Author: Dan Kennedy

After two years of COVID, we are older, sadder and wiser

Photo (cc) 2020 by actor812

Previously published at GBH News.

COVID-19 has been the central reality of our lives for two years now. But the moment it became real is different for each of us.

For me, it was Wednesday, March 11, 2020. That was the day when Northeastern University, where I teach, announced it was shutting down; when fans were sent home in the midst of an NBA game after a player tested positive; and when then-President Donald Trump delivered a rambling, unnerving address that sent the Dow Jones futures tumbling.

So yes, that’s when we all began to take COVID-19 seriously. But we really had no idea of what was to come. I remember telling my students that I hoped we’d be back in person in a few weeks. Now here we are, two years later, and schools, workplaces, stores and the like are still not fully back to normal, though the situation is certainly far better than it once was.

The arc of our progression from hopefulness to humility can be traced in how Trump and President Joe Biden have spoken about the pandemic. Trump virtually never said an honest word when discussing COVID, telling us over and over during the final months of his presidency that it was no big deal.

Still, a statement he made on Feb. 27, 2020, stands out for its audacious mendacity. “It’s going to disappear,” he said. “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”

Well, the miracle failed to materialize. By Election Day, nearly 233,000 Americans had died of COVID-19, and we still had nothing to protect ourselves except masks and social distancing.

If Trump’s optimism in the early days of the pandemic proved illusory, there were reasons to be hopeful a year later. Effective vaccines began coming online, and tens of millions of Americans rushed to get the shots. By the Fourth of July, President Joe Biden was cautiously hailing the return to something like normal.

“Don’t get me wrong, COVID-19 has not been vanquished,” he said. “We all know powerful variants have emerged, like the delta variant, but the best defense against these variants is to get vaccinated.” He added: “So, today, while the virus hasn’t been vanquished, we know this: It no longer controls our lives. It no longer paralyzes our nation. And it’s within our power to make sure it never does again.”

We all know what happened next. Delta proved to be far more contagious than the earlier forms of COVID-19. Combined with the maddening, inexplicable refusal among many Americans — disproportionately Trump supporters — to get vaccinated or even wear masks, we experienced a horrifying fall infection rate surge. And then it started to abate.

Until it didn’t.

We were riding home from a Thanksgiving visit with family when I saw a story on my phone about yet another COVID-19 variant, this one out of South Africa. Dubbed omicron, the variant proved to be wildly more contagious than delta, although it seemed to have welcome characteristics as well, such as causing milder illness. Still, omicron ripped through the population, even striking those who had been “triple-vaxxed,” though the rate of severe illness and death among that group was blessedly low.

So here we are again. Two years into the pandemic, we are older, sadder and wiser. The omicron surge has faded as rapidly as it began. But, as I write, some 959,000 Americans have now died of COVID, and the virus seems likely to be with us for years to come. A year ago, we might have exhaled in delight at the prospect of vaccinating our way out of all this. Now we’re just holding our breath.

“We will continue to combat the virus as we do other diseases. And because this is a virus that mutates and spreads, we will stay on guard,” Biden said cautiously in his State of the Union address last week. He added: “I cannot promise a new variant won’t come. But I can promise you we’ll do everything within our power to be ready if it does.”

That’s a long way from saying, as Trump did, that COVID-19 will miraculously “disappear.” It’s also a dialing back of the optimism Biden expressed last summer. But it’s realistic.

Unfortunately, the ongoing stresses caused by COVID-19 come amid other disorienting events. The economy is growing rapidly, but inflation is eating up wage gains. Political strife continues, with a sizable portion of the electorate claiming to believe Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The planet is still warming.

Looming over all of this is the terrible war being waged by Russia against Ukraine. We feel helpless as increasingly horrific images are beamed onto our televisions and digital devices.

Existence feels fragile. Looking back, it seems as though COVID-19 ushered in a new age of uncertainty. I hope we get through this together.

Lex Weaver of The Scope explains how to practice journalism as an act of service

Lex Weaver. Photo by Ruby Wallau via Northeastern University.

