DailyNewsGems

Most Viewed Online Stories of 2024

Syrians chant slogans and wave rebel flags as they gather for Friday prayers at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

Photo Credit: Leo Correa/AP. 

***

2024 proved to be a tumultuous year, both on American soil and around the world.

The Israel/Hamas war continues unabated, a bloody confrontation, which originated on October 7, 2023, when Hamas (a Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist political organization) launched a land, sea, and air assault on Israel from the Gaza Strip.

Since the fighting began, approximately 1.9 million people, representing 90% of Gaza’s population - have fled their homes over the past year, and 79% of the territory is under Israeli-issued evacuation orders, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

The United Nations additionally estimates that at least 56% of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israel–Hamas war were women and children.

After 61 years of ruthless dictatorship, the Ba'athist Syria regime (officially the Syrian Arab Republic or SAR), came crashing down in early December, when the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, fled Damascus after one of the country's main rebel groups, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, (Liberation of the Levant) launched a surprise attack in November. Syria has been tangled in a crippling civil war for the last 13 years.

On December 13, thousands took to the streets of its capital city, Damascus, to celebrate the fall of the Assad regime.

In March, in the Russian presidential election, incumbent Vladimir Putin was reelected to a fifth term as he continues his quest to heighten his offensive against Ukraine with a vow to wipe the Eastern European country off the map.

Donald Trump delivers victory speech on Election Night.

Photo: Time.com

***

And after four years out of office, Donald Trump, will return to power on January 20th after he was elected for a second non-consecutive term on November 5, the first candidate to do so since Grover Cleveland in 1892, and only the second in American history. The former New York real estate tycoon and reality TV star, won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, becoming only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988.

To add a little icing on the cake, the Republicans won both chambers of Congress. The last time the GOP controlled the Senate, House and presidency was from January 20, 2017, to January 3, 2019, Trump’s first term in office.

Before thumping Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz by grabbing 49.9 % of the popular vote in November, Trump was found guilty, on May 30, of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush money trial, which makes him the first president to be ever convicted of a felony.

But Trump might have been delivered a timely lifeline with other criminal indictments he faces, when on July 1 – in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts that rely on core constitutional powers, taken while in office, presumed immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

On June 11, Hunter Biden, the embattled second son of President Joe Biden, was convicted of three felony counts of possession of a firearm while under influence of narcotics. He would later be pardoned of the conviction by his father, the President of the United States.

***

Gun violence continued to rear its ugly head in 2024.

A Sept. 4 mass school shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia left two teachers and two students dead.

While campaigning in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, there was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump; fortunately, the Republican nominee escaped with minor injuries. Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.

Brian Thompson, 50, CEO of UnitedHealthcare wasn’t so fortunate. He was mercilessly killed by gun shots fired by Luigi Mangion, 26, in Midtown Manhattan on December 4th. The Ivy League suspect hailed from Towson, Maryland.

As of December 14, at least 19,577 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year -- an average of almost 46 deaths each day, according to the Gun Violence Archive. 

2024 was also another cataclysmic year for victims of hurricanes, resulting in scores of deaths.

On September 26 – Hurricane Helene, considered the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Maria in 2017, made landfall in Florida as a category four hurricane, resulting in 236 deaths and more than 685 missing across six states in the southeast.

From October 8-11, Hurricane Milton, a powerful and destructive tropical cyclone, made landfall in Florida, where 35 people were killed, six were missing, and 3.4 million people were without power. Between October 8–9, 44 tornadoes touched down across Florida, including three EF3 tornadoes (wind speeds between 136 and 165 mph).

Taken together, five hurricanes made landfall in the continental U.S. in 2024.

In this year’s Fall Classic, the Los Angeles Dodgers made quick work of the New York Yankees in five games of the 120th edition of the World Series, enabling the Dodgers to capture their 8th championship in World Series history.

The fifth game at Yankee Stadium was punctuated with a heightened sense of drama, when the Dodgers made history by bouncing back from a 5-0 deficit during the Series clinching win, the first team to accomplish such a remarkable feat and prevail victorious, 7-6.

Previously in the year, history was again on the Dodgers side when superstar and Japan native, Shohei Ohtani, became the first major league baseball player to become a 50/50 man; that is, belt 50 home runs and steal at least 50 bases in a single season.

On June 17, the Boston Celtics conquered the Dallas Mavericks in five games to win their 18th overall NBA championship, surpassing their chief rival in the west, the Los Angeles Lakers, with the most NBA championships.

A week later, on June 24, the Florida Panthers beat Edmonton in the Stanley Cup Finals, to claim their first championship in NHL franchise history.

***

It’s Caitlin’s world, we just live in it.

Iowa native, Caitlin Clark, turned in a sensational rookie year and catapulted the WNBA to new heights. In addition to being named rookie of the year, the “Mad Bomber” tallied the most points by a point guard in a season in WNBA history, recorded the most double-doubles by a rookie guard in WNBA history, and most points by a rookie in WNBA history, among other milestones.

And if those accolades weren’t enough, the slender, dribble happy point guard for the Indiana Fever was named Time magazine’s Athlete of the Year on December 12th.

In the entertainment industry, 2024 was a monster year for the atomic bomb thriller, “Oppenheimer,” which came away with seven Oscars, including best actor (Cillian Murphy), best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.) and best director (Christopher Nolan) at the 96th Academy Awards on March 10 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

Taylor Swift’s complete dominance of the music industry was in full swing. Much like the Energizer Bunny; she kept going and going and going. “The Eras Tour” culminated on December 11 in Vancouver, British Columbia after 149 dates, spanning five continents over nearly two years, which grossed an estimated $2 billion in ticket sales, doubling the record set by Coldplay’s 156-date “Music of the Spheres World Tour.”

On September 16--rapper, record producer, and record executive, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs was arrested in Manhattan and charged with racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

***
To get a better grasp of some of the major stories of the year, I checked in with some popular news websites to see what single story generated the most page views on their home pages.

Here is what some websites reported.

CNN

CNN's # 1 article for 2024 was CNN’s story around Sean Combs / Cassie Ventura following CNN airing the exclusive video of Sean Combs in the hotel.

