What’s Wrong With Mainstream Media?

Sometimes I watch TV news programs in the evening, the much-maligned “mainstream media”. Lately the main subject has been scandals involving Donald Trump: adultery with a porn star and a Playboy model involving mysterious payoffs, and the long-running investigation of his and his campaign’s Russian connections. These are both complicated issues, involving his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, the “National Enquirer”, Sean Hannity, and many others.

Scandals involving an American President are genuine news. And these are genuine scandals. Although Trump and his allies constantly cry “Fake News!” the reporting about his ever-increasing problems has been professional and factual. The only things that have been fake have been the lies told by Trump and Co., which keep collapsing under the weight of new disclosures.

These are certainly headline stories. But the major TV news programs focus nearly exclusively and obsessively on the latest revelations, no matter how inconsequential. The announcement that Rudy Giuliani would be joining Trump’s defense team prompted countless long-winded speculations about why Giuliani was selected, what he might do, etc., etc. I’ve watched as one news hour with Famous Reporter A faded into the next news hour with Famous Reporter B, each inviting Expert C, D, and E to comment on the same bit of news.

Isn’t anything else happening in the world?

Contrast this TV “news” experience with reading a national newspaper. After Page One’s top stories, an international section offers a look at the world, where wars in Syria and Afghanistan and Niger involve American soldiers risking their lives. Remarkable political changes are happening on the Korean peninsula between North and South.

A national section offers stories about a day in American life, mostly outside of Washington, not involving famous politicians, but important to our own lives. Public school teachers are waging an unprecedented nationwide battle for decent school funding. In every state, local politicians are preparing for elections in November, which might result in an historic shift in national politics. Violations of the privacy of millions of people threaten to bring down some of the biggest companies on earth. The economy, whose fluctuations affect us all directly, is booming now, but warning signs are scary.

Not to mention all the interesting and sometimes significant news about popular culture, sports, housing, and health that might interest you and me.

Although the folks around Trump seek to kill the messenger with accusations of fake news, lack of evidence is not a problem with the major news channels. The weakness of mainstream TV news is the obsession with scandal, the endless repetition of information, and the stretch into speculation in order to keep talking about one all-consuming story. The relatively new format of warring political commentators offering openly partisan remarks about every issue does a disservice to those of us who just want to know what’s going on. These “experts” give us contrasting spins, rather than reasoned analysis. The newscaster has become a host asking questions, rather than a voice who can be trusted to tell us all sides of an issue based on the latest facts.

It may be no surprise that I prefer a newspaper as a source of real news. Instead of celebrities who have just come out of the make-up room to center stage, real news is better conveyed by journalists on the ground, not anonymous but not famous, not glamorous but well informed, trying to convey the truths they have discovered. Instead of TV producers with ratings on their minds deciding which few stories to broadcast, newspapers give us a wide choice of readings, each with much more information than anything broadcast on TV.

Long ago, Pew Research Center contrasted TV and newspaper news stories. They found that TV news offers more personality and less policy, and focuses more on the media themselves.

But the news about newspapers is discouraging. Since 2000, the number of newspaper firms in the US has fallen from 6200 to below 4500. Advertising revenue has dropped by two-thirds. I know that most of the best newspapers are shrinking in coverage as their staffs get cut. The “Denver Post” recently announced a 30% cut in newsroom staff, after many other recent cuts. There have been significant staff cuts at papers in Los Angeles, Montana, Jacksonville, FL, San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, OR, and Chicago, just to mention this year’s bad news.

I get my news from print journalists whom I read on my computer. The internet allows me to sample good writing on whatever topic I am working on from all over the world. I can easily check whether some story or piece of evidence has been made up by somebody or is being reported by many reputable journalists. I also subscribe to my local newspaper and to the NY Times. Wherever I am, I buy a newspaper.

That costs more than my “free” TV news. But you get what you pay for.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, April 24, 2018

The Extremism of NRA Politics

For reasons we will puzzle over for decades, the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, provoked a mass political movement of young Americans, when all the other horrific school massacres did not. Gun politics is, at least now, big news.

