IS MEDIA’S ISIS PILE-ON DOING DISSERVICE?

By Dominique Paul Noth

From near the bottom in July, fear of terrorism
has leaped up in the Gallup poll.

Having spent a lifetime in journalism I am well aware of the public’s desire to Kill the Messenger. But I am also aware of the media tendency to way overplay the storylines with endless interruptions, manufactured tie-ins and redundant segments, thus concocting a drumbeat of interminable bad news that translates into Social Calamity Speeding Toward You. No wonder so many wish the messenger would, figuratively, go jump in the lake.

Many Americans are going through that feeling right now.  Combine ISIS, robust time to candidates expressing fear of terrorists as they pursue their subset of a subset of presidential voters (yet we all have to endure it) and endless segments on the horrors of San Bernardino. Bam! A new national disaster. The public is enduring this latest gussied-up float in the media parade that is marching through all networks, multiple cable channels and newsy websites.

In pursuit of eyeballs and ratings, this bloviating seems designed to turn citizens more fearful and hawkish at the same time -- quite a combination.  Yet as the investigation unfolds the talking heads are forced to take back speculations that first filled airtime and panicked the nation.

The spate of repetitive reporting includes a dozen non-news news flashes and flat guesswork around how ISIS is infecting citizens around the world through social media (though it seems in actual count to be a few hundred, maybe, rather than the whole world).  But even a few hundred – heck one or two – can do a lot of damage if they’ve lost all restraint and are willing to kill themselves for a cause.

No government expertise can fully eliminate the destructive power of those who live double lives without being part of an organized movement.

The candidates who want to run government don’t confess to this, however obvious.  Maybe they think  we should  have learned such limitations  over centuries (WWI started with one assassin triggering multiple coalitions; anarchists intimidated democratic societies as much as ISIS does today; McCarthyism sent swatches of the nation trembling to the bathroom or nuclear shelter;  9/11 not only led to a war against a county that had nothing to do with the Twin Towers devastation but also led patriotic Americans to kill Sikhs at service stations -- and I could go on and on how we have been driven over the edge by whomever is determined today’s Frankenstein monster).

Usually fear peters out and sanity is restored through sturdy commitment and great police work, not candidates pontificating on patriotism.
  
This month it seems that a zombie terror has come to our country – if you listen to the media, which is clearly listening to each other.  Everyone discusses how ISIS or Isil or Daesh led to the San Bernardino killings by an American born Muslim and his foreign born head-wrapped wife – and that is false. It turns out,  in a fact largely ignored by the terrified public,  that the pair were discussing jihad in private messages (not social media) before ISIS was even created.  Something stirred -- WHAT? Abnormal hatred, desire for secrecy or for revenge against whatever.

That inability to know or blame ought to lead the thoughtful to ponder what is happening, block by block, family by family -- and also what is valued and criticized within communities. Apparently a few people can  appear normal while they are actually stripped by fanatical beliefs or mental state of those natural instincts toward humanity.  Whether caused by sophisticated terrorist propaganda, private demons, an unknown insult  or person by person encounters within a culture . . . we can’t yet say.

That is actually the unanswerable part of the San Bernardino story. Don’t be sidetracked by the search for a bogeyman. The early evidence as the investigation unfolds is that a couple could do all this without their friends or family knowing or suspecting -  even with a grandmother in  the house – and worse could  leave behind a six month old as they ran toward suicide by police, as their final shootout can accurately be described. There is no religion that teaches this much less commands it. There is no government that can make this disappear.

But now people obsessed with media reporting believe the world around them, particularly the Islamic world, is abnormal. All predicated on one disturbed couple with easy access to assault weapons.  From many quarters we are being told in one way or another that the only solution is to distrust everyone, lock them out of our doors and country, buy more guns and prepare for 1.5 billion “Walking Dead.”

Big surprise! In this outsized media atmosphere, fear of terrorist attacks and of ISIS has now taken over the No. 1 spot in the polls of the American public, where once it lagged far behind. The same media that blisters the air with those talking points is also reporting the results of the polls they helped create. All reinforce what they kept saying; making us think the entire nation feels under the same threat. 