Lex Weaver is editor-in-chief of The Scope, published by Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. The Scope is a digital magazine focused on telling stories of justice, hope and resilience in Greater Boston, with an emphasis on communities of color. Their mission: practicing journalism as an act of service. They work to amplify the voices of those overlooked by traditional media.

The current version of The Scope launched in the fall of 2017 and was based on a brilliant prototype created by then graduate students Emily Hopkins (now a data reporter at ProPublica), Priyanka Ketkar (now a multimedia editor at Lakes District News in British Columbia) and Brilee Weaver (now a social media manager for Northeastern’s external affairs office.) As our Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman, The Scope’s first adviser, reminded us the other day, it was initially called The Docket, but we changed the name for a couple of reasons: 1) We wanted to cover more than criminal justice; 2) people outside of Northeastern thought we were a project of the law school.

Thanks to a Poynter-Koch Fellowship, The Scope has a full-time editor-in-chief. Catherine McGloin was The Scope’s first full-time editor and our inaugural Poynter fellow. She started in the summer of 2019 and did a tremendous amount of work to build both content and audience — a feature called Changemakers, editor coffee hours in Nubian Square and email newsletters were all her idea. She was followed by Ha Ta.

Lex has continued to help The Scope grow in terms of content, audience and partnerships.

In our weekly Quick Takes, I look at The Boston Globe as it turns 150, and Ellen Clegg reports on a California bill aimed at funding local public interest journalism.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

How events-as-journalism cast a New York Times story in a different light

It was an unremarkable story. On Jan. 26, The New York Times published a real-estate feature about Robbinsville, New Jersey, a community that has become increasingly prosperous and desirable since changing its name from Washington Township 15 years ago. But the article contained within it the kernel of an unpleasant truth that it would take a smaller news organization to highlight.

The Times story, by Dave Caldwell, included this:

A few years after the opening of the mixed-use Town Center development of shops, restaurants and residences, one of the first of its kind in the state, Amazon opened a fulfillment center in Robbinsville in 2014, and a corner of the township became a warehouse hub. So the township was able to build a high school, a municipal building and a police training facility without raising property taxes. That drew more residents and, in turn, more businesses….

The Amazon fulfillment center and other warehouses are on the eastern side of the Turnpike, providing separation from Town Center.

Pretty innocuous-sounding. But warehouse development is a hot issue in New Jersey — so hot that it was the subject of an hour-long event last Wednesday sponsored by NJ Spotlight News, one of the news organizations being tracked by Ellen Clegg and me for our book project, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Spotlight, a nonprofit that focuses on state politics and policy, merged several years ago with NJ PBS.

Events can be another way of doing journalism, and Spotlight does a lot of them. The one I attended, titled “Warehouse Growth in New Jersey: Impacts and Opportunities,” shed some unexpected light on the Times’ assertions. The keynote speaker, Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, explained it this way:

About a month ago, The New York Times had a great profile of Robbinsville and all its progress. And it gleefully pointed out that its proud warehouse development was sited far from its Town Center, as if that were some remarkable feat. What the Times didn’t mention was that Robbinsville residents enjoy all the tax benefits of those warehouses with none of their impacts. Because what they’ve managed to do is outsource them completely to Allentown and Upper Freehold, where they’ve dumped them on their border. The traffic, air pollution, crime and noise that are all centered on the residential areas of two communities that derive exactly none of their benefits that don’t stop at the municipal border. It’s a nice trick if you can manage it, and it’s Exhibit A for why we desperately need to think beyond municipal borders.

Rasmussen’s point was that regional and state governments need to regulate runaway warehouse development in New Jersey in order to prevent exactly the kind of situation that the Times praised — locating the facilities on the outskirts, where they detract from the quality of life in other communities.

Micah Rasmussen

Before sitting in on the webinar, I had no idea what an issue warehouse development is in New Jersey. I am not going to go into any details except to observe that Rasmussen and the panelists, moderated by Spotlight reporter Jon Hurdle, had plenty to talk about.