For 2024, CNN's Election Day live story was #1 with 85 million page views.

FOX News

The most viewed story at FoxNews.com for 2024 was “107 days: Kamala Harris has yet to do formal press conference since emerging as Democratic nominee.”

BBC

According to a BBC spokesperson, “over the year, BBC News Online has seen its innovative live pages, implemented as part of BBC News’ digital-first strategy, act as the primary driver of UK audiences online. Live pages combine live BBC News channel broadcasts, on-the-ground updates, video clips and expert analysis from BBC News correspondents and BBC Verify."

The most viewed stories of the year on BBC News Online included:

General Election results live page

U.S. Election Results Live Page

Southport stabbings live page

UK riots live page

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times' most-viewed story of this year is "The dirty secret of California’s legal weed," an investigation in collaboration with Weed Week reported by LAT's Paige St. John and WW's Alex Halperin:

The Guardian

The Guardian’s interactive on the UK general election result, which saw Labour win by a landslide, was the Guardian's most viewed article this year in terms of page views. This was closely followed by US election results and map. 

The Times and Sunday Times (London)

The most-visited article from The Times and The Sunday Times this year, so far, was 'Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)

The Daily Beast (American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture).

The Daily Beast’s most viewed story of the year was “Cheryl Hines Brutally Trolled After RFK Jr. Endorses Trump”

The Economist

The Economist's two biggest articles of the year were their interactive poll tracker and their presidential forecast model.

A spokesperson from the Economist said they saw more than 30% more traffic to the model than during the previous election period in 2020. There was a further swell of visitors as results arrived: Wednesday November 6th set an all-time record for traffic on our app and website.

ProPublica (a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in New York City).

ProPublica's top story of the year, measured by views, so far: "Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign" by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski (published June 3).

The Marshall Project (a nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about inequities within the U.S. criminal justice system.

Measuring web traffic on all of the Marshall Project’s sites, a chilling story about penalizing women who give birth for often false drug tests was their most viewed story of the year.

“5 Things to Know About Kamala Harris’ Criminal Justice Record” was the most viewed article for 2024 on their home page only.

OpenSecrets (a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that tracks and publishes data on campaign finance and lobbying, including a revolving door database which documents the individuals who have worked in both the public sector and lobbying firms and may have conflicts of interest.)

The most viewed stories at OpenSecrets for 2024 included:

Total 2024 election spending projected to exceed previous record

Pro-Trump dark money network tied to Elon Musk behind fake pro-Harris
campaign scheme

Kamala Harris drives record fundraising after Biden exit

New York Magazine

The most viewed stories at the New York Magazine website for 2024 included:

Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles

My Unraveling: I had my health. I had a job. And then, abruptly, I didn’t. By Tom Scocca, the editor of Indignity.

The Divorce Tapes by Beth Raymer

The Lure of Divorce by Emily Gould

Vox (an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media)

Top stories of the year at Vox, ranked by visitors, included:

Scientists just discovered a sea creature as large as two basketball courts. Here’s what it looks like.

Stop setting your thermostat at 72

January 6 insurrectionists had a great day in the Supreme Court today

The Supreme Court just lit a match and tossed it into dozens of federal agencies: SEC v. Jarkesy could render much of the federal government unable to function.

The Epstein “list,” explained: What the tranche of recently unsealed court documents contains.

Michelle Obama articulated something Democrats have been afraid to say

America is not ready for what comes next: The attempt on Donald Trump’s life has put the republic in peril.

Republicans ask the Supreme Court to disenfranchise thousands of swing state voters: A new Supreme Court case could potentially hand Arizona to Donald Trump. 

Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis, explained: Three months after she disclosed her illness, the Princess of Wales is making a return to public life.

FBI.gov

The most viewed story at FBI.gov for 2024 was “FBI Seeking Assistance Connecting Victims to Samuel Little’s Confessions” (originally published in 2019).

The most popular FBI Story on FBI.gov for 2024 (originally published in 2024) was “Chinese Government Poses 'Broad and Unrelenting' Threat to U.S. Critical Infrastructure, FBI Director Says”

The most visited page on FBI.gov for 2024 other than the home page was their top 10 fugitive list.

Weather.com

The most viewed article from weather.com this year was "Hurricane Milton to Make Destructive Florida Landfall Tonight"

Google

On December 10, Google announced the top searches of the year under multiple categories, including: trending, sports, entertainment, and google maps, among others.

Merry Christmas! and Happy Holidays!

--Bill Lucey
December 16, 2024
[email protected]

Polls Underestimate Trump Supporters--Yet Again!

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

***

Donald Trump won the popular vote by approximately 2.4 million votes, marking the first time a Republican had accomplished such a feat since President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004.

It also means a majority of pollsters have completed the hat trick: for the third consecutive presidential cycle, the polls have missed the mark, vastly underestimating the strength of the former New York real estate tycoon.

The latest election results show Trump with 76,977,118 votes or 49.9% of the vote compared with Vice President Kamala Harris’s 74,479,029 votes or 48.3% of the electorate.

The last election pollsters predicted, correctly, was Obama/Romney in 2012, when Nate Silver catapulted to fame as a wunderkind by correctly predicting not only Barack Obama's victory but the outcome of the presidential contest in all 50 states.

Now, pollsters are about as reliable as a Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback.

Pollsters, of course, much like Donald Trump after losing to Joe Biden in 2020, don’t like to admit defeat.

They now tell us they were right on the money with Harris’ vote percentage (48.3 %) but underestimated the strength of Donald Trump supporters (49.9 %)

Such explanations sound like a badly worded concession speech from a candidate who went down in flames.

Nevertheless, most pollsters continue to argue their polling was not flawed.

Political Scientist, Peter J. Woolley, founding director of PublicMind—an independent public opinion research group at Fairleigh Dickinson University thinks the suggestion that polls have been wrong in the last three presidential elections is a myth.

