To MSNBC and Other News Media: How to Cover T____

MSNBC is not alone, of course, in treating the seditionist ringleader ex-President as media outlets might treat regular ex-Presidents, you know, those who are not intent upon getting back into office in order to avoid prison. 

Here's a prime example of how not to cover T_____ from this morning's online Washington Amazon Post. This (below) is what appears as the lead story just under the masthead, with a captioned photo of "President Trump" behind the Resolute right there in the Oval.  

Notice the T____ rumor news from the diseased cranial cavity where T____ policy is hatched is presented as much more important than the current real President doing real Presidential stuff like as dealing with real immigration problems (see "More Coverage" below the unreal lead story in the much-reduced font).

 

Instead of offering readers news of what is happening in the world today, the Amazon Post chose to go with a story about what's going on among T____'s thought disorders related to his fantasy of being President again.

 

Two nights ago Lawrence O'Donnell admitted what no other news host or outlet will admit: he doesn't know how to cover Donald T___.  This is just one reason I love Lawrence ODonnell.  Lawrence points out that in an era when constant monstrous lies are told daily by a presidential candidate who was elected with fewer votes than his opponent in 2016, who lost his reelection bid by 7 million votes, and is now running again on a "Make Me Dictator platform," the result has led to a situation now characterized by the "banality of crazy."

So here are a couple of rules to get started for covering pathological former Presidents who happen to be uncontrolled sociopaths:

1. Never lead with a story that T____ or his team is responsible for.  The WaPo story above a clear example of this kind of story, one created by the T____ gang to get headlines just like the one they got, this time by promising international chaos if T____ is re-elected.

2. Never normalize the abnormal.  The captioned photo above is a clear example of this: a dangerous malignant narcissist presented in an image that captures him as the respected President of the most powerful nation on planet earth.  Rather than making the abnormal appear normal, mass media must "amplify the crazy" so that readers are never led to believe T____ is anything other than a demented gangster who cares for nothing beyond his own orange hide.

The True Awfulness of MSNBC Political Coverage

When the Insane Clown lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by 7 million popular votes, that segment of the American electorate still preferring democracy over fascism thought we could take a deep breath and begin to treat the MAGA-inspired PTSD that peaked in January 2021 during and following the seditionist insurrection led by the bloated Orange Psychopath (OP).

Following Biden's inauguration, there were even signs of other news beginning to emerge from the rutted news cycle, like tendrils of green pushing through the path beat down by the jack-booted army of conspiracy-mongering cultists.  Even humor poked through occasionally, and we saw democratic normalcy begin to appear through features and news of the Biden Administration plans and initiatives.

It didn't take long, however, for OP to rise to the top of the news cesspool once more. When the indictments began fly left and right, mostly right, the world's most garrulous liar took center stage once more on every MSNBC news set other than Maddow, where he remains to this day.  Even Rachel has been dragged in recently, as T____'s team of nazi enablers gin up lies and insults that would make Hitler and Goebbels blush.

After all, the MSNBC excuse goes, don't the American people have to warned about what's coming if OP is elected to a second term? And doesn't the Dem base need some new injections of fear and loathing to gin up the polls? And so the unreasoned reasoning goes.

Meanwhile, when MSNBC evening anchors do mention Joe Biden in passing, it is to talk about his low poll numbers, how old he is, how he is not publicizing his accomplishments, or to cover his latest warning speech about the resurrected OJ. It's as if the producers and writers and reporters at MSNBC are helpless to change the narrative.

So here's an idea. Begin to cover what the President does, says, proposes, enables, promotes, and celebrates.  Tell us what is going on politically in the political world beyond the river of sewage that emanates from the OP camp.  I would even guess that the Biden Team might begin to be more forthcoming and promotional with their accomplishments and plans if they can count on some cameras being there to cover it and some prime time news readers to report it.

I might even return to watch an hour or two of the nightly news line-up, rather than spending all my time on the BBC or CBC or Andy Griffith.  If MSNBC were to give Team OJ the coverage it deserves, there would be hours remaining to fill with real news that just might inspire all those mainstream Dems and Republicans and Progressives to look forward to the future, rather than to hovering in fear of it.

My Final Day at Cambridge College

When I came to Cambridge College in 2008, it was to teach in a unique educational leadership doctoral program that was started in 2006 to prepare school leaders with an unambiguous and historically-informed social justice agenda. As a full-time tenured faculty member, I was a rare bird, for the College at that time had fewer than 30 full-time "core" faculty members, which carried the same benefits and responsibilities as tenured faculty.  The rest of the faculty was comprised of adjuncts and part-time professors, and they numbered in the low hundreds. 

