I don’t read The Washington Post any more. I don’t see a hard copy. I don’t go prowling around its website.

Instead, I read four of its newsletters delivered by email every day. In fact, WashPo offers 68 newsletters culled from the work of its journalists and pundits. So it’s easy to select the kind of news anyone might want (rather than have an algorithm do it).

These newsletters are well-crafted and not necessarily hastily churned-out hodgepodges of factoids. For example, the Daily 202 (all about news from the American capital), begins like this today:

10 important questions raised by Sally Yates’s testimony on the ‘compromised’ Michael Flynn

Sally Yates’s Senate testimony in three minutes

THE BIG IDEA: Sally Yates’s riveting testimony Monday raised far more questions than it answered. Most of all, it cast fresh doubts on Donald Trump’s judgment. [boldface in original]

Each Daily 202 from WashPo is designed to be quickly read. Each item is one or two paragraphs and contains a link or two for further consumption.

WashPo’s not alone in the newsletter game. The failing New York Times has 56 newsletter offerings, ranging from daily to “as necessary.” The Los Angeles Times has 22 newsletters; the Wall Street Journal has 20 newsletters. CNN offers 11 newsletters; Fox News has 12 newsletters. CBS News offers 10; NBC News, seven; ABC News, three.

Lots of newspapers and other news media have newsletters. They’ve been described as “newspapers on your front porch” although, remember, newsletters offer nuggets, not the full course menu. Because the world has abandoned analog (print) for digital, a reader doesn’t have to walk to the front yard where the damn paperboy threw the paper instead of hitting the porch. Email arrives conveniently. The bite-sized portions fit audiences’ assumed shortened attention spans. Newsletters carry audio and video and still images, too. The good newsletters are well designed and attractive (meaning eyeballs like them, so advertisers do, too).

Email, once thought dead, has revived news consumption — or at least news companies hope so.

But newsletters bearing brief snippets of news with linked opportunities for more do not represent a dramatic change in news presentation — only in delivery mechanism.

Anyone who’s worked in a newsroom — or read a newspaper intelligently — recognizes briefs. They’ve been a staple of newspapers for a century (and in the digital era, on websites, too). Sometimes they operate as teasers — boldface single sentences or phrases containing the “see page 10” tagline arrayed in boxes at the top of the front page. Or they’re paragraphs down the left-hand side of the front page. Inside the paper, they’re shortened stories — a paragraph or two — deemed insufficiently important to warrant full play.

Teaser is an important word in the news biz. It shouts, “Read me. Read all of me.” Email newsletters — useful to me, at least — still amount to teasers. The senders want subscriptions. They want readers and viewers. All news organizations, still operating with the crippled business model of advertising-driven revenue — find old habits difficult to break. Readers wanted. Viewers wanted. Eyeballs wanted, because eyeballs can still be  sold to advertisers.

I like the newsletters. It’s handy to have them come to me via email. I can read them wherever and whenever I wish on whatever device I wish. As a news junkie, I appreciate the plethora of précis found in them.

I only hope newsletters are driving increased revenue for news organizations — and that such revenue eventually allows the tens of thousands of journalists canned by those organizations since 2007 to be rehired.

Without journalists, news doesn’t get credibly reported and written. Without journalists, my newsletters would be … news-less.

A code of ethics defines behaviors. Many professions have such codes. For physicians, for example, the code of medical ethics of the American Medical Association prescribes how they should interact with patients. For many, if not most, journalists, the code of ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists dictates acceptable practices.

The executive branch of the American government also has a code of ethics and an office to oversee it. The United States Office of Government Ethics, whose tagline is “Preventing Conflict of Interest in the Executive Branch,” issues regulations titled “Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch.”

The OGE rules say any political appointee must sign an ethics pledge regarding conflict of interest. For example, the code says a former lobbyist turned political appointee cannot act on a topic or issue he or she handled for a private-sector client.

However, presidents, through executive orders, can allow conflict-of-interest waivers to be granted when, in the words of the Obama White House, “the literal application of the Pledge does not make sense or is not in the public interest.”

Those waivers are public documents. Says the OGE: “You may obtain actual copies of any waiver granted to a Government employee by an executive branch agency.”

Ethics codes prescribe behaviors. Waivers may undo limitations on some behaviors. Executive branch codes generally limit the participation of former lobbyists. Therefore, it’s in the public interest to know whether executive branch appointees remain faithful to ethics codes and whether waivers are granted for appropriate reasons. Right?

Enter the administration of President Donald and its war on transparency.

From The New York Times:

The Trump administration, in a significant escalation of its clash with the government’s top ethics watchdog, has moved to block an effort to disclose any ethics waivers granted to former lobbyists who now work in the White House or federal agencies.

Walter M. Shaub, head of the OGE, five weeks ago asked the Trump administration “for copies of any waivers it issued that may have granted appointees exemptions from ethics rules” by June 1. This, presumably, was requested to allow them to be inspected by the public for compliance.

Remember, ethics rules generally prevent appointees who were lobbyists from working in the executive branch on issues or topics they handled outside of government. If the public cannot inspect the waivers, then the public cannot determine whether such appointees are in fact waived from that restriction.

Polite people called the Trump administration’s refusal “unprecedented and extremely troubling” and “extraordinary” and a “[challenge] to the very authority of the director of the [OGE] and his ability to carry out the functions of the office.”

Less polite people call it what it is: Bullshit. President Donald and his administration is becoming mired ever deeper in the authoritarian position that they need no oversight from anyone. That’s outrageous and dangerous. The administration should provide OGE with copies of all waivers granted.

Three charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, two covering about 15 years, bluntly demonstrate the swift collapse of the centuries-old newspaper industry business model. They also herald the rise of an information-disbursing replacement — the internet.

A 2015 survey by the American Society of News Editors shows newsroom (not overall) employment in the nation’s 1,400 daily newspapers at just under 33,000 people. That’s down from a high of 56,000 newsroom employees in the early ’90s. Of course, those paying attention to newsroom cuts over the past two years have seen what newspaper managements, particularly at Gannett, have done to its remaining workforce. I estimate the daily newsroom workforce to be down to nearly 31,000.

The BLS data covers all employment in the newspaper industry, not just reporters and editors, and not just from dailies. The Editor & Publisher Yearbook lists more than 6,500 community weeklies, defined as any newspaper publishing at least once a week but no more than three times a week.

From the BLS report:

From January 2001 to September 2016, the newspaper publishers industry lost over half of its employment, from 412,000 to 174,000. In contrast, employment in the Internet publishing and web search portals industry increased from 67,000 jobs in January 2007 to 206,000 jobs in September 2016. [emphasis added]

The second chart shows the rise and fall of selected information industries. The number of newspaper publishers has fallen from about 9,300 to about 7,500 in 15 years. Other information businesses have remained fairly static save for one — internet and web search portals.

As regular readers know, I’ve taught journalism for the past 26 years. Persuading young women and men — and their tuition-paying parents — to consider a career in journalism is increasingly a difficult task. The chart below partly explains why.

In 2015, the annual pay in the internet and web search portal business averaged more than $197,000. Newspaper publishers averaged about $48,400. Feedback from students tells me entry-level pay for journalists runs about $23,000 to $27,000. That’s not an enticing salary range when student loan debt averages more than $30,000 per borrower.

I have no startling revelation to make, nor do I have sufficient insight into redesigning the newspaper industry’s business model to make journalism a more financially rewarding career option for my students, let alone continue its role in holding government (and corporations) accountable for their actions.

I’m angry newspaper managements either refused to see this coming in the 1990s, or did and refused to adapt to the digital age earlier. If they had, perhaps civic discourse fueled by good journalism would be in far better shape than it is today.

Is there a sane mind in the White House, one who believes the resurgence of coal promised by President Donald is a fiction concocted to garner November votes? Or who at least believes the coal industry is dead on its feet?

Even after his election, the president continued to promise coal renewal. In an address at the Environmental Protection Agency in March, he said:

We will unlock job producing natural gas, oil and shale energy. We will produce American coal to power American industry. [emphasis added]

President Donald has taken steps to unleash coal. He’s rolled back clean-air policies and regulations of previous administrations. He’s taken aim at President Obama’s Clean Power Plan with the goal of killing it. He has ordered the lifting of a moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands.

