Why I’m easing up on my news consumption
Having spent more than 40 years reporting, writing and editing the news, I am surprised to conclude that overconsumption of news, at least in the forms I’ve been gorging on it since 2016, is neither good for my emotional well-being nor essential to the health of the republic.
The idea struck me at a holiday dinner with close friends in Charleston, S.C., where I was the only journalist at the table. Our cheerful conversation darkened like a sudden squall in the harbor when it turned to the news. One woman, an intelligent, well-read friend for whom I have great respect and affection, posed a serious question to me: “Is there anywhere you can go for just good news?” I almost choked on my oyster. “No,” I replied, after a brief pause. “The news is what happens. Not what you wish had happened. It’s not news if the mayor was almost in a life-threatening car crash. It’s big news if he was.”
There are exceptions. “Man Lands on Moon” was both good and big news. Your hometown winning the World Series is good news. But big news is urgent, and bad news is almost always more urgent than good news. Also, my experience is that people may think they want good news, but there’s no evidence that they will pay for it.
Only days later, the story of Davyon Johnson popped up. The Oklahoma 6th-grader managed to save two lives in one day. First, he used the Heimlich maneuver on a classmate who was choking on a bottle cap, the Associated Press reported. Later that same day, according to the Muskogee Phoenix, he helped a woman escape from a burning house. Then CNN aired footage of two baby bald eagles hatching. Suddenly, I was awash in good news.
It didn’t last. Part of the problem with “news” is that there isn’t really enough of it, good or bad, to fill the 24/7 maw opened up by cable news, talk radio and social media. I was there in Atlanta in June 1980 when Ted Turner threw the switch to launch CNN, which he informally called “the news channel,” as in “How could anybody not watch the news channel?” I had written a page-one profile of his venture for The Wall Street Journal which began with the question “Is America ready for Ted Turner?” It was the wrong question. It should’ve been: “How can they possibly fill 24 hours with news?”
CNN programmers talked then of all the stuff they planned to cover: exercise, pet care, home repairs, farm news and the like. But they soon discovered “Crossfire,” which featured two angry White males spitting at each other over politics. The rest is history. The Reagan administration’s FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine; by 1996, we had Fox News on cable TV and Rush Limbaugh on the radio. Today, we have the fearmongering likes of Dan Bongino succeeding Limbaugh on the radio and upping the game as a social media mega-troll.
The disinformation game is wide open to anyone: Russia, China or a former president who can’t admit he lost an election. In this toxic media stew, I can fine-tune whatever flavor of “news” turns me on, and I can even delude myself into believing that by staying absolutely current on my Twitter feed, I can somehow contribute to saving democracy.
But who am I kidding? Whether I know within minutes every detail of the cloakroom maneuvers aimed at reviving Build Back Better is not going to affect its fate. I don’t need to hear everything Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said today. Also, spare me the gibberish uttered by former president Donald Trump on his tin-can-and-string-memo-to-journalist-to-Twitter telegraph. If the news is big enough, it will find me. I don’t intend to stop fretting about my country. Nor will I give up reading the newspapers and magazines I deem essential to understanding the world around me. But I am planning a crash news diet.
What to take off the plate? I subscribe to way too many “insider” newsletters, whose pundits fill me with dread and anxiety each day. Maybe I will allow myself two? Or three? I follow far too many people on Twitter, which results in a tornado of nightly angst. I plan to cut my “following” list ruthlessly. And I already have forgone most cable news.
As another year of certain mayhem begins, I hope my attempt at moderation renders the desired calming effect. I would dread having to take the next step--cold turkey--as I did to kick cigarettes years ago. Two addictions with one big difference. Smoking kills you. News, in the proper dose, is healthy. And for me, a life with no news might not be worth living.
--John Huey, a former Time, Inc. editor-in-chief
Women can be evil, too
Two villainesses have captured the nation’s attention from the courtroom this week. Or is that two victims?
Elizabeth Holmes and Ghislaine Maxwell stand accused of very different crimes. The now-disgraced Silicon Valley golden girl allegedly duped investors into thinking her company’s blood-testing technology could detect disease with a pinprick. The New York socialite-in-exile, meanwhile, allegedly trafficked teenage girls as young as 14 for financier Jeffrey Epstein and his rich friends to rape.
Yet these women have seized on similar strategies for their defense: Blame the men.
Start with the wannabe magician who lied her way to a $9 billion valuation. Holmes fooled doctors and funders and pharmacies and everyday folks. Now, however, she’s claiming she was the mark.
Her board of directors--mostly a bunch of distinguished, aging gentlemen including Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and George P. Shultz--didn’t give her good enough advice, she says. Those scientists and engineers who she claimed were changing the world? They didn’t trust her too much; she trusted them too much. They told her that her miracle machine worked. She, innocent and ignorant, merely relayed that information to the public.
And then there’s Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh Balwani, her partner in (maybe) crime and, at one point, in love. Better known as Sunny, the right-hand man was, in his former girlfriend’s retelling, actually a puppet master. The subject is touchy, and serious: Holmes charges Balwani with emotional and sexual abuse. She says he told her he was “astonished” at her “mediocrity,” that she had to “kill the old Elizabeth” to become stronger. He forced her to sleep with him, she says, “because he wanted me to know he still loved me.”
The reported conduct (which Balwani denies) is appalling. But can abuse excuse abuse? Or does exploiting trauma as an excuse for hurting others only cause more harm?
The case is simpler when it comes to those movers and shakers Holmes got to put their stamps on her sham. Holmes played on her femininity to impressive effect, even as she modulated her voice to a baritone and her wardrobe to a black-turtlenecked Steve Jobs sendup. She caught the notice of powerful men because she emphasized, in adopting these traits so incongruous with her appearance, that she wasn’t one of them--and that, all the same, she was playing their game.
When she succeeded, she was notable because she wasn’t a man. Now, in her ignominy, she suggests she wasn’t responsible for any of it--because she wasn’t a man. She can only have it both ways if society is still sexist enough to think this counts as feminism.
And if society is even more sexist than that, a jury will also acquit Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell, by all accounts, ran Epstein’s monstrous life. She managed his many homes, his glitzy relationships and his uncontrollable yen for so-called massages. The last, as it turned out, meant luring minors to Epstein’s estates, where he could undress them, touch them and worse. Beforehand, she might befriend a girl as a means of grooming her for violation--gossiping with her, shopping with her, talking with her about sex. She’d sometimes watch as the rape took place, to put the child “at ease” with her presence, according to an indictment.
But, of course, none of it was her fault! “Ever since Eve was accused of tempting Adam with the apple,” Maxwell’s attorney proclaimed, “women have been blamed for the bad behavior of men.” So her team will try to blame a man for the bad behavior of a woman --when really there is more than enough badness to go around for each of the accused, dead and alive, to take their share.
Maxwell, in seeking to capitalize on the stereotype of the weak woman bending and breaking in the hands of a savvy man, takes a page out of Holmes’s book--and rewrites it even worse. Because where Holmes may have hoodwinked mighty men who underestimated a gal’s ability to bamboozle their big old brains, Maxwell was deceiving the most vulnerable members of her own sex. Now, the real victims risk going without justice, because a fake victim has invented herself.
False feminism always hurts the cause of gender equality. The suggestion that a woman guilty of wrongdoing can only ever have been under the control of a man deprives all women of agency. After all, to become less culpable, they must also become less capable. This is an appeal to prejudice masquerading as progressivism.
The least sexist thing we can do is embrace the uninspiring reality: Women can be evil, too.
--Molly Roberts, Washington Post
Isolated voltage! Perils of charging electric cars
Would you willingly spend 30 minutes in a deserted parking lot at 11:30 p.m.? Advise your child or loved one to do it?
Probably not, but electric vehicle owners frequently face that prospect when they need to charge a vehicle away from home.
It’s not uncommon for smartphone apps to send drivers to "public" EV chargers in the back lot of a closed car dealership, an empty corner of a big-box store parking lot, or otherwise tucked out of sight.
“These are less than natural places for people to want to stop on a long drive,” said Gabe Shenhar, Consumer Reports associate director of automotive testing.
Early in the current wave of EV adoption, one charger was in such a daunting spot that some women involved in the project called it "the rape charger" because the location felt so unsafe. The charger was eventually moved, but that spotlights problems that continue today:
EV chargers are frequently in neglected, backlot spaces to save money connecting them to the main utility lines.
As with many projects, women don’t have enough input on where the chargers should go.
“Visibility and safety are the table stakes,” EV advocate Chelsea Sexton said. “Nobody’s going to use a charger that doesn’t feel safe. Lighting, amenities, restrooms, things to do while you wait are important.”
Important, but rare.
There are several reasons for that. Most EV owners do the majority of charging overnight at home. That means many public chargers don’t get a lot of use. It’s hard to make them profitable if they’re used only a few hours a day, but it's also hard to convince drivers to buy more EVs if they can’t find convenient, safe public charging when they need it, especially on long highway drives.
Planning a long drive on interstate highways recently, I found multiple instances where the only DC fast chargers available were in the lots of dealers that would certainly be deserted, and possibly closed, when I reached them at night.
“Grid-tied chargers are generally placed as close as possible to available power to reduce the cost of extending circuits” with trenches and wiring, said Desmond Wheatley, CEO of Beam Global, which makes solar power chargers that can be put anywhere. “Hence, many chargers are found at the back of the supermarket where the dumpsters are and where the power comes into the building.
"Early adopters of EVs will put up with this but mass consumers will not.”
Tesla got it right. How others can catch up
Superchargers, the network of proprietary DC fast chargers Tesla built for its customers, “tend to be in busy, well-lit areas,” Shenhar said. Other chargers, most operated by companies that get income solely from the electricity they sell, “tend to be in strip malls that are OK in the day, less so at night,” he said. “They’re not well lit, empty, have few services available. Women expressed concerns about safety.”
This issue will only grow as more EVs hit the road.
“While the majority of charging will occur at homes and places of business, there must also be reliable options for public charging,” Nicole Antakli, Charge Enterprises chief business officer, said. “Every consumer must feel comfortable when charging their vehicle; this should include the ease of the charging hardware mechanics connecting to the vehicle, payment accessibility, exceptional visibility, effective lighting and surveillance of the chargers.”
Volta Charging places advertising-supported chargers in highly visible places in front of destinations for shopping, entertainment and dining. Its thousands of chargers across the U.S. are recognizable because they’re smack in front of popular businesses and have video screens and speakers selling high-end services and goods.
“It’s a triple win,” said Quin Garcia, managing director of Autotech Ventures, an investor in Volta. “It’s free to the customer, the advertisers get exposure, and the business gets an amenity smack in front of their door.” Volta can afford to run high-voltage lines to its street-side chargers because it gets advertising revenue, unlike services whose only income comes from selling electricity.
Charging companies and automakers both have a role to play in ensuring charging is easy and secure.
General Motors has an opportunity to make a major impact with the 40,000 public chargers it's promised to install across the U.S., and thousands more at its dealers. GM's recently announced $750 million program to expand public, work and home charging will succeed only if the stations are easy to find and people are comfortable using them, day or night.
--The Week
Journalists can’t save democracy
Ever since Donald Trump's shocking victory in the 2016 presidential race, a debate has been raging among mainstream journalists over the media's role in paving the way for the demagogue's win. With Trump sounding very much like he intends to make another run for the White House in 2024 and polls indicating he will easily win his party's nomination if he does, this argument has surged to life once again.
For Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, media critic Jay Rosen, and others, the stakes are obvious and enormous. Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. Given that reality, aspiring to neutrality between the parties ends up contributing to the realization of the worst-case scenario.
According to Milbank, that's already happening, with coverage of Democrat Joe Biden rivaling the negativity that characterized stories about Trump's time in the White House. It would be much better for members of the media to do their jobs with a proper sense of proportion, consistently describing the danger Trump and his party represents, placing them in a category distinct from whatever faults the Biden administration displays, and actively becoming "partisans for democracy."
On the other side of argument, Ross Douthat of the New York Times argues that this view of news coverage will only increase the appeal of right-wing populism. Because "suspicion of the establishment is precisely what's generating support for populism in the first place," rallying the establishment behind one of the two parties won't succeed in suppressing the populist insurgency. "Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism's dangers while convincing skeptical readers that you can be trusted to describe reality in full."
If forced to choose between those two positions, I incline toward Douthat's side of the debate. I fear that if mainstream media outlets become more openly partisan, they will lose even more trust and authority and end up being taken seriously only by those who already agree with them about the threat of the populist right.
Yet I fear that even Douthat is being more than a little naïve about our fractured and polarized epistemic reality. What counts as a scandal worthy of coverage? Which ones are huge and which are trivial? How much time and attention should be devoted to which kinds of political corruption? Douthat's column presumes that the answers to these questions are fairly obvious, that journalists should cover them accordingly, and that if they don't, conservative viewers will see this as further evidence of media bias and untrustworthiness.
That might have been true in 1998. But in 2021, it's beside the point. The right's media ecosystem actively encourages its audience to view any and all mainstream coverage that makes Republicans look bad as evidence of bias and bad faith. This same ecosystem treats any and all mainstream coverage of Democrats that doesn't savage them as infected by hypocrisy and double standards. These judgments are made prior to any open-minded assessment of the facts in particular cases.