Due to administrative incompetence and penurious policies, the Ed Leadership EdD program was dead by 2014. I stayed on, continuing to teach in the Masters program and continuing to create new courses focused on antiracism, historical accountability, and social justice.

There have been exactly three new core faculty hires after me.  One moved into administration and the two others, I found out today, had their positions discontinued several days ago, resulting in curt, unceremonious Zoom layoffs that are, doubtless, planned to be permanent.  Today I became the third.  

If my math is correct, that leaves a total of five full-time core faculty members, as others in that 20-something number of 2008 have retired or are now deceased. And even though Covid, mismanagement, rumors of administrative improprieties, and managerial churn have taken their toll on enrollment, organizational continuity, and the number of recruits in the College's adjunct army, Cambridge College continues, nonetheless, to move forward with grandiose plans for Cambridge College Global, which we might see advertised on matchbooks worldwide.

And so I am offered 6.75 months of severance pay, per the AFT negotiated contract which expires this year, and no health or life insurance coverage beyond January 31.  That's what Cambridge College is offering its core faculty for 15 years of service.  That's not nearly enough, as the College knows now and will continue to learn anew as their crass plans unfold. 

In a final bit of sadly comic irony, the cheap clock that the College sent me just a few weeks back to mark my 15 years of teaching service stopped working after a few days.  I lasted 15 years, and as Cambridge College will come to know, I am still ticking strong.

MA Wildcatters Earn Big Dividends After 3 Day Strike

 From Jacobin:

A wildly successful, illegal three-day strike by the Andover Education Association (AEA) in November has reverberated statewide for educators in Massachusetts.

The lowest-paid instructional assistants got a 60 percent wage jump immediately. Classroom aides on the higher end of the scale got a 37 percent increase.

Members won paid family medical leave, an extra personal day, fewer staff meetings, and the extension of lunch and recess times for elementary students.

Andover is twenty miles north of Boston, and the strike involved ten schools.

For ten months and twenty-seven bargaining sessions, the Andover School Committee had insisted that none of these demands were possible. But by the end of the first day of the strike, they had ceded many items. By day three, they agreed to almost all of the union’s demands.

Public-school workers can’t legally strike in Massachusetts — but Andover’s is just one of a series of school unions that have struck over the last four years, defying the ban, and in some cases paying heavy fines as a result.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association is pushing for legislation that would legalize public sector strikes after six months of bargaining. . . .

Colorado Kicks Trump Off Primary Ballot | Clarence Thomas’ Greed | Trump...

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

My Sentiment Exactly

From Common Dreams:

Good Fucking Riddance: HK Finally Kicks His Bucket of Blood

In gratitude, we mark the death of Henry Kissinger, America's peerless war criminal. As U.S officials laud an "elder statesman" and "erudite strategist," the rest of us, and surely millions of brown-skinned people, celebrate the end of an "iconic napalm rights advocate" whose lies, hubris, towering inhumanity and many blood-soaked foreign policy follies left a legacy - in Vietnam, Chile, Cambodia, Argentina - of an "enormous pile of corpses" that may number four million. The consensus: "Burn hot, Henry."

 

"Non-profit" Hospitals (see Ascension) Shift Mission from Community Service to $erving Corporate $elf.

There's an interesting op-ed in the NYTimes today on the failure of non-profit hospitals to live up to their mission required by the IRS in order to maintain their non-profit status.  

My own experience with the non-profit Ascension St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville has convinced me that their mission is focused on building a corporate empire that pays massive salaries to execs, while providing the Church with funds, perhaps, to, um, settle lawsuits?

I spent the better part of a year trying to talk with someone in billing about inflated bills that my insurance company assured me and Ascension that I did not owe. Every time I found a different number to call in hopes of getting my billing questions answered, I ended up talking to poor underpaid English language learner employee in the Phillippines.  I found out after repeated attempts that Ascension St. Thomas has entirely dismantled their billing department in the Nashville area since becoming part of the Ascension corporate chain of hospitals.

After writing numerous letters threatening legal action to stop the fake statements, the bills finally stopped.  Will they begin again?  Who knows. 

I do know that I have had my voluminous medical records moved to another medical provider with different doctors.  I regret leaving some of my old docs, but what can a person do who is trying to preserve his sanity?

Part 2: TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

As promised in Part 1 yesterday, Gov. Bill Lee announced his latest planned school voucher scam in Nashville.  Alongside him was fellow unholy-rolling governor, Sarah H. Sanders of Arkansas infamy. 

Today I would like to present some research findings that clearly show the negative effects of school voucher programs on student achievement and student well-being. We know that Bill Lee and his Tennessee Taliban legislative supermajority don't, or can't, read research, but I am hoping that someone will translate the findings into something they might understand: Them voucher thangs ain't workin'.

