The past 24 hours have been one of those synchronistic moments that only make sense when you make the connection between seemingly unrelated events.

The events:

• I received an email from a friend seeking advice about the future of the non-profit organization she co-founded 15 years ago.
• I sent an email to another friend explaining why I have stopped reading op-eds in the Washington Post and New York Times.
• This morning, I perused the home page of NYTimes.COM.
• I then turned on the TV to see what is happening in Ukraine.

The connection:

• The best advice I could give my first friend was something I learned during my days managing the social entrepreneurship portfolio at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. The only difference between a for-profit and non-profit entity is the nomenclature and what are allowable uses for net revenue. Survival is the same in both cases. Strategically, are you creating enough value to generate customers/members and investors/donors? If so, success depends on offering the right products/services, delivery, marketing, etc.
• When I explained to my second friend, I have lost interest in people’s opinion versus reporting of facts, she replied, “Well, if everyone quit reading op-eds, you’d have no readers.” Touché.
• Among the list of op-ed links on the Times’ home page was the following. “Four Times Opinion Columnists on What They Want Joe Biden to Say Tonight.”
• “Morning Joe” opens with the following panel in their DC and NYC studios: co-hosts Joe, Mika, and Willie Geist plus Katty Kay (former BBC anchor), Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Financial Times national editor Ed Luce and Politico White House Correspondent Jonathan Lemire.
• I immediately turned to CNN where the morning show hosts were merely directing traffic among correspondents in several Ukraine locations, Moscow and the Poland/Ukraine border crossing.

So let me begin pulling this together with a quote often attributed to Mark Twain but actually of unknown origin. “All generalizations are false, including this one.”

The friend who questioned my own writing went on to say, “Of course, I believe facts are important, but all facts exist in context.” And there lies the rub. Some essays on the op-ed page do provide context. For example, to understand the nonsense of Vladimir Putin’s claims about the innate union between Russia and Ukraine you need to look at the history of the region over many centuries. Or review the Russian president’s public statements that are evidence of Putin’s personal outrage over Western dismissal of his country following the demise of the USSR.

Which brings me to the future of Deprogramming101. When I started this blog five and a half years ago, the mission statement ended as follows. “The ultimate goal is not to find RIGHT answers, it is to promote the asking of BETTER questions.” And I have admittedly violated that strategic goal on occasion. But if that mission statement still has value, I need to reexamine the product by which I deliver that value.

When I return to full-time blogging I hope to be more true to the original goal. To promote counter-intuitive thinking. And not being satisfied with an adequate answer, but always looking for the next right answer.

Believing that good questions are still the best way to achieve those goals, allow me to use the coverage of the war in Ukraine as an example.

• Why do cable news networks pay their “contributors,” e.g. pundits, between $31,000 and $570,000 annually instead of beefing up news bureaus around the world?
• When did “Meet the Press” and other Sunday talk shows become “A Meeting of the Press,” with panels of journalists chatting among themselves instead of concentrating on holding leaders’ feet to the fire to explain or justify their policies and programs?
• What is different about the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the 1991 Iraq invasion of Qatar when Western military forces had no problem defending Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s army?
• Why did Russian media use terms like “we will be welcomed as liberators” and “shock and awe” or trumped up justifications to prepare the Russian people for the impending invasion?
• And finally, why aren’t historical data and facts which provide context not part of news reporting instead of being labeled as op-ed essays? Has the news industry, print and broadcast, contributed to the plethora of disinformation by failing to differentiate between reporting and opinion?

Consider the historical context of these last questions. Before digital news media, the Washington Post and New York Times had an editorial page. Today, they place links to opinion pieces at the top of their home pages right next to the lead stories. And local news broadcasts used to have editorials at the end of the show. But they were delivered by the station owner or general manager, not the news anchor.

I wonder if a return to separating fact from opinion could make a difference as it did a half century ago. Walter Cronkite did not accelerate opposition to the war in Vietnam because he personally disagreed with the Johnson administration or General Westmoreland. He left the comfort of his studio desk and reported the facts on the ground from the combat arena.

Ironically, of the three cable news networks, CNN (“The most trusted name in news”) and MSNBC (“This is who we are”) have let Fox (“We report, you decide”) claim the high ground. I can only wonder, was Shakespeare watching Fox News programming when he coined the phrase, “More honoured in the breach than the observance?”

I question, you decide!

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

No, that’s not a typo in the subject line.  Today’s post is not about “messenger RNA,” the therapeutic breakthrough at the center of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines.  In this case, “mRNC” refers to “mouthpieces of the Republic National Committee,” the media sources who, in a swap that would make Faust blush, have abandoned their intellectual integrity in pursuit of being the loudest voice in the right-wing echo chamber.

