Journalism – CAFFEINATED POLITICS (2024)

It has been a tough week to read the newspaper obituary pages. One of the best writers and reporters I started reading in my teenage years and then onwards into adulthood was Richard Fineman. I had a subscription to Newsweek, a newsmagaine where he worked for nearly 30 years as a reporter and editor. I would pour over each edition and make notes or underline points I wanted to be easily able to locate. I pulled the binders for this post where I kept certain articles and pages. Fineman was a reporter’s reporter. There is, I feel, no higher praise.

Robert Fineman died at the age of 75 from cancer.

His work helped Newsweek stand out at a time that many people consider a golden age for newsmagazines. Alongside colleagues like Gloria Borger, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, Mr. Fineman created a weekly report that blended breaking news with measured analysis and context, setting the tone for how people in Washington and the nation discussed them.

“He believed in the story, always attuned to where the political conversation was headed,” the historian Jon Meacham, who worked with Mr. Fineman at Newsweek, said in an email. “Howard was what was known as a master ‘violinist,’ the lead voice of the magazine responsible for writing the piece that served as the overture to everything that followed.”

After Mr. Fineman declared in 1999 that George W. Bush had all but captured the Republican presidential nomination over his closest rival, Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, the senator called Mr. Fineman a “gasbag” who had no understanding of the warp and weft of America outside Washington.

Mr. Fineman was unshaken. He called Mr. McCain immediately to patch things up, telling the senator that he was right about Beltway insularity — but also that he was no fan of the East Coast bubble either, and that he had already traveled thousands of miles covering the nascent campaign season.

As a conciliatory gesture, Mr. McCain sent Mr. Fineman a pair of red boxing gloves.

Today I read of a second blow to the journalism world when it was reported Christophe Deloire, whose nonpartisan organization to protect journalists. rescued dissidents from jail. and championed a diversity of viewpoints in the profession around the world, died in Paris. He was 53 and the cause of death was also cancer.

Mr. Deloire, who was himself a journalist and an author, lobbied publicly and labored behind the scenes to promote a free press in countries that muzzled journalists. He helped negotiate freedom for those who had been threatened with arrest, imprisoned or held hostage.Image

In 2023, Reporters Without Borders, known by its French initials R.S.F., coordinated the clandestine escape ofMarina Ovsyannikova, a former Russian state TV journalist who incensed the Kremlin by storming a live news program in 2022 to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.

As leader and spokesman for the Paris-based R.S.F., Mr. Deloire oversaw a program to provide Ukrainian journalists with protective equipment and training after the Russian invasion began, and he established a Journalism Trust Initiative to certify the validity of news outlets as a way to help restore public confidence in the news media.

In his quest for pluralism in the profession, Mr. Deloire was a leading opponent of the appointment last summer ofGeoffroy Lejeune,a far-right media mogul, as editor in chief of Le Journal du Dimanche, France’s only Sunday newspaper.

I grew up with radio news broadcasters that were part of the family, or so it seemed. The same was true for a group of print reporters. I understand with the internet and social media that type of journalism seems ancient, though it should not, for the sake of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”Being well-informed is a vital component of a strong functioning democracy. Or republic. Be it our country or anywhere around the world. When we lose anchors of reporting the news or protecting the journalism profession it strikes deeper about what too many either take for granted, or never knew about in the frist place.

“As Walter Cronkite would say, that’s the way it is.” Howard Fineman

Newspapers are the first draft of history on any day. Given the enormity of the history-setting news from a New York courtroom Thursday afternoon when 34 guilty verdicts were handed down against a former president for election finance and tax crimes, what follows on this post will be in history books for all of time. Donald disrespected his country, his wife, his family, and himself in a way that underscores a complete lack of character and moral fiber. His stain on this land has met the first encounter with law and order. More courtrooms await him. What he has done must and will meet the demands of the law but also for what history demands regarding accountability for his actions against the nation.

A news story erupted Saturday catching me off-guard and James too, as I shouted the lead paragraph to him while sitting in my office. Last week, many of us learned fromThe New York Timesthat an upside-down American flag had been temporarily raised over the Samuel Alito household in the days after January 6, 2021. For those of us who come from homes where respect for the flag is almost hereditary and as adults, we follow the traditions of flag flying from our parents and grandparents, the news story was troubling. Especially since the person at the heart of the story was a sitting justice on the United States Supreme Court. During the following days, the news about the flag was made into pointed, and correctly so, editorial cartoons blasting his lack of patriotism and making it clear that blaming one’s wife, as Alito did, was slimy.

