Posts Tagged ‘Iraq War’
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”*…
Of course, we don’t have to choose… but, if only by default, we are choosing. Local news is collapsing– and that’s a problem of just the sort that Thomas Jefferson (author of the quote above) feared. A recent report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News unpacks the scary details…
In 2000, many Americans lived in a community with journalists — people whose job it was to cover school board decisions, announce small business openings and closures, root out corruption at city hall, warn commuters about road work and trumpet the exploits of the high school teams. Today, most of those journalists are gone. The evaporation of local news coverage has hit small towns and big cities, suburbs and rural areas. Even as the country has grown, we’ve lost journalists.
Using data that’s never been tapped before, we now know just how severe this local journalist shortage has become. Less than a quarter-century ago, the United States had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents on average. Now, the equivalent number is 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents, about a 75% decline. (Local Journalist Equivalent is a new measure we’re introducing, akin to a Full Time Equivalent or FTE).
This means that big chunks of the country have severe shortages. Stunningly, more than 1,000 counties — one out of three — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist. And the “better off” parts of the country are in lousy shape, too. About two-thirds of the counties — home to 217 million people — are below even that already-catastrophic national average of 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents.
To put that statistic in perspective, that means that if you live in a county of 10,000 people, there wouldn’t be even one full-time reporter to cover all of the schools, the town councils, the economic development projects, basketball games, environmental decisions, local businesses, and local events. There are 97,000 cities, towns, counties and other units of government. This report shows that there are the equivalent 27,000 local journalists. Most governments, most neighborhoods, and most residents are being covered poorly or not at all.
We also cannot assume the local news crisis is largely a rural phenomenon. The new data shows the extent to which the layoffs of journalists over time have left acute reporting shortages in many urban and suburban areas. If you’re in a big city like Los Angeles, which has a mere 3.6 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people, your neighborhood might be covered if there’s a serious crime but not much else. You may get little reliable information on local candidates in many of L.A. County’s cities, whether the schools in your neighborhood are improving, whether the hospital nearby has a bad mortality rate, or how inspiring people might be working to repair your playground.
The crisis is more severe and widespread than previously thought…
A map of how many local journalists cover each U.S. county reveals in stark detail the stunning collapse in local reporting: “Local Journalist Index 2025,” from @muckrack.com and @rebuildlocalnews.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
And note that many of the journalists who have survived are toiling under private equity ownership… which is effectively managing further decline.
Please consider supporting your local, non-profit public media organizations. They face threats from the Trump Administration (and several states, e.g.), and beyond those, face the challenges of continuing to adapt to a changing media environment. Despite that, they continue to do the work sessential to an effective democracy.
* Thomas Jefferson
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As read all about it, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that Robert Novak violated journalistic ethics when he used his column in the Washingtom Post to “out” Valerie Plame as a CIA operative…
Plame was the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a career diplomat that had been the US Ambassador to a few minor countries and had served other diplomatic roles. Plame, who was already a CIA agent when she married Wilson, was used to good advantage by the CIA with her husband providing diplomatic cover.
All that changed when Wilson angered the administration of George W. Bush by publicly opposing the expected invasion of Iraq, explaining that on a fact finding mission to Africa he had discovered the alleged attempt by Iraq to acquire uranium was false.
Information was leaked to [conservative columnist] Robert Novak of the Washington Post about Plame’s job as a CIA agent, and he dutifully published the information. Plame’s position as a CIA agent was compromised, and having been outed made her useless to the CIA, resulting in her resignation and the end of her 18 year career in the CIA. This vindictive act of political dirty tricks undermined the security of the United States, but apparently the perpetrators cared more about their own politics than the good of the country. Plame was clearly sacrificed to get at Wilson for having the gall to (honestly) undermine the false case for invading Iraq.
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a high ranking Bush administration official was not charged with illegally revealing Plame’s position with the CIA or with also revealing secret intelligence estimate information to the New York Times. Libby was indicted, however, for various counts of lying and obstructing justice. He was convicted of 4 of those counts and received a 30 month prison sentence. President George W. Bush commuted the sentence, removing the jail time but leaving the fine and probation and allowing the conviction to stand. It was later revealed that Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state, was the actual source of the leak to Novak.
After the trial, baffled jurors wondered to the press why Karl Rove and vice-president Dick Cheney had not been on trial. Many observers wondered the same thing. Wilson and Plame found federal courts to be unsympathetic to their lawsuits and the Obama administration was also unsupportive.
Plame had a book published about the incident titled Fair Game in 2007, and in 2010 a movie by the same name was released…
“We need to return from the self-centered concept of sincerity to the other-centered concept of truth”*…
Research universities have been central to the accomplishments of “The American Century.” Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific leaders and innovators.
