have running the country?

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These moments of bloggy sadness and disgust have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Of course the "hospital boat" thing is a distraction from the Epstein files. Here's hoping the fallout from that investigation brings the whole facade tumbling down sooner rather than later.

All hail the semicolon; and a few words about Mamdami.

I tell you what: Nothing brings out the pedants like a post about punctuation. (And I'm counting on you lot to follow through!)

3D-Agentur | Deposit Photos

Washington Post columnist Mark Lasswell knows this, apparently. His column published in the paper today is titled, "This punctuation mark is semi-dead. People have opinions." (You can read it for free here; you're welcome.)

Lasswell's bio on WaPo's website says only that he has a BA from the University of Missouri. His LinkedIn indicates that he was an op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal before being forced out in 2017 due to intra-department conflicts during Trump 1.0. That seems like an odd thing to leave out of one's biography on your current employer's website, but maybe he's flying under the radar due to Jeff Bezos's ownership of the Post.

Anyway, back to the poor, benighted semicolon, which Lasswell says was introduced by a Venetian printer in 1494. But according to a study released by Babbel, its usage has dropped by half over the past 50 years in British English books; things are not much better on this side of the pond, according to a Swedish study of semicolon usage in US publications from 1920 through 2019. 

One wonders why it was left to a Swedish academic to study semicolon usage in the United States, but answering that question is beyond the scope of this post (translation: I ain't spending my Sunday afternoon reading a 27-page linguistics paper. If that's your jam, have at it).

Lasswell doesn't proffer any reasons for the declining usage; instead, he wisely (perhaps) leaves it to the peanut gallery to speculate. The usual suspects are suggested, including the dumbing down of edumacation (rest assured that the Oxford comma also gets dragged into the discussion). 

I didn't comment (well, I did, but not about what I'm about to say here), but the discussion did put me in mind of something I learned in a Great Courses course from linguist John McWhorter: As languages become the lingua franca of more people, particularly as people with different native languages come together more often, certain things about them become simplified. For example, irregular verb forms become more regular. And I would suggest that punctuation becomes simpler, too. The semicolon has only a few uses in prose: to connect two closely related independent clauses (i.e., if the text on each side of the semicolon could stand as a sentence on its own); and separating items in a list, if one or more of the items is complex so as to require a comma. (Mama Google's A.I. adds a third usage -- before a conjunctive adverb like "moreover" -- but to my mind, that's the first rule with an extra word thrown in to underscore the relationship between the first and second clauses.) 

So the semicolon is fairly specialized, and people who don't write regularly (I'm not counting social media posts as "writing regularly") probably forget what it's used for. I've seen a whole lot of comma splices that should have been a semicolon. 

I like semicolons; I appreciate their usefulness; and I do get annoyed with comma splices. But at work, we tend toward extreme avoidance. I've seen complex lists in legislation that use nothing but commas. But then we tend to use commas more sparingly than I'd like, too, which is a whole 'nother rant.

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Okay, briefly, Mamdami (since I can't bring myself to comment on Trump's Big Bullshit Bill without swearing): People all over the country are losing their minds over Zohran Mamdami's win in last week's New York Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdami, who says he's a democratic socialist, is predictably making conservatives' heads explode -- but he's also discomfiting Democratic Party stalwarts like Bill Clinton who backed former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo (never mind that Cuomo quit as governor after an investigation found credible evidence that he sexually harassed eleven women). Cuomo outspent Mamdami, $87 per vote to $19 per vote; still, Mamdami won.

There are so many angles to cover with a story like this, Islamophobia (Mamdami is Muslim) being only one. But the thing that most interests me is the Democrats' reactions. They're correct when they say that you can't extrapolate election results in liberal New York City to the rest of the country. But the sotto voce backlash to Zamdami's win is reminding me a whole lot of what the party did to Bernie Sanders in 2016: they decided it was Hillary's turn to be president, and they just were not going to acknowledge Bernie's popularity, period, end of story. Why? Because the Democratic National Committee's business model is to collect as much money as possible to elect as many candidates as possible so they can hold onto as much power as possible. That's their whole reason for being. 

But Bernie proposed helping people, not corporate donors. He talked about income inequality and the oligarchy, and the DNC's big donors are part of the oligarchy. Bernie funded his campaign with small-dollar donations that the DNC couldn't control (and Bernie, bless him, refused to hand over his donor list to the DNC when he dropped out of the race).

Mamdami won by doing the same thing. No wonder the DNC is scared; he's attacking their business model.

