Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 816

They all look like Chuck Todd: The lack of diversity on shows like “Meet the Press” is just embarrassing

In case you missed it last weekend, something remarkable happened on Meet The Press during a round table discussion about the state of the 2016 campaign: Moderator Chuck Todd hosted an all-female panel, featuring NBC correspondents Hallie Jackson, Katy Tur, Kristen Welker and Andrea Mitchell. The good news is that Meet the Press deserves credit for bucking a long Sunday morning trend in which male guests dominate the discussions and set the Beltway policy agenda. The bad news is that it's still considered a newsworthy event when Meet the Press, or any of the Sunday shows, features an all-female discussion, especially when the topic isn't considered to be a gender-based one, such as contraception and choice. Does the recent Meet the Press episode suggest the Sunday shows are finally going to get serious about trying to address their stubborn lack of diversity? Let's hope so. Media Matters has been documenting the trend for years and our latest study, for 2015, confirmed the unfortunate imbalances: The Sunday shows, those elite bastions of public policy debate, remain wed to conservative, traditional bookings, where conservative white men still dominate. (Yes, even with a Democrat in the White House, Republicans pile up more appearances.) "In 2015, the guests on the five Sunday morning political talk shows were once again overwhelmingly white, conservative, and male in every category measured," Media Matters reported. Last year, while the campaign season featuring Hillary Clinton was in full bloom, 27 percent of the guests on the Sunday shows were women. But here's the truly strange part about the overall lack of diversity today: It comes at time when the political press has reported, analyzed, and even lectured the Republican Party about how it needs to embrace diversity in order to thrive in a changing America. (And if not embrace, then to at least not purposefully offend and drive away non-white voters.) "Republicans Can't Win With White Voters Alone," wrote Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic years ago. TheWashington Post confirmed the point this election cycle, writing, "Winning more and more of the white vote will become an increasingly futile endeavor for Republicans if they can't find a way to win more of the Hispanic and/or black vote." As lots of analysts have pointed out, white voters aren't driving the 2016 election. In fact, it's very likely that if Clinton wins the presidency, she will have done so without winning a majority of white voters. In fact, thanks to America's shifting demographics, she doesn't even have to come close to winning the white vote. Just ask Mitt Romney. He won the white vote by 20 points in 2012 and lost to Barack Obama badly on Election Day. And obviously, if Clinton does especially well among women, she won't need a majority of male voters to win in November. But turn on the Sunday shows, and white men are dominating the conversation. And white conservative men in particular seem to be in charge. White Republicans were the largest group of elected and administration guests on the Sunday shows, according to Media Matters' data. And on four of the five shows, conservative men made up the largest group of journalists invited as guests. Question: Why do the Sunday shows reflect a center-right white country that doesn't actually exist? (Note that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as "liberal" has surged in recent years.) Like the Republican Party, the Beltway press corps -- and specifically the very elite members who appear on the Sunday morning talk shows -- often refuses to embrace the increasingly diverse United States, despite the possibility that Democrats may shatter another diversity milestone by nominating the first women to become president. In many ways, diversity is defining the 2016 campaign season. But the Sunday shows, whose editorial focus has remained transfixed on the 2016 campaign since last summer, appear to be detached from the rapidly changing political landscape. Rather than mirror the transformation, the Sunday shows too often remain entrenched, manning the ramparts against change. Some other diversity lowlights of 2015, as documented by Media Matters: * Men represented between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Sunday show guests. * Men made up more than four-fifths of all elected and administration guests. * Whites comprised three-quarters or more of all elected and administration guests on all shows. * Whites made up two-thirds or more of all journalist guests on the Sunday shows. * Whites comprised more than three-quarters of all guests. * There were twice as many conservative men guests as compared to progressive men. This problem is hardly a new one. Four years ago, in February 2012, I noted:

This past Sunday, for instance, NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face The Nation, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CNN's State of The Union hosted 16 interview subjects, 14 of which were with men. That imbalance has been consistent throughout the month. A total of 56 guests were booked on the Sunday programs to discuss national affairs in February. Of those, 52 were men.

Especially galling was the discussion Sunday shows held in February 2012, when controversy erupted regarding the administration's plan to require religious institutions to offer contraception as part of their health care plan for employees. The Sunday programs discussed that story with 24 of their newsmaker guests, but only two of them were women -- Republican women. Yes, but Sunday show producers are limited in terms of their booking choices, and if Beltway politics is driven by men, then producers have to invite lots and lots of men on the shows, right? Wrong, because the numbers, as reported by Talking Points Memo, tell a much different story about the makeup of Beltway politics and especially the Democratic Party (emphasis added):

By House Democratic leadership's count, there are 78 white men who are Democrats, out of 188 Democratic members in the chamber. This means that white men do not make up a majority of the House Democratic caucus.

So how is it that political press stalwarts, such as the Sunday shows, remain stubbornly white, male and conservative while the rest of the country, and the rest of our politics, moves in the opposite direction?

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The empty charter school dream: “Togetherness” sides with smug hipster parents and falls apart

Last year, in advance of “Togetherness”’ lovely season one finale, a person who knows a lot more about Los Angeles school districts than I do wrote a piece here in Salon about how completely broken the show’s perspective on charter schools is. Joshua Leibner, a former LAUSD teacher, eloquently explains the hypocrisies of the show’s approach to children’s education. As a result, he explains, he is pretty fed up with the show by the end of the first season. I wasn't there—yet. Ostensibly in the name of character arcs and the willing suspension of disbelief—and more because of how beautiful that closing scene was—I gave the show a pass. I was enamored enough of the characters that creators Mark and Jay Duplass showcased in “Togetherness” that I was willing to chalk up Michelle (Melanie Lynskey)’s sudden transformation into a charter-school organizer as part of her own internal transformation from a dissatisfied stay-at-home mom to a woman with her own voice and her own ideas. In the show's defense, Michelle’s decision to throw in her lot with the charter school being put together in her community is much more about her burgeoning crush on its organizer, David Garcia (John Ortiz), and her desire to do something different from what her husband Brett (Mark Duplass) has already decided on, than it is about the political realities of their neighborhood in Los Angeles (gentrifying Eagle Rock, where the Duplass brothers live in real life). Narrative can’t divorce from politics entirely, but the finale of season one—which takes Michelle, Brett and David out of Eagle Rock for a back-and-forth of sexual energy in a hotel in Sacramento—illustrates how the realities of charter schools are often quite beside the point for these three characters. And though that is frustrating in its own way, it’s also illustrative of what has made “Togetherness” so appealing. These are characters that with just a shade or two of different framing would be much more infuriating. But because of the dexterity of the filmmakers and the surprising resonance of the performances, it’s hard not to feel for them, even when they are poised on the cusp of yet another terrible decision. And romantically, at least, this has worked beautifully in the show. Michelle’s decision to sleep with David is both completely understandable and even triumphant for her, and you feel it, as a viewer watching her transform for eight episodes. But you also feel the absolute devastation lurking around the corner for her husband Brett, who is finally becoming able to express his love for Michelle again. It can be, and often is, a deeply felt show. This season, that has all changed. For a show that can be so self-aware about marital dynamics and Hollywood culture, the charter school subplot is a glaring blind spot, one that is given more and more screentime as the season progresses. No lessons are learned from critiques like Leibner’s of the charter school plot from season one; if anything, season two demonstrates a weird entrenching in a political stance that subverts the other positive elements of the show. If these characters are asking for our empathy despite seeming like the exact replicas of the privileged gentrifiers that are a dime a dozen on television these days, investing four different characters’ energy into the politicized belief that a charter school will solve their problems is not a very good strategy. In the second season, Michelle becomes the sole organizer of the charter school; her former collaborator and former crush shies away from the project after she ends things with him, and her husband moves out of their house after learning about her (brief) affair. She finds a new collaborator, in the form of powerbroker-turned-homemaker Anna (Katie Aselton)—only to learn that Anna is sabotaging Michelle’s charter to introduce her own. The arc of “Togetherness”’ season two, which continues tonight and ends next Sunday, April 10, is about Michelle shaking off these major obstacles to succeed anyway. And though I understand the character’s motivations (and think that Lynskey is incredible in the role), it’s a profoundly unsatisfying arc. When Michelle is motivated by consideration of and a sense of mission in charter schools, instead of desperation, she becomes an increasingly frustrating character, one who can’t articulate what she wants to keep her kids safe from in public schools but is driven almost wholly by that impulse. And Anna, as her primary obstacle, is an extremely frustrating caricature, a kind of ennui-crazed super-bitch mean-girl whose encroachment onto Michelle’s turf looks and feels like a high-school manipulation. Anna and Michelle disagree over curricula; Anna becomes interested in a French program called Le Petit Village, which she describes in tonight’s episode as “a dual-immersion French charter school” featuring “French language arts, Singapore math, Montessori approaches” and the involvement of a professor from nearby Occidental College. She is advocating for a privileged, fenced-off environment for her privileged child and her privileged subsection of the Eagle Rock community, which is underscored by her ability to quickly raise money for Le Petit Village, while Michelle’s project is still stuck in Kickstarter drought. This is all fine, and perfectly realistic, unfortunately; rich people gonna rich people, and mean girls gonna mean girl. But the odd element, for me, is the pretension that Michelle is any different from or better than Anna. The sentiment of excluding their children from the existing community of Eagle Rock that they’re currently gentrifying is identical. To paraphrase Leibner—public education is never even introduced as an option for the Piersons, which makes impassioned speeches like this from Michelle in season one all the more frustrating:

My daughter is going to start kindergarten and we’re talking about where is she going to go… what is she going to do… I’m wondering why is there not some community place — somewhere I can put her and feel good with a lot of different people. I don’t want to put her in a private school where she doesn’t get to experience what life is like where we live.

This is almost identical to what Mark Duplass said about the show's education plot in an interview last month on WBEZ, although unlike Michelle, he does directly address public schools:

Michelle's quest to find the right school for her children is also a quest for herself to be a part of a community of people that she can see in the neighborhood and know their names and feel comfortable sending her kids to their home. [...] The way that it struck us is like, there's three or four public schools in your neighborhood, two of which are awesome, one of which is not so great and one of which kind of sucks, is what it comes down to. And depending on what street you live on you get a little lucky or not.

