Sunday Reader – 
By Glynn Wilson –

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The east-facing window in this humble abode was enshrouded in fog the first thing Sunday morning, not the famous smoke you sometimes see in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.

Since it’s National Public Sleeping Day and the weather was not conducive to a groundhog seeing its shadow, I almost turned over and fell back asleep.

#NationalPublicSleepingDay

But something in my dreams forced me awake, maybe because I rewatched “Inception” last night, and the implications are a bit unsettling.

Inception

Changing channels in the NPR app on the new iPhone 11, WUOT was playing a version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and it does feel like Spring is about to, well, spring. With the app you can listen with no ads and surf the web, something you can’t accomplish with Google’s YouTube as smart as those Silicon Valley programmers think they are.

Vivaldi – Spring

Clearly I’m not in the Spring of my life, more like the Fall, and human existence on planet Earth also appears to be in Fall, if not free-fall.

But let’s look on the bright side for today and look at the Smoky Mountains in spring.

Great Smoky Mountains Association

Sunday Papers

As you know I like to read The New York Times on Sunday mornings, as well as The Washington Post, and try to find important stories to share with my readers on Facebook. This harkens back to a time when I discovered The Times as a young man and sold it in a coffee bar, newsstand-bookstore on the Southside of Birmingham. Yes, I was trying to make a living, but also spreading the news to help enlighten the people around me.

This has always been an altruistic mission for me, not a strictly selfish one, which is probably why I’m not rich to this day.

Many news publishers are in the media business for the money alone. You see them everywhere you look, whether you realize it or not, like Jay Penske, who recently bought out Rolling Stone magazine and is now having his people hammer readers with emails demanding they pay to read the rock and roll magazine, even though the best writers are long gone.

I won’t be sharing his links anymore.

You see I guess I believed the story professors told me about how crucial the press is in fostering democracy. Call me a true believer, and like Tom Paine, I will probably die a pauper because of that belief. In this narcissistic time, people only seem to care about themselves and their selfies and memes.

It’s not that I didn’t have chances to cash in early in this life. One science professor back in the early 1980s tried to tell me to get into the medical profession then, which was becoming a major growth industry at that time.

I also had a chance to consider the law.

But writing legal documents bored the hell of me, just like many of the lawyers I know who try to make the leap to becoming journalists or fiction writers in mid-career.

According to a recent column in The Times, David Brooks, who you may know as a so-called conservative commentator on PBS, while he’s really very purple, wrote that if you want to get really, really rich, medicine is the number one profession to get into, followed by the law.

NYT: How to Get Really Rich!

Instead, I decided to become a journalist, or in those days a newspaper reporter, and then launched a free-lance career writing for magazines. I had a couple of chances to try radio and television, and maybe I should have tried harder to go in that direction.

On CBS’s “Sunday Morning” this week, LeVar Burton — known for his roles in “Roots,” “Star Trek” and “Reading Rainbow,” talked about his life and career on TV and the good that television can do.

“What is television to you?”

“Simply the most powerful medium in the history of civilization for communicating thoughts, ideas and stories,” Burton said.

He said it was his mentor, children’s TV giant and ordained Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers, who shaped his understanding of what television can do: “He taught me that it was okay to use television as a ministry, that it was possible to enlighten while entertaining, that the two don’t cancel each other out.”

CBS: LeVar Burton on the good that television can do

But the web came along in the mid-1990s, and I fell in love with the internet, before it really seemed possible to make a living publishing on the web. So I taught for awhile, went back to reporting for newspapers and writing for magazines, before going independent on the web 15 years ago.

Since then I’ve fought injustice as hard as Marty Baron at The Washington Post, who just announced his retirement, and certainly as hard as the new owner Jeff Bezos, who just stepped down as Chairman at Amazon as people in Alabama are trying to form a union for Amazon workers.

Both those guys just got richer in this business than I have, so far.

But the biggest laugh I got this Sunday in reading the newspapers online was the Opinion column of Maureen Dowd.

Now here is a rich, liberal woman who has never voted for a Republican in her life, not covering the news objectively but commenting on it from the left. She is knowledgable and has some worthwhile education and experience and is worth reading, sometimes, although I sometimes find her style just a bit too tabloid snarky.

What is funny this week is that she decided it was time to lecture the public by telling them the job of the press is not to help Democrats.

Of course we know this already, and she is right that democrats tend to think that is our job. Many liberals think we are supposed to be progressive bloggers, and as everyone now knows, many people will simply not read or view anything that doesn’t confirm their own beliefs 100 percent of the time these days.

I face this myself all the time. I’ve had people comment publicly on my Facebook posts complaining when I have the gall to criticize a democrat, or when a Google ad pops up on my site advertising for a Republican or conservative cause, even though I have very little control over who buys Google ads or what ads come up on this site. I try to block the fake news ads from the right-wing, and I have tried to find an attorney to sue Google to stop it.

What else can I do?

Do people stop reading The New York Times because they quote Republicans or run conservative columnists? Do people unsubscribe from cable or blow up their TVs because conservatives and Republicans appear on the screen? Will dedicated Times readers stop reading Maureen Dowd because she lectures them about the “fair and balanced” role of the press in a democracy?

I doubt it, but what’s funny is her timing, coming at a time when we just barely avoided the death of democracy at the hands of an autocrat hell bent on insurrection, using the term “election fraud” as a dog whistle meaning that too many poor black people voted in America’s cities. What choice did we have in this past election cycle but try to help Democrats? Clearly Trump and the Republicans are not in favor of democracy. They seem hell bent on destroying it, and the people following them seem to think having the first American dictator would “Make America Great Again.”

The best part of the column is that she finally admitted what I’ve written about before, thanking Trump for helping to change a Times policy of not using the term “lie” to refer to prevarications of politicians.

“After many years when I had to comb the thesaurus to find a synonym for ‘liar’ to use about Dick Cheney (and others), The Times finally allowed us to call high-ranking politicians who lied, liars. Thank you, Donald Trump!”

If the press had spent a little more time investigating Trump and calling him a liar much sooner, say back in 2015, is it possible we would not have had to live through four years of him as president?

We did at the New American Journal, as we continued to pioneer the kind of science-based journalism America needs. If the people writing for The Times knew more of their own history pioneering objective journalism, maybe we could avoid having to deal with Trump for four more years, and face him again in 2024.

For me it’s not about helping Democrats. It’s about standing on the necks of fascists like Trump, like the cops who have killed African Americans by stifling their breath, and not just George Floyd.

The movies tell us much about fighting bad guys and gals with good ones. If the entire American press and media were to finally realize that’s what objectivity really means, maybe we could all feel better about the future of democracy and the planet.

I can’t do this all by myself and alone. Jeff Bezos came up with a great new slogan for The Washington Post when he bought it. Democracy Dies in Darkness. Now let’s see them really live up to it.

We are paving the way. It’s not just about capitalism, “the money.”

“Everyone must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” – MLK