Don Pesci: On transactional journalism

An anti-Adams screed by James Callendar in the vicious presidential campaign of 1800.

VERNON, Conn.

Journalism, we are told, is suffering from two ailments: Fake news – some of the boys and girls are just pestiferous ideologues – and transactional journalism. Of the two, the more fatal is transactional journalism, because it perverts the very purpose of honest reporting, which is to tell the truth and shame the Devil.

Reporters who engage in transactional journalism are the Donald Trumps of the reportorial world. Journalism is, among other things, a business, and business orbits around access to a product. When he was attorney general of Connecticut for more than 20 years, Dick Blumenthal was a master at putting his product before the television cameras, so much so that it was said of him -- by journalists weary of having to make his frequent media releases into reportorial foie gras -- that there was no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between Blumenthal and a television camera.

Transactional journalism, as the name implies, involves a mutually beneficial arrangement – or a Faustian bargain, depending on your point of view -- between a politician and a journalist: The journalist will give the politician the kind of coverage he wants, and the politician will return the favor by giving the journalist the kind of access he needs; both are frauds parading as saints.

Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson discussed transactional journalism at the Hillsdale College (in Iliinois) National Leadership Seminar in 2018. She was presenting to the faculty and students of the college a modern iteration of an arrangement that is as old as the country.

The Adams-Jefferson campaign of 1800, truly vicious, was prosecuted by proxies; gentlemen of the time did not engage publicy in three ring campaign circuses. Jefferson, according to one surrogate defamer, president of Yale College at the time, presented a danger to virtuous wives and daughters. Should Jefferson become president, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” A Connecticut newspaper warned that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”

Jefferson, for his part, found James Callender, an influential journalist of the day, a useful tool. Callender specialized in incendiary pamphleteering. Pulling out all the stops on his media organ, Callender, a satirist born in Scotland, wrote that Adams was a “rageful, lying, warmongering fellow,” a “repulsive pedant” and “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”

Callender had a private beef with Adams. He had been prosecuted and imprisoned by the Adams administration for violating the execrable Alien and Sedition Acts and was receiving payments for his seemingly objective journalism from Jefferson. To his credit, Callender later turned on Jefferson, authoring a series of newspaper articles alleging that Jefferson had sired children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.
Stumbling out of a bar in 1803, Callender drowned in the James River; so it was reported. However, there were doubters. Federalists suspected skullduggery since Callender was due to testify in a much publicized trial, The People vs. Croswell, involving charges against publisher Harry Croswell for having reprinted claims that Jefferson paid Callender to defame George Washington.

Two morals may be drawn from all this reportorial perfidy: 1) If you are a seasoned politician and want a good press, you should buy a sympathetic reporter; 2) If you are a bought reporter, stay bought, and avoid bars and rivers.
American campaigning and American political journalism were born in the same crib. In the good old days, newspapers were little more than party organs. Honest Abe Lincoln wrote editorials for a sympathetic paper under a pseudonym. The notion that the press is and ought to be non-partisan and objective is a modern aspiration, sometimes attained, sometimes not.
Attkisson sees transactional journalism as a noxious practice, fatal to honest journalism. The coin of the realm in transactional journalism is not money, but favorable news in return for access, which is corrupting on both ends; the reporter becomes a conveyance of partisan news, and the politician’s messaging is dishonestly sold as objective reporting. In biblical terms, the bought reporter sells his birthright of honest journalism for a mess of political pottage.

Attkisson’s book The Smear offers some timely advice followed by a warning: “One smear artist I interviewed said nearly every image you run across in daily life, whether it’s on the news, a comedian’s joke, a meme on social media or a comment on the Internet, was put there for a reason. It’s like scenes in a movie, he said. Nothing happens by accident. Sometimes people have paid a great deal of money to put those images before you. What you need to ask yourself isn’t so much ‘is it true,’ but ‘who wants me to believe it and why?’”
She warns that the firewall between political reporting and propaganda may easily be breached: “We are not keeping an adequate firewall, giving the very people access to the newsroom who are trying to sway our opinion and shape news coverage. I am often not sure what these pundits on both sides add, besides propaganda talking points. This is part of what I call the soft ‘infiltration’ of the news media. We haven’t done a good job at staying at arm’s length from the interests that seek to use us as tools.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based essayist.