One of the panelists, Kim Gaddy, national environmental justice director of Clean Water Action and a New Jersey activist, spoke passionately about the disproportionate effects of warehouse development on communities of color.

“When we think about the proliferation of warehouses throughout our region and concentrated in Black, brown and low-wealth communities that have historically borne the brunt of this,” she said, “it is for this reason that we believe that we cannot talk about where or how warehouses are distributed but why is it that we need these facilities in the first place.”

Kim Gaddy

The rest of the panel comprised a representative from the warehouse industry; an official from the New Jersey League of Municipalities; and the executive director of New Jersey Future, a planning and land-use organization.

My purpose in attending was not to become an expert on New Jersey’s warehouse issues. Rather, I wanted to see how a small news organization makes use of events to extend its reach. The webinar itself reached nearly 250 people, and is now the subject of a story on Spotlight’s website. The discussion also provided ample material for follow-up stories.

There was nothing especially wrong with that New York Times story. But there was a lot more to it — and it takes journalism that is invested in the communities it covers to bring that to light.

Sociopathy on wheels along the Minuteman Bikeway

The Minuteman Bikeway, looking west at Lake Street in East Arlington.

One of the best parts about living just north and west of Boston is easy access to the Minuteman Bikeway, a 10-mile paved path that extends from the Alewife T station, at the Cambridge-Arlington line, to Bedford Center. There are also spurs to Somerville, Belmont and Concord. I’ve biked, run and walked on it many times since we moved back to the area seven years ago.

On Saturday, though, I saw something I’d never witnessed before. I was running west, coming up to Lake Street in East Arlington, when the driver of a car pulled up to the path and proceeded to drive onto it, make a three-point turn, and then head off. I don’t think it was possible that he was confused about what he was doing. It was pure sociopathy.

I tweeted about it, and it went modestly viral:

It turns out that there are people in East Arlington who’ve been tracking such incidents — and that what I witnessed was actually predicted back in 2017, when plans were unveiled to improve the Minuteman crossing at Lake Street.

https://twitter.com/PetruSofio/status/1500207823141195776

A couple of years ago I was running along a different stretch of the Minuteman at night, with a headlamp, when a driver lurched onto the path and started heading toward me. In that case I think he realized he’d made a mistake and appeared to be trying to figure out how to get off the path.

So what could be done? I suggested a couple of concrete barriers, but someone advised that you need to be able to get ambulances down the path. Someone else suggested collapsible bollards.

Certainly you need something. Riding your bike on a busy city street is dangerous, even when decent bike lanes have been established. You ought to feel as though you’re safe on a designated bike path.

Why Trump got off

This very long story in The New York Times on why Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg decided not to prosecute Donald Trump comes down to two things. Prosecutors couldn’t flip Trump’s money guy, Allen Weisselberg. And Bragg didn’t want to move ahead with a trial in which the star witness would be Michael Cohen, Trump’s thuggish former lawyer.

Fantasies about Trump in stripes aside, that sounds like a smart decision to me.

The Boston Globe marks 150 years as a growing and profitable news organization

There’s a bit of news in Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory’s message marking the paper’s 150th anniversary today: he writes that the Globe now has “about 250 staffers in its newsroom and on the editorial pages.”

That’s up significantly from a few years ago. In 2018, the Globe had a full-time staff of about 220 journalists, which means that the size of the newsroom has increased by nearly 14% over the past four years. Regular readers know that the paper has been boosting its coverage of climate change and technology, among other topics.

McGrory and owners John and Linda Henry deserve to take a bow for the Globe’s renaissance in recent years. After buying the paper from the New York Times Co. in 2013, the Henrys compiled an uneven record in rebuilding the Globe as a sustainable business. When I checked in with John Henry in mid-2018, the paper was still losing money and had fallen short of its goal of selling 100,000 digital subscriptions. Henry was forced to declare that he had no plans to sell.

