Changing up the morning ritual

Quordle

Daily Quordle #51
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I’ve been changing up the morning ritual in the past, lessee, two years. Formerly, I would get up, check the email, and perhaps work on the blog, But at 7 a.m., my wife and I would go downstairs and watch CBS This Morning, now CBS Mornings, to watch “your world in ninety seconds.”

When the headlines were unrelentingly about COVID – the spread of COVID, the death toll of COVID – I sometimes passed on the opportunity to start my day with misery. Presently, I’ve been feeling similarly about Ukraine. I guess I’m more equipped to deal with distress in the evening. Besides, I tend to get enough news from various news outlets during the day.

Instead, I do the daily Wordle. I should note that my wife is MUCH better at this than I am, just as she’s better at Boggle. My daughter is better, too. Wordle has become an odd family bonding experience.

I’ve repeatedly told my wife she’d rule on Wheel of Fortune. We actually have the home game, a consolation prize from when on JEOPARDY! and our comparative scores prove my point. But at least we all still have our Wordle streaks going, unlike some people.

FOUR words

Then I attempt Quordle. The first several times I never got the four words in the nine tries. My mistake was to work it like I played Wordle. I know now to try to expose as many letters by finding three or even four words that hit most of the consonants. I’ve been much more successful.

After wishing my wife goodbye, I go back into the office. The cats want to be fed. I HAD been giving them nourishment at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. But with the stupid time change, if I attend them at 7 and 7, when we “fall back”, they’d be caterwauling to get food at 6 and 6.

This is just one reason that I’m OK with the idea of changing to permanent Daylight Saving Time, even though it’ll be dark on December mornings. I’ve made my feelings about changing the clocks quite clear here. (I’m essentially agreeing with  Marco Rubio; this pains me.)

After finally feeding the felines, I take my blood pressure and my pulse to make sure I’m not dead. THEN I eat. The rest is the usual alternating of email/blogging to music, riding the stationary bike while watching TV (JEOPARDY, 60 Minutes, Finding Your Roots, Trevor Noah, et al), washing the dishes/reading the newspaper to music. This may be altered by a medical appointment, Bible study, grocery shopping, or the eternal “something else,” that unexpected task that sucks up hours in the day.

Where do you get your news

What IS news?

My intention was to write a blog post answering another Ask Roger Anything question. But it got VERY long, and slightly off point. So I’m going to address “Where do you get your news?”

I remember going to a panel discussion in 2017, part of a symposium called Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World.” The segment I attended was “Presidents and the Press: Trump, Nixon, and More.” I wrote about it here. Looking back, when the threat of disinformation already seemed problematic, it now seems like a Peter Zenger moment compared with what we’re now experiencing less than five years later.

One issue for me: I don’t know what “the media” means anymore. Twenty years ago, it would have been pretty easy: CBS the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Fox News, NPR, the New York Times, the Associated Press, the usual suspects.

Now, EVERYTHING is “the media”. Facebook and Twitter feeds and YouTube influencers, pretty much anyone with a megaphone, a microphone, and, preferably, video. This is NOT all bad, mind you. Stories from George Floyd’s murder to war atrocities have been revealed.

Still. About a dozen years ago, I was trying to engage someone in a conversation about information consumption. They said that they had gotten some tidbit from Facebook. I asked where they found it on Facebook. What was the source? “FACEBOOK,” they retorted, exasperated that I seem to be hard of hearing.

North, east, south, west

The other thing I don’t know anymore is “What is ‘news’?” Because many people take in their info via feeds, all the news is of the same significance. So a Kardashian marries, war crimes, the opening of the new Marvel movie, the next mass casualty shooting comes at you. What’s important?

If you happen to read a newspaper – you dinosaur! – you can tell what’s considered most significant the placement of the stories and the size of the headlines. Watching a news broadcast, the story that tends to lead might give you a clue. Online, so many items are vying for our attention.

A friend of mine recently complained that Ginni Thomas’ call to the White House on January 6 disappeared quickly. Of COURSE, it did; that was old news, which may pop up again if she’s called before a House committee or refuses to. But we have to move on to the next topic.

As noted, WHERE one gets the news matters a lot. Sure NBC and Fox are different. But I’ve been receiving newsfeeds that are even less mainstream, let’s say. It’s a bunch of articles such as Fauci, Vaccines, and Big Pharma’s Power by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Anti-vax, pro-Canadian truckers who were blocking Ottawa’s downtown earlier this year.

Don’t believe your eyes

But a lot of it pro-Putin. This utterly fascinates me. Here’s a quote from the sender. “Putin is spot on and I wish we had a leader like him…..remember again the msm is just full of lies and U.S.A./Israeli foreign policy and their puppets like Zelensky who can’t even control his fanatic military project what they are and what they are actually doing in Ukraine onto Putin and Russia…God help us with the jerks we have to deal with …”

The atrocities we think we’re seeing on our TV screens are either “some staged dead” or “killed by Ukrainian fanatical ultra-nationalist battalions.”