Addressing this topic was precipitated when a respected friend sent me an article by Neil Patel, co-founder of The Daily Caller, titled, “What the Protests in Cuba Tell Us About the Left’s Agenda for America.”  Let me start by quoting Patel’s own description of his media outlet. It is “an online news outlet, and The Daily Caller News Foundation, a nonprofit that trains journalists, produces fact checks, and does investigative reporting.”  A worthy mission that seems more honored in the breach than the practice.  Here are today’s headlines on The Daily Caller’s home page.

• Rand Paul To Send Letter To DOJ Asking For Criminal Referral Into Dr. Fauci
• Deion Sanders Has Pathetic Reaction After Reporter Addresses Him By His First Name
• U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Gets Humiliated At The Olympics
• Dolly Parton Goes Viral With One Simple Video
• Wednesday Morning Dispatch: Eric Swalwell Embarrasses Himself Yet Again

Based on these news “priorities,” the journalists Patel claims his non-profit trains seem more likely to be the next generation of anchors and  correspondents at TMZ or Entertainment Tonight or InfoWars contributors.  Take the story about the U.S. women’s soccer team by Daily Caller Foundation trained David Hookstead, who writes:

I never cheer against America, but it’s damn hard to cheer for our women’s national soccer team. They’ve spent years protesting and complaining about money, and then they get obliterated to open the Olympics.

If you can’t even show up and win, then why are we putting up with any of the other nonsense?

Yes, the women lost their first Olympic match ending a 44 game winning streak.  Will they still be “humiliated” if they make it out of group play and win the gold medal in what everyone admits will be a less than normal Olympic environment?  Additionally, Patel did not mention the history of income disparity between the men’s and women’s squads or the fact the men’s national team failed to qualify for the Olympics.  So much for fact-checking and thorough investigative reporting.

Which brings me back to Patel’s take on Cuba.  Make no mistake about the dire situation in Cuba, a nation in crisis searching for an identity whose future has been influenced for 70 years by strong personalities ranging from U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista, a military dictator who served as head of the government from 1952-59 to Russian-backed Fidel Castro who led the nation from 1959 to 2008.  Two extremes neither of which have foreshadowed a better life for the Cuban people.

FACT:  The current situation in Cuba represents a difficult foreign policy choice for President Biden not helped by an inconsistent back and forth by his three predecessors.  In 2002, George W. Bush announced “the initiative for a New Cuba.”  In exchange for political and economic reforms, Bush offered to ease restrictions on humanitarian assistance and resume mail service between Cuba and the U.S.  In 2014, following 18 months of secret talks, Barack Obama announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations.  In response to bipartisan criticism, Obama pointed to a half decade of tension which had served neither the Cuban people nor American national security interests.  To fulfill his desire to undo the Obama legacy, Donald Trump immediately re-imposed travel restrictions and severed diplomatic ties.  To hamstring his successor, on January 11, 2021, Trump re-designated Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” and imposed new sanctions.

History may not have the answer to the current crisis, but it does tell us what not to do.

• Support the protesters with armed mercenaries.
• Covert operations to take out the current leadership.
• Create an environment that results in another Mariel boatlift.
• Make Cuba more dependent on Russian assistance in return for Cuba becoming a Kremlin puppet including a Russian military base within 100 miles of the U.S. mainland.

It might be a good time for politicians and journalists to read Graham T. Allison’s analysis of October 1962 titled, “Conceptual Models and The Cuban Missile Crisis” (September 1969/American Political Science Review).  Graham found that the two more traditional models of decision making–the state is a unitary rational actor and there are systems/procedures that produce rational outputs–would have been disastrous.  He posits a third model, based on Miles’ Law, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”  It requires the reconciliation of different viewpoints (e.g. the hawkish General Curtis LeMay and the more dovish long-time JFK aid Theodore Sorenson).  In contrast to the Bay of Pigs, in which tactical decisions were seen as the purview of the Department of Defense and CIA, Kennedy wanted a team of advisors with very diverse perspectives.  In October 1962 that collective arguably made the difference between peace and nuclear war.

For argument sake, let’s assume Patel is correct when he claims there are Democrat members of Congress who support communism over the aspirations of the Cuban people (although there is no evidence to support this position).  In line with Graham’s third model of decision making, they should have a place at the table as they are the ones who might envision a pathway to resolving the crisis in a way that meets major objectives without backing any stakeholder into a precipitous corner.

But that also assumes Patel actually cares about resolving the crisis in Cuba.  Instead he uses the crisis to reinforce false narratives.  Biden and his followers are anti-capitalists.  The corporate media is a tool of Biden and the left-wing of the Democratic party.  Big Tech is turning us all into socialists. The proof comes when he completely forgets his concerns about Cuba and jumps the shark to take on his real target.

The American left is pushing a truly radical policy vision through the Biden administration. It is attempting to expand the government by trillions of dollars more than any time in history. Its vision includes government involvement in many new areas of American life.

In other words, the Cuban crisis was just one more beard to disguise Patel’s true passion, once again promoting an RNC talking point, Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda is a radical, anti-capitalism plot.  Let me remind Patel and other “journalists” of his ilk, owning the libs solves nothing.  Which is what makes him a certified, clinically tested mRNC.

