Don Pesci: Conn. truck tolls and searching for journalistic balance
Truck tolls on Interstate 95 north in Rhode Island
Photo by Scientificaldan
Surely no one is surprised that Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has thrown his support to a trucks-only toll bill. {Rhode Island has already imposed truck tolls.}
Connecticut, according to a handful of media critics of the measure, needs a new source of revenue, pretty much for the same reason the prodigal’s son needed more dough from his dad. He overspent, drew down his allowance and took on debt, the way a sinking ship takes on water through a hole in its hull. If Dad can absorb the debt, there is no problem; he can in that case, quite literally, afford to be merciful. But if he himself has fallen on hard times, mercy comes at too dear a price. Connecticut is the prodigal’s father who has fallen on hard times.
The author of the new transportation initiative, we are given to understand from various news sources, is state Senate President Martin Looney, who seemed, only a short time ago, to have wrinkled his nose at the toll proposals then on the table for discussion, one of which was a trucks-only tolling scheme.
Democrats are now agreed that a new revenue stream is necessary and that Lamont’s rollout was defective. During his gubernatorial campaign, Lamont proposed truck only tolling; once elected, he proposed multiple gantries on major highways, about 58 gantries that would collect user fees from all road travelers. The new revenue source is necessary, Democrats continue to argue, because the Transportation Fund lock-box has been depleted – by legislators who, as it turns out, had diverted funds destined for the lock-box, dumping them into the General Fund so they might reduce the continuing budget deficits for which they absurdly do not claim responsibility.
This analysis barely scratches the surface, though it does point to the real problem. The real problem is that the ruling Democratic Party is disinclined to make long-term, permanent cuts in spending. Additional taxes, we all know, are always permanent and long term. If you raise taxes, you eliminate the disturbing need to cut spending. Additional ruinous taxation, at this point in Connecticut's descent into its three decades old death spiral, will help only politicians -- no one else.
Why are Democrats so averse to permanent, long-term cuts in spending?
They are operating, as we all do, on a pleasure-pain principle. All life on the planet tends to resist pain and welcome pleasure. Even a daisy raising its head to greet the morning sun operates on the pleasure-pain principle. So then, we should ask ourselves: which is more painful for the average Democrat legislator, incurring the displeasure of the many supportive special interests in his political universe, or incurring the much more defused displeasure of those people he claims to represent who will be adversely impacted by yet another tax?
Democrat legislators are supposed to represent the general good of the whole demos, not special interests such as state worker unions. That is the desideratum we find in textbooks on good government. If Connecticut could produce a Machiavelli and put him to work churning out editorials for most newspapers in the state, we should soon have a proper view of modern state politics. Chris Powell at the Journal Inquirer occasionally quotes Ambrose Bierce on this point. Bierce defined “politics” in his “Devil’s Dictionary as: “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
If that seems cynical, it is. But perhaps the state could use a strong dose of cynicism, purely as an emetic. In the golden age of Athenian democracy, cynics were the world’s first hippies: They questioned all authority. It may seem cynical to say so, but a questioning and contrarian posture is proper to good journalism. In fact, it is indispensable to good journalism. How, without a touch of cynicism, should journalists go about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable? Journalism’s most deadly enemy is auto-pilot thoughtlessness and political sycophancy. There was a heroic journalist – whose name I have forgotten, so rare are instances of heroism in the field – who made it a habit of blowing his sources every five years or so because he feared falling into a slough of sycophancy.
Before we leave the question of cynicism, which is poorly understood, allow me to use the substitute term “contrarian.” We know a thing by contraries. If you want to know whether position A advances the common good, you cannot arrive at an adequate answer to the question without due consideration of position B -- B being “Not A.” Without a consideration of B, A will be accepted unreflectively without serious examination. In all areas of human life, we seek proportional balance. In Connecticut politics, we seek what has been called internationally a “balance of power.”
Indeed, I may observe parenthetically that both state and national constitutions provide a balance of power between three functions indispensable to democracy: the legislative power of writing laws, the executive power of executing laws, and the judicial power of judging laws. These powers should be separate and equal -- in a special sense. And they cannot be equal unless they are separate. Equality among the different departments is arrived at when each department is prevented from encroaching on the constitutional prerogatives of the other two departments. The powers are divided functionally so that each function may retain its integrity. That is constitutional balance. It is also good government.