And guess who is leading the barrage of “Do Something! Do Anything!” – the Republican candidates for president. Did anyone really listen to their Dec. 15 debate and those insane generalities about better algorithms, sterner faces and “we need toughness” as solutions? Could anyone follow the generalized didactics about regime change vs. tolerating an unsavory leader?  Whatever happened to case by case judgment?

Trust in the government on terrorism has plunged in media blitz.

If you think the candidates were sometimes silly and patronizing to the voters, meet the Congress.  All parties not in the White House seem rife with nasty demands to kill the bastards (if not the messengers).  They assign blame not to the terrorists’ own misguided extremism but to a “weak” administration – that same administration that, on the other unnoticed hand, has used more drones and targeted homicides of identified enemies on and off the battlefield.  The same administration that is actually slowly rolling back the territory ISIS rules.

Those polls, which change wind at will making the American public seem ridiculously fickle, report disapproval of President Obama’s ISIS policy. But what they are really saying is that citizens want their fear of lone wolf terrorists and organized terrorism thrown out of town by sundown. So according to the polls, the nation disagrees with his efforts 60% (at least this week) and the White House endures constant criticism that he is not excitable enough or fury-filled enough and too reluctant to embrace war as a solution, with the implication spoken by some that he must be a “durn furriner” -- or even an alien.

Talk about tunnel vision! The GOP squabblers are so confused they don’t know how often they are agreeing with Obama’s policies while condemning them. One AP fact checker was dumbstruck by the “number of candidates criticizing Obama’s course against ISIS while proposing largely the same steps that are already underway.”

The GOP candidates flailed around, not understanding, as one writer put it, that “they are offering simple-minded solutions to the complexities of a dangerous world.”  Nor do they have a clue about the labyrinthine problems of the Internet. 

I’m putting my vote behind common sense. Americans are worried certainly, but they are not succumbing to cowering -- similar to what happened in France after the ISIS massacre. At first it appeared that the radical right wing’s Muslim and refugee hating party of Marie Le Pen was on the verge of powerful election victory, so unhinged and helpless had the French felt in the first days after the attack. But in the conclusive second round of regional voting a few weeks later, her party fell far back.

There is a mix of both reasonable and unreasonable fear in the US, but why is the reasonable fear being blown out of proportion? The unreasonable fear is spurring the sense of America as a coward country unless citizens put soldiers or mercenaries on the battlefield to defeat an enemy -- without understanding how the enemy may be feeding on our foreign presence.

Has anyone caught the other irony?  This is the same nation and media that praise or reluctantly credit Edward Snowden for breaking the law but revealing secrets we needed to know of how much the government is peeking into our digital lives. Yet the same people are roundly criticizing the same government for not peeking, for not finding out years ago that radicalization was one of the sweet nothings being whispered between Sayed Farook and his eventual bride Tashfeen Malik.  Only now, confounding the media reports, it turns out none of that occurred on social media but in private message.

In the US the talking heads are saying, “Well, we’re just giving the public what they want – the polls prove it.”  Really?  I’m waiting out a few weeks when I think the public will come to its senses – and I wish more of the media would do the same and report with caution. Because left behind are things more difficult to report that used to top the polls and are still in need of determined solutions – such trivialities as job creation, guns and health care.

All now take the back seat as America spins on this ISIS flavored media roulette wheel.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 

FRESH ALLIANCES, LEGAL ACTION STIR AGAINST WALKER MACHINE

Badly outnumbered in October, Assembly Democrats could do no more than stand in
recusal opposition to the self-serving campaign finance bill, typical of the self-protective changes that have occupied the GOP and rarely helped their constituents.

By Dominique Paul Noth

The extreme gerrymandering of Wisconsin districts, once the Republicans went ballistic with Census power in 2011 and 2012, made progressives throw up their hands in disbelief, look around the state in dismay  and in several cases I know decide to leave. They saw little chance to restore balance in assembly, senate, municipalities and school districts under the new strictures. 

Others deeply disagree. They cite some pretty potent legal action against the gerrymander that has an even better chance than an Aaron Rodgers Hail Mary pass. They know similar national legal outrage is on their side.