Labels: Adams, Attkisson, Callender, Croswell, Hillsdale, Jefferson, Lincoln, The Smear, Trump

More troubled small colleges

Emily Dickinson Hall at Hampshire College. The building was designed by the architecture firm of former faculty member Norton Juster, and and houses much of the space devoted to humanities at the college, including creative writing and theater. It’s named after the famed 19th Century poet, who lived in Amherst.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

A couple of minor private Massachusetts colleges have announced in the past year that they’re folding -- Mount Ida and Newbury colleges. And Green Mountain College, in Vermont, announced last week that’s closing. Small colleges have been closing around America at an accelerating rate but few of them have been particularly distinguished.

However, as the demographic and financial crisis of higher education mounts, some prestigious colleges must close, too, or merge with larger, nearby institutions. Still, it was a bit of a bombshell last Tuesday to learn that Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., is in serious enough trouble that it’s seeking a partner, and, I assume, might have to close if it doesn’t get one.

Will a nearby institution rescue Hampshire? If so, it will probably be one of the four that helped found Hampshire in 1965 (it opened for students in 1970} for experimentation in the liberal arts when the Baby Boomer population meant surging applications. Those are the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Smith, Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges. Hampshire and the four comprise the Five College Consortium, whose students can take course at any of the schools.

Hampshire is known for its alternative curriculum, emphasis on portfolios rather than course-distribution requirements and reliance on professors’ narrative assessments instead of grade point averages. Despite this seemingly touchy-feely approach, the college sends a big percentage of its graduates off to highly selective graduate schools.

Since 1970, Hampshire (sometimes affectionally called “Hamster’’) has become a sort of semi-elite institution. But its $52 million endowment is far too small for its ambitions and its applications have generally been slipping in recent years as they have at many other private colleges.

Hampshire, unlike some other economically challenged colleges, has not tried to turn itself into a glorified vocational school. Rather it has stuck with an emphasis on the liberal arts – an education that produces the most engaged and effective citizens. So I hope that some way may be found for Hampshire to survive with maximum independence and not just as a sort of experimental-education campus of one or more of the other four institutions in the Five College Consortium.

Hampshire College is in foreground, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is in the upper left while Amherst College is in upper right. They comprise, with Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges, the Five College Consortium.

— Photo by MonsieurNapoleon

A take on being working class in the 21st Century

Painting by Sam Belisle in his group show with Teddy Benfield, Laurence Cuelenaere and Kenson Truong called “Forward Thinking: Four Young Artists’ Take on the 21st Century,’’ at the Adelson Galleries, Boston, Feb. 1-24.: The gallery says “Mr. Belisle’s paintings highlight the working class and specifically aim to show dualities in perceptions of the environment and space created by socioeconomic upbringings.’’

If only I had written it down too

“My Young Father’s Drawings’’ (encaustic), by Nancy Whitcomb, now showing at the Providence Art Club.

What we see and don't see

“Collapse: Of the Self ‘‘ (oil and ink on wood panel), by Steve Sangapore, as part of a group show with Lydia Kinney and Casey Stanberrry from Jan. 30 through Feb. 24 at Fountain Street Gallery’s Annex, Boston.

Mr. Sangapore's works address the idea that consciousness creates the universe. His pieces are split down the middle, with one side showing what we perceive, and the other the quantum world that we can't see

On Abolition Row

Images from the show “Black Spaces Matter: Celebrating New Bedford’s Abolition Row,’’ at the UMass Dartmouth Art Gallery, New Bedford. The exhibition features the story of Abolition Row in New Bedford, where African-American historical figures such as Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists resided. The show includes virtual reality neighborhood tours, documentary films, 3-D printed models, artistic illustrations, student projects, historic maps and photographs.

‘Dear old New England’

Stereographic card showing an MIT mechanical drafting studio, 19th ]Century (photo by E.L. Allen, left/right inverted).

“I never fully realized how much a New England birth in itself was worth, but I am happy that that was my lot. I have felt it so keenly these last few days. Dear old New England, with all her sternness and uncompromising opinions; the home of all that is good and noble.”

― Matthew Pearl, in the novel The Technologists, set in 19th Century Greater Boston and involving the early days of MIT.

Don Pesci: Trump replenishes Connecticut's treasury as state's cultural reinvention continues

Airline plane engine maker Pratt & Whitney’s headquarters in East Hartford. Its sales have surged with, among other things, government contracts.

While Connecticut Democrats were busying themselves thumping President Trump during the recently concluded elections – the state’s all Democrat U.S. congressional delegation would not shed a tear if U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer were to succeed in impeaching him – Trump has delivered the goods to The Provision State.

