Day 117: Florida Freedom Summer of 2024: 20^th Century emphasis by editors on news has morphed into 21^st Century control by publishers.  No wonder most voters don’t know what's going on really in this  2022 mid-term elections season.

My first paid position as a journalist was as editor of the Schofield News weekly, an army base publication in Hawaii. A lieutenant nominally was in charge of our group but he provided little oversight.

I was allowed complete editorial control, as a private first class.  It was assumed, rightly, that the paper would include only reports favorable to the U.S. Army.     Moving on….

In civilian life, I became a general assignment reporter for the Decatur, IL daily morning Herald working for City Editor Don Roberts.   He decided the beats to which I and the other reporters would be assigned.  In the same building, for same publisher, the Decatur Daily Review was published.  The staffs were fiercely competitive, though we all worked for the same publisher.

The publisher promoted me to be one of three editorial page writers for five newspapers in the small Lindsay-Schaub chain in central Illinois, including the Decatur dailies.  Ed Lindsay was the publisher. 

I never knew a Shaub.  But my boss was Dave Felts, an editorial page curmudgeon who led the morning meetings and assigned the editorials for the day based on our suggestions.

The only publisher caveats I can recall is that the chain supported Adlai Stevenson for anything and everything and we demanded recognition for Red China.  Neither of those positions was welcomed in generally Republican downstate Illinois.

I went from D league journalism to the majors, to New York City, as a feature writer/United Nations correspondent for Scripps-Howard Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate providing features for 900 papers across the nation and U.S. territories.  I worked for Bob Metz, the editor.  Boyd Lewis, the publisher, was on the premises but had no authority over the content, although he was the one who hired me, and later suggested I find work elsewhere.

Bob Isaacs and Joe Odin, two Jewish publishers trying to be Connecticut Yankees hired me to edit the Stratford, CT, News weekly.  They were ecstatic about everything I was publishing until their advertising fell off considerably, because of several controversial issues I raised, including criticism of the pervasive anti-intellectual climate in a community which was known worldwide for its summer Shakespeare Festivals.  Still they never tried to question anything I published.

On my last fulltime job in journalism during the next 20 years,   I got the first taste of the new form journalism would take in this Century.  I was feature writer/copy editor under an editorial chief, and assistant editor for TV Age trade magazine which was published twice monthly.  The publisher Sol Paul was on the premises, but I never felt his iron grip for the first 18 months.

The magazine published a subtle satirical article written by a colleague spoofing a tour of CBS-TV led by producer Herb Brodkin, for a group of Japanese television executive who knew little English.  The editors published the report.  CBS-TV let Paul know that all of its advertising would be withdrawn if the writer whose byline was not published did not apologize in writing and the magazine did not issue an explanation discounting the article as unauthorized.

Paul insisted on both requirements.  I, the author, a third reporter and a receptionist, went out on strike, and picketed outside the building next to Radio City Music Hall, across from the Time/Life Building.  Paul agreed to settle the dispute by signing a declaration avowing the First Amendment rights of journalists, and our control over our bylines, after the National Labor Relations Board opined that to do otherwise would be a violation of journalists’ working conditions.  We accepted severance pay and all four of us no longer worked for TV Age.

But generally, the news and information flow were controlled by editors and writers, not publishers,   Writers knew their limits, of course.  Jack Gould, New York Times TV Critic, couldn’t publish a word about the greedy broadcasting industry which had been lauded for taking huge losses on the JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations over a six day period in the fall of 1963.,  The time could never be recovered under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Rules at the time.  What neither he nor anyone else could write about for publication was the stuffing of commercials unlawfully into every half hour in the spring until those public servants not only recouped their losses but made significant progress.

Still investigative journalism then was hardly dead.

The 20^th Century investigative journalist reports are epitomized in All the President’s Men, about the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, and the resulting resignation of Richard Nixon as president of the United States.  Publisher Katherine Graham is consulted but the actual shots are controlled by the newspapers’ charismatic editor Ben Bradlee.

In 2015, a film about the New York Times’ owned Boston Globe’s investigation of the extensive network of Catholic clergy abusing children, showed how such investigations were slowed down and avoided for decades. When the Boston Globe's tenacious "Spotlight" team of reporters delved into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, their year-long investigation uncovered a decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of Boston's religious, legal, and government establishment, touching off a wave of revelations around the world.—Open Road  The cover-up was facilitated for decades by the publishers who worked with those establishments to keep readers from knowing the worst.

By now such investigations seem unlikely because business oriented corporations often are the publishers running the businesses.  They often regard their properties as advertising vehicles, especially since circulation dropped in recent years since the papers became accessible on line.

  Broadcasters who were hampered until the Reagan Administration by the Federal Communications Commission restraints on advertising have avoided meaningful investigative journalism entirely and the networks have bleached their products accordingly.

At the extremes, FOX News has gone to the far right, and CNN-TV and MSNBC-TV, to the left.  In all cases on those networks, relevant facts may be blended into massive talking head opinions.   Information seems to be a forgotten commodity in the process, especially when commentators differ in discussion about facts.

And what seems to worry publishers, those corporate execs, most is controversy.  Elections are covered with little distinction between candidates, unless a contest is between a 2020 election denier, and a rational Democrat whose seat is endangered, or so polarized that the freakiness itself becomes the story. 

Coverage of local elections avoids ideas and candidate views which might threaten the economic future of the community.  In my hometown of Gainesville, FL for example a nationally covered controversy about the hiring of a right wing evangelical Christian anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-China U.,S. Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican, from Nebraska farm country, as the new president of the University of Florida, was not considered relevant for any discussion or debate between and among candidates for the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, county and separately city commission seats or the Board of Education.