But so many reasons exist to deny coal its presidentially desired comeback. S&R has detailed these reasons in the past.

An industry analysis forecasts a grim future for coal in 2017:

Coal production declining by as much as 40 million tons. Coal prices failing to increase enough to benefit shareholder or stimulate new investment. Coal exports remaining weak. Little or no gain from regulatory relief as capital continues its flight from coal. Increasingly dim employment prospects.

Three of the largest coal companies in the United States — Contura, Arch Coal, and Peabody — are in various stages of bankruptcy proceedings. Industry employment has fallen from 150,000 jobs in 1990 to 64,000 in 2015.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says those jobs aren’t returning.

Coal’s value as an investment will remain clouded, however, by market competition from natural gas, wind, and solar, and gains in energy efficiency. Potential benefits from regulatory relief that has been promised by the new administration will provide little or no gain. And the long-term prognosis for the coal industry in every region from now through 2050 is poor, as more coal-fired power plants will close and as utilities will continue to allocate capital away from coal. Promises to create more coal jobs will not be kept — indeed the industry will continue to cut payrolls.

These losses will be related in part to the coal industry’s long-term business model of producing more coal with fewer workers. Job losses will be exacerbated further by the current low coal-price environment and by the inability of the industry and its component companies to adapt to a smaller customer base. [emphasis added]

The former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, isn’t buying the president’s coal con, either.

Politicians who ignore these market realities and make promises to coal communities they can’t keep are engaged in something worse than a con. They are telling those communities, in effect: The best hope they have, and that their children have, is to be trapped in a dying industry that will poison them. [emphasis added]

Now, it appears, there’s a sane mind in the White House who disagrees with President Donald’s coal dream. He would be the chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn. From CNN:

“Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as a feedstock,” Gary Cohn said aboard Air Force One on Thursday, referring to raw materials that get converted into a fuel. … “If you think about how solar and how much wind power we’ve created in the United States, we can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly,” Cohn said.

Given the premium President Donald places on loyalty, should be we expect to hear soon Cohn’s been fired and a pro-coal chief economic adviser will be forthcoming?

Imagine you’re filthy rich. A one-percenter. You’ve got tons of investments and other sources of interest-based income. Yes, I know, you’ve got that vacation house in Aspen and that skiing chalet in Zermatt. But those, and the house in the Hamptons, are getting a little pricey for upkeep and paying the household staff a livable wage.

You’re tempted to sell off some of those investments to bring in some cash because the market’s pretty good right now. Besides, your Bentley is now three years old. Time to replace it with a new, $310,000 Mulsanne.

But your  team of crack accountants tells you to hold off selling anything: “Remember, President Donald says he’s gonna push serious tax reform through Congress real soon.” In fact, the president’s treasury secretary said the new tax plan would be “the biggest tax cut and the largest tax reform in the history of this country.”

You, of course, salivate, thinking of all the money you’ll save if your top income-tax rate falls from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, to say nothing of the cut to 15 percent applied to all the businesses you own. (You know, of course, that team of crack accountants has for years kept you from paying anywhere near the top rate.)

So you indeed hold off selling. You tell all your one-percenter and one-tenth-of-one-percenter pals to hold off, too. So they do.

Suddenly, you and all your chums making nearly $500,000 a year in income are postponing sales of investments and hitting the pause button on paying taxes. Others who aren’t one-percenters are onto this game, too. They’re holding on to all the cash they can.

You’re not alone. Big transnational corporations, nominally based in the United States, are holding off repatriating more than $2 trillion in overseas profits (as they have for years), hoping for Congress to cut ‘em a deal — 35 percent to just 5 percent — as it did with the never-created-jobs American Jobs Creation Act in 2004.

Then there’s Congress stalling on creating real budgets. The men and women who earn at least $174,000 a year to make difficult decisions and compromises are in their ninth year of passing short-term bills called “continuing resolutions” to keep the government functioning.

All of this has consequences on the nation’s ability to pay its bills.

Max Ehrenfreund and Damian Palleta write in The Washington Post’s Wonkblog:

Wealthy Americans and business owners are putting off paying taxes in the hopes that Republicans will deliver big cuts, leaving the government increasingly short on cash and accelerating its crash into the debt ceiling.

Federal data and anecdotes from tax advisers reveal that a significant number of taxpayers are postponing cashing out on investments and other financial decisions, hoping to pay less later if the White House and congressional Republicans pass a huge reduction in tax rates. [emphasis added]

The Treasury Department as of this week only has $177 billion in its bank account. Yeah, I know: Sounds like a lot of money. But it’s chump change compared with requested federal outlays of a few trillion dollars.

Borrowing is difficult for the feds at the moment, the Post reporters write.

Even before the tax payments slowed, the government was spending more money than it brought in through revenue. To cover the difference, the government borrows money by issuing debt. But it can only issue debt up to a certain limit, known as the debt ceiling. And the debt ceiling can be raised only by Congress. The government has been bumping up against the debt ceiling since mid-March, and the Treasury Department is expected to run out of emergency steps to avoid defaulting on payments in a few months. [emphasis added]

The government’s bean counters can probably stretch that $177 billion (some tax money will continue to roll in but not as fast as the government spends it) until late summer or early fall. The debt ceiling sits at $19.81 trillion right now.

Congress doesn’t like to deal with the need to raise the debt ceiling. It doesn’t like the many dire threats and more dire counterthreats by both parties. So it stalls, usually ending a few days or hours before a government shutdown. So it will continue to stall through the summer. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has suggested lawmakers deal with the debt ceiling before they depart for their August recess. (those 22 days when they don’t have to deal with the nation’s pressing business.) Who knew Mnuchin was a comedian?

But don’t worry. I’m sure the patriotic one-percenters will rise up in the nation’s hour of need, find the cash, and pay taxes soonest.

We’re saved, right?

Alex Honnold

Alex Honnold is a remarkable young man. He may be the foremost rock climber in generations. That his most recent feat was done entirely ropeless — meaning he’d die if he fell — adds to his impressive résumé.

Honnold, 31, climbed the Freerider route on the 3,000-foot granite monolith El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in just under four hours. (See the illustrated route map in The New York Times.) Just try to imagine it: He scaled vertical, sometimes overhanging granite, often using fingernail-sized handholds, with only his talent, control over fear, and sheer will protecting him from a fatal fall.

A life as a full-time, professional rock climber, such as Honnold, requires financial support. Honnold’s website points this out: “These are the companies that allow me to climb all day every day,” he writes. His sponsors include mountaineering equipment suppliers Black Diamond, Maxim Dynamic Ropes, La Sportiva, and North Face as well as GoalZero and Stride. (Ironic, isn’t it, that a climber who shuns the protection of a rope has rope manufacturers as sponsors …)

Sponsorship isn’t new in the mountaineering world. Want to climb Everest? Be prepared to pony up about $45,000 per person. Or … find sponsors. Honnold’s means of supporting his chosen sport isn’t any different than that of other professional athletes. He has excelled, and sponsors have flocked to him.

Honnold’s feat will be the focus of a documentary for National Geographic, whose film crew followed Honnold as he flashed up El Cap.

The Freerider solo ascent wasn’t just a risk for Honnold. NatGeo surely had bet a large amount of money on a successful outcome of Honnold’s months of training for the climb. Success, of course, would be defined simply: Honnold lived.

After Honnold’s spectacular climb, Tim Pastore, president of original programming and production at National Geographic channels, praised the young man:

Alex’s passion to push himself to the edge of what is humanly possible, to continually redefine the limits set for him, encompasses everything we represent at National Geographic. He is a true explorer in every sense of the word, one who fully embodies the pioneering spirit we have championed at National Geographic for more than 129 years. Alex’s feat is nothing short of historic, and when people see the extreme preparation and indomitable human spirit we captured for our upcoming movie they will truly be in awe.

What would Pastore have said had Honnold fallen — and died?

Well, Honnold didn’t. The documentary is scheduled for release some time in 2018. NatGeo can sell ads against it on its cable channel … and re-air it incessantly … to recoup its investment.

May Alex Honnold have a long and happy life. Others who chose to solo mountains without the protection of a rope did not.

President Donald stood this week on the bank of the Ohio River before 400 steelworkers, coal miners, and construction workers with barges of coal parked behind him. Amid departures from his text to chastise those he called “obstructionists,” President Donald touted his plan to spend $1 trillion to rebuild the nation’s airports, roads, bridges and tunnels and all other elements of American infrastructure.

With barges as his background canvas, he told of lapses and collapses in the nation’s inland waterways. He cited a gate failure at the Markland Locks on the Ohio River that took five months to repair. He pointed to a massive section of a canal wall that collapsed near Chicago, delaying shipping. [See speech video.]

A release from the White House press office coincided with President Donald’s remarks. Regard inland waterways, the release said:

The infrastructure of America’s inland waterways has been allowed to fall apart, causing delays and preventing the United States from achieving its economic potential. According to [the American Society of Civil Engineers], most of the locks and dams needed to travel the internal waterways are past their 50-year lifespan and nearly 50 percent of voyages suffered delays. Our inland waterway system requires $8.7 billion in maintenance and the maintenance backlog is only getting worse.

How nice of the president to notice the inland waterways of America need work. Much of the time, that maintenance responsibility falls to the Army Corps of Engineers. “The Corps plans, builds, operates and maintains … a wide range of water resources facilities,” according to its civil-works inventory website. Here’s its workload:

The Corps maintains approximately 12,000 miles of inland waterways with 220 locks at 171 sites; and approximately 300 deep-draft and over 600 shallow-draft coastal channels and harbors (including on the Great Lakes), which extends 13,000 miles, and includes 21 locks, more than 900 other coastal structures, and 800 coastal and inland bridges.

This is the failing inland waterway system that’s in such horrible shape President Donald promises to fix it, as he said in his speech, using American construction workers, American coal, American steel, American aluminum, etc.

Then why does his fiscal 2018 federal budget propose a 22-percent cut — about $1 billion — from the Corp’s civil-works budget? If he’s touting a $1 trillion overall plan to address all the nation’s infrastructure needs, why’s he penny-pinching the Corps’ ability to address all the waterway issues he pointed to in front of 400 American workers in Cincinnati?

Think any of those coal and steel workers cheering during his speech will notice President Donald’s mouth says one thing and his budget pen says another?

photo credit: Greg Lynch, WHIO TV

President Donald’s administrative minions, since day one, have been “reviewing” federal regulations they argue are so costly they curtail growth in American manufacturing, and worse, put American jobs at risk. Thus they are focusing on rules that govern environmental reviews in permitting processes and regulate impacts on worker health and safety.

Industry groups oppose one particular regulation — the rule tightening ozone emissions under the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

According to a Reuters story by David Lawder, “The National Association of Manufacturers said the EPA’s review requirements for new sources of emissions such as factories can add $100,000 in costs for modeling air quality to a new facility and delay factory expansions by 18 months.”

According to Lawder, “Several groups argu[ed] this would expose them to increased permitting hurdles for new facilities, raising costs.” [emphasis added]

Other rules opposed by industry would curtail exposure to other substances, such as cancer-causing crystalline silica dust common at construction sites; beryllium, a potential carcinogen; and mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from power plants.

Regulations on industry raise its costs. So it’s predictable industry would seek limits on any regulations that would cost it money (or prevent maximizing shareholder value).

If the administration succeeds in limiting regulations regarding chemical emissions, it also succeeds in transferring costs from industry to those who would be affected by exposure to those chemicals — such as industry’s own employees and the general public.

Exposure to ozone can aggravate health ailments such as asthma, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis. Beryllium exposure can cause tissue and organ disease as well as cancer. Inhaling or ingesting mercury can damage the nervous, digestive, and immune systems, lungs, and kidneys. It can be fatal.

Such exposures mean more trips to the emergency room. That means missed workdays (limiting industry efficiency and productivity). That means more co-pays and deductibles for doctor’s visits or hospitalization (assuming the sick person has insurance). The desire of industry to avoid costs associated with regulations of toxic substances transfers the impact of exposure — and its associated costs — to the rest of us.

When any industry argues for curtailing regulation of toxic emissions, always ask: Whose wallet wins? Whose wallet loses?

In the era of President Donald and the Swampsters, the losing wallet won’t belong to industry.

Donald won. Hillary lost. Now the Democrats face what The New York Times called “a widening breach in their party.”

Perched ever farther on the left is Bernie Sanders, perhaps still smarting from being stiffed by the Democratic National Committee while leading revival-style rallies of millennials and urging stiff resistance to the Donald agenda — and to the DNC’s approach to political reclamation. Then there’s the DNC and the party’s elected leaders demanding a more conservative, data-driven approach to finding votes where Hillary didn’t get them.

Oh, well. Good luck with that, Dems. Neither approach is destined for electoral redemption. Professional Democrats have tended toward elitism when selecting and supporting candidates. The national party assumed (as did virtually all media and pollsters) Hillary had an easy road covered with rose petals to the White House. The 2016 version of the Democratic Party continued its longstanding march away from those who had always supported it. The party’s elites oozed a “father knows best” attitude. Cockiness ruled after Donald became the GOP standard bearer.

Perhaps the Democratic Party, and especially the DNC, ought to consider … humility. Consider the example of Michael Dukakis as a Democratic candidate. No, not presidential candidate Dukakis of tank-driving infamy. Look at gubernatorial candidate Dukakis.

Massachusetts voters elected Dukakis as the state’s 65th governor in 1974. He campaigned as a reformer and bearer of a no-new-taxes pledge. But he was arrogant to state government employees, in particular the powerful Metropolitan District Commission he’d promised to dismantle. He commuted sentences of murderers. Dukakis was unable to deal with the state’s “Taxachusetts” reputation. High sales and income taxes dominated the 1978 campaign — and state’s Democratic Party refused to renominate him. He lost to Edward J. King in the primary.

The loss humiliated Dukakis — much in the way today’s national Democrats were after Donald out-electoral-colleged Hillary. So far, today’s Democrats have spent too much time hand-wringing over the reasons Hillary lost, to say nothing of the congressional hammering the Republicans handed them.

Losing taught Dukakis how to be a better candidate. He spent the next four years touring the state’s 14 counties — repeatedly. He apologized — repeatedly — in venues large and small for losing, for his arrogance, for his mistakes as a governor. He rebuilt the state Democratic Party’s lost confidence in him. He persuaded not only the party, but also the MDC, state employees, the state police — all of whom he had pissed off — that he would be the best candidate to push Ed King out of office.

Which Dukakis did, becoming the state’s 67th governor.

Today’s national Democrats badly need a dose of humility. They need to regain “the common touch.” They should spend the next three years touring the country, hat in hand, particularly in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, , Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin.

Democrats want votes. Thus they ought to spend far more time listening to (instead of polling) people whose votes they want. Instead of presenting those voters with an  already drafted agenda set in concrete, they should first ask voters: “What do you want? What do you need?” Too often Democrats decide what they issues want to address and how before asking voters for their issues and their positions.

It’s time to send Democrats on that listening (and apologizing) tour. It worked for Dukakis … at least as a candidate for governor.

Time magazine’s first cover

The owner of the grandparent of weekly news magazines, Time, has decided to shed 300 jobs through layoffs and buyouts to reduce its costs.

A media corporation whacking jobs to save money? That’s not surprising news in the digital era. But what continues to aggravate and irritate is the lame corporate-speak executives use to explain the “downsizing” and to insist better, more profitable days lie in the future.

Consider remarks in a memo to staff from Time Inc.’s chief executive officer, Rich Battista:

[O]ne of the key components of our go-forward strategy is reengineering our cost structure to become more efficient and to reinvest resources in our growth areas as we position the company for long-term success. Today we took a difficult but necessary step in that plan as approximately 300 of our colleagues throughout Time Inc.’s global operation will be leaving the company. …

Time Inc. is a company in rapid transformation in an industry undergoing dynamic change. Transformations do take time and patience, but I am encouraged by the demonstrable progress we are making as we implement our strategy in key growth areas, such as video, native advertising and brand extensions, and as we see positive signs of stabilizing our print business, which remains an important part of our company. [emphasis added]

Somewhere in the business universe there must be a place where CEOs are taught to obfuscate in such Orwellian language. Find it and yank it out by its roots.

Time Inc.’s future, given that it rejected a $1.8 billion offer for the company, may indeed lie somewhere in its rapid transformation as it implements its strategy in key growth areas. Time Inc. eventually may part itself out by selling titles such as Sports Illustrated, People and Time. Maybe it will reinvent itself while reengineering its cost structure.

It’s a difficult time for publishers, particularly for news weeklies. Newsweek has faded to a clickbait operation. Time magazine’s circulation has fallen more than 20 percent from 2003 to 2013 from 4.1 million to 3.2 million. Meanwhile, its average number of ad pages fell by nearly half. Deserting news weeklies like Time were the auto, food and beverage, and financial and real estate industries. Time Inc.’s stock price has declined to $14.

New York Times media writer Sydney Ember observes:

Print advertising and circulation revenues continue to fall, starving magazine companies of the lifeblood that long sustained them. Most publishers have shifted their focus to increasing nonprint revenue, but new revenue sources have yet to make up the shortfall. To compensate, publishers continue to slash costs, transforming themselves into leaner companies with fewer employees and diminished resources. [emphasis added]

That’s been a common theme for the news and information industries for more than 20 years. Ember’s direct language contrasts with Battista’s executive spin. (By the way, will Battista’s $5,766,870 in total compensation take a hit, as 300 people take theirs?)

Still, despite slumping readership, circulation, and advertising across its titles, Battista remains an optimist.

“This is a great company,” Battista told Ember. “We think there’s tremendous untapped potential, and we’re just scratching the surface.” [emphasis added]

Time Inc. will be scratching that surface in its go-forward strategy with 300 fewer people. But the bullshit will remain.

Antarctica is cold. I learned that in grade school. The record is 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit below zero set in 1983. Did you know the southernmost continent is also a desert? I know much of the history of the exploration of the continent — the stories of Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, James Clark Ross, Caroline Mikkelsen, and others. I know the continent’s 5,400,000 square miles are 98 percent covered with ice (although that’s changing, I suppose, as the climate and sea continue to warm).

But I’ve never been to Antarctica. It’s likely that you haven’t, either. So how do we know so much about the fifth-largest continent?

We read books about it. Teachers taught us about it (usually from textbooks and, if you’re my age, “film strips”). We’ve seen movies and videos about Antarctica. We’ve seen the continent on maps and globes. We’ve watched Emperor penguins on basic cable nature specials.

I’ve talked with people who’ve been to Antarctica. They’ve said the intense cold can make strong metals like steel brittle, weak, and easy to snap. Care must be taking in breathing the extremely cold air or lung damage results. They’ve learned about the continent from personal experience, not from being told the experience of others.

For many of us, much, even most, of what we know has been the received knowledge brought to us by others. Technology, over time, has accelerated the impact of what C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist, said seven decades ago. He called knowledge that enters our lives via media “the second-hand world.” That concept applies today in understanding why America’s a bit of a mess.

Our images of this world and of ourselves are given to us by crowds of witnesses we have never met and never shall meet. Yet for each of us these images— provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of our life as a human being. None of us stands alone directly confronting a world of solid fact. [emphasis added]

Sometimes the technology we carry in our pockets today seduces us into thinking personal (first-hand) experience is unnecessary. At the least, the phone and the tablet can find at Google the second-hand world of others in mere seconds. After I wrote the first paragraph, I wondered when women first arrived at Antarctica. I asked Google, which led to Wikipedia, which led to Mikkelsen. Answer: 1935.

The second-hand world is useful, of course. That’s how human beings have learned for eons. Imagine prehistoric parents telling their progeny: “Hey. See that really big cat with the two really large, curving canine teeth? Stay the hell away from it.”

But the second-hand world can make us lazy. Consider my journalism students. For more than a quarter of a century, as they took my grammar and Associated Press style quizzes, I had let them use anything they brought into the classroom with them. But about three years ago, I began to see they wouldn’t even take the AP Stylebook and their notes out of their backpacks. If they didn’t know something, they tried to Google it with the phones, tablets, and laptops I’d let them use.

Instead of mastering the basics of their own language for their own needs, they relied entirely on a second-hand world’s data. Google gave them information, but they didn’t understand that in the context of the quiz questions. Thus they’d fail quizzes, because they were no longer thinking. So, no more using electronic devices during quizzes.

Second-hand world as a seductive tool

Such is the allure of Mills’ second-hand world. For many of us, it saves time: Just ask Google for the answer instead of learning to solve it yourself. It saves us memory: Don’t try remember the nation’s bordering Saudi Arabia (Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen). Just ask Google. Thus an opportunity for a deeper understanding of Mideast and its enduring conflicts is swept aside by dependence on a second-hand world — one crafted by others, and not by you.

We don’t think much about who or what crafts that second-hand world, do we? We pick and choose from what exists within it to suit our own needs — and our own predilections.

Enter the journalists, members of those crowds of witnesses who are paid to observe, who make a living by experiencing an event or an issue first hand.

For better, and sometimes for worse, they seek to reliably interpret the first-hand world to provide the rest of us with a useful, usable second-hand world. Their experience of reality becomes our one-step-removed experience. They become teachers.

Would that it were that simple, right? One neatly packaged second-hand world for all provided by journalists …

There’s more than one second-hand world …

It’s hard to argue the second-hand world of The Washington Post is equivalent to that provided by the Breitbart News Network. It’d be insane to suggest that the mediated reality of The New York Times precisely mirrors that from Infowars or the Drudge Report.

Journalism has touted itself as an objective recorder of fact since the advent of the telegraph. Its adherents argue objectivity represents a fair, accurate, disinterested, and nonpartisan view of a first-hand world. Hence The Times’ slogan of reporting news “without fear or favor.” In a simpler, easier time and a slower, less complicated world, perhaps that was mostly true.

But not now. Journalists no longer (if they ever did) provide a single, monolithic version of reality. Watch Fox News and CNN on the same issue for the same hour, for example. Which offers the better second-hand world? That depends, of course, on you and I, receivers of the signal.

Journalists are human beings. They’re as frail as the rest of us. Or as brave. But their minds are not empty vessels. They’ve been filled over time with sensibilities — by parents, friends, schools, churches, mentors, employers. They’ve been touched by received wisdom, first-hand experiences, cultural and ethnicity traditions, and formal and informal training and mentoring. They have developed expectations about how life should be ordered. That’s further reinforced by being socialized into the expectations of media employers as well as exposure to the values and traditions of the profession.

Multiply that by the numbers of delivery vehicles — television, internet, radio, newspapers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, texts, and heaven knows what else — through which journalists can present second-hand worlds.

Worlds. With an S. Not world. Mills’ sociological notions from the 1950s have fractured in the digital age. No longer is there one (if there ever really was just one) second-hand world readily accepted as shared reality. Now modern information “content” corporations can fill an Amazon shopping cart with a second-hand world mediated just for you.

A population with a brain malfunction?

Therein lies one of America’s most serious mental-health issues. With so many second-hand worlds in the Amazon catalog, how do you choose?

These days, too many of us choose based on a single variable — we choose the mediated world as we believe ours ought to be. The key word? Believe. Not think. So we shop according to what we believe. We might buy the world presented by President Donald’s tweets (even if in our heart of hearts we know that much of that is verifiable, inaccurate drivel — lies). Or that of Jake Tapper and Don Lemon. Or Alex Jones or Sean Hannity. Or Joe and Mika. Or The New Republic or HuffPost or WashPo. Or websites from any number of left- or right-leaning wingnuts.