“Good pollsters,” Woolley says, “are the first to say their work are ‘estimates’ not predictions and not pinpoints. It is media outlets and internet trolls that tend to over-report the accuracy of polls, not good pollsters. Bad pollsters tend to brag about their polls. Good pollsters are always on edge. Good pollsters know that under ideal conditions, one in 20 poll measurements will be ‘wrong.’ Polls are a scientific method of arriving at an estimate. Estimate is the keyword.”

***

Most polls I was following one or two months prior to the election, showed Harris with a one or two percentage lead, including The Washington Post, the New York Times, Nate Silver (The Silver Bulletin) and FiveThirtyEight.

On Election Eve, Silver declared Harris a marginal favorite, though his “gut” told him Trump may pull off an upset.

When I asked The New York Times about misfiring on the presidential election vote totals, a spokesperson for the Times, issued the following statement:

"Polls will never be perfectly precise, nor are they advertised as such, and a main feature of our coverage this year was helping readers understand the uncertainty in the race. We made clear in our coverage that if the polls were off by even a little bit from final vote counts, as they were likely to be, that one of the candidates could sweep all seven battlegrounds."

My big beef isn’t so much the accuracy of the polls themselves, but how certain news organizations attached so much prominence to them.

The New York Times, Washington Post, among others, treated these polls, at least from my vantage point, like they were gospel and glaringly splashed these polls across their home pages as if they're credible and reliable sources of information, or at least that was what the reader was led to believe.

Despite the statement released from a Times spokesperson, I rarely saw these polls accompanied with a warning that they shouldn’t be interpreted as being “perfectly precise.”

To their credit, the New York Times did publish articles explaining how tricky the polls can be in accurately predicting the outcome.

Nate Cohn, of the Times, for example, did underscore two weeks before the election, that pollsters might very well have egg splattered on their face for the third straight presidential election. Cohn went on to explain how different polling methods have been recalibrated over the last 15 years to better gauge the mood of the country.

One pollster who was unquestionably off her game was J. Ann Selzer, president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1996. Selzer, known as the “Queen of Polling” predicted vice president Harris would win Iowa by three percentage points, 47% to 44. By the time the votes were all counted, Selzer was off by 16 points.

Trump ended up winning Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%. Selzer, in turn, ended her polling operation altogether as she tries to defend her reputation, which has been badly bruised since the stunning election results.

While a majority of pollsters may continue to staunchly defend their polls as being within the margin of error, most agree that they need to reevaluate how they gather information from potential voters.

Most pollsters agree that they’re increasingly having difficulty identifying Trump supporters. Democrat voters tend to be more civic minded and usually respond to survey questions from pollsters. Trump supporters, on the other hand, are distrustful of pollsters and the media, and have a tendency not to respond to surveys.

In particular, pollsters recognize the need to expand their polling methods beyond online, text, and phone methods and conduct more mail survey forms. Republicans and conservative voters seem more receptive to surveys sent to them in the mail, preliminary studies show.

The Trump campaign was able to focus on low-propensity voters or voters who haven’t consistently voted in the past and were decidedly less “politically engaged.”

Though pollsters can talk until they’re blue in the face about how close their estimates were to the final tally; a David Brooks column highlighted just how disengaged the Democratic ticket was from the average voter.

Brooks wrote: "In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters."

"She did manage,” Brooks explained, “to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men."

When I saw the seismic shift of the country going into Trump's column on Election Night, I immediately thought of James Carville's opinion piece in the New York Times (July 8, 2024) when he stressed that Kamala can't be just crowned the nominee without a democratic process. Carville wrote, "it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open."

Nancy Pelosi and her cabal stripped the ball from Joe's hands and force-fed Kamala to the American voters instead of creating a mini-primary (as Carville suggested) where the best and the brightest of the party would vie for the nomination. Pelosi did this because she reasoned-we have our progressive candidate who will easily trounce Trump, a convicted felon, as he appeared to be unraveling at the seams and sounding mentally unstable by the day. This was Pelosi and her inner circle's big opportunity to get a progressive into the White House.

Many are going to argue that this proves the country isn't ready for a woman president. That's just plain wrong. The country isn't ready for a progressive female candidate (Hillary & Kamala, for example) who promoted abortion rights and LGBTQ rights at the expense of traditional working-class issues, like economic growth, reduced grocery prices, affordable housing, while ignoring illegal immigration and the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Democrats have kicked the can down the road on immigration and cost of living for way too long, opting instead for the status quo.

For better or worse, richer or poorer, voters reached a tipping point and opted for a candidate who promised to turn the federal government on its head.

God help us, I think we’re in for a tumultuous four years under Donald Trump when the treasured principles of our Republic will be brought to a severe test, but Democrats have only themselves to blame.

--Bill Lucey
November 25, 2024
[email protected] 

 

Have All Baseball Fans Fully Embraced Shohei Ohtani?

 

Los Angeles Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani waves to fans after becoming MLB's first 50/50 man in a historic game against the Miami Marlins, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024, in Miami.

Photo Credit: AP/Wilfredo Lee

***

With nine games left in the season, Shohei Ohtani has ascended to the top of the mountain, having gone where no one has ever gone before in becoming MLB’s first player to crack 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season.

In Thursday’s game against the Miami Marlins, Ohtani surpassed 50 home runs for the season.

Quite an accomplishment.

Shohei seems to do everything in a big, grand fashion, starting before the season even began, when he signed a monster contract, a whopping 10-year $700 million contract to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Yesterday was no exception. Shohei went large again.

The Dodgers leadoff hitter went to the plate six times, and came away with six hits, including three home runs and two steals with 10 RBIs. In doing so, he became the first player with three home runs and two stolen bases in a game since at least 1900 and the first player since RBIs became official in 1920 with 10 RBIs and five extra-base hits in a game.

The reaction to yesterday’s fireworks was, deservingly so, simply overwhelming.

If you spent any time on social media on Thursday, the feeds on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), among others, was filled with short videos of Ohtani’s majestic blasts.

And to sweeten the pot even more, not only was history made, but the Dodgers clinched a playoff spot, becoming the fourth team to clinch a spot for the 2024 postseason, following a 20-4 pounding of the Marlins at LoanDepot Park in Miami, Fla.