And then last weekend, a long-simmering issue of black professional athletes expressing and supporting anti-Semitism exploded in twinkling lights on the Jacksonville Stadium after the traditional annual game between Georgia Bulldogs and Florida Gators.

The sign explicitly stated “West was right about the Jews.”

That headline was repeated on a nearby bank.  Photos of an earlier banner making the same statement was circulated widely throughout media.  Photos are the new way of saying this is the news, without words. 

Nightly newscasts of crimes committed that day are illustrated with the mostly black mug shots of men who were arrested.  None of the names are memorable, but the cumulative effect seems to foster the belief that crime is over the top, and it is being committed by black me.  Local elections go unmentioned while the visual obscenities permeate television news broadcasts in this election period.

The “West” is the billionaire black entertainer Kanye West who now calls himself “Ye.” Because of his unapologetic anti-Semitic remarks, companies led by Adidas have cancelled contracts with  his businesses. 

The West story was quickly compounded by support he received from Kyrie  Irving, an NBA professional basketball star whose career already had drawn political headlines for his refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Kyrie, who plays for the Brooklyn Nets, in the borough with a heavy Jewish population, continues to stand by his support of an anti-Semitic film, although he has apologized for the support he gave to West, been fined $500,000 and finally he was given a five game suspension by his team which may be continued if he does not back down completely on the issue.

The National Basketball Association president Adam Silver has mumbled about Kyrie, but the executive is Jewish and so….   Now the media still has not gotten connected to the depth of this tension created by black athletes fostering hatred and dislike NOT for white people in general, but only for white Jews in particular.

Google research revealed a similar controversy in the summer of 2020, during the presidential election. NFL football player Desean Jackson, a member of Louis Farrakhan’s Muslim brotherhood,  and former NBA player Stephen Jackson were getting comparable national attention for their anti-Semitic comments.

Any editor and journalist I knew in print, in broadcasting, would have found any excuse to become a part of this controversy erupting between two groups which have had a love-hate relationship certainly since the brief moments of solidarity in the civil rights movements, before black power took African-Americans in a different direction, and Jews became among the loudest vocal opponents of affirmative action, because they envision such a requirement as resulting in a return to old Ivy League policies of quota limits for Jews.

The Gainesville Sun, my hometown newspaper, is owned by Gannett Newspapers/Gatehouse Media the largest newspaper chain in the nation.  Each Sun edition on-line is accompanied by several pages of the USA Today paper published by Gannett.    Remarkably in an election season, Doug Ray, long time editor of the Sun and the neighboring Ocala-Star Banner, was terminated, for no apparent scandal or similar reason.  To compound the matter, he has not been replaced.

Instead, Nathan Crabbe, the choir boy editorial page director, has been instructed to oversee newspaper operation.   By-lines of two veteran reporters have disappeared.  Perhaps that turmoil might explain to some how the “West’ banner story in Jacksonville on the day of the prestigious game involving the Florida Gators fell between the cracks.

The banner story was not covered in any way by a Sun news or sports writer.   Yesterday, the USA Today section covered the five-day suspension of Kyrie by his team.   The in-depth account hardly suggested how widespread Kyrie coverage has been since last weekend.

National print and broadcasting media have blasted Kyrie at every turn, and covered twitter exchanges between him and popular former NBA Star and current TV sports analyst Shaquille O’Neale, and a widely publicized demand in google headlines for further Kyrie punishment by another former NBA Star and commentator Charles Barkley.  But no significance has been attached to the brouhaha.

Whites either appear to be silent or they are not asked to comment by journalists or both. The silence becomes deafening when political candidates are not asked about their views of incipient black anti-Semitism. 

No one appears willing to touch at all on the issue of blacks who perhaps personally and in the voting booth regard their Christian religion as more important than their race.

In Florida, Nikki Fried who clearly bested her rival former Gov. Charlie Christ (D-FL) in their one debate, easily was defeated by him in the party’s gubernatorial primary. 

Until this election, Ms. Fried was the brightest star in the future of the state for Democrats.  Fried was the only Democrat in a statewide office, as Secretary of Agriculture.  Her experience and volunteer work are all pluses.  She is a member of Florida Blue Key (FBK), the prestigious mostly legal University of Florida fraternity.

Her one major drawback in the context of this account is she is now and always has been Jewish, and involved with a Jewish business person in the fledgling marijuana issue.  She is the first Jew elected to statewide office in decades, the first Jewish woman ever elected to statewide office in Florida.   That seems to have turned out to be a liability rather than an asset.  But we will never really know, because no journalist has ever covered the issue.

So it seems neither a story about a Jew or about a black anti-Semite, and the effect of either or both on the coming election, holds any interest for any mass medium.  The slightest coverage of either or both would not have a positive effect on the bottom financial line, for the media or for their communities.  Black teenagers may regard them as role models.

And now just before the mid-term election, the richest man in the United States, Elon Musk, appears to be treating his purchase of Twitter,  as if he had bought a coffee chain, and needs to cut down on its losses immediately regardless of the constitutional protection for extensive coverage of any kind.  Hate speech?  Crying fire in a crowded theater?

For better or worse, Twitter should be popping about every issue at stake in this election, but the medium has become the message and the content is being drowned out by business decisions, e.g., the laying off of half of its staff.

So the question remains: Where have all the journalists gone? a few days before our 2022 Midterm election?

Gabriel Hillel for Florida Freedom Summer of 2024