7 days, 7 stories
State-of-the-state, the press, the American psyche
Greetings, with one of those periodic temperature-checks on our democracy.
The usual newsShrink title focal points are state or government, essential role of the press and the multi-dimensional psyche or soul.
Early in the week some academic author promoting his latest book on toxic masculinity was a fleeting blip on a news screen that didn’t merit un-muting.
But today’s quirky distinct skew toward the masculine didn’t appear until sorting of gathered news-figures’ photos here and below.
All of these guys might well be update-illustrations of many classics from over the decades. Volumes like:
most anything the Jungian James Hollis has published and taught over 30 years;
the 70’s Levinson Seasons of a Man’s Life and Sheehy’s Passages;
the 1950 Freudian Eric Erickson’s “Eight Ages of Man” in Childhood and Society; or way back to
Jung’s 1931“Stages of Life” about adult-individuation, Volume 8 of his Collected Works.
Then also in current news cycles, suddenly the issue of age is all-the-rage! It’s trending in all kinds of stories — particularly among high-profile men across a broad range of public life. (More typically the issue also arises and applies to women in public life too, of course, and often more intensely.)
So, there are sub-themes to read and listen for here: Signs that maybe what’s being termed the “new old age,” isn’t — new. Or even necessarily old, just adult. (Understood most simply, that’s just adulthood at any decade that’s more conscious, and growing increasingly so.)
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In the above-center quote veteran journalist, author and longtime Lehigh University professor Jack Lule opens today’s look at the field of the fleet-footed journalist-troubadour. A favorite reader and friend, a decade ago Jack was amazingly generous with his time, ideas and depth of knowledge on both journalism and depth-psychology aspects of my dissertation work.
The journalist-troubadour in focus today is the late Steve Crump, 30-year veteran TV news journalist and award-winning documentarian, whose death at 65 was noted in last week’s post.
State of the press
Much of Crump’s life and legacy are captured well in the story last week from Theoden Janes of The Charlotte Observer. What’s pulled my attention back to him repeatedly since is the long narrative-arc — his life in what were very much his own terms, as story. From depth-psychological perspective I’m of course looking particularly at those many thresholds, crisis-points along the way where deepening initiatory challenge and transformation are either met, or bypassed/postponed until it becomes no longer possible.
And in Crump’s case, he seems to have met, endured and become bigger, deeper, more whole… over and over and over again, even just in decades after his childhood in Jim Crow-era Louisville. Among these described, of this profoundly private man over most of his adult life, were the far-too-fast, and too-young death of his beloved mother just as Crump began his exemplary long WBTV career… and the grueling battle he publicly waged over 5 years with advanced colon cancer, primarily for the joy and calling of getting to tell one more story, to have what for him was like one new life.
There’s a unique and personal element to Crump’s milestone-moments and life-shifts, from expansion into individual civil-rights-history documentary work to his by-all-accounts precious and private near-decade-long marriage to Cathy when he was 57. Above all, at every life-stage and juncture there is a sense of joy and calling about Steve Crump, around work, life, love, illness… and death. That especially comes through in this Charlotte Observer piece from April 2019.
#1. “I don’t want to die with my music still in me:” Steve Crump comes clean about cancer
The story includes an embedded video and the link here to the time in 2016 that Crump’s on-scene coverage of Hurricane Matthew in Charleston, SC overlapped with racial tensions and hate-speech following a high-profile mass-shooting and a police shooting of an unarmed Black man. A young white man repeatedly and tauntingly calls Crump variations on the n-word, behavior for which he was ultimately charged and punished. Here is Crump’s op-ed account of it with an excerpt:
Steve Crump: I was just doing my job when racist accosted me (Charlotte Observer October 2016)
In several weeks, Dylann Storm Roof goes on trial for the murder of nine people at Mother Emanuel AME Church and former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager heads to court for the death of Walter Scott. Despite its lush palm trees, nearby beaches and Southern folklore, Charleston historically has been a dividing line when it comes to race in America. Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, is miles away from the spot of my encounter with Mr. Eybers. I begin by attempting to find a sense of personal healing.
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Next are two examples that focus on both technology and measurement sides of press coverage in today’s news environment, important as well as content excellence.
#2. The Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart
This periodic tool applies reputable research-methodology by a well-screened and selected range of trained researchers examining samples of news items along several measures of bias. For full disclosure, during my dissertation work around 2012-2013, for a time I was in fairly regular periodic contact with Vanessa Ontero, the Denver-based former patent attorney who at the time was creating, developing and pioneering the instrument.
