The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

The era of the great American newspaper columnist went out with the end of the 20th century and the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper, roughly in the 2004-2005 time period as George W. Bush campaigned for and won reelection as president, a period I often refer to as The Bush Years, and not affectionately so.

That’s when New York Times editor at the time Bill Keller made the decision to withhold from publication an investigative story about massive domestic spying on Americans by the Bush administration and AT&T, a conglomeration of telecom giants (people laughingly called them “Baby Bells”) that had been broken up under the Ronald Reagan Justice Department, but allowed to reconstitute into one behemoth led by Southwest Bell out of Texas under Bush — in the wake of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Excruciatingly, I lived through every maddening moment of this time still a free-lance reporter for The New York Times in the South, fully connected to the internet and still watching CNN, which had not totally imploded yet under the ownership of AOL-Time Inc. By then the Time Inc. board had sent cable TV and 24-hour news CNN founder Ted Turner packing to the Buffalo Ranch in Montana, though. So CNN was going down fast, getting rid of most associate producers and going with smaller teams in the field, just a camera guy and on air talent.

But I knew it was the end of an era, and turned to the web myself to figure out what would come next.

In case you weren’t born yet or were not paying close attention back then, that’s right after editor Howell Raines from Alabama got let go from the Times for being an arrogant prick (their words, not mine, and it was not just for hiring Jayson Blair or Judi Miller of WMD fame), and author and correspondent Rick Bragg quit in New Orleans, where I was at the time.

News commentary is full of recent attempts to re-capture the magic of the columnist, the latest tool being the podcast. I literally do not have time or patience for such things, as a consumer or a producer.

But for the sake of argument, take for example a recent attempt by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman under the headline: The Day Facebook Ruined the Internet.

“Your uncle caught a flounder this afternoon. President Biden said something about the Middle East. It’s your boss’s birthday. Your unrequited crush from sophomore year is with some dude on a beach in the Florida Panhandle and drinking a beer,” Hurwitz-Goodman says as an intro. “Feeds, updated in real time and tailored to individual users, have become a standard feature of online social networks.”

This Los Angeles-based filmmaker traces the proliferation of these streams of curated updates to one day in September 2006 — the day Facebook switched on its News Feed.

“The News Feed’s launch had a seismic impact on the internet both in the short term — by inducing widespread apoplexy among Facebook users — and in the long term by fundamentally changing the social media landscape and experience. Hurwitz-Goodman argues that the News Feed and the internetwide transformations it inspired resulted in not only a decrease in privacy but also a loss of user autonomy and an erosion of a widely shared sense of community.”

Now I often like these on point and witty columns making light of different time periods, like this one recently in The Washington Post art section: The 1960s didn’t end until the ’80s. So says this art show about painting in D.C..

I’ve often said the same thing about the ’60s, having lived through them in the 1970s and early 1980s myself (there’s a key chapter in my book about that called “The Summer of 1979”) — Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

But good grief Charlie Brown. This podcast description blaming all the problems of the world and the internet on the Facebook news feed — which by the way was called The Wall back then, not a news feed since Facebook never really liked news — is a bit ridiculous. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was paying any attention to Facebook in 2006.

They are paying attention now, however, and I’m almost daily vexed by this pathetic attempt to tell people what the important news is by using a popularity algorithm, instead of a human brain trained in American objective journalism.

If you can’t do any better a job at describing it than that, why on Earth would I take the time to listen?

I could argue just as convincingly that the date in 2012 when Facebook went public was more problematic, but why try to convince a newspaper-o-file now revamping radio online that Facebook did not kill the daily newspaper all by itself?

There were the bloggers, after all (I was one of them), who started summarizing news coverage for people and getting to the point more directly, and yes, telling it more like it is without all the ceremonial both-sidedness.

We could also talk about the problems with Google and YouTube, not to mention all the bad news, editorial and business decisions made by newspaper managers over the years — when the coming internet should have been anticipated but was instead laughed at. What first got their attention was CraigsList, which took away most of their classified ad money. It was pretty much all down hill from there.

But the real problem here are the threats to democracy and the human species on planet Earth, not the economic viability of the platform that people use to find out what’s going on and base their political and social decisions and actions on now.

Smart, educated people are able to negotiate different platforms and figure out at least some things for themselves — although way too many are far too dependent on cable news, in my humble opinion.

No writer today in print or on the web can compete with cable news for audience reach, especially since people also share all the talk from cable news all over social media, including Facebook, Twitter and the rest. The other side simply gets information from friends who watch Fox News, or these days, NewsMax or Trump’s YouTube channel. He may be banned from Twitter and Facebook, but Trump can still YouTube, even if it’s under another name, maybe Jarrad Kushner? And he has a massive email list.

The good news for us is that there are still millions of people out there who do read news, mainly online. We often reach 2 million hits a month. The NYTimes website seems to be making out fine these days with its paywall, ditto The Washington Post, if most other newspapers out in the hinterlands seem more doomed than ever by the downward spiral of relevant content to even attempt to sell to readers.

Both the two surviving major papers have some interesting columnists. Just none with the reach and power of a Walter Lippmann or a William Safire, Russell Baker, Anthony Lewis, A. M. Rosenthal, James Reston, Tom Wicker, Frank Rich or Bob Herbert.

Yes, these days we have Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, David Brooks (at least for now) and Charles Blow.

And then there is the so-called conservative Ross Douthat, who replaced Bill Kristol after his brief and controversial stint writing for the paper’s editorial page.

According to the Wikipedia page on him, Ross Gregory Douthat is an American conservative political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of Christianity in America and “sustainable decadence” in contemporary society.

Douthat was born on November 28, 1979, in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut (read rich kid). As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family, to Catholicism (read mixed up and not sure which religion to support, probably for political reasons, or the result of severe cognitive dissonance disorder).

His mother, Patricia Snow, is a writer. His great-grandfather was Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut (political connections). His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm and poet. In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and a writer for Smithsonian (he married well). He and his family still live in New Haven, Connecticut, a place not well loved by Trump supporters, at least the ones who have heard of it.

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient, one of the early “conservative” newspapers on college campuses. (I had the distinct honor and pleasure of playing a crucial role in killing one of those at the University of Alabama when I was in grad school writing a column for The Crimson White in the mid-1990s).

In April 2009, Douthat became the youngest regular op-ed writer in The New York Times after replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page.

Personally, I rarely bother to read Douthat. But he recently pissed off my good friend Rowland Scherman the photographer, long a New York Times reader and subscriber, and formerly the proud owner of a great bar on the Southside of Birmingham simply called “Joe.”

Scherman penned a letter to the editor to respond to one of Douthat’s columns — which the editorial page editor will probably ignore — and also sent it to me. Some of it is contained in the comments on this story: Congressional Report on Capitol Insurrection Fails to Tell the Whole Truth and Let Justice Flow Like Rain.

In short, he cites Abraham Lincoln’s famous Proclamation 113, which was used to justify declaring martial law during the Civil War.

What got his ire up was this column: Three Paths to Containing Trump.

Since that was published on Sunday, June 6, Douthat has penned a followup: Are We Destined for a Trump Coup in 2024?

I’m not even going to take the time and space to summarize here. I’ve written many times about solutions to Trump, which all involve investigating him, indicting him, arresting him, and putting him in jail, or at least exile.

If you’re still interested enough to follow along, poney up for the paywall and read it for yourself.

There is a better column you can read for free here.

Break Time is Over: Activists and Democrats Must Engage Now on Voting Rights

The problem is outlined better here:

National Action on a Federal Voting Rights Law is Now Critical, Even if it Takes Eliminating the Jim Crow Era Senate Filibuster

After thinking through all of this myself, here is my add to this discussion for today.

Some of the key Democrats in Washington, D.C. are quite willing to let this all play out on all the news feeds, willing to bet the farm that American voters will turn out in great enough numbers to keep Democrats in charge of the House and Senate in 2022 and the White House in 2024 — even if they lose on all the big legislative attempts going on now, including voting rights bills, infrastructure and all the rest.

You might say, “That’s politics for you.”

Just let voters see Republican obstructionism continue, they say, and we will use that to win on Election Day.

There are others who say this is a dangerous game to play, considering all that is at stake, and voters might respond better if they could see all this great legislation pass, even if it comes with only votes from Democrats — which would mean eliminating the filibuster.

But since one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin of conservative, rural West Virginia seems intent on playing a one man show power game to join Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in obstruction, what are Democrats to do?

Sigh.

Oh my.

It’s going to be one long, hot summer in Washington with lots more discontent — even after we get rid of the Brood X cicadas — and excruciating to see how the powers that be handle the situation.

As much good as the Biden administration is already doing with executive action, this will continue to give people hope.

The real question is how will the diverse set of actors leading the progressive left respond?

There are already all kinds of editorial hints at impatience.

Will Congress fail to accomplish much this summer and simply give up and call a recess and go home in August?

Enquiring minds want to know.

You can pay for one of the last great American newspapers and read all about it, although you might be disappointed in their columnists. You can follow along on cable news, Facebook or Twitter.

Or you can read us right here for free.

It’s up to you. Only the fate of American democracy and human survival on planet Earth are at stake.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ever heard of Murphy’s law?