CNN’s cancellation of Reliable Sources and Brian Stelter’s departure from the cable channel has staffers anxious and CNN’s chairman and CEO Chris Licht told anxious staffers (8/19) that more changes are coming, Deadline.com reported (8/20).
Sources who were present told Deadline that Licht told CNN employees at the well-attended editorial meeting, “There will be moves you may not agree with or understand.” Some took that to mean they may not like some of the changes.
Still, the sudden departure of longtime media reporter Stelter and the decades-running Reliable Sources after the last show (8/21) has left both on-air and behind-the-scenes talent at the Warner Bros Discovery-owned cable newser worried about both the direction CNN is going and their own jobs.
Warner Bros. Discovery has been in the midst of trimming costs and laying off staffers following the merger.
Peter Kafka at Vox.com noted (8/18) that many believe Stelter is the victim of John Malone, the billionaire cable magnate and the most powerful investor in Warner Brothers Discovery Inc., which now owns CNN and the rest of what used to be called Time Warner.
Malone’s politics lean quite right/libertarian, though he was also critical of Donald Trump during his administration. More to the point. Kafka noted: Current and former CNN employees believe Malone’s view of CNN is entirely colored by Fox News. “John Malone doesn’t watch CNN. John Malone only watches CNN via Fox News,” says a CNN employee. “If I watched CNN via Fox News, I would hate CNN too.”
And Stelter, who spent most of the Trump era criticizing the American right’s embrace of disinformation, was already a target of Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson, who delighted in lampooning him. Then, after Stelter’s boss, Jeff Zucker, was pushed out in February, Stelter went after Malone, who had said he wished CNN was more like Fox News because Fox News had “actual journalism.”
Asked about this theory by the New York Times, Malone gave one of the most candid admissions you’ll ever see a public person make in the guise of a denial: “Mr. Malone said he wants “the ‘news’ portion of CNN to be more centrist, but I am not in control or directly involved.”
“Translation: Yes, this pleases me,” Kafka noted.
The question remains whether the managers will push other CNN journalists off the air as well, or whether they won’t let go anyone else because they’ve made an example of Stelter.
But Kafka also noted Warner Brothers Discovery has a heavy debt load and CEO David Zaslav has told investors he’s going to find $3 billion in savings.
CNN’s new CEO, Chris Licht, met with Republican lawmakers in mid-July in the Capitol to tell them, “We want to win back your trust,” Eliana Johnson reported at the conservative Washington Free Beacon in what was called “CNN Chief’s Republican Apology Tour” (8/1). The CNN chief spent between 45 minutes and an hour cajoling GOP lawmakers who no longer appear on the network to come back on the air — and assuring them he’d praise producers for inviting them and communicate his displeasure if he doesn’t believe they are treated fairly, Johnson reported.
“The charm offensive underscores Licht’s effort to reverse the course set by his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, who was pushed out of CNN in February ostensibly over a consensual sexual relationship with a colleague. Zucker helped transform CNN into ground zero for the strident resistance to former president Donald Trump and Republicans more broadly, with personalities like Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter adopting nakedly partisan stances that would once have seemed strange in a newsroom—though it is now par for the course,” Johnson wrote.
AMERICANS SEE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY IS NO. 1 THREAT AND SUPPORT TRUMP PROBES, POLL FINDS. The growing threat to democracy is the most important issue facing the country, according to a new poll that also found strong support for continued investigations into the actions of former President Donald Trump, Marketwatch reported (8/22).
An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month and released Sunday found 57% of respondents agreed that investigations into potential wrongdoing by Trump should carry on. That included 92% of Democrats and 61% of independents, but only 21% of Republicans.
Half of those polled said Trump was solely or mainly responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, a five-percentage-point gain since a similar poll in May, before the House Jan. 6 select committee began its series of public hearings.
Meanwhile, “threats to democracy” rose to the No. 1 issue facing America, topping “cost of living.” In a similar poll in May, “cost of living” was the No. 1 concern, while “threats to democracy” did not make the list.
The poll found growing dissatisfaction with the FBI following the recent raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, with 34% having either “very little” confidence or “none at all” in the agency, compared with 26% who said that in December 2019. Still, about 39% expressed “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the FBI, on par with polls dating back to 2014.
Confidence in the US Supreme Court has tumbled since Roe v. Wade was overturned, though, with 37% of respondents having little or no confidence in the high court, compared to 17% who said that in December 2019.
MEDIA COLUMNIST PONDERS HOW TO COVER ANTI-DEMOCRACY POLS. Margaret Sullivan recently retired after 42 years in journalism, including the last six years as media columnist for the Washington Post. In her final column (8/20), she took on the question of “How do you cover a candidate who is effectively anti-democratic?”
She answered, “One thing is certain. News outlets can’t continue to do speech, rally and debate coverage — the heart of campaign reporting — in the same old way. They will need to lean less on knee-jerk live coverage and more on reporting that relentlessly provides meaningful context.
“Real-time fact checking is of limited usefulness, in my view. Better to wait until these live events have occurred and then present them packaged with plenty of truthful reporting around them.
“Journalists simply can’t allow themselves to be megaphones or stenographers. They have to be dedicated truth-tellers, using clear language, plenty of context and thoughtful framing to get that truth across.
“Please, pundits, stop trying to predict the future. You’re bad at it.”
Sullivan noted the disparate presentations that the Associated Press and the New York Times gave to a recent story out of Florida about a new push by Gov. Ron DeSantis to crack down on the supposedly terrible problem of voter fraud. In fact, illegal voting is a rare occurrence, though something that Trump and his allies would have you believe underlies all the efforts to deny him victory.
As Kate Pickert, director of Loyola Marymount’s journalism program, noted, AP’s Twitter news alert took DeSantis’s hyperventilating news conference at face value, providing the kind of treatment the governor might have written himself: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced criminal charges against 20 people for illegally voting in 2020, the first major public move from the Republican’s controversial new election police unit.” Whereas the New York Times tweet cut through the noise (I’ve added the italics): “Gov. Ron DeSantis said 17 people have been charged with casting illegal ballots in the 2020 election, in which 11.1 million Floridians voted. There is no evidence that election crimes are a serious problem in Florida or anywhere else in the U.S.”
(For the record, Sullivan noted, the AP often does a good job with framing, and the Times sometimes blows it.)
She also noted that Edward Luce, associate editor of the Financial Times, tweeted (8/12): “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.” Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director appointed by George W. Bush, chimed in (8/17): “I agree.”
Sulllivan’s prescription starts with “less live campaign coverage, more context and thoughtful framing, and more fearless straight talk from news leaders about what’s at stake and why politics coverage looks different. The latter could take many forms: editors’ notes on stories, columns written by news directors and posted prominently on websites, public appearances, and more.
“Even if the reality-based press does a perfect job with coverage focused nonstop on the truth — and that’s unlikely — it will be no match for the duplicitous right-wing media, particularly Fox News with its all-in audience and constant work on behalf of Trump and his allies. Prime-time commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity will do the heavy lifting. A candidate can’t buy that kind of help.”
CORPORATE AMERICA BRINGS JOBS BACK TO U.S. IN RESPONSE TO SUPPLY CHAIN GAPS. US companies are moving nearly 350,000 overseas jobs back to the United States this year—a new record—as companies become more wary about chasing cheap labor overseas and look to move infrastructure a bit closer to home, the Wall Street Journal reported (8/20).
Hunter at DailyKos thanked Joe Biden, but he noted (8/22), “The ability of presidents to shift global economic patterns is marginal at best, and business trends 18 months into a presidency may still likely be the result of corporate decisions made even earlier. There’s really only one way for a US president to dramatically reconfigure worldwide capitalism in a short period of time, and that’s to screw something up to near-apocalyptic levels. To so botch world markets that they’re on the brink of collapse. So what we really should be saying here is: Thanks, Donald Trump!
