800,000 Dead From Covid—Who Cares?
On a day when some outlets (e.g., New York Times, 12/13/21) soberly reported that the recorded US death toll was about to surpass 800,000—a number greater than the entire population of Seattle, Denver or Washington, DC; greater than the US toll from the Spanish Flu or the Civil War—the Atlantic (12/13/21) gleefully marked the occasion by publishing a glib piece headlined “Where I Live, No One Cares About Covid.”
Author Matthew Walther (of Catholic magazine the Lamp and the American Conservative) mocked the “parochialism” of “relentless adherence to CDC directives,” which he compared to other “silly novelties—no-fault divorce, factory-sliced bread, frozen meals and, of course, infant formula—[that] are adopted enthusiastically by the upper middle classes.”
Michigan—where Walther lives—had at the time of publication the highest Covid death rate of any state. More than one out of every 400 people there has died from the disease.
Business Partner of the Year
In case you’re confused why Time magazine (12/13/21) decided that CEO Elon Musk was the person who “has done the most to influence the events” of 2021: Time is now owned by tech billionaire Marc Benioff, who’s an investor in Musk’s SpaceX (Observer, 6/8/21).
Scaring Visitors Away
“Rising Crime Scaring Some Visitors Away From Michigan Avenue and Other Chicago Destinations During Crucial Holiday Shopping Season,” the Chicago Tribune (12/11/21) breathlessly announced. Wrote reporter Robert Channick:
From retailers and restaurants to hotels, businesses are beefing up security and seeking help from law enforcement as visitors stay away in droves, alarmed by the confluence of organized crime and seemingly random assaults plaguing even once “safe” locales like the Magnificent Mile.
The problem, as lawyer/activist David Menschel pointed out (Twitter, 11/12/21): Crime in District 18, the Chicago precinct that includes the Magnificent Mile shopping district, is down 18% since 2019, and down 23% since 2018. It’s up 5% from 2020, when much of downtown Chicago was shut down by Covid.
‘Woke Police’ or Basic Reporting?
The Daily Beast (11/28/21) reported on internal conflicts at Politico, including “complaints about internal ‘woke police'” and “a divisive unionization drive.” Unionizing is supported by more than 80% of eligible employees, so maybe “divisive” isn’t the best word to describe it. As for the “woke police,” the central example offered of their influence was an internal review of a Politico story (3/5/21) about GOP efforts to exclude transgender girls from girls’ sports. “The in-house diversity champion ultimately agreed that the article was not inclusive enough of transgender voices,” the Daily Beast said—by which it meant that it wasn’t inclusive at all, as there were no trans-identified sources quoted in the piece. Some would call interviewing the subject of your story Journalism 101—but apparently it’s too “woke” for some.
‘Alarming’ Record Low Unemployment
How class-biased is Politico‘s Playbook newsletter? When it reported the news that “Nebraska logged the lowest unemployment rate of any state on record in October,” it introduced the item (11/21/21) with “Nebraska set an alarming record this week.”
Toxic Equality
As Chileans prepared to vote in a presidential race between far-right populist José Antonio Kast and leftist Gabriel Boric, Bloomberg‘s editors (11/26/21) lamented:
The two front-runners for the presidency are extremists—an ultraconservative who seems nostalgic for the dictatorial rule of Augusto Pinochet, and a leftist who promises not merely to reform but to dismantle Chile’s economic model. It’s hard to say which of these agendas might prove more toxic.
Well, let’s see: Kast presents himself as the heir to the US-backed Pinochet (“If he were alive, he would vote for me”—El Mostrador, 11/9/17) and opposes the constitutional convention that 80% of Chileans voted for last year to undo Pinochet’s repressive legacy. Boric, on the other hand, supports the democratic process and wants to address the country’s gaping inequality (BBC, 10/21/19). But to billionaire-owned Bloomberg, threats to democracy and threats to free-market orthodoxy are equally “toxic.”
CNN’s Anti-Extremism Extremists
CNN (12/2/21) ran a report on “The Science of Extremism,” in which the network’s John Avlon (a former Giuliani speechwriter) explained that while the right wing is prejudiced against “ethnic minorities,” “gays and lesbians” and “feminists,” leftists are similarly prejudiced against “Christians,” “business people” and “the military.” For expertise on extremism, Avlon turned to NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, who, as Adam Johnson (The Column, 12/10/21) pointed out, argues that both the left and right deny “inconvenient truths” (YouTube, 8/10/13): While the right are “young-Earthers” and “climate change deniers,” the left are “IQ deniers,” “heritability deniers,” “sex difference deniers” and “stereotype accuracy deniers.”
Stuck in the Middle With ExxonMobil
Christine Arena (Twitter, 11/30/21), a former VP at the PR firm Edelman, summarized research into the role of the PR industry (and her former employer in particular) in blocking solutions to the climate crisis:
From 2008 to 2018, Edelman made nearly $ 500 million in contracts with trade associations opposed to climate action. This does not include income made from their corporate clients Exxon, Chevron, etc., who also oppose climate action.
When the New York Times (12/10/21) reported on this story, it framed Edelman as a helpless giant caught in the middle: “A PR Giant Is Caught Between Climate Pledges and Fossil Fuel Clients.”
Corporate Crime = Violence
When corporations pollute air, that’s violence. That produces cancer, respiratory diseases. When they contaminate your drinking water, that is violence. When they have unsafe workplaces—60,000 workers die from workplace-related diseases—that’s violence. There’s nothing philosophically abstract about corporate crime.
—Ralph Nader (CounterSpin, 12/10/21)