There are a lot of sociopolitical assumptions manifest here. "Togetherness" tries to simplify the issue by making Anna into the Bad Gentrifier; it emphasizes her obsession with exclusivity and buzzy educational terms, as quoted above, and in next week’s finale, she hilariously starts using a fence as a design element for promoting Le Petit Village. Michelle, meanwhile, with her emphasis on “inclusion,” is the Good Gentrifier; in tonight’s episode, she takes that one step further by impulsively declaring Brett’s ridiculous soundscape/puppet “Dune” adaptation as part of her charter school’s curriculum, thus frustratingly yoking together an exclusive sort of diversity with a sudden discovery of arts education as a thing worth having. Of course, in terms of the plot, Brett’s “Dune” thing had to resolve somehow, and connecting it to Michelle’s charter school makes for a nice, tied-off plot thread. But while this makes the charter school into a means to an end for the adult characters' arcs, it does not make charter schools less crappy, and it does not make Michelle's charter school better than Anna's Le Petit Village. An arts-and-humanities curriculum does not undo the exclusivity of cordoned-off education, and just because designing that curriculum creates a sense of purpose for two middle-aged hipster parents, that does not mean it will be a particularly good curriculum. There is an extraordinarily laziness at work here, and it's even apparent in Michelle's desperate scrambling for some new way to one-up Anna's well-funded, well-researched and well-considered idea. You almost wish, perversely, that Anna would win the dumb charter, so that at least the show would be honest about what charter schools really are and maybe would force the blinkered cast of characters to gain a bit more perspective. “Togetherness”’s whole second season pivots on the idea of Michelle as a sort of community hero, and unfortunately, it falls completely flat. In last week’s episode, “Geri-ina,” Michelle discovers Anna has been holding meetings without her and then confronts her at a fundraiser at Anna’s swanky mansion. In the altercation, Michelle pushes Anna into her pool. It’s supposed to be a triumphant moment, like Michelle winning the kick-the-can game against the eventually sympathetic park hipsters in last season’s fifth episode. But the victory here seems like ego run amok. Anna never has a moment of reconciliation; Michelle never experiences an ounce of self-awareness, and, without giving too much away, the finale next week falls even further down the rabbit hole of self-satisfied moralizing about Art, Community and The Children—dragging all four lead characters, the community of Eagle Rock, and the legacy of “Togetherness” along with it. Because that is the other thing, and an important thing; next week’s episode of “Togetherness” is its last. HBO decided not to renew the show after this second season, and although low ratings are probably the reason why, it is not difficult to imagine that a certain amount of political blinkeredness might have soured viewers on Michelle, Brett, Alex and Tina (Amanda Peet). In that vein, one of the things that continually amazed me, in watching “Togetherness,” is Brett and Michelle’s purported engagement with the community they live in; where the idea of community was desired and elusive in the first season, by the second there is a relatively stable contingent of supporters and friends who, in the last two episodes especially, end up doing all kinds of risky and sort of ludicrous things to get this particularly odd vision of a non-exclusive-but-still-exclusive school off the ground. They believe, mostly silently, in Michelle’s nearly nonexistent vision; they listen, mostly silently, to Brett and Alex’s bizarre stage directions. It sincerely makes me wonder: Who does “Togetherness” think the rest of us out in the world really are?Last year, in advance of “Togetherness”’ lovely season one finale, a person who knows a lot more about Los Angeles school districts than I do wrote a piece here in Salon about how completely broken the show’s perspective on charter schools is. Joshua Leibner, a former LAUSD teacher, eloquently explains the hypocrisies of the show’s approach to children’s education. As a result, he explains, he is pretty fed up with the show by the end of the first season. I wasn't there—yet. Ostensibly in the name of character arcs and the willing suspension of disbelief—and more because of how beautiful that closing scene was—I gave the show a pass. I was enamored enough of the characters that creators Mark and Jay Duplass showcased in “Togetherness” that I was willing to chalk up Michelle (Melanie Lynskey)’s sudden transformation into a charter-school organizer as part of her own internal transformation from a dissatisfied stay-at-home mom to a woman with her own voice and her own ideas. In the show's defense, Michelle’s decision to throw in her lot with the charter school being put together in her community is much more about her burgeoning crush on its organizer, David Garcia (John Ortiz), and her desire to do something different from what her husband Brett (Mark Duplass) has already decided on, than it is about the political realities of their neighborhood in Los Angeles (gentrifying Eagle Rock, where the Duplass brothers live in real life). Narrative can’t divorce from politics entirely, but the finale of season one—which takes Michelle, Brett and David out of Eagle Rock for a back-and-forth of sexual energy in a hotel in Sacramento—illustrates how the realities of charter schools are often quite beside the point for these three characters. And though that is frustrating in its own way, it’s also illustrative of what has made “Togetherness” so appealing. These are characters that with just a shade or two of different framing would be much more infuriating. But because of the dexterity of the filmmakers and the surprising resonance of the performances, it’s hard not to feel for them, even when they are poised on the cusp of yet another terrible decision. And romantically, at least, this has worked beautifully in the show. Michelle’s decision to sleep with David is both completely understandable and even triumphant for her, and you feel it, as a viewer watching her transform for eight episodes. But you also feel the absolute devastation lurking around the corner for her husband Brett, who is finally becoming able to express his love for Michelle again. It can be, and often is, a deeply felt show. This season, that has all changed. For a show that can be so self-aware about marital dynamics and Hollywood culture, the charter school subplot is a glaring blind spot, one that is given more and more screentime as the season progresses. No lessons are learned from critiques like Leibner’s of the charter school plot from season one; if anything, season two demonstrates a weird entrenching in a political stance that subverts the other positive elements of the show. If these characters are asking for our empathy despite seeming like the exact replicas of the privileged gentrifiers that are a dime a dozen on television these days, investing four different characters’ energy into the politicized belief that a charter school will solve their problems is not a very good strategy. In the second season, Michelle becomes the sole organizer of the charter school; her former collaborator and former crush shies away from the project after she ends things with him, and her husband moves out of their house after learning about her (brief) affair. She finds a new collaborator, in the form of powerbroker-turned-homemaker Anna (Katie Aselton)—only to learn that Anna is sabotaging Michelle’s charter to introduce her own. The arc of “Togetherness”’ season two, which continues tonight and ends next Sunday, April 10, is about Michelle shaking off these major obstacles to succeed anyway. And though I understand the character’s motivations (and think that Lynskey is incredible in the role), it’s a profoundly unsatisfying arc. When Michelle is motivated by consideration of and a sense of mission in charter schools, instead of desperation, she becomes an increasingly frustrating character, one who can’t articulate what she wants to keep her kids safe from in public schools but is driven almost wholly by that impulse. And Anna, as her primary obstacle, is an extremely frustrating caricature, a kind of ennui-crazed super-bitch mean-girl whose encroachment onto Michelle’s turf looks and feels like a high-school manipulation. Anna and Michelle disagree over curricula; Anna becomes interested in a French program called Le Petit Village, which she describes in tonight’s episode as “a dual-immersion French charter school” featuring “French language arts, Singapore math, Montessori approaches” and the involvement of a professor from nearby Occidental College. She is advocating for a privileged, fenced-off environment for her privileged child and her privileged subsection of the Eagle Rock community, which is underscored by her ability to quickly raise money for Le Petit Village, while Michelle’s project is still stuck in Kickstarter drought. This is all fine, and perfectly realistic, unfortunately; rich people gonna rich people, and mean girls gonna mean girl. But the odd element, for me, is the pretension that Michelle is any different from or better than Anna. The sentiment of excluding their children from the existing community of Eagle Rock that they’re currently gentrifying is identical. To paraphrase Leibner—public education is never even introduced as an option for the Piersons, which makes impassioned speeches like this from Michelle in season one all the more frustrating:

My daughter is going to start kindergarten and we’re talking about where is she going to go… what is she going to do… I’m wondering why is there not some community place — somewhere I can put her and feel good with a lot of different people. I don’t want to put her in a private school where she doesn’t get to experience what life is like where we live.

This is almost identical to what Mark Duplass said about the show's education plot in an interview last month on WBEZ, although unlike Michelle, he does directly address public schools:

Michelle's quest to find the right school for her children is also a quest for herself to be a part of a community of people that she can see in the neighborhood and know their names and feel comfortable sending her kids to their home. [...] The way that it struck us is like, there's three or four public schools in your neighborhood, two of which are awesome, one of which is not so great and one of which kind of sucks, is what it comes down to. And depending on what street you live on you get a little lucky or not.

There are a lot of sociopolitical assumptions manifest here. "Togetherness" tries to simplify the issue by making Anna into the Bad Gentrifier; it emphasizes her obsession with exclusivity and buzzy educational terms, as quoted above, and in next week’s finale, she hilariously starts using a fence as a design element for promoting Le Petit Village. Michelle, meanwhile, with her emphasis on “inclusion,” is the Good Gentrifier; in tonight’s episode, she takes that one step further by impulsively declaring Brett’s ridiculous soundscape/puppet “Dune” adaptation as part of her charter school’s curriculum, thus frustratingly yoking together an exclusive sort of diversity with a sudden discovery of arts education as a thing worth having. Of course, in terms of the plot, Brett’s “Dune” thing had to resolve somehow, and connecting it to Michelle’s charter school makes for a nice, tied-off plot thread. But while this makes the charter school into a means to an end for the adult characters' arcs, it does not make charter schools less crappy, and it does not make Michelle's charter school better than Anna's Le Petit Village. An arts-and-humanities curriculum does not undo the exclusivity of cordoned-off education, and just because designing that curriculum creates a sense of purpose for two middle-aged hipster parents, that does not mean it will be a particularly good curriculum. There is an extraordinarily laziness at work here, and it's even apparent in Michelle's desperate scrambling for some new way to one-up Anna's well-funded, well-researched and well-considered idea. You almost wish, perversely, that Anna would win the dumb charter, so that at least the show would be honest about what charter schools really are and maybe would force the blinkered cast of characters to gain a bit more perspective. “Togetherness”’s whole second season pivots on the idea of Michelle as a sort of community hero, and unfortunately, it falls completely flat. In last week’s episode, “Geri-ina,” Michelle discovers Anna has been holding meetings without her and then confronts her at a fundraiser at Anna’s swanky mansion. In the altercation, Michelle pushes Anna into her pool. It’s supposed to be a triumphant moment, like Michelle winning the kick-the-can game against the eventually sympathetic park hipsters in last season’s fifth episode. But the victory here seems like ego run amok. Anna never has a moment of reconciliation; Michelle never experiences an ounce of self-awareness, and, without giving too much away, the finale next week falls even further down the rabbit hole of self-satisfied moralizing about Art, Community and The Children—dragging all four lead characters, the community of Eagle Rock, and the legacy of “Togetherness” along with it. Because that is the other thing, and an important thing; next week’s episode of “Togetherness” is its last. HBO decided not to renew the show after this second season, and although low ratings are probably the reason why, it is not difficult to imagine that a certain amount of political blinkeredness might have soured viewers on Michelle, Brett, Alex and Tina (Amanda Peet). In that vein, one of the things that continually amazed me, in watching “Togetherness,” is Brett and Michelle’s purported engagement with the community they live in; where the idea of community was desired and elusive in the first season, by the second there is a relatively stable contingent of supporters and friends who, in the last two episodes especially, end up doing all kinds of risky and sort of ludicrous things to get this particularly odd vision of a non-exclusive-but-still-exclusive school off the ground. They believe, mostly silently, in Michelle’s nearly nonexistent vision; they listen, mostly silently, to Brett and Alex’s bizarre stage directions. It sincerely makes me wonder: Who does “Togetherness” think the rest of us out in the world really are?