Research universities originated in Prussia in the early 19th century (animated by Wilhelm von Humboldt‘s vision of Einheit von Lehre und Forschung [the unity of teaching and research]). And indeed, into the early 1930s the world’s leading research universities were in Germany.
As historian Roger L. Geiger has explained, “the model for the American research university was established by five of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago).” The American research university first emerged in the late 19th century, when these fifteen institutions began to graft graduate programs derived from the German model onto undergraduate programs derived from the British model.
By 1960, U.S. research universities had become the global model; they still dominate the top of global university rankings (see, e.g., here, here, and here).
But as Nils Gilman explains, their pivotal role is in jeaopardy…
I wrote about MAGA’s coming assault on US higher education in the first week of the new administration. Here’s a brief update.
Within two weeks of the new regime taking office, the National Institutes of Health lost its director and deputy director and the new leadership announced that NIH was axing overhead costs on research grants — the operational lifeblood of large research universities. (Like everything else Team Trump has been trying to do, this effort caught up in litigation, through who knows whether the Trumpniks will pay attention to adverse rulings.) Should it move forward, these moves will kill the golden goose of US biomedical research.
The regime has also been threatening to withhold federal funding from colleges that do not kill programs at odds with the MAGA agenda, including abolishing DEI efforts and banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Two new fronts were opened last week with a direct targeting of Columbia University, ostensibly because of its coddling of Gaza protestors last year — including the demand that it place one of its academic departments in receivership. And on Friday, the regime announced investigations into 52 universities as part of its DEI crackdown. All of this entails a viewpoint-based assault on academic freedom that is unprecedented in American history, way beyond even McCarthyism — though, as my friend John Aubrey Douglas wrote a couple of years ago, it is a standard part of the modern authoritarian playbook.
Five brief observations:
- The MAGA axe is falling on all fields whose Wissenschaft is at odds with the ideological agenda of some faction of MAGA. This includes not just definitionally “woke” departments like ethnic and gender studies, but will envelop the whole of the humanities, as well as biomedical research and climate science.
- True to its nativism, the new regime seems especially keen on reining in transnational scientific collaboration. Furthermore, as MAGA closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become physically impossible (not to mention intellectually indefensible, as John Quiggan says).
- As of yet, there appears to be little if any coordinated pushback against any of this, either politically or even as an industry. If you look at the websites of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the International Association of University Presidents, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, or other similar organizations, you’d have no idea that anything untoward is happening. Incredibly, despite the unabashed way MAGA telegraphed its intention to do all of this, university leaderships appear to be totally unprepared. What I take this to mean is that it’s going to happen, more or less unopposed.
- I expect that the evisceration of US research universities will spell the end of the long US dominance of research publications. It will also hasten the collapse of peer review — already in trouble for several reasons, including the replicability crisis and a business model predicated on free labor from US academics — as the standard quality control mechanism for scholarship.
- It is a sign of the times that several French research organizations and universities are now beginning to offer landing spots for US academics who find they “can no longer pursue their activities in their country of origin due to wars, political persecution, or censorship.” This may save a few individual careers, but obviously it’s not going to work for more than a tiny fraction of the half million+ ladder rank faculty in the country.
These are just ongoing field notes from the front, so I don’t have any big conclusions around this, so I’ll just repeat what I’ve been saying on this topic for years:
In 1933, German research universities were by every measure the greatest in the world. This intellectual power was in turn a cornerstone of German industrial and ultimately military might. In a few short years, however, using tactics not dissimilar to the ones listed above, the Nazis destroyed them — not least because the universities themselves went along with what was being done to them (Selbst-Gleichschaltung, as it was known). And nearly a century on, German universities have still not recovered, despite many proposed efforts — and neither has Germany’s prestige or power.
Self-inflicted wounds: “The MAGA assault on US universities has begun in earnest,” and, @nilsgilman.bsky.social suggests, it appears that the universities are going passively to surrender.
A case-in-point attack, with a suggested response: “What should be Columbia University’s legal answer to the extortionate & unconstitutional demands of the Trump administration.”
See also: “First they came for Columbia” (and this different piece with the same title), “The Crumbling Foundations of American Strength,” and “The Economic Danger of Disinvesting in Education.”
(Image above: source)
* Iris Murdoch
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As we re-educate, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Iraq, the start of the Iraq War (AKA, the Second Gulf War). 22 days later, American (and Allied) forces took Baghdad, and on May 1, President Bush announced “Mission Accomplished.” In the event, U.S. military forces remained in Iraq until their withdrawal in 2011.
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