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Next Comes What
Why Journalists Ignore Reality
00:25:36
Journalism is reverting to a pre-kindergarten state in the face of Trumpism, but we can still get the word out. Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts first: Read the post that...
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You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Over the long weekend, we saw ABC News post a headline that read 54 shot over weekend in Chicago as Governor rejects Trump's Threat to send in National Guard. On the show this week, Martha Raddatz interviewed Maryland Governor Wes Moore about Donald Trump sending troops to D.C. we traveled there this week and walked the streets with Governor Moore and asked him how Democrats are tackling crime while taking on the president. When Moore tried to expl that the.
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National Guard is not trained for municipal.
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Policing, she mentioned an 87% reduction in carjackings, robberies cut by half. Why wouldn't you want that here if that is actually helping? Meanwhile this morning, the New York Times had a much simpler piece that was refreshing in its honesty. That headline read Crime festers in Republican States while their troops patrol Washington. The piece by David Chen noted that Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation's capitol, according to FBI statistics. He pointed out that Nashville also reports a higher rate of violent crime than.
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Washington D.C. according to FBI data, 13 of the 20 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates were in Republican run states.
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Now when I used to teach martial arts and self defense all over the district, some of the programs I designed were for adults and other ones were for children.
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How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?
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Teaching self defense to kids is both simpler and more complicated than working with adults is. Really?
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I didn't see that. You know, I have heard it's sort of crazy.
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Some of the kids I taught in pre K settings were just three or four years old.
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I did numerous shows and also did a number of truths, long truths, I think pretty poignant truths at that age.
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And for years afterward. Kids brains aren't generally capable of abstract thinking.
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That's pretty serious stuff.
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To connect one concrete situation that they see on the ground to bigger ideas.
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Well, it's fake news.
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You can walk them through an example, but give them another situation and their brain just won't tend to draw big picture ideas from it.
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You know, it's just so, it's so fake.
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So today I want to talk about when journalists and public intellectuals revert to that pre kindergarten state and miss the forest for the trees. I want to talk about that old campaign. If you see something, say something.
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I didn't hear that one.
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I want to suggest that appealing to government authorities is unlikely to work in our current deluded national Framework, how's he feeling?
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What's wrong?
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So it's critical for us to speak up about what's happening and hold those reporting on and framing the current crisis for the public eye. We need to hold them to account for what they are pretending not to see.
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I had heard that, but I didn't hear it to that extent.
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When I taught those self defense classes to kids, we would include a few physical techniques because they're empowering for the kids and they're fun for the kids. But we spent far more time on verbal skills because those are really more critical for both children and adults. The challenge of how to get them to recognize someone else's behavior as dangerous when their brains just weren't yet optimized for noticing. That kind of thing was a real project to take on. And the way I developed to handle it was to use role plays, which are pretty standard in teaching any group, but to use them in a new way. The kids had been coached through some specific age appropriate role plays in which a peer or an adult played by me, usually as a teacher, as a coach, or as a neighbor, doing something inappropriate, asking them to keep a secret for just the two of us or something just a little off, but definitely strange. They had already learned some responses from me, usually involving leaving, yelling, or telling someone, or sometimes all of the above. And at that point I would take everything up a notch by including and empowering the whole group that was watching in my head. I called the game Spot the Con. But with the kids, I specifically instructed them to watch for the moment when I was going to try to trick the kid who was doing the role play with me. They could often see that I was trying to fool their classmates before the child doing the scenario with me could see it. This was in part because I was pressuring the kid directly in subtle ways, which really messes with someone's ability to think. I had encouraged the class basically to be a Greek chorus in that situation, although I never called it that. I said that whenever they noticed I was trying to get the child up there with me to do something wrong or dangerous, they could call out to that kid at the front and say, it's a trick. I couldn't accelerate their brains into working in an abstract mode, but I could help them start to recognize the set of concrete behaviors that they could observe specific tones of voice and body language, the kinds of things people use when they're trying to fool you. In the case of that New York Times story from Monday, in which David Chen notes that the states Sending national guard troops to D.C. have higher crime rates. Chen is spotting the con and he's revealing how the federal government is trying to trick the public or actively misrepresent what's happening on the ground. Why fight with the president instead of having that chance if that is an opportunity that can improve crime? In the examples from Martha Raddatz and Bill Hutchinson that I gave, the reporters involved were acting as if they had no ability to understand what what's going on or report on it beyond the framework that the Trump administration had provided them with. Violent crime has all has clearly declined in the city, and yet Baltimore has the fifth highest rate in violent crime, fourth highest murder rate per capita in cities over 100,000. In the Martha Raddatz interview, she talks about how the National Guard are backing up local law enforcement. And Governor Moore responds, they're picking up trash. She acknowledges that, yes, they're picking up.
