This is a talk by Timothy Snyder, historian at Yale, about why the press matters.
Dear Reporters, Investigative Journalists, Fact Checkers, Columnists, Bloggers, First Amendment Practitioners and Supporters,
The acknowledged cold-blooded murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and critic of the Saudi regime should outrage everyone who values the First Amendment and the rule of law. Columnists and editorial writers have noted how President Trump’s attacks on journalists and facts and love of authoritarian heads of state have helped to create the poisonous atmosphere that allows haters of a free expression to feel licensed to intimidate, imprison and kill.
If you haven’t yet seen it, take a few minutes to watch Yale Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder’s talk, “Reporters, the Heroes of Our Time,” which was posted in March 2018, but is most timely at this time: “Without the people who seek facts, we can forget about justice, freedom, and equality”:
The attachment has links to many of his talks on events since the 2016 U.S. election.
Sincerely,
Erich Martel
Retired Wash., DC high school history teacher
(1969-2011: Cardozo HS, Wilson HS, Phelps ACE HS)
ehmartel@starpower.net
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Trump never gives a speech at a rally in which he fails to stoke hatred for the press among his Trumpeteers.
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and, from what I’ve read, he is also stoking a growing interest from students looking for a career: journalism classes are full. I hope this is true
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Trump hates anyone and anything that he cannot control, that might reveal who he really is. So, what does Traitor Trump do, everything possible to cast doubt on those that speak the truth?
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I couldn’t agree more with what this professor is saying -for a lot of reasons. A lot.
A few thoughts, however:
In an age dominated by tweet storms, photo ops, memes and 15 second campaign attack ads, I have to wonder how this message can’t help but get lost in the electronic weeds…or digital rainforest, more like it?
How could some of these very important ideas be formatted to reach a wider audience? I’m thinking about what Tony Schwartz, the “father of the daisy ad for the Johnson campaign”, taught about ‘guerilla media’.
I’m watching this YouTube video which is, what, about 15 minutes long. And, even I find my brain drifting off. And, I’m someone who reads A LOT, who loves newspapers and can focus on projects for long stretches of time. etc…. etc.. It makes me wonder what this fast paced, quick cut, high def, YouTube way of life is doing to this insides of my head? And, more importantly, the brains of our kids?? (I’m now seeing the touch screen generation sitting in front of me in class each day….they’ve been immersed in all this high tech life stuff since birth….maybe even before, if that’s possible.)
“What hath God wrought”…..-indeed.
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I’m showing my age here but I just had to find the clip from David Bowie’s “Man Who Fell to Earth”….the one where he watches the 12 TV screens at once while Blue Bayou plays in the background. I’d watch that movie again and maybe the film Idiocracy if I had the time. In hindsight both were prescient, sad to say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxmU61TTQoA
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Vice News had the story of the Turkish journalists that broke the story of the murder in the Saudi consulate. They did it the old fashioned way. They investigated and talked to people. They also reviewed copies of security and traffic cameras. We need journalists that go the extra mile to find the truth.
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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Northern NM Press Women, and listen to Inez Russell Gomez speak about journalism in the face of current threats. Inez is the editor of our locally owned paper, The Santa Fe New Mexican. It was an excellent discussion. Inez emphasized the need to publish original pieces, such as the White House Anonymous letter, so that readers can decide for themselves without the lens or filter of 2nd or 3rd parties. This is especially critical nowadays when competing ideologies can’t even agree on what a fact is. But what stopped me in my tracks was the speculation in the journalism community that Khashoggi’s brutal murder is the real reason Nikki Haley abruptly resigned. She was privy to intel info detailing the murder on 10/2, and that is what led to the resignation letter on 10/9. Sounds quite plausible. If any of you are local, in December, 52 journalists from around the world will join local writers for a conference, Journalism under Fire. The schedule for the event can be found at https://www.sfcir.org/journalism-under-fire/.
