Day: February 12, 2024

A Connecticut pastor has been arrested on allegations that he sold crystal meth out of his church’s rectory, police say. https://t.co/6hnCJHTPtx

— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 13, 2024

Thank you, Joe! https://t.co/fSolVhwKoF

— Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz (@Bundeskanzler) February 12, 2024

Back in the 1960s and 70s, the media was referred to as ‘The Fourth Estate’. The media played a role as a check and balance against government abuse of power, corruption, and overreach. The media was an integral part of any healthy democracy.

The old mass media companies prior to the information age, now referred to as the legacy media, carried a reputation for hard headed journalism, which exposed scandals without fear or favour. Walter Cronkite was an icon of creditability and trust in the media. The spirit of journalistic purity was symbolised by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s expose of the Watergate break in and subsequent cover up. 

Journalism was once a career many aspired to as a noble profession, embedded with ethics and a sense for telling the truth. Some journalists became legendary, after rigorous years of apprenticeship involving hardship and dangerous assignments, where their lives were sometimes at risk. There was a distinct career path, beginning as a junior reporter, beat journalist, investigative journalist, to correspondent, columnist, through to editor. However, most of this generation of modern journalists are long gone. 

The fall of nobility

Over the last three decades the craft of journalism has been losing integrity. This has become much more rapid over the last few years. Mainstream media jobs have disappeared, as local and beat journalism has waned, which was once a traditional training ground. 

Journalists have been forced by their employers to create stories from narratives. Facts now play a secondary role in the creation of ‘propaganda’ pieces. Very few journalists questioned the narrative of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ before the invasion of Iraq. No journalists questioned the narrative of governments during the Covid pandemic, and very few are willing to critically examine the narrative of climate change. The same is occurring over the Russo-Ukraine conflict. Tucker Carlson’s recent interview of Russin President Vladimir Putin was ridiculed by the mainstream media, rather than being seen as important piece of journalism capturing the Russian side of the story. 

Most journalists working toady in the mainstream media are acting for partisan interests. Some use the word ‘presstitute’ to describe the profession today. 

The symbol of today’s discredited media are the Pulitzer prizes given in 2018 regarding Russian election meddling awarded to the New York Times and Washington Post, which was later found to be a complete hoax. 

What has destroyed traditional journalism?

With the concentration of media ownership over the last couple of decades, organization rationalization has drastically reduced the number of jobs available. 

Various media groups have pushed their own editorial lines. This has led to polarization of the media, across a spectrum of bias. 

The release of the ‘Twitter files’ exposed the close relation ship the social media platform had with the various security agencies in the United States. Other disclosures around the world have shown that governments had been leaning on social media platforms to censor criticism. There is no question, governments have (and are) working in collusion with the major social media platforms. 

Organizations like the Public Media Alliance have developed a front against what they define as ‘disinformation’ among its members, which include the ABC and SBS (Australia), CBC (Canada), Mediacorp (Singapore), Thai PBS (Thailand), BBC (UK), and PBS (US). In addition, media organizations receive funding from corporations, such as Pfizer, which restricts open reporting. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation gave out grants to media outlets like The Guardian in 2020 to support ‘global health’ reporting. 

All of the above has drastically limited the freedom of journalistic expression, where journalists themselves are discouraged from reporting what they believe to be the truth, against narratives their employers support. As a consequence, many talented journalists have sort more lucrative jobs as publicists, speech writers, and political secretaries. 

Investigative journalism is a dangerous occupation. According to the International Federation of Journalists, 120 journalists died on the job in 2023. Most of these have been in war zones. The institutional attacks on journalists are symbolized by the incarceration of Julian Assange at HM Prison Belmarsh in London, since 2019, while fighting extradition to the United States on charges of espionage. The defamation, libel, and Official Secrets Act are used to persecute journalists. Investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle-Brown was recently sentenced to two years jail in Malaysia in absentia for defamation.

Finally, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) is drastically destroying journalism. We are now at the point where some media organizations are creating content through AI, dispensing with journalists all together. This saves media companies paying out massive salaries for journalists, with the AI creation of content from desktop resources. 

Impartial reporting is dead

Journalistic ethics have been forcibly dropped with the rise of the media as a propaganda tool. Objectivity and the facts have fallen victim to self-serving narratives.

Objective reporting has been replaced with ‘ego-journalism’, where news is replaced with opinion orientated commentary, where presenters become ‘brands’ in their own right. These platforms are being used to used to attack and ridicule political figures, in a way that would have not been acceptable a generation ago. 

