Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

24 February 2019

Saving Real News

For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

We Americans are losing a three-front war against disinformation and fake news. We are losing badly.

Lately, we’ve focused our attention on the newest front: foreign fake news served over the Internet by the likes of Russia and Iran. But the two most insidious and longstanding sources of disinformation and fake news are native. They grew up right here at home. And each has been expanding in scope and influence for over two generations.

Fox television and its fellow travelers on right-wing radio together comprise the most effective and insidious political propaganda organ in human history. They pioneered three novel techniques that the propaganda machines of Hitler, Stalin and Mao never conceived.

First, although they sometimes make spectacular mistakes, they don’t, as a rule, dish up original lies. Instead, they repeat others’ lies, including those of our president and corporate propaganda organs. That way, they can credibly claim to be serving up the “news” as others said it. Our “mainstream” media encourage this scam by over-relying on quotations from pols and celebrities, rather than doing original research or consulting less famous but more knowledgeable experts.

Second, Fox and friends make their propaganda “fun” and accessible to their target audience: less-educated, mostly male voters. They do so by hiring entertaining blowhards to present it. Again, this technique is something that the “classic” propagandists of the last century never tried. Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda for Hitler, for example, was so highbrow that much of it went over ordinary Germans’ heads.

Not so Fox. Its blowhards practice mind-melding with their target audience of non-college-educated, overly self-assured males, for which the fictional Archie Bunker was a paradigm. The hired blowhards shout. They rant breathlessly. They gesticulate. They exaggerate. They wax sarcastic. They disrespect and ridicule minorities, especially sexual ones. They gang up on specially selected token opposition, reinforcing the group conformity that defines their target demographic. They predict gloom and doom. In every way, they mimic, blend into, and so co-opt their target audience.

Fox’ and Sinclair’s third technique of propaganda is the most clever and insidious of all. They subtly erase the line between fact and opinion, news and commentary. They blend the two together seamlessly, so that only professional journalists and people outside their target audience can see what they’re doing. Not only do they consistently present their own opinions as fact; in so doing, they also train their audience not to recognize the difference between fact and opinion. (A good example of the method is this composite clip, which shows how Fox used the technique under two different presidents, demonizing Obama and lauding Trump for doing precisely the same thing.)

This assault on real news has been going on for about two generations, ever since Rupert Murdoch’s Fox won the commanding heights of cable-television “news.” Rush Limbaugh and other radio-talk-show blowhards extended the technique into audio. Now Sinclair has broadened the empire of zealous right-wing cant with its nascent monopoly of radio in medium-sized cities.

The second major front in the battle against fake news goes mostly unnoticed as such. It’s the battle with the collective propaganda organs of corporate America, or, as the current euphemism has it, their “advertising and public relations.”

Few today recognize non-news corporations as sources of fake news. They fall under most observers’ radar because they specialize. They don’t try to serve up fake news every day, and they don’t cover anywhere near every news topic. Instead, they focus their effort on shading, denying and refuting specific facts that threaten their profits. They make only irregular contact with the general public and keep a narrow focus on specific products that are under threat from the advancement of science and technology. They use fake news to wind back the clock.

Two spectacular successes of corporate fake news illustrate the phenomenon. Both are so well known as to have become part of today’s social fabric.

For nearly half a century, tobacco companies lied about, obfuscated and denied the health effects of smoking tobacco, even as proof in medical and scientific journals piled up. Today, with deaths from smoking just beginning to decline for the first time (due mostly to a drop in smoking), tobacco still kills more people annually than traffic accidents, terrorist attacks and gun violence combined. Yet as a result of its producers’ fake news, tobacco continues to evade plenary regulation as a dangerous controlled substance.

What makes the tobacco story so unusual is that dying from lung cancer, heart disease or emphysema is hardly an abstract or remote political issue. It’s about as personal as any issue can get. It affects smokers, their families, and the health professionals who treat them in a direct and personal way.

Yet despite the large numbers of smokers and ex-smokers who die every year, the tobacco industries’ fake news has held off a coordinated public response to the scourge for well over two generations. Now the battle has shifted to electronic cigarettes, where fake news about their effects on youth and bystanders continues, and the use of electronic cigarettes to help addicted smokers quit muddies the waters.

The story of global warming is less personal but in some ways worse. Last year the New York Times reminded us, in a special report, that American scientists first rang the alarm in the 1970s. Yet purveyors of coal, oil and gas and their byproducts mounted a spectacularly effective fake news campaign. So effective was it that today, coming on half a century later, the United States is the only nation to have withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, and the only major power whose leaders still deny global warming and its source in burning fossil fuels. And it was our own American scientists who had sounded the alarm and had done the leading research in the first place!

