The Issue isn't Being Fair, it's Seeking the Truth

This response from a former newspaper editor and publisher is part of a series on the First Amendment and the role of the news media in America. Oxford Dictionaries recently named "post-truth" its 2016 word of the year.

I mention that because I believe a major step toward improving news organizations is to get away from the idea of fairness as we have known it and replace it with a commitment to tell the truth about the issues that mean the most to the community and audiences a news operation serves.

The goal of most news organizations now is to accurately and fairly present the opposing sides of an issue. Making sure a story is "fair" is both a goal and a shield. But being satisfied with getting comments from "both sides" is undermining our news organizations, promoting falsehoods, and distorting the truth.

Say what you will about John Stewart and John Oliver being comedians, they get/got to the truth on important issues – which is why, I believe, they are popular and respected, especially among millennials.

Because thinking we are doing our job by doing the usual – "the democrats say this, the republicans say that," – is so easy and deeply ingrained, journalists need training to acquire the skills to get to the truth – developing sources, cultivating experts who can provide context and understanding, and following news threads wherever they lead.

Being all things to all people is no longer possible – if it ever was. The goal must be truth, not fairness in the traditional newspaper sense, and being obsessive about getting to the truth is the road we need to travel.

The Other Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one that comes before the second amendment we hear so much about. Like all 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, it is composed of a single sentence, and it is one of the most extraordinary sentences I have ever read, prohibiting the federal government from regulating the private beliefs of its people. The rights may seem unrelated, but to me those 45 words follow a simple and straight line: the government may not tell me what to believe; it may not interfere with how I express my beliefs; and it may not stop me from joining peaceably with other people to protest government activities which I think threaten those beliefs. It protects my thoughts, my voice and my body. This is the foundation of our democracy. If there is an “American Exceptionalism,” it is embodied in the first amendment.

The fact that “the press” is in there is not accidental, and yet so often these days we treat it as a remote, often adversarial, body, rather than the extension of our speech that the framers intended.

The press is under fire in a lot of places: In Turkey, for example, the government has jailed 120 journalists since July, closed 150 news organizations, and pressed for deep-pocketed loyalists to buy what’s left. Things aren’t so dire in this country, but the threats to a free press are pervasive. Some of them are self-inflicted. Some are economic, as revenues at traditional news outlets continue to decline. Some stem from the digital revolution (almost two-thirds of Americans get all or some of their news from social media). Some are because the press has become politicians' favorite whipping boy.

This is dangerous, and I have reached out to people I know in the news business to see if we can talk about what the issues are and ways we might address them. I will be writing about this in future posts, and I hope you will join the conversation in the weeks and months ahead.

At Last, Chris Christie Gets a Job Offer

After months of disappointment, the New Jersey governor is said to finally be in line for a top administration job. According to unidentified sources, Donald Trump will appoint New Jersey Governor Chris Christie his official food taster, a position President Franklin Pierce discontinued in the 1850s. “Nobody died,” Pierce said at the time, “and my food got cold.”

The position was apparently rediscovered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who recommended Christie, the man who sent his father to prison a decade ago.

It represents a stunning turnaround for Christie, following a series of stinging defeats that had caused many to write him off. Last summer Trump offered the New Jersey governor the vice presidential spot on his ticket, only to take it back and give it to Mike Pence. Trump later named Christie to lead his transition team, but last week he summarily sacked him and handed that job too over to Pence. This time Christie seems safe. Pence said he has no interest in the position. “My plate’s full.”

Christie was thrilled, saying “I get to sit beside Mr. Trump at every meal.” He vehemently denied he had ever called the president-elect an “Indian giver” and compared his job’s importance to that of the Minister of Public Enlightenment, a portfolio that recently went to Stephen K. Bannon.

“Mr. Trump makes all his decisions in his gut,” Christie said, “and let me assure the American people that nothing is getting into Mr. Trump's gut that hasn’t gone through mine first.”

A Tribute to Our Children

Wednesday morning’s headline came like a punch to the solar plexus. For my children, though, and many of their friends and children of my friends, the election results came as more than a momentary loss of breath. They were devastated. “I’m terrified and so deeply sad,” a young friend texted me.

They had recoiled from Trump’s 18 months of bigotry and bullying tone, from his ugly threats and innuendo, and his victory could not erase that history. And there was, I think, something more: this seemingly endless campaign barely spoke to issues that concerned them. The air was so filled with immediate grievances that the future was ignored.

All politicians pay lip service to the future, but only the young have to worry about it. The solvency of social security in 50 years matters far more to them than to me, as do the cost of college and the size of the national debt. And then there is the state of the earth and its relentless warming, which is very real to my children – but which for Trump and the entire Republican Party is a subject of derision.

Now that Trump is president-elect, what are we to make of his rhetorical bile? Was it campaign tactics or is this the character of the man? There is simply no good answer to that question, but yesterday’s meeting with President Obama gives me hope of an orderly transition and a resilient system.