Six months later, Henry said the Globe had finally become profitable. Today the paper has some 235,000 paid digital subscribers, making it a leader among large regional newspapers, and has far more reporting capacity than most of its peer news organizations, many of which are owned by cost-obsessed hedge funds.

I’ve been a Globe reader for nearly 50 years. It’s a very different institution compared to the pre-internet glory days, when it covered national and international news with its own reporters and had a staff — at its 2000 peak — of about 550 full-timers.

Yet it remains one of the best, most deeply staffed papers in the country. It’s also evidence that committed, deep-pockets local ownership can be the difference between a thriving journalistic enterprise and a decimated newspaper hanging on for survival.

Muzzle follow-up: Rhode Island Supreme Court strikes down ‘civil death’ law

Peter Neronha

A Rhode Island law that was the subject of a 2021 GBH News Muzzle Award has been struck down by that state’s Supreme Court.

The Associated Press reports that Rhode Island’s “civil death” law, under which anyone serving a life sentence was regarded as dead with respect to having access to the justice system, “deprives those persons imprisoned at the ACI for life of their right to bring civil actions in our state courts.” (The ACI is the Adult Correctional Institutions.) The bizarre law stated:

Every person imprisoned in the adult correctional institutions for life shall, with respect to all rights of property, to the bond of matrimony and to all civil rights and relations of any nature whatsoever, be deemed to be dead in all respects, as if his or her natural death had taken place at the time of conviction.

Last July I awarded a New England Muzzle to Rhode Island’s attorney general, Peter Neronha, a Democrat, for his overzealous defense of a law that didn’t exist in any other state. Among other things, Neronha argued that life in prison — or, for that matter, the death penalty — are more severe punishments than civil death yet pose no constitutional issues.

In fact, as the Rhode Island ACLU pointed out, there are punishments that many would regard as worse than life in prison, or even death. As the ACLU’s state executive director, Steven Brown, explained, civil death means that “an inmate … serving a life sentence could be waterboarded, beaten mercilessly by guards, or held in a cell and denied all food and water, but have no access to our state courts to challenge these egregious violations of his constitutional rights.”

In a press release, the Rhode Island ACLU hailed Wednesday’s decision as “an important victory for the principle that the courts should be open to all for redress.”

Pundits wrestle with a State of the Union address overshadowed by war

White House photo

Previously published at GBH News.

The dichotomy at the heart of any State of the Union address was on full display Tuesday night. The president’s annual message to Congress is a major news event. Yet it is fundamentally a political exercise.

So when serious news from the outside world intrudes, cognitive dissonance ensues. That was surely the case during President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union as well as in the subsequent coverage.

How did the pundits handle it? For the most part, they treated it as two speeches — a sober, even stirring call to support the Ukrainian people as they fight desperately to hold off an unprovoked invasion by Russian forces, and a domestic-policy address aimed at shoring up Biden’s miserable poll numbers.

“It was as inspiring as any section of a State of the Union, in large part because it was about something bigger and more compelling than politics as usual,” wrote Washington post columnist Jennifer Rubin of Biden’s opening, which focused on Ukraine. “Moreover, it was a rare display of bipartisanship, and a reminder that in facing external threats we can rise to the occasion…. From there on out, bipartisanship receded.”

The real-news-versus-politics divide was particularly acute in the way the war in Ukraine and the State of the Union address were played on the front pages of our three leading newspapers. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal all led with Ukraine. The Journal didn’t even place Biden’s address above the fold.

Originality was hard to find in my post-speech scan of the coverage. One exception was Ezra Klein of the Times, who noted that Biden did little — nothing, really — to prepare Americans for the economic effects of the tough sanctions that he and other Western leaders have imposed on the Putin regime.

“For all Biden’s resolve on Tuesday night, he did not try to prepare Americans to sacrifice on behalf of Ukrainians in the coming months, if only by paying higher prices at the pump,” Klein wrote. “Instead, he said, ‘my top priority is getting prices under control.’ That’s the tension Putin is exploiting.”