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Donald Trump is the pinnacle of American stupidity: Why his campaign consummates decades of rising anti-intellectualism

During Tuesday’s Republican town hall in Milwaukee, it was not a candidate, but the host, Anderson Cooper, who had the best line of the night, when he told Donald Trump — in the politest way possible — that he was acting like a fatuous little boy. “Sir, with all due respect, that’s the argument of a 5-year-old,” said the CNN anchor, after Trump defended his attack on Ted Cruz’s wife by saying that he “didn’t start it,” in just the same manner a child who is unable to admit any wrongdoing (or someone with narcissistic personality disorder) might. Of course, while the Donald is nearly 70 years old, and his stout physique and leathery skin display what several decades of gravity, tanning booths and well-done steaks can accomplish, his temperament has remained fixed somewhere in the adolescent period of development. The billionaire has thrived off of petty insults, having defended the size of his junk (admittedly, he’s not the only grown man who feels the need to do this, but the only presidential candidate); threatened to “beat the crap out of” protesters; and, most recently, tweeted an unflattering picture of his opponent’s wife next to his supermodel trophy wife. Trump also speaks at a 4th-grade level — by far the lowest of all presidential candidates — and has offered almost nothing in terms of actual policy, just bravado about his superhuman deal-making abilities. Trump represents the culmination of Republican — and American — stupidity. For many voters, his ignorance of both foreign and domestic issues is offset by his bold and folksy rhetoric, along with his absolute confidence, which, as Bill Maher recently noted, “is perfect for the country that scores low in math and science but off the charts in self-esteem.” In this age of 24/7 entertainment, where even the news is seen as a form of escapism, his sophomoric antics are considered fun and amusing, while his vulgar and often inflammatory comments are regarded as rebellious by those who are fed up with perceived “political correctness.” Trump, of course, didn’t invent the politics of simplemindedness. Republican patron saint Ronald Reagan was incredibly ill-informed and even hostile toward learnedness, but he was an actor who could pull off inspiring speeches with a kind of paternal charm. The same cannot be said for our last president, George W. Bush, whom Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi accredits with paving the way for Trump’s know-nothing triumph in his article "Revenge of the Simple." Famous for his inability to string together coherent sentences, Bush was not especially proficient at hiding his deficits. But it didn’t matter; his simplicity was part of his charm, particularly when up against the sophisticated and pompous Vice President Al Gore. Ultimately, it came down to the question of which man a large swath of the population would rather have a beer with. In his piece, Taibbi recounts how Bush strategist Karl Rove sold the president's simplicity to the American voters:

“Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood movies left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked at paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming to steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer bond is was villainous)... The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.”

After eight years of Bush, it was hard to imagine a less intelligent or articulate Republican on a presidential ticket. And then Senator John McCain, R - Ariz., decided to tap Sarah Palin — who made Bush look like Stephen Hawking — as his running mate. Her inability to answer basic questions evinced a frightening lack of knowledge and judgement in someone who might have been a heartbeat away from the presidency. But once again, this was part of her appeal. Later on, McCain staffers revealed that her ignorance was even worse than it looked, as portrayed in the HBO movie “Game Change.” In the film, Palin thought the Queen ran the British government, didn't know the difference between North and South Korea, thought Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, and had never heard of the Federal Reserve. Since 2008, ignorance has increasingly become a political principle in Republican circles, as Taibbi puts it. After Obama defeated McCain and Palin, the reactionary Tea Party movement arose, and anti-intellectualism and extremism began to infiltrate the GOP. (While the Republican establishment has long exploited the ignorance of voters, it managed to keep the more reactionary figures in line, until recently.) Leading Tea Party Republicans like Michele Bachmann, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and of course, Donald Trump, have found tremendous success in being about as unsophisticated and uninformed as possible. And now here we are in 2016. After 10 months on the campaign trail, Trump seems in no rush to become more knowledgeable on the issues -- or more “presidential,” for that matter. And why should he be? So far, he’s managed to prove all the pundits wrong and win state after state on a giant heap of blustering bullshit. Trump’s recent interviews on foreign policy with The Washington Post and The New York Times reveal just how deluded he is, and major media outlets are now expressing deep concern. “Mr. Trump is confronting most of these issues for the first time, and many of his thoughts are contradictory and shockingly ignorant,” writes the New York Times editorial board. Unfortunately, ignorance is no longer seen as a negative to many voters, but a sincere sign of authenticity.

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The media’s biggest 2016 failure isn’t Donald Trump — it’s ignoring the “profound crisis” of climate change

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This is why you crave beef: Inside secrets of Big Meat’s billion-dollar ad and lobbying campaigns