“There’s nothing like new trade wars followed by a raging economy-crashing pandemic to restructure world supply chains. Nothing like not knowing whether your major product lines are going to become ground zero for a new tit-for-tat battle dreamed up between tee and hole. And while we can’t blame Donald Trump for most of the world’s response to COVID-19, we can blame him for turning the disease from short-term crisis to million-death long-term crisis through the mighty power of just not giving a damn. We also can’t entirely blame him for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent demonstrations showing that even if your factories in Mexico are humming along without issue, it still doesn’t help you if a racist twit looking to boost xenophobic panics for political purposes shuts down the border crossings, leaving your parts stranded on the wrong side.”
The chaos of pandemic supply lines has become an existential problem for U.S. companies relying on computer chips and other parts essential for their products. Automobile manufacturers, appliance manufacturers and others have been constrained in their ability to actually assemble finished products as pandemic shutdowns in Asia’s major technology hubs have caused just-in-time part deliveries to dry up for weeks or months at a time. The resulting shipping chaos has put major US ports in gridlock, fouling even deliveries of stuff that isn’t in short supply.
Companies that can, are taking a serious look at shrinking the supply lines for vital parts. That’s a trend that’s likely going to escalate after the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that Europe, too, is not as stable a manufacturing environment as it was even two years ago. Shipping costs are going up, energy costs are going up, and political instability is going up.
All of that is bad news for any supply chain with more than two links. And the fragility of such supply lines has been known for a Very Long Damn Time, but corporate titans (see: Boeing) have previously been indifferent to the risks because accounting for theoretical risks doesn’t net you an executive bonus. Cutting manufacturing costs by 2%, however, very much does.
Other factors at play also suggest “onshoring” is going to strengthen in the next few years. The Biden-signed CHIPS Act gives big tax breaks to companies building high-tech manufacturing plants in the US, and the Inflation Reduction Act prioritizes the manufacturing of next-generation energy solutions.
Companies also are having to respond to consumer frustration over their carbon footprints, prodding them into reducing the distances parts need to be shipped. It’s not just that shipping has become more unreliable and expensive, with new pandemic externalities attached. Those shipping networks are clearly going to be changing in a climate-emergency world, and nobody’s quite sure how that’s going to fall out.
The Journal also notes that just because companies are bringing those jobs back, that doesn’t mean they want to, ahem, give them to American workers without a fight. Firms are also spending big to automate production lines and reduce jobs. Let’s wait on being too churlish about that one; automation has been forever blamed for ending well-paying but monotonous jobs, but past futures have always produced new workforces alongside the losses.
REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS CONTINUE TO BITE DEMOCRATIC HAND THAT’S CREATING GOOD JOBS FOR THEIR STATES. Some of the states with the greatest potential for wind and solar energy production are red states, some of which are already exploiting it to the benefit of their citizens. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the biggest federal investment made yet in green energy, will only increase that production, and with it will come more clean energy jobs and lower costs for ratepayers. But every single Republican in Congress voted against that bill, and Republican governors in those states opposed it as well, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (8/22).
Take Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who said of the bill: “What you’re doing is you’re taking taxpayer dollars and you’re trying to figure out a way to appease some policy of a constituent group or a lobbyist group. … And I just believe that you should let the free market work.” Right now Oklahoma is the third-largest producer—after Texas and Iowa—of wind energy, which provides 40% of the state’s electricity, not to mention more than 20,000 jobs. According to a White House fact sheet, there were actually 21,602 Oklahomans in the clean energy industry as of last year, and the infusion of an estimated $20.2 billion in investment in that state alone will result in many more new jobs.