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Seven semicolons and the use of "discomfiting" in a single blog post. I ought to get a prize or something.

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But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to back an accused sexual harasser for political office? I mean, Andrew Cuomo is no Trump...

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These moments of bloggy punctuality have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Post 1 of 2: WaPo's non-endorsement and the state of media bias today.

Of course it's the week when I promised y'all a fun post that a Big News Thing blows up that I feel the need to comment on. Neither subject will wait, in my opinion. So for the first time in hearth/myth history, I'm releasing two blog posts on the same day. Here's the first one.

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On Friday, the Washington Post editorial staff -- reportedly under pressure from the paper's owner, multibillionaire Jeff Bezos -- declined to endorse either party's political candidate for president. Reportedly, the editors had an endorsement of Democratic nominee and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris all ready to go, but Bezos stepped in and killed it. There has been a ton of speculation as to why; while the why matters in the real world, it doesn't matter for the purposes of this post. What matters to me is the reaction of staff and subscribers.

In short, there's been a lot of outrage. The union that represents staffers at the paper issued a statement criticizing the decision:

Stolen from the dead bird app

A number of the paper's op-ed columnists issued their own, more strongly worded, statement. Former WaPo columnists have also blasted the paper for the decision not to buck Bezos. At least one editorial staffer has resigned. I've also seen whole bunch of people -- whether subscribers or general troublemakers -- call on more staffers to resign. 

A personal anecdote: As most of you know, I was a broadcast journalist, mostly in radio, from the time I graduated from college in 1979 until my last layoff, from Mutual/NBC Radio News, in 1999. In that 20-year span, I saw the business change a lot. It went from stations being owned by local folks who believed that they had a responsibility to program their stations in the public interest, convenience and necessity to those same local stations being snapped up by corporations interested only in ginning up ratings to make more money for their shareholders. That was a big reason that I decided to get out of the news business in 1999.

But another big reason was this: I had nowhere to go. If you think my options for news jobs in the nation's capital would have been unlimited, you're wrong. By the fall of 1999, network radio news outfits had dwindled to a handful, mostly staffed by a skeleton crew: the Associated Press, ABC, Mutual/NBC, CBS, and NPR. ABC had maybe ten people in DC. CBS's newsroom in DC consisted of only two or three people, and anyway, our shop at Mutual/NBC was being folded into the CBS operation in New York. NPR wanted reporters with experience in long-form programming. In short, there were no jobs. And at the time, I was a single mom with two small children. So I went back to school for a paralegal certificate and started working for lawyers.

For the past ten or 15 years, I've been watching the same thing happening to newspapers that happened to radio news: People with money have been snapping up papers, big and small, in the interest of turning a big profit for their shareholders and themselves. News staffs have been cut in the name of saving money. The practical result for journalists is that there are fewer jobs. But when journalists lose their jobs, subscribers lose, too; they lose a source of news of both their community and the wider world.

WaPo's subscribers today are angry -- understandably so -- and tens of thousands have threatened to cancel their subscriptions. It's unclear how many have actually followed through on their threats, although confirmed reports indicate the Post received 1,600 cancellations in the first three hours after the decision not to endorse anybody appeared. (I've also seen rumors that a total of 60,000 subscribers canceled, but I can't find any evidence backing that up, and frankly I think somebody pulled the number out of their ass.) Here is my problem with that line of thinking: Bezos is, as I said above, a multibillionaire. A digital subscription to the Washington Post is about $16 a month. (I know this because that's what I'm paying for mine.) Does anyone in their right mind think that depriving a multibillionaire of his cut of $16 a month is going to make a dent? Even if 60,000 subscribers did quit, that's only $960,000 a month, and he only gets part of that. That's chump change for a guy who's worth more than $200 billion.

You know who will be hurt by the paper losing subscribers, though? The journalists who work there. And at that level, there are only a handful of places they can go -- all of which will be under the same financial constraints that WaPo has been under.

Why don't people in any industry who work for shitty bosses just up and quit? Generally, it's because they can't afford to.

I've made lots of politically based decisions on where to spend my money. I don't buy Papa John's pizza because their founder is an asshole; I refuse to enter a Hobby Lobby because of their anti-LGBTQ+ stance; I avoid Home Depot like the plague; I wouldn't have a MyPillow in my house on a bet; and on and on. But I will not make a spending decision that will deprive working journalists of an income. 

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This is already pretty long, but I want to do the media bias thing, too. 