That was of course before the 2016 presidential election, and the vast if not revolutionary changes in the news, media and political landscapes ever since. The Bias Chart has grown and evolved to a much more corporate and appropriately structured process, and in my view it’s one useful lens on how we are consuming and producing news in today’s environment.
However, I’m finding such measures less and less relevant in a media environment in which there is no such thing as a fourth-estate role of journalistic coverage of the fundamental functionings of each branch of our government, at any level local to state to national. Without that basic, agreed-upon nonpartisan function, the very decision of whether to cover — or to completely ignore (much less distort) even major proceedings newsworthy by any journalistic measure — is biased from the outset. If the legitimate proceedings of court, legislature or executive level bode factually negative for an outlet’s preferred positions and consumers, covering them at all is going to be inherently “negative.” The bias is baked-in.
Pondering this has recalled from corporate communications days the challenge of tracking and measuring impacts of our media relations work — which to be meaningful had to include measuring negative coverage that was prevented, that didn’t happen. This stuff is just not as simple as counting beads on an abacus or beans in a row!
For those interested in more along these lines, Robert Hubbell’s September 4 Today’s Edition Newsletter on Substack, “One more time with feeling: Ignore the polls!” has some good information and insights. He also criticizes major news organizations for routinely ignoring the President’s speeches, including those of substantive policy-making value. He has a point.
And on this unusual focus from Vanity Fair I’m not sure what I think…thoughts from anyone more attuned to the market and data dimensions?
MSNBC Is Having Its Super Bowl With Donald Trump’s Indictments
The network’s mix of weighty reflection, analysis, and schadenfreude is drawing in major ratings, surpassing Fox News and CNN as the go-to network for coverage of Trump’s criminal charges.
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Illustrated at right above, in case you missed or didn’t save it for later reference for following the many Trump court cases: From The New York Times, in my view it’s the best example I’ve seen in awhile combining both complex, much entangled people and factual content and maximized design-technology to make it smoothly interactive, clear and informative. (If you read to the end, be aware that the next-generation ultimate possibilities are daunting.)
#3. The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped
One logistical note here, which I hope may just be an anomaly with my devices. This worked best when I first read on my iPhone, with both the scrolling text and adjoining highlighted photos clear. Later when I try to revisit on Mac laptop, the photos are blurry. I haven’t tried on iPad, but I expect that to be more similar to phone.
This reminds me more generally of how critically important it is for news and other content to be produced and tested in design formats, fonts and zoomable margins that work well on mobile devices. That’s how the vast majority of highest-volume readers and users are accessing — and it’s very often overlooked by content-expert journalists. (The otherwise-excellent Assembly publication has recently made some much-needed improvements in this; hopefully more are to come.)
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Continuing that focus with most recent updates…
State of the State
The fact that two separate grand juries reviewed and recommended or issued indictments in these cases, with the second opting to indict 19 — which was only half of those recommended by the first panel — for me reinforces a stabilizing sense of the careful deliberative process here.
#4. Georgia Panel Recommended Charging Dozens, Including Lindsey Graham, in Trump Case
As noted previously, it had seemed surprising that Graham had not been noted as at least an un-indicted co-conspirator, given his high-profile on-camera actions at the time.
And this, also late this week:
Judge Denies Meadows’s Request to Move Georgia Case to Federal Court (NYT)
Moving the case to federal court would have given Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, one key advantage: a jury pool that was more favorable to Donald J. Trump.
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Here’s a revisit of an entirely different court case explored closely in editions back in the winter. This latest development in the conviction of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and son does not seem to be your usual appeal-for-a-new-trial sort of defense move:
Murdaugh request for new trial based on alleged jury tampering by clerk of court (NBC News)
The Murdaugh legal dynasty’s generations-long choke-hold on their entire SC region was of course the stuff of gothic drama. There were sure to be the circus-quality trials and pre-trial proceedings amplified in today’s podcast-hungry, cable-TV-real-crime-streaming age.
Of course it all must be reviewed and ruled-on. But meanwhile, this evidence presented by defense attorneys, sworn affidavits from jurors — along with the clerk of court’s, yes, officer of the court herself’s, own book-deal, now published in the case??!! — is just… Lawless.
It’s hard to know what isn’t lawless, when normal is a different courtroom a few states away, where a key Proud Boys leader in the January 6 violent insurrection at our nation’s Capitol gets a hefty prison sentence… All while the much-indicted, fairly defeated former-president/now candidate for whom they were doing it fundraises mightily with his Republicans and is polling evenly with the incumbent.
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Which brings us to the visual and quote from 20-year veteran international correspondent, food writer then longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, now 58. A graduate of both UNC (AB) and Columbia University (MA with highest honors) journalism schools, Bruni shifted professional direction two years ago. He joined the faculty as a fellow in Duke’s prestigious Sanford School of Public Policy. He still writes guest columns and a regular newsletter for the Times.
Here’s where Bruni takes on the politics-of-age issues head-on.
#5.Biden is Old and Trump is on Trial. Will Anything else matter?
The whole piece makes good points well worth reading. His pithy conclusion and the visual by Ben Wiseman make the choice for voters, and for democracy, very clear:
Old is workable. Depravity is a dead end.
Meanwhile, pictured at left, in The Charlotte Observer Issac J. Bailey makes different and similarly salient points about recent publicly visible health issues with 81-year-old Senate Minority Leader — and Republican fundraiser par excellence — Mitch McConnell.
#6.Mitch McConnell isn’t ‘too old’ to serve. He should retire because he’s sick and frail
As subject for another day, similar points apply across the Senate aisle to 90-year-old Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is diagnosed with and demonstrating cognitive impairment. Indeed concerned Democratic representatives in her state are expressing them. Again reinforcing the same logic regarding both McConnell and Feinstein, love or hate her politics, but 76-year-old Elizabeth Warren could hardly be in sharper mental and physical form.
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Then, as illustrated at right (by Alanah Sarginson) David Brooks and his wife-colleague Anne Snyder are promoting and teaching in his University of Chicago alma mater’s new life-transition college curriculum classes. Modeled after Stanford and Harvard programs for such high-tuition-dollar students, these are for retiring or otherwise displaced C-suite type leaders to find new life paths. Brooks is calling these paths:
The New Old Age (The Atlantic)
What a new life stage can teach the rest of us about how to find meaning and purpose — before it’s too late.
Guess it could be an all-new path to him, but a whole lot of us have been on it retirement-wise, post-career-career-wise and otherwise for 15-20 years or so and counting!
David Brooks and Anne Snyder to Join UChicago’s Leadership & Society Initiative (University of Chicago.edu)
Brooks and Snyder are a brand, doing this sort of thing in many venues, so they’re pictured together above.
Here he’s also promoting his next new book coming out in October, titled How to Know a Person. Maybe there’s some good stuff inside. But with this most inside-out of processes, a title like that and self-appointed how-to expert in charge of knowing another seem more surefire ways not to. (Perhaps better a receptively present mutually curious companion?) This makes me think of Joseph Campbell’s reminder that shared knowledge and connection with our own deepest Self is a key part of it:
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s.
There’s good work being done, and good information about it, described here in the Atlantic piece. Brooks’ pontificating tendency is noticeably mellowing, with more accessibly warm terminology for example — most likely with his beloved Snyder’s muse-collaborator influence. His claims to discovery/creation of and self-appointed guide to a never-explored life-stage frontier are amusingly Brooksian. It’s a bit like Al Gore and “invention of the Internet.”
But for me these things don’t offset the sheer offensiveness of Brooks’ repeated pattern, as with past books, of blatant self-promotion masked as aw-shucks avuncular cluelessness. In sweeping statements he disregards — or worse, feigns ignorance that’s beyond credulity — for a vastly diverse array of gifted, devoted professionals, and the many “lacking, nonexistent” institutions and programs from academia and psychotherapy to spiritual direction and executive/leadership coaching. Both individuals and institutions have been long, visibly and deeply committed to this work… over decades. Nationwide and beyond.
The 7.31.22 newShrink edition, What's in a Name? The Power of Brand, Authority, Who Tells the Story has a deeper-dive take on Brooks (62) and his 2017 second marriage to his research-assistant Snyder (37). Personally and to some extent professionally, it has been what’s apparently his first-ever, initiatory crisis, characteristic “putting one’s ego in its place” with the (eventual) ensuing individuation process of becoming more conscious.
That’s surely made more difficult by its having played-out in his New York Times workplace and on the very public stages of Brooks’ many professional and media venues. And the very successes of his past writing projects, books, lectures now pose pressure to keep delivering the same money-making material. All of which warrants compassion for anyone in the midst of it.