Most of all, though, I take heart from my children and their friends. They are seeing that the arc of their lives is not so orderly and preordained that they can live removed from the world. And each is resolved to become more involved in the public space – and to build and share a commons with people with whom, on the surface, they may seem to have little in common.

The Long Drive Home

Well, I didn’t do much good in Pennsylvania. When I arrived last week, the now-disparaged polls had Hillary up by four points. When I left yesterday, Trump had carried the state. Note to Democratic Party: Don’t send Blaines to swing states (I use the plural because my sister and brother-in-law went too). Meanwhile, while I was in Pennsylvania, my own district in northern Maine cast its single electoral vote for Donald Trump. Food for thought for eleven hours in the car. The voters spoke. The system wasn’t rigged. And Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States. He appealed to millions of people who don’t like where this country is headed, and he gave voice, he says, to “the forgotten men and women” of America. That’s a good thing. We should listen. As the saying goes, we really should get out more.

But over the last few months I have also met people who are not so much forgotten as invisible, who keep getting sent back to the end of the line, which, if campaign rhetoric is to be believed, may soon be forming in Mexico for some of them. And somehow the state of America – our broken borders and seething cities, our crumbling morals and crushing debt – is their fault.

We need to look for common ground, not scapegoats.

“What happens,” Langston Hughes asked 65 years ago, “to a dream deferred?”

After a campaign with so much ugliness, I drove home listening only to music, or to nothing at all, to silence. No news, no analysis, no talking heads. Near the end of the long drive, the radio played 12 German Dances by Franz Schubert. I’d never heard them before. Truth be known, I’m tone deaf. But they were beautiful.

And where there is that kind of beauty, there is surely hope.

Notes from the Field

Sometimes I think God sent Donald Trump to help me get comfortable with my mortality. He has poisoned the civic discourse in ways from which we won’t soon recover. But I’ll be shuffling off this mortal coil far sooner than the younger people who will have to clean up his mess.

That’s just one statistically irrelevant thought from my last few days canvassing in the field.

Another is that many people like me – old, white and male – don’t like Hillary Clinton very much, and they’re not very civil about it. “She should be in prison” has become their reflexive refrain. If you call them on the phone, they just hang up. You get kind of tired of old white men after a while.

Especially compared with my conversations with immigrants, often voting for the first time. They’re excited to be citizens, to be Americans, and to vote – although several were afraid of being challenged at the polls.

This didn’t seem a future to fear. It seemed the future that has always defined America at its best, a future I’d actually like to hang around for.

What a contrast to those who can’t get past our imperfect choices, as if we have ever had anything else in politics – “I’m voting for Donald Duck,” a man said yesterday. Great.

Finally, those who will vote for a third party might consider what the Libertarian vice-presidential candidate told CNN yesterday:

“I do see a big difference between the two other candidates,” said Bill Weld. “Trump . . . is totally unfit to be president, [while Clinton is] is a perfectly reputable, professional, responsible candidate for president of the United States and deserves to be treated as such. . . . Frankly, I think Mrs. Clinton has been receiving a pretty raw deal.”

In the last few days I’ve seen the past and I’ve seen the future. I like the future better.

The Real Fall Classic

We have heard a lot lately about what disasters our cities are, particularly the old industrial centers that were once the backbone of American manufacturing. Often the stories are told by people who don’t go near the places they describe, as if our inner cities were foreign and far away and easily forgotten. This discomfort with urban America isn’t new. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” wrote Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, his 1906 exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry and its impoverished immigrant work force. And Time magazine once wrote of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, so overloaded with industrial waste it used to regularly catch fire, that it “oozes rather than flows.”

The two cities are back in the news. At 8:08 this evening, the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians will open the 2016 World Series in Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland. As you undoubtedly know by now, this is an historic series. The Indians were last world champions in 1948, when Larry Doby and Satchel Paige became the first African American players to win series rings. The Cubs haven’t won in 108 years.

They are two of the original major league teams. Cleveland began in 1900, the Cubs two years later. They play in inner-city parks within walking distance of the neighborhoods, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field was built over a century ago.

I’m rooting for the Cubs because they have been cursed for so long, but in truth I’m more excited by the resurgence of two old teams and their two gritty cities, bright rays of hope in an often-gloomy fall.

I Didn’t Know It Was an Option

My life has not been the same since Grover Cleveland stole the election from James G. Blaine in 1884. It was a close campaign, “marred,” according to Wikipedia, “by exceptional political acrimony and personal invective,” something quite unusual in American political history. Cleveland, it turned out, had sired an illegitimate child, while Blaine had some unfortunate issues with a few railroad bonds. This led partisan zealots to call a man, long known as the plumed knight, “the continental liar from the state of Maine.” This was not good for the brand. Nobody got a majority. Spoilers from the Prohibition and Anti-Monopoly parties combined for almost 3% of the total vote, and the election itself came down to New York, which Cleveland (who just happened to be governor) carried by 1,047 votes out of 1,171,312 cast. That’s less than one one hundredth of one percent.

Ah, we have witnesses to the nefarious activities that took place in New York City’s heavily Irish neighborhoods, where Tammany Hall ruled with an iron fist, doling out jobs and liquor in exchange for votes – where the air was rife with stories of men literally rising from the dead to cast a vote for Cleveland.