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Trash in certain places, but if you.
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Look at the crime, but that they are also helping law enforcement. And that's when she cites that reduction in carjacking that was mentioned by the mayor. And you've heard Mayor Bowser say 87% reduction in carjackings, robberies cut by half. He seemed unwilling to look at why and to what ends the National Guard had been sent to the city or to acknowledge that the District's crime rate had less to do with what was happening than an attempt to subvert local authorities. Why wouldn't you want that here? There is a long history around the world of journalists and public intellectuals doing exactly these kinds of things. I want to take a look at a few examples from different times and places, as sometimes it's easier to see what's going on from a distance, if that is actually helping. Before the Gulag came into formal existence, the Soviet Union ran several years of concentration camps for political and and class opponents that set the stage for that later system. Most famous among those camps for creating the principles and the methods of the later Gulag was the camp on the Solovetsky Islands known as Solovki. Though Solovki was the site of a monastery for centuries before the arrival of the Soviet state, that era brought forced labor, torture, sadistic treatment and executions to the islands. Despite a massive PR campaign, rumors continued to appear about the camp there, which the government tried to quell. Eventually, they lured perhaps the most celebrated Soviet writer of the day, Maxim Gorky, who was living in exile in Italy at the time, to return to Russia and report on the great achievements of the party. Without warning, his plans to see Industrial sites were derailed. Instead, he was sent by ferry north to Solovki to report what he saw there. When detainees learned that Gorky was coming, they were beside themselves with joy. Gorky will spot everything, find out everything. One detainee there at the time wrote, he's been around. You can't fool him. But the Soviets hid many of the telltale signs of their worst crimes. Before Gorky's arrival, he visited the sickbay, a labor camp, and stopped in at the children's colony. There, Gorky stopped to speak to a boy privately. They Talked alone for 40 minutes or more. The author emerged weeping. But when Gorky's story on his trip came out, the part on Solovki was only a small piece of what he wrote, and the truth of the place was missing. In a devastating betrayal, Gorky concluded instead that camps such as Solovki were absolutely necessary. New York Times reporter Walter Duranty famously won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his fawning coverage of Stalin's achievements while managing to ignore or downplay everything from the birth of the Soviet Gulag to the deliberate starvation of Ukraine, Uncle Joe's mass execution of political opponents and show trials eliminating some of the same.
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The easy answer would be to blame the strict surveillance and limitations placed on foreign reporters by the Soviet Union, which is exactly what the New York Times did when the Pulitzer committee announced their decision not to revoke Durante's prize even after it came to light that his stories were largely fabricated propaganda.
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Durante's rationalization of widespread atrocities over and over were typically summed up in his.
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Infamous line, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
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On May 16, 1948, the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk was discovered when his body was pulled out of Salonika Bay in Greece.
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Polk was the first Middle east correspondent for this CBS network. He was hired in 1946, just after World War II, because he had worked for various newspapers and he so impressed people such as Howard K. Smith and Edward R. Murrow that he was chosen to be one of the Murrow boys, the elite corps of newsmen who were hired in the 1940s to cover a rapidly changing and increasingly unnerving world.
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I won't go into the details of the Greek civil war underway at the time, but in brief, it was a conflict between rightist forces in control and Communist insurgents.
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At that time, the Soviets were essentially dominating so much of Eastern Europe, taking over countries and converting them to communism.
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The government blamed Polk's death on the Communists. He had planned to meet with.
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Around that time, the Truman administration sent $400 million to prop up the Greek authorities.
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But Polk had recently written critically about the ruling party.
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He came to understand very quickly, quickly that the Greek authorities were hoarding that US aid money. He accused them of being corrupt and even fascist. He said so on the air, on the CBS radio network and in a widely read article in Harper's magazine that made him a target.