The state’s underperforming economy may finally join the rest of the nation, much of which had recovered from the Great Recession many moons ago, in a splendid recovery – just in time too. Economists in Connecticut have not titled the coming jobs boom The Trump Bump, although a recent Hartford Business Journal (HBJ) report, “UTC’s 4Q profits jump 73%; CEO Hayes airs separation plans HBJ” comes dangerously close.

Here is the good news: “Farmington conglomerate United Technologies Corp., which plans to split into three separate companies, on Wednesday said its fourth-quarter profits soared 72.7 percent on booming aerospace sales and a favorable U.S. corporate tax rate.

UTC CEO Gregory Hayes, a smile lighting his face, noted that profits were up and "2018 was a transformational year for United Technologies."

HBJ reported, “The thriving aviation market drove UTC's fourth-quarter surge, Hayes said in a conference call Wednesday morning, with newly acquired Rockwell Collins leading sales growth with $4.9 billion in revenues during the quarter, up 29 percent year-over-year. East Hartford's Pratt & Whitney posted $5.5 billion in sales, up 24.2 percent.”

A rising economic tide, President Kennedy once said, lifts all the boats. And this rising tide, the result chiefly of Trump’s new military procurements, will water Connecticut's parched treasury. A larger employment pie allows state government to engorge itself with new revenue – without raising taxes. It is a win-win for both anti-Trump Democrats in Connecticut like Congressman John Larson and tax-weary citizens of the state still reeling from former Gov. Dan Malloy’s crippling tax increases.

Republicans already are ringing the tocsin: Maybe if we wait a bit, we won’t need those tolls after all. Also, is it possible we may be fondling too often the third rail of New England’s social issues?

Prior to the progressive take-over of Connecticut, the state was prepared to go its own way, luxuriating in its own unique character. Connecticut was for much of its history a refuge from New York’s predatory politics and brutal taxation. All this changed with the advent of former Sen. Lowell Weicker’s successful gubernatorial bid in 1991. Weicker forced an income tax through the General Assembly; the playing field having been leveled, the state found itself in competition with New York City and Boston.

It was no contest, and Connecticut “got its clock cleaned,” a favorite expression of Weicker’s. How, for instance, can Connecticut compete with New York in job poaching?

Connecticut is now in a race to the bottom on so called “social issues.” Bad political models make for bad cultural dives to the bottom. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a nominal Catholic, has now begun a scuffle with his wounded Catholic Church. “Andrew Cuomo,” Fox News reports, “is under fire from faith leaders after he signed a bill into law that legalizes abortion up until birth in many cases.”

Cuomo will have no problem in a fisticuffs contest with his church’s faith leaders. In much of New England, it pays politically to scuff up Catholic doctrine. His real problem will be with pregnant mothers – they are women too – who have consulted ultrasound images and found that late-term fetuses bear a striking resemblance to born babies. But New York, in any case, has taken a great social leap forward, and Connecticut, a national leader on progressive social issues, has a bit of catching up to do. Progressives do not believe in definitional lines – fetus or baby? -- whatever science and common sense suggests.

Connecticut’s own Senator from Planned Parenthood, Dick Blumenthal, has yet to tell us, perhaps because no one has put the question to him publicly during one of his frequent highly scripted media availabilities, why his most cherished industry should be the only one in the United States that remains unregulated. The suit-prone Blumenthal was, for more than two decades as Connecticut’s attorney general, the state regulator-in-chief.

Connecticut’s cultural reinvention is well underway, and the political map has changed as well, mostly owing to the inattention of Republicans and the approval of the state’s left-of-center media. Culture is an Archimedean lever: Give me a place outside the world where I can place my lever, said Archimedes, and I will move the world. This is the progressive order of business; first change the culture and politics will meekly follow in its train.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Bring it on

“Summer Feeling” (mixed media paper collage), by Adam Langehough, in his show “New Landscapes,’’ at Paper Nautilus, Providence, through March 2.

Collared and leashed nature

Walkway in the “Emerald Necklace’’ — a string of parks in Boston and Brookline conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park. (See below.)

“Early Spring Afternoon — Central Park’’ (1911), by Willard Leroy Metcalf.

“Such strangers will have to hide

and take cover before the caretakers

of the trail arrive tomorrow.

They will efficiently find all wildness

from the storm and make sure that

it is all discarded and hauled to the dump.

“Perhaps I am looking for nature

in all the wrong places.

Here it has been collared and leashed

and rendered docile.

Still it fights back.

My hopeful dog directs my attention to the stream

and points to an otter that sinks when I look.

‘Maybe this time, boss?’ he implores.

Overhead, three noisy geese, free as you please,

as insolent as if they were twenty,

announce their imminent landing

at the county water control pond.

Not all of us are on a leash yet.’’

 
— From “Down the Urban Trail,’’ by Ahellas Alixopulos

Trying to get their attention

A Prius hybrid car. You tend to find them in affluent suburbs.

GoLocal reported Jan. 12 that a “new study finds that less than fifty percent {43 percent to be precise} of Rhode Islanders are willing to make significant ‘lifestyle changes’ in order to combat climate change.’’  That would include such things as driving their cars less. I’m surprised that the percentage willing to help address the scientific fact of global warming is that high. It takes a disaster to park over their heads to get the attention of many, probably most people when it comes to big issues, especially global ones. Rhode Islanders, says the study, are the least likely in New England to make changes because of fear of climate change. Maybe a big hurricane would change their minds.

Two-thirds of Massachusetts people in the research are willing to make such lifestyle changes, but that probably mostly reflects the higher percentage of well-educated people there, as well as its affluence, especially in the densely populated eastern part of the state.  Obviously, the more affluent you are, the more likely you are to buy an electric car, etc.

To read the GoLocal article, please hit this link.

Addressing the analog-to-digital transition

“The Last Selfie’’ (acrylic), by Michael Spillers, in the “2019 International Juried Show’’ at Beacon Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 24.

This exhibition features works by 23 artists from across the United States who, the gallery says, “were asked to show how the analog-to-digital transition that technology has gone through has affected them as artists. The selected works reflect a wide range of opinions and ideas, both positive and negative. However the viewer feels about the transition, they will find works that both empathize with their opinions and that show them a different perspective. ‘‘

Or bumper cars

In Boston’s Financial District.

“Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.’’

— Bill Bryson, travel writer, including his hilarious A Walk in the Woods, about a misbegotten hike on the Appalachian Trail.

Challenging your perceptions

By Nancy Jenner. in her show “World News: Alternate Views,’’ Jan. 31-March 1, at BabsonART’s (part of Babson College) Hollister Gallery, in Wellesley, Mass.

Her two installations challenge the perceptions of environmental pollution and how political turmoil affects families. She works with different media, such as archival paper and gouache, to build a visual narrative on each topic. Today's media-rich culture allows a person to consume only the news media that confirm their own biases, and Jenner's installations aim to offer a new perspective for the viewer to challenge those biases.

See last days of ‘Depth of Perception’ in Boston

Mapping stone walls from above

Stone wall at what had been Robert Frost's farm in Derry, N.H., a wall he describes in his famous poem "Mending Wall".

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The Concord (N.H.) Monitor ran an intriguing story on Jan. 15 headlined “Crowdsourcing New Hampshire’s love affair with stone walls’’. Stone walls, built mostly by English colonists and their descendants, most of them farmers, from the 17th to the early 19 centuries, are one of our region’s most beloved features – and a reminder of how hard earlier New Englanders had to work to wrest a living from a rocky soil.

The Monitor’s David Brooks reports how an aerial mapping system called LIDAR has eased the mapping old stone walls, many hidden in woods that have long since enveloped open fields. “The state has uploaded a zoomable image of most of New Hampshire taken by airplanes using LIDAR, which operates like sonar but uses light waves and produces a more detailed image,’’ even from a mile in the air.

“Members of the public can search through the black-and-white image and if they find what appears to be a stone wall, notable for unnatural straightness amid meandering hills or streams, they can mark it with a drawing tool that creates a thin pink line. These lines will create a map and database of the state’s stone walls. The online map includes a ‘progress to date’ link keeping a running tally of how many miles of walls have been marked.”

The project could improve our understanding of land-use patterns that developed since Europeans started to move en masse into New England. It’s always useful to know where we’ve been, which can help tell us where we’re going.

To read Mr. Brooks’s story, please hit this link.

Llewellyn King: The women who would be president

Good morning class, draw near and listen ever so closely.

So, you all want to be president of the United States, arguably the most difficult and demanding job in the world?

Clearly, you feel that you have unique talents which will promote peace and prosperity and block injustice, racism and men hitting on women.

You are sure that you will be able to curb, gently, the imperial instincts of China and its canny leader, Xi Jinping.