Blaine gracefully accepted his narrow defeat, as that was the custom in those days, and Cleveland went on to govern well. I don’t think it occurred to Blaine that he had another option. He had devoted his life to government and to a political system in which he believed – and 19 years after Appomattox, he also knew how fragile that system could be.

Threats and Issues

It was 80 degrees in New York City last evening, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded and, said the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “2016 has really blown that [record] out of the water.” If the history of this presidential campaign is any guide, global warming – or any environmental issues, for that matter – will not be the subject of much discussion in tomorrow night’s debate. This would be unbelievable, given the worldwide focus on such issues, except the campaign debates so far have been pretty much devoid of any issues.

Hillary Clinton’s website lays out her policies on climate change, which she calls “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. It threatens our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures.”

Donald Trump’s website, on the other hand, not only has no policy position on climate change, it has no position on any environmental issues whatsoever. He is, however, on record as saying that "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

This would be laughable had it not been tweeted by the Republican candidate for president. I’m not suggesting that we all must agree on issues. On the contrary, democracy is based on the free exchange of competing ideas. Trump’s campaign, however, doesn’t traffic in ideas. Instead, insults have been substituted for issues and thinly veiled threats have become the response to disagreement.

This is dangerous territory.

A Good Man

In all his adult life I don’t think my stepfather ever voted for a Democrat – and he lived in Massachusetts where Republicans have long been hard to find. He was conservative in almost all things. He wore gray suits, button-down shirts, and ties with regimental stripes. He became a stockbroker when he married my mother and only invested in blue-chip stocks. He was shot down on his 13^th mission (which made him superstitious forever after) and spent the last year of World War II in a German prisoner-of-war camp – the same camp where The Great Escape had earlier taken place. But by the time he got there everyone was close to starving, including the guards. Back home, he was presumed dead. After the war, he took almost no part in public affairs and was deeply unsettled by the radical changes that came over the country in the 1960s.

He disliked big government, which he associated with the Democratic Party. And every April when he sat at his desk to do his taxes, he grumbled about the IRS and its exasperating forms. But he never complained about actually paying his taxes, nor tried to pay less than he owed. I asked him about that once, and he said simply that he was grateful to have the money to pay his taxes and it was his duty to do so.

He died at the age of 70 after a painful five-year battle with cancer, and not once during that time did I hear him complain about his misfortune.

Dispatch from Mexico City: ¡Ponga esa Pared!

Put up that wall! Pronto! Deeply anonymous sources are suggesting that the real reason for building the wall along the Rio Grande is to keep Americans from fleeing a Trump presidency. In addition, Mexican immigrants, at least some undocumented, continue to “pour” across the border, heading south. Many of them are probably not the best people – “people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us (sic). They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” As a result, Mexico is reportedly considering paying its share the costs.

Numbers tell the story: according to a study by the Pew Research Center, a million Mexicans went home from America between 2009 and 2014, while only 870,000 came north. In addition, American citizens now make up 75% of all documented foreigners in Mexico, and they are increasing faster than Mexicans in the U.S.

“It’s one thing when they come to our beaches and stay in our resort hotels,” said Jorge Rodriguez, sipping coffee at a sidewalk café. “But now they’re refusing to go home. We need a wall. ”

In other news, the FBI is reportedly looking for a 400-pound man or woman as a “person of interest” in last summer’s hacking into the DNC’s emails. The person is believed to spend a lot of time in the bedroom and be a computer whiz.

Meanwhile, carbon dioxide passed the 400-ppm threshold, probably for good. Since we are in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, hardly anyone noticed.

A Wandering Mind: Thoughts on Language

My mind wandered during Monday’s debate, as I grew weary of listening to one man’s rambling refusal to recognize any source of knowledge or wisdom beyond his “gut.” Doing so is the purpose of education – and Donald Trump seems to have missed a few classes. A friend of mine believes that this election is payback for a public education system that no longer turns out students grounded in civics, history and literature. The result is millions of voters unable to see through the hologram that is the Republican candidate.

I believe the current educational insistence on quantitative inputs that produce quantifiable outputs a computer can grade denies children a vast range of possibilities to explore the world with their imaginations. Robert Macfarlane writes that the Oxford Junior Dictionary now includes “MP3 player”, “voice-mail” and “chatroom” but has dropped “heron”, “otter” and “pasture”. Instead of “blackberry” we have “Blackberry”, a change the editors justify because modern children spend so little time outside.

“Technology is miraculous,” writes Macfarlane in Landmarks, “but so too is nature – and this aspect of the world’s wonder seems under threat of erasure in children’s narratives, dreams and plots.”

But there are seeds of hope. My local paper’s lead story tells of opening day at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School on Great Cranberry Island, closed since 2000 due to a lack of students. Reopening a 13-student school is not the conventional notion of progress, but perhaps these kids’ intimate explorations of island life will save more words from extinction – and so provide a small step toward reinvigorating our civic discourse.