Whenever public discussion of guns breaks into our daily lives, the NRA raises its voice, ostensibly to protect its interpretation of the Second Amendment. The NRA leadership must be especially concerned this time, since they are paying for a nationwide TV campaign,  “NRA: Freedom’s Safest Place”. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre says the NRA’s political ideology “evokes the patriotism, freedom, history, traditions and struggles of ‘we the people’.”

I have no argument with the right of the NRA, or anybody else, to proclaim its interpretation of American law about guns. The only “we the people” who count for LaPierre are the minority who support the NRA.

But gun rights are not the main subject of the NRA’s current political intervention. Below the surface of public statements about gun legislation, the NRA sells its members a disturbing critique of our society. Under the title “Standing Guard | Colleges Spread Anti-Gun Sentiment” on the NRA website, LaPierre says this about American higher education. Every sentence is worth notice.

“American freedom faces no greater threat than from our academic institutions, where the most basic fundamental principles upon which our nation was founded are aggressively attacked by extreme socialists posing as honest professors. Principles upon which America has become the greatest nation in the world—constitutional freedom, free-market capitalism and individual responsibility—have been replaced with Marxism, socialism and a perverse culture of politically correct societal collectivism. We know that, at the end of the day, the wave of socialism we face threatens all of our freedoms and could very well destroy our nation.

Make no mistake. Their goal is not just to create a campus of socialism. They lust for a nation of socialism. They’ll warp every young mind they can get their hands on, to pervert the American values we hold dear to create a brand new, socialist voter to send to the polls. If their socialist takeover is successful, they’ll do everything they can to render Trump ineffective, with an end goal to replace him with a screaming socialist in 2020. And then they’ll come for us … for our freedom and for our guns. That is the tsunami of socialism that threatens every law-abiding gun owner and freedom-loving American in this country.”

In the NRA’s magazine, “American Hunter”, this statement of principle appears under a more threatening title: “Our Colleges are Breeding Grounds for Socialists Who Will Take Our Guns”.

This is not mainly about guns. LaPierre’s America is mortally threatened by organized socialists and brain-washed youth, echoes of Joseph McCarthy in 2018.

During the 1950s, politicians who doubted McCarthy’s crazy charges, but who thought their personal political interests could be served by being quiet, created a federal government that embodied exactly what McCarthy and his ilk supposedly warned about: an ideological state which ignored the Constitution and used the law to punish political opponents. By the time a few courageous politicians raised critical voices, government had damaged the lives of civil rights activists, labor leaders, writers, filmmakers, and teachers.

Are we repeating a terrible history? Our Republican-dominated government takes the NRA’s cash and praises its stance on gun rights. The biggest Congressional recipients of NRA money are all Republicans: 51 Republicans in the Senate and 41 in the House get more NRA dollars than any of their Democratic colleagues.

Politicians who praise the NRA also implicitly endorse LaPierre’s extremist rejection of American society. They support the accusation that college campuses, including those in their districts, teach revolutionary socialism and hatred for American institutions. They believe that “academic elites are brainwashing our youth like never before.” They agree that “every freedom-loving American” is endangered by a home-grown socialist conspiracy. They fear the greatest threat to our freedom: “our academic institutions”.

My congressman, Darin LaHood, is running for reelection this year. He proudly announced that the NRA gave him an A-rating, saying, “I am grateful for the NRA’s support.” He accepted $1000 from them, as did all of the other six Republican congressmen from Illinois. LaHood’s page on gun control on his website is mainly about how much he appreciates the NRA.

Mr. LaHood, please tell the voters in our District whether you support the NRA’s broader political ideology, as announced by its spokesman and published in its official media.

Do you think that socialists have “hijacked” the institutions of higher learning in Illinois? Do you believe that Illinois faculty are promoting communism out of a “lust for a nation of socialism”? Will a “wave of socialism” will “destroy our nation”? Or do you think that NRA propaganda is itself dangerous?

Are you willing to defend the men and women who teach in our state’s and our nation’s colleges and universities from NRA accusations?

Republican and Democratic politicians who oppose restrictions on gun rights, also need to be clear about their stance on NRA political extremism. If your congressman is supported by and supports the NRA, does he (nearly all are “he”) also endorse the NRA’s radical rejection of contemporary American life?