Most of us, I think, have an imagined second-hand world in our minds. It might be a world from an easier time, a memory as wistful as it is distant. It might be a world formed from fear in a time of economic anxiety. Or it might be a world crafted because of a fear of End Times, defined differently by so many people.

Learning of Mills’ notion of the second-hand world was a defining moment for me in grad school.

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in a second-hand world. … So decisive to experience itself are the results of these communications that often men do not really believe what they “see before their very eyes” until they have been “informed” about it by the official announcement, the radio, the camera, the hand-out. Communications not only limit experience; often they expropriate the chances to have experience that can rightly be called “our own.” For our standards of credibility, and of reality itself, as well as our judgments and discernments, are determined much less by any pristine experience we may have than by our exposure to the output of the cultural apparatus. [emphasis added]

But the vast reach of numerous media outlets of wildly divergent perspectives and oh-my-god definitions of “fact” have created an expanding universe of second-hand worlds Mills may not have contemplated.

Corporate journalism is problematic, too …

Journalism contributes to that universe. Or, to be blunt, corporate journalism does. If Sinclair Broadcast Group completes its proposed $3.9 billion purchase of Tribune Media, its ownership will speak to more than 70 percent of all American households, providing listeners and viewers with a second-hand world derived from a politically conservative perspective. Then again, National Public Radio, through more than 1,000 stations, reaches 30 million listeners who are attendant to NPR’s often liberally molded second-hand world. But those are only two of the many mediated worlds to which you can subscribe, out of fear, or anxiety, or sheer stupidity because you have refused to think critically about the media products you consume.

We are not well served by corporate journalism’s overbundance of commentators and pundits pushing this second-hand world or that one. It’s annoying that many media outlets no longer clearly distinguish between opinion and reporting through Chyron tags or print and online warning labels. These days it’s difficult to determine whether journalism’s “content products” represent advocacy, adversarial positioning, subjectivity, or faux objectivity. Journalism has always presented an agenda of events and issues for us to consider. But too much of what purports to be journalism is now punditry telling us what and how we ought to believe about those proffered agendas.

Journalism as a profession, as an industry, has numerous problems to resolve and opportunities to grasp. Journalism remains a principal conduit of so much information purporting to represent the truth of physical and psychological existence. Journalism shapes so many versions of Mills’ second-hand world.

But the rest of us? Those who consume journalism’s content? So many of us ought to stop being so damn tribal and rejecting any notion that doesn’t fit the preferred narrative of the tribe’s carefully mediated second-hand world.

As we at S&R say frequently: Think. It ain’t illegal yet. America has lost its once-remarkable cognitive compass because so many people have lost the desire or ability to think with a discerning mind. That must change.

Oh, my. Look at the dot. It’s blue. It’s representative of “one unified network,” says the chief marketing officer of Gannett, owner of the USA Today Network.

The blue dot — and accompanying typographic changes to logos — has begun to appear in the online identities of nine USA Today Network outlets. The remaining 110 news outlets will make the changes in the next several months, says Andy Yost, Gannett’s marketing chief. Even print edition front-page flags will receive typographic makeovers.

It’s just a damned blue dot. But it’s symbolic of ownership-driven “branding” that eliminates distinctive local audience and market identities among its member newspapers. All 110 USA Today Network newspaper logos will have that little blue dot and similar topography.

Inoffensive nationwide blandness has been Gannett’s modus operandi for decades. USA Today was created to be a national constant no matter where a reader consumed it. Hence its nickname — McPaper. A Big Mac tastes the same, no matter whether you eat it in Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon. USA Today, dropped before 6 a.m. at the door of your motel room, looks the same in Greenfield, California, as it does in Greenfield, Massachusetts. That kind of thinking pervades Gannett’s newspapers, because, as the logo says, they’re “part of the USA Today Network.”

A good newspaper contributes to and is reflective of a characteristic regional identity. Love it or hate it, readers know the values and traditions their local newspaper represents. Does a newspaper change what it looks like from time to time? Certainly. But its facelift isn’t designed to make it look like every other damned newspaper in the country.

What does Gannett hope this change to 110 blue dots provides? Revenue, presumably. USA Today Network is not just a chain of newspaper outlets — it’s a national ad network. A principal goal of the assimilation of 110 journalism identities into the “blue dot network” (kind of like the Borg, I suppose) is likely to better entice national advertisers to the network.

In a Poynter Institute story about the blue dot, Steve Dorsey, vice president of innovation and planning at the Austin American-Statesman, suggests uniformity makes sense with a national ad network. But, he says:

The typography of a newspaper is its DNA. Everything else changes every single day: the photos change, the words, but that typography is the one thing that’s unique to that publication. … Who knows. The more you take out that local flavor, the more challenging it is to uniquely connect with an audience.

Branding guru Yost says, in typical marketing vague-speak, the unification idea is a winner.

Focus groups of readers have shown a unanimous positive response to the new typeface. The reaction from the markets so far has been very positive and employees at these markets are very excited to see the changes. [emphasis added]

Nothing in the Poynter story discusses the impact of the blue dot unification on the quality of journalism provided by the USA Today Network. Nor does the story discuss how much this initiative will cost, what additional revenues are anticipated, and whether those additional revenues will be reinvested in reporting resources.

Layoffs at Gannett newspaper properties have become a year-long phenomenon. In May, Gannett canned employees at about three dozen of its newspapers. Like other news media organizations still dependent on the old print advertising business model, Gannett has suffered steep revenue declines not yet offset by gains in digital ad revenue.

So the blue dot becomes a symbol of Gannett’s family of newspapers. It will change the identity of newspapers readers have loved (and hated). But readership of print editions is declining. No doubt the brains behind the blue-dot branding — especially of online entities — were thinking of the behaviors of (hopefully) readers-to-be — millennials, whose inclination is to get everything online.

Or is that consumers, not readers? If those sought-after millennials are going become avid readers of Gannett’s journalism (and thus consuming accompanying ads), then the journalism will have to be damn good.

But at the moment, with a depleted corps of journalists, a poor revenue outlook, and this grasping-at-straws, blue-dot gamble, Gannett has bet big on branding — not on investment in the people who produce great journalism.

Now that the FBI has its gumshoes working on cleaning up college athletics, perhaps it could focus on examining corruption elsewhere — perhaps in the American Congress, as my S&R college Sam Smith suggests.

Congress has always been amenable to financial persuasion. That’s the nature of power. Those who have it want to keep it. Those with money want to harness power to achieves their own ends. Politicians and the wealthy have danced together for a few centuries. But now? It’s really nasty.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision unleashed a corrupt system of reward and punishment in Congress. That’s especially ironic, as Citizens United, a right-wing organization founded in 1988, bills itself as “dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control.” What that Court decision permitted is far from any conservative group’s goal to rein in the expanse of government.

The Court, in effect, equated money with speech. If the Constitution guarantees free speech, and money is speech, then money cannot be limited when it is acting as speech. The decision rearranged who could spend how much on which campaigns under what circumstances. That, combined with Internal Revenue Service rules regarding 501 (c) tax-exempt organizations, married permission to spend big money to vehicles that could spend it — and in many cases to do so anonymously.

That idiotic marriage provides megamillionaires and billionaires with a large truncheon with which to bludgeon members of Congress who don’t march to the correct ideological tune.

Consider a Senate with 51 members of the Pink party and 49 of the Beige party. The Pinks write a health-care bill depriving millions of Americans affordable insurance. (The Beiges oppose it and submit a bill providing universal, single-payer coverage, of course.) But two Pink senators are alarmed at the Pink bill and refuse to support it, dooming the Pink bill.

A single arrogant billionaire, pissed off at the two Pink recalcitrants, contributes $5 million to a 501(c) “social welfare” organization. That contribution stays anonymous. The money is used to create a super PAC, which runs ads in those Pink senators’ home states intent on changing the senators’ votes. Or worse, the super PAC runs “issue” ads during the next election cycle that attack the senators, benefitting whomever runs against them in the party’s primary. The senators cave; the Pink bill passes.

Or …

The two Pink senators have some discomfort with the Pink bill. So they quietly make it known among lobbyists (who probably wrote most of the bill) whose clients would benefit by its passage. Soon, a single billionaire gives many millions to a 501 (c) group, which creates a super PAC that runs ads in the senators’ home states supporting their reelection.

In Congress (and probably in state legislatures, too) it has become difficult to distinguish between the bribe seeker and the extortionist. Attempts to thoughtfully poke and probe at the merits of an idea have been supplanted by using only ideological rectitude as the only yardstick for that idea. Anonymous money is largely the means of conversation — not philosophy, morality, or even “facts.”

Big money begets loud (and usually anonymous) voices. Small money begets only whispers. It’s easy to see whose voices legislators hear most clearly.

That’s the principal consequence of the Citizens United decision. The conservatives’ goal of “citizens’ control” found itself distorted by the selfishness of moneyed interests who would not be content to merely participate in a fair, even-handed, public-square debate. They simply spent enough money to hijack the public square as well as the debate. Hey, after all, it’s only money, right?

Citizens’ United left the governed with a government that turned its citizens into supplicants for legislative crumbs, allowed billionaires to control the content of legislation, widened the inequities in power and wealth, and eventually led to a nation so divided each half refuses to admit the existence of the other side’s ideas.

Until Congress crafts fair, transparent, common-sense campaign finance legislation, those with the most money will speak anonymously and with far greater impact than the vast majority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

You may begin laughing now. Congress will never do that within my remaining lifetime.

Note: This post has been adapted from a passage in my forthcoming second novel, due out late this year or earlier next year.

Ah, Thanksgiving. The time to be thankful, as tradition and good manners tell me.

So, I’ll be thankful. But for what?

“Yeah. Like I’m gonna be thankful …”

I’m thankful, surely, for the love, compassion, caring, and patience of my family and my closest friends near and far (and here at S&R). I’m thankful I’ve reached 71 years old in reasonably good health and as a well-trained, professional curmudgeon.

I’m thankful I have health insurance (costly as it is) while millions of Americans do not — and will not under “reform” proposals advancing in Congress. I’m not thankful Congress and the executive branch of the federal government believe not every American should be provided quality health care at an affordable price. I’m not thankful health care for veterans isn’t as timely as veterans of America’s armed forces wish it would be.

I’m thankful I have the freedom to buy a firearm (I’ve always wanted a lever-action carbine like the cowboys flaunted in ‘40s and ‘50s western movies). But I’m not thankful I’m able to buy lots of 30-shot magazines and assault weapons designed solely for killing people in warfare yet marketed and sold as “manly.” I’m not thankful for the gun industry’s militarized (but, sadly, legal) advertising.

I’m thankful I can teach (at least in a university setting) what I want to within the purview of my profession and my experience. I’m not thankful state legislatures and the Texas Board of Education can severely restrict what is taught in primary and secondary schools based on ideological or religious preferences.

I’m thankful so many Americans — as well as immigrants who have not yet become naturalized citizens — have been willing to shoulder arms (and in these days of cyber warfare, take up computers) in defense of the rest of us. But I’m not thankful — no one should be thankful — for the unwise, sometimes morally impaired, policy decisions old men make that commit young men and women to a battlefield far away. I am thankful for the sacrifice of the young  — but rarely for the contorted decisions by the old that led to it.

I’m thankful the United States is perceived as powerful. It lends the feeling, if not always the substance, of security within American borders. But I’m not thankful the United States maintains nearly 800 bases in 70 countries worldwide. I’m thankful so many Americans are not isolationist in their thinking, but I’m not thankful the massive American military presence beyond our borders comes with such important questions rarely discussed: How much do they cost? Have corruption and no-bid contracts made the cost unreasonable? How are the bases paid for? How is the benefit to the United States measured? With what metrics? Is the perceived benefit worth the actual cost?

I’m thankful the First Amendment exists. It allows me to speak freely, to work as a journalist without fear of prior restraint, to practice (or not) any religion I wish, to yell aggrieved at the government and expect an answer, and to assemble peaceably with whomever I want. But I’m not thankful so many seek to limit the baseline freedoms inherent in the First Amendment. The president argues the media have too much freedom. The American Civil Liberties Union is attacked because it protects free speech — even abhorrent speech not declared illegal by law or court. I’m thankful free speech has such an ardent advocate. I’m not thankful how so many nut jobs and white supremacists use that freedom so ignorantly, shamefully, and hatefully. No one should be thankful hate speech, and hate crimes, have caused so much trauma to innocent people.

I’m thankful for the modern conveniences afforded by digital technology. My satellite GPS device will allow me to summon help on my sojourns through the desert Southwest absent cell service. But I am surely not thankful these modern devices allow federal, state, and local governments to track me, often without warrant, despite my lawful behavior and movements. I’m so not thankful many Americans have allowed the government to persuade them security trumps privacy. I’m not thankful for such governmental abilities to intrude without cause or warrant into my private life.

I’m thankful I’ve been able to visit every national park west of the Rockies, many in both summer and winter. I’m thankful John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot (and so many other preservationists, conservationists, and environmental writers) sought to protect the remarkable, irreplaceable natural resources within America’s boundaries. I’m not thankful the current secretary of the Interior and his appointed minions, spurred on by the president and Big Logging, Big Ranching, Big Mining, and Big Drilling, are hell-bent on undoing that legacy. Nor am I thankful the doubling of the American population since my birth at the end of World War II has increased the extraction pressures on those resources contained in national parks, monuments, and forests.

I’m thankful my students have the opportunity to go to college. I’m not thankful such opportunities are spread unevenly across gender, ethnic, ideological, socioeconomic, and religious boundaries. I’m not thankful American college students — you know, the youth who presumably represent the future of the Republic — are saddled with a debt of, on average, more than $30,000 when they graduate (if they graduate). I’m certainly not thankful the latest Republican tax “reform” legislation could tax graduate students’ tuition waivers as income.

I’m thankful I can vote for whomever the hell I want to without anyone telling me how to vote (or requiring me to say how I voted). But I’m not thankful for the hundreds of millions of dollars of negative political advertising, often paid for by people and organizations who do not disclose their ad spending, that tries to make me afraid of someone or something, thus seeking to influence my vote. That’s outrageous. I’m not thankful for the many ways American elections are fundamentally unfair — the outdated Electoral College, redistricting, gerrymandering, anonymous Big Donor spending, foreign nation-state meddling, Facebook and Google’s stance they aren’t “media companies” thus wittingly or unwittingly spreading “fake” election news, and the “real media” focusing on the horse race instead of doing their goddamn jobs by reporting on overlooked issues and long-term impacts of electoral choices. I’m not grateful a politician’s election to Congress has become a virtual sinecure and a semi-permanent seat among the wealthy and powerful. I’m not thankful national politicians have mastered the art of being nice human beings on camera and back-stabbing rats off camera.

Despite all this, I’m thankful to be an American. We all should be because we do, in fact, have much to be thankful for. (But someone else can draft that list, ‘cause I’m not in the mood.)

But I’m not thankful for the many ways, over time, being an American has become more costly economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. I’ve witnessed the gradual degradation of the American dream from the Eisenhower ‘50s to the Donald’s debacles of prevarications and refusal, in the past six months, to be interviewed on camera by a major American news network other than Fox. A lack of transparency by any politician defrauds us all.

So, as I park myself at the dinner table with one of my brothers, his wife, and Mom, I’ll be thankful.

But since I left college as a hippie in the ‘60s, the “thankful” list has shrunk, and the “not thankful” list is on its second ream of paper.

Eat hearty come Thursday, folks. Chow down on that tryptophan and pumpkin pie. Burp freely. Have another drink. Be merry as you will.

But come Friday, the same crap you, too, are not thankful for will still be there …

Those who can control language have power over those who cannot. That has been the most corrosive power exercised by President Donald’s administration. This is especially true in matters relating to science.

The White House has eliminated virtually every mention of climate change from its website and those of other cabinet departments and federal agencies. Employees, especially scientists, at the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services have been ordered to end any external communication without “consultation” with senior political appointees.

Donald appointed a secretary of Education who has repeatedly supported Republicans with anti-science views who deny the human role in climate disruption. The secretary’s family foundation supports anti-science evangelical and fundamentalist organizations.