Justice Sam Alito tried to claim in his awkward attempt at rationalization that the whole matter was simply a response to a dispute with neighbors. How demeaning oneself and looking like a complete idiot across the entire nation ‘showed the neighbor’ is not something I have yet been able to compute. But then I do not live in a conspiracy bubble of insanity. I was opposed to the insurrection by the angry white mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021.

With that as a backdrop comes the news report on Saturday that the Washington Postdid not learn about the flag on May 16 from thatTimesreport. Rather the newsroom knew of the shameful Alito story since the day it happened. Like anyone who wishes to drop an embarrassment and have some cover, the Post dropped the news in the middle of this Memorial Day weekend. More than a week after theTimes’s report.

I want you to know that I feel compelled to set my own record in clear view and be upfront before continuing this article. For the record, this home has subscribed to the digital edition of the Washington Post since the campaign season in 2016. We feel it is important to support newspapers, (Wisconsin State Journal, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times) but also strongly feel that having updated news along with views and perspectives about this perilous time where autocrats and fascists are posing direct threats to our democracy. Being solid news consumers is something every citizen needs to undertake. Being informed of facts is essential in any age, but more so now than ever. I do not shy away from standing alongside sound journalistic standards or the straight talk required when those standards are not upheld. Just because I have a subscription to a newspaper and respect the overall product published each day does not mean I will be quiet when their newsroom fails to meet the required standards. Being a subscriber seems to make it incumbent that I speak out. Let me then be blunt. I am simply aghast that the Washington Post scuttled this story about Alito for years.

On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, whichthe Alitos did not attend— Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”

As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”

Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.

Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.

I cannot afford the Post any praise for reporting their account of the story this weekend. Yes, there was that first-hand account of confronting the Alito family at their home, and it underscores (again) the white and angry mentality that is so ripe among their kind. “Feel our pain’ from the resentment-prone and heavily weighted grievance crowd makes the rest of us want to vomit. But so does the lean and half-hearted and surely hours-long struggle of how to explain the paper’s lack of reporting this story in a timely fashion. What resulted felt like an iron-deficient hospital patient needing another blood transfusion.

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

“At the time” they decided “not to report” the Alito story. But what about during the many months of court chaos that unfolded where the very fabric of objectivity had been torn asunder with bribes provided to Clarence Thomas for luxury travels and his wife was reported to be neck deep in far right-wing activism and outright lunacy? And of course, Alito himself was in the muck, too. I am sure he undertakes Catholic finger play before dinner but that does not give him license for what was at the heart of a New York Timesstory. They reported a conservative activist knew the ruling in 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby after donors of the right-winger had dinner with the justice. Alito surely needed a confessional session by then, and yet in recalling that story during the past three years, the Post saw no need to report the flag events of 2021 to their readers. They could not see the long chain of events and draw any conclusions?

The integrity of the Supreme Court is a major story that plays out almost weekly with news articles and court cases that strike at the very heart of our conscience as a democracy. Yes, the Post sat on the flag story. A story that showcases the weak foundation of a fragile white conservative male justice who willingly tossed his country and his wife off the flagpole at his home.

The Post had the PRIME moment to report the flag story when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring Trump from that state’s primary ballot. The Court stated Colorado couldn’t make the decision, but also shockingly set forth additional rules for how Section 3 can be applied….and equally important not applied. But hear me now, the ruling was a bare five-justice majority that issued that harmful decision for our democracy. Oh….yes…let us not forget……Justice Alito provided that powerful essential fifth vote that cratered the Fourteenth Amendment’s bar to insurrectionists’ holding office.

The Washington Post has a great deal to explain. Not only to loyal newspaper subscribers who rely on information but also to a nation that faces a severe test about the very foundations of this nation.

During this spring’s protests on college and university campuses regarding the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, I saw an image on television that I was not at all sure of its meaning. In the mix of images presented in the ABC News story, I was not even certain what campus the image had originated from. But on Saturday, as I was reading the newspapers outside on a fantastic spring day, an article that took up most of the page brought that image and story behind it to light. Once again, the relevancy of newspapers cannot be overstated.

