If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)

There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once considered a career in journalism.

You can describe the game and gin up excitement with personal mannerisms the way television anchors increasingly do, or you can quietly shed light on the science of the game the way Cone (inset) does. He represents the difference between reporting as theater and reporting as insight.

When Cone tells you wrist and elbow action is as important as finger location in throwing strikes, you know a lot more than when another reporter tells you that you’ve just seen a changeup, which the camera has probably already told you. (more…)

I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture. At this point it would be expensive to correct it, but the predicament heightens my awareness that a great many aspects of our culture are missing from the discourse we are reluctantly beginning about energy. (more…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)

Acting in its usual role as the national mind the press has decided that the rising fuel price is bad news, end of story. But it may be just the beginning of a much more important story.

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 40, Del Marbrook’s regular podcasts for The Student Operated Press)

The most frustrating aspect of journalism is its daily failure to challenge society’s assumptions.

When television reporters say General Motors or Ford have decided to downsize, they say something like, “Heavily unionized General Motors announced a plan to downsize its North American operations this morning.” Notice the anti-union bias. It is assumed that part of GM’s trouble is its unions. There is never a story saying, “Badly managed General Motors…” or “Unimaginative General Motors…”

But that’s hardly the only problem with this kind of knee-jerk reporting. First, it’s not reporting at all, it’s putting a GM press release on the top of a huge stack of assumptions. There is rarely any reportage about huge salaries and bonuses paid to executives for managing their companies poorly or chopping them up and shipping them overseas. There is never any reportage about whether there should be any more obligation in American society to limit profit margins in order to share more with workers. It is presumed that whatever is good for shareholders is good for everyone. And sometimes it is simply assumed that whatever is good for executives is good for the rest of us. These undemocratic assumptions essentially take healthy discussion off the table—and that is their intent. (more…)

“He’s the preeminent leader in the securitization sector.”—which means he probably helped engineer the mortgage crisis.

Where but in Manhattan can you eavesdrop on such snatches of conversation? But that’s what I heard walking behind two suits this morning in midtown. The conversation was like sushi: mercury, what mercury? (more…)

Since the end of World War II it has been gospel in the United States that all development is good. It creates jobs and fuels consumption. It’s never rapine, bad for the environment or corruptive of the public weal.

Farmers sell land to developers, developers lop off the tops of mountains for resorts, concrete spreads, the infrastructure groans—all this is good. That is the gospel according to our political exegetes. But what if their desire to be right outweighs their intellects? (more…)

The news that General Motors, reporting a record $722-million fourth-quarter loss, is offering buyouts to all 74,000 of its unionized employees suggests to me that we need to talk about what nations are for.

Are they for getting out of the way of global corporations? Except when it’s necessary for the sons and daughters of the poor to defend those corporations? Are they for serving as the foreign office and defense department of global corporations? Are they for breaking the unions that speak for workers?

Or are nations to uphold our collective ideals, give us all a crack at happiness and prosperity, protect us from criminals within and without, and nurture the general good?

The problem is we all pay lip service to that last description, but our policies are calling into question our commitment to it. We seem to be buying the idea that everything will be okay if we just let corporations do whatever they want to do. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 34, my weekly podcast for The Student Operated Press to journalism students)

Transparency International is an organization that monitors corruption throughout the world. In its latest report the United States ranks Number 22 in corruption, far from the bottom, but much too far from the top. What does this tell us? Well, first of all, did you know we’re considered that corrupt? You probably didn’t. And whose fault is that? Was it a front page story? Did it get as much time on CNN and Fox as O.J. Simpson’s latest squalid enterprise? Did the press bother to tell us how Transparency International decided upon such a ranking? These are not rhetorical questions. We need to know. We need to know why news of such corruption takes us by surprise. We need to know whether we live in a decent and law-abiding capitalist society or a society that winks at corrupt corporate governance, at Tammany politics. We need to know if we have a press we can trust to tell us what kind of society we’re living in, since, after all, our bread and butter and futures depend on it. (more…)