Sleek seems like a good word to describe the offices of the National Chicken Council (NCC) in Washington, D.C. The sleekness begins on the street. The building at 1152 Fifteenth Street, which houses the NCC, is ultramodern, enclosed in glass, with a lavish lobby that echoes my footsteps as I walk in. Up on the fourth floor, I’m greeted by NCC’s senior vice president Bill Roenigk—a jovial man who looks exactly like a “Bill.” Roenigk leads me into a conference room where we sit at a large, oval table. Even though there are some vintage photos of farmers on the walls, the whole place feels much more “consulting” than “farming.” The NCC, just like its beef and pork equivalents (the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Board), is a trade association of meat producers. These organizations protect the interests of the industry, deal with PR crises, lobby the government, and arrange marketing campaigns. But at its core, their goal is rather simple: make sure Americans buy as much chicken, beef, and pork as possible. In other countries, similar organizations exist: the British Meat Processors Association, the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, and so on. Such organizations, together with powerful meat companies such as Tyson Foods or JBS, spend billions of dollars a year on lobbying and promotion so that we don’t lose our appetites for animal protein. Some researchers argue that increasing meat consumption around the globe, the U.S. included, is not demand driven but supply driven: it’s pushed more by the actions of the meat industry and not so much by the desires of our taste buds. The industry doesn’t exactly pretend otherwise, either. As the cattlemen’s magazine Beef admitted in 2013: “The beef industry has worked hard to create the love affair that Americans have with a big, juicy ribeye.” The meat industry is capable of swinging our food preferences because it is ultrapowerful and ultraconsolidated. Consider these numbers: in 2011, in the U.S. alone, the annual sales of meat were worth $186 billion. That’s more than the GDP of Hungary or Ukraine. Moreover, just four pork producers control two-thirds of the market, and the top four in beef have about 75 percent of the market. Tyson, the largest meat corporation in the U.S., recently had a revenue of $34 billion—that’s over twenty times as much as the GDP of Belize. Other companies besides those that raise, slaughter, and sell meat benefit from consumers’ carnivorous appetites: the fertilizer and pesticide producers, farm equipment manufacturers, seed growers (including Monsanto), soy and corn farmers, and pharmaceutical corporations, which sell antibiotics, beta-adrenergic agonists, and other drugs to the meat companies. In a way, they are all part of the meat business too. According to the American Meat Institute, the industry’s primary trade organization: “Meat and poultry industry impacts firms in all 509 sectors of the U.S. economy. . . . The meat and poultry industry’s economic ripple effect generates $864.2 billion annually to the U.S. economy, or roughly 6 percent of the entire GDP.” Compared to the meat industry, the vegetable and fruit industry has little clout. For one thing, if the name “vegetable and fruit industry” sounds odd, that’s because such an expression is almost never used. The vegetable and fruit industry hardly exists as a united entity. In North America or the UK, only about five different types of meat really count in terms of sales: beef (including veal), pork, chicken, turkey, and lamb or mutton. Now think of all the different kinds of veggies, fruits, beans, and lentils out there. Or just consider the varieties of beans grown and sold in the U.S.: pinto, navy, black, great northern, garbanzo, red kidney, lima, yellow eye, fava, mung, adzuki, marrow, appaloosa, anasazi. The list goes on. Do lima bean producers want you to eat more lima beans? Of course they do. But they not only have to compete with garbanzo bean producers but also with other bean, pea, lentil, and vegetable growers. In a similar fashion, apples go up against peaches, blueberries against cherries. Even if the fruit and vegetable producers did unite, their sales would still be much smaller than those of the meat industry: in 2011, for example, all vegetables, fruits, and nuts combined made just over $45 billion in farm cash receipts. That’s almost four times less than the livestock products earned. Beans, peas, and lentils—which are considered proper meat substitutes—fare even worse. In 2011 they made a staggering 140 times less than livestock products. Who has the power to convince you to love their foods and to eat more and more of them? Not the chickpea industry, that’s for sure. To make certain you keep eating meat, the industry levies almost a tax on products sold, known as beef and pork checkoffs. In the U.S. each beef producer pays $1 per bovine head at the time the animal is sold, and each pork producer foots $0.40 per $100 of value. In Canada, the levy is $1 per animal head, and in Australia, it’s $5 a head. Between 1987 and 2013, the U.S. beef checkoff collected $1.2 billion, an impressive pile of money that is used “to increase domestic and/or international demand for beef ”—in the words of the industry itself. To give you some perspective: one of the very few campaigns drafted to promote eating veggies, 5 A Day for Better Health, developed by the National Cancer Institute and the Produce for Better Health Foundation, had in 1999 a public communications budget of less than $3 million. When Americans ask, “What’s for dinner?,” most will automatically reply: “Beef.” That’s hardly a surprise. Back in 1992 the industry spent $42 million of beef checkoff money spreading the slogan “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.” As for its effectiveness, consider this quote from the industry’s own website: “In the minds of the many consumers hearing that question [‘What’s for dinner?’], a dominant answer has been planted: Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. Not just planted, in fact. Watered, nourished and cared for over the past two decades.” In 2015 the beef industry was planning to spend $39 million of checkoff revenues on promotion and research, “consumer public relations,” “nutrition-influencer relations," and countering “misinformation from anti-beef groups.” One of the checkoff websites, www.beefretail.org, is full of ideas on how to make people buy (and eat) more beef. Some examples: organizing cooking demonstrations on university campuses and student contests, providing in-store samplings of easy beef recipes, and employing influential chefs. Yet it’s the youngest consumers that the meat industry is particularly keen to hook on burgers and drumsticks. In their marketing effort, for example, they design “beef education” curriculums for K–12 classrooms. They are especially eager to attract Millennials, born between the early 1980s and early 2000s. To encourage them to eat more burgers and steaks, beef promoters share recipes on Facebook and use Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, where they post pictures of “delicious beef meals.” They create apps and online resources: these, according to an industry marketing how-to guide, are “a must-have to attract and retain Millennials’ interest.” These campaigns pay dividends. Between 2006 and 2013, every dollar dropped into the beef checkoff ’s piggybank returned over eleven dollars to the industry. If it wasn’t for the checkoff, the industry has calculated that we would be eating 11.3 percent less beef. Meanwhile, the pork industry’s “The Other White Meat” tagline is the fifth-most recognized ad slogan in the history of American advertising (the first being Allstate Insurance Company “You’re in Good Hands”). During the five years following the campaign’s kickoff in 1987, sales of pork shot up 20 percent. As C. W. Post, founder of General Foods, reportedly once said about cereal—but it could easily be said about meat: “You can’t just manufacture cereal. You’ve got to get it halfway down the customer’s throat through advertising. Then they’ve got to swallow it.” Checkoff programs are successful not only because they are large but also because the promotional messages of the meat industry are, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, “government speech.” These are not your typical marketing campaigns; they have the blessing of the government. The USDA actually reviews the promotional messages prepared by checkoffs. As David Robinson Simon writes in his book "Meatonomics": “It may say it’s the National Pork Board, but the background sounds you’re hearing are the imposing bass tones of the U.S. government . . . a lack of government involvement would likely lead to the decline—or maybe the end—of checkoffs.” Although the American poultry industry doesn’t have a checkoff program, it still works hard to increase the demand for chicken and turkey. As Bill Roenigk explained to me, leaning back in his chair in the polished conference room of the NCC, meat demand is like a large dog, just sitting there, pretty immobile. But this dog also has a rather big tail. Good promotion and advertising is like grabbing this tail and wag-wag-wagging the dog as hard as you can. “So how do chicken producers wag the dog?” I ask. Roenigk laughs. “Social media campaigns are big at the moment,” he tells me. “We are making September the ‘Eat Chicken Month,’ for example.” Yet generic promotion by meat producers—whether of beef, pork, or chicken—is just a part of the story of how publicity keeps us craving meat. Meat vendors, such as restaurants, also play a large part. Take McDonald’s. Although it’s not a meat company per se, McDonald’s is the largest beef buyer not only in the U.S. but in other countries, too (Ireland, for example). Selling on average about seventy-five burgers per second across the globe, McDonald’s plays a large role in our ongoing love affair with meat. In 2011 it spent a whopping $1.37 billion on advertising. There are only thirty-six companies in the U.S. that shell out upward of $1 billion a year on ads (think GM, Google, Apple). And no, veggie and fruit producers didn’t make the list, unless you count Unilever with its soups and ketchup. And guess which ads appear most frequently on children’s Saturday morning television? Number one: McDonald’s. Number two: Burger King. The only figure that American kids recognize better than Ronald McDonald is Santa Claus. Selling meat with advertising comes with a few simple rules of thumb. “Don’t show animals” is a major one. A study done in Europe found out that it’s better to avoid using any photos or even drawings of cows, pigs, or chickens, no matter how cute. “Rather to make the consumer reflect about the living animal, communication should be centered on other attributes linked to the hedonic sides of meal preparation and consumption,” write the authors. And that is why you won’t see many animals in meat ads. In other words: They don’t want you to think about the animal too much or you may lose your appetite. But advertising, no matter how successful, is not the only way to ensure that demand for meat doesn’t go down; there is lobbying, too. Just one block away from the offices of the NCC is K Street: a stately line of heavy-looking buildings, among them steak houses and banks. There is nothing frilly on K Street, nothing cute, hipster, or kiddie friendly. It’s a street of coffee-wielding suit-clad people, all in a rush. Consultants, lawyers, and, most of all, lobbyists—so many of the latter work here that K Street has been dubbed “the lobbyists’ boulevard.” Lobbying, as Roenigk tells me, is something that the NCC is now “focusing on.” It’s perfectly legal, of course, and involves arranging campaign contributions, encouraging lawsuits, and organizing public-relations campaigns—all to influence government policy. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that during the 2013 election cycle, the animal products industry contributed $17.5 million to federal candidates. And such contributions appear to work. One study confirmed that changes in contributions do change voting behavior and that you can basically “‘buy’ legislators’ votes” without breaking the law. One thing that the meat industry would rather not lose (and would likely lobby intensely for if they were to) is government subsidies. According to Chuck Conner, deputy secretary of agriculture, producers of fresh fruits and vegetables “have traditionally been under-represented in farm bill policy.” Meanwhile, between 1995 and 2012 , American taxpayers helped pay $4.1 billion in livestock subsidies. It’s a big number, but in reality what animal food producers actually receive—indirectly—is far more than that. The author of "Meatonomics" calculated that each year the U.S. spends $38 billion to subsidize meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. Why is that number so much higher than the official livestock subsidies? One reason is feed grain subsidies. From 1995 to 2012, corn producers pocketed over $84 billion, and soybean growers $27 billion—which makes it considerably cheaper to buy corn and soybeans than to grow them. Since 60 percent of the corn and almost half of the soybeans that sprout from American soil are used for feeding livestock, subsidizing these crops is, to a large extent, tantamount to subsidizing the meat industry—and encouraging meat consumption. If it wasn’t for subsidies, we would be paying considerably more for our steaks and drumsticks. That would quite likely dampen our love affair with meat. “NCC did a study a couple of years ago,” Roenigk tells me. “If you take the price of chicken and consumers’ income, these two factors can explain 90 percent of why we eat more or less chicken.” Imagine if beef prices were to go up 10 percent, would you buy less? Switch to chicken? Studies show that on average, a 10 percent increase in beef ’s price means about a 7.5 percent decrease in consumption. And then the demand for pork rises 3 percent and for chicken 2.4 percent—so it’s bye-bye beef stew, hello chicken fajitas. However, some consumers, when faced with a higher bill at the butcher’s, end up cutting down on meat altogether. In one NCC survey, 35 percent of shoppers said that when chicken prices increase, they just eat more veggies. But the government is not the only entity subsidizing the meat industry. There are hidden costs to meat production that, instead of being paid by producers, are paid by taxpayers as part of what some call “subsidies by omission,” and these costs are quite substantial. Neal Barnard, professor of medicine at George Washington University, calculated that, in 1992, direct health-care costs attributable to meat eating in the U.S. were over $61 billion—from hypertension, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so on. In "Meatonomics," Simon estimates that external costs of the animal food industry add up to at least $414 billion yearly—not only in health care but also in environmental costs such as pollution. For every dollar of beef or chicken sold, Simon argues, the industry imposes $1.70 of externalities on us. (In economics, an externality is a cost that affects a party that did not choose to incur that cost and which is not reflected in the cost of the goods.) So the next time you buy $10 worth of steak think about this: you are in reality paying $27 for it, just in installments— part at the checkout counter, part with your taxes, part with your health insurance. What all such meat subsidies mean in practice is that for many Americans who struggle to make ends meet, buying a few burgers at McDonald’s is often a cheaper way to feed the family than serving them lentil dal and a fresh salad. They may be eating meat simply because it’s relatively low cost and readily available. As far as the meat industry goes, that’s perfectly fine, of course. They want to keep the subsidies flowing and the externalities external. What they don’t want is for the government to promote a plant-based diet. On June 3, 2013, a seemingly trivial sign appeared at one of the food stations in the white expanse of the Longworth cafeteria—the bright, open space located in the same building as the offices of the House Agriculture Committee in Washington, D.C. It’s here on workdays around noon that a long line of staffers forms: members of Congress and lobbyists await their turn to grab lunch. On that particular Monday, many of them spotted a new sign advertising one of the food options. The sign, supposedly placed by one of the cafeteria’s employees, simply said: “Meatless Monday.” That was enough for the meat industry to raise an outcry. On June 7, the Farm Animal Welfare Coalition, a group that includes some of the nation’s largest farm and ranch organizations, issued a statement to the House Administration Committee, protesting the appearance of the sign. In their letter, they wrote: “‘Meatless Mondays’ is an acknowledged tool of animal rights and environmental organizations who seek to publicly denigrate U.S. livestock and poultry production.” On the following Monday, June 10, the “Meatless Monday” sign at the Longworth cafeteria was gone. It has never appeared again. There is much more to the meat industry’s pressure on the government than a disappearing “Meatless Monday” sign, of course. As Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University, has stressed, the meat industry has, in recent years, won the major battles. One of those battles has been over the Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines, according to the USDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which jointly publish them every five years, “provide authoritative advice . . . about consuming fewer calories, making informed food choices . . . to promote overall health.” Nestle has a different definition of the Dietary Guidelines, though. In her book "Food Politics," she writes: “Dietary guidelines are political compromises between what science tells us about nutrition and what is good for the food industry.” Among the words and phrases that the meat industry doesn’t like are “eat less,” as in, “eat less meat.” Over the years the standard word used by the Dietary Guidelines has been choose (“choose lean meat”) instead of “eat less.” Choose doesn’t bother the industry as much because it encourages people to go out and buy more chicken or less fatty beef. Another standard tactic is to point a finger at particular nutrients but not the foods that contain them. So it’s “no” to cholesterol and fat but silence about fatty meats. On the first day of her job working on the editorial production of the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, back in the 1980s, Nestle was given clear rules. She recalls: “No matter what the research indicated, the report could not recommend ‘eat less meat’ as a way to reduce intake of saturated fat. . . . When released in 1988, the Surgeon General’s Report recommended ‘choose lean meats.’” How is the meat industry able to put so much pressure on the Dietary Guidelines committees and the USDA? The first issue lies with the function of the USDA itself—and goes back to the establishment of the department in 1862. Since its very beginnings, the USDA has had two roles: one was to help the industry achieve a reliable food supply and sell more products and the second was to advise Americans on their diets. And here is the problem. Today—as opposed to the nineteenth century when undernutrition was the challenge—those two roles just don’t fit together well. The USDA has a conflict of interest at its very core. The second issue also concerns conflicts of interest, but this time among members of the committees drafting dietary recommendations. Over the years, some guidelines committee members received grant supports from the National Live Stock and Meat Board, served on the grant review committee for the American Meat Institute, or had their research supported by the National Dairy Council—to name but a few. And then there is the phenomenon of revolving doors: industry people changing careers to become government people, and vice versa. Examples? Dale Moore, chief of staff to Ann Veneman, the secretary of agriculture, was formerly the executive director for legislative affairs of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA). Deputy Secretary James Moseley co-owned a large factory farm in Indiana. USDA director of communications Alisa Harrison used to be NCBA’s executive director of public relations, while NCBA’s former president, JoAnn Smith, got appointed as chief of USDA’s Food Marketing and Inspection Division. The list goes on. There is one more place where meat-industry-related conflicts of interest pop up: scientific research. If you scroll down to the author disclosure sections of research papers published in peer-reviewed journals, in some of them you may discover that the scientists behind the study received funding from the meat industry. For example, the author of one 2012 analysis, which praises beef as a great source of protein, “has been paid by the Beef Checkoff . . . to provide consulting services.” The author of yet another research paper, published in 2014, and claiming that lean beef has benefits for cardiovascular health, “received grant funds from the Beef Checkoff Program.” Sometimes the connections may be pretty obscure. A Swedish study, which is often quoted as proof that vegetarian diets are unhealthy, was supported by a grant from the benign-sounding Swedish Nutrition Foundation. But if you go to the foundation’s website, you may find out that there are several meat and dairy businesses among its “member companies,” including McDonald’s. Besides sponsoring scientists directly, the meat industry sponsors organizations promoting good nutrition. Tyson Foods, the California Beef Council, and the Texas Beef Council, among others, give money to the American Heart Association. The American Dietetic Association Foundation receives funds from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and so does the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation. Of course, the fact that someone receives funding from the meat industry doesn’t automatically mean that his or her research will be skewed to cheer the consumption of meat. But it may. In 2013 editors of several scientific journals, including the prestigious BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal ), announced that they will no longer accept studies funded by the tobacco industry. The editors wrote that although some may say that funding doesn’t equal endorsement, such a view “ignores the growing body of evidence that biases and research misconduct are often impossible to detect.” Excerpted from "Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat" by Marta Zaraska. Published by Basic Books. Copyright © 2016 Marta Zaraska. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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CNN’s Donald Trump disgrace: Trump coverage is the smoking gun, CNN is the corpse

If Donald Trump didn’t constitute, in this year’s favorite word, an existential threat to American democracy, the contortions into which he has thrown the Republican Party, as they simultaneously try to thwart him while espousing his basic policies, would be hilarious. On the other hand, the contortions into which he has thrown the media are less hilarious, because they ultimately have more bearing on the outcome of the presidential race. What Trump’s candidacy has managed to do is reveal fault lines in the media that usually are buried beneath the typical journalistic blather, the groupthink and the feigned objectivity of the mainstream media — and the reflexive lockstep partisanship in the right-wing media. (The liberals, with a pox on both Trump and his GOP rivals, get to sit this one out.) Thanks to Trump, there are civil wars now erupting within the mainstream media between the business side and the editorial side, and within the right-wing media among the establishment Republicans, the populist renegades, and the so-called moderate, intellectual neoconservatives. What it really shows is just how craven, self-serving and self-involved our media are. Let’s begin with the MSM. As I wrote here several weeks back, CBS head Les Moonves was mercenary enough to crow over how much money Trump coverage was pouring into his network’s coffers. Trump is a veritable gold mine, which is one reason why the media have given him so much free coverage — by one account $1.9 billion worth, which is nearly two-and-a-half times as much as the next highest candidate, Hillary Clinton, and more than five times as much as Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz each. In his inaugural column as the late David Carr’s successor, The New York Times’ new media maven, Jim Rutenberg, examined just how big a stake the media have in Trump — especially CNN, which was nearly on life support before Trump applied CPR. So far during this campaign, Rutenberg writes, CNN’s prime-time ratings have soared 170 percent, and CNN head Jeff Zucker boasted to Rutenberg that on debate nights the network gets $200,000 for a 30-second ad. This gives Trump a tremendous amount of leverage, and he isn’t afraid to use it to make sure he is treated respectfully. I can’t recall a situation in which a network was so dependent on a candidate. Usually, it’s the other way around. CNN is so fawning to Trump it’s embarrassing, and its primary night coverage a disgrace. Sitting at desks are representatives for all the candidates, each given equal weight, with every Trump criticism parried by the Trump supporter, lest the network lose Trump’s favor. Anderson Cooper might as well be Trump’s apprentice for all the steely journalistic probing he gives him. But at least now you know how cable television news would have treated Hitler were it around in Germany back in the early ’30s. (Note to TV execs who still have a conscience, if any exist: Instead of out-of-work, old political operatives and partisan hacks giving us their tired takes on the primary results, why not have political scientists and historians do analysis? Just a thought.) Yet amid the glut of Trump coverage, here is something that has gotten far too little attention in the media, for obvious reasons. According to Kyle Blaine at BuzzFeed, Trump not only gets uncritical coverage; he has actually negotiated with the networks as to how they shoot his rallies. If you want to know why the press is kept in a pen and not allowed to mingle at Trump events, it is, according to Blaine, because the press conceded that to Trump. They are not even allowed to provide cutaways of the crowd’s reaction. Again, I can’t recall the press ever capitulating to a candidate in this way, but, then, there was never a candidate who gave the press as much revenue as Trump. Nixon assiduously staged his events; he didn’t tell the press how it could cover them. In any case, can you imagine the howls of protest if the media agreed to the same sort of terms with Clinton or Sanders or even Cruz? Trump coverage is the smoking gun and CNN is the corpse. And yet, again according to Kyle Blaine, there are some in the media who are actually discomfited by the surrender to Trump. As he puts it, “Conversations with more than a dozen reporters, producers, and executives across the major networks reveal internal tensions about the wall-to-wall coverage Trump has received and the degree to which the Republican frontrunner has — or hasn’t — been challenged on their air.” But TV reporters are not likely to put their jobs on the line to take on Trump. In the mainstream print media, where the tensions between the public’s apparent desire for Trump news (and the desire of papers and magazines to satisfy it) and reporters’ disdain for him are in daily full view, there’s more of a full-blown war. The Washington Post, to cite one prominent example, runs dozens of Trump stories one after another, but just about every one of those stories is hostile. Though one can only guess at motives, the difference between the generally lap-dog TV coverage (only this week did Chuck Todd finally demand that Trump no longer literally phone in his appearances on “Meet the Press”) and tougher newspaper coverage may reflect several things: that print journalism, as the late media analyst Neil Postman used to say, is more intellectually engaging than visual journalism; that TV has more at stake financially than print media and is thus more cautious in attacking its golden goose; and that print media feel a moral responsibility that TV doesn’t. From the decades of insipid political reporting we have gotten in magazines and newspapers, you certainly wouldn’t guess that last one. But we never had a Trump before either — or, for that matter, a Ted Cruz — as a major party candidate. Some reporters, and a whole lot of pundits, evidently don’t want to take responsibility for sitting back and seeing him elected president. Finally, for all the tensions between money and duty, and between irresponsibility and responsibility in the mainstream media, it is the conservative media that Trump has really discombobulated. Just look at Fox News, which is basically the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. On the one hand, you have the network lashing out at Trump and his “sick obsession” with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, even though Trump has clearly boosted the ratings. On the other hand, you have Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly serving as major facilitators for Trump, and the network, by one count, mentioning Trump 25,000 times in the past month. Put another way, you have Ailes speaking for the GOP establishment, of which he is a member in good standing, and Hannity and O’Reilly speaking for — and to — the angry old white men who seem to comprise Trump’s supporters and the bulk of Fox’s viewers. For an even more stark case of right-wing civil war, there is Breitbart, one of whose reporters was assaulted, allegedly by Trump’s own campaign manager, which led the Breitbart honchos to come to the defense of… Trump! Ah, those conservatives. But perhaps the most interesting case of internecine media warfare is that of the “smart” neoconservatives against the GOP rank and file and the media that speak for them. These folks — the David Brookses, the Ross Douthats, the Michael Gersons, the David Frums — obviously hate Trump, maybe less for ideological or even political reasons than for personal ones. Trump’s brand of authoritarian populism is everything these intellectual conservatives have spent their careers telling folks that conservatism wasn’t — even though, truth to tell, there was always know-nothing Trumpism lurking within Republicanism. I was especially taken by Ross Douthat’s column last weekend in which he fell back on the default position that the neoconservatives often invoke nostalgically: compassionate conservatism (as if!), the legacy of good old Jack Kemp, who was supposedly a softie when it came to poor people, and the lionization of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who, no doubt, all of them are praying will be the GOP presidential candidate at a contested convention. Gerson even wrote a piece in TheWashington Post this week conceding that, given Trump, a Hillary presidency wouldn’t be so bad as long as she had Ryan to spar with. The media have always gone easy on Ryan, way too easy, treating him as if he were a real economic guru, when, in fact, no one who worships Ayn Rand as the prophet should be anywhere near government — or books. But the pining for Ryan in the “smart” right-wing media just goes to show how utterly baffled the right-wing press is. Guys like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush enabled them to indulge their fantasies of a smart, gentle conservatism that allegedly worked, never mind that the George W. Bush administration proved it didn’t. Now Donald Trump has blown up those fantasies, and the right-wing media are as confused as the right wing itself. This piece was first published on BillMoyers.com If Donald Trump didn’t constitute, in this year’s favorite word, an existential threat to American democracy, the contortions into which he has thrown the Republican Party, as they simultaneously try to thwart him while espousing his basic policies, would be hilarious. On the other hand, the contortions into which he has thrown the media are less hilarious, because they ultimately have more bearing on the outcome of the presidential race. What Trump’s candidacy has managed to do is reveal fault lines in the media that usually are buried beneath the typical journalistic blather, the groupthink and the feigned objectivity of the mainstream media — and the reflexive lockstep partisanship in the right-wing media. (The liberals, with a pox on both Trump and his GOP rivals, get to sit this one out.) Thanks to Trump, there are civil wars now erupting within the mainstream media between the business side and the editorial side, and within the right-wing media among the establishment Republicans, the populist renegades, and the so-called moderate, intellectual neoconservatives. What it really shows is just how craven, self-serving and self-involved our media are. Let’s begin with the MSM. As I wrote here several weeks back, CBS head Les Moonves was mercenary enough to crow over how much money Trump coverage was pouring into his network’s coffers. Trump is a veritable gold mine, which is one reason why the media have given him so much free coverage — by one account $1.9 billion worth, which is nearly two-and-a-half times as much as the next highest candidate, Hillary Clinton, and more than five times as much as Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz each. In his inaugural column as the late David Carr’s successor, The New York Times’ new media maven, Jim Rutenberg, examined just how big a stake the media have in Trump — especially CNN, which was nearly on life support before Trump applied CPR. So far during this campaign, Rutenberg writes, CNN’s prime-time ratings have soared 170 percent, and CNN head Jeff Zucker boasted to Rutenberg that on debate nights the network gets $200,000 for a 30-second ad. This gives Trump a tremendous amount of leverage, and he isn’t afraid to use it to make sure he is treated respectfully. I can’t recall a situation in which a network was so dependent on a candidate. Usually, it’s the other way around. CNN is so fawning to Trump it’s embarrassing, and its primary night coverage a disgrace. Sitting at desks are representatives for all the candidates, each given equal weight, with every Trump criticism parried by the Trump supporter, lest the network lose Trump’s favor. Anderson Cooper might as well be Trump’s apprentice for all the steely journalistic probing he gives him. But at least now you know how cable television news would have treated Hitler were it around in Germany back in the early ’30s. (Note to TV execs who still have a conscience, if any exist: Instead of out-of-work, old political operatives and partisan hacks giving us their tired takes on the primary results, why not have political scientists and historians do analysis? Just a thought.) Yet amid the glut of Trump coverage, here is something that has gotten far too little attention in the media, for obvious reasons. According to Kyle Blaine at BuzzFeed, Trump not only gets uncritical coverage; he has actually negotiated with the networks as to how they shoot his rallies. If you want to know why the press is kept in a pen and not allowed to mingle at Trump events, it is, according to Blaine, because the press conceded that to Trump. They are not even allowed to provide cutaways of the crowd’s reaction. Again, I can’t recall the press ever capitulating to a candidate in this way, but, then, there was never a candidate who gave the press as much revenue as Trump. Nixon assiduously staged his events; he didn’t tell the press how it could cover them. In any case, can you imagine the howls of protest if the media agreed to the same sort of terms with Clinton or Sanders or even Cruz? Trump coverage is the smoking gun and CNN is the corpse. And yet, again according to Kyle Blaine, there are some in the media who are actually discomfited by the surrender to Trump. As he puts it, “Conversations with more than a dozen reporters, producers, and executives across the major networks reveal internal tensions about the wall-to-wall coverage Trump has received and the degree to which the Republican frontrunner has — or hasn’t — been challenged on their air.” But TV reporters are not likely to put their jobs on the line to take on Trump. In the mainstream print media, where the tensions between the public’s apparent desire for Trump news (and the desire of papers and magazines to satisfy it) and reporters’ disdain for him are in daily full view, there’s more of a full-blown war. The Washington Post, to cite one prominent example, runs dozens of Trump stories one after another, but just about every one of those stories is hostile. Though one can only guess at motives, the difference between the generally lap-dog TV coverage (only this week did Chuck Todd finally demand that Trump no longer literally phone in his appearances on “Meet the Press”) and tougher newspaper coverage may reflect several things: that print journalism, as the late media analyst Neil Postman used to say, is more intellectually engaging than visual journalism; that TV has more at stake financially than print media and is thus more cautious in attacking its golden goose; and that print media feel a moral responsibility that TV doesn’t. From the decades of insipid political reporting we have gotten in magazines and newspapers, you certainly wouldn’t guess that last one. But we never had a Trump before either — or, for that matter, a Ted Cruz — as a major party candidate. Some reporters, and a whole lot of pundits, evidently don’t want to take responsibility for sitting back and seeing him elected president. Finally, for all the tensions between money and duty, and between irresponsibility and responsibility in the mainstream media, it is the conservative media that Trump has really discombobulated. Just look at Fox News, which is basically the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. On the one hand, you have the network lashing out at Trump and his “sick obsession” with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, even though Trump has clearly boosted the ratings. On the other hand, you have Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly serving as major facilitators for Trump, and the network, by one count, mentioning Trump 25,000 times in the past month. Put another way, you have Ailes speaking for the GOP establishment, of which he is a member in good standing, and Hannity and O’Reilly speaking for — and to — the angry old white men who seem to comprise Trump’s supporters and the bulk of Fox’s viewers. For an even more stark case of right-wing civil war, there is Breitbart, one of whose reporters was assaulted, allegedly by Trump’s own campaign manager, which led the Breitbart honchos to come to the defense of… Trump! Ah, those conservatives. But perhaps the most interesting case of internecine media warfare is that of the “smart” neoconservatives against the GOP rank and file and the media that speak for them. These folks — the David Brookses, the Ross Douthats, the Michael Gersons, the David Frums — obviously hate Trump, maybe less for ideological or even political reasons than for personal ones. Trump’s brand of authoritarian populism is everything these intellectual conservatives have spent their careers telling folks that conservatism wasn’t — even though, truth to tell, there was always know-nothing Trumpism lurking within Republicanism. I was especially taken by Ross Douthat’s column last weekend in which he fell back on the default position that the neoconservatives often invoke nostalgically: compassionate conservatism (as if!), the legacy of good old Jack Kemp, who was supposedly a softie when it came to poor people, and the lionization of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who, no doubt, all of them are praying will be the GOP presidential candidate at a contested convention. Gerson even wrote a piece in TheWashington Post this week conceding that, given Trump, a Hillary presidency wouldn’t be so bad as long as she had Ryan to spar with. The media have always gone easy on Ryan, way too easy, treating him as if he were a real economic guru, when, in fact, no one who worships Ayn Rand as the prophet should be anywhere near government — or books. But the pining for Ryan in the “smart” right-wing media just goes to show how utterly baffled the right-wing press is. Guys like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush enabled them to indulge their fantasies of a smart, gentle conservatism that allegedly worked, never mind that the George W. Bush administration proved it didn’t. Now Donald Trump has blown up those fantasies, and the right-wing media are as confused as the right wing itself. This piece was first published on BillMoyers.com

