News, Notes, and Notions for 19May24
There are some social media/news media trends in the Year of Our Lord 2024 that need to be not only pointed out, but pointed at while mercilessly mocking
Admittedly, I am far more online than the average person probably is, and probably more so than is healthy. Unavoidable, to do writing and media in the modern world, at least the way I do. Any accusation that my own perception might be a bit skewed accordingly could well have some merit to it.
Still, there are some social media and news media trends in the Year of Our Lord 2024 that need to be not only pointed out, but pointed at while mercilessly mocked. Let us review a few of them.
Nothing good ever happens when you go monologuing into the front facing camera of your cell phone when alone in a vehicle. Like the old saying of being in a bar after midnight. Yes, that particular old saying is generalized hyperbole but there is much truth to it. Just because something catastrophically bad does not happen 99 times out of 100, the odds of that one catastrophic thing happening skyrockets because of the situation you yourself have created. Whatever that smoking hot take that just cannot wait until you get to someone else, it definitely needs the “count to ten” effect of driving somewhere else before venting your unfiltered thoughts directly onto the interwebs. Actors have directors for a reason. Writers have editors for a reason. Politicians have speechwriters for a reason. Cicero you are not; you need to - at a minimum - self-edit at least to the point of not grabbing your phone and monologuing for all posterity something you didn’t properly think through. Solo car monologuing is a one-way ticket to social media character of the day, and it is entirely avoidable.
If you can tweet from a monetized Twitter/X account, or Instagram, or Facebook, or whatever other social media promoting your monetized published piece on a website perfectly ideologically/philosophically aligned to your point of view about how badly you are “persecuted”…you ain’t. Not only is it navel-gazing narcissism to think someone disagreeing with you on the interwebs is persecution, but it is also an insult to the untold thousands persecuted to a monstrous degree, suffering, and often dying for their various faiths worldwide.
If you are ever tempted to utter the phrase - or a similar phrase of - “this is the most (insert hyperbolic descriptor here) time in American history since the Civil War…” put your typing thumb in the nearest open desk drawer and slam it shut as hard as you can. That flash of pain is still nothing compared to the century and a half of strife, struggle, pain, suffering, and overcoming our predecessors went through to give you the immense privilege of pretending they did not so you could make your online bloviating seem far more historically important than it is. Your political choice between two people for an elected office pales to reconstruction, two World Wars, the Civil Rights movement, economic upheaval, mass immigration movements to integrate, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and on and on that list goes practically forever before it gets to whatever it is you are all fired up about on a random Tuesday morning. Your nine-word Starbucks order being more expensive is an issue to discuss, not a self-serving comparison to overcoming the injustices of the past. Things that are different are not the same, and your clout won’t go up by attaching ahistorical nonsense as an to your hot take.
Settle down, folks. Cool your thumbs. Use the revolver theory of life and apply it to social media and news media: If you only have six bullets from now until the day you die to really fight something, is this something you want to use one of those six bullets on?
With rare exceptions, the answer is no. Especially in an environment where everything everywhere all at once is life-or-death biggest thing of the century of the week…until the next news segment at least.
Keep your bearing, and let us have a good week of being in, but not of, the purposefully curated chaos of the times we live in.
Latest Heard Tell Shows
Standardized Testing, Teachers, Students, & Texas-sized Problems in Education w/ Garion Frankel
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Your Heard Tell Show is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern the times we live in by talking standardized testing in Texas and elsewhere with Garion Frankel. Writing in the Houston Chronicle, Garion talks about the STAAR testing and integration of automatic grading as a touch point to discuss how testing is dominating school policy, teaching methods, funding, and the power struggles inside the big business and high profile K-12 education system. Garion also talks post-COVID education, how losing things like the arts and vocational programs hurts students, the secondary-to-college pipeline, and how above all else the in-classroom teachers are getting a raw deal and pressure from all sides that prevent them from properly educating students.
Sorting All The US Presidents Into Hogwarts Houses From Harry Potter w/Sarah Stook
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Your Heard Tell Show is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern our times by having a little fun with history as Sarah Stook returns to Heard Tell to explain the how and why of her listing of all the Presidents of the United States sorted into Hogwarts Houses from the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Sarah explains the four houses and their characteristics, why certain chief executives wound up where they did, how not everyone turns out how folks think they will - in Harry Potter or in real life - and which US Presidents would be most representative of the beloved characters of the world wide phenomenon that is Harry Potter.
Latest Media Appearances:
For The News Forum up in Canada, I did a spot for their Forum Daily News program about University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees voting to move funding from DEI program to campus safety after protests - and news media coverage thereof - on campus. They needed a quick clip, but the cast of characters involved is worth reading up in your own time, as you have folks who very much have agendas beyond the university using the moment to further themselves.
What a business, where you can talk about UNC Chapel Hill for a Canadian news outlet…my bit is at the 19:10 mark of the full clip here:
I was part of a panel on the Armstrong Williams show, where we spent a good 45 minutes hashing out everything from Trump’s NYC criminal trial to political evangelical Christian’s seemingly unwavering support of the former president, the economy, and education.
I’m on from the 19:20 mark onward in this full clip of the program:
Worth Reading
After her appearance on Heard Tell talking to us about the horrific state of child protection in West Virginia and our then-speculation that there was a coverup going on over the death of a 14-year-old girl in Boone County, Kelli Caseman writes this piece at WV Watch updating developments and how local reporters are fighting state government stonewalling:
For example, since the onset of the pandemic, Gov. Justice has held what he calls “media briefings” or “administrative update briefings” where reporters aren’t even in the same room. It’s all his stage. Journalists are merely expendable players. If they ask the wrong question, they won’t be invited back.
We watched in late 2022 as investigative reporter Amelia Ferrell Knisely was unceremoniously fired from West Virginia Public Broadcasting in apparent retaliation for her dogged reporting on our state’s child welfare system. And we watched during the last legislative session when the legislature passed Senate Bill 844, a bill that strips away our state’s public media from editorial independence and places the authority to hire West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s executive director in the hands of the administration’s cabinet secretary for the Department of Arts, Culture, and History.
We’ve watched state public information officers for government offices stop sharing public information. Government employees stopped returning reporter’s calls for comment. Our state systems have stopped honoring Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. FOIA allows the public to request access to records from any federal agency. West Virginia Code §29B-1-1 requires government entities to provide “full and complete” information when requested unless the information falls under specific, relatively narrow exemptions. The code reads, in part:
“The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.”
Public records are just that. And yet, here we are.
In March, an elderly man in the state’s custody died after being burned alive in a whirlpool with water at 134 degrees. For context, hot tub water is usually around 100-102 degrees. Del. Amy Summers, chairwoman of the House Health Committee, submitted an op-ed to state media, saying that a legislative oversight meeting with the Department of Health Facilities secretary had been canceled without notice. The secretary didn’t even bother to respond to her requests to explain why they did it.
That’s right: An elected official took to the media to articulate her frustration with continued stonewalling from our government because she couldn’t get answers from them in her role as chair of the House Health Committee.
And then there’s the terrible story of Kyneddi Miller, the 14-year-old girl whose emaciated body was found on a foam pad in the family’s bathroom. Days after the story became public, during his daily streaming show, the governor said that CPS knew nothing. He walked that back days later.
Last Friday, the secretary of the West Virginia Department of Human Services told a reporter that CPS had never been referred to the family — didn’t even have a piece of paper with this child’s name on it in their system.
Except on that same day, the state police responded to a FOIA request showing that they had referred the family to CPS over a year ago.
That was almost a week ago since that FOIA request uncovered what looks like a blatant lie, and we haven’t heard a word from the governor or CPS since.
Are you angry yet?
Is a taco a sandwhich: An Indiana judge weighs in over a zoning issue and gets it totally wrong, via The New York Times:
The question of what is and what is not technically a sandwich grips us tightly.
The question won’t die. But one day I will, and I can imagine that the last thing I hear will be some guy explaining to me why a hot dog is a sandwich, or why a hamburger is a sandwich, or why my soul leaving my body as I breathe my last breath is also a sandwich.
On Monday, in Fort Wayne, Ind., a judge ruled that tacos are “Mexican-style sandwiches,” and while a local zoning issue might not usually make national headlines, it was impossible to resist this one. It took the absurd sandwich question seriously in a civil court case, then appeared to land on the wrong answer.
I type these words from Los Angeles, where the question itself is trifling. There are many kinds of well-established, Mexican-style sandwiches here — cemitas, pambazos, dozens of regional styles of tortas — and the taco is simply not one of them. The taco is its own glorious archetype, its own indisputable and formidable department of joy.
But getting caught up in this argument is a bit of a distraction. The ruling wasn’t made to settle a manufactured debate, boost brand engagement or bump someone’s “is-it-a-sandwich” T-shirt sales on Etsy. It was made for the more boring, messy business of real life. And here, I have to admit, it starts to make sense.
We are going to have to have David McGarry on Heard Tell to talk about this coming up soon, but read his piece pushing back on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and various efforts to blame everything on social media:
The trends Haidt identifies deserve attention and rigorous scientific scrutiny. To date, definitive pronouncements of a youth mental-health epidemic caused by social media lack any firm grounding. Throughout history, moral panics have often fixated on new technologies, only to recede from public consciousness with little trace.
These panics often shroud themselves in purportedly credible research. For example, near the end of the twentieth century, multiple US jurisdictions banned underage possession of pagers, citing fears of teens engaging in drug-related activity and prostitution. In an especially silly example from 2005, CNN cited a King’s College psychologist who claimed that “E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot.’” From the printing press to video games, and television to rock and roll, continued uses of the temporarily reviled technologies have rebutted alarmists’ claims.
Haidt acknowledges this history but gleans the wrong lesson. “The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system,” he writes on his blog, After Babel. “In that story, the wolf does eventually come.” Of course, proverbial villagers must remain aware that wolves exist—yet also understand that the wolf’s arrival is not an inevitability. An understanding that human psychology tends towards moral panic, groupthink, and fear-based confirmation bias—particularly when facing new technologies—should prompt researchers and policymakers to view each new alarm with heightened skepticism.
In his book, Haidt writes, “It’s hard for us to understand what is happening, or know what to do about it. But we must do something. We must try new policies and measure the outcomes” (emphasis added). Such underestimation of regulation’s potential tradeoffs should discomfort readers—particularly conservatives. Regulatory experimentation—especially of the bold, persistent, sweeping type Haidt advocates—usually triggers significant unintended consequences. Historically, lawmakers insistent on “doing something” merely for action’s sake have routinely failed to achieve their stated ends. Nonetheless, they have often erected regulatory infrastructure whose consequences and potential for abuse they neither intended nor foresaw.
Pat Forde on the hot mess at the PGA Championship:
Scheffler’s Louisville-based attorney, Steve Romines, issued the following statement Friday morning to Sports Illustrated: “In the early hours of the morning in advance of his tee time Scottie was going to the course to begin his pre-round preparation. Due to the combination of event traffic and a traffic fatality in the area it was a very chaotic situation. He was proceeding as directed by another traffic officer and driving a marked player’s vehicle with credentials visible. In the confusion, Scottie is alleged to have disregarded a different officer’s traffic signals resulting in these charges. Multiple eyewitnesses have confirmed that he did not do anything wrong but was simply proceeding as directed. He stopped immediately upon being directed to and never at any point assaulted any officer with his vehicle. We will litigate this matter as needed and he will be completely exonerated.”
Scheffler returned to the course at approximately 9:10 a.m. And here’s where the situation got even stranger.
The PGA of America basically rolled out the red carpet for Scheffler’s return to the site of where he was arrested and ultimately charged with felony assault of a police officer. Imagine any other athlete getting busted, then being sent out to compete four hours later—with the apparent blessing of all involved parties. A police escort back to the scene of an alleged assault of a police officer?
Did anyone step up and consider the optics here?
How does Louisville Metro Police feel about the extraordinary privilege bestowed upon a star golfer? How do other athletes feel who have been treated far more harshly by the leaders of their sport after brushes with the law?
A large percentage of the fans clearly don’t care. They cheered for Scheffler and chanted his name when he took to the 10th tee to start his round in a steady rain. They shouted their approval when he delivered a great second shot out of the rough.
In the Show Must Go On haste of a major championship, the availability of the No. 1 golfer in the world to play the second round of a tournament somehow became the most important part of a sad and terrible morning. A man was dead, an arrest was made … and people were worried about a tee time.
Worth Listening To:
If you are a SciFi fan, check out the latest project from our friend Keith Conrad:
My New Podcast: Auditory Anthology
A weekly podcast bringing to life the most captivating science fiction stories. Narrated by Darren Marlar from the Weird Darkness podcast.
Auditory AnthologyKeith Conrad / Darren Marlar
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This is just heartbreaking stuff. From Peter Santenello:
Over eight months ago, the deadliest fire in modern American history torched the city of Lahaina on the Hawaiian Island of Maui. So, what's it like now? Join local firefighter Jonny and me as we explore the restricted burn zone to better understand the situation from a local's perspective.