The NRA is not protecting the Second Amendment, it is attacking America. Do they agree?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, April 17, 2018

Science Isn’t Always Scientific

The name Asperger is widely known as a syndrome related to autism. The label honors Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger (1906-1980), an Austrian pediatrician who studied mental disorders in children in the 1930s and early 1940s. His diagnosis of “autistic psychopathy” related to social detachment was eventually given professional approval in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (called DSM) in 1994 as Asperger syndrome.

Asperger’s research focused on children who had difficulty making social contact, as in classic autism, but who were also highly intelligent and could lead extraordinarily productive lives. Asperger lauded the later successes of these autistic children, whose “social worth” he promoted. Because many doctors in Austria and Germany believed that genetic abnormalities reduced the worth of a human life, Asperger’s defense of his “Aspies” enabled him to cultivate a lifelong reputation as the friend of the handicapped. He had a long and successful career, eventually becoming chair of pediatrics at the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital and director of children’s clinics.

Asperger’s work was not well known until the 1980s, after he had died. Since then his 1944 discussion of those particular cases of autism has become widely known. His birthday is recognized as “International Asperger’s Day”.

But Asperger had not been so generous with children whose autism was more severe. Like many Nazi doctors, he decided whether handicapped patients were worthy of life, and sent the “unworthy” to their deaths in special institutions of mass murder. In 1942, he was senior pediatrician on a Viennese commission evaluating the status of 210 Austrian children residing in mental hospitals. 35 were judged unfit and were sent to die.

Asperger played a despicable role in a despicable system, participating in murdering children whom he deemed unworthy of life. He deserves no international honor. His name should not be used without an understanding of his deeds.

Does that mean that the condition now called Asperger’s syndrome should also not exist as a medical diagnosis and research subject? The American Psychiatric Association made a purely medical-scientific argument in 2010 that “Asperger’s disorder” no longer be listed as a separate condition in the DSM, which it produces.

Arguments among health professionals about how to diagnose and treat mental illness will probably never end, because there is so much about how our brain works that is unknown. Decisions about how autism functions should be made based on the best science that we can produce today, not on our moral condemnation of Asperger. If he was correct about the nature of his unusual cases, that disorder should have a name, just not his.

His life illustrates how scientific knowledge always has shortcomings: Einstein’s mistakes are legendary, but do not detract from his achievements. The international scientific establishment is designed to improve our understanding of ourselves and our world, by correcting mistakes and oversights in our current knowledge. That is the beauty of science.

But there are many for whom objective scientific inquiry is threatening: producers of ineffective medicines; polluters of air and water; contributors to global warming. Those who do not want to believe the best science use the existence of scientific disagreement to reject science itself. The deniers of evolution and of global warming seek out such disagreements to argue that science itself is wrong and their beliefs are right, despite the evidence.

Right now, the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented political attack on science. Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency discounts scientists whose findings he doesn’t like. Most scientific research is funded by government grants. Pruitt claims that scientists who receive funding from the government are biased and should be replaced on scientific advisory committees by scientists who are funded by the industries that pollute the environment. He wants the EPA to ignore all research where participants were guaranteed that their personal health data would be kept confidential. That means ignoring virtually all large studies of public health, which show the effects of environmental pollution.

Worse than bad science is no science. There is still no director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the longest that job has ever been vacant. Without a director, leadership about science in the White House falls to the deputy assistant, Michael Kratsios, a 31-year-old with a bachelor’s in political science, who has studied voting in Greece and has never done scientific work.

Trump’s new budget request included severe cuts to science in disease control, mental health, environment, oil spills, geology, and, of course, climate.

It is hard for most Americans to judge scientific arguments, especially when people of ill will use clever techniques and obscure jargon to call into question good science. But one doesn’t need specialized knowledge to know that private industry pays for science that supports its private interests, that political ideology distorts scientific reasoning, that we need good science to stay healthy and to keep our society functioning.

Asperger let politics rule his science with tragic results. In Washington, politics again threatens to subvert science. That will have tragic consequences for us and our children.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, April 10, 2018