2024 will be the 12th consecutive year the Dodgers have advanced to the playoffs; but it will be Ohtani’s first trip to the playoffs, after seven full seasons in MLB.

Ever since belting his first career home run against Josh Tomlin of the Cleveland Indians on April 3, 2018, as a member of the Los Angeles Angels, Ohtani has lived up to his grand billing since arriving from Japan.

He now, age 30, has accumulated 222 home runs, 857 hits, and 557 RBI’s since entering the league in 2018.

Not only was history made in Miami on Thursday, but the Japan native additionally became the all-time Dodger single-season record holder in home runs, passing Shawn Green’s club record of 49, set in 2001.

Previously in 2024, Ohtani became only the 6th player in MLB history to have a 40/40 year.

The others are: José Canseco (1988), Barry Bonds (1996), Alex Rodriguez (1998), Alfonso Soriano (2006) and Ronald Acuña Jr. (2023).

What’s interesting about the list, is that three of those six players have been accused of using performance enhancing drugs. The tainted list of players doesn’t include Shohei Ohtani.

When you stop and ponder the accomplishment of hitting 50 home runs and stealing 50 bases in the same season, it's no wonder that former Dodgers player, Justin Turner, once described Shohei as a “once in a lifetime player.”

Given his unique ability to both pitch and hit so superbly, many describe Ohtani as the "Japanese Babe Ruth;" a Reuters article once described him as, a "Nito-ryu," or two-sword samurai

Over in Japan, the celebration for Ohtani becoming a 50/50 man has been deafening.

According to journalist and infographics designer, Satoshi Toyoshima, “Ohtani’s hometown of Oshu City in Iwate Prefecture hung a banner celebrating 50/50 at its city hall. “

In addition, Japan’s national newspapers issued special editions and handed them out on the streets to ecstatic bystanders.

In 2021, Stephen A. Smith, an ESPN host, apologized after saying that Los Angeles Angels pitching and hitting sensation Shohei Ohtani's use of translators negatively impacts Major League Baseball's popularity.

***

As euphoric as the reaction has been to Ohtani standing alone as the sole member of the 50/50 club, I detect, at times, some animosity here in the United States to his many clouts this year as a member of the Dodgers.

So, I wondered if the whiff of animosity I’m detecting toward him is because he’s from a big market team or because he’s Japanese?

Ohtani was involved with a scandal early in the season when Ippei Mizuhara, his longtime friend and interpreter was found to have made $4.5 million in wire transfers from the slugger’s account to cover mounting gambling debts.

After a thorough investigation, it was determined, the Japanese superstar didn’t have any prior knowledge of the wire transfers to bookmakers and was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Still, I strongly contend many baseball fans are using the scandal Ohtani was involved with as a convenient excuse not to join in the celebration of his accomplishments, like they would the Derek Jeter’s or Cal Ripken Jr’s of baseball.

Hiroshi Kitamura, Director of International Relations at William & Mary disagrees with me.

“I believe that Shohei Ohtani’s quest for 50/50 was embraced widely,” Kitamura said. “If,” Kitamura continued, “there is less enthusiasm towards him than to Cal Ripken or Derek Jeter, that, I think, is because the bases have become bigger and the pitch clock rule has made it easier to steal bases than in the past.”

Kitamura additionally isn’t detecting an anti-Asian animosity.

“In particular,” Kitamura thinks quite the contrary, “the physical strength he displays, day in and day out, is breaking stereotypes of Asian men and is inspiring new groups of fans.”

Leslie Heaphy, professor of sports history at Kent State at Stark, thinks Ohtani is still suffering from the gambling scandal. “For many,” Heaphy thinks, “just the association is enough to view the player with suspicion. I also think people like homerun records more than stolen bases so that may impact some of the lack of attention as well.”

Whether there are pro-Ohtani or anti-Ohtani forces afoot, Steven Wisensale, professor (emeritus) of public policy at the University of Connecticut (UCONN), thinks we should celebrate and appreciate this unique and unprecedented moment in baseball history.

Wisensale believes this is “a huge milestone and one that no one ever dreamed about previously. I will put it up there with Ripken’s streak, Williams’ .406 and DiMaggio’s 56. If he hits the 50/50 mark, I see no one breaking that unless his name is Shohei Ohtani.”

“For people who know baseball and understand the skills that are needed to succeed, such as reaching the 50/50 milestone”, Wisensale argued, “they will honor that player, regardless of his race or ethnicity.”

Despite the gambling incident now in the rear-view mirror, the scandal appears to have left some scar tissue, at least with some fans.

“I believe his gambling scandal that started the year has taken some charm off of Ohtani with fans; I don't think it matters with him not being from the United States,” Andy Billman, professor of film and media studies at the University of New Haven told me. “Ichiro Suzuki,” Billman pointed out, “is proof when he went off years ago in Seattle and was very popular. Also, in today's viewing capacity for sports, I believe the Dodgers being on the West Coast hurts him more.”

But there are some, albeit a minority, who detect whiffs of hostility to foreigners as a reason for not fully embracing Ohtani’s historic milestone.

Rob Ruck, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh agrees with me that “some of the animosity is because he's from a foreign country at a time when MAGA ("Make America Great Again") has ramped up nativism to an outrageous level.”

Dodgers manager, Dave Roberts, thinks Ohtani “wants to be the best player that’s ever played this game.”

It sure will be fun for all baseball fans, fun for the United States, fun for Japan, and fun for the youth of both countries over the next few years to see if the Ōshū, Iwate, Japan native lives up to such top billing.

--Bill Lucey
[email protected] 
September 20, 2024

***

Ohtani: Feats, Facts, & Historic Firsts

• Ohtani was the first Japanese player to hit for the cycle in the major leagues, something he never accomplished in five years in Japan.

• He's been clocked as fast as 3.80 seconds from home to first.

• On July 13, 2021, became the first player elected to the all-star game as both a player and pitcher.

• Closed out the 2023 World Baseball Classic by striking out Mike Trout. He won the tournament MVP.

• July 13, 2024, became the first Japanese player to hit 200 home runs.