Stitt, along with 22 other GOP governors, signed a statement in early August opposing the IRA, claiming: “With sky high prices at the pump, the last thing Americans need is for Democrats to punish energy producers, which will ultimately hurt working families struggling to pay for gas, goods, food, and utilities.” The statement also was signed by Govs. Doug Ducey of Arizona, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Greg Abbott of Texas, and Spencer Cox of Utah. Each of those states is among the top handful in the country in either solar or wind potential as well as current production, and in some cases both.
All of them could see huge growth in the industry. Take Texas, which is the highest wind producer, second-highest solar producer, and has more than a quarter of a million jobs already in clean energy. It has the potential to produce 1.3 million megawatts just with wind alone, and has the highest capacity for building up solar facilities in terms of land mass. It’s expected to see $66.5 billion in investment in the next eight years thanks to the IRA.
Arizona has the highest average annual sunlight of any state in the country and has 59,383 clean energy industry workers. It’s poised to receive $4.1 billion in power generation and storage funds between now and 2030. Iowa has 30,393 workers in clean energy jobs already and will get an estimated $24.6 billion of investment by 2030. There are 158,467 Florida workers employed in the industry now; it will take in an estimated $62.7 billion from the law.
That’s not even accounting for the thousands of dollars in savings the people in these states will have in utility rates, and in energy upgrades to their homes.
You can bet that when it comes time for the ground-breaking ceremonies for the new manufacturing facilities and renewable energy farms, these governors will be on hand to boast about all the jobs being created and all the savings for their citizens. They’ll be thrilled to take credit for it, because that’s what Republicans do.
RIGHT-WING DARK MONEY GROUP GETS $1.6 BILLION DONATION FROM TAX-DODGING BUSINESS MOGUL. A right-wing dark money group controlled by Leonard Leo—a legal activist who has played an outsized role in packing the US Supreme Court with conservative ideologues—was the beneficiary of a massive, possibly unprecedented donation of $1.6 billion from a shadowy electronics mogul with ties to the Koch network.
The enormous infusion of cash, first reported by the New York Times (8/22), could bolster and embolden right-wing efforts to drag the US judicial and political systems even further to the right for decades to come, imperiling the climate, what’s left of abortion rights, the franchise, and other freedoms that have come under growing threat from the GOP and conservative judges, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (8/22).
According to the Times, the donation to the Marble Freedom Trust from former Tripp Lite CEO and longtime Republican benefactor Barre Seid is “among the largest—if not the largest—single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit.”
The Times reports how the gift, based entirely on funds generated by the sale of Tripp Lite, “was arranged through an unusual series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax liabilities” for both Seid and Leo’s nonprofit.
Citing tax records and an unnamed source with knowledge of the matter, the Times explained that “rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100% of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo’s nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion.”
The Marble Freedom Trust “then received all of the proceeds from the sale” last year, the Times found.
“For perspective,” the newspaper added, “the $1.6 billion that the Marble trust reaped from the sale is slightly more than the total of $1.5 billion spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with Democrats.”
See more Dispatches at www.populist.com.
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Seid is a major but relatively low-profile donor to Republicans and right-wing causes, including to organizations that attack climate science. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) notes that Seid is “closely allied with the Koch network and funnels dark money through the same groups used by the Kochs, including Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has been fighting a losing battle against dark money and its influence—particularly on the judiciary—tweeted: “The dark money machine heats up, and of course around the guy who used dark money to capture the Supreme Court for big special interests. All the more need for DISCLOSE vote.” That’s his legislation to require more disclosure of political donations by corporate entities.
“When this money lands in races,” Whitehouse added, “you can bet it will be well hidden behind phony front groups.”
“After stacking the federal courts with conservative friends and allies, Leonard Leo has single-handedly amassed a $1.6 billion dark money slush fund that will dwarf Democratic spending for years to come,” Mark Joseph Stern, Slate’s court reporter, tweeted. “An extraordinary manipulation of loopholes in tax and campaign finance law.”
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2022
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