Forget Local News

Dead or Dying

It’s not much of a secret anymore. Local newspapers, digital and otherwise, have been sliding into oblivion for years. Competition from social media, national purveyors of news and a proclivity to filter out periodicals (in any format) that present anything a viewer/listener/reader finds remotely troubling or contrary to what they want as their “reality” has devastated the old-world local news business. The very local news purveyors, where so many mainstream journalists have cut their baby teeth, their attempts to be relevant, have been dramatically usurped by… well… every other form of media.

“The economic environment of local news continues to become more dismal as print advertising disappears and managements struggle to raise digital advertising and subscription fees enough to take up the slack… Advertisers have many online platforms to reach customers, and the vast majority of remaining newspaper readers are in the aging demographic that digital advertisers don’t much care for.

“‘Since 2008, there hasn’t been a single year of revenue gain in the newspaper industry as a whole,’ says veteran industry analyst Ken Doctor. That’s produced a strategy of ‘continuous cost-cutting for more than a decade in local news.’ The cuts have come heavily in the form of layoffs at media companies of scores or hundreds of workers at a time.” Michael Hiltzik writing for the November 20^th Los Angeles Times.

Search engines and social media, even neighborhood flyers, seem like a much more efficient marketing approach. Advertising for its own sake, not in support of local news gathering. Cheap. Even local announcements no longer require a formal “newspaper” to reach their targeted audience. Try Twitter or Facebook. But what are falling between the cracks are those “little stories” and the accountability of local government officials who are no longer being watched by local journalists.

On November 19^th, newspaper giants, Gannett and GateHouse Media, formally merged. They hollered that the financial strength of the combined mega-news organizations would result in a “stronger” and “more viable” print and digital news enterprise “with deep local roots and national scale” per Michael Reed, the chief executive of New Media Investment Group, GateHouse’s parent, on November 14^th. 

“One would hope so, since the news business could use an injection of optimism these days. Perhaps there are grounds for hope, since the ‘new Gannett,’ as Reed dubbed the combination, will have national-scale heft, creating the largest newspaper chain in the U.S., encompassing 263 daily news organizations. But there may be just as much reason for doubt. The economic environment of local news continues to become more dismal as print advertising disappears and managements struggle to raise digital advertising and subscription fees enough to take up the slack. But the numbers just don’t support the intention.” LA Times. 

But the numbers just don’t support that very noble aspiration. Others have made similar promises, but the results speak for themselves: local news, where it has continued, is hemorrhaging red ink. We may not be privy to the little local stories of financial difficulty, but as publicly traded companies snap up these local losers, the required published numbers are not pretty.

The “new Gannett” merged entities are supposed to save an annual $300 million in “synergies” reflected in their going forward business plan. Really? “Earlier this year, GateHouse reportedly laid off more than 60 employees (the company would not disclose the actual number but called it ‘immaterial’) and Gannett reportedly laid off several hundred...

“The private equity firm Alden Capital — which owns the Orange County Register, Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and more than 90 other publications and boasts a reputation as a pitiless parer of payroll — has attracted much of the ire over wholesale plundering of local news resources — with good reason, for Alden publications have been cutting staff at about twice the rate of the industry as a whole… But public companies such as Gannett, GateHouse and also McClatchy Co. can’t escape the industry’s economic challenges.

“McClatchy — a chain of 30 newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald and Kansas City Star — may be another canary in the news industry’s coal mine. McClatchy reported a loss of $304.7 million on revenue of $167.4 million in the third quarter that ended Sept. 29. Most of the loss reflected a write-down of the Sacramento company’s news assets.

“But the company also reported long-term debt of more than $700 million. McClatchy said its finances were so impaired that it wouldn’t have the cash or cash flow to make a required minimum contribution of $124 million to its pension fund next year and was negotiating a possible takeover of the plan by the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp… McClatchy’s parlous condition has sent it on a quest for a merger partner.” LA Times.

Cutting back physical delivery saves money, but maintaining a rigorous digital infrastructure requires big start-up costs and continued upgrades and security patches. Advertisers are finding and staying with alternatives: “As traditional revenues continue to decline — and at an ever faster pace — those companies find themselves in a vise. Making the transition to digital news requires resources that may be harder to come by. Meanwhile, Doctor says, they’re trying to buy time through shrinkage even as their ultimate destination remains unclear.

“‘After two more years of this,’ Doctor asks, ‘what kind of products are going to be left in local communities that readers feel are worth a digital subscription? What’s your strategy after all the cost-cutting?’” LA Times. 

So what, you ask? But as outlets for professional journalism are replaced by online pseudo-news gathering amateurs, including hordes of conspiracy theorists recently equipped with new deep fake news tools – see my November 14^th Can Democracy Survive Deep Fakes? blog, what happens to trained professional truth-seekers? Is there even more filtration in search of appropriately biased online “news” sources? Do we become more polarized? Do we continue to be victimized by “news by the richest” under the extraordinarily damaging Citizens United Supreme Court ruling? Have the lines between “opinion” and “news” been so blurred that facts just die in no man’s land? 

All I see these days, is little ripples and big waves eroding democracy here every day… aggregated into a tsunami seeking to sweep away all contrary views and facts. Nothing screams a Rashomon view of what is happening like the impeachment hearings. Ad hominin personal attacks substitute for facts, opinions gather a growing immunity to facts, and distortion rules the day. 

              I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly how do American voters assess truth when they enter their polling stations at the next election?

Green Gold for Gringos

You don’t need to be an abogado to realize the value of an avocado. It used to be that you had to live in California or the Southwest to access these luscious fruits-masquerading-as-vegetables, and mostly you found them at Mexican restaurants in the form of guacamole. They were seasonal and grown mostly in the warmer US climates where they were consumed. Time passed. Today, those yummy green fruit-veggies are everywhere. Demand exploded. Boston loves them. Seattle and Buffalo as well. They are in so many dishes, from sushi rolls and avocado toast to foodie-driven salads. Not so seasonal anymore either. OK, Peter, so why have they elevated their presence into a socio-economic-political blog? Tariffs wars? If only…

Mexico can produce them year-round. And that’s the catch. It’s one of those stories that slides under the tsunami of news about impeachment efforts, Brexit and the indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu. “[The Mexican state of] Michoacan, whose plentiful rain, sunshine and rich volcanic soil make it an ideal place to grow the fruit, was uniquely positioned to capitalize on its rising popularity. It is the only state in the country allowed to sell to the U.S., which banned avocados from Mexico until 1997 over concerns about pests.

“As exports of Michoacan avocados boomed — on their way to $2.4 billion last year — luxury housing developments and car dealerships sprang up in Uruapan and elsewhere as huge swaths of forest were cleared to grow more.” Kate Linthicum writing for the Los Angeles Times, November 22^nd. That’s the story most of us know, if we know anything about the cultivation of Mexican avocados at all. And Americans do love their avocados.

But Mexican farmers are being shot, driven off their land. Precious forests are illegally being razed. It’s also one of those side-bars, a product of too many guns, particularly military-grade assault rifles, purchased “legally” at US gun shows or from the thousands of US gun stores and smuggled into Mexico, fueling a civil war of corrupting, ultra-violent cartels against an ill-equipped government trying to contain a contagion that makes life for too many Mexicans living hell.

We all know about the cultivation, processing, shipment and transshipment of hard and soft narcotics from and through Mexico, particularly driven by exceptionally high and unchecked demand from the United States. But drug smuggling is dangerous work, and as an increasing number of states decriminalize or even legalize some once illicit drugs, cartels needed to find new products to generate cashflow. Illegally harvested timber was an easy side-business, but it was an excuse for something bigger. Diversification. 

“The cartel members showed up in this verdant stretch of western Mexico [Michoacan] armed with automatic weapons and chainsaws… Soon they were cutting timber day and night, the crash of falling trees echoing throughout the virgin forest. When locals protested, explaining that the area was protected from logging, they were held at gunpoint and ordered to keep quiet… Stealing wood was just a prelude to a more ambitious plan.

“The newcomers, members of a criminal group called the Viagras, were almost certainly clearing the forest to set up a grow operation. They wouldn’t be planting marijuana or other crops long favored by Mexican cartels, but something potentially even more profitable: avocados.

“Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry, headquartered in Michoacan state, has become a prime target for cartels, which have been seizing farms and clearing protected woodlands to plant their own groves of what locals call ‘green gold.’

“More than a dozen criminal groups are battling for control of the avocado trade in and around the city of Uruapan, preying on wealthy orchard owners, the laborers who pick the fruit and the drivers who truck it north to the United States… ‘The threat is constant and from all sides,’ said Jose Maria Ayala Montero, who works for a trade association that formed its own vigilante army to protect growers.

“After seizing control of the forest in March, the Viagras announced a tax on residents who owned avocado trees, charging $250 a hectare in ‘protection fees.’… But they had competition. Rivals from the Jalisco New Generation cartel wanted to control the same stretch of land — and residents were about to get caught in the middle of a vicious fight… In May, a convoy of pickup trucks loaded with Jalisco fighters raced into the woods and an hourlong gun battle broke out…

“‘They’ll come to your house and shoot up your whole family,’ [said one farmer] ‘Kids included.’... Last year, 1,338 people were killed in Michoacan, more than any year on record. This year has been even deadlier, with 1,309 homicides through October, putting the death toll on track to top 1,500.” LA Times.

Why now? Why avocados? Strangely, this nasty trend is an offshoot of US policy. “Mexican forces, with strong U.S. support, focused on capturing or killing cartel leaders. But that strategy backfired as the big cartels fractured into smaller and nimbler organizations that sought criminal opportunity wherever they could find it.

“‘For many of those smaller groups, it’s far easier to just prey on local populations,’ said Falko Ernst, a Mexico-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, which promotes nonviolent solutions to conflicts. ‘It’s a myth that it’s only about drugs.’

“In Michoacan, where there have been dozens of cartel splits over the last dozen years, organized crime’s invasion of the avocado industry is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere in the country — and a potent illustration of how the government has unintentionally fueled more violence.” LA Times. 

It is a full-blown civil war, enabled by inane American gun policies and our big brother demands of Mexico, even as the United States has been completely impotent in stemming the US demand for illicit narcotics. Bad enough when this ultra-violence focused on drugs, but when the explosion of gangs seeps into everyday life and very legitimate livelihoods – from the gangster equivalence of “eminent domain” to their old-world protection rackets – the nature and scope of the social harm across the entire spectrum of Mexican existence becomes devastatingly obvious. Mexico is edging towards “failed state” status along our border that a 17^th century solution – a physical wall – will not even begin to contain.

When trucks carrying avocados cross US inspection stations at the border, the inspectors are looking at… er… avocados. Now what? “Eduardo Moncada, a political scientist at Barnard College who is writing a book in part about extortion in Michoacan, said the avocado trade’s relationship with organized crime varies dramatically across the region, which makes it difficult for authorities and citizens to navigate… ‘When you don’t know who controls what, it becomes much harder to live your daily life,’ he said.

“Many here had high hopes for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office a year ago and declared that Mexico was no longer at war with cartels. But besides vowing to fight poverty and shift security duties from the military to a newly created civilian National Guard, he has yet to articulate a new plan to curb violence.

“‘There is an abject absence of law enforcement strategy,’ said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ‘If you’re going to say what does not work, you have to say what will work.’” LA Times. Corruption remains one of the biggest problems on earth, fueling income inequality, preserving endemic poverty, stemming true economic growth, fomenting violence and injustice… and we have become one of the greatest enablers of this malignancy on earth. Even within our own nation, corruption has been legitimized at the very top of our power structure. Our message to the rest of the world has changed.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and I remember when I thought that sex made the world go round, but apparently, I was so wrong; it’s corruption.

Israel as Mirror

My only trip to Israel was as a teenaged boy… well where I went wasn’t Israel yet… it was part of Jordan then. Although eligible to cross into “real” Israel with my son-of-a-US-diplomat black passport, I was in the company of others with regular US passports who could not. I was forced to stay with them, but I craved a day or two on “the other side.” I was content to have visited the Jordanian town of Jerusalem and see the birthplace of my Christian roots.

I noticed how the Palestinians in Jordan were organized in barbed-wire-surrounded “refugee camps,” not allowed to leave their compounds to live anywhere else. The “camps,” where children lived on powdered milk and local charity, were situated with views of the inhabitants’ pre-1948 homes in what was then the relatively new state of Israel. It was a purposeful political manipulation. Arab politicians, not carrying a whit about the Palestinians, using hatred of Israel to rally rabid followers to their own political agendas. The children raised in those campus had a very rich diet of mandatory hatred of Israel, fans flamed for political power.

Palestinian refugee camps were also located with that view in Syria’s Golan Heights or from southern Lebanon. We lived in Beirut, a city with a small Jewish section. Many Lebanese wanted to open the border with Israel, but Egypt and particularly Syria would have crushed Lebanon in an instant had they tried. It took the Arab-initiated six-day war, in 1967, to annex the Jordanian land upon which I saw Israel. I was long gone by then, in college. We call that are the West Bank, the modern-day source of such violent confrontation. What’s left of Palestine. With a little Gaza down the road.

US policy for decades was to join the chorus of the vast majority of nations, the United Nations itself, to call for an eventual two state solution, one which declared Tel Aviv’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the heart of the West Bank, virtually entirely otherwise Palestinian, flatly illegal. Donald Trump moved our embassy to Jerusalem, accepted Israel’s permanent annexation of the Golan Heights, rejected the two-state solution and just a few days ago further reversed US policies by declaring those West Bank Jewish settlements legitimate and permanent. Arab states seethed.

Make no mistake, Israel is an essential ally. So much more than the scary evangelical commitment to Armageddon, a strong Israel able to foment the rapture and the Second Coming of Christ. Israel is a source of so much modern technology, reinventing agriculture in desert lands, giving us eyes and ears in a very hostile and volatile region. An educated people with so much to give to the rest of the world. Our friend through thick or thin. A parallel military force ready to defend US interests with her might.

But the world is experiencing climate change, forced migration as once fertile farms turn into dust – the factor that pushed Al Qaeda and ISIS to speak for those unrepresented and disenfranchised farmers and push their holy hell on the rest of us – political jockeying as the United States pulls away from her global relationships. With a couple of exceptions. Autocrats and diplomatic ties based on constituent demands. All that intellectual richness, creativity, is subservient to political aspirations of amoral and self-aggrandizing leaders.

With Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s longest reigning monarch… er… prime minister, sharing right wing autocratic aspirations with our President… another bromance… well the destruction to both nations’ ability to deal with the rest of the world by unilateral arrogance is staggering. Indeed, leaders in both countries have gone out of their way to suborn conspiracy theories, force a “your either for me or against me” dichotomy among the electorate, and legitimize their core constituencies – traditional and politically conservative Jews in one nation and lily white multigenerational traditionalists in the other – at the expense of “others” – Arabs or immigrants, take your pick. Divide and conquer. 

Both countries have become virtually ungovernable, unable to find compromise, by amplifying and encouraging severe polarization. Leaders who have manipulated their followers, whipping them into a frenzy. Trump has brought the United States to an explosive divide that we last witnessed during the road to our Civil War.

Netanyahu, sitting on the doorstep of an imminent criminal indictment for corruption (which was actually filed against him on November 21^st), could not do enough to denigrate Palestinians, now officially and legally second-class citizens, and goad neighboring Arab neighbors with inflammatory speech and threats. Flaunting international rules. It made him wildly popular with his right-wing constituency. Purposely poking at Arab nations who, sooner or later, will buy or develop powerful weapons of mass destruction that could easily be deployed, directly or via well-supplied terrorists, to decimate Israel. 

Both countries have so split their countries into uncompromising factions that the normal course of legislative democracy borders on impossible. The divide, evidenced by the Trump impeachment hearings, speaks for itself. But many of us are unaware of the parallel paralysis that divides Israel today. In two elections earlier this year, Bibi’s Likud coalition failed to muster a majority of the Knesset to maintain his post as prime minister. 

Even though political opponent Benny Gantz’ centrist Blue and White party secured more parliamentary seats than did Likud in the last, September vote, because Netanyahu was closer to forming a coalition that was Gantz, he was given the first shot at forming a coalition to support his continue leadership as prime minister. He failed for a second time on one year. So, the opportunity to form a coalition was handed to Gantz.

“Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday [11/20] won at least a temporary political respite after his main rival to lead the country failed in a weeks-long bid to form a coalition government — a task Netanyahu also could not accomplish.

“But the prime minister is still expected to be indicted on corruption charges [the indictment was formalized on 11/21] any day and the country now faces the likelihood of new elections, which would be an unprecedented third national vote in less than a year… After centrist politician Benny Gantz announced Wednesday that he could not muster the parliamentary backing for a new government — a task at which Netanyahu had failed twice — the country was again thrown into political limbo.

“There will be a three-week period during which any lawmaker — Gantz and Netanyahu included — can try to build a governing coalition. Failing that, new elections will take place, probably in March 2020.

“Staying in office has been Netanyahu’s overriding goal since corruption scandals began closing in on him. He could fight the accusations while in office — Israeli law does not require prime ministers to resign if charged, although no sitting leader has been — and try to use his leadership post to engineer legal immunity.

“Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party, gave up his bid late Wednesday to assemble a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, informing President Reuven Rivlin he would not make a midnight deadline. Rivlin, who had given Gantz the mandate to try to cobble together a coalition, said he would notify the parliament speaker Thursday.

“As the final hours ticked down to Wednesday’s deadline, Rivlin pressured Gantz and Netanyahu to form a ‘national unity’ government to break the deadlock and avoid yet another election. Rivlin suggested that Gantz and Netanyahu could alternate serving as prime minister, with Netanyahu promising to step aside if indicted.” Los Angeles Times, November 21^st. In the unlikely event that a “national unity” government is formed, the only certainty is that it simply will not work. Picture the United States being governed by a combination of Senate GOP Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell and Dem Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer.

As I look at all the instability the world over, from Bolivia and Venezuela to Ukraine and Russia, from Hong Kong to Western China, the entire Middle East, the struggles over Brexit, a partial list at best, it is equally sad to watch the great democratic experiments in both the United States and Israel simply unravel under the helm of corrupt and self-indulgent autocrat wannabes.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and history teaches us that if nations cannot bridge severe polarization, they also cannot sustain democracy itself.