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Initial responses from US journalists were highly suspicious of the Greek government's account. Then the overseas writers, a group of foreign correspondents, banded together to investigate the murder of their friend. But it was a dicey moment in both international and domestic politics to criticize even a reactionary US ally under threat from communist forces.
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There was a conspiracy between US government officials in the US Embassy in Athens and at the State Department here in Washington to cover up what really happened and to advance American interests in the Cold War to essentially put it on communists instead of someone else.
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What happened was both extraordinary and depressingly familiar. The Committee of Journalists invited Walter Lippmann to head up the investigation. Lippman was someone who had himself been critical of some US foreign entanglements and was a trusted news figure. In Catherine McGarr's book City of Newsmen, she lays out how, as far as we know, that group of overseas writers never directly lied or committed an obvious cover up, but nevertheless became a critical part of a whitewashing process through their failures to do their jobs. They chose General William Donovan as their independent investigator for the project. Though he had been the founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, they knew him and knew enough to be suspicious of him. And yet they let him become their key source of information and provider of all records and documents. For their consideration they published a 76 page pamphlet laying out what they had found, which was a both sides kind of document that resolutely refused to draw some of the obvious conclusions available to them. Particularly that the man tried and convicted for Polk's murder could not have done the crime.
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He was tortured into making a false confession.
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Committee members did not trust the devious Donovan and they were not stupid, McGarr wrote. They simply could not write or act independently when they had agreed to be part of a group. While there is no formal club of journalists today investigating the murder of one of their own, the same principles are in play now. Just as with Gorky, we see a kind of self interest overriding the facts on the ground. As with Duranty, we see the arrogance of those whose Status relies on being insiders, lead them to parrot government talking points without applying rigorous analysis.
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But you have to admit, Governor, that.
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There are people out there who don't feel safe and you can tout what you have done. But that is a real problem to people. And there's just enough good coverage, sometimes from the very same publications that it's become clear it isn't that whole outlets have forgotten how to report critically.
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Now to the woman who was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. She's telling her story publicly for the first time as lawmakers in Capitol Hill pushed for the release of all the files on Epstein. ABC News Live prime anchor Lindsay Davis is in Washington with that story. Good morning, Lindsay.
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Legacy news organizations have just caved to a power consensus, as with those oversea writers and the death of George Polk. They can produce a 76 page report investigating what's happening and even include some trenchant facts in it. But in the end, they will manage to say nothing at all. So how do you think Democrats should approach Donald Trump differently than they did in 2024? Only today do we learn in the Boston Globe. And kudos to them. The Department of Justice attorney who accused Harvard of wanton indifference to antisemitism, admired Mein Kampf and wrote a paper from Adolf Hitler's perspective. Just as there is crime on the streets of D.C. there is antisemitism in America. But it is not necessary to accept the Trump administration's transparent lies, pretending its wrecking ball approach to governance has any goal of combating either of those problems.
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On the evening of his inauguration, President Donald Trump has just returned to the White House where he is pardoning some 1500 January 6th rioters who have been convicted for participating in the attack on the Capitol four years ago. The president is speaking now. Let's listen in. So this is January 6th. These are the hostages. Approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Yes, full pardon.
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We see it also in coverage of Gaza. Publications in the US Are in many cases still unwilling to acknowledge that whatever mission the Israeli government began with when responding to the horrific Hamas massacre in October 2023, it has descended into nearly two years of unspeakable atrocities.
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Starvation has claimed at least 83 lives in Gaz Gaza just this month, including 10 year old Noor Abu Salah's, she became like this because of hunger, thirst and the siege, the siege imposed on us by the Israelis. Her uncle shouts. This is a Palestinian child. He says the world would be outraged if only she had been born anywhere else.
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It has obliterated Gaza. It has killed tens of thousands of non combatant women and children, erased cultural heritage and fired directly on the people it has been actively starving.
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There's new reporting the Trump administration is serious about turning Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle east, turning that enclave into a tourist resort.
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The refusal of much of the press to name what has been happening or to wait until it is undeniable to acknowledge it, is beyond the level of Gorky's betrayal.
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The idea is to create a tourism and high tech hub along the Mediterranean. Now here's the rub. According to the plan, Nearly all the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza would have.