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I don’t know how to discuss being raped: I am different, permanently, but there’s no language to describe how

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Universities think I’m disposable, but my non-tenured status makes me a better teacher

For the past fifteen years, I’ve taught first-year writing at a small liberal arts college, and though I teach essentially the same course every semester, I never get bored. The students I work with are on the brink of adulthood, and their energy is exhilarating. They are goofy and raw, flinging themselves confidently into the world, yet they are full of self-doubt at times. With these students, I try to create a classroom environment that encourages uninhibited free thought and conversation. And yet, no matter what I do or achieve in the classroom, my pedagogical accomplishments will always be perceived as inferior to those of my colleagues. I am “contingent faculty,” otherwise known as an adjunct professor, hired each year on an as-needed basis, though the college always seems to need me.

In the past fifteen years, I’ve taught approximately 40 courses, all but two of them intensive first-year writing. I am happy with the compensation I receive for the work I do, but I teach on one-year contracts, and I often don’t know until early summer if I’ll have a job for the next academic year. If I am hired to teach three courses, I qualify for benefits. Often, I am hired to teach two, and late in the fall semester another course is added for the spring, which demands nimble footwork from the people in payroll and human resources and scrambles my personal finances. One year, I was asked to add a third section of composition in a single term the night before classes started.

Almost anything could impact my employment status from year to year: enrollment, administrative whim, the decision by a tenured professor in another discipline to try their hand at teaching writing. Because of this uncertainty, it feels as though my performance in the classroom has little to do with whether or not I am offered courses in a given year; this is often true for adjuncts. Because our teaching is so rarely observed (colleges and universities seldom invest time and resources in supporting adjuncts’ teaching), we rely on our student evaluations for evidence of our effectiveness, for proof of our very existence in the institution where we feel so often overlooked.

If our evaluations are bad, we may not get asked back. But good evaluations are no guarantee of anything. We are not encumbered by any sense of a safety net; the lack of one forces us to stay fresh, because there is no getting comfortable when you have no idea if you’ll have a job from year to year. Tenured faculty know that pretty much no matter what they do, they’ll be back, and though they argue that they are able to take risks because of this security, equally likely is that their effort will be dimmed, that they will care a little bit less for not having to worry. The edge is harder to hold onto when the landing is soft.

Adjuncts, on the other hand, feel free, and perhaps even compelled, to take chances in the classroom, like having blunt, often uncomfortable, conversations about things like dorm damage and rape culture, about issues and problems on campus and within academia. Pre-tenure faculty depend on student evaluations for promotion and advancement. If students dislike them, rate them poorly, complain to the administration about them, it is their career on the line. I don’t have a career. If my institution decides not to use me, I am free to find work elsewhere. I can afford to level with my students, risking their displeasure, because in order for me to keep wanting to do what I do, I need evaluations that demonstrate that I have helped educate my students, not just made them happy. I can only do that by pushing them out of their comfort zones, with all possible repercussions.

I realize that this position is counterintuitive to the whole idea of tenure, and that it contradicts the belief that adjuncts teach to the evaluations, because they operate, the thinking goes, on the assumption that good evaluations are the only way they get asked back. Supposedly, tenure encourages edginess and boundary-pushing, because tenure is designed to protect intellectual freedom. Too often, though, tenure breeds complacency. When faculty refuse to serve on committees or attend meetings, or when their teaching becomes rote and uninspired, there is little a college or university can do. The National Education Association claims that 2% of tenured faculty are dismissed from their positions every year (http://www.nea.org/home/33067.htm), but they don’t offer details about how often this is due to some sort of gross misconduct versus a dean of faculty or a committee deciding that a tenured professor has just been mailing it in for too long. Professors who are just uninterested in or too far removed from their students’ realities to connect with them in any meaningful way? From what I’ve seen at the various schools I’ve taught at over the years, they’ll keep their jobs as long as they want them. Tenure guarantees a professor the right to due process if an institution wants to remove them, and the institution must compile evidence for removal. Lukewarm or even negative student evaluations of a tenured professor won’t get much attention unless there are other issues of incompetence or unprofessional behavior to address.

But I, not knowing from year to year if I’ll have a job, feel free to swing for the fences. When every semester I teach could be my last, why go out giving anything less than my best effort? I fear only losing what it is I love about teaching: the chance to see what happens when I don’t hold back and when my students don’t, either. For example, I feel compelled to confront students who have always been told their work is perfect. A couple of years ago, a student sat crying in my office because all her fears, she said, had come true. “I knew that being a good high school writer wouldn’t mean anything when I got to college!” She had learned how to produce thorough, precise, intellectually sterile essays. I was offering a seemingly chaotic process that encouraged exploration and experimentation: extensive overwriting without attention to grammar or syntax in the early stages. By the end of the term, she was handing in powerful work.

As an adjunct, I am in the institution but not of it. I’ve seen the best of what academia has to offer: genuine passion for teaching and learning, collegiality and cooperation and respect among colleagues. I’ve also seen the worst: bitter divisions, power grabs, posturing, language designed only to assert the speaker’s sense of superiority. (I once counted how many times a colleague used the word “epistemological” in a routine English department meeting: seven). I have been on the receiving end of innumerable kindnesses; I have also been the target of vicious personal attacks designed to remind me of my low status. But mostly, I have been invisible. Whether I am there or not seems not to matter; only recently has any effort been made to engage me in conversation about the teaching of writing, for example, despite my years of experience. Many times in the past, my attempts to contribute were rebuffed. To many of the tenured faculty, my presence is a seemingly unhappy reminder of loose ends, the untidy extra classes at the fringes of the curriculum that I am sent in to clean up. My otherness has seemed to perplex some of my colleagues; they don’t know quite what to do with me. A professor who had just been awarded tenure expressed disbelief when I asked for my teaching to be observed: “Why would you want the scrutiny we have to go through?” The answer, to me, seemed obvious: I wanted to get better. But I also wanted some acknowledgment.

That the value of a college education has been called into question with particular intensity as of late matters very little to people in positions like mine, because we are not involved with the bigger picture at our schools. In other words, it is very difficult to be critical of an institution or a system of which you are a direct beneficiary; it’s easier for those of us with an outside perspective to ignore the noise. Adjuncts can be honest, are not distracted by campus culture or schmoozing with the administration, and can focus on what matters.

What matters to me, the reason I do this work when I could earn similar wages elsewhere, are the relationships with my students; they are central to my work as a college professor. Without job security, status, benefits, or any of the other perks of tenure, what is left for professors like me is the teaching itself, nothing less and nothing more. I teach my students and I am interested in and available to them, but when my classes and office hours are over, I leave. I don’t get bogged down in campus politics, department or committee meetings, or the constant one-upmanship that plagues faculty interaction. I am not tempted to waste my energy; I have no dogs in those fights.

Nonetheless, I’m forced to face the reality that adjuncts are disposable; we live with the constant sense that we are unwanted, that our opinions don’t matter. (Recently, the college alerted the faculty, including me, that we would be asked to fill out a survey about job satisfaction. It later had to be clarified that only tenured and tenure-track faculty were being surveyed). However, the nervous freedom I feel about having a job or not translates to a classroom energy that is unencumbered, and therefore exciting. Carmen Maria Machado writes in her March 2015 New Yorker essay “O Adjunct! My Adjunct!” that “If I disappeared at the end of the semester, the school would replace me without much trouble, having invested nothing at all in my career. This sensation – a great responsibility, precariously held – is also like nothing else I’ve experienced.”  I agree. I could go do other work, but this teaching feels sacred, and I know I am lucky to have it. The constant sense of peril forces me to live in the moment of each semester, and I want to present to you a radical, controversial position: I am every bit as good a teacher, perhaps better in some cases, than my tenured colleagues, precisely because of my status as an adjunct professor.