I need not write it here, as we are all aware that our digital age, while wonderful in a variety of ways, has also created a high volume of trash ‘journalism’ that has not been properly fact-checked or vetted. Too many people use social media for what they think is news, and as such, are simply loading up on disinformation. Over the decades of my friendships and contacts with people of varying ages and demographics who I worked with from radio broadcasting to the state legislature, or later with grant writing for a non-profit, one thing united them all. Newspapers were tossed at the front door each morning no matter where I had an office or desk as current events impacted our jobs. Reliable and trusted newspaper journalism mattered then and now.

When pro-Palestinian student protesters took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University last month and renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” thebannerthey unfurled contained images of a cartoon character created over 50 years ago that symbolizes the resilience of Palestinians.

On either side of the text were two images of a barefoot boy with tattered clothes and spiky hair, his back turned to us.

The character is called Handala (variously transliterated as Hanzala or Handzala), a name derived from a native plant that is deep-rooted, persistent and bears bitter fruit, and has become a potent symbol of the Palestinian struggle. The image was created by thePalestinian political cartoonist Naji Al-Aliin 1969, one of the most widely read cartoonists in the Arab world,who was murdered in London in 1987. (The case remains unsolved.)

Handala is 10 years old, the same age that Ali was when he became a refugee in 1948.

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War, Ali exclusively depicted Handala with his back turned, a gesture that transformed him into a silent witness of the horrors and outrages going on around him. The stance, according to the cartoonist, represented a rejection of the political machinations of foreign nations when it came to the fate of ordinary Palestinians.

Margaret Olin, a religious studies scholar at the Yale Divinity School and co-author of “The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine,” has been photographing Handala’s appearance in murals and as graffiti during her visits to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the past decade. “It’s become a symbol of the whole Palestinian movement to return to their former homes,” she said in a telephone interview.

Handala, she explained, “has the resonance ofPaul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,”which Walter Benjamin described as the angel of history. “He’s facing the ravages of time and disaster, but he’s turned around so that you see the disasters too.” She added that the character “also has a tinge of Günter Grass’s Oskar in ‘The Tin Drum,’ a child who also refused to grow while the disasters of Germany took place around him. He’s the child as witness, the child who’s stuck witnessing, just waiting for the disasters to pass.”

The figure of Handala, she observed, is “plastered on houses in East Jerusalem, where residents are being forced out by illegal settlements. He’s carried into protests. He’s everywhere.”

Newspapers are still mighty important because theyprovide a wide range of information, help keep people informed, and increase knowledge. I have been a reader and subscriber to newspapers most of my life. From the weekly publication from the county where I was born, The Waushara Argus, to the newspaper where I have lived most of my adult life, the Wisconsin State Journal, to the essential part of any day no matter where I wake up, The New York Times. Over my lifetime newspapers have enlightened me, as they did this weekend, to a topic I was not aware of, but had a curiosity about.

If you wish to have pre-existing beliefs strengthened, stick to your social media and angry white male shouters on the shrill-sounding networks. If, however, you wish for sound journalism that is fact-based and objective you need to pick up a daily newspaper. You are bound to learn a lot.

One of my Caffeinated Politics Facebook readers continually takes exception to my posting editorial cartoons. Such drawings are a centuries-long form of journalism. On Tuesday he wrote, “You post some interesting, serious stuff on this page. Then you completely destroy your credibility with childishness like this”. Needless to say, the journalism of an editorial cartoon works best when people react! I am always astounded by the reaction of some readers to editorial cartoons that are placed in daily newspapers. The fact that those drawings create a reaction proves the power and potency of their creative force.

From the start of our history, such opinion drawings in publications have helped to further a needed dialogue on the topic of the day people are much discussing. Phil Hands is the editorial cartoonist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin and doubtless many of you have seen his work. The cartoon below is one I had to go back and search for as a response to those who question why editorial cartoons are so pointed regarding Donald Trump. The cartoon worked when Trump sat in the White House for one term watching Fox News television and it still resonates today as his criminal trials have started.

Readers to my little place here on the internet highway know I very much enjoy a pithy and well-drawn political cartoon, the type that arrives each morning on the Op-Ed pages of many papers around the nation. The role of these forms of information and emotional prodding is something Americans have relied on to help frame the issues of the day.

What disturbs me about the blowback, at times, against editorial cartoonists is the timid newspaper owners and publishers caving to the worst instincts of readers. Years ago, I was dismayed when the international edition of The New York Times fell in line with the domestic edition and eliminated all such editorial cartoons.