The Sad Estate of Connecticut's Fourth Estate
The old Hartford Courant Building circa 1900. The Connecticut Courant began as a weekly on Oct. 29, 1764, started by Thomas Green. The daily Hartford Courant, which remains after many decades state’s biggest newspaper, traces its existence back to the weekly, thus claiming the title of "America's oldest continuously published newspaper", and adopting as its slogan, "Older than the nation."
It is important to bear in mind an adversarial balance when discussing, say, the proper relationship between political parties or the proper relationship between government and the media.
There is universal agreement that the relationship between the Trump administration and the national media is an adversarial one. Some wonder, however, whether in this instance the adversarial relationship is too much of a good thing. A judicious journalistic balance weaves like a battered boxer between too much and too little. Moderation in all things -- though Trump seems to be unfamiliar with the concept -- is still the golden rule. Then too, the chief pursuit of good journalism is the objective, politically unadorned truth, which ought never to be sacrificed to a strife of interests. Was the relationship between the media and the Obama administration an adversarial one? The frisson as Obama did what some saw as him pledging to do -- remake the United States from the bottom up -- was, as many of us remember it, mild to non-existent.
Coming back to home plate, is the relationship between Connecticut’s media and what we perhaps should call the Weicker-Malloy-Lamont administration – all three administrations favoring tax increases over long-term, permanent cost reductions – an adversarial one? On important questions of the day, are Connecticut editorialists and commentators truly objective? How many editorials in Connecticut papers may be described as objectively conservative?
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.
Llewellyn King: With his attacks on 'mainstream media,' which he, too, depends on, Trump pumps up dictators
Mr. President, one of the things you should know, as your first tumultuous year in office draws to its close, is that the United States has the best media in the world. Only United Kingdom media rivals it.
It is a bulwark of the American Dream, of American exceptionalism.
Its role as the carrier of information in the United States is as important as it is outside the nation.
That is why your situation room in the White House has so many news feeds. Often, despite the huge apparatus of government information gathering, it is reporters who tell it like it is first and give you actionable information.
It is because of the media that we know what is going on in Myanmar, Syria, Yemen and Zimbabwe -- even inside the royal family of Saudi Arabia.
I would have the temerity suggest that even you, despite your seemingly pathological hatred of all information that does not accord with your own views and personal interests, and your administration in times of crisis turn first to the media, and especially to outlets like The New York Times and CNN. In your heart of hearts, you know you are going to find out what is happening there, not on the political networks like Fox, One America News and Newsmax, and not through government’s cumbersome channels of information relay.
Mr. President, we are an irregular army of no-particular hue. We wear no uniform and are the antithesis of unity. We live in a world of miserable pay (the television stars are the exceptions), bad hours, stress, sometimes too much drink, and disrupted private lives. We write about everyone’s hurt but our own. But we love what we do and know when it matters; matters globally as much as domestically.
Dan Raviv, when he was with CBS, described his job his way, “I like to find out what’s going on and tell people.” Exactly.
For all of the academic talk about media and society, that is the job – finding out -- and it is a great and important job. That is why thousands of news people work through the night, or crawl out of bed at 3 a.m., or risk their lives in places like Iraq, Syria and Congo, and will be working on Christmas Day and every other holiday. That is why we eat bad food out of machines, fly in cramped aircraft and go without sleep.
So journalists do not mind personally if you denigrate us, call our work “fake” and impugn our integrity or have your agent, press secretary Sarah Sanders, do so.
But, Mr. President, we do mind and we should mind, and we should be in a state of incandescent rage with the way you are damaging the truth and hurting America at home and, especially, abroad. We do mind and should mind and keep minding when you put journalists’ lives at risk in distant and hostile places.
And we should mind, and you should mind, when you and Sanders give aid and comfort to criminal coddlers, dictators, kleptocratic governments and oppressive regimes.
This scum, these men and women who trash decency as the inherent right of power, now fear the scrutiny of media less. They dismiss the incriminating as “fake.” It happens in Ankara, Beijing, Budapest, Damascus, Moscow, Nairobi, Riyadh and many other places.
