| Number 545 | January 14, 2014 |
This Week: The Year's Top News Stories for 2013 |
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Greetings, I'm beginning to think that this year-end focus on "The Top News Stories" might be a regular feature of Nygaard Notes. Besides just being interesting and fun to read (I hope!), the practice of reflecting and attempting to place the day-to-day news in a larger context seems worthwhile. And there's another reason for engaging in this exercise, perhaps the most important one: It helps us get in the habit of asking our own questions. I often remind people that journalism is primarily the writing down of the answers to questions. Which questions? That's what we should always be thinking about. When we take news articles at face value, we accept the premises and priorities of the people who produce those articles—that is, we accept the questions that they decide to ask—and often those premises and priorities are not the same as ours. The antidote is to formulate our own questions about "what is going on" before we look at or listen to a news story. That way, we can know what answers we are looking for. And, over time, we'll get to know which news outlets most often answer our questions. In this way we will, over time, get better at selecting which news sources—among the trillions available—are the best ones for us to read or watch. Note that I'm not saying that this process will lead us to find news outlets that we can uncritically "believe" or "trust." Remember, this is not about finding the "truth." It's about getting the best answers to the best questions, the answers that will allow us to understand what it is that needs doing, and how we can help it get done. So, this issue is all about the question: What is worth paying attention to as we say goodbye to the year 2013, and hello to the new year? Despite the unusual length of this issue of the Notes, I had no room to include a piece I wrote for the political newsletter Counterpunch. It's about a socialized health care experiment underway in Montana. (Really!) It appeared a few days ago, and if you want to read it, you can find it HERE. So, with this extra-long issue of Nygaard Notes, I welcome the new readers this week, and I wish a wonderful, transformative New Year to each and every reader, new and old! Nygaard |
"Quote" of the Week: Two-thirds of the world's population short of waterThis week's "Quote" comes from page 21 of a British magazine called "The Week: The Best of the U.S. and International Media." It's kind of like a TIME or a Newsweek, I guess. My neighbor gave it to me. Anyhow, page 21 was the "Health and Science" page, containing five very short items. One of them was about "vast reserves of freshwater" that have been found beneath the seabed of the continental shelves off of Australia, China, North America, and South Africa. There's lots of it, apparently. The very last sentence was this one: "By 2025, two thirds of the world's population will no longer have a secure water supply, according to the United Nations." What!? I did not know that. Nor did I know that we are nearing the end of The Water for Life Decade 2005-2015, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 23rd, 2003. A little research reveals that the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) confirms The Week's offhand comment, stating it this way: "By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world's population could be living under water stressed conditions." Front-page news? I think so. Read more about existing and predicted water scarcity on the UNDESA website. |
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Every December the Associated Press surveys its U.S. editors and news directors to determine the Top Ten News Stories of the year. Here is their list for 2013: The Number One story was the "HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL," followed by the BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING, and the VATICAN CHANGEOVER. Rounding out the Top Ten were: The DIVIDED CONGRESS; NSA SPYING; GAY MARRIAGE; NELSON MANDELA; The PHILIPPINES TYPHOON; SYRIA, and; MISSING WOMEN FOUND. Most of the stories will be familiar to readers, I think. That last one (Missing Women Found) was the story of the young women in Cleveland who had been kept in captivity for between 9 and 11 years, and made their escape in May. Their captor hung himself in his jail cell, so we're told, on September 3rd. As always, we can learn something by considering the stories that did not make the list this year. I'll mention just a few. While the amazing spectacle of Hurricane Yolanda (Haiyan) that hit the Philippines in November was a big story, the much bigger story of which it is a part—human-induced Global Climate change—did not rise to the status of "Top Story" in the minds of the media establishment. So many parts to that story! A "1,000-year flood" was reported in Colorado in September. On May 31st a tornado went through El Reno, OK, breaking the record for widest tornado ever recorded, at 2.6 miles wide. In October we saw North American Storm complex, which was a blizzard and tornado outbreak that affected the Northwest, Rockies, and much of the Midwest. And finally, the failure of the UN Climate Summit in November. I could list many more. The July acquittal by a Florida jury of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, wasn't considered a Top Story, nor was the larger story of the history and current reality of racism in the United States, how it works and what people are doing about it. We