A third, more specialized, example of corporate fake news has less longevity. It’s a rare example of positive fake news, as distinguished from the negative fake news that disputes the well established science of cigarette smoke’s assault on human health and carbon dioxide’s assault on our climate. This particular bit of fake news asserts that “clean coal”—in general or in the form of carbon sequestration—is a currently viable technology, rather than a public-relations slogan and a research project.

In fact, there is no such thing today as “clean coal” or carbon sequestration in the real world. The very few carbon-sequestration demonstration projects that have worked at all have proved unsustainable in the long term, as well as much more expensive and polluting than alternative fuels like natural gas.

That’s why private industry in the United States, where “fracking” has made natural gas cheap, has almost universally chosen natural gas as the preferred fuel for generating electricity. Not only is it a cheaper fuel than coal per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. It also produces far less carbon dioxide (the green house gas), particulate pollution and sulfur dioxide (which cause asthma and other respiratory diseases), and mercury pollution of waterways and fish (which concentrates itself up the food chain and makes sushi inappropriate for pregnant women).

The negative fake news about smoking and global warming tries to disclaim ineluctable, eternal truths—the well-proven long-term damage that tobacco smoke does to human health and that fossil-fuel-caused global warming does to our planet’s climate. In contrast, the positive fake news of “clean coal” may not be false forever. One can never be entirely certain that human ingenuity will remain incapable of solving the problem of carbon sequestration and doing it economically. But no one has succeeded so far, after about a decade of serious research. And there are good practical reasons why succeeding has proven elusive. “Clean coal” remains an expensive research project so risky that private industry will not finance it on its own dime but demands that government foot the bill.

So there you have it. Facts, real news and “truth” are on the ropes in the United States of America. Longstanding and immensely powerful private institutions have battered them bloody, and there is no fully public institution strong enough to defend them. (PBS and NPR, which are hardly dominant in their respective small but significant audiences, are only partly funded by government money.)

All this action on the first two fronts of the fake-news war makes the action on the third understandable. Our political sphere has not yet even recognized, let alone come to grips with, the third kind of fake news. That’s weaponized and individualized fake news, served over social media on the Internet, and prepared over the Internet by mining private data to derive the political and psychological profiles of target individuals. Already foreign spooks (Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Internet Research Agency) and domestic political interests (the Mercer Family working with Cambridge Analytica, a British firm) have used this form of fake news to help elect Trump as our president.

As if all this were not horrific enough, traditional purveyors of real news have suffered yet another harsh reality. Their business model is failing. Facebook and other Internet media have sucked up the advertising revenue that newspapers used to depend on. Today Facebook earns “more ad revenue in a year than all American newspapers combined.” And insofar as this third front is concerned, Facebook is a big part of the problem.

So the traditional vendors of real news are suffering and dying like bees in colony collapse. Local newspapers have been and are failing by the hundreds. A vulture capitalist is buying them up and stripping them of their real property. Not a week goes by without reports of journalists losing their jobs.

Today a cold-blooded, clear-eyed assessment suggests that real news could soon disappear in America, if only for lack of independent, respected firms to convey it. Our society and democracy could develop a culture of fake news offered by the rich, the powerful and the devious, and anyone else with an agenda. Outside of college classrooms and corporate boardrooms, what is “reality” could become what hucksters, self-promoters and con-men like our current president say it is.

What, if anything, can we do? It’s far too late to repeal or modify the First Amendment, and doing so would contravene our national character. So we can’t, as China and Iran are doing and India is reportedly considering, hire tens of thousands to censor the Internet or convey official “truth.” And even assuming Mark Zuckerberg has the motivation, by the time he comes to realize how deeply his greed and negligence have wounded our democracy, let alone to conceive and implement effective countermeasures, our democracy may, for all practical purposes, be dead and buried.

We seem to have only one desperate hope of restoring real news in America anywhere near as quickly as we must to save our Republic and our future as a nation built on realism, practicality, and science. We must re-create something like the universal public respect for professional, real news that prevailed when Walter Cronkite ruled the airwaves and three consummately professional TV news channels informed us: ABC, CBS and NBC.

Whatever modern substitutes we anoint or re-create for these services today must likewise be private. The right wing has done such an effective job of destroying public esteem for government that PBS and NPR—media vilified as “left wing” while only partially sustained by public funding—are unequal to the task, at least without assistance.

