Jerry Herman wrote a Christmas song; his arch rival Stephen Sondheim never did. Too mundane? No inspiration? One non-ethics related revelation I got from watching the remarkable Peter Jackson Beatles documentary was how the group tried to spark its creativity with collaboration and improvisation: this is an excellent analysis that dovetails nicely with mine. An ethics-related observation: What a rude, selfish jerk Yoko Ono is, and how disrespectful of his colleagues John Lennon was to tolerate her conduct. As a director, I would never allow a spouse or significant other to exercise that degree of interference with the creative process. It distances the cast member involved from the rest of the team, and creates an inherent distraction. Generally I don’t like any bystanders or audience in rehearsals, and never any I would consider hostile, which Yoko obviously was. The other three Beatles did an amazing job feigning disinterest, neutrality and blindness, usually acting as if she was invisible, like a ghost.
1. Look! I have something almost nice to say about the New York Times! Ross Douthat, of late the boldest of the Times conservative columnists, was given the prime editorial slot for his piece, “Can the Press Stop A Trump Restoration?” I assume that he didn’t compose the title, which misrepresents the thrust and tone of what he wrote, though it wonderfully accurately expressed that “enemy of the people” vibe of the Times and the mainstream media generally. The press has no business asking the question, because the press has no business to try to help or hinder any political candidate except by reporting news, facts and the truth, and allowing the public to make its own choices.
Douthat obviously agrees, writing, “A journalism that conspicuously shades the truth or tries to hide self-evident realities for the sake of some higher cause will inevitably lose the trust of some of the people it’s trying to steer away from demagogy — undercutting, in the process, the very democratic order that it’s setting out to save. I think this has happened already.”
Gee, Ross, ya think? The essay was obviously inspired by a column by The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank who made the risible claim that President Biden’s media coverage has lately been as negative as or even more negative than Trump’s coverage through most of 2020. Like everything Milbank writes, it’s a deceitful comparison at best: Trump received negative coverage regardless of whether his policies were working or not, regardless of what he said or the exaggerated attacks against him. Biden has been criticized because his first year in office has been virtually unspinnable, just one disater after another. Never mind, argued Milbank: with a Trump resurgence looming, reporting the facts means that “my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”
That position is as unhinged and blind as it is frightening. Criticizing a President who has enabled mass violations of the Equal Protection clause, assisted attacks on free speech, tried to recruit the news media into even more blatant state propaganda, proposed neutering the Supreme Court, attempted unconstitutional mask mandates, persecuted one set of rioters over another due to race and party affiliation and other abuses and threatened parents who dissent from leftist indoctrination by public schools with FBI harassment is anti-democracy? Ironically, the Times, by highlighting Douthat’s evisceration of Milbank, is also attacking its own announcement during the 2016 campaign that it felt obligated to tilt its coverage to help elect Hillary Clinton.
Maybe, in addition to the fact that the Times enjoys exposing its rival’s weaknesses, it is finally realizing that Douthat is right, as he notes,
[T]he essential problem with the idea that just a little less media neutrality, a little more overt alarmism, would put Trumpism in its place [is that]…[Y]ou can’t suppress a populist insurgency just by rallying the establishment if suspicion of the establishment is precisely what’s generating support for populism in the first place. Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism’s dangers while convincing skeptical readers that you can be trusted to describe reality in full.
Unfortunately for the Times and the Post, that ship has sailed. Continue reading