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To be relocated, taken out of Gaza and moved somewhere else. We see the same pattern with other things, like even coverage of AI, particularly large language models. Those who promote its contributions have already forgotten that the most useful information they find through it has simply been skimmed from human generated sources that are far more accurate and reliable.
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My son said, hey dad, come over here. When he put in a request to ChatGPT, there were three pages that sounded like a lot of books that I'd written with names of characters that I'd used in the past. And I thought, oh my God, I feel so violated. It was like someone had just taken my entire library without my knowing it.
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People who style themselves contrarians or truth tellers show themselves to be the most gullible cheerleaders while still somehow believing themselves the only reasonable adults in the room. Paramount is on the verge of acquiring Bari Weiss's the Free Press and tossing her the keys to CBS News. The deal is on the one yard line, I'm told, according to Byers and Puck. We see it especially in coverage of how Trump is inflicting terror on Americans by using federal agents to harass, kidnap and detain people nationwide. Why wouldn't you want that? Here, here. But this seemingly willful blindness extends to so many other arenas. It's afflicting the field of journalism on a widespread basis, even as some individual journalists push back on it. In an interview published on Monday in which Ben Smith of Semaphore spoke to Oliver Darcy, he was asked, you've been covering politics your entire life. I'm curious, in this current moment, do you think democracy is under threat here in the U.S. smith's response was fascinating. He said, one thing you do see so clearly on the media beat is the way in which institutions struggle to survive this radically transparent, decentralized information environment. I guess I see the political moment primarily in the story of attempts to destroy or maintain or rebuild institutions, rather than in More abstract terms. That response is fascinating for two reasons. What interests him is not democracy, but what institutions will survive in the current information environment. He wants to be a power broker communicating with other power brokers. The second part of what's fascinating is that he lays out exactly what's required for him to keep that role. He has to refrain from abstract thinking, from connecting the larger dots. Never mind that concepts like current information environment and attempts to rebuild institutions are themselves abstract ideas.
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Gustavos 2024. What do you take away? I mean, to me, I think the big story is actually an attempt to sort of walk away from a kind of progressive political posture.
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Just like Gorky, just like the Overseas Writers Group. In the wake of George Polk's death, to continue as a player in the world that he's helped create, Smith has to refuse to acknowledge what he understands on some intuitive level. To be a reasonable man, an important man in this bright new future, he has to not ask the difficult questions. He has to embrace the convoluted task of avoiding coverage of what's happening right before his eyes. In pre kindergarten, of course, this is excusable, but in a press corps or among our public intellectuals, it's unforgivable. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that he has openly described what he's doing.
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You hear a lot less about sustainability, you hear a lot less about dei, things like that. It's all gone under. Yeah. And I think it's actually part of the reason they're so happy to talk about AI is it's kind of politically neutral. I think they're concerned about. They're concerned about the backlash.
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Given this myopic approach to events by our public intellectuals and journalists, what are we to do in the wake of the shameful report on George Polk's death? Independent journalist Izzy Stone called it out, saying, someday perhaps the truth will be known and these men will blush for their role in its unfolding. In his footsteps, we can call out public voices on social media that are derailing democracy. But we can also actively support journalists at independent outlets like Boltz, Law dork, the handbasket, L.A. taco and others. We can reward them by subscribing. Meanwhile, we have to continue to force coverage of events by adding more voices to those under attack. People in the streets are important, and we are just coming off countless events around the country highlighting government abuses and proclaiming workers over billionaires. Protesters taking to the streets on Labor Day, railing against President Trump and other billionaires taking power away from the working class.
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We call not only on community leaders but our elected officials to stand with us as we continue to fight to protect home rule.
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Vietnam, too, for instance, was misleadingly covered in much of the press for a long time under an unspoken gentleman's agreement to give the government the benefit of the doubt.
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To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
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Now, as then, independent journalists and everyday people can press awareness of the truth into the public consciousness. Remember that Trump followers and the politically disengaged aren't seeing any real coverage of what's happening. The more you can bring it to the streets of your town, to school board meetings, to library board meetings, to city council chambers, the more actual events will take hold in people's minds wherever the government is. Dismantling protections, which is nearly everywhere these days, is an ideal place to act. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess.
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To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and.
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Consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening and thank you for watching. If you do have the means, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber and you can do that@Andreapitzer.com and just go to the newsletter link which is in the first paragraph of the home page and you can sign up from there.