There are only two private, professional news organizations with enough resources and prestige to rise to the occasion. Both are “print” media, including online. As print media, they foster a “cooler,” more thoughtful and thorough approach to news than video. They are the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Each of these newspapers has managed to create a sustainable financial model from subscription fees. The Washington Post also has Jeff Bezos’ bottomless financial backing. More important, each paper has the kind of broad and deep team of professional journalists, and therefore the broad coverage, that no TV news organization now can sustain.

There are economic downsides to elevating these two private firms to the high place that the three professional TV news media once occupied. Advertising once supported the three TV networks’ news, including advertising on unrelated network entertainment. That advertising made real news free of charge to the viewer. In contrast, subscribing to both the Post and the Times today will cost each subscriber well over $200 per year after promotional periods. That’s a significant sum for many Americans.

Yet subscribing to both papers is essential for those who can afford it, lest one or the other achieve a monopoly. Those who can only subscribe to one will be locked into a single source of news. And both are, in the final analysis, private firms, with all the partiality that implies in our age of privatization and belittled government.

The hour is late, and there are no alternatives. Real news is on life support in America. We need something—anything—to serve as did ABC, CBS, and NBC TV in the last century. We need honest journalists and their real news to connect us all with a common reality on which we can build our individual opinions.

Without that something, we will morph into a social organism with multiple eyes that see differently in different directions, and we will almost certainly die. Supporting a duopoly in real news, as distinguished from the triopoly of TV news in the old days, is a small price to pay for social and political survival.

Broadcast media can nowise fill the gap. The ones that still survive are rapidly succumbing to the breathless sensationalism of Fox, if not its over-the-top partisanship. Even Rachel Maddow is, though she’s by far the best of the lot. Part of the reason is that video and audio are such much less time-efficient than print, so breathlessness comes with their territory.

Rightly or wrongly, broadcast media are also tarred as partisan themselves. The president and his cronies have tried to tar the Post and the Times with partisanship, too, but the charge has not yet stuck, at least among their educated readership. And both go out of their way to avoid the appearance, let alone the reality, of partisanship.

Both also have robust Internet presences and mobile apps. Both have podcasts which, for listeners driving in cars, are the modern equivalent of the old AM radio broadcasts. Both are experimenting with virtual reality and other leading-edge media.

Due to their successful subscription business models, both have the money to expand into new media as technology evolves. More important, as I have outlined in another post, both make much of their news content available for free, in the form of free daily online newsletters and a limited number of free online stories per month.

Compared to the Post, the Times has several flaws, which I have noted in earlier essays (click here or here). It puts far too much emphasis on the arts and on fashion, and far too little on science and engineering. As a result, it has few reporters who understand the rudiments of technology or quantitative analysis. Many of its reporters appear to be frustrated creative writers: they write news stories (even business and political ones) like short stories, in chronological order, instead of the tightly-organized logical order that news, let alone efficient reading, demands. And the Times has hired reporters like Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who mimic Fox in front-page stories, name-calling all likely Democratic presidential candidates as “far left,” without elucidating the many differences among them.

But in these times such sins are peccadillo. We Americans are badly losing the war to keep news real. Today we are losing the war on all three fronts. Therefore we need to recruit every national news service with professional standards to the cause. Despite its failings the Times meets that rather modest criterion.

So we who care about democracy and the real news that supports it must support both remaining professional national newspapers if we can. We must consider the dual subscription fees as a tiny addition to the substantial taxes that we pay for a government that we hope someday will work again. We must consider those fees installment payments on the survival of our Republic.

A Personal Note. I try to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, on at least the most important things discussed on this Blog. For example, I now am able to drive on the Sun’s power, and not with fossil fuels, at least when residing in Santa Fe, where I keep my Chevy Volt.

And so it is with real news. I’ve subscribed to the Post for about a year now. For years I’ve groused about the Times and its deficiencies, including its reluctance to bite the hand that feeds it—Manhattan’s arrogant and high-handed finance-banking culture. But now I’ve subscribed to it, too, on line, even though my fiancée already has a print subscription that we enjoy together whenever we reside in her home.

Along with our donations to public TV and radio, these are our hopeful subsidies, which we make for the survival of American democracy. They are not so much consumer purchases as partial fulfillment of our patriotic duties as citizens.

Biological organisms that cannot see clearly mostly die. We hope that doesn’t happen to America. But today we Americans are, as a society, well on the way to that sorry fate. Our last hope is to pay the freight to keep real news and real journalism alive.

Avoiding Health Lobbying Armageddon

Today a front-page (print) story in the Times predicted lobbying Armageddon, once again, in America. Apparently every professional specialty and trade association involved in health insurance and even health care—doctors, hospitals, medical groups, pharmaceutical makers and distributors, and (of course!) health insurers—is joining in a single innocuously named trade association to lobby against so-called “Medicare for All.” Revealing how money talks in America, they’ve hired a key operative from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to lead their charge.

The focus of this effort is self-evidently self-interest. Private health insurers want to keep their profits. Their executives want to keep their often obscenely high salaries. Ditto private hospitals, private pharmaceutical companies (virtually all of them), and private hospitals and medical groups. They all fear their private, profit-making enterprises being outlawed by government decree. And they will all put their considerable resources, their time, their social clout, and their bodies on the line to keep that from happening.

It all reminds me of my late favorite uncle, a surgeon. He wasn’t interested in business or paperwork. He wanted to use his medical training to help people. So he spent most of his career in the Navy, on active duty. He and his wife both served in World War II and Korea, and he rose to the rank of Captain (the equivalent of colonel in our ground forces) before retiring. Yet when I spoke to him about Medicare in the early seventies, he fulminated about “socialized medicine” and became uncharacteristically unreasonable.

This is what Bernie and his ilk are up against in seeking to phase out private insurance and private medicine: a huuuuge fight. It’s what their socialist forebears got every time they pushed universal health insurance by outlawing private insurance. They got political Armageddon. They had to fight the most effective, well-financed and relentless propaganda machines in human history.

There is another way. I’ve outlined the approach in another post, which got surprisingly few hits, considering its importance. Maybe my timing was wrong, or maybe most Dem presidential candidates have already made up their minds on this make-or-break issue.

But Armageddon is a bad idea, whether it involves nuclear weapons, foot soldiers or lobbyists. Better to avoid it if you can.

Advocates for universal health insurance can do so simply by pushing “Medicare for All Who Want It,” leaving private health insurance safe and intact. Over time, privately insured patients will migrate to the public system because: (1) it will cost less without private profit and with more efficient administration, (2) it will offer lower premiums because it will have a bigger risk pool than any private plan, (3) it’s independent of employment and so fully portable, and (4) it eliminates the constant annoyance and confusion of self-interested advertising and promotion.

Yes, the lobbyists will fight “Medicare for All Who Want It,” too. But they’ll be fighting without their principal rhetorical and political weapons. There won’t be any coercion: patients will have free choice all the way. The many who want to stay right where they are can do so. The transition to government insurance will be gradual, by attrition; both patients and providers, including insurance companies, will have time to adapt. They could have decades, and those decades will pass without notable enrichment of lobbyists, lawyers and other professional advocates.

Best of all, the new law will not contravene human inertia. Voters who like what they have will not have to spend days researching and considering new insurance plans. Insurers can continue doing what they’re doing. Ditto doctors, hospitals, medical groups and pharmaceutical companies. Even members of Congress won’t have to dispute and write transition rules: natural attrition will do the work for them.

Some people like a good fight. Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both appear to be among them. But as much as I admire the latter’s spirit and empathy for suffering people, I think she has a lot to learn.

Getting things done without screaming and stress, like “No-Drama Obama“ at his best, is the highest form of politics. I hope that some of our Democratic presidential hopefuls, at least those who haven’t yet committed themselves, will at least take a look at a softer, smoother plan.

Perhaps part of the reason for neglecting a smoother plan is that it would use taxes for financing. Apparently many pols consider taxing the kiss of death. Certainly GOP propagandists have done their best to make it so.

But taxing for health insurance has three distinct advantages, two practical and one political. First, there is no constitutional objection to taxing; our Sixteenth Amendment allowed Congress to tax incomes over a century ago. Even Chief Justice Roberts, in his decisive concurrence, upheld “Obamacare” by interpreting its mandate-penalty as a tax.

Second, there is no apparent impediment to taxing specially for a specific purpose. A tax imposed for “Medicare for All Who Want It” would be nothing more, in substance, than the fees that Medicare insureds pay for their insurance right now. And the tax/fees could be made progressive: richer insureds could pay more, as even now they do.

Finally, attitudes toward taxes are changing rapidly. The vast majority of voters have seen how Trump paid off himself, his social class, and big corporations with undeserved tax cuts. So public sentiment is rising to use taxes for their original and proper purpose: to promote the general welfare. What could do that better than universal health insurance, which protects individuals and, through “herd immunity,” the community and the nation?

If the taxes for health insurance in fact pay most or all of the cost of providing the health insurance, on an insured-by-insured basis, the common sense of tax financing would be hard to deny. Except to the extent the tax/premium payments were progressive, there would be no transfers or redistribution of wealth at all, just payment by individuals for government services.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

 For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here.
For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here.
For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017
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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 2/24/2019 10:43:00 AM  

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