The usual arguments for and against tenure are stale and tiresome. Tenured faculty feel entitled to it because of how hard it is, supposedly, to get. Adjunct faculty want to teach and not be exploited. But regardless of your position in this longstanding debate, it’s not hard to see the ways in which the status quo is unsustainable. Tuition at private colleges continues to soar, yet the value of a bachelor’s degree is now decreasing. Studies showing how significantly a college degree boosts earning “prompted a stampede through college and university gates” according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor. But a glut of people with the degree has made the Master’s degree what the bachelor’s once was, which forces students to take on even more debt: running to stand still. And with a decrease in tenure-track positions and a dramatic increase in a reliance on cheap adjunct labor to balance the books, academia itself becomes less appealing, or even viable, as a career choice. We’re at a crossroads.

We need a model that harnesses the energy that fuels fresh teaching and jettisons the machinery that both discourages innovation and encourages stratification on campus. The distinctions between faculty are increasingly artificial and misleading; labels and titles are the rewards for successfully manipulating the system rather than an acknowledgement of a commitment to excellence.

I am not suggesting that adjuncts are categorically better classroom teachers than tenured ones, although we do teach differently, and these differences are valuable. I am suggesting that colleges and universities who employ adjuncts need to recognize that they are an underutilized resource in terms of the existential soul-searching academia is having to do these days, as the value of an expensive education is questioned with growing intensity. Adjuncts are highly educated, deeply dedicated, and working on the front lines of teaching. And yet we are consistently taken for granted. The second-class status imposed on us is a false construct that fails both the institution and its students.

Yet it might be the very thing that helps us retain our edge. Outsiders keep the mainstream honest. For this reason alone, I don’t want tenure. I only want a chance to become more a part of the life of the institution I support with my hard work. This lack of professional ambition, as some might see it, doesn’t make me any less of a teacher. It’s possible, notes Rachel Reiderer in “The Teaching Class,” “to love what one does, be good at it, and still be exploited.”

I don’t want to lose what helps keep me at my best in the classroom; neither do I want to participate in a system that takes advantage of my willingness to accept the crumbs that fall from the table. There is a better way, for everyone involved: support adjuncts fairly, and knock down the divisions between “us” and “them” in academia. Let’s hold each other, and ourselves, to a higher standard than the one we’re using now.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve taught first-year writing at a small liberal arts college, and though I teach essentially the same course every semester, I never get bored. The students I work with are on the brink of adulthood, and their energy is exhilarating. They are goofy and raw, flinging themselves confidently into the world, yet they are full of self-doubt at times. With these students, I try to create a classroom environment that encourages uninhibited free thought and conversation. And yet, no matter what I do or achieve in the classroom, my pedagogical accomplishments will always be perceived as inferior to those of my colleagues. I am “contingent faculty,” otherwise known as an adjunct professor, hired each year on an as-needed basis, though the college always seems to need me.

In the past fifteen years, I’ve taught approximately 40 courses, all but two of them intensive first-year writing. I am happy with the compensation I receive for the work I do, but I teach on one-year contracts, and I often don’t know until early summer if I’ll have a job for the next academic year. If I am hired to teach three courses, I qualify for benefits. Often, I am hired to teach two, and late in the fall semester another course is added for the spring, which demands nimble footwork from the people in payroll and human resources and scrambles my personal finances. One year, I was asked to add a third section of composition in a single term the night before classes started.

Almost anything could impact my employment status from year to year: enrollment, administrative whim, the decision by a tenured professor in another discipline to try their hand at teaching writing. Because of this uncertainty, it feels as though my performance in the classroom has little to do with whether or not I am offered courses in a given year; this is often true for adjuncts. Because our teaching is so rarely observed (colleges and universities seldom invest time and resources in supporting adjuncts’ teaching), we rely on our student evaluations for evidence of our effectiveness, for proof of our very existence in the institution where we feel so often overlooked.

If our evaluations are bad, we may not get asked back. But good evaluations are no guarantee of anything. We are not encumbered by any sense of a safety net; the lack of one forces us to stay fresh, because there is no getting comfortable when you have no idea if you’ll have a job from year to year. Tenured faculty know that pretty much no matter what they do, they’ll be back, and though they argue that they are able to take risks because of this security, equally likely is that their effort will be dimmed, that they will care a little bit less for not having to worry. The edge is harder to hold onto when the landing is soft.

Adjuncts, on the other hand, feel free, and perhaps even compelled, to take chances in the classroom, like having blunt, often uncomfortable, conversations about things like dorm damage and rape culture, about issues and problems on campus and within academia. Pre-tenure faculty depend on student evaluations for promotion and advancement. If students dislike them, rate them poorly, complain to the administration about them, it is their career on the line. I don’t have a career. If my institution decides not to use me, I am free to find work elsewhere. I can afford to level with my students, risking their displeasure, because in order for me to keep wanting to do what I do, I need evaluations that demonstrate that I have helped educate my students, not just made them happy. I can only do that by pushing them out of their comfort zones, with all possible repercussions.

I realize that this position is counterintuitive to the whole idea of tenure, and that it contradicts the belief that adjuncts teach to the evaluations, because they operate, the thinking goes, on the assumption that good evaluations are the only way they get asked back. Supposedly, tenure encourages edginess and boundary-pushing, because tenure is designed to protect intellectual freedom. Too often, though, tenure breeds complacency. When faculty refuse to serve on committees or attend meetings, or when their teaching becomes rote and uninspired, there is little a college or university can do. The National Education Association claims that 2% of tenured faculty are dismissed from their positions every year (http://www.nea.org/home/33067.htm), but they don’t offer details about how often this is due to some sort of gross misconduct versus a dean of faculty or a committee deciding that a tenured professor has just been mailing it in for too long. Professors who are just uninterested in or too far removed from their students’ realities to connect with them in any meaningful way? From what I’ve seen at the various schools I’ve taught at over the years, they’ll keep their jobs as long as they want them. Tenure guarantees a professor the right to due process if an institution wants to remove them, and the institution must compile evidence for removal. Lukewarm or even negative student evaluations of a tenured professor won’t get much attention unless there are other issues of incompetence or unprofessional behavior to address.

But I, not knowing from year to year if I’ll have a job, feel free to swing for the fences. When every semester I teach could be my last, why go out giving anything less than my best effort? I fear only losing what it is I love about teaching: the chance to see what happens when I don’t hold back and when my students don’t, either. For example, I feel compelled to confront students who have always been told their work is perfect. A couple of years ago, a student sat crying in my office because all her fears, she said, had come true. “I knew that being a good high school writer wouldn’t mean anything when I got to college!” She had learned how to produce thorough, precise, intellectually sterile essays. I was offering a seemingly chaotic process that encouraged exploration and experimentation: extensive overwriting without attention to grammar or syntax in the early stages. By the end of the term, she was handing in powerful work.

As an adjunct, I am in the institution but not of it. I’ve seen the best of what academia has to offer: genuine passion for teaching and learning, collegiality and cooperation and respect among colleagues. I’ve also seen the worst: bitter divisions, power grabs, posturing, language designed only to assert the speaker’s sense of superiority. (I once counted how many times a colleague used the word “epistemological” in a routine English department meeting: seven). I have been on the receiving end of innumerable kindnesses; I have also been the target of vicious personal attacks designed to remind me of my low status. But mostly, I have been invisible. Whether I am there or not seems not to matter; only recently has any effort been made to engage me in conversation about the teaching of writing, for example, despite my years of experience. Many times in the past, my attempts to contribute were rebuffed. To many of the tenured faculty, my presence is a seemingly unhappy reminder of loose ends, the untidy extra classes at the fringes of the curriculum that I am sent in to clean up. My otherness has seemed to perplex some of my colleagues; they don’t know quite what to do with me. A professor who had just been awarded tenure expressed disbelief when I asked for my teaching to be observed: “Why would you want the scrutiny we have to go through?” The answer, to me, seemed obvious: I wanted to get better. But I also wanted some acknowledgment.

That the value of a college education has been called into question with particular intensity as of late matters very little to people in positions like mine, because we are not involved with the bigger picture at our schools. In other words, it is very difficult to be critical of an institution or a system of which you are a direct beneficiary; it’s easier for those of us with an outside perspective to ignore the noise. Adjuncts can be honest, are not distracted by campus culture or schmoozing with the administration, and can focus on what matters.

What matters to me, the reason I do this work when I could earn similar wages elsewhere, are the relationships with my students; they are central to my work as a college professor. Without job security, status, benefits, or any of the other perks of tenure, what is left for professors like me is the teaching itself, nothing less and nothing more. I teach my students and I am interested in and available to them, but when my classes and office hours are over, I leave. I don’t get bogged down in campus politics, department or committee meetings, or the constant one-upmanship that plagues faculty interaction. I am not tempted to waste my energy; I have no dogs in those fights.

Nonetheless, I’m forced to face the reality that adjuncts are disposable; we live with the constant sense that we are unwanted, that our opinions don’t matter. (Recently, the college alerted the faculty, including me, that we would be asked to fill out a survey about job satisfaction. It later had to be clarified that only tenured and tenure-track faculty were being surveyed). However, the nervous freedom I feel about having a job or not translates to a classroom energy that is unencumbered, and therefore exciting. Carmen Maria Machado writes in her March 2015 New Yorker essay “O Adjunct! My Adjunct!” that “If I disappeared at the end of the semester, the school would replace me without much trouble, having invested nothing at all in my career. This sensation – a great responsibility, precariously held – is also like nothing else I’ve experienced.”  I agree. I could go do other work, but this teaching feels sacred, and I know I am lucky to have it. The constant sense of peril forces me to live in the moment of each semester, and I want to present to you a radical, controversial position: I am every bit as good a teacher, perhaps better in some cases, than my tenured colleagues, precisely because of my status as an adjunct professor.

The usual arguments for and against tenure are stale and tiresome. Tenured faculty feel entitled to it because of how hard it is, supposedly, to get. Adjunct faculty want to teach and not be exploited. But regardless of your position in this longstanding debate, it’s not hard to see the ways in which the status quo is unsustainable. Tuition at private colleges continues to soar, yet the value of a bachelor’s degree is now decreasing. Studies showing how significantly a college degree boosts earning “prompted a stampede through college and university gates” according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor. But a glut of people with the degree has made the Master’s degree what the bachelor’s once was, which forces students to take on even more debt: running to stand still. And with a decrease in tenure-track positions and a dramatic increase in a reliance on cheap adjunct labor to balance the books, academia itself becomes less appealing, or even viable, as a career choice. We’re at a crossroads.

We need a model that harnesses the energy that fuels fresh teaching and jettisons the machinery that both discourages innovation and encourages stratification on campus. The distinctions between faculty are increasingly artificial and misleading; labels and titles are the rewards for successfully manipulating the system rather than an acknowledgement of a commitment to excellence.

I am not suggesting that adjuncts are categorically better classroom teachers than tenured ones, although we do teach differently, and these differences are valuable. I am suggesting that colleges and universities who employ adjuncts need to recognize that they are an underutilized resource in terms of the existential soul-searching academia is having to do these days, as the value of an expensive education is questioned with growing intensity. Adjuncts are highly educated, deeply dedicated, and working on the front lines of teaching. And yet we are consistently taken for granted. The second-class status imposed on us is a false construct that fails both the institution and its students.

Yet it might be the very thing that helps us retain our edge. Outsiders keep the mainstream honest. For this reason alone, I don’t want tenure. I only want a chance to become more a part of the life of the institution I support with my hard work. This lack of professional ambition, as some might see it, doesn’t make me any less of a teacher. It’s possible, notes Rachel Reiderer in “The Teaching Class,” “to love what one does, be good at it, and still be exploited.”

I don’t want to lose what helps keep me at my best in the classroom; neither do I want to participate in a system that takes advantage of my willingness to accept the crumbs that fall from the table. There is a better way, for everyone involved: support adjuncts fairly, and knock down the divisions between “us” and “them” in academia. Let’s hold each other, and ourselves, to a higher standard than the one we’re using now.

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Our “Falling Down” election: What an Angry White Man on a rampage can tell us about Donald Trump and voter rage

In 1993, a movie came out that followed a laid-off defense engineer who walked, grim-faced, across Los Angeles after being stopped dead in a traffic jam. The movie was deliberately zeitgeist-y: In his white shirt, tie, and crew cut, Michael Douglas’s character was somewhere between an Everyman and a parody of a certain kind of white guy -- embodying the rage of the “entitled” Caucasian who was now seeing how life worked for working class people and minorities. He encounters almost no other middle-class white males in his march across the dirty, chaotic city. Instead, he shouts at a Korean market-owner for his accent and prices -- trashing his shop -- attacks two Latino men with a baseball bat, and walks away callously as a mostly nonwhite group are hit by bullets intended for him. Many of the shots of the city show non-English writing on signs and storefronts. He’s also alienated from his wife (played by Barbara Hershey), who has filed a restraining order against him. The movie was read at the time as a statement about the Angry White Man, as well as a general feeling of frustration, experienced widely, as the nation emerged from a recession. Here’s a review by Hal Hinson in the Washington Post:

As a description of our collective recession-era funk, "Falling Down" is to the early '90s what "Network" was to the late '70s. Written by Ebbe Roe Smith, the movie appraises the state of our national disease in a manner that goes far beyond what economic indicators tell us. If the last election was about change, the soul sickness shown in "Falling Down"reflects precisely why that change was essential. It's the grim chart at the end of our hospital beds.

The movie seems like a natural to describe the emergence of Newt Gingrich, who drew heavily from discontented middle-class whites. The film could serve, more recently, as an explanation of the psychology of the Tea Party, especially given many of those voters’ discomfort with multicultural America. A 2010 posting on Breitbart did both these things. In 2016, the movie seems like a natural reference point for the wave of frustration Donald Trump is riding. Trump’s support comes heavily from white men, some of whom, like Douglas’s character, lament the way the country is changing, are given to violence, and express themselves through an intense, macho brand of anger. This Esquire story updates the movie to our era and the current Republican frontrunner.

Falling Down is about a toxic mixture of self-pity and the hunger for order. But both the movie's creators believed that a man like William Foster was an anachronism; the world had passed him by. They were wrong. Donald Trump has tapped into a certain resentment toward the cultural shifts afoot in the U.S., and it is enough, probably, to launch him at least to become the Republican party's nominee.

This won’t be the last of these pieces, and there’s a reason they’ll proliferate. The parallels between Douglas’s character (known as D-FENS, for his license plate) and Trump voters are real. But they’re hardly a perfect fit. Some of these differences are less serious than others. For instance, Douglas’ character is a West Coast urbanite. Trump’s support comes most strongly from rural people in New York State, Appalachia and other parts of the South. The difference in education is perhaps more important: The “Falling Down” character is an engineer; Trump support is strongest among voters without college degrees. One thing they do have in common remains important, and it part of what’s most interesting about the movie: Except for a scene in which D-FENS confronts a neo-Nazi and another in which he lashes out at two wealthy golfers, his conflicts are almost all with people poorer or less privileged than he is. And he feels, from what we can tell, nothing but contempt for these others. He certainly doesn’t see himself as caught in the same economic web as those he disdains. He doesn’t realize that they’re struggling with something too. There’s just about no empathy coming from him, and even less compassion. In another way, the film remains relevant: A lot of people — and not just racists or people who are inherently resentful — have seen their lives stall or turned upside down because of the impact of the Great Recession, the spike in rents and home prices, the reshaping of the economy and other changes. Liberals, affluent urbanites and professionals in the media condescend to these people at their peril. The last decade has shown that economic shifts can unseat even those who thought they were protected. Sneer at people who have been downsized, and you may find it happening to you. Or you may find an even more virulent political movement growing. Something new seems to be happening now, as well. Bernie Sanders, who taps into similar fears and resentments as Trump, continues to win voters while Trump seems to be more and more disliked. The Washington Post reports:

These numbers are simply amazing. Trump is viewed unfavorably by at least 80 percent of some of the groups that Republican strategists had hoped the GOP might improve among: young voters and Latinos. He’s viewed unfavorably by three out of four moderates… What’s more, these new numbers also suggest other complications to Trump’s working-class-white strategy that we’ve discussed before: Trump seems uniquely positioned to alienate white women and white college graduates to an untold degree.

The fading of Trump’s support may have to do with more than just his hard line on abortion, which has certainly hurt him with women. It also may be that he has too much in common with Michael Douglas’s character. Anger can be compelling, especially in the short term. But if someone — whether a billionaire or a downsized engineer — demonstrates no empathy, no sense of common humanity, it’s just hot air. In a two-hour movie, the frustration can hold our attention. But month after month, someone full of rage and no sense of other people’s pain or experience becomes tiresome. Americans — at least a few of them — may be seeing this now.In 1993, a movie came out that followed a laid-off defense engineer who walked, grim-faced, across Los Angeles after being stopped dead in a traffic jam. The movie was deliberately zeitgeist-y: In his white shirt, tie, and crew cut, Michael Douglas’s character was somewhere between an Everyman and a parody of a certain kind of white guy -- embodying the rage of the “entitled” Caucasian who was now seeing how life worked for working class people and minorities. He encounters almost no other middle-class white males in his march across the dirty, chaotic city. Instead, he shouts at a Korean market-owner for his accent and prices -- trashing his shop -- attacks two Latino men with a baseball bat, and walks away callously as a mostly nonwhite group are hit by bullets intended for him. Many of the shots of the city show non-English writing on signs and storefronts. He’s also alienated from his wife (played by Barbara Hershey), who has filed a restraining order against him. The movie was read at the time as a statement about the Angry White Man, as well as a general feeling of frustration, experienced widely, as the nation emerged from a recession. Here’s a review by Hal Hinson in the Washington Post:

As a description of our collective recession-era funk, "Falling Down" is to the early '90s what "Network" was to the late '70s. Written by Ebbe Roe Smith, the movie appraises the state of our national disease in a manner that goes far beyond what economic indicators tell us. If the last election was about change, the soul sickness shown in "Falling Down"reflects precisely why that change was essential. It's the grim chart at the end of our hospital beds.

The movie seems like a natural to describe the emergence of Newt Gingrich, who drew heavily from discontented middle-class whites. The film could serve, more recently, as an explanation of the psychology of the Tea Party, especially given many of those voters’ discomfort with multicultural America. A 2010 posting on Breitbart did both these things. In 2016, the movie seems like a natural reference point for the wave of frustration Donald Trump is riding. Trump’s support comes heavily from white men, some of whom, like Douglas’s character, lament the way the country is changing, are given to violence, and express themselves through an intense, macho brand of anger. This Esquire story updates the movie to our era and the current Republican frontrunner.

Falling Down is about a toxic mixture of self-pity and the hunger for order. But both the movie's creators believed that a man like William Foster was an anachronism; the world had passed him by. They were wrong. Donald Trump has tapped into a certain resentment toward the cultural shifts afoot in the U.S., and it is enough, probably, to launch him at least to become the Republican party's nominee.

This won’t be the last of these pieces, and there’s a reason they’ll proliferate. The parallels between Douglas’s character (known as D-FENS, for his license plate) and Trump voters are real. But they’re hardly a perfect fit. Some of these differences are less serious than others. For instance, Douglas’ character is a West Coast urbanite. Trump’s support comes most strongly from rural people in New York State, Appalachia and other parts of the South. The difference in education is perhaps more important: The “Falling Down” character is an engineer; Trump support is strongest among voters without college degrees. One thing they do have in common remains important, and it part of what’s most interesting about the movie: Except for a scene in which D-FENS confronts a neo-Nazi and another in which he lashes out at two wealthy golfers, his conflicts are almost all with people poorer or less privileged than he is. And he feels, from what we can tell, nothing but contempt for these others. He certainly doesn’t see himself as caught in the same economic web as those he disdains. He doesn’t realize that they’re struggling with something too. There’s just about no empathy coming from him, and even less compassion. In another way, the film remains relevant: A lot of people — and not just racists or people who are inherently resentful — have seen their lives stall or turned upside down because of the impact of the Great Recession, the spike in rents and home prices, the reshaping of the economy and other changes. Liberals, affluent urbanites and professionals in the media condescend to these people at their peril. The last decade has shown that economic shifts can unseat even those who thought they were protected. Sneer at people who have been downsized, and you may find it happening to you. Or you may find an even more virulent political movement growing. Something new seems to be happening now, as well. Bernie Sanders, who taps into similar fears and resentments as Trump, continues to win voters while Trump seems to be more and more disliked. The Washington Post reports:

These numbers are simply amazing. Trump is viewed unfavorably by at least 80 percent of some of the groups that Republican strategists had hoped the GOP might improve among: young voters and Latinos. He’s viewed unfavorably by three out of four moderates… What’s more, these new numbers also suggest other complications to Trump’s working-class-white strategy that we’ve discussed before: Trump seems uniquely positioned to alienate white women and white college graduates to an untold degree.

The fading of Trump’s support may have to do with more than just his hard line on abortion, which has certainly hurt him with women. It also may be that he has too much in common with Michael Douglas’s character. Anger can be compelling, especially in the short term. But if someone — whether a billionaire or a downsized engineer — demonstrates no empathy, no sense of common humanity, it’s just hot air. In a two-hour movie, the frustration can hold our attention. But month after month, someone full of rage and no sense of other people’s pain or experience becomes tiresome. Americans — at least a few of them — may be seeing this now.

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“The system deprives athletes of the education that they’re promised”: Joe Nocera on the injustice of college sports

On Saturday evening, the University of North Carolina and Syracuse University will face off in the Final Four of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament in front of tens of thousands of fans at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. The game will be televised on CBS, which along with Turner signed a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with the NCAA for the rights to the tournament in 2010.  The Atlantic Coast Conference, to which both schools belong, will earn a record