It’s much easier (and cheaper) to espouse narratives than undertake hard investigative work. Good investigative work is often suppressed by social media censorship in a number of ways. This includes the inability to post certain articles, de-amplifying posts so few read them, modifying algorithms so posts wont show up in search results, labelling an article with so form of pseudo ‘fact check’, or deplatforming a person outright. 

With a concentrated media and less journalists, there is less coverage of a number of issues, leaving large gaps in news coverage, especially local news. Specialist journalists are now few and far between, as senior journalists are often sacrificed for juniors on much lower salaries. 

Traditional journalism is quickly dying, as is the media’s ability to act as a check and balance of government. 

A new era in journalism

However, the above doesn’t mean that journalism is totally dead. Journalism is taking on a new form through independent media. The recent Tucker Carlson interviews of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin clearly show the rising influence of independent online journalism, much to the dismay of the legacy media. More people are heading across to alternative media, leaving the legacy media in large numbers.

Many journalists from the legacy media are jumping across and creating their own independent organizations, using multiple online platforms to get their material out to consumers. They utilize YouTube, Rumble, X (Twitter), Spotify, and Substack. New organizations like Public (Michael Shallenberger), and The Free Press (Douglas Murray), have their own research and production staff, collecting revenue through paywalls. 

Many new sites open each month, but few find themselves sustainable. There is a lot of experimentation going on with developing specialised newsletters, videos, and podcasts, where consumer monetary support deems them viable. 

There are dangers that many independent platforms are propagating opinionated current affairs. However, this style brings in the numbers and revenue. There is also a danger that some of the platforms these independent journalists use, might be purchased by corporations that censor content. 

There is a solution

The legacy media became concentrated, which fostered fragmentation through those who didn’t want to be part of the system, or left the system altogether. However, these independent platforms, some small and others not so small are competing for the same potential consumers. A single consumer only has a limited amount of money they are prepared to spend on news and opinion. They must choose very selectively, as its not practical to subscribe to multiple independent platforms.

The solution could be the amalgamation of independent platforms into consortiums, where consumers pay one subscription for access of a group of independent sites. This would not be too different than subscribing to Netflix, Disney, or Prime for movie content. Such a s consortium approach will strengthen the power of independent content producers, and make independent journalism accessible to more consumers than at present. 

These consortiums or networks of independent journalists, packaged around anchor sites is the next logical step in the growth and sustainability of independent journalism.

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have captured international media attention. In the past, such “international crises” have pressured U.S. presidents to “do something” about them. President Joe Biden—who is a veteran of the Cold War and the War on Terror—has reflexively and zealously enmeshed the United States within them. Yet he has also verbally gone beyond deliberate past ambiguity on U.S. policy toward Taiwan and pledged multiple times to defend the island from an attack or invasion by China. This interventionist policy in multiple regions—Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia—is a dangerous overstretch.

Whether U.S. policymakers admit it or not—they don’t—the United States has acted as the world’s policeman since the end of World War II. Back then, the other great powers had suffered catastrophic damage to their economies and societies. In contrast, the largely damage-free United States accounted for half the world’s remaining economic output. The United States became the world’s policeman not because of its security needs but because it could. After the war, the principal potential U.S. adversary, the Soviet Union, had tempered its revolutionary expansionism and sought to rebuild its industrial capacity torched by the Nazi invasion. Also, the United States developed a lead in new potent nuclear weapons technology.

However, the world has changed much since the Allied victory in the World War and the end of the Cold War. Today, the United States only accounts for about 15 percent of global GDP but nearly 40 percent of the world’s military spending. That global overstretch is currently unsustainable and unnecessary.

The Middle East, with its chronic instability and conflicts, has forced U.S. interventions since the late 1970s to secure the global oil supply. Yet the fracking revolution has made the United States the number one oil producer in the world again. Thus, the United States maintains land, sea, and air forces in the region to guard other nations’ supplies of oil—especially those of wealthy nations in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Even if the fracking revolution had not happened, buying oil at the international market price would have been cheaper than paying for expensive military forces to protect a lucrative commodity that flows even during, around, and through wars. As for the $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel, it seems to subsidize behavior counterproductive to a long-term two-state solution to the perennial conflicts over Palestine.

For starters, Europe, the primary theater of U.S. concern during the Cold War, has receded in relative economic importance. The European Union’s share of the world’s GDP has been declining and now accounts for less than 15 percent of the total. Yet, Europe’s GDP is still large compared to that of the country most threatening it, Russia, which has a GDP of less than 3 percent of the global total. With a GDP of about five times that of Russia, the Europeans must provide for their own defense and, more specifically, take over assisting Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Increasing their assistance to Ukraine and keeping the Russians busy is less costly in lives and money than fighting the Russians directly. Although the Ukrainians have done a heroic job—eliminating one-third of Russian combat forces—Ukraine is far less strategic to the United States than it is to European nations. Nevertheless, U.S. aid has already topped $75 billion—a huge contribution to European security.