If someone is offended by a political cartoon it seems time to yank the work of that cartoonist. Conservative and Trump-supporting newspapers dropped cartoonists because there was a sharp edge created about Trump in the White House. When fragile-minded readers contact newspapers we know what follows. Corporate bean counters sweat and whimper. Soon the cartoonist is dropped because it is argued that editorial cartoons aren’t seen as bringing in income if they prompt critical thinking among the subscribers. (Having a penchant for reading local newspapers as I travel about, it is a concern of mine that many small papers do not even have an editorial page.)

The reason these cartoons matter is that they are vital to our culture as they stir the national conversation about topics and personalities that are at times gritty and hard to stomach. Visual metaphors are important as they often convey a truth that can not be easily summed up in an analysis news article or even a long editorial.

I grew up with Herblock (Herbert Block) as he made Richard Nixon look criminal and Ronald Reagan look out of touch with day-to-day governing. In each case, news stories underscored why such editorial cartoons were correct in their opinion-shaped renderings. Cartoonists really are an essential part of journalism as they also seek to frame the current perspective and national mood into a news format.

Some will look at political cartoons and see nothing but another layer of tension being added to the issues of the day. The other way to respond is to note such cartoons allow for difficult issues to be more easily discussed. I am sure, for some readers, cartoons lure them into reading more to further refine their knowledge about the news stories of the day. And let us be honest, there is nothing wrong with editorial cartoons courting controversy. That is a very real role for newspapers to participate in and plays hand-in-hand with what democracy should look and feel like when opening a newspaper.

Editorial cartoons are an important part of journalism. We must not let editorial cartoons disappear! Our democracy counts on it.

Today there is much interest in the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes. Among the well-deserved honors, the Feature Photography award was given to the Associated Press for their coverage of the more than 500,000 people who made the journey through the dense jungles of the Darién Gap on the Colombia-Panama border, most with hopes of reaching the United States. The AP’s feature, pieced together from day-to-day coverage of a historic rise in migration through the Darién Gap, created an intimate picture of a major news event. Some of those remarkable images are posted below.

The Pulitzer Board’s citation called the AP’s work “poignant photographs chronicling unprecedented masses of migrants and their arduous journey north from Colombia to the border of the United States.”

Every year on May 3, UNESCOcommemoratesWorld Press Freedom Day. This year I need not write, given the almost hourly headlines, the day was marked by the dire and grave threats to journalists where the war on Gaza is becoming the deadliest conflict for journalists and media workers in recent memory. Journalism is delivered by reporters and news photographers to a world that needs a better understanding of the events that impact their lives. It is, again I need not write, a most valued profession.

As CBS News reported, the war on Gaza is the deadliest ever to be recorded by theCPJsince the nonprofit began to collect data in 1992. For comparison, the number of journalists killed in the first two months in Gaza surpassed the amount killed in the Vietnam War, which lasted two decades, according to the IFJ. According to CPJ, Four Israeli journalists were killed, three by Hamas during their attack on Oct. 7. Three Lebanese journalists were killed by Israeli airstrikes or shelling. 102 Palestinian journalists were also killed by airstrikes, shelling, or snipers, according to IFJ.

Think of a reporter as a pair of eyes and ears to the larger world and then think of losing those senses. That is what happens each time a reporter is killed. This past week, the BBC reported on the importance of this annual event and spoke about one of the reporters who worked as an Al Jazeera cameraman. He was killed last year. When back on my computer I did a Google search and located more information about Samer Abudaqa who was hit in an Israeli drone attack while reporting at Farhana school in Khan Younis, located in southern Gaza. He bled to death for more than four hours as emergency workers were unable to reach him because the Israeli army would not let them. Given the destruction of every hospital in Gaza, one does have to ask where he would have received vital medical attention even if humanity was allowed among the Israeli soldiers to take hold?

While researching more information about Abudaqa I came across a joined story, also from CBS News.

CPJ hastrackednumerous forms of censorship: attacks, threats, assaults, and arrests of journalists covering the war in Gaza. Journalists have had family members killed.One of those is Al-Jazeera’s Wael Al-Dahdouh. In November, he received the call while on air that his wife, children, and grandson were killed after they relocated to an area they were told was safe.

At the center of why journalists play such an important role is the importance for people to know about the workings of their government, and as the college campus protests have pointed out, what is being done with the people’s money. The need for press freedom is so great, and yet the attempts by some governments to curtail the work of journalists are egregious.

