The Reckoning

        Two days after the elections the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, wrote to all of his subscribers:

 "After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?"

        Sulzberger never answers his own question (the answer is yes!) but with the Times only weeks away from downsizing its own news room-as has been previously announced-his  unusual letter seems to express the palpable fear that print media is rapidly approaching a terminal condition; threatening to bring us all to the day of a vanished democracy because citizens are increasingly informed only by Twitter-style one liners.  Such a development is as difficult to absorb as Donald Trump's election and may be more dangerous than his election.

        David Lieberman of USA Today writes about the "fear of losing all-important subscribers to its print and digital editions at a time of plummeting advertising revenue and challenges from online news venues."  There are signs all around.  Some newspapers were hit with waves of subscriber cancellations in September after they endorsed Secretary Clinton.   Lieberman reports "at least one city - possibly San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis or Cleveland - likely will soon lose its last daily newspaper.  It "could be a lot more widespread than people have been predicting," says Mike Simonton, who tracks media debt for Fitch Ratings. "It's hard to ignore that possibility as the pace of newspaper closings accelerates."

"Starting Wednesday, Hearst's 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer survives as a scaled-down online publication offering mostly commentary. That leaves The Seattle Times as the city's only major paper-and-ink daily.  Gannett...parent of USA TODAY, may shutter the 140-year-old Tucson Citizen, which competes with the Arizona Daily Star, if a buyer can't be found."   

 

        Cable TV has a different but related affliction. Its fierce pursuit of viewers led it to bet heavily on expert panels who were often demonstrably inexpert. Except for a few panelists from the Trump side, they turned out by Wednesday morning to have been dead wrong. David Axlerod, speaking among the large panels of experts on CNN when the evening was yet young on November 9th prophesied "a Trump victory is very, very unlikely."  He had been chief strategist of Barak Obama's campaigns, and Senior White Adviser. If he didn't know what was happening across the country who did? 

        So went this catastrophic failure of a long list of experts and moderators including Rachel Maddow, star of MSNBC, Amy Walter at PBS and many others. After the elections dozens of interviews in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin uncovered that local citizens had stopped listening to these commentators a long time ago. It turns out that these experts knew mostly their own mirror images. They could not see the inequality suffered by nearly two-thirds of the American people because it had moved beyond their comfortable, "expert" horizons, out of sight. 

        Therein lies a tragedy greater than a Trump victory (if you think it was tragic). It's not only the print media who are at-risk because of lost advertising and diminished circulation, so also are the TV media whose high pitched spiels require us to accept news delivered primarily to sell products by entertaining us. One imagines their budgets for hiring expert panels has dropped lots.

         Russia's Vladamir Putin, and before him Stalin and Adolph Hitler, strengthened their hold on authoritarian government by eliminating a free press. President-elect Trump need take no such steps, even if he wished to, because the chickens of our disdain have come home to roost.  Our preference for well-rehearsed PBS and cable round tables may become the thin soup of an increasingly thinned out journalism. Bad for democracy, even worse for the common good.  Paint Donald Trump ugly if you wish, but the real tragedy is what we're doing to ourselves.

 

The Times - Are They a-Changin?

       Right now the only predictable election result next week is the dangerous public disenchantment stretching from Texas to North Dakota.  After November 8th we are likely to find scattered all over the ground only the remains, the shards, of the Republican and Democratic parties regardless of who is elected to the White House.  That may turn out to be the good news.

        Also broken into pieces after next week may be the long era of U. S. civil religion since 1800 which people thought promised them exceptional treatment but now seems parallel to the empty promises of contemporary political leadership. The unproductive distance between party machine candidates (Hillary) and rebels (The Donald) resembles the lived experience of three-fourths of Americans who for twenty years and longer have suffered an income stagnation that nether Republican Bush nor Democrat Obama corrected. This while the public's money poured into the fifteen year Bush/Obama war which keeps expanding.  

        The massive slaughter of the innocents in the lands of that other denominated religion, Islam, contain the worst kind of news: It's well known, of course, but the ultimate irony must be grasped: that the boundaries of the Middle East and the weapons flowing into it (some from Russia also) were are all determined and made by the Christian West: the boundaries by the European powers after World War I; the weapons by the U. S. after World War II. Essentially they're all ours! The irony is the so-called Christian Western nations fashioned a kind of hell among the Islamic nations.

        It is a hard truth but in the possible collapse of politics as we've known it both believers and non-believers will find themselves reckoning with the end of what had seemed a liturgical guarantee for exceptional America, an everlasting springtime now come to winter.

       The end of Tom Hayden's life last week can remind us of the true vocation of the prophet--whether secular or sacred--who in Hayden's instance shouted out against the hundreds of thousands dying in the Vietnam war while most of the the American churches and synagogues, for patriotic reasons, backed away from what for Martin Luther King, Jr. was a similar cry against that war he could not stifle in himself.  

       A new way must be found amid the ruins to reclaim this prophetic vocation in spirit and in truth. The times are still trying to change, Bob Dylan, and maybe this time you'll be right, in honor of your Nobel Prize.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin

              For the times they are a-changin