Surely mitigating that some, the guy — and Snyder too — make, and have, lots of money and pipelines for more. Lots.
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State of the psyche
To close in the spirit of those troubadours of today’s opener…
#7. Jimmy Dreams (as perhaps we need him to)
Something kept nagging after last week’s Labor Day post included singer Jimmy Buffett’s death at age 76. I reflected on his music, a bit puzzled by my speechwriting days with its seemingly unlikely significance for so many of those men who were corporate-leader-bankers (not pothead beach bums).
Listening to playlist of a few favorite ballads I was struck by things I think rare in this culture. Especially for men his relatable imagery pulls through the continuing thread of the boy-in-the-man, the younger-wild pirate still hovering in the intensely disciplined businessman. In a sense he sang the entire narrative arc, the weaving forward of past and future, of an increasingly conscious, individuating man’s life. (And women’s too. It just hit me that so many of his images offer men many societally acceptable connections with the more tender and vulnerable angels of their nature.)
A couple of items into the week describe something like this in several ways.
Jimmy Buffett Was More Than Beaches and Booze (The New York Times)
There was wistfulness behind party tunes like “Margaritaville.” Buffett helped listeners feel like they’d earned the good times just by holding on.
The quote pictured above from James Taylor is from Rolling Stone this week:
Jimmy Buffett invented his own character, which, in a sense we all do: invent, assemble, inherit, or fall into our inner identity. But Jimmy was the founder of an actual tribe…
People say he was a lord of life and that's true: somewhere between Falstaff and the pirate, Jean Laffite. But to me, my friend Jimmy Buffet was a real example of a man: no puffed up defensive macho bullshit, but a model of how to enjoy the great gift of being alive.
I found the best, and most “psychological” grasp of it in this 2018 profile in New York Times Magazine by Taffy Brodesser-Akner:
Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle
The occasion is Buffett’s Broadway musical, set to open.
Mr. Buffett may no longer be Jimmy Buffett, but at one time he was. Most of the songs he’s famous for aren’t about love. They’re seemingly simple songs about how we spend our lives. But listen closer. “A Pirate Looks at Forty” is about a middle-age crisis wherein a man’s skills become obsolete before he’s ready to retire. “I have been drunk now for over two weeks” seems like a party lyric but it’s not — it’s a crushing one…
… It’s 5 o’Clock Somewhere” — a song he didn’t write but recorded with Alan Jackson and took out on tour — man, that one’s the real heartbreaker. Take away the jaunty island beat and you’ll find a song about a man who is so miserable that he can’t bring himself to return to work from his lunch break. “I’m getting paid by the hour, and older by the minute,” it goes. “My boss just pushed me over the limit.” The guy hasn’t taken a vacation day in a year…
Has any pop star identified this particular strain of existential crisis better than Mr. Buffett? Who has been such a dedicated balladeer of the T.G.I.F. class? Who has been such a folk hero of workaday boredom and 9 to 5 drudgery? The knowledge that if we allow ourselves to think hard enough about our lives we will realize that they are spent in service of making someone else rich while we merely scrape by? Mr. Buffett may be rich, but he wasn’t always. He has grappled with dark thoughts about time and existence. He saw from the stage that we had, too. So he gave language to it: There has to be something more to this. There has to be a way to exist that isn’t quite so compromised.
In depth psychological terms that sounds pretty initiated, like an individuating adult showing the rest of us how to be.
By around Tuesday the nagging took the form of dreaming and waking with the above song, Jimmy Dreams. Finally checking back in last week’s post revealed I had omitted this favorite when listing a few from the playlist of his ballads.
Disarmingly simple, I leave you with it today.
Jimmy dreams, he’s a child to the end./What a joy/when you are your best friend/And the world’s such a toy/if you just stay a boy/you can spin it again and again.
Jimmy flies/with no use for disguise/just escapes/using mirrors and capes./And the words do the trick/there is no bigger kick/than just rhyming again and again.
The sound of the low tide/the smell of the rain/traveling alone/on my boat and my plane./Take it all in, it’s as big as it seems./Count all your blessings and remember your dreams…
…Jimmy stares toward the bright Pleiades./It’s so strange what his distant eye sees:/The world’s such a toy if you just stay a boy, you can spin it again and again.
Who knows why you start/rediscovering your heart?/But that’s why Jimmy dreams.
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”