It is no surprise that this annual observance, and what it represents matters to us all since it is a foundational fact that journalists do the valued work for those who live in a democracy, or where people strive for more freedoms. For journalists working in places where rights are fewer this past week was a reminder to those governments that they must be aware that the rest of the world is watching. May 3rd was a day about recognizing the universal truth–whether or not it is applied in practice in each nation–that there must be a commitment to press freedom.

Al-Dahdouh was covering the news live when his son was killed by an Israeli bomb. The blast was heard by viewers and listeners. Later that day, he was back on the air reporting. That is the sign of professional steadfastness we call attention to on World Press Freedom Day.

It has been interesting over the past weeks to follow one aspect of the Gaza protests occurring at colleges and universities nationwide that has not made for top-of-the-fold coverage. While we are all aware that protestors from UCLA to Columbia University have pitched tents and made demands of the top brass in places of higher education, less known are the attempts made to stymie reporters and others from reporting the stories that have captivated the nation. While we are most aware of how people and organizations want to try and control their own press coverage or steer it in a positive direction be it from a White House press secretary or spokespeople for large corporations, the degree to which these protests at times have been handled regarding reporting has been concerning.

One of the nagging aches occurred over the weeks at Columbia University where the campus was closed to the press during the protests. The glaring hypocrisy between the shutdown of on-the-ground reporting from the scene of the news will come Monday, when at that same university the announcements of the always prestigious Pulitzer Prize journalism awards will be made. One can assume reporters will be offered unfettered access to that event.

Attempts made to limit press coverage of the protests or to limit access or stifle the ability of reporters to get the accurate ‘temperature’ of the crowd and its reasoning is galling. CNN reported that journalists who were tasked with covering violent unrest on college campuses across the US have been arrested and barred access as police moved in to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters.

AtUCLA,reporters for the student-run newspaper The Daily Bruin, said they were violently attacked during the clashes Tuesday night, including being followed, slapped and sprayed with irritants, the newspaper said. Student Editor Anna Dai-Liu told CNN that she was gassed, and other student reporters were assaulted, with one reporter being taken to emergency care.

“Shortly before 3:30 a.m., four Daily Bruin reporters were walking on campus when they were followed and then assaulted,” the newspaper reported. “Five to six assailants also sprayed reporters with an irritant. As some reporters went to help a reporter that was pulled to the ground, assailants began to record on their cellphones.”

Wednesday night at UW-Madison it was not the police who were trying to limit coverage of the pro-Palestinian rally, but a member of the protest organization who made an effort to limit my work as a blogger. I have been writing at Caffeinated Politics for 18 years so I was taken aback when approached by a young man who told me there was a requirement to ask permission to take pictures of people at the protest. At first, I thought he was joking and smiled at him while inquiring how that would happen when tens of people filled my camera lens when taking photographs. He seemed unsure how to respond to that so he simply repeated I needed to ask permission. I informed him I was a blogger and would not ask people for permission. He got huffy in tone and with words but I stayed in a low volume mode and with no sense of hesitation alerted him that the protest was on campus grounds, and open to the public. I told him when people make a protest for public policy changes with the UW administration on an open campus it disallows him to ask me to get permission for my work. I added, though in reflection I am sure he did not connect my argument to the present situation, that my refusal to follow his requirement would be akin to him signing a petition to obtain an outcome through governmental channels but then wanting to make sure nobody knew he had signed the petition. Needless to say, I kept talking with folks and taking my photos.

I do not consider myself a working journalist but rather a writer on the Op-Ed page of a newspaper. I have always highly respected the working profession of journalists and reporters and have been mindful of what they dealt with over the past weeks when trying to best cover this fast-paced story.

In a statement, Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, said that journalists “have a constitutional right to be present at these protests so the public may stay informed and law enforcement agencies and administrators at higher education institutions can be held to account.”

She urged law enforcement “to allow journalists to do their work without interference or threat of arrest and detainment.”

What student protests will look like going forward is an open questions. So, too, is how media will cover them.

Despite her concerns about what she sees as distracted news coverage, Iqbal is glad the protests are dominating national news.

The Barnard student said she wants the issue to become “inescapable.” But she would also prefer that the public turn to students’ Instagram accounts for updates on what’s going on, “as opposed to CNN.””

That last line is most telling about the lack of awareness from some younger people about the importance of objective news coverage. If one considers Instagram more aligned with news coverage than the working professionals at an all-news network then we clearly have bigger problems we must address in both higher education and also generally as a country.