| Number 252 | April 16, 2004 |
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This Week:
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| It’s WEEK TWO of the
* NYGAARD NOTES PLEDGE DRIVE! * Thanks, once again, to those of you who have already sent in your pledges of support for Nygaard Notes. The rest of you apparently need just a little more encouragement to “do the right thing,” and join the legions of Nygaardians who have already put their money where their mouths are. So, this week I offer you the second installment of “Why Is Nygaard Notes Unique?” Even if you’ve already made your pledge, or don’t plan to make a pledge, this might be worth reading, as it gives some ideas about what an “alternative” media project might be, or might do. In the era of mega-media and infomercials, this is worth thinking about. And, just think: YOU, RIGHT NOW can become a part of the movement for independent, values-based journalism that is changing the world from the bottom up. All you need to do is make out a check to “Nygaard Notes,” and mail it to:
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Greetings, Last week’s editor’s note was really long. So, that’s it for this week’s editor’s note. Nygaard |
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It seems that, in the wake of a flurry of scandals involving plagiarism and lying by reporters for newspapers all over the place (including USA Today’s Pulitzer-prize finalist Jack Kelley, who turned out to be making up most of his award-winning stories), the nation’s editors have started thinking a little differently about their jobs. That’s what an article from the March 22nd New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) was about. It was headlined, “Newspaper Editors Move To Tighten Safeguards.” The first quotation from that piece is from Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of the Washington Post, who the Times claimed explained the phenomenon by saying
Another editor was quoted, as well, this one from a Missouri paper called The Sedalia Democrat, where it was found that a reporter, Michael Kinney, “had copied the work of others without attribution in at least two dozen movie reviews and sports columns.” The editor ended up firing the reporter, and then, the Times tells us, “He said he was a different editor as a result of the experience.” Different in what way? Here, apparently, is what he said:
It’s hard to imagine what he thought his “responsibilities” were before that point, and the Times didn’t comment. |
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As promised last week, here are even MORE reasons why you might want to donate actual dollars to support this project known as Nygaard Notes. NYGAARD NOTES IS AN EXAMPLE OF “VALUES-BASED JOURNALISM.” The trendy phrase in mainstream journalism circles of late is “advocacy journalism.” This is defined as “Journalism in which the writer or the publication expresses a subjective view or promotes a certain cause.” That’s worthwhile—and certainly better than pretending to be “objective”—but Nygaard Notes does not do this. I practice instead what I have called “Values-based Journalism,” in which I use my core values of Solidarity, Justice, Compassion, and Democracy to guide my investigations and analyses of current events and trends. As I explained in my essay “A Word About Bias,” facts and quotations can only be truly “understood” if one has a clear set of values to use in the service of thinking about them. I actually believe that one cannot think clearly WITHOUT using values. For more on this, you could go back and read my essay in Nygaard Notes #65 called “Morals, Ethics, Values, and Thinking.” Or, you could just read Nygaard Notes consistently, since I try to model this “values-based journalism” on a weekly basis. NYGAARD NOTES IS PERSONAL AND RESPONSIVE. I can’t tell you how many people contact me with questions about issues that they have been working on in their communities. Just a couple of weeks ago I heard from a reader in Silicon Valley, who had a fascinating tale to tell of being laid off from his high-paying tech job, refinancing his home, and living off the cash from that sale while searching for work. He had seen an article in the newspaper about the federal budget deficit, and was making connections between his own lived experience and the larger economic issues that are in the newspapers every day. “I wonder,” he said, “how long the current situation [of living off of debt, on the personal and the national level] can be sustained.” He spoke of how he had watched the “dot-com boom” of the 90s and saw how unsustainable it appeared to be, wondering if “I was clueless or mass delusion was epidemic.” He is not clueless, and I was able to document the mass delusion about which he was wondering. He wrote back saying, “I don't think I've ever gotten a personal reply as well-researched as that!” This happens all the time, and it’s not a matter of me having extra time on my hands. In the process of researching my response to this reader who took the time to contact me, I learned some important things that will inform my future writing on the economy. So, by making myself a resource for this reader, I make myself a better resource for the larger readership. NYGAARD NOTES SPEAKS PLAIN LANGUAGE. Another reader wrote to me last week, saying, “I'd like to thank you for your weekly newsletter. You explain your topics so clearly and concisely and in such a way that even the most naive person could understand what you are talking about.” Since Nygaard Notes is intended, in part, to counter the dangerous illusion that one must be an “expert” on every issue in order to deserve the chance to have a voice in the affairs of the community/state/nation, this comment means a lot to me. Nygaard Notes routinely demystifies some pretty complex issues, which is why this reader said that the essays in the Notes “have helped me more clearly stand my ground.” This is an often-heard refrain from the readers of Nygaard Notes. NYGAARD NOTES IS FUNNY. At least, I think it is. Some of the letters I get indicate that there are readers who do not always “get” my jokes, but many people do get them. Humor is a great force for healing, and for maintaining one’s sanity. As Emma Goldman is reported to have said, “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” Dancing, singing, laughing—these things are the leavening in the tough bread of life, no? And that’s how the pages of Nygaard Notes, filled as they often are with so many of the brutal realities of modern life, can still, somehow, be entertaining. And this is part of why I am often told by readers that “I have given up reading newspapers, but I still read Nygaard Notes!” NYGAARD NOTES HAS DEPTH. Since no fact has any meaning until it is connected to a larger context, Nygaard Notes always tries to give some background and context for the facts it reports. Whether it is traveling back to World War I for context on last year’s attack on Iraq, or explaining the theory of supply-side economics as the basis for the federal budget, or giving a list of little-known websites for further research, Nygaard Notes tries to give people the tools to not only see the facts, but to understand them. |