Some clips are below from Brookings, which includes links to the research studies, themselves:

Part of the push for ESA vouchers comes from the lingering frustration over the pandemic-era school closures and concern over learning loss as measured by standardized tests. But on that question, the last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

 Another link, with Executive Summary below:

Executive Summary
Vouchers to pay for students to attend private schools continue to command public attention. The current administration has proposed vouchers in its budget, and more than half of states are operating or have proposed voucher programs. Four recent rigorous studies—in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio—used different research designs and reached the same result: on average, students that use vouchers to attend private schools do less well on tests than similar students that do not attend private schools. The Louisiana and Indiana studies offer some hints that negative effects may diminish over time. Whether effects ever will become positive is unclear. Test scores are not the only education outcome and some observers have downplayed them, citing older evidence that voucher programs increase high school graduation and college-going. We lack evidence that the current generation of voucher programs will yield these longer-term outcomes. We also lack evidence of how public schools and private schools differ in their instructional and teaching strategies that would explain negative effects on test scores. Both questions should be high on the research agenda.

From Time Magazine, with a clip below:

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

 

TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

Each of ruby red states in the new Old Confederacy has its own niche attraction for Westerners and Northerners looking to move to a fascist-friendly community where narrowness of thought is highly valued if it happens to run in the same rut as the white male protestant power structure.  While all of the red states offer haven for white nationalists, anti-intellectuals, and conspiracy theorists, Florida is particularly attractive to those angry anti-vaxxers and anti-wokesters, while states like Tennessee and Arkansas draw thousands of Christian nationalist transplants each year who would be happy to jettison Constitutional guarantees against the establishment of a state religion. And as long anti-social media remains unhindered from expanding financial empires based the perpetuation of ignorance, divisiveness, and toxic myth, then the state of the Union will continue to suffer, even as disunion grows like cancer.

As Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, seeks to further promote immigration of white Christians, a top governmental priority is the provision of state funds for parents to enroll their children in religious schools or other private schools at public expense. And so today, Lee will announce a proposed new program that will offer 20,000 parents next year a school voucher worth about $7,000 for tuition, books, uniforms, etc. In 2025-26, Lee plans to include all of 1 million students in Tennessee who are now eligible for free public schools, "regardless of income or previous school enrollment."

Now when we do a little back of the envelope math, you can see that the cost during the first year is going to run the State $140,000,000 on top of the normal allocation for public schools, including transportation, lunches, construction, maintenance, libraries, salaries, etc. 

Let's assume, after Year One, that 10 percent of the State's school-age parents decide to choose vouchers over public schools, where their kids now have athletic teams, theater, music, special ed, technical education--most of which will go bye-bye when their children enroll in the old Pizza Hut at the strip mall that has been turned into the Bill Lee Christian Nationalist Elementary School of Lee (Robert E.) County.

It's easy to see that the cost would be over the moon--$700,000,000 every year for 10 percent of TN's school children. That would be almost 15 percent of TN's contribution to the annual K-12 budget. All the while, the State must continue to fund the public schools that are not going away just because they lose 10 percent of the student body.  And it will lose most of the federal funding for the 100,000 students who end up in private schools.

What new taxes will be imposed on Tennesseans to pay for this fantasy thought disorder? 

And what about curriculum and standards?  

What about teacher qualifications?

Is Bill Lee prepared to put a resource officer in each of the Christian madrassas that he plans to open, just like in the public schools? 

Does Bill Lee have a plan to make sure children gain the necessary academic, social, and life skills to succeed at work and/or to go to college? 

Where's the accountability? Where is Bill Lee's and the Republican Supermajority's accountability?

It is way past time for the teacher unions, parents, grandparents, and other concerned citizens to fight, fight, fight the further erosion of another of our cherished institutions: public schools.  Let me know if you are engaged in an organized effort or would like to get involved: 

james.horn@cambridgecollege.edu

 

 

Portland Settles Teacher Strike with Big Gains

After 3 weeks of walking picket lines with parents and children, Portland's public school teachers have reached a tentative agreement that brings them much needed resources.  A clip below from The Guardian: 

“This contract is a watershed moment for Portland students, families and educators,” said Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Teachers Association. “Educators have secured improvements on all our key issues … Educators walked picket lines alongside families, students and allies – and because of that, our schools are getting the added investment they need.”

The deal would provide educators with a 13.8% cumulative cost-of-living increase over the next three years and about half of all educators would earn an extra 10.6% from yearly step increases, PPS said. The agreement would also add classroom time for elementary and middle grades starting next year and increase teacher planning time by 90 minutes each week for elementary and middle-aged classrooms.

The district would also triple the number of team members dedicated to supporting students’ mental and emotional health.