could also include here the ongoing efforts at voter suppression (and the resistance to it) that affects not only people of color, but also poor people, young people, old people, and people with disabilities. Surely a Top Story, no? There are still 84,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan (as of December), more than 50,000 of which are U.S. troops. After almost eleven years of U.S. occupation (the longest "war" in U.S. history), the "cultivation and production [of opium] hit record levels this year" in Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan is somehow not a Top Story. In fact, the Voice of Russia reports that it remains "extremely difficult if not impossible to ascertain the real situation in the country." Is it true that Iraq is on "the brink of collapse," as has been reported? Surely the multi-year U.S. occupation gives the U.S. special responsibilities here. A Top Story? Neither the death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, nor the remarkable political evolution in Latin America of which he was a part, rose to the status of Top Story in 2013. Ah, the list of Non-top Top Stories goes on: War was averted in Iran! The Rise of Austerity and the human suffering that it spawns was a big story. Within a week of the Top Story of the Boston Marathon, we saw 14 people killed in the explosion of a Texas fertilizer plant, and also the collapse of the Rana Plaza industrial complex in Bangladesh (where clothes were made for sale in the West, including the U.S.) which killed at least 1,100 people and injured more than 2,500. Yet only Boston was a Top Story? How about the story of 26,000 Military Sexual Assaults—over 70 Sex Crimes Per Day—that was reported in early May? Fast food workers around the nation organized to protest a lack of respect, and to demand an increase in the minimum wage. Top Stories, all. The list could go on forever, it seems, but now it's time to consider an entirely different way to think about The Year's Top Stories, what they are and what they might be in a radically-reconfigured media system. |
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It was back in 2011 (NN #474) that I first suggested an alternative approach to thinking about The Year's Top News Stories (TYTNS). As it stands, the criteria used to select a story for "Top Story" status seem somewhat arbitrary, but the process seems to boil down to popularity. That's another way of saying that a story's elevation to "Top Story" status is determined, in large part, by The Market. If a lot of people "buy" it, then it becomes a Top News Story. Well, that's one way to do it. As an alternative, I suggested, let's take seriously the old adage about journalism being "the first rough draft of history," and look at the news of 2013 as if we were historians. What would be the Big Themes of the time? What chapters would be in the 2013 chapter of our history book? This would have little to do with the "popularity" of stories, as many eye-catching stories really have little significance in the bigger scheme of things. Most journalists would have a hard time with this alternative approach, and that's because it necessarily involves all kinds of value judgements and decisions about what makes something significant. This conflicts with the "objectivity" dogma in the news business, which says that journalists are somehow "neutral," and simply record the facts as they see them, with no value judgements or prioritizing. This has always seemed fundamentally wrong to me, since decisions must be made constantly about what is in the news and how it is understood, and there's nothing objective about that. I suppose we could pretend that such decisions are made by "the market," based on universally-shared values. But, even as I write those words I start to chuckle. So let's take responsibility for our decisions, and attempt to come up with a list of the Big Themes of our times, then attempt to designate The Year's Top News Stories based on the degree to which they help us understand each of those themes. You, dear reader, can and should come up with your own Big Themes, but here are some of mine: * What did this year's news tell us about how our society distributes its wealth? * After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was common to hear people refer to the United States as "The World's Only Superpower." Now, not so much. Which 2013 stories help us to understand what's happening to that power? What does this mean for the United States? The world? * Is the health and vitality of democracy in the U.S. gaining strength, or is it losing strength? Or both? * This is related to the previous theme, but since capitalism is bigger than the United States—functioning as the de facto World System—it's worth making it a chapter in our history of the year, and asking how the news media dealt with the issue. * What information came to light in 2013 that best helps us understand our changing climate, the story that may trump all other stories before too long? * As a candidate, Ronald Reagan made famous the question: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" It's a good question: How are people in the United States doing this year? Are things getting better? Worse? How do we compare to people elsewhere? So we might title the chapters of our book, The First Draft of The History of 2013, as follows: 1. INEQUALITY AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION The following article gives a hint of what might be included in each chapter of our History of the Year 2013 as it played out in the news.
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You might be able to guess that some of The Year's Top News Stories (TYTNS) as selected by the Associated Press would also be on the Nygaard list of TYTNS. Health Care Overhaul, for example, and Gay Marriage, and Syria. But even with those stories, the issue is not so much that they were widely covered, as much as it is how they were covered. How is it that, in the tsunami of coverage of Obamacare, for example, so many people still don't understand how the U.S. health-care system works? Why do the specific successes in the struggle for "Gay Marriage" make the list of Top Stories, while the larger context and struggles for human rights for LGBTQIA people are so poorly covered? In the end, a focus on Big Themes instead of Big Stories calls into question the whole idea of a "Top Ten" list of stories. A much more useful exercise might be to publish a summary of some of the stories that best help us illuminate the Big Themes of our times. And, as you'll see in the following summary, some stories illuminate more than one theme. When we look at our interconnected world using a Systems Orientation, we expect such crossovers and connections. It's all One Big System, after all. We have to break it down into smaller units because our brains can't think about everything at once, but that doesn't change the integrated reality. In a new media world, once we've agreed on the Big Themes that we want our daily news to illuminate, then we could set up "Beats" that would be covered by our working journalists. A "Democracy Beat," for instance, a "Climate Beat," and so on, each of which could make up a chapter in our history book. Here are some ideas for those chapters—the Themes that define them and the Beats that would be needed to construct them—for the year just ended. Chapter One: INEQUALITY The big story here is that the general population, and the media that serves it, began to talk about the issue of inequality in 2013, even to the point that some in the mass media began to notice all of the work that grassroots movements have been doing for years, or decades, or forever. Many aspects of this story came into view in 2013. A major study came out in October noting that "More than half of fast-food workers rely on public assistance programs, costing taxpayers $7 billion a year." (Google "Fast Food, Poverty Wages" to see the 26-page report.) Such public subsidies to large corporations (which allow the corporations to pay poverty wages and thus boost profits) are nothing new, but the documentation was noted a bit more broadly than might have been the case in the past, in part due to the efforts of activists working on campaigns to raise the legally-mandated minimum wage. Yes! Magazine on December 27th summarized a few highlights about efforts to address wealth distribution in the U.S.: "Voters this year passed minimum wage laws in SeaTac, Washington, ($15 an hour) and the state of New Jersey. An overwhelming majority favors raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour. Domestic workers won the right to a minimum wage after years of organizing." At its September convention, the AFL-CIO continued to expand its focus beyond dues-paying union members, pledging to "work hand in hand with community partners" for the rights of all workers and families, even unorganized and difficult-to-organize workers like domestic workers, independent contractors, and freelancers. The decades-long decline in the share of national income going to labor continued in 2013, as was documented in two major reports released in September: "The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share" from the Brookings Institution and "Labor's Declining Share of Income and Rising Inequality" from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Big Stories. Contributing to the rising inequality in the U.S. and globally is the continued business push for "trade agreements" like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and the alarming-but-unreported Trade in Services Agreement.
News of the declining power of the United States—and the jockeying for world power that accompanies it—are regularly seen in the daily news, although rarely are the dots connected within the news cycle. Events or stories in 2013 that illuminate this subject would include the dynamics that allowed us to avoid direct military intervention in Syria, as well as the tortured negotiations about long-term U.S. plans in Afghanistan. In a story about Iran and the U.S., the January 6th New York Times (I know, it's 2014 and this is supposed to be about big stories in 2013!) reported that "The United States, reluctant to intervene in bloody, inconclusive conflicts, is seeing its regional influence decline, while Iraq, which cost the Americans $1 trillion and more than 4,000 lives, is growing increasingly unstable." While it's reported as a story about the Obama administration and its quandary, the story here is the decline in influence of a nation that, not too long ago, was widely considered to be The World's Only Superpower. Remember? China appears to be strengthening its status as the Great Power in Asia, which is being (mis)reported in this country as a "threat" to the United States. Latin America is filled with stories of the increasing assertiveness of national governments as they challenge their status as economic colonies of the U.S. From Brazil to Bolivia to Ecuador to Venezuela and beyond, the increasing regional autonomy will continue to evolve in the absence of Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013. Our media reported on very little of this in 2013. The costs—both to the U.S. and to the world—of maintaining the formal structures of Empire remain almost unremarked in this country. The goals and activities of the 700-800 military bases maintained by the U.S. in more than 60 countries should be common knowledge, yet few people in this country even know they exist, let alone what they are supposed to be, or are actually, doing. Ongoing challenges to the undemocratic United Nations governance system, with its U.S.-dominated and veto-bound Security Council, continue to evolve as U.S. power declines. And here I'd like to give a shout out to Nygaard Notes reader Joe Schwartzberg, whose book on democratizing the UN was just published in November. Check it out: "Transforming the United Nations System: Designs for a Workable World."
Which stories in 2013 helped us answer this question: Are we a more democratic nation now than we were a year ago? The U.S. media typically reduces the idea of democracy to its most formal elements, such as elections and the activities of the legislative and executive leaders who win those elections. That's all well and good, but a focus on the capacity of people to govern themselves—to act as agents of change instead of simply spectators or donation-givers—would lead to a whole other set of stories, stories that rarely get into the daily news cycle. What are the structures that people are building, and using, to affect public policy and economic practices? What are the many ways that people are organizing to make things happen? What are the exciting strategies that people are coming up with in order to address the issues that concern them? Many of these reports could probably be categorized under the issues that are being addressed: The development and growth of Idle No More in Canada, for example, might be reported on the Humans and The Environment Beat. And the strategic decisions and initiatives undertaken by organized labor might be reported by the Social Health reporters or fall to the Inequality Beat. But the Democracy Beat would look at them, too, because the strength, vitality, and effectiveness of grassroots, people-powered projects—whatever the issues at hand—tell us a lot about the strength, vitality, and effectiveness of our democracy. On the flip side, what is happening in the U.S. to inhibit the possibilities for popular self-government? Here's where reporters assigned to the Democracy Beat might report on voter suppression, for example. (Although little-reported, at least 92 bills to restrict voting rights were introduced in 33 states in 2013.) The Democracy Beat would cover the news about spying by the National Security State and the spectacular whistle-blowing stories. What were the effects on democracy in 2013 in regard to government oversight, transparency of government operations, money in politics, and the various instances of harassment, detention, and threats against dissidents in this country? Lots of Big Stories here!
Various extreme weather events occurred in 2013—as they do in any year—and not all of them are due directly to global warming. Or, at least, it's hard to tell. Still, reporters on the Climate Beat in 2013 would have noted the relationships between the specific events and the larger patterns. Some of them I mentioned earlier, and to that list we can add FIRES: The huge Colorado wildfires in June and July; the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona in June; the Idyllwild Fire in California in July; and thousands of other wildfires. Major wildfires were seen in Australia as that nation had its hottest year on record. In addition, some major news came out in the form of official and less-than-official reports documenting trends and patterns. I reported on three of them in the last Nygaard Notes. One report noted that such problems as "starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies" are "likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change..." That was in November. I noted two other reports that came out in October, one talking about serious threats to the world's oceans, the other documenting that air pollution is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. I never got around to reporting the May 12th announcement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that "the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 400 parts per million." Meteorologist Michael Mann tells us that, at this rate, we will soon see "dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate." Those are just a few major milestones. This would be a long chapter, and the Climate Beat would be very, very busy supplying the information to complete it.
In a sense, we really do get quite a bit of news about the state of capitalism, what with the reporting on the Great Recession, the hijinx in the financial markets, the ups and downs of the stock markets, stories about austerity and disappearing pensions and factory offshoring and outrageous executive pay scales and all the rest. As it happens, the Opinion page in my local paper, the Star Tribune on Sunday January 5th had a pair of lengthy commentaries under the headline: THE STATE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM. So the idea of talking about "the system" is not completely out of the question in the corporate media. But the change that we would see in the New World of media that I am trying to imagine here would have less to do with the frequency and quantity of articles about "capitalism," and more to do with what I call the media's PET. That stands for the Placement, Emphasis, and Tone chosen when reporting a story. That is, when reporting on events or other news, the popular understanding of the events is shaped by WHERE the articles appear (Placement), WHY they are considered newsworthy (Emphasis), and HOW the responsible journalist feels about the issue (Tone). Here's a great example. There's been a cascade of news in recent weeks of a really gigantic theft of personal financial data from the records of Target, the really gigantic retail corporation. Up to 110 million people may be at risk of identity theft, credit scams, and who-knows-what else. The Washington Post quoted a security analyst saying that "These criminals are building up dossiers on individuals." Dossiers for use in theft and fraud on a massive scale. This is big news around the country, but especially here in my home state of Minnesota, which is the home of the Target Corporation. In fact, the data theft was the lead story in this week's Sunday edition of the local daily The Star Tribune. Here's the headline: "Hefty Bill Is In the Cards for Target: The Financial Hit for Credit Card Breach Could Run into Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for the Self-insured Retailer." Here's the lead paragraph: "The massive consumer data breach at Target Corp. potentially exposes the company to years of litigation that could eventually cost it hundreds of millions of dollars." Notice the PET here? Placement on the front page, Tone of near-panic, but the Emphasis is on the cost to Target! In other words, this story is newsworthy because it may cost the corporation a lot of money, and expose it to huge numbers of lawsuits. So we learn that the breach "significantly strengthens the legal cases of banks, credit unions and individuals looking to sue Target." And the scale of the theft "could lead to more-extensive fraud and greater legal exposure for Target..." And they tell us that "the cost to Target [of fixing the damage] could be astronomical." The article has no quotes from consumers, there is no list of "things you can do" if your credit information has been hacked, no pondering of the costs and consequences to consumers who, after all, are the victims in all of this. The Star Tribune, by placing the emphasis on the costs to Target, sends the message that the corporation is the victim, rather than the party guilty of the "fraud, negligence, and invasion of privacy" that the article informs us would be the basis for the potential lawsuits that are likely in Target's future. Completely out of the picture, as far as I have been able to see, is any reporting on the risks and rewards of capitalism's move away from paper money to plastic, of the "business rationale" for tracking customers using their hard-to-protect electronic footprints, of the concentration of retail power that allows what may be a simple human security error to put at risk over 100 million people. In other words, what does this huge scandal tell us about the nature of our economic system as it is evolving in the 21st Century? Covered as a part of the State of Capitalism beat, this story and many others would be framed and placed in such a way that we would all think about how and why such things happen, and what we can do about them. Besides filing lawsuits, that is. Chapter Six: SOCIAL HEALTH In 1971, General Emilio Medici, the then military dictator of Brazil, commented on economic conditions in his country with the infamous line: "The economy is doing fine, but the people aren't." We can modify the statement for the United States of 2013: "The stock market is doing fine, but the people aren't." Here's a CNN headline from December 31: "Stocks: 2013 Is One for the Record Books." Here's one from the British daily The Independent: "Global Stock Markets Surge in 2013 as Confidence Returns." How about the Burlington Free Press: "Stocks End Red-Hot 2013 at All-Time Highs." Here in my home state of Minnesota, the front page of the Business Section this week (January 13) featured a report on the performance of Minnesota-based stocks in 2013 under the headline "Best Year Ever." The average gain in the stock value of the state's 100 largest publicly-owned companies was 49.3 percent in 2013, while the national average was "only" 33 percent or so. We know all this because the media faithfully tracks all the stock indicators, from the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the S & P 500 Index to the NASDAQ. The exact number of each index is reported hourly on every news station and news website, daily in every newspaper, in fact it's almost impossible to not know those numbers. Although many people wisely tune out the specific numbers, 'most everyone knows when the market is "up" and when the market is "down." How about the average person in this country? Are they "up" or "down"? If there is a Dow Jones index, shouldn't there be a "Doug Jones" index that tells us how Doug and Donna and the kids are doing? (The idea of a "Doug Jones Index" was thought up by Jim Hightower in 1993; Google "Doug Jones Index" and Hightower to read more.) In fact, the idea of trying to measure the welfare of the great majority of people in the country is not just a matter of idle speculation. There is a place called the Institute for Innovation in Social Policy that's been publishing something called the Index of Social Health for the past 25 years. (I first reported on it in Nygaard Notes #86, back in year 2000). The most recent Index was released in October of 2013, and was ignored by the U.S. media, as always. The Index of Social Health produces a number—like the Dow Jones, a sort-of average—by combining 16 separate indicators of social well-being. Here's how the Institute explains it: "The premise of the Index is that American life is revealed not by any single social issue, but by the combined effect of many issues, acting on each other. In looking at social problems that affect Americans at each stage of life—childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age—as well as problems that affect all ages, the Index seeks to provide a comprehensive view of the social health of the nation." The 16 indicators they use to produce the Index include such things as infant mortality, child abuse, unemployment, weekly wages, homicides, and food insecurity. Here's the latest summary: "In 2011 (the last year for which complete data are available), the Index of Social Health stood at 50.2 out of a possible 100—up 1.7 points from the previous year, but still five points below the most recent peak in 2007. This score is the second lowest in the past fifteen years, the only lower score being last year's 48.5. Overall, between 1970 and 2011, the Index declined from 64.0 to 50.2, a drop of 21.6 percent. A Social Health reporter would cover all of the indicators (and, of course, many other indicators), with the goal of helping the average news viewer better answer the question, "How are we doing?" The Social Health Beat would also follow other indexes, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, the International Index of Social Progress, and the United Nations Human Development Index. I've reported on all of them in these pages (but not lately, which reminds me that I'd better get back to them!). The Top Story of 2013 in this Chapter? Maybe I already said it: "The stock market is doing fine, but the people aren't." |