The United States instead needs to focus its attention and resources on what now seems to be the region most important to the United States: East Asia. In recent decades, the combined GDP of East Asia has risen to 26 percent of the world’s total. In this region, the rise of China, the United States’ most likely future adversary, and its recent more assertive actions toward Taiwan and the South China Sea bear watching. However, President Biden should quit straying from the U.S. official policy of ambiguity toward defending Taiwan.

The Chinese threat must be put in perspective. Xi Jinping’s recent purge of generals in the PLA indicates that he fears that the rot exhibited by Russia’s military and its botched invasion of Ukraine could afflict his own military in an attack on Taiwan. As in autocratic Russia, no one in despotic China has any incentive to tell the emperor that his military has no clothes. Also, Xi has increased party and state involvement in the economy, which has already added to China’s huge economic problems caused by existing inefficient state-owned industries and banks. Therefore, the increasing relative GDP of the East Asian region and the potential of a rising China should require most of the United States’ attention and resources, but not to the point of excessive alarm or hysteria.

This article was also published in The National Interest 

As a native Wichitan, I never expected my work on San Francisco homelessness to bring me home. But as it turns out, Wichita has the greatest potential to become the national model for successfully addressing homelessness. If it succeeds, Wichita can add resolving homelessness to its list of enterprising successes.

I head up a national public policy research organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, where homelessness is legendary. So we created our Beyond Homelessinitiative, encompassing peer-reviewed research into the root causes of homelessness as well as advancing solutions based on evidence.

In studying communities across the nation, the two overarching things I’ve learned are that housing doesn’t solve homelessness and that the only communities that are reducing homelessness are those in which the various concerned interests have come out of their silos to work together in a coordinated, holistic approach.

“Homelessness” itself is a misnomer. Individuals and families end up on the street for a host of reasons, which can range from trauma and mental problems to addiction and just plain bad luck. Getting and staying out of life on the streets involves overcoming those issues. Unfortunately, federal policy, mirrored in almost every locale across the country, simplistically applies a one-size-fits-all Housing First solution, which is failing badly, at tremendous cost, almost everywhere. In announcing the policy in 2013, President Obama promised Housing First would “end homelessness” in 10 years. Instead, unsheltered homelessness has risen nationally from 184,718 in 2013 to 256,610 in 2023—a nearly 40-percent increase.

In 2016, my adopted home of California explicitly adopted this federal policy, with similarly disastrous results: homelessness grew from 118,142 in 2016 to 181,399 in 2023, a greater-than-50-percent increase. The state spends over $1 billion a year on housing programs for the homeless (with additional federal and city spending), but homelessness keeps growing.

One American city that has bucked this tragic trend is San Antonio, Texas. It achieved this by bringing every sector of the community together to share ideas, concerns, and experiences, and to develop and execute a strategic plan to create a 22-acre campus of care called Haven for Hope. Since opening in 2010, Haven has produced a 77-percent decline in downtown unsheltered homelessness, with millions of dollars in savings to police, fire, and EMS–providing benefits to the city that go beyond the lives restored. The campus engages the entire city, including 1,000 volunteers monthly, creating a virtuous circle that feeds the sense of community we all want.

Delegations from hundreds of locales have visited Haven for Hope, yet virtually none has adopted the model. Almost everywhere, vested interests have been too committed to their separate paths to work together. The results have been tragic.

Now, Wichita promises to be a rare exception. Starting four years ago, planning for Wichita’s OneRise began with a series of meetings among key people from the government, education, nonprofit, real-estate, philanthropic, business, and civic sectors sharing concerns and ideas for Wichita’s needs. Last year the master plan developed from this effort was unveiled, while meetings continued to strategize about how all the participants can best coordinate to make the plan a reality. The proposed 70-acre park will encompass the promotion of behavioral health, housing, childcare, and services providing a path out of homelessness. It will coordinate and connect with service providers across the city. Those in distress will be able to find respite at this central location, and those at risk of becoming homeless will be able to avert the crisis. OneRise will truly end the specter of suffering that has tragically become too common in Wichita and in the process feed a vibrant response system, with participants focusing on their core strengths.

Unlike in my adopted state, innovators such as those behind Haven and OneRise don’t just throw money at problems: they set goals and use metrics based on outcomes to track and reward success. As a result, the streets will become safer and more livable, and homeless people will get the help they need. That’s a model worthy of my hometown Wichita’s vibrant culture.

This article was also published in The Wichtita Eagle