• With an all-star HR in 2024, became the first player to hit a HR and get the win in an all-star game.

• Only two other players in MLB history (Barry Bonds and Brady Anderson) hit both 50 home runs and stolen 50 bases in any season of their careers. Ohtani accomplished both in the same season.

• When Shohei was 17-years old in Japan, he threw a remarkable 99 miles per hour.

• Ohtani was courted by all 30 MLB teams before reaching agreement with the Los Angeles Angels in December, 2017.

• Ohtani is 6-foot-4, and weighs 215 pounds.

Kate Middleton Shocks the World

Catherine, Princess of Wales, announced in a video on Friday, March 22, 2024, that she has been diagnosed with a form of cancer.

Photo Credit: BBC

***

“Time, space, and privacy,” are words unfamiliar to members of a prying press and its voyeuristic mass audience.

But “time, space, and privacy” was just what Catherine, Princess of Wales, was asking for when she stunned the world by announcing she’s been diagnosed with cancer.

What type of cancer remains unknown.

In a two-minute and 15 second personal video released on Friday, while sitting at a bench in the gardens at Windsor Castle, wearing casual jeans and a white striped sweater, Kate Middleton, ashen-faced, announced she first learned she had cancer in post-operative tests after her abdominal surgery in January.

The diagnosis was as stunning to the princess as it is to the public.

Kate Middleton is only 42, a picture of health and vigor, fit as a fiddle, and about as athletic and agile kicking a soccer ball or swinging a tennis racket as you can possibly find with a woman her age.

So, yes, this news is stunning beyond belief.

According to Macmillan Cancer Support, 393,000 people, on average, are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United Kingdom and each year about 167, 000 die from cancer.

Research additionally shows that half of those diagnosed with cancer in the U.K. survive for at least 10 years after diagnosis.

Since the announcement, Kensington Palace has been flooded with well-wishers, messages of love, support, and kind words for her bravery to announce her condition instead of keeping it hidden under a cloak of secrecy.

This comes shortly after King Charles III made a public announcement that he has been diagnosed with a form of cancer, which was discovered after undergoing treatment for an enlarged prostate.

The hope is the medical staff of both the princess and the king have caught the cancer early enough to prevent it from spreading.

During her video announcement, the princess said, “I am well and getting stronger every day by focusing on the things that will help me heal ­ in my mind, body, and spirits.”

The princess began her “preventative chemotherapy” in late February. She was administered drugs, most likely directly into the vein, which slowly progress into the bloodstream from a bag of fluid in a treatment typically lasting several hours. The objective is to destroy cancer cells, keeping them from spreading any further or even returning.

The chemo treatment usually takes several months and can cause unpleasant side effects, the most common being drowsiness and feeling nauseous.

Whether Kate Middleton will be given the “time, space, and privacy,” she’s pleading for while dealing with this trauma, only time will tell. The Royal Family has always eaten up lots of ink with daily newspapers spanning the globe. The guess is the press will continue to press hard for what type of cancer she’s been diagnosed with and delve into how the rest of her family is coping with this crushing news.

This photo taken for Mothering Sunday by William, Prince of Wales, was later revealed to have been photoshopped or edited by Catherine, Princess of Wales and became a stinging source of embarrassment.

***

Hopefully, the demonization of Princess Catherine by the press will end.

Before her revelation of cancer, the princess was ridiculed, mocked, and became the subject of merciless conspiracy theories for Photo shopping, or editing, a picture Prince William took of her with her children ­ George, Charlotte, and Louis ­ for a Mothering Sunday photo.

Soon after major news agencies, including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and Getty, issued “kill” notices to take down the photo because it had been manipulated, conspiracy theories came thick and fast, including that she had a face-lift, was in a coma, she was in hiding, there was a body-double used in the picture and some even wondered whether she had died.

You would have thought she had committed an unspeakable crime.

I never quite understood the crime in trying to put her children and herself in the best possible light before it's released to the world. What’s wrong with making the photos more polished and aesthetically pleasing?

There must be something I wasn’t quite understanding, so I turned to some photo experts to help me understand what lies beneath the crime of the century.

Kelley Wilder, professor of photographic history at De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) in the U.K., tells me, "Kate Middleton is entitled to her personal health privacy and that of her children. That much is clear. "

"What is not clear," Professor Wilder explained, "is why did the family and their media consultants allow the publication of a clearly manipulated image (it really is quite poor by the standards of what is possible today) as a family photograph? It wasn’t necessary."

There certainly was a strict uniformity to how Queen Elizabeth II handled photos intended for public consumption. She was known to have the same photographer at Windsor, Buckingham Palace, or even on her tours around the U.K. and the world. She didn’t have to go through a complicated process of having the photos approved by a hierarchy of public relation staff--she had one photographer and trusted him or her completely.

Wilder points out that news photos have been manipulated for a long-time, including coloring, and printing the sky with clouds.

"Photographers for the Matthew Brady studio," Wilder pointed out, "famously moved bodies to ‘capture’ the feel of battle in the Civil War. There are the notable ‘cannon balls on, cannon balls off’ images of the Valley of the Shadow of Death by Roger Fenton."

The Valley of the Shadow of Death is a photograph by Roger Fenton, taken on April 23, 1855, during the Crimean War. Many believe Fenton deliberately placed cannonballs on the road to make the scene appear more dramatic than it really was.

Nadya Bair, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Hamilton College (Clinton, N.Y.), reminded me that there has always been some manipulation of news images which is why, Bair argues, "so many of the controversies around staged photos ­ like Joe Rosenthal's Flag Raising at Iwo Jima and Robert Capa's Falling Soldier ­ are really about news images. They get to the heart of the public's long-standing suspicion of what they see in the news and the extent to which what they are being told happened really happened."

There are other examples. For example, Joseph Stalin having his enemies removed from pictures. And, of course, Hollywood was famous for manipulating photos of their glamor movie stars, airbrushing photos to remove wrinkles and dark shadows under their eyes.

In 2012, The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted a whole exhibit to the topic: "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop."

