OUR MEDIA COULD - SHOULD - MUST DO BETTER

By Ruth A. Sheets

I’ve been a news junkie since childhood.  My family watched the news most evenings.  It was Huntly and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite who faithfully broadcast the day’s news.  Those who either read the news or reported from the field seemed honest, fair, and to be “telling it like it is.” 

When I was a kid I didn’t know that the news could be shaped to get out just what certain people in power wanted us to know.  When they told us they were reporting from somewhere in the world, we had no doubt that was true.  When they showed us violence in Birmingham, Alabama, we saw police and their dogs attacking people, true.  When a rocket was launched into space, we watched the story with intense interest and worry for the astronauts. 

Of course, not everything was exactly as presented, but we had a sense that the basics were accurate.  We had 3 networks back then plus Public Broadcasting.  There were also radio, newspapers, and magazines to add some depth to the TV broadcasts.  One of the most powerful broadcasts I remember was the one in which CBS’s Walter Cronkite, having visited Vietnam to informally assess the situation, declared we could not win the war there.  I was shocked because media support up until that time seemed complete.  They did show protests, but which looking back on after the Cronkite statement, I realized was often not favorable or even unbiased.  At the time I supported the war because I couldn’t believe our president would be putting so many men into a war that was unwinnable and unjust.  That broadcast and a diary our Civics teacher assigned to keep of the events of the war for February 1968 helped turn me away from support of the Vietnam war.  A few amazing protest songs pushed me the rest of the way.  

I don’t believe the broadcast media has been as well-respected since then.  That is probably the fault of the media themselves.  Newspapers had their zenith with reports on Watergate, the FBI’s spying on our own citizens, and “The Pentagon Papers” in the early 1970s.  It isn’t that there were not good reporters and writers but that somehow over time the reporting became watered down and really negative.  Clinton’s sexual conduct, which was pretty normal in politics at the time seemed more important than the actual challenges the world was facing.  They somehow missed the lead-up to the 2008 crash (or somehow didn’t communicate well what was happening). 

In 2015, an inexperienced con artist sucked up all the air that could have kept our media honestly balanced.  Donald Trump brought his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and general ignorance further onto the public stage and was covered as though he really had something amazing to offer this nation after his claim that Obama was a bad president and not really American.  His opponent in 2016 was Hillary Clinton, a very prepared, competent, experienced candidate, yet the media, whenever they blasted us with Trump’s bombast, whining, and hatred, felt they just had to mention Clinton’s emails (using a private server while in office, a common practice among government employees) or Ben Gazi (where 4 American officials were killed by terrorists in 2012).  The newspapers did somewhat better, but still covered nearly everything Trump said and did.  Tom Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy wrote in 2017,

“The mainstream press highlights what’s wrong with politics without also telling us what’s right.  It’s a version of politics that rewards a particular brand of politics. When everything and everybody is portrayed as deeply flawed, there’s no sense making distinctions on that score, which works to the advantage of those who are more deeply flawed. Civility and sound proposals are no longer the stuff of headlines, which instead give voice to those who are skilled in the art of destruction.” 

And now, that negativity in coverage continues.  We have thousands of media sources mostly online, but also on TV, radio, and in print.  They know well that Trump is unfit for office, has lied in public more times than anyone I know of has counted, and is a supporter of and model candidate for “project 2025.” Those things are poorly covered and our media try to “sane-wash” Trump’s disjointed, menacing, hate-filled, and lie-saturated events.  Our various media managed to make the June 27^th debate seem like Biden’s inadequacy and old age were disastrous while nearly totally skipping the reality that Donald Trump lied at least 30 times and made no sense.  That fact is now out here, but it is still not seen as being as problematic as Biden’s old age despite Trump being only 3 years younger than Biden, essentially no difference by their age.  Biden is still working as president and getting things done; Trump travels around the country fearmongering, blaming immigrants for crimes that have not happened, and of course, lying at every opportunity, yet receives far too much coverage. 

I don’t understand our media’s need to prop up Trump, Vance, and the rest of their Republican ticket in the face of their hatred, incompetence, and attempts to promote a Trump dictatorship.  Or, maybe it’s just the media’s corporate obsession with political negativity and the value of disruption and chaos. 

The media now are facing a real challenge, interesting, intelligent, caring, prepared, patriotic candidates in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.  They are careful, creative, and refuse to take Trump’s baiting nor respond to his insults.  Some of the media, at least are covering their current speeches and rallies alongside Trump’s and possibly by quirk of fate, Harris and Walz are looking ready to assume the positions of President and Vice President while Trump is looking more and more like the incompetent child-man he really is.  I hope people are noticing.

THE NEW MISOGYNY, JUST A RERUN

By Ruth A. Sheets

We are facing a strange time with a weird bunch of actors.  I don’t know about you, but I would not have believed so many people would be on board with the effort of dragging our nation into some “golden” past when women were irrelevant well, except for doing all the work of bearing and raising our children and pampering a controlling husband or male partner.  I knew there were forces of misogyny doing their best to undermine women at every turn and to keep women out of nearly every position that had some authority attached to it, but I didn’t realize just how malignant the efforts were and that when they released the Cracken, it would be huge and target women at every level, more than a century after women got the vote.

Going on 52 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that women should have the right to abortion up until the fetus is viable, currently about 24 weeks.  There was enormous celebration then because previously, for so  many women, to end a pregnancy meant getting “help” from someone who had to perform the “procedure” in secret which often meant in unsanitary conditions that could have a bad outcome:  some women died or were unable to become pregnant afterwards.  Even knowing that, many women still chose abortion.

In the 1960s, a group of women in Chicago, the Janes provided safe abortions for women, that is, until they were set up/betrayed, and several of them were arrested.  They had an underground network of activist women trained by medical personnel to provide abortions to women through a word of mouth network.  They figure they performed around 11,000 out of 11,000 safe abortions.

By the late 1970s, Republicans and conservatives in general needed a cause.  The War in Vietnam was over and they weren’t getting traction on anything else.  They had staunch anti-abortion folks in their ranks and chose that to be the issue to run on even though the majority of Americans was in favor of abortion being legal.  Men were mostly behind the move, but realized they would have to recruit women to promote the issue.  They found a few and they tied the anti-abortion stance to pushing the value/wonder of being a stay-at-home mom providing total care for her kids and her hubby.  Of course the women doing the pushing of this movement did not live what they were promoting, but they whipped up the women to such heights they didn’t even notice that Phyllis Schlafly was a lawyer, and the other woman leaders were also professionals, not stay-at-homes.  Hypocrisy!

The movement gained traction through the ‘80s and ‘90s, but the Supreme Court still ruled that women had a basic right to abortion care, but let the states take bites out of that right, and many states took big bites:  waiting periods and expensive ultrasounds that were totally unnecessary, the criteria for facilities that provided abortions, etc.  Protesters harassed women going to perfectly legal clinics, providers were killed, clinics vandalized, and workers terrorized.  Some effort was made to stop the violence and harassment, but not much and the bad behavior continues. 

Meanwhile, in significant numbers, women have entered many fields that were once nearly exclusively male:  tech, engineering and all types of design.  Orchestras have many female members.  About 20% of Congress is female and women have been elected to state legislatures too.  There are female governors even in some “red” states.  Very few women are at the top of major corporations, but at the mid-management level, women are steadily increasing in number.  Many women are journalists, influencers, news anchors, and sports reporters and announcers.  Women are scientists in every field.  The majority of college students and graduates are women too.  I mention this because the movement to drive women back into the home, no birth control, popping babies at the will of the sperm and the state is ultimately not a winning proposition for any political party. 

Donald Trump and his handlers, while in the White House were able to put on the Supreme Court 3 justices who along with the three conservatives already there, have decided that the old days were much better than today, so have handed down numerous decisions under John Roberts that have set a framework to promote rich white men and corporations and diminish everyone else.  That includes ending the abortion protections women had by letting states’ mostly old white male and conservative female legislatures decide about a woman’s bodily autonomy.  Right now, people still have some respect for the Court, but it is on the edge of losing it. 

I, like many other women and our allies, are hoping younger women are putting together networks like the Janes all over the country to provide abortions, to help with miscarriages, and to stockpile Mifepristone and other abortion medications to make them available to anyone who needs them.  Most of us have read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and are determined it will not happen here.  We women and our allies need to make it clear to the men and their female surrogates who like J.D. Vance and his master, Donald Trump that we do not appreciate their misogyny, calling women childless cat ladies who have miserable lives and want everyone else to be miserable.  Women don’t appreciate being told that post-menopausal women will provide the child care for the younger women rather than our government providing help to afford child care.  It is not OK that right now at least 20 states have pretty much banned abortions.  Why?  They want to control women.  What they need to realize is that even if Trump is re-elected, women are not going to return to being baby factories and care-givers for selfish child-men.  Misogyny has been around for millennia, and a bunch of scared men are trying to use it as a weapon and they have courted women to go along with the game as long as they get to share in the male power.  Those female surrogates don’t see that they will only be given as much power as the men around them permit in their rabid misogyny.

So women, and allies, if we care about our future and want the struggle to be a bit less problematic, we need to ditch this new, old misogyny, declare that we are not going back,  and vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and Democrats up and down the ballot because Republicans have decided women are good only for doing men’s bidding, and care nothing for the quality of the men doing the bidding.