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It is a fact of political life in the United States that there are many, many Individualist and Competitive media commentators out there, from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News. Individualist and Competitive is my phrase for the so-called “right-wing,” for which I use the initials “IC.” Part of the function of the IC media is to take pieces of news that support their agenda and repeat them endlessly. So, when there is an item in the news about some failure in the realm of public education, for example, these media outlets will repeat it, feature it in their talk shows, analyze it, and repeat, repeat, repeat until it is a part of the public discourse on the subject. The original item may or may not be true, but that doesn’t matter. The point for these commentators is to reinforce what they want people to believe is a larger “truth.” (In this case, that public education is a failure and should be replaced by a privatized system.) Since there are so many of these IC outlets, and since they have attracted a great deal of money in support of their work (directly, from wealthy backers, and indirectly, from advertisers seeking to reach their audiences), they collectively form what has been called the political “echo chamber.” This “echo chamber”—the function of which is the repetition and reinforcement of certain types of ideas along with the ridiculing of other ideas—has succeeded in moving the political “center” in the United States to the so-called “right” over the past 30 years. It’s all been a part of a quite conscious and intentional plan by wealthy adherents to the IC ideology, and the think tanks and media outlets that they sponsor. That plan has been so successful that we now have George W. Bush in the White House. But I think there is a great danger in focusing on George W. Bush as an individual. The success of the long-running ideological campaign of the IC folks is not that we have George W. as the “President” of the United States. It is that we have someone like George W. as the President. By focusing their work on philosophy and ideology rather than reacting only to individual issues, the IC crowd has succeeded, to a large extent, in winning the hearts and minds of the U.S. electorate. All of the arguments of Bush and his supporters rest on the acceptance of a philosophy of highly-competitive individualism. Social Security? The answer is individual accounts. Health care? Individuals need individual insurance policies. Employment? Every individual should be a “contract” or temporary worker. Taxes? Cut taxes and leave the money in the hands of individuals. There is an ideology that ties all these things together; it’s not “crazy.” I have proposed a different ideology that I suggest forms a coherent philosophical unity for those who are opposed to the Individualist and Competitive philosophy. I call this alternative philosophy the Social and Cooperative (SC) model. Rather than competing with others for, say, a good education for one’s children, the SC philosophy says that we need a universal guarantee of good education – one in which there is no place for “winners” and “losers.” Social Security is seen as a social response to the social problems of disability, retirement support, and loss of employment income – the SC philosophy says that an individualized system makes no sense in response to a social problem. On the philosophical level, the SC point of view believes that the needs of the individual only make sense when they are consistent with the needs of the society as a whole. As Jim Hightower puts it: Everybody’s better off when everybody’s better off. There are many examples to support this perspective: Every individual wants their kids to have a good education, and the society as a whole benefits when its citizens as a group are well-educated. Every individual wants good health care, and the society as a whole benefits when more of its citizens are healthy. Every individual wants income security, and the society as a whole benefits—in so very many ways, from crime reduction to increased tax revenues to less mental illness and domestic abuse and more—when economic desperation is reduced. In contrast, many individuals want to be millionaires, but is society better off when more of them are? And everyone wants to pay less in taxes, but... you see my point. All of the above statements can and should be debated. And all of them have facts, statistics, and studies to support them; they appear “radical” only when viewed through the currently-dominant IC lens. But you’ll rarely hear any of these ideas respectfully discussed in the public discourse of this country. They don’t resonate in the current echo chamber. Nygaard Notes is a part of a different kind of echo chamber, one that exists to give credibility to ideas from the Social and Cooperative perspective, one that’s radically at odds with the IC agenda of Limbaugh, Bush, and their ilk. But rather than do it through ridicule and cheap shots, Nygaard Notes does it through well-documented, values-based journalism, a journalism that brings together the heart with the mind, each one strengthening the other. Readers can see, I hope, that Nygaard Notes is not primarily concerned with complaining or with laying blame. The concern here is applying my core values of Compassion, Solidarity, Justice, and Democracy—the values I think are most consistent with a Social and Cooperative philosophy—to the issues of the day. My voice aims to echo the many other voices who are interested in going beyond our anger and envisioning a different kind of country, a different kind of world. Together, we can do it, and we can see that the selfish and shortsighted Individualist and Competitive philosophy becomes only a footnote in our history of progress and evolution. |