Doug Nickel, professor of art at Brown University, thinks the furor of the amateurish photo surfaced after “considerable distrust about the Royal Family's lack of disclosure of information about Kate surgery.”

Echoing that sentiment is Darren Newbury, professor of photographic history at the University of Brighton (south coast of England), who explained that "what has happened here, is that the conventions of news photography have changed over time, and certainly from mid-20th century (in the West, at least), the idea of truth has become seen as part of the rhetoric of the news/documentary image. And news organizations have evolved codes of practice that reflect that it was the current expectations and codes of practice of news photographs that Kate’s photograph violated and the threat it posed to those news organizations credibility that led to the furor."

The Photoshop software was developed by brothers Thomas and John Knoll in 1987. Later, they sold the license, and in 1988, Adobe Systems launched the software.

While minor adjustments in Photoshop are acceptable (dodging and burning, cropping), the Associated Press Code of Ethics for photojournalists states that "the content of a photograph must not be altered in Photoshop or by any other means. No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph. The faces or identities of individuals must not be obscured by Photoshop or any other editing tool."

Others aren’t quite buying the so-called “ethical standards” mantra the media asserts it clings to with digital photos in the 21st century.

Anne McCauley, professor of the history of photography and modern art at Princeton University, thinks this case over photoshopping was simply royal-bashing.

"Frankly,” McCauley said, "the line between going into Photoshop and erasing an ugly detail and doing things that are today accepted as legitimate and not manipulation (like increasing contrast, changing the color intensity, etc.) is rather a ridiculous one. All photos are ‘distortions’ from ‘reality.”’ That’s something people are going to have to get used to (also in video, of course) because of AI. Throughout all of history except the last 150 years, all imagery was handmade."

From McCauley's vantage point, "This picture was made to be controversial by people who feed off controversy, especially the tabloid press. It’s not controversial."

There certainly wasn’t anything manipulated or distorted with Kate Middleton’s face from the two-minute heart-rending video she delivered from Windsor Castle on Friday.

John Tagg, professor of art history at Binghamton University (Broome County, N.Y.), had a decidedly more blistering take on the Photoshop storm.

"The exaggerated fuss over Middleton's Mothering Sunday family snap,” Tagg explained, “seems to be the product of Britain's toxic and voyeuristic tabloid culture, higher end anxieties about journalistic privileges, and the outdated default secrecy maintained by an out of touch, over-protected and now roleless Royal clan.” “The missing fingers,” Tagg observed, “then become a metaphor and alibi for other claims and discontents, swirled around, of course, in the addictive cycles and free-for-all of social media."

Whoever was to blame or not to blame in this Photoshop circus, I think it’s fair to say the Royal Family has learned a valuable lesson about retouching photos and are probably much better off (as Queen Elizabeth II did) leaving photos of the family in the hands of their public relations staff, who are better equipped to examine the photos before they’re released to the tumultuous environment of social media.

And, hopefully ­ given what Kate Middleton is dealing with, the media and voyeuristic press has learned that there are bigger crimes in the world than a Photoshopped photograph of the Royal Family.

Winston Churchill, while serving as British Prime Minister, suffered an acute stroke in 1953, which was never revealed to the public.

Photo Credit: BBC Archive

***

With Catherine, the Princess of Wales, making full disclosure of her condition, fully prepared for the challenges it presents and what kind of excruciating toll it will likely take on her family and loved ones, she (and her father-in-law, King Charles III) have clearly broken new ground.

In the past, the health of the Royal Family and British prime ministers was usually shrouded in a cloak of secrecy.

And you didn’t have to go back very far to find cases of covering up the true condition of the Royal Family.

When Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 (age 96), the cause of death was given as “old age.” But according to a book written by Gyles Brandreth, "Queen Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait," the queen had a form of myeloma, or bone marrow cancer.

Similarly, the British public certainly wasn't aware that Charles III’s grandfather, King George VI, was diagnosed with lung cancer before he died in February 1952. He was 56. Some argue that even the king didn’t realize he was terminally ill when he died in his sleep.

In 1953, British PM Winston Churchill, unbeknownst to the general public or even the press, suffered an acute stroke, which incapacitated him for two months. It wasn't until 1966, when Churchill's personal doctor, Lord Moran, published an account of the former PM's condition, that the public came to realize his true condition while he was in office. Many considered it a breach of confidence.

Across the Atlantic, the true condition of U.S. presidents was often concealed from the public in the past. This includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in his last years, was coughing heavily, losing weight, and constantly fatigued. A report after his death disclosed that the president was weighed down with “acute congestive heart failure.” He was 63 when he died on April 12, 1945.

It wasn't until 2002 that the public came to a fuller understanding of John F. Kennedy's health while in office. Medical files opened up to historian Robert Dallek showed that he took painkillers, anti-anxiety agents, stimulants, and sleeping pills, as well as hormones to keep him alive, with extra doses in times of stress. Biographers have since concluded JFK suffered persistent digestive problems and Addison's disease, “a life-threatening lack of adrenal function.”

If King Charles III and Catherine, Princess of Wales, are fortunate enough to survive their cancer diagnoses, it certainly will send a strong message to those spanning the globe about the importance of early diagnosis of cancer and how critical it is in saving lives. Their courageous disclosures also comfort others diagnosed with cancer, that they are not alone in their battle against this deadly disease.

For now, all we can do is support the king and princess, keep them in our thoughts and prayers, and express to them our unwavering confidence that they’ll successfully lick this cruel disease.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

March 24, 2024

***

Examples of Photo Manipulation in the News

Circa 1864: Thanks to some razor-sharp researchers at the Library of Congress, it was discovered that the photo below of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in front of his troops at City Point, Va., during the American Civil War is actually a composite of three separate prints: (1) the head in this photo is taken from a portrait of Grant; (2) the horse and body are those of Maj. Gen. Alexander M. McCook; and (3) the background is of Confederate prisoners captured at the battle of Fisher's Hill, Va.

Circa 1930: Stalin was famous for air-brushing his enemies out of photographs, including this one, in which a commissar was removed from the original after becoming a bitter foe of the Soviet leader.

May 1970: This Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by John Filo shows bystander Mary Ann Vecchio (not a student) wailing as she kneels over the body of student Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University, where National Guardsmen sprayed a hail of bullets into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. The fence post behind Vecchio was removed when it published by LIFE Magazine.

August 1989: The cover of TV Guide shows daytime talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. This picture was manipulated by joining the head of Winfrey onto the body of actress Ann-Margret, taken from a 1979 publicity shot. The composite was created without permission of Winfrey or Ann-Margret, and was detected by Ann-Margret's fashion designer, who recognized the dress.

June 1994: This photograph of O.J. Simpson appeared on the cover of Time magazine soon after Simpson's arrest on suspicion of murder in the death his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. This photograph was manipulated from the original mug-shot that appeared, unaltered, on the cover of Newsweek. Time magazine was accused of manipulating the photograph to make Simpson appear "darker" and "menacing."

September 2000: As a way of showcasing its diverse enrollment, the University of Wisconsin at Madison edited a photograph on a brochure cover by digitally inserting a Black student in a crowd of white football fans. The original photograph of white fans was taken in 1993. The additional Black student, Diallo Shabazz, a senior, was taken in 1994. University officials said that they spent the summer searching for pictures that would show the school's diversity, but as you can see they had no luck.

July 2003: The photograph of actress Julia Roberts, published by Redbook, was a composite of Roberts' head taken at the 2002 People's Choice award and her body taken at the Notting Hill movie premiere in 1999.

Hearst, its publisher, apologized for its “mistake:” "In an effort to make a cover that would pop on the newsstand, we combined two different shots of Julia Roberts. We acknowledge that we may have gone too far and hope that Ms. Roberts will accept our apology."

March 2005: This digital composite of retail businesswoman and television personality Martha Stewart's head on a model's body appeared on the cover of Newsweek as Stewart was leaving prison, purportedly "thinner, wealthier, and ready for prime time," as the headline screams.

Newsweek disclosed the source of the cover image on Page 3 with the lines: "Cover: Photo illustration by Michael Elins ... head shot by Marc Bryan-Brown."

April 2005: The photo below, which appeared on the cover of Star Magazine, was a digital composite of actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who were rumored to have been involved in a romantic relationship.

The picture of Pitt was taken in Anguilla, a Caribbean Island, in January 2005. The picture of Jolie was taken in Virginia in 2004. Not until page 8 of the issue would readers find a disclaimer noting the image was a "composite of two photographs."

September 2006: A photograph of CBS news anchor Katie Couric was digitally modified from this original to give Couric, a slimmer, trimmer waistline along with a thinner face.

This photo appeared in CBS' in-house magazine Watch!

CBS spokesman Gil Schwartz said, "The doctored image was the work of a CBS photo department employee who got a little zealous." Schwartz added, "I talked to my photo department; we had a discussion about it. I think photo understands this is not something we'd do in the future."

April 2007: The New York Times published this digitally manipulated photograph. In a correction, the Times' editor stated that “the wood siding at the far left of the building was out of alignment because the picture was retouched by a Times staff member who took the picture, but who is not a staff photographer. He altered it because a flash created a white spot on the picture when he shot it through the window of a train. “

The retouching tool additionally left a round circle on the building's window at the right.

The editor's note stated, "Times policy forbids the manipulation of any photograph. Had editors been aware of the manipulation and seen the original picture, they would have either published the picture with the blemish or not used."

June 2010: This cover of The Economist magazine shows President Barack Obama appearing alone on a Louisiana beach inspecting an oil spill.

The original photo, shot by Reuters photographer Larry Downing, shows Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen and Charlotte Randolph, a local parish president, standing alongside the president.

A Reuters spokesperson said, "Reuters has a strict policy against modifying, removing, adding to or altering any of its photographs without first obtaining the permission of Reuters and, where necessary, the third parties referred to." 

In response, Emma Duncan, deputy editor of The Economist, stated: "I was editing the paper the week we ran the image of President Obama with the oil rig in the background. Yes, Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the image (Admiral Allen was removed by the crop). We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.”

Duncan further explained, “We often edit the photos we use on our covers. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead. I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story. The damage beyond the spill referred to on the cover was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America."

Source: "Photo Tampering Throughout History"--examples collected by the Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Book Review: How the New York Times Survived Scandal and Scorn

Veteran journalist, Adam Nagourney, (a New York Times’ staff writer since 1996), undertook a mighty tall order; chronicling The New York Times during some of its most tumultuous years of its 172-year history, roughly from 1977, through the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

The finished product was titled “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.”

It was published in September.

The book is an independent work, the Times did not authorize it.

During his meticulous and scrupulous research and countless person to person interviews, I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the well-respected Nagourney to open up old wounds, recount bitter feelings, bruised egos, spilled blood, and describe careless journalistic practices at a newspaper he works at.

Fortunately for him, most of the journalists Nagourney writes about have long left the building.

A. M. Rosenthal was executive editor of The New York Times from 1977 through 1986.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

***

Fittingly, Nagourney begins his history of the Times recounting the reign (or to some, the “reign of terror”) of A.M. (aka “Abe”) Rosenthal and his appointment as executive editor in 1977.

By the time he retired in 1999, Rosenthal completed a 55-year career with the Times as reporter, foreign correspondent, metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor, associated managing editor, managing editor, executive editor, and finally columnist, His final op-ed column appeared on November 5, 1999, along with a biographical sketch of his career written by Clyde Haberman.

As the reader quickly discovers, so much of how the Times changed and progressed over the decades was in reaction to how things were run during the Abe Rosenthal era. Not many can deny that Abe Rosenthal, despite his and volcanic personality and tyrannical rule, made the Times a better paper, he scoured the country for the some of the most talented journalists and expected they live up to their top billing and his high expectations.

As Nagourney wrote: “Rosenthal believed that the Times was different from every other newspaper and that it was obliged to stand apart from, and to rise above, the world it was chronicling.”

Abe Rosenthal’s court, however, appeared limited to the well-established conventional writers and editors, those considered outside the box had limited opportunities to advance.

