Archives for 2024

Three weeks ago today I put up post saying we should all subscribe to this Cleveland paper – the Plain Dealer – because of his editorial stating that there aren’t two sides to facts.

We Should All Subscribe to this Cleveland Newspaper – The Plain Dealer

And now I want to post a follow-up.  We weren’t the the only ones who felt this way!

An interview with a newsroom leader who speaks the truth about Donald Trump

On the overwhelming response: “There’s a lot of anger with the national media.”

I was shocked. I told my wife and the editor that I asked to read it: “You know I was expecting the complete opposite.” I expected to get a hundred, two hundred emails and texts saying: “You’re an idiot, you’re in the bag for the libs,” and that kind of thing. And when immediately it was not that I was surprised.

And then it just blew up. People were reposting it on their social pages. And you know, I started hearing from across the country and across the globe. And by the end of that first day, I had so many emails from people just to say thanks from everywhere. “Tears in their eyes,” they said, multiple people, saying “I’m reading this with tears in my eyes.”

And I gotta tell you I was taken aback because I didn’t feel like it was anything that we hadn’t said. But then I thought, you know, when you work on something like this for six months, and you’re trying so hard to get the language right. Maybe it’s the tone. Maybe it’s the timing. Maybe it was just the time was right.

There’s a lot of anger with the national media, the New York Times and the Washington Post in particular. People feel that they have allowed the Fox News kind of media to set the agenda — that if you go back and count how many times they’ve looked at Joe Biden’s mental state… Anybody that has read a detailed interview with Joe Biden knows he’s not some dribbling idiot that can’t speak. He’s still got his faculties. But Fox News pieces together the places where he stumbles and says dumb things, and tries to portray him as a blithering idiot, and the people who watch that truly believe it. I mean, I get notes from people that are definitely afraid about the future of this country because they think a guy who has no brain matter left is running it.

So [the readers I heard from] are mad that instead of kind of standing firm and setting their own agenda, because Fox News shows it that way, because a sizable part of the population starts to believe it, they feel like they’ve got to address it like it’s a legitimate concern. Instead of saying: “This is absolute horse shit, we’re not gonna do that.”

I was surprised at how many people brought that up — that understood that and are furious about it. And so they were saying: We wish other national media would do what you’re doing: Speaking about this as clear-headedly as you can, and saying,” the truth is the truth, and we’re not going to veer from the truth.”

Read the whole thing!

Open thread.

‘There’s a Lot of Anger With the National Media’Post + Comments (76)

There’s an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  It’s not the same, of course, but it strikes me that in these turbulent times, when everything the U.S. stands for is in peril, leaders have appeared.

Sheldon Whitehouse is one.  Marc Elias is another.  ProPublia is another.   Not a person, of course, but a media entity that is leading gate way, committing actual journalism on a regular basis.

To that list I would add Shawn Fain.  We talk about this or that person giving something “a bad name” – in my opinion, Shawn Fain is giving unions a good name.

The Guardian interviews Shawn Fain

From Amazon and UPS to Starbucks and Hollywood studios, organized labor is making a comeback in the US after decades of decline. Shawn Fain thinks he knows why: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”

The United Auto Workers (UAW) president has emerged at the front of the pack of a new generation of labor leaders as a galvanizing voice in a critical year for the labor movement and American politics.

A soft-spoken but unrelentingly blunt midwesterner, Fain has met the moment in his role as the union’s newly elected president. Having beaten the US’s big three automakers into a landmark new union contract, Fain’s members have been courted by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Fain has gone all in for the Democrats despite some reservations and the misgivings of some of his members.

Now he faces bigger tests. The UAW is taking its fight to states that have long, successful records of seeing off union drives – and he must hold his new coalition together as the US enters a fractious election cycle that will pit worker against worker.

The union boss’s political ascendancy was crowned by his recent appearance as a guest at Joe Biden’s State of Union address, where both he and the union were called out in a nationally-televised salute from the commander-in-chief.

Sporting a new, closely cropped beard and wearing a dark business suit and tie for the Capitol occasion, Fain responded with a raised power fist, telegraphing in one succinct image how much organized labor’s message and tone have changed of late, along with their popularity.

The winning trajectory of the union and its new, class-conscious president have caught carmakers off guard, no more so than when Fain, 55, contrasts his workers’ declining wages with corporate share buybacks and the lavish compensation bestowed upon automotive CEOs.

Not without irony, Fain’s ascent almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible but for the 2022 federal felony convictions of more than a dozen union officials, as well as three Stellantis executives, for fraud and corruption, including embezzlement of union training funds. A UAW dissident with near 30 years’ previous service as a Stellantis (formerly FCA and Chrysler) electrician in Kokomo, Indiana, Fain unseated the union’s long-entrenched leadership cabal in 2023, vowing to root out corruption and change what he viewed as the union’s overly accommodating posture toward their employers.

Southern Republican Governors Are Suddenly Afraid (gift link)

by Jamelle Bouie

Last year the United Auto Workers announced an ambitious plan to organize workers and unionize foreign-owned auto plants in the South.

“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., said after winning significant wage and benefit gains in negotiations with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Six.”

Fain, believe it or not, may have understated the union’s ambitions.

Another excerpt:

The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. “We the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the U.A.W. has brought into our states,” their joint statement reads. “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society.

Jamelle Bouie is one of the redeeming things about the NYT.  Read the whole thing.  

Open thread.

Another Hero For Our Times – Shawn FainPost + Comments (74)