They cling to the return to blue or at least respect for the purple that is traditionally the real Wisconsin. This balancing factor has long reared up in presidential year elections such as we have coming up in 2016 – and every sensible pollster expects a Democratic sweep.

Sober heads realize that you have to start with April of 2016 because November is going to be focused on federal level hopes – US presidency, Senate and House. The voters can’t change the governor’s mansion until 2018 though they can render the Walker juggernaut impotent by reversing just one state chamber in November and being intelligent about judicial and municipal races in February and April.

Still, that’s something of a Band-Aid until municipalities and statehouses return to sanity -- the stability to provide real choice year in and year out. And that will take aggressive turnout to counteract the gerrymandering and the misguided values.

A recent Madison.com column rounded up the current statewide damage of the Walker years  and the damage to come as long as the machine controls not just the governor’s office but both legislative chambers and, worst of all, the corrupt referee known as the  state supreme court.  It all  makes for mighty accurate and depressing reading – and curiously enough even GOP analysts admit the consequences are chilling the districts once safely in that party’s control.

There’s something going on in Wisconsin, and if you discount the Pollyanna wish-fulfillment aspects – the demand for instant gratification rampant in public expectations, be the concern Isis or health care costs -- you might find reasons for patience and hope. Perhaps the Wisconsin Idea, the real meaning of reform and the place of the state as one of the leading factories of democratic advances might return, as opposed to remaining the hind end of US representative democracy. 

Rather amazingly on issues like public education, environmental protection for future generations, assault weapons, property taxes and local control,  the state’s lousy record is unifying  conservatives and liberals on the same general issues. They haven’t yet realized the truth in that or the advantages of working together. 

Pollsters keep running into traditional GOP voters not about to leap the fence to the Democratic side but no longer a shoo-in for the machine candidate.  Worries about how these voters will jump are now rushing into Republican legislators’ decisions of how to run again and in several cases why to take early retirement instead. 

The main mistake of the GOP, it seems, has been solidifying their power by taking away so many aspects of local control.  Their own supporters and especially their supporters’ children are now suffering the consequences of lording it over the opposition rather than directly helping the citizens in the bills they pushed.  They were dealing in revenge politics. It works for a while but has a limited shelf life in Wisconsin.

While retaining her seat, Supervisor Marina
Dimitrijevic quit her chairperson role
to run Wisconsin's Working
Families Party.

Meanwhile, the progressives are tired of being labeled losers or waiting four years between notable victories while they are still the dominant side of Wisconsin voting (that darn gerrymandering).  The danger of such frustration is apparent if you look at the national extremists on the Republican side.  (Remember when there was a time when Republicans had moderates and even progressive ideas?). They blame Romney’s loss not on Obama’s appeal but because Romney sought out the center.

So right now if you look at that cuckooland presidential field, the Republicans are reveling in the most outrageous excessive nastiness and un-politically correct revisionist they can find, viewing each tack to the middle as a sign of weakness not common sense.  No one can say how long this tendency will last – we’re nearly a year ahead of the actual election.

One thing is clear -- Democrats better not follow that pattern.   In online social media their camps might seem in similar disarray if you listen to the voices so pro-Sanders they say they won’t vote for Hillary, and vice versa. It’s largely nonsense or anticipatory sour grapes. But to casual observers and troublemakers it can sound like Republican style dissension rather than in-fighting among relatives around the dinner table.

Online where younger frustrated texters and strident voices thrive -- and law and order decisions foreign and domestic are constantly dissected and attacked -- it is almost inevitable that Sanders will win any online poll – as just occurred when the Working Families Party (WFP) gave Sanders the online voting nod for the presidency.  And that could seem divisive until you realize that Sanders himself and Hillary herself have been careful not to be so ornery in their disagreements as to bar future cooperation.

In Wisconsin, WFP this year established a chapter known as WWFP (the extra W for Wisconsin) led by such progressive voices as Marina Dimitrijevic, Eyon Biddle and Kim Schroeder.  Both Dimitrijevic and national organizer Joe Dinkin (based in New York City where notches in the WFP belt include Mayor Bill de Blasio) have discussed the importance of issues like public education and economic inequality ahead of personality contests. Sander’s platform is built around similar issues (raising minimum wage, paid sick days, reducing or eliminating student debt, opposing privatization of public schools, attacking Wall Street profits at the expense of Main Street) and he has been consistent for decades.

