The Day the Newspaper Died –

Attorney General Merrick “Nostalgia” Garland swears to tell the truth before the Senate Oversight Committee: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Please allow me to apologize in advance for some of what I’m about to say. They say the truth hurts, and even psychologists agree looking with hope toward the future is more healthy than dwelling with nostalgia on the past.

But that won’t stop people from longing for a bygone era, especially in times of stress and loneliness, when drastic changes occur in people’s lives. More about this later.

For what I’m about to report, I could write several little news stories and share them all as sensational clickbait. Sometimes it’s just easier to write one column and connect the dots all together in a way.

There is one little sensational story going around on the net and the tube this morning about the testimony of Attorney General Merrick Garland before the Senate’s so-called oversight committee.

They are probably still talking abut it on Fox News and MSNBC, although I don’t pay any attention to the garbage on cable news talk myself.

Garland was called to testify mainly about the ongoing fentanyl crisis, but that’s not what news outlets are reporting on this morning. It had to be about Hunter Biden’s laptop, you know, like everything else in Washington these days since Republicans took over the House.

So Republicans on the committee grilled Garland about that. And news outlets reported that Garland “pledged” that he would not interfere in the alleged criminal probe ordered by former president Donald Trump. There is an irony ahead. Watch for it.

It was not more than a blurb in the New York Times and Washington Post, but Politico led with it. Yet that’s not what was interesting about the story.

Not covered anywhere else, Politico ended its coverage with what it called a “rare agreement between Garland and Republicans on the panel” as Senator John Cornyn of Texas deplored the practice of many news outlets to mention which president appointed a particular judge when reporting on one of the judicial rulings. This is supposed to demonstrate that the judicial branch is the least political branch of government, something I’ve reported on many times, even recently.

Related: Attorney General Merrick Garland Should Bring the Hammer of Justice Down on Trump

Garland claimed that he “fought against that practice” when he joined the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals a quarter-century ago, but made no headway.

“When I first got on the judiciary, I and several of my colleagues pounded our heads against the wall trying to get the reporters to stop — this is more than 25 years ago — to stop reporting the name of the president who appointed us … or the party. Unfortunately, this is a battle that has not been won,” Garland said. “And I don’t think, given the authority the First Amendment, its importance — it’s one that we’re not going to be able to win.”

Sorry, Mr. Nostalgia Garland, but judges don’t get to tell news reporters how to report the news, any more than presidents or members of Congress.

“I come from a kinder and gentler era and a kinder and gentler court, even in terms of the way the members of the court treat themselves,” Garland added. “My moral authority is against divisiveness from all sides and all quarters and for all arguments to be made on the merits.”

Informed readers may notice that Garland chose a former campaign slogan of George W. Bush to try to make his point. Remember when Bush said he would be a “kinder, gentler” Republican President than his predecessors? So how did that turn out, I would have asked Garland if I had been in the committee room.

In fact, newspapers and wire services often don’t tell readers who appointed the judge, still. I argued 20 years ago that news reports should in fact carry this information, because readers have a right to know. It’s easy enough to find out these days. All anyone has to do is Google it or look it up on Wikipedia.

My argument was on a now defunct blog, one of the first on the web down in Alabamaland, called the Political Parlor. My argument came in response to a question from a former reporter named Dana Byerely, who worked in Montgomery covering state politics for the former New York Times owned papers in the state in Florence, Tuscaloosa and Gadsden. (The Times sold them long ago, during the first newspaper financial crisis leading up to the Bush Great Recession).

I have no doubt Garland would rather I just called it the Great Recession, and not used Bush’s name, so people would forget that it was Bush and his deregulation policies that caused it, just like the lack of banking regulations caused the first Great Depression in 1929 when Herbert Hoover was president.

A few long-time readers will recall back in the day when I was able to influence The New York Times editorial page to refer to the Justice Department then as the “Bush Justice Department.” Look it up. The editorial writer was a guy named Lawrence Downs, who acted as the copy editor on many of the stories I covered for the Times between 2002 and 2005.

Ask former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman if he thinks the judiciary is a non-partisan, non-political branch of government. He spent seven years in federal prison because of a “political prosecution” by the “Bush Justice Department” to keep him from winning another election as governor.

So no, Mr. Garland, we will not promote your nostalgia based on some fantasy of justice perpetrated as a myth and legend in the 20th century. This is the 21st century, and you would do well to try to remember that the Republicans you are trying to appease would toss unbiased non-partisanship out the window of New York’s tallest skyscraper live on Fox News if they could, and lock your ass up in jail for life for not kissing Trump’s ring and butt as the first King of America.

Wake the fuck up man! #LockTrumpUp!

The Day the Newspaper Died

Meanwhile down in Alabama, some of my Facebook friends are expressing their sadness that the print edition of the newspaper has finally died its final death in the biggest cities in the state. The Newhouse media group (a family chain that hides under the corporate-sounding name Advance Publications) announced that they were ceasing all publication of any printed newspaper in Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville. It hasn’t been daily since 2012.

NPR’S Debbie Elliott produced a nostalgic puff piece on it, and my friend Rick Lovelady, a musician and realtor in Birmingham, lamented it on his Facebook page.

“Granted we are way behind on reading our news deliveries, still it’s sad to have a city w/o a printed newspaper,” he said. “I know i’m hopelessly sentimental, and suffer from nostalgium, but, it’s hard to say goodbye.”

Hey, I feel you, man. But there are a few things people need to try to understand.

From 1986-1989, I sold newspapers and magazines on the Southside of Birmingham, Alabama at a book store, newsstand and coffee bar called NewsBreak, after figuring out that some newspapers were corrupt, suing one in federal court and winning.

Columbia Journalism Review: THE OVERTIME WARS

The Birmingham Post-Herald was in many ways a better newspaper than the News ever was. Newhouse put the Post-Herald out of business as the Bush Great Recession was approaching, with management thinking that the morning time slot was the future. They forced the Post-Herald to switch from morning to afternoon under a joint operating agreement. Nobody there at the time was willing to admit that the net was the future.

On a related side note, when I moved back from Washington in 2005 to allow my elderly mother to remain in her home for as long as possible in the suburbs of Birmingham, I ran into Kyle Whitmire in The Garage Bar on Southside. He was writing his War on Dumb column for the long defunct Birmingham Weekly, while I was hired to cover the HealthSouth trial of Richard Scrushy for The New York Times. He was advocating for paywalls even then, while I was always about the future of news for free on the web. You see the Times was debating its first paywall it tried from 2005-2007. It didn’t work so they abandoned it. They lost online ad revenue, search engine placement, and the columnists were livid. They lost audience. He was for it. I was against it. Who was right?

NYT: Ex-HealthSouth Officer Testifies About Meeting Boss on Lake

But I understand that some people still like print. I got over it in grad school in the mid-1990s, with the purchase of my first Power Macintosh computer and an early internet connection. When I figured out that you could read Time magazine and The New York Times online, my ink-stained print reading days came to an abrupt end.

“If you’re feeling more nostalgic lately, you’re not alone,” says Dr. David B. Feldman in Psychology Today.

Why Nostalgia Is on the Rise

“Nostalgia is on the rise,” he wrote back in 2021 at the height of the covid-19 pandemic crisis.

One indicator was people were turning to old technology in a nostalgic way, buying vinyl record albums, Polaroid cameras, old video games like those on Atari, and watching old movies and TV shows as a way to turn back time.

“It’s like taking a time machine,” one person said.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers asked people to describe under what circumstances they become nostalgic. The most frequently reported triggers were negative emotions and mood states, particularly loneliness.

The investigators followed this initial study with another one, this time purposely putting some participants (college students) in a negative mood by asking them to read a distressing news story. Other participants read more neutral or positive stories. The results were surprisingly straightforward: Those who read the negative stories were subsequently more likely to engage in nostalgia than those who read the neutral or positive ones.

In other words, nostalgia is a way of coping with distress by temporarily escaping the pain of the present.

“And there’s no denying that the past two years have been painful and distressing. We’ve seen the fear, suffering, and loss of the COVID-19 pandemic, a string of brutal killings and violent attacks that highlight the reality of racism in our country, and a series of fires and storms that have destroyed both property and life,” Dr. Feldman says. “We’ve experienced increased political division and intense political strife.”

In the midst of it all, surveys show that people have been feeling more lonely and isolated, particularly younger people. It’s easy to see why it would be comforting to escape the present.

Research also shows the efficacy of nostalgia as a coping mechanism.

“As a result of engaging in nostalgic recollections, people often report experiencing a more positive mood, feeling more socially connected, and having a greater sense that their lives are meaningful,” he writes. “This has led some to suggest that nostalgia might even be useful as a psychotherapeutic technique. Indeed, a six-week nostalgia intervention was shown to improve well-being in a sample of college students. In short, nostalgia seems to work.”

But he also cautions that we shouldn’t fall in love with nostalgia too quickly.

“There are some important pitfalls associated with being unquestioningly nostalgic for bygone days, particularly from a social standpoint,” he says.

As Joshua Fields Millburn has written, “There’s a problem with nostalgia: it tells only half-truths.”

We often remember the sweet things about a particular era, conveniently forgetting the bitter aspects.

As historian Stephanie Coontz noted in a 2013 column in the New York Times, the past wasn’t often such a happy place for some groups in our society, particularly those facing marginalization.

“I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s,” she writes. “The ones who never cross-examined those memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the civil rights and the women’s movements.”

In other words, not everyone has equal access to things worth being nostalgic about.

“For many, the past may not be a comforting place to take shelter,” Feldman says. “The future may be a more inviting abode.”

“Nostalgia is the death of hope,” artist Mark Kennedy once said.

Nostalgia is all about the past, Feldman points out, while hope is about the future.

“Hope’s central message — the future can be better — is one we need now perhaps more than ever,” Feldman says. “Hope isn’t just a passive feeling. When people have hope, they actually tend to take action, and even, under some circumstances, help fuel social change. So I would argue that, in painful times like those we’ve experienced over the past two years, focusing on the future may be more productive than taking shelter in the past.”

Forget Promoting a Myth: The People Need Justice

Unfortunately, we seem to have an attorney general who is so nostalgic to try to recreate a myth from the past that never really existed anyway than one who is willing to embrace the undying hope that millions of people have for the future of our country: That one day justice will actually be served on the worst, most criminal president we have ever had in the history of the United States of America.

Please, Mr. Garland, if you have any courage and decency left in you, stop this nostalgic fantasy about the past, and do what is right for our future. Get a grand jury to indict and charge Trump with at least a few of his crimes, and at the very least prevent him from running for public office again.

As I have suggested on numerous occasions, it seems like the Insurrection Act of 1807 would work well enough. Trump clearly engaged in a seditious conspiracy to incite an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power and overturn a legitimate U.S. election.

If you simply do not have the guts to put Trump on trial for all his other crimes, and get a D.C. jury and judge to sentence this former criminal president to prison where he belongs, at the very least a charge of inciting an illegal insurrection would prevent him from running for public office ever again. There is no doubt a jury in Washington would convict him of that in less than the three hours it took for the jury to convict Alex Murdaugh of murdering his family and sending him to prison for life.

Wake the fuck up man! #LockTrumpUp!

___

If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.