The original source of some of this is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the
former Vatican envoy and outspoken papal critic. He released a letter in March blaming “deep state” forces in the United States, the European Union, and NATO for triggering the current war and demonizing Russia.”

It is reasonable to ask, as Noam Chomsky does, whether the US policy will bring about de-escalation in Ukraine. It’s quite another to make Putin the victim in this narrative.

I had wondered where folks such Tucker Carlson had gotten his pro-Russia position, which he has now conveniently abandoned. It’s OK to believe that sort of thinking is unsettling. But know that a lot of people in this country are getting the same messages, probably from sources which we’ve never heard of.

Lesley Stahl of CBS News is 80

60 Minutes for 30 years

Lesley Stahl
CBS News, 2018

I was watching 60 Minutes in November. Lesley Stahl was reporting on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda making a comeback. “Visiting mountain gorillas is no walk in the park. It’s an uphill hike for more than an hour at an altitude of 8000 feet, through that farmland that once belonged to the gorillas just to get to the park.

“Lesley Stahl: Are you out of breath?
Tara Stoinski: Yes. [LAUGHS]
Lesley Stahl: Or is it just me?”

And I thought that reporter must be close to 80! And she was. She must love the gorillas, which she first covered back in 1987.

It occurred to me that I had been watching Lesley Stahl for nearly half a century. As she noted in her 1999 book Reporting Live (1999), she, Connie Chung, and Bernard Shaw were the ‘affirmative action babies’ in what became known as the Class of ’72.” As such, she was assigned to cover, in June 1972, a “third-rate burglary” in the Watergate complex. Like Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, the seemingly insignificant story really launched her career.

She was a White House correspondent during the presidencies of Carter, Reagan, and part of Bush 41. Also, she moderated the CBS Sunday morning program Face The Nation between September 1983 and May 1991.

Since March 1991, she’s been a correspondent for 60 Minutes. Thirty years is as long as Steve Kroft and the late Ed Bradley were on the show; only Morley Safer and Mike Wallace, both of whom started in 1968 are now deceased, were on longer.

Awards

Lesley Stahl received 13 Emmys, plus numerous other awards. One was for “a shocking 2015 report on how some police recruit vulnerable young people for dangerous jobs as confidential informants.” One was for a series based on her “unprecedented” access at Guantanamo Bay prison facilities. “Another [was] for an eye-opening story about China’s huge real estate bubble… She won her 13th Emmy for her interview with the widow of a slain hostage that offered a rare look inside the technically illegal process of negotiating with terrorists.”

Stahl has gotten the big interviews. Former National Security Council official Fiona Hill, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, the then-new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and many, many more. She has managed to greatly annoy some of the powerful, including Trump (2020) and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007).

“She and her husband, author Aaron Latham, live in New York. They have a daughter, Taylor Latham, and two granddaughters. Jordan and Chloe, the subjects of her book, ‘Becoming Grandma: the Joy and Science of the New Grandparenting.'”

The October Surprise in 2020

“autocratic malarkey”

hydrochloroquineI woke up in the morning, and suddenly, it made sense, in a Bizarro world sort of way. Many pundits said there was no October surprise in 2020. I would disagree. The surprise was djt getting COVID.

He flies on Marine One to the hospital on a Friday. By Sunday, he’s riding around in a limo, waving to supporters. And on Monday evening, he’s back at the White House, defiantly ripping off his mask, saying “Screw you, COVID.” A week or so later, he’s off doing dozens of his rallies before tens of thousands of his adoring acolytes, including five events in four states in one day.

Now, you and I may see this as grossly irresponsible behavior, creating a bunch of possible super-spreader events. But to his fans, he is portraying Strength and Resilience.

It’s like in that old Saturday Night Live skit. He is the Arnold clones, Hans and Franz. He’s going to “Pump you up.” Meanwhile, the other guy, he says, is hiding in his basement like a “girly man.”

Never underestimate the appeal of toxic masculinity, especially mixed with half-truths. My gut says that the big blue wave didn’t come because those mysterious undecided voters leaned red. And possibly because his supporters lie to pollsters.

“The unhinged, dangerous, Democracy-destabilizing thing”

He gave a speech at the White House around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday in which he prematurely declared victory. This despite the fact that “millions upon millions of legitimate votes were still being counted. As Vanity Fair noted: “The goal, in all of its authoritarian bluster, was to get out in front of a result that might not land in his favor.”

Now, “the networks quickly and aggressively called bulls**t on Trump’s remarks, either breaking away from the speech or butting in with fact-checks. ‘We are reluctant to step in but duty-bound to point out when he says, ‘We did win this election, we’ve already won,’ that’s not based in the facts at all,’ said MSNBC’s Brian Williams.

His colleague Nicolle Wallace put it this way: ‘It’s straight-up autocratic malarkey, and what we have to keep in mind is that he’s not the boss of the counting…”

“CBS threw up a graphic stating, ‘CBS NEWS IS NOT PROJECTING A WINNER IN THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE,’ and Norah O’Donnell described Trump as ‘castrating the facts…’

“But perhaps the most noteworthy analysis was that seen on Trump’s frenemy network, Fox News… At a historic and uncharted moment like this, it was crucial to have a respected veteran newsman like anchor Chris Wallace telling the viewers what they needed to hear.

“‘This is an extremely flammable situation, and the president just threw a match on it,’ Wallace said. ‘He hasn’t won these states. Nobody is saying he’s won the states. The states haven’t said that he’s won.’

“The question is, did the viewers believe him?”

Where he leads, they will follow

Apparently not. Because the media, he keeps telling them, is fake. This despite the fact the shift in vote count was predictable.

“Dozens of [his] angry supporters… converged on vote-counting centers in Detroit and Phoenix as the returns went against him Wednesday in the two key states. The folks pounding on the Plexiglass in Detroit chanting “Stop the Count” made the NBC News on Wednesday. I feared for the wellbeing of the election workers inside.

Demonstrators, some armed, gathered at the government office in Maricopa County, AZ yelling, “Kill Fox,” and “Count the Vote.” Reportedly, the group became so threatening that the work of counting the vote had to be ended for the evening.

What does one want in a president? I found this four-minute video from John Green (no relation) about the decency of Joe Biden rather touching. And this 20-minute piece of John Oliver on the incompetence of the coronavirus response infuriating.

But djt apparently overcame the COVID. So he must be America Strong, even if he leaves it to his idiot son-in-law to “Let the Markets Decide America’s COVID-19 Fate.”

His fans appreciate his disdain for “political correctness.” He orchestrates his rallies as places to express their anger: “Fire Fauci,” “Lock Her Up.” Yet they’re OK with him lying to them about the seriousness of the pandemic, pushing conspiracy theories, dismissing climate change, pandering to racists, using the government for personal gain, and ruining our international reputation.

Yes, he suggests he’s for individual liberty, but it’s for those who agree with him. Lower taxes but really for the rich. Smaller government when it involves human services or the environment, but not the military. 

My rational brain says his fans are crazy. But I also have to admit I’m just not experiencing his persona the same way as they do. And it’s not just the one person but Trumpism I just don’t grok.

Consume the news for every viewpoint

The need to know

I was on a Zoom meeting with some guys at church in September. The question was how do we consume the news. As I’ve said here before, I read a lot of newsfeeds from various sources.

Some are mainstream, such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, and Washington Post. Some are progressive, such as Truthout and the Daily Kos. I consume a lot of conservative material, such as Daily Signal and Red State.

Oh, and there are non-news sources that often have news stories such as Thomas Industries, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and NatGeo. I’ve discovered that I can read about the exact same unlying facts, and discover that the conclusions are quite different.

This explains why I can never seem to keep up with my email. Initially, I subscribed so that I could peruse a balance of articles. I want to be a good, informed citizen. Of course, I come to these with my own biases, my own POV, but I’m willing to be convinced that I’m wrong. And even if I disagree, it might be a good piece for blog fodder.

Since I started working the Census, it’s been more skimming and less reading. It is especially true with the daily newspaper, which doesn’t take that long to read, even on Sunday. Yet it tends to pile up periodically.

Televsion

And TV news is worse. One guy in my group noted that by the time he sees the evening news – he watches ABC- he’s already gotten the gist of most of the stories presented. Largely true for me as well. I record both NBC and CBS, but I tend to fast forward through the stuff I’ve already sussed out. This is especially true of the unfortunate narratives of fires and floods.

Sometimes, there is a story after the first commercial break that’s unfamiliar to me. The later stories often highlight a twist I didn’t foresee. NBC has a series called Inequality in America. It has features about the digital divide or Americans going to Mexico to get COVID-related medications. I need more than Joe Friday “just the facts.” Context matters too.

When my wife was away on a recent Sunday visiting her mom, I partook in something I seldom do. I binge-watched. It was the previous week of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, plus JEOPARDY! I need to alternate; it keeps my mind in balance.

A recent CBS News poll asked, “When you get the news these days, do you feel…?”
Misled 63%
Angry 56%
Informed 53%
Anxious 46%
Confused 35%

I say now that maybe after the election, I’ll cut back. This is probably a lie. No matter who wins on November 3, I’ll still have an apparently unquenchable need to know.

How do you consume the news? By this, I don’t mean that you get info from “the Internet” or “Facebook”, but WHAT on the Internet, WHO on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.  

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