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What concerns me is that billionaires club owns many media outlets. I wonder about the possible slant in reporting. Where do we go to find honest news? Much of what we see is propaganda for someone. I wish they would stick to facts and get rid of the editorializing. I also wonder how much real news is hidden under the carpet because it doesn’t fit the bias of the entertainment mogul. I value a free press, but I acknowledge the need to be careful. Look at the reporting of education and how lacking in substance that is. It is scary. Who should we trust?
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This is increasingly true. NPR, for crying out loud, runs pro-ed-deform pieces all the time now because of all the money that it gets from Gates.
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Trust me. I’m not on anyone’s payroll.
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I follow you because of that. I appreciate your honesty.
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Trust smart, well-educated, professional journalists with integrity like most of those at the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
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Those newspapers and major magazines like The New Yorker have fact checkers.
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It is the soldier, not the reporter, that brings us freedom of the press.
It is the sailor, not the preacher, that brings us freedom of religion,
It is the airman, not the attorney, that brings us the right to have an attorney.
etc.
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Sounds good but too simplistic. Those goosestepping North Koreans have nothing to do with a free press. We may fight to protect our rights, yes.
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Was it soldiers who marched to Versailles and brought Louis XVI back to Paris? Was it soldiers who,drew up the United States constitution, guaranteeing freedom of the press? Was it soldiers who outlawed the military in the only stable Central American democracy, Costa Rica?
You are correct in one way. If the military does not guarentee the rights and freedoms we cherish, then they go away. The same is true for a dozen other societal institutions, all of which are the legs and bracing that hold up a free society bound by law.
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The dialogues below illustrate why the press and the Democratic Party must start taking on the role of EDUCATORS. There is widespread ignorance about the issues.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that Repugnicanism, under Donald Trump, has morphed into something very like a religious cult. Why do I think this? Well, the roughly 35 percent of the population that belongs to this cult is completely impervious to reason or evidence. Conversations with these people go something like this:
Typical Conversation One
ME: We should start naming hurricanes after the politicians who deny anthropogenic global warming.
TRUMPETEER: Right. That’s stupid. Like politicians cause the weather.
ME: By burning fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If you add carbon dioxide to air, and the heat from an external source, the sun, remains the same, the air heats up. A sixth-grade science experiment will show this. Take two bottles full of air, and place a thermometer in each. Add carbon dioxide to one of the bottles. Shine identical heat lamps onto them. The thermometer in the bottle with the carbon dioxide will show a higher temperature. When you heat up a fluid, like air or water, it moves. Heat is, after all, nothing but molecules moving due to their kinetic energy. It’s easy enough to demonstrate this. Put a pot of water on the stove, turn on the heat, and watch. This is a preschool science experiment. When the atmosphere and ocean are heated up, they move more, and so we get bigger, more powerful storms of longer duration.
TRUMPETEER: This is not proven. It’s a hoax.
ME: I just explained this to you. This isn’t difficult to understand.
TRUMPTEER: Boy, you’ll believe any crazy thing, won’t you?
YUP: Crazy stuff like science.
Typical Conversation Two
ME: It’s time for us to enact universal, single-payer health insurance.
TRUMPETEER: Ha! The administration just released a report saying that Sanders’s proposal would BANKRUPT the country, that it would cost 10.7 percent of GDP by 2022.
ME: Uh, we’re already paying a lot more than that. According to the latest figures I’ve seen, in 2013, healthcare costs in the United States were 17.1 percent of GDP.
TRUMPETEER: Yeah? Well, under our system, we have the best healthcare.
ME: Of all the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—you know, countries like Canada and Japan and Germany and Denmark and so on—the United States has the highest infant mortality, the lowest longevity, and the highest rates of all the diseases of affluence.
TRUMPTEER: Yeah, but people come here from other countries to be treated.
ME: Yes, rich people do, because we have some of the best treatment facilities that money can buy. But that’s just the point. Many millions of Americans can’t buy these services.