He is a lifelong organizer and politician -- he showed campaign astuteness in Vermont while wandering in the wilderness on national debates in the Senate, making friends far more than changing policy. So he is a particular champion of those beliefs and in context the pressure from his camp has forced front-runner Clinton to speak up on the same issues, which is what his supporters should want.  

Hillary in an interview shrewdly revived an old saying in politics – Republicans fall in line while Democrats fall in love. That reflects the tendency of Democrats to pick personality first. Seen in this context WFP is a necessary corrective to the Democratic past.

Former Supervisor Eyon Biddle returned to
Milwaukee to help run the WWFP.

The WFP is not squeamish as some Democrats have been about pumping issues first and rejecting candidates who talk a good game and then vote selfishly when in office and against the platforms they ran on.  That really isn’t Hillary whose progressive credentials are long and deep. But so is her pragmatism and experienced deal-making, which fosters some suspicion on the left. 

Cynics who want to win at all costs will take this online vote for Sanders as a way to dismiss WFP members as typically overly excitable or non-pragmatic progressives. But that is to misread the shift in emphasis and the embrace of Bernie for a lovable example of leading every speech with passion for issues.  To this point he hasn’t generated the national revolution he aspired to. Only selective states seem to be “feeling the Bern” if you believe the polls. But to dismiss his enthusiasts as naïve is itself naïve.

WWFP is operating in a Bern friendly state where it does not field its own slate of candidates or have a separate line on the ballot (so-called fusion voting). It matches its choices to the existing party structure and would accept the right Republican or Green Party fella  if he or she was an ardent believer in the same social issues and has a well planned campaign. So this is common sense fusion within the (usually) Democratic label, since most Walker acolytes are wishy-washy on these issues.

In this way, as the WWFP gathers strength and supporters, that means  a local endorsement from WWFP is difficult to earn and requires a lot of commitment to turning out voters -- new voters where possible. It is something of a stamp of true progressive values and approval, which is why WWFP takes time and care in putting its brand on candidates.

And WWFP represents only one facet of the notable changes in grassroots activity in Wisconsin.  The challenge for anyone who thinks of themselves as progressive, activists admit,  is getting their voters to put aside temporary disputes  to turn out – and they must not just turn out every four years and in the fall but  again and again on crucial local elections. A further issue largely discussed on the sidelines but growing in importance involves how you can be a moderate and still earn progressive support. There does tend to be passion around who deserves that label of progressive.

Martha Laning

Many other notable changes in the grassroots landscape warrant future discussion.  The state Democratic Party  in under new leadership and some new listening sessions in various districts.  It is still evolving into a big change of the perceived emphasis in the past on centralized party bosses and familiar avenues of decision. Martha Laning, for four months the new chair, is still developing a full staff and slate of November candidates, focusing on a likely take-back of the state senate.  

Other progressive groups and newly aroused activists are weighing how to fit into the picture. Already many veterans are recruiting new activists and organizing online groups, drinking clubs and hosting sessions with politicians around the issues they are eager to support.

Indeed, if you look at the just released Badger Blueprint for the future from Senate Democrats, while too generalized in its sweep, it is anticipating legislation that dovetails with WWFP and other progressive goals.   

The unions also have changed, not just for their own members. Union leaders always argued that their insistence on better wages raised all boats and generally improved working conditions for all over the decades and it is true.  But now they are plunging into the water and pulling those boats up, and that is a change from two decades ago. While once there was tension between unions and certain minorities, that has fallen away and today there are new embraces in supporting each other’s rallies and getting out the vote.

This new cooperation is especially important in Wisconsin where Walker’s minions have gone out of their way to weaken labor unions -- not because they ever represented any real economic danger to taxpayers, usually just the opposite. It was because unions were good at raising money against the GOP and mobilizing  grassroots support. If you look deeply into Act 10 and right-to-work laws, they really have little to do with freedom of opportunity for the worker. Their intent was to destroy the money flow against Republicans.  

But Walker’s weakening them in one area may have strengthened their determination in embracing groups with like-minded concerns and speeding modernized methods of getting the word out.  And they still have the best street campaign instincts in the election business.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 

TRUMP HAS DRAGGED US ALL DOWN WITH HIM

By Dominique Paul Noth

I almost detest writing another word about Donald Trump.  About the only time in my life that I agreed with Rush Limbaugh was when he said Trump is playing the media like an old fiddle. He is, even as the media understandably exploded over his ridiculous call to ban all Muslims from the US, a view so repellent that the White House press secretary suggests it automatically disqualifies Trump from being president. Still, why give him more space?

Except  so poisonous was his language and his later justifications by mischaracterizing both FDR and Ike that now the world with some 1.5 billion Muslims has also reacted with an outrage we can’t fully dispute. It was one thing when such words and statistical lies spewed from an unshaven street corner bigot but this was the leading candidate of a major party.  To many minorities who have good reason to be cautious about us (even more reason that we have to be cautious about them) he  held up a warped mirror and put preening and bullying back in fashion.

It isn’t sufficient that his repeated chant of  “we have no choice” but to reject all Muslims was both unconstitutional and unenforceable.  The percentage of Americans who regard Muslims as “the other” to be dreaded may not have been very large but now we all seem like the great mentally unwashed.

Not 1 in 100 have met a Muslim or can explain Islam as a religion and not 1 in 300 have any clue why the two main branches, the Sunni and Shi’ites, have turned disagreement over succession to dislike and detest. Even Muslim political leaders don’t fully understand it and Trump sure hasn’t made any accord or cooperation easier, just turned the world more dangerous for our troops.  He has become the ugly American Isis wants all of us to seem.

Even as Trump spoke I did post an immediate “what the hey?” for his audience for cheering  and hooting over his supposed poll data about how Muslims hate Americans.  At the time he was citing numbers they should have known were  spurious and motivated by hatred. They stem from a group he called respected and his good friends. Really?  They are  the Center for Security Policy run by Frank Gaffney Jr., identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a racist organization that attacks all non-Christian religions as enemies of western civilization.  It can’t even be called a right-wing organization anymore since its statements, conspiracy theories,  attacks and polls have been so virulent that it  has been barred from CPAC and other conservative organizations and magazines.

Of all the GOP political candidates so far only Ben Carson and Trump have cuddled up to  the Center for Security Policy. But since the group has  some big money supporters, we’ll have to see how many others bundle with them at an upcoming conference.

To my knowledge only commentator Chris Hayes on MSNBC on Dec. 8 has called out in detail the group that Trump keeps using as his source material – and only Rachel Maddow on MSNBC discussed why conservatives not liberals have taken to calling Trump a Fascist and given the history  lesson that justifies that call. I do wonder if they are among the remaining outposts in journalism for political legacy. 

I can call to mind any number of incidents that we could have referred to as Christian mass killers, but we were either too smart or too sensitive to do so.  There were   different times in past centuries when  Christian religious sects went after each other with calls for ostracization.  White supremacists routinely wrapped themselves inside Christian movements like the Ku Klux Klan only 100 years ago, a history I learned in high school.

But here’s what I learned firsthand in college (Marquette University) in the early 1960s when JFK was the first Catholic president.  I recall a Jesuit teacher pounding on the table in Johnston Hall, I think, warning all good Catholics in his theology class  to stay away from that tempting building with a swimming pool just down the street on Wisconsin Ave. or else they were inviting in the devil.   That was the YMCA and today the refurbished building is a Marquette dorm. I confess I laughed at the priest then like I would like to laugh at Trump now.

But here’s what really stuns me – the hypocrisy of the denouncers. John Kasich, Paul Ryan,  Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorino, Chris Christie and others have forcibly agreed his remarks are way out of bounds. Yet all keep saying they signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee. Which might be Trump, if he continues to lead.  And they denounce his language without acknowledging their own milder verbiage against Syrians and Muslims that actually paved the way for Trump.

I hope registered Republicans will remember this moment of moral cowardice. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.