POSTSCRIPT

Patel names names.  Five to be exact.  And generalizes these five individuals represent the Democratic leadership, 314 members of Congress and 82 million voters who made Biden the 46th president.  I wonder what his response would be if I reminded him of the dozen or more 2020 congressional candidates who embraced QAnon.  Would he agree these 12 plus advocates of debunked conspiracy theories are representative of the entire GOP?

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

The title of today’s post is also the name of a Peter Allen song featured in Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical film “All That Jazz,” starring Roy Scheider and Ann Reinking.  This week, I had a sense of déjà vu when MSNBC, the Washington Post and New York Times admitted they erred when each reported the FBI and CIA had informed Rudy Giuliani and One American News Network (OAN) they had been targeted by Russia to spread disinformation about Joe Biden and Ukraine interference in the 2016 election.

Why?  The song and accompanying dance sequence are a visual representation of how knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next.  Reinking wants to show Fosse’s cinematic alter-ego Joe Dideon how she taught his daughter dance steps she had originally learned from Dideon.  It must have been a moment of great pride and satisfaction when Fosse watched how he ensured, through Reinking and his on-screen daughter (Erzebet Foldi), the Fosse-style of dance would continue long after he was gone.

Some things should not be passed from generation to generation.  Avoiding the mistakes of our predecessors, regardless of the profession or situation, is the advantage of learning from the past experiences of others.  The three media outlets that blew the Giuliani/OAN story should have known better.  It has been less than 50 years since two reporters made the same blunder which almost negated their otherwise stellar example of investigative journalism.

The year was 1973.  The reporters were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.  The story was Watergate.  Their mistake involved misrepresenting information from a source about H. R. Haldeman’s role in crimes committed during the 1972 presidential election.  This one error could have derailed the paper’s Watergate investigation and all the solid reporting the two neophyte reporters had done.

Using anonymous sources is risky business.  Not only because you can never be sure of their motivation or to whom they may be loyal.  The process of vetting sources is more an art than a science.  The potentially fatal error by Woodstein (as Post editor Ben Bradlee referred to them) involved confirmation by a second source that Hugh Sloan, Jr., treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President, had fingered Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, as overseeing the direct tricks campaign which included the Watergate break-in and controlling the slush fund that financed the operation.

As well documented in their book All the President’s Men, that second source did not meet in person with either of the reporters and insisted the information be passed in a way it could never be traced back to him or he could be charged with a violation of the law which prohibits leaking grand jury testimony.  Think of it as the James Bond equivalent of the childhood game “Telephone.”  Anyone who has every participated in the game knows the original message seldom, if ever, remains intact as it moves down the chain of players.

The lesson from this episode in the downfall of a president is that two things can be true at the same time.  To prove this point, I will draw on the script from the film version of Woodstein’s book.  After the Post runs a story with the headline “Testimony Ties Top Nixon Aide to Secret Fund,” the White House pounces on Bradlee and his paper with evidence the story is flawed.  Bradlee demands Woodstein find out exactly how this could have happened.  When they meet Bradlee at his home, Bernstein explains:

I finally got through to Sloan–it was all a misunderstanding that we had: he would have told the Grand Jury about Haldeman, he was ready to, only nobody on the Grand Jury asked him the goddamn question.

To which Woodward adds, “So I guess you could say that we screwed up, but we weren’t wrong.”

Which brings us back to Giuliani and OAN.  We know the three news outlets screwed up as they have publicly admitted as much.  But were they wrong.  The formal retraction reads as follows.

Correction: An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation. That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings.

Let’s be clear.  The only “correction” is that OAN and Giuliani did not receive the warnings.  The factual distortion during this real game of “Telephone” was that the subjects of an investigation had been warned.  Like Woodstein, Post reporters Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris and Tom Hamberger (Nakaharberger?) screwed up, but the story could still largely be true.  The FBI may have had evidence that Giuliani and OAN were “the target of a Russian influence operation.”  There must be some truth in the story or the FBI could not convince a federal judge to approve a search warrant for Giuliani’s home and office.  Furthermore, it begs the question, “If the FBI was prepared to share this information with Giuliani and OAN, who stopped them and why?”  One hopes Nakashima, et. al., will stay on the story as did Woodstein.

Being half-right when it comes to journalism is not good enough.  In fact, being 99 percent right is too low a standard. I suggest the managing editors of the Post put up the following sign in the “bullpen,” where row upon row of reporters do their research and draft their stories.

You’ve done worse than let Haldeman slip away, you’ve got people feeling sorry for him.  I didn’t think that was possible.

~Deep Throat/All the President’s Men

Remind each reporter to substitute the name of the subject of their own investigations for Haldeman’s.

And if they order it from Amazon in the next 9 hours and 24 minutes, it will be there by Wednesday. Right, Jeff?

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP