Friday’s Fake News Quiz
Guess which of yesterday’s headlines are false.
Read MoreGeneral Kelly was right . . . and oh so wrong
Last week White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, "the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
Read MoreIt’s Science Friday. Who cares?
When Sam Clovis, President Trump’s nominee to be the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist, was asked to list his academic credentials in science or agriculture, he answered, “None.”
Read MoreBecause Pi is everywhere
At his memorial service on Saturday, my old friend and distant cousin Bayard Storey was eulogized for both his scientific accomplishments and his political activism.
Read MoreBreaking the Silence
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Joseph N. Welch to Senator Joe McCarthy, June 9th, 1954
Read MoreThe real cost of hush money
$32 million is a troubling amount of money. That’s how much Lis Wiehl was paid to keep silent about her allegations of sexual harassment by Bill O’Reilly, including a “nonconsensual sexual relationship,” which seems a euphemism for rape. That brings to $45 million the amount paid to O’Reilly’s victims – and almost $100 million paid on behalf of male employees of Fox News. All the agreements had confidentiality clauses.
The amounts are jaw dropping – and you could argue that the payments to Harvey Weinstein’s victims, in the form of film careers, were worth far more. More troubling is what they bought: silence.
The women are victims. The game the men were playing was not about sex, it was about power. Their behavior was reprehensible; it was also just creepy. “When you’re a star,” Donald Trump said, “you can do anything.”
The deck was stacked: Juliet Huddy told Megyn Kelly she’s still “terrified” of Fox News, even after her lawyers hammered out a six-figure settlement. “You know that you’re just this one person that’s about to go up against literally a machine.”
And that’s what’s so troubling about the silence. It wasn’t just one person. There were dozens of them at Fox, thousands elsewhere – yesterday the California Senate hired a law firm to investigate sexual intimidation claims in Sacramento.
The real cost of silence is not the huge sums the perps and their companies paid in hush money. It’s that it allowed other and future victims, in the midst of a criminal epidemic, to believe they were alone.
♪ O Say Can We See Through the Demagoguery ♪
Chris Long will be working for nothing this year. The 6’3” 270-pound defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles said this week that he’s donating his next 10 weeks’ salary to increasing educational opportunities for underserved kids in the three cities where he has played professional football. Earlier he had given his first six weeks’ pay for scholarships in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. That’s 16 weeks, the entire NFL season, for which he is paid $1 million.
Read MoreThis land is not your land
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man
Not if you’re a Rohingya.
Read More“I’m Bob Corker”
"If Bob Corker had any honor or decency,” Steve Bannon told Sean Hannity, “he should resign immediately.”
Read MoreNot with a bang but a twitter
Three movements marked my coming of age five decades ago: civil rights, environmental protection and peace. They share a simple theme: respect for the earth, for each other, and for other nations and cultures.
Read MoreStumble of the Week
An occasional regular Friday feature.
Read MoreBlogging in a time of horror
The aim of these blogs is to present short essays that will give you an idea to consider, if only fleetingly, much like Robert Frost’s belief that a poem could be “a momentary stay against confusion.” So perhaps they’re not equipped to deal with a tragedy of the proportions of Sunday’s massacre in Las Vegas, which to date has killed 59 people and wounded over 520 more. Yet to write about something else seems a kind of a desecration, as does engaging in the same mind-numbing dance in which accusations of “politicizing” the shootings stifle any debate at all.
Read MoreSleeping with the Olympic bomber (Part 3)
I didn’t think too much about the news because, like most people, I knew the Olympic bomber was an overweight guy with a mustache. Then I remembered – the fat guy, Richard Jewell, had been the victim of a rush to judgment by both police and the press. The real bomber was Eric Rudolph.
Read MoreSleeping with the Olympic bomber (Part 2)
You run into some odd people on the Appalachian Trail (when, that is, you run into anyone at all). My daughter Gayley and I once shared a shelter with two women who were through hiking from Georgia, and we occasionally met someone heading in other direction, but for the most part we had the trail to ourselves.
Read MoreShameless Begging
Two or three decades ago some free local newspapers instituted something called “voluntary pay,” in which they asked their readers to put money in an envelope enclosed in the paper – and assured them they would continue to receive the paper whether they ponied up or not. This was an interesting strategy, one which made no sense to me and whose results were so sufficiently modest that the idea never caught on with the industry.
Read MoreSleeping with the Olympic Bomber (Part 1)
Rereading A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s riotous account of hiking the Appalachian Trail with the delightfully curmudgeonly Katz, made me think of two things.
Read MoreSeptember 15, 1963, a bomb explodes in Birmingham
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) .
Read MoreA narrow trail lovingly made
A new trail begins just west of Little Long Pond on the Mt. Desert Land & Garden Preserve, which consists of 1,165 acres abutting Acadia National Park. The Richard Trail is named for Richard Rockefeller, a doctor who for years chaired the advisory board of Doctors Without Borders and died when the plane he was piloting crashed in fog and heavy rain three years ago.
Read MoreFreaky Friday
Seventy-seven years ago yesterday, at four in the afternoon, the first wave of German bombers, 348 in all, flew without warning across the English Channel to bomb London and other cities in England. This was the beginning of the Blitz, which went on nightly for eight months and left 43,000 British civilians dead. Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle . . . this fortress built by Nature for herself” turned out to be little protection “against infection and the hand of war.”
Read MoreThe Good News
This is a simple story about people who do their jobs well.
I’m judging a statewide newspaper contest, which consists of entries from six local daily papers, all of them multi-issue series of interest and importance to their communities. Contrary to the constant barrage of reports about fake news, sensationalism, and bias, these submissions bespeak a profession that is, well, professional. They are not large, metropolitan newspapers, but small, one-time family-owned operations, who charge their few reporters to dig deep into issues that affect their readers and the communities they serve.
Read More