You have provided the world’s malfeasants with the great blanket rejoinder: fake.
Everything not laudatory to the abusers is fake and the messengers, the journalists, trade in untruth and should be treated accordingly -- as concoctors, fabricators, liars, spies and even traitors.
Mr. President, you have damaged the world’s safety valve and given huge comfort to the enemies of decency, openness and democracy.
You have armed the dictators with a pernicious weapon by undermining the freedom of the press to find out what is going on and publish it. You have spread the suffering of the politcal prisoner in distant jails and all who are suffering the brutality of oppression. Their hope is often only the faint light cast by inquiring media.
A great shame on you, Mr. President.
Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is also a veteran publisher, columnist and international business consultant.
Llewellyn King: Mr. Bannon, this is journalists' tough and essential mission
-- Photo by Kai Mork
At a news conference.
No, Steve Bannon, counselor to President Trump, the news media are not the opposition. Nor are they a monolithic structure acting at the behest of some unseen hand, in conspiratorial unison. {Editor's note: Reminder: Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mr. Bannon's former employer Breitbart News and many, many other large and small news and opinion media outlets that the right-wing Mr. Bannon favors are part of "the media''. }
I am of the media and have been for 60 years -- in fact from long before it was known collectively and misleadingly as a blob called "the media''.
We are an irregular army, an array of misfits, disciplined by deadlines and little else. We eat irregularly, are sustained on coffee and, at times, something stronger. We love what we do and we do it in the face of shifting threats, from death on the front lines of war, to the excesses of media owners and the difficulty of making a living at it. We do the same job and do our best, whether it is for the smallest newspaper, newsletter or some great news outlet, such as The Washington Post or a TV network. John Steinbeck once said, “No one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.” So do we.
My friend Dan Raviv, of CBS News, once summed up what it is about — during another one of these periods when journalism was under attack — by explaining his own motivation, “I like to find out what’s going on and tell people.”
Why, then, are the media seen as monolithic, conspiratorial and of one mind? I will suggest it is because of an immutable law of the work that is beyond explanation, but is indestructible and essential: news judgment. It is to journalism what perfect pitch is to musicians. You have it or you do not; and while it can be cultivated, it cannot be inculcated.
In play, it makes us look collaborative: Journalists appear to belong to some secret order, such as the Freemasons. Whether we are from the smallest outlet to the mighty networks, if we are reporters, we will tend to pick the same things from a speech or an event. As an example, different newspapers will find the same news in the Sunday news shows and report it their Monday editions.
That is why when Kellyanne Conway uttered the words “alternative facts,” in an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, we pounced. We did so not because we are of one mind, but because the enormity of such a concept demanded our attention. No conspiracy, no political agenda, no common purpose beyond the news, just Conway's extraordinary concept that facts are fungible, somehow legitimately subject to manipulation for political purpose. That is news. Big news.
Conway has complained that none of the other things she said in that interview were headlined. If she feels that way, clearly, she does not grasp the import of her own words; it was not the messengers, it was the message.
Why are so many journalists considered to be ''liberal''?
I am not sure that so many are liberal, but if I concede the point, consider this: We see the soft underbelly of society, whether we are covering refugees or police courts. People come to us seeking redress for real grievances and, mostly, all we can do is sympathize. If you have seen children dying of starvation or families sleeping on the street, you are unlikely to be worrying about the property rights of the rich. What you see conditions you.
I interviewed my first refugees in 1956. They were escaping the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. That and later having seen thousands of refugees in Jordan, Pakistan, South Africa and Turkey, has indelibly informed me; those images are etched into my being.
When President Trump suspended the trickle of Syrian refugees we are taking into the United States. It seemed again to be the powerful denying the humanity of the weak, most pitiable.
History is not to be denied and facts are just that. Journalism shows us the world out there, not the world in a leafy suburb. If knowing something of the pain of the world and wishing for justice is liberal, then indict and convict us.
Surprisingly, we are not very political. Congress is stuffed with lawyers, not journalists. We do not, in general, run for office.
Remember, Steve, if you know anything about the world, science or even politics, you learned a lot of it from journalists. We are the messengers, but we do not write the message.
Our essential job is to keep a wary eye on authority: Here’s looking at you, Steve
Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, is a long-time publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant.