1. Why are some stories covered only once and dropped by the media, but others receive constant coverage? Parker Malloy at The Present Age examines this critical question in Flooding the Zone with Narrative, which reacts to this Alec Karakatsanis’ article about the decisions editors make about what they publish.
Malloy writes: “Why are some issues easily conceptualized as a single news story — ‘the debtors’ prison story’ — while other stories are seen as continuously plentiful sources of daily news to be covered from the same and different angles each night, such as the ‘surge in shoplifting’?”
This! This has been one of my biggest frustrations with the news world. The papers pick and choose which topics get relentless and disproportionate coverage, and which topics are printed and immediately forgotten, never allowed to truly become “stories.”
Oh yes, I feel this frustration. These editorial choices impact elections and how governments spend our tax money (as we saw last year with the relentless coverage of the overblown shoplifting narrative). I wish the editors and publishers who make these decisions were open to conversations about how this dynamic works.
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2. Imagine your partner or someone close to you dying suddenly and then having to deal with radical anti-vax activists publicly while mourning.
Dr. Céline Gounder explains what she’s faced after the loss of her husband, the late soccer journalist Grant Wahl, to a ruptured aortic aneurysm while he was covering the recent Men’s World Cup in Qatar. (Wahl was one of my favorite writers and journalists, and his death deeply impacted many people.) Because Grounder is an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist who has been a prominent voice during this Covid pandemic, anti-vaxxers leaped to blame the vaccine—and Grounder—for Wahl’s death. The messages they sent to her were nothing short of evil.
She writes, “I knew that disinformation purveyors would blame Grant’s death on Covid vaccines, and I knew what tactics they would use to do so. I also knew that debunking what these people believe head-on in public risks giving them the attention they crave and invites further trolling. But this situation was different from the many others I’d dealt with as an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist or while serving on the Biden-Harris transition Covid Advisory Board. This was my Grant, and I needed to know what had happened to him. And I knew I had to share that information publicly: Pairing facts with empathy is the best way to disempower trolls.”
Grounder explains that she felt compelled to write about what she’s faced after the anti-vax community tried to blame Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s collapse during a game last week on Covid vaccines. She writes, “When disinformation profiteers leverage tragedies like Grant’s and Mr. Hamlin’s for their personal gain, they retraumatize families, compromise our ability to interpret information and distinguish truth from lies and put all of us at risk.”
And that’s why we should be concerned about these dynamics and their impact on people and society.
3. Republican politicians like to claim that the goal of their forced birth policies is not to jail the women who may seek abortions. That’s always been a lie, and now another Republican has admitted it.
Jessica Valenti explains how the Alabama Attorney General’s office plans to work around this promise. She writes, “In the worst wink-wink-nudge-nudge statement I’ve seen in a long time, the Alabama AG’s office told a conservative reporter that just because the abortion ban won’t let them arrest women, it doesn’t mean that the state can’t use other laws to put women behind bars: A spokesperson for Marshall told 1819 News this weekend that even though the Human Life Protection Act exempts women from being prosecuted, it “does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law—which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children. (emphasis added)”
4. I’m not surprised by this one: Popular Information’s Judd Legum follows up on the story about Vicki Baggett, the Florida teacher seeking to have 150 books removed from school libraries under the Stop WOKE Act that Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law last April.
Legum writes, “While Baggett claims she is keeping inappropriate content away from children, her former and current students tell Popular Information that Baggett openly promoted racist and homophobic beliefs in class.”
That adds some context for why Baggett objects to books like When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball.
5. Dave Eggers writes in the New Yorker about the Profound Defiance of Daily Life in Kyiv, starting with a visit to the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. While waiting for their tour to start, their guide approached to ask Eggers and the writer Peter Godwin to go to the basement because of an air raid. The guide received the notification from an app on her smartphone.
Eggers writes, “The technology is now so advanced that Ukrainian citizens can know, more or less in real time, where the Russian missiles are coming from and generally where they’re going. In this case, Russia had just launched some seventy missiles, headed to sites all over Ukraine. The assumption was that they were directed at power substations, meant to cripple the country’s electrical grid. Vladimir Putin’s recent strategy has been to knock out the power in the depth of winter in hopes of breaking the spirits of everyday Ukrainians.
So far this strategy has not worked.”
People who believe in democracy should be glad that’s the case.
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Quick Pitches:
Las Vegas Raiders Owner Mark Davis is apparently embarrassed that visiting fans so often outnumber Raiders fans at their new stadium in Las Vegas. I thought taking the money from people visiting Las Vegas for a weekend of gambling and football was why he left his team’s devoted following in Oakland, though? (RaidersBeat.com)
Pocket reminded me of this Guardian commentary by Sally Denton asking Why Is So Little Known About the 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR? That’s a good question. (Pocket)
Orange Unified School District’s new radical conservative board majority fired its respected Superintendent with no explanation on a day’s notice. I’m glad voters in my area took this threat seriously in last year’s election. (John Fensterwald, EdSource)
Charlie Pierce wonders why everyone has forgotten that Democrats now have subpoena power in the Senate. Oh yes, I would love to see some tit-for-tat. He writes, “I find positively delicious the prospect of hauling Jared Kushner in front of the Senate for every time Hunter Biden is summoned to the Clown Show. I know it’s not exactly good government, but that ship sailed over the horizon last weekend. And tempering the unruly temperament of the House is actually what the Senate was originally designed to do.” (Charlie Pierce, Esquire)
Don’t they know they’re supposed to let them return to their luxury hotels and fly home — then wait a year to ask the public to look at grainy internet photos to find them?
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) 7:58 PM ∙ Jan 9, 2023
Today’s Thought:
“When only the extremists are willing to take a stand, only the extremists will win. The GOP is a hostage to its most irresponsible members because it’s too frightened to confront them.”—Noah Bertlatsky, Public Notice (1/9/23).
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