In that kind of tribal and trustless environment, it may already be too late for mainstream journalists to demonstrate their fairness--let alone save American democracy.
--Damon Linker
Is Omicron panic the beginning of the way we live now?
Perhaps this is what endemic COVID looks like: Occasional weeks or months of relative normalcy punctuated by sudden bursts of fear and panic, continuing on and on into the foreseeable future.
I don't want to be a doomsayer, but a little bit of pessimism feels warranted after the emergence of Omicron as a COVID "variant of concern" over the [post-Thanksgiving] weekend. The development shut down a chunk of international travel, sent markets tumbling, and generally threatened a widespread-but-fragile sense that maybe this time the worst of the pandemic was over, or almost so, for many of us. It was difficult to know whether to be terrified because of Omicron's many mutations that could render the virus impervious to our defenses, or hopeful that existing vaccines might prove effective against the new threat.
As always, separating good information from the bad proved to be a Herculean task--the flurry of online speculation quickly outraced the few facts we do have. There's so much that isn't known yet.
The thing we do know? Omicron is coming to the United States, if it hasn't already arrived.
"Inevitably, it will be here," infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Nov. 28 on ABC's “This Week.” "The question is will we be prepared for it? If and when--and it's going to be when--it comes here, hopefully we will be ready for it."
Hopefully that's true, and Omicron won't turn out to be a Delta-style disaster. But even if the United States and the world somehow duck this particular bullet, the new variant makes a few things clear:
The federal government must, must, must become more nimble
The announcement of Omicron's arrival came just a week after the Centers for Disease Control finally approved vaccine booster shots for all adults. Plenty of observers believe it should have happened sooner. "I think the confusing message around the boosters may end up being one of the biggest missed opportunities in this pandemic," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, said earlier [in November]. Indeed, Democratic governors like Jared Polis in Colorado and Laura Kelly in Kansas stopped waiting and approved boosters in their states even before the CDC action.
Vaccine makers Pfizer and BioNTech now say they could ship variant-specific vaccines within 100 days, if necessary. It might be necessary--but it's difficult to have faith that the CDC and FDA will move with all due speed. The pandemic is nearly two years old, but Americans still don't have access to the kind of quick-and-easy COVID tests available to Europeans, largely because of U.S. agencies' laborious approval process. That obviously needs to change.
Anti-vax Republicans should shut up and get out of the way.
Theoretically, lean-government conservatives ought to be great at streamlining cumbersome and outdated bureaucracies in order to keep Americans safe. That's not happening. Instead, Republican governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas have tried to block vaccine and mask mandates, while Fox News stars (and some Trumpist members of Congress) have spread conspiracy theories. That's why it was particularly galling last week when The Wall Street Journal--owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News--blamed President Biden for the rising COVID death toll.
Delete joke about man who killed father and mother asking for mercy on grounds he is an orphan. Insert joke about newspaper editorial that blames Joe Biden for not doing a better job countering the anti-vaccine propaganda spread by the newspaper's owners.--David Frum
It has always been the case that unvaccinated people risk not only their own health but also the well-being of their neighbors--in part because they serve as potential breeding grounds for COVID variants. It's probably not a coincidence that Omicron was first detected in South Africa, where barely more than a third of the population has received the jab. Every Tucker Carlson rant that encourages vaccine hesitancy makes the next deadly variant a bit more likely.
Worldwide vaccination efforts must be redoubled.
My colleague Ryan Cooper has been an insistent voice urging rich nations like the U.S. to ensure COVID vaccines reach poorer nations. "Obviously it's immoral to let people die by the millions because they live in places too impoverished or dysfunctional to obtain or distribute vaccines," he wrote in September. "But it's also bad for everyone because allowing the virus to circulate in the Global South risks new variants cropping up that could get around the vaccines and harm rich countries." It should now be clear that he is right.
President Biden said [on Nov. 26] that "the United States has already donated more vaccines to other countries than every other country combined." Clearly, that's not enough. Biden has also called on the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property rights on vaccines and other supplies so that poorer nations can scale up their efforts, but wealthy countries like the United Kingdom and European Union nations are opposed. Omicron should force a rethinking of those priorities.
Even if all those things happen, though, Omicron is yet another reminder that the new normal might not look like the old one. We're all eager to move on. "When can the COVID masks finally come off?" the New York Times asked earlier this month. Right now--and perhaps for a very long time to come--the answer is: "Not quite yet." --Joel Mathis, The Week