Last night, I asked friends on Facebook which news sources they rely on, given that several of them had said they were canceling their WaPo subscriptions. I didn't tell them that I was going to use their answers as fodder for this post (apologies for the subterfuge, guys).

Anyway, this afternoon, I made a little spreadsheet of the responses as of about noon my time. Then I went to the media bias chart that has made the rounds on social media from time to time and looked up as many of  the responses as I could find. (It appears the chart doesn't rate many Substack blogs, and some others weren't rated for whatever reason.)

I've boiled it down to this graphic: 

Everything above the orange "Bias" line is from my impromptu survey. Surprise! My friends all get their news from left-leaning outlets. What differentiates these news outfits is how reliable, and how biased, each one is. Tops for reliability is ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization. Least biased is the BBC; the AP is next. 

Least reliable and most biased on this list is the Meidas Touch.

The two outfits in blue got the most mentions. Heather Cox Richardson -- who I think is terrific, by the way -- is pretty reliable but not always, and her bias rating, while not terrible, definitely skews left.

I bring this up because liberals and progressives give conservatives a hard time for their news consuming habits: Fox News, Newsmax, Sinclair stations, and so on. But those of us on the left kinda live in a news silo, too -- me included. It might behoove all of us to broaden our reading and viewing habits. I'm not suggesting that we go to the dark side, but heading closer to the center line couldn't hurt.

The three outfits at the bottom of the graphic are the top rated in this iteration of the media bias chart, and all three are rated better than any of the news outlets mentioned by my Facebook friends. Two are podcasts, one from NPR and the other from (y'all are gonna hate this) the Wall Street Journal. The third is the "CBS Evening News".

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For the record, I voted by mail -- straight Democratic, thanks -- and my county clerk already has my ballot.

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These moments of media blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get out and vote!

How to get rid of a boss: a case study.

So let's say that at your latest staff meeting at work, the Big Boss tells everybody on your team that you're getting a new supervisor. Oh, and by the way, your old supervisor was offered a brand-new position in the organization, but instead of taking it, she quit.

Now, you and your colleagues have heard some things about this new supervisor, none of them good. He has some sketchy behavior in his past -- unethical and possibly even illegal. You also know that he's a crony of the Big Boss, and that B.B. has been padding the C-suite with several of his cronies over the past few months -- in an effort, B.B. says, to make the company more profitable. But your company is no stranger to putting principles ahead of money; that's the way it has done business over many decades. And you and your colleagues sure as hell don't want to work for this sketchy new supervisor. So what do you do?

Welp, if you're the Washington Post newsroom, you assign an investigative team to run a bunch of stories about the shenanigans in your new supervisor's past so that he'll quit before he even starts the job. 

And it worked! On Friday, it was announced that Robert Winnett would not be joining the Post as its executive editor, after all. 

As a former journalist, I've been bemused by watching this unfold. Winnett was hired away from the London Daily Telegram by the Post's new chief executive officer and publisher, William Lewis. Both Lewis and Winnett are British. Both are White. They had worked together in the past, at the London Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

But British newspapers have been known to play fast-and-loose with certain practices that are considered highly unethical to American journalists. From the link above, here, in a nutshell, is the dirt on these two guys:

A Post investigation published Sunday revealed Winnett's connections to a confessed con artist turned whistleblower who has admitted to using illegal methods to gain information for stories in Britain's Sunday Times...

The New York Times also reported that Winnett and Lewis had based some stories on stolen records, and raised new questions about a payment made to obtain information that led to a 2009 investigation into government corruption, which shook the British political establishment and led to several officials' resignations.

The Post story goes on to note, "Paying sources for information is considered unethical in most American newsrooms. So is representing oneself as anything other than a journalist to gain confidential information as part of newsgathering..."  

The way Winnett's predecessor was shown the door also rankled among the newsroom staff. Sally Buzbee was the first woman hired as executive editor at the paper, which won three Pulitzer Prizes this year. But Lewis decided she had to go anyway. He offered her a position heading up a brand-new division at the Post covering service news and social media -- which, to be honest, sounds a lot like kicking the little lady out of a man's job and sending her back to editing the women's page. Instead, she quit. 

And now Winnett isn't coming. But it's okay -- Winnett wasn't supposed to transition into the job until after the election this fall, anyway. In the interim, Lewis had hired Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, to run the newsroom, and then helm the new division when Winnett came on board. Now I guess Murray will be the executive editor for the forseeable future. 

But never mind that. Don't you wish you had the power at your job to publicly embarrass your incoming supervisor and his boss by publicizing their sketchy pasts?

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These moments of bloggy just deserts have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!