Divisions on the right were apparent in both the House chamber and in the subsequent commentary. During Biden’s speech, far-right Reps. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene disgraced themselves by interrupting the president just as he was about to invoke the memory of his late son, Beau Biden, whose death from brain cancer may have been related to his exposure to toxic fumes while he was serving in the military.

Writing for the ultraconservative PJ Media site, Matt Margolis made the same point somewhat more artfully, criticizing Biden for talking about his dead son rather than the 13 American soldiers who were killed by terrorists during last summer’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. There was, Margolis said, “not a single word about the withdrawal” in Biden’s speech. “Not a single word to honor those who died because of his incompetence.”

At National Review, a more mainstream conservative publication, Dan McLaughlin praised Biden on Ukraine but dismissed the rest of his address, writing, “You could tell the pandemic is really and truly over when we saw a return to Democrats demonizing the pharma companies that gave us life-saving vaccines.”

McLaughlin also attempted to turn the Big Lie on its head, taking Biden to task for speaking out against voter-suppression efforts fueled by pro-Trump Republicans who dare not question the former president’s false assertions that he actually won the 2020 election. “This is hardly the first time Biden has cast doubt on the legitimacy of our elections,” McLaughlin wrote in a truly mind-bending line.

Meanwhile, Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark, a Never Trump conservative site, summarized the moment in a pre-speech assessment beneath a headline that read “The West Is Winning, Russia Is Losing, and Biden Is Doing a Good Job.”

Although Biden noticeably did not move to the center, doubling down on popular but stalled-out ideas such as a $15 minimum wage, child-care assistance and controls on drug prices, he nevertheless invoked the moderate, unifying appeal that carried him to victory over Trump.

David A. Graham of The Atlantic wrote that “rather than try to convince Americans not to believe what they’re feeling, or claim credit for things they don’t see, Biden offered them a promise that things are about to get better. To make the case, he tacked toward the middle — with a few pointed detours — delivering a speech that hews closer to the ‘popularist’ movement in the Democratic Party than to its more progressive contingent.”

“Popularism,” in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the idea that the Democrats should de-emphasize the more divisive aspects of their agenda in favor of those with broad support. Examples offered by Graham were Biden’s calls for more police funding and keeping kids in school during COVID-19 surges.

According to a snap poll conducted by CBS News, the speech was popular with those who were watching, with 78% saying they approved of his speech and just 22% disapproving. But, CBS cautioned, “As we’ve seen with previous presidents’ State of the Union speeches, those who watched tonight are more likely to be from the president’s own political party, boosting approval of the speech.”

In other words, whatever political benefit Biden receives from his address is likely to be short-lived. His popularity — and, thus, the Democratic Party’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections — are likely to be grounded in matters that are largely beyond his control, such as the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the ongoing battle against COVID and the persistence of inflation in an otherwise strong economy.

For one night, though, the stage was his. It’s fair to say that he made the most of it.

The Doctor is in: Why a respected media analyst decided to start a local news site

Ken Doctor. Via Newsonomics.

For a number of years, Ken Doctor was among our most valuable observers of the news business through his Newsonomics website and his must-read articles at Nieman Lab.

A former Knight Ridder executive, Doctor recently rejoined the ranks of working journalists. He’s the founder and CEO of Lookout Local, a digital local news site in Santa Cruz, California. Ken hopes that Lookout Local can provide a model of what works in the local news ecosystem. He says he wants to change the conversation.

In Quick Takes for the week, I share my crowdsourced research on independent news organizations in Massachusetts, and Ellen Clegg unpacks a study published by an economic think tank in Cambridge that quantifies the impact when hedge funds acquire local newspapers.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Putin may be just getting started

This is what I’m worried about. Russia screwed up and lost the first week of the war. But they have endless capacity to ratchet things up and unleash wave after wave of hell on the people of Ukraine. From Talking Points Memo:

The Russian military is still holding a lot of their capacity in reserve. Even if things are going relatively poorly after a week they have lots of capacity to intensify their assault, lots of ability to make the onslaught much more brutal and effective.