TRUMPETEER: Yeah, right. We need a system like they have in Venezuala. That really worked with them.
ME: ALL of the countries in the OECD have some sort of government-provided, universal care system.
TRUMPETEER: That’s Communism.
ME: That’s just name-calling.
TRUMPETEER: Death panels!
ME: You can’t call what they have in France or Finland or Japan Death Panels. That’s nonsensical. Again, the OECD countries have BETTER OUTCOMES and spend less than HALF what we do per capita.
TRUMPETEER: Make America Great Again!
ME: That’s what I’m suggesting.
TRUMPETEER: Libtard snowflake idiot.
ME: Sigh.
Again, the press and the party need to do more EDUCATING of the citizenry. The DEMs should be running ads, for example, with five-year-olds demonstrating how global warming works with simple science experiments. Trump is only possible because of widespread ignorance, and that’s the problem that needs to be addressed.
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Great dialogues, but I think it’s worse than ignorance, it’s learned in the context of some form of abuse: poverty, neglect, derision, fear, etc. Ironically and incongruously in a big way, Trump remains perpetually caught up in this. Probably the same can be said for Gotti, and lots of gang leaders and members.
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You remind me (by the way, this is way off the political subject) of the effect that reading Plato’s dialogues had on me when I was first beginning to teach. I at once realized that all of the professors I valued when I was young taught used this Socratic dialogue to teach in some way.
Not surprisingly, education people have recently (in the last couple of decades) begun promoting “Socratic Seminars” as methods for instruction. If you read those dialogues, you will find the Students raising questions, Socrates responding with questions or answers that lead logically to the answer to the original question. As a percentage of time spent, Socrates dominates the conversation with his understanding and his wisdom. Not so in the Socratic Seminar as envisioned by education people. They are bound and determined that the students are going to do all the talking.
Until we teach students what authority sounds like, we will not succeed in avoiding modern conservatism and its acceptance of false prophets. Ironically, the Jesus loved by many conservatives was said in the scripture to have had this authority in contrast to the scribes and Pharises.
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Yes. Yes. Yes. Education has always been, since long before there were schools, the means by which people who know something pass this knowledge of their culture along to people who don’t yet. This is a freaking SACRED mission. It dismays, sickens, and then angers me to hear Ed School people pooh poohing this. Education is cultural transmision.
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If you know how to make guitars and violins, then you can teach the necessary descriptive and procedural knowledge to people who don’t yet. That will ensure that in the next generation, there will be luthiers. And yes, Socratic dialogue is one of MANY useful tools for doing that, but as you point out, in those dialogues, it is very clear who is directing the conversation and has the important stuff to impart.
If you don’t have knowledge to impart, then you should not be teaching. It’s that simple.
It’s truly mind-blowing that we’ve come to time in which there are actually education “professionals” who don’t think that possession of knowledge to be imparted is one of the essential, defining characteristics a “teacher.”
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What I have encountered in Ed circles is the idea that we should set children up with readings and excel isles to “discover” what we are trying to teach. I am told there is one prof locally who will not allow young teachers who do not subscribe to this method to pass through the gate. He is his own St. Peter.
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Well, you’re exactly right, Bob, but the question your cogent dialogues raise, impolite though it may be, is this: are Trump’s supporters, like the man himself, simply too ignorant, or even stupid, to understand the scientific method and respects the empirical evidence it produces?
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Yes, I needed to rewrite that before posting it, because it seems I’m saying contradictory things there. I do think that people are educable. The Democratic Party seems not to think so, because they devote almost no resources to doing that. They need to rethink this. One way to succeed on these issues is to make education on them ubiquitous. At some point, if you make the teaching simple enough, people will become ashamed of having these troglodyte opinions because too many people will have laughed in their faces. Social sanction is a powerful force.
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Oh, I definitely agree with you that the Democrats haven’t done a great job communicating their message. Thanks for posting it, Bob–it’s first-rate and something the Democratic Party, especially its media people–need to hear.
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Yes, Bob. As the Colombian president said recently, the world needs pedagogues, not demagogues. The Dem I’m supporting now may be going down in flames because of attack ads that say he’s attacking healthcare. Opposite land! His Republican opponent tried to torpedo Obamacare; the Dem is for Medicare-for-All. But when the voter has ZERO background knowledge in his head, this ludicrous claim seems plausible. These lies are the only “facts” in his head, and he votes accordingly. This is why our current Ignorance Curriculum is dooming democracy. Background knowledge is ballast against lies. You and I would dismiss these attack ads because we know that Democrats are the ones who want to expand coverage, and that the Republicans have spend the last 8 years trying to kill Obamacare with zero replacement plan. But a staggering number of people I’ve met have no notion of what “Democrats” and “Republicans” even mean; not even a rough idea. Empty heads have no immunity to lies. Dems need huge armies of Jesuit-caliber canvassers armed with vivid, graphic-intensive flip books to provide remedial background knowledge, explain how things really are, and preach the gospel of Democrats so as to immunize voters from the Republicans’ lies, and to give the hordes of disaffected non-voters a compelling reason to register and vote (see this https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/despite-rampant-voter-enthusiasm-the-reality-many-dont-plan-to-vote-in-november/2018/10/17/d2773a9a-cbda-11e8-920f-dd52e1ae4570_story.html?utm_term=.c128b90ce7a6. )
What the Dem strategists in my district are doing falls so far short of this. The persuasion piece is perfunctory. It’s “Are your registered to vote?” Easy escape for the passerby: “No.” Give them a reason to register before you ask them that!! Also data gathering on phone-based PDI (invidious tech) is privileged over effective rhetoric and teaching. Weak, weak, weak.
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Dems need huge armies of Jesuit-caliber canvassers armed with vivid, graphic-intensive flip books to provide remedial background knowledge
yes yes yes yes yes
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WordPress doesn’t have a LOVE button for your post, Ponderosa. So: <B
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Thanks, Bob. The Dem I’m supporting, along with the campaign staff he’s hired, are bright young people with Ivy League pedigrees. But I really wonder whether they have the wherewithal to play politics effectively. I worry that their PC bubble/safe zone education leaves them stunned and confused when faced with a radically different real world (they often look stunned and confused). Foremost among the things they don’t grasp: what working class people are really like. How to talk to non-Ivy humans. They remind me of TFA kids –convinced that their high grades, youth and general fabulousness guarantees them success at anything they put their hand to. And then they face the buzzsaw of real classrooms and scramble for the exits after their two-year stint is done. I’m really worried about this class of elite college graduates, especially when they try their hand at politics. Since early on, they’ve been segregated from the masses by tracking or zip code and they have no idea how different the C/D students of the world (the majority) really are. They think politics should be a civil discussion of queer theory, when, in fact it’s a smash mouth war to dragoon enough low-information voters to the polls to reach 51%. They assume wonky policy details about Senate bills will have an impact on voters, when what voters first need is an explanation of what the Senate is and does. When all you talk about in college is race and gender, race and gender is the only thing you see. That’s fatal. Do they have the wherewithal to marshal the masses to the Democrats’ side? I really worry.
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The pot(us) calling the kettle fake.
When did we become San Marcos?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/carl-bernstein-trump-preparing-to-call-midterm-elections-illegitimate-if-democrats-take-power
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Trump provides slogans to his loyalists He allows and encourages parrot-head responses from his loyalists. No insult to parrots intended.
I once had two talking parrots. They were part of a larger collection of animated toys. When activated, my parrot would repeat anything I said. When I turned on the second parrot the two would go on and on repeating my initial comment.
Trump thrives on giving tax breaks, with some for the middle-class scheduled to be read before the midterms. Everything in his world is about money and power. Reasoning and criticism are not allowed. This dictatorship must end.
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