His initial budget priorities sought to slash funding for science-based federal agencies such as the EPA and the National Institutes of Health. The goal? Remove federal funding for scientific research from environmental and climate-based investigators.

Each of these, and other, actions control language. By removing science from its long-standing federal role as a principal arbiter for what is fact and what isn’t, the Donald’s administration has uprooted the language of science (and an understanding of the scientific method) from public discourse.

This week, President Donald has limited the ability of the Centers for Disease Control to discuss its important work — which includes protecting the population from epidemics of infectious disease. Policy analysts at the CDC were instructed not to use these seven words: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based.”

This is mindful of George Carlin’s treatise on the seven dirty words unspeakable on television.

I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. They’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really.

We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. We assign a word to a thought. And we’re stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words that hurt can heal. It’s a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that aren’t into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. [emphasis added, as if Carlin ever needed emphasis]

Carlin foresaw President Donald, because Carlin saw in television executives of his day the same trait — the desire to control the ability of people to talk and argue in certain ways. Donald, who is consumed by his attention to ratings and approval numbers, always seeks to control the show seen by his core base supporters he believes elected him and will do so again. That core is not filled with fans of science and factual evidence.

The imposition of language controls at the CDC is only the latest insult to civic discourse. Undoubtedly, more will follow.

How nice of the retiring Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the outgoing chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, to declare this past Monday “Science Day” in the House of Representatives.

Yes, according to a press release from the science committee office, Rep. Smith had the House primed to consider “five bipartisan Science Committee bills that support careers and education in STEM, reauthorize federal firefighting programs and promote cooperative space and science programs between NASA and Israel.”

The House majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was soooo proud of the intended accomplishments of Science Day: “America has led the world in science and innovation for generations. To think, 65 percent of today’s students will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet. In our mission to prepare America’s next generation of innovation, the House will honor our nation’s history of leadership with Science Day. We will bring five bills to the floor that will support science, our nation’s infrastructure, aerospace and STEM careers. I applaud Chairman Smith on his hard work to get these bills ready for floor consideration.”

If you’d like to see the bills, laughably labeled as “bipartisan,” go to the committee’s press release. But if Monday was Science Day, it was a low bar.

The House did not consider Monday a bill to increasing funding for basic scientific research. The House did not consider a bill to strengthen the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to actually conduct research into how to best protect the environment. The House did not consider a bill to fund scientific investigations into how to prepare the nation for the consequences of climate change.

No such bills would be considered, because Rep. Smith, as rabidly anti-science as can be, would not permit his committee to even consider them.

Recall that Rep. Smith once subpoenaed the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and accused NOAA scientists of doctoring data in a study on climate change. He has subpoenaed other organizations that have transgressed against his anti-science beliefs, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists did with its investigation into what and when the fossil-fuel industry knew about global warming.

Scientists should be allowed to conduct rigorous research independent of government interference. But Rep. Smith does not trust scientists, whom he considers politically motivated:

Smith’s subpoena-happy chairmanship hasn’t come out of nowhere. It apparently depends upon a conviction that the scientific community has a liberal agenda and that, if scientific results conflict with right-wing ideas, the scientists must be lying.

When Rep. Smith became chair of the House science panel, politics trumped independence.

[T]he committee almost immediately became a platform for a series of increasingly partisan and bitter quarrels over politics and policy.

It began in April 2013, when the [scientific] community got wind of draft from the committee to reauthorize programs at NSF. Among other things, the bill called for the NSF director to personally certify every research project was “groundbreaking … not duplicative … and in the national interest.”

The language triggered an unprecedented, all-out war between Smith and NSF officials over the meaning of the seemingly innocuous phrase “national interest.” Smith insisted he was merely trying to ensure that NSF spent its money wisely. But NSF and research leaders said it was code for favoring applied research over basic research, and the natural sciences over the social sciences.

Rep. Smith’s influence as chair of the House science committee mirrors the anti-science rhetoric now prevalent in other federal cabinet departments, notably Scott Pruitt’s EPA, Ryan Zinke’s Interior, and Betsy Devos’s Education. None of this antipathy toward competent scientists, let alone the scientific method of inquiry, would be possible were it not continually fomented at the top — by President Donald. He nominated opponents of science for high government offices.

Will pro-science legislation prosper under the House committee after Rep. Smith departs its chair? There are likely candidates for the job, but none signal a dramatic change from the course charted by Rep. Smith.

Science, at the federal level, as conservatives control all three branches of government, remains under assault by those afraid to think beyond ideology.

I want to buy a gun.

As a kid, I loved westerns — those with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, and John Wayne. They were heroes — good guys in white hats defeating bad guys in black hats. Those heroes had guns — but they never drew first. That was the code of the West.

One movie — Winchester ’73, starring James Stewart — touted the gun I wanted most. I saw that rifle, that lever-action carbine, and I wanted one. But I was just a kid.

Now I’m not a kid. So I want to buy a Winchester Model 94 Carbine. It’s only about twelve hundred bucks. I can afford it. Lever action, seven-shot magazine, satin wood finish, brushed steel barrel. I have friends who can teach me to safely shoot it, respect it, and maintain it. So why not?

As I salivate, two thoughts emerge.

First, what the hell would I do with it? I’m not a hunter nor do I wish to become one. Do I need to defend my home against armed invaders? Unlikely. I never served in the military or law enforcement. People can train me to fire the carbine accurately, but I doubt they can train me, at my age, to steel myself sufficiently to kill someone with it in hurried self-defense. So, I suppose, I can just shoot tin cans off the fence posts from my deck. Is that worth twelve hundred bucks plus the cost of ammo and accessories and items for maintenance?

Second, I have endured episodes of depression, panic disorder, and anxiety since I was a teenager. I have been medicated off and on for more than 50 years. I am a high-functioning individual with three degrees who has spent nearly three decades teaching undergraduates how to write. The only harm I’ve done to any of them is with a red pen.

Politicians and others trying grapple with who should not be permitted to own a firearm slur millions of decent but troubled people by uttering a vague phrase — mental health — in the context of gun rights or gun control. The president of the United States wants to usurp due process and yank guns out of the hands of someone presumed dangerous because of concerns about his or her mental health.

Who decides that? Based on what evidence? Provided by whom? Gathered in what legal manner? Adjudicated in what court?

Anyone who kills in a mass, indiscriminate fashion is by definition fucking crazy. But not all and likely not the majority of those suffering from an emotional or psychological malady are insane enough to commit mass murder. We’re unhappy, not homicidal.

So I want to buy a gun. If you try to prevent me from doing that, the wrath of many lawyers will rain down upon you.

Money moves toward enterprises where profit lies in waiting. But money runs as fast as possible from the tired and unprofitable.

Wind turbines along I-80 in southern Wyoming.

Consider the fortunes of wind-generated energy and that produced by burning coal — a carbon fuel notable for emissions of carbon dioxide into an atmosphere already laden with it.

President Donald campaigned on the reckless promise to rescue the coal industry. I’ve already written about the economic improbability of coal’s rebirth (and the jobs that go with it). Note, too, that President Donald’s former chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, disagreed with the president’s touting of coal. (Hence the italicized former.)

Now President Donald has proposed forced intervention to save the coal industry. He’s ordered the energy secretary, Rick Perry, to find steps to halt the closing of unprofitable coal plants around the country. (Ditto on unprofitable nuclear plants, too.)

Unprofitable. That whoosing sound is money rushing away from coal (and nukes) as fast as it can. No sane energy executive is going to continue to operate a plant that loses massive amounts of money. Nor is a sane executive going to recommend spending up two billion dollars to build a coal plant that will have a half-century lifetime in the era of climate change. There’s no money to be made there.

So a president who routinely invokes the magic of the mythical “free market” to create American jobs seeks to save an money-losing industry — instead of promoting one that, in the long run, shows great potential for profit and lessens the burden shouldered by our common good, the Earth’s atmosphere.