This was certainly true for any journalists who happened to be gay. Nagourney writes how Rosenthal questioned the standards editor, Allan M. Siegal, whether he was hiring a cluster of gays on the metropolitan and national desks? Siegel responded he wasn’t intentionally hiring gays, but he wasn’t excluding them either.

Rosenthal held strong convictions (beliefs apparently shared by publisher at the time, Punch Sulzberger) that gays represented a seditious force in the newsroom, which, if left unchecked, will affect the content of the paper subversively.

It wouldn’t be until Max Frankel (1986-1994) took the reins from Rosenthal as executive editor would gay issues and the AIDS epidemic be given the coverage it deserved. Frankel promoted deputy national editor Jeffrey Schmalz to give readers a more comprehensive overview of HIV/AIDS and its impact on the LGBT community.

Schmalz, who was gay, was diagnosed with AIDS himself, writing about it in 1992 and ultimately dying from complications of the disease in 1993. He was 39.

Frankel was additionally the editor who relaxed some of the more austere editorial policies under Rosenthal by letting reporters, for example, have more than one byline in the same day’s paper, along with allowing multiple bylines to a story, something reporters vigorously pushed for.

Women, too, were given short shrift before and during Abe Rosenthal’s reign.

A Women’s Caucus in 1972 was formed, which found there were 385 men on the Times’ staff compared with only 40 women, 11 of the women were in the family and style pages. There were no women executives listed on the masthead, the 11-member editorial board didn’t include a woman, and there were no women photographers, and no women columnists.

While working on the metro desk, Anna Quindlen (later an op-ed columnist) was seven months pregnant when editor, Arthur Gelb, approached her station to ask “So, this is the last one, right? “

Appointing women and minorities to senior positions became a high priority for Max Frankel, along with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. when he succeeded his father as publisher.

Soma Golden Behr was the first female national editor; Gerald Boyd was promoted to managing editor in 2001, becoming the first African-American on the Times’ masthead.  Prior to that, Bob Herbert was named a Times’ op-ed columnist in 1993, while Margot Jefferson earned a Pulitzer in 1995 as a Black critic on cultural criticism.

The New York Times’ website went live at 11: 59 p.m. on Friday, January 19, 1996. 

As the Times slowly made the migration from print to the Internet, Nagourney’s book takes on a decidedly more dramatic tone and the stories and characters he writes about become all the more juicier.

Howell Raines, executive editor, arm raised at center, celebrated a record number of Pulitzers in 2002, at the desk of Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor.

 Photo Credit:  Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

 ***

Nagourney writes that soon after Howell Raines was promoted to executive editor in 2001 and led the Times to a record 7 Pulitzer Prizes for its 9/11 coverage, the House that Adolph Ochs built began to crumble, one brick at a time, igniting a nationwide scandal when the Times internal editorial flaws were exposed.

The first major scandal involved a young Black reporter, Jayson Blair, who after serving his internship was promoted to a full-time reporter in January, 2001.

He turned into a prolific reporter with his byline appearing in over 750 stories in just under five years. Eventually, more and more of the details in his stories began to be questioned by editors.

An internal investigation found problems with at least 36 of the 73 articles Blair wrote for the Times. He fabricated some quotes, wasn’t even in cities he claimed to have been in; and most damning of all-he lifted passages from a San Antonio Express-News article.

On May 2, 2003, the Times published an article announcing Blair’s resignation and chronicling his acts of “journalistic fraud.” 

The next major scandal involved the Times’ national security correspondent, Judith Miller, who after 9/11 began quoting from some purported reputable sources of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; many of the stories were splashed on page one of the Times.

As history proved, there were no WMD’s in Iraq, triggering complaints from Times’ staffers and media critics why her Iraq articles weren’t scrutinized more closely.

It turned out to be another major embarrassment for the Times.

In an attempt to defend her journalistic integrity, Miller wrote: “The experts and the journalists who covered them we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."

But as Nagourney points out, other newspapers didn’t botch the WMD story as badly as the Times did.

Judith Miller resigned from the Times on November 9, 2005.

The Times first public editor, Daniel Okrent (appointed by executive editor Bill Keller), attempted to untangle the lapse of sound editorial judgement in an article (Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?) published on May 30, 2004. 

Interestingly, both the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller debacles, may be attributable to Howell Raines, who pressured subordinates extremely hard to promote more minorities; and for the national desk to press harder on Iraq and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In their quest to meet Raines violent demands, they overlooked important tenets of journalism: truth and accuracy.

Former executive editors of The New York Times, from left to right: Dan Baquet (2014-2022), Jill Abramson (2011-2014), Bill Keller (2003-2011)

Photo Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux

***

After the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd on June 5, 2003, the baton was passed to the well-seasoned and Pulitzer Prize winning Bill Keller, who did a remarkable job of restoring credibility to the Times. First, by hiring a public editor and then on May 9, 2005, appointing an internal committee to examine how the Times could regain reader’s trust.

Their findings would be made available on the Times' company website at www.nytco.com.

Nagourney devotes the final chapters of his book examining how the Times navigated a new reality to the newspaper industry--for better or worse--how readers rely more and more on the Internet, podcasts, blogs, etc., for their news.

Seeing the writing on the wall and in a fight for its own survival, as readers spent more time online than reading the print edition, the Times unveiled a metered model on January 20, 2010 (that would begin in 2011), charging readers for access to the Times, which would empower NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business.

The pay model has been a rousing success. As of Q2 2023, The New York Times Company registered 9.2 million digital only subscribers.

When Jill Abramson (the first female executive editor in the Times’s history) succeeded Bill Keller as executive editor in 2011, reporters were now expected (at the urging of new CEO Mark Thompson) to tweet more often, spend time on podcasts, videos, web articles, mobile apps, and engage with their online audience in addition to their responsibilities to the print edition of the paper.

It was a tall order; and it was a facet of the new journalism that executive editor Jill Abramson took a rather dim view of.

It was Abramson’s contention that the extra online responsibilities would be putting too much of a burden on reporters to such an extent that it would compromise the quality of a completed story or project.

Nagourney wrote: “Abramson didn’t want the Times to become a news organization measured