And you have a sure-fire plan to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East and to persuade our shaken allies that it is worth standing firm with us.

You might want to know what to do about Africa’s soaring population and declining prospects.

You, also, I trust have given thought to the future as the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds with huge consequences for the future of work (artificial intelligence taking away jobs); the future of transportation (autonomous vehicles, ships and airplanes); and remote farming (farms operated from city desks).

If you are all set on those things, we can get down to the ones which may decide the election: the social issues, including abortion, education, gender equity and gender equality, gun control, access to healthcare, immigration and income inequality.

You might want to tell people how you will turn back the tides and solve global warming. Rich people are starting to worry about their oceanfront homes; that means it will become a fashionable topic with those who have been indifferent screaming for action

Now, ladies, step forward for little individual tutelage.

Elizabeth Warren: You have the pole position as the racers line up, but already there are troubling things. Ms. Warren, you must stop taking President Trump’s bait. How the devil did you get into getting your DNA analyzed? Bad move. Lead the debate, do not join it.

Kamala Harris: A few good notices and you are off and running. Just wait until the opposition research pulls apart the cases you prosecuted when you were a district attorney in San Francisco -- and the things you said in court. Two former prosecutors, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, have tarnished the brand.

Kirsten Gillibrand: The announcement on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was, well, weak. It looked like you were there because you had just published a children’s book called something like Snuggles the Rabbit.. Bold statesmanship was not to be heard. It is hard to look presidential on a comedy program. Looking presidential is worth a lot in the polls, especially at the beginning. Now to those giant flip-flops on guns and abortion. Were you not a darling of the NRA? What about your switching from pro-life to pro-getting-elected? Explain your double epiphany.

Tulsi Gabbard: Step forward and salute. Major, you are the only declared candidate with military service: the only candidate in sight who has worn your country’s uniform and seen active duty. Bravo! That is going to be a huge credential, but not quite enough to outweigh the fact that you are too exotic: born in American Samoa, raised in Hawaii and a Hindu. At 38, you have got time, lots and lots of it. Beware hopefuls. This lady may not be for turning.

To the whole class of four: Have you ever run a large organization? Have you a big scandal you think you can keep hidden (you cannot)? Do you know enough people to staff the cabinet? Do you know how you will find 1,200 people to fill the positions that must be confirmed by the Senate? How is your golf game?

Three of you are senators, Gillibrand, Harris and Warren, and Gabbard is a member of the House. Hard to run against Washington when you already have contracted Potomac Fever.

Suggestion: Get a big idea and run with that. Keep out of the granular social stuff, it will bring you down. Prepare to be vice president and bide your time.

House, Senate, White House, America’s women are on the move, and may the best woman win.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email isllewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

The hunger games

'Wings of fright'

In downtown Chelsea.

“The refugee’s run

across the desert borderlands

carved wings of fright

into his forehead,

growing more crooked

with every eviction notice

in this waterfront city of the north.’’

— From “Mi Vida: Wings of Fright

Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1987,’’ by Martin Espada

Chelsea is a gritty old manufacturing town next to Boston.

Mr. Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, lives in very bucolic Leverett, Mass., well known for its Buddhist  New England Peace Pagoda and the many babbling brooks coursing down its hills.

The New England Peace Pagoda, in Leverett.

Saw Mill River Falls near Rattlesnake Gutter, in Leverett.

The January thaw

Slush in January.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

January obviously sometimes has a bleak beauty, but….

When I lived in New Hampshire some of the locals, to sort of justify living in a place with a, well, rigorous climate, noted that you were much more likely to get sick down south, where the year-round warmth helps bacteria and viruses to thrive far more than in New England. It reminds me of my former colleague Sam Abt, who smoked a couple of packs of Pall Malls every day and yet who never seemed to get sick even as everyone around him was coughing and sniffling. “No bugs can live down there’’ (in his lungs), he asserted.

To me January is about slowly lifting darkness and taking people to hospitals on roads covered with black ice. So bring on the January thaw, the seed catalogs and the annual beach-pass dues.

The New England Weather Book, by David Ludlum and the editors of the now long-departed Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal, wrote of the thaw: “{R}esearch has demonstrated that the thaw is a reality and most frequently occurs between January 20 and 26….Although the thaw does not come every year, it has put in an appearance often enough to establish its place as a singular factor of the New England climate.’’

Apparently our January thaw this year will come on Jan. 23-24, unfortunately with rain.

We’ll take it!