A remarkable Vox piece by Umair Ifran and Javier Zarracina, illustrated by smart charts, shows the growth of wind farms in the United States. The federal government says that wind turbines now account for more than 8 percent of national renewable energy — beating even hydroelectricity.

Wind power isn’t going away. So why do Americans have a government that lags in investment in a clean power-generating technology and insists on preserving a fossil-fuel past that has produced public-health consequences and contributes to climate change?

photo credit: Denny Wilkins

If you’d like a reason to be cynical about whether government favors you or favors an industry, look no further than a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA has decided to review 10 chemicals in public use but considered toxic by many scientists. However, the EPA will only assess the risk of these chemicals in terms of direct human contact. A law passed by Congress in 2016 requires the EPA to assess toxicity risk in hundreds of chemicals to determine whether they should be further regulated or even removed from the market, according to The New York Times.

Under potential review are chemicals in common commercial products. Take, for example, the chemical often used to dry clean your clothes, the solvent perchloroethylene. Yes, it will clean your Sunday best, but it’s nasty stuff. Also on the list is 1,4-dioxane. You might find it in your deodorant, your shampoos, or your cosmetics. Its use, too, might not be in your best interest.

But the EPA’s review, taken at behest of Congress, will be limited to only direct contact. Members of Congress, says The Times, argue the 2016 law calls for comprehensive analysis of risk. That would include contamination of air, land, and water in addition to direct contact.

So how does the EPA ignore the will of Congress? (Well, maybe not. A coalition has challenged this in the Ninth Circuit’s court of appeals in San Francisco.)

The EPA can flout because of the chemical industry’s clout. President Donald’s appointee to head its toxic chemicals unit, Nancy B. Beck, worked for the American Chemical Council. Her assistant, Erik Baptist, served as a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute. Beck, while at the council, had argued the Obama administration ought to narrow the scope of such toxicity reviews. Now at the EPA, she’s in charge. Result: Scope narrowed.

Industry’s concerns trump social concern. More productive economic activity — enhanced by rushed, hasty deregulation — trumps social concern. The EPA’s decision to step backward in toxicity reviews mirrors its other, recent actions that would minimize environmental protection (a goal inherent in the agency’s name) and increase health and safety risks for human beings like you and me. The agency seeks to roll back more than 60 environmental regulations. Fortunately, many are being challenged in court.

I suppose I ought to be shocked. I’m not. Dismayed? Yes. Angry? Yes. Surprised? Hell, no.

Name an administration in which industry has not played a significant role in determining how it’s regulated. Name a session of Congress that did not use industry lobbyists to write regulations (and tax rules) that benefit industry while raising costs to consumers and increasing risks to their health and safety.

If you’re older, like me, you’ve seen this American dynamic playing out over decades. If you’re young, you’re going to see this continue. But, if you’re young, recognize this inherent, political, and pragmatic part of how the Republic operates. Recognize it, learn about it, so you can demand change.

Enter journalists. We know about the EPA’s toxicity decision because journalists, despite EPA’s recalcitrant attitude toward willingly providing information to them, still do their jobs. They tell people what they need to know. (Note that the EPA and other federal agencies in the President Donald administration have removed information paid for by citizens’ taxes from their websites, claiming they’ve only removed “outdated language.”)

Despite claims by ideologues, journalists primarily deal with facts. (You, the readers and viewers, get to decide if those facts represent some kind of truth.)

If you’re young (or old, or in between), and you want the EPA to act as if protecting the environment (and public health and safety) matters more than industry’s influence, then insist journalists do their jobs — keep covering the EPA intelligently, insistently, and dispassionately.

Anywhere you find industry trumping common sense and common concern for public health and safety, demand more from journalists. Politicians will lie to you. Industry’s flacks and advertising will deceive you.

Journalists will provide information gathered through hard work. You decide how to use that information. (You ought to listen to scientists, too … if they’re not working for or are solely funded by an industry. If they are, ask questions to determine the independence of their research.)

Now think again how you’ll clean that wine-stained pair of pants or that favorite sweater.

Ben Bagdikian, one of the nation’s foremost media critics, died in 2016 at age 96. He left behind warnings about concentration in media ownership. We should have paid more attention.

Ben Bagdikian

Beginning in 1983 with the publication of “The Media Monopoly” and again in 2000 with “The New Media Monopoly,” he railed against the growing power of ever fewer owners of media — big fish swallowing little fish, then still bigger fish swallowing those big fish. In the 2000 edition, he called the most monstrous fish “The Big Five” — Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Viacom, and the German firm Bertelsmann. He argued these corporations had “more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history.”

That was only 18 years ago. The world of media has dramatically changed — and, thanks to a federal judge’s decision this week in the merger case of AT&T and Time Warner, more change in media ownership and concentration lies ahead. AT&T (which provides the conduit) and Time Warner (which provides the content) argue they must be allowed to merge to compete with the new generation of media titans — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

Bagdikian would have none of this. He’d continue to argue the media concentration underway for more than a century has consequences on how we the people see ourselves, see others, and govern ourselves.

In the 1997 edition, Bagdikian issued this warning:

Unlike other developed democracies, the United States does not have a parliamentary political system in which voters cast their ballots for parties. Parties in most countries have distinct commitments to differing national programs, differences easily discerned by voters. Citizens voting in those countries know that when they cast their ballots for a party’s candidate they are voting for particular policies. In the United States, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then. … No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate. [emphasis added]

It’s hard to argue the majority of citizens voting in elections — national, regional, or local — do so intelligently based on adequate information about candidates.

Why? Perhaps the throw weight of national broadcasters and news corporations drowned out competing voices. Perhaps the ideological formation of tribes among media — Fox over there and MSNBC over here and CNN dashing back and forth between them as NPR watches aristocratically — denied the majority of voters sufficient, factual information about candidates. Perhaps the media failed in general to ferret out in greater detail and prominence the role of the über-wealthy’s massive but hidden money that infused candidates and campaigns. Perhaps because the concentration of media along the coasts left too little journalistic horsepower between the coasts to deliver well-reported facts for the majority of Americans who live there.

That’s Bagdikian’s basic premise: Concentration of media harms democracy.

The inappropriate fit between the country’s major media and the country’s political system has starved voters of relevant information, leaving them at the mercy of paid political propaganda that is close to meaningless and often worse. It has eroded the central requirement of a democracy that those who are governed give not only their consent but their informed consent. [emphasis added]

I don’t know how the merger of AT&T and Time Warner — in this new era sans net neutrality — will lead to more informed citizens.

Consider today’s media monoliths and their market capitalizations (brought to us via CNN’s Pacific newsletter edited by Dylan Byers):

Apple:                         $939.9 billion
Amazon:                     $819.6 billion
Alphabet:                   $788.6 billion
Facebook:                  $554.4 billion
AT&T:                          $207.75 billion
Time Warner:             $74.59 billion
Verizon:                      $203.2 billion
Netflix:                        $156.74 billion
Disney:                       $154.98 billion
Comcast:                    $147.62 billion
Fox:                             $73.73 billion
Charter:                      $65.93 billion
T-Mobile:                    $48.95 billion

Sprint:                         $20.70 billion

CBS:                            $19.39 billion
Viacom:                      $11.44 billion

Writes Byers: “Ten years from now, half of these companies may have been acquired by the other half. The Elite Eight, most likely: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon.”

Bagdikian believed in an antidote for all the sins media concentration can accumulate — more and better journalism. Journalists, he said, should “never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.” [emphasis added]

Bagdikian lived long enough to see tens of thousands of journalists kicked to the curb by their corporate owners. He saw the erosion of the very workforce he argued is necessary for democracy to prosper in the Republic.

I’m 72. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to live long enough to see a resurgence in the size of the cadre of daily newsroom journalists sufficient to return it to Republic-saving strength. The Midwest will remain a virtual news desert for the remainder of my lifetime.

Decades of media concentration delivered this mess to us. Bagdikian warned us repeatedly. But massive amounts of money and various editions of Congress as well as a few presidents weakened laws against media concentration.

It’s probably too late to stuff that foul-tasting toothpaste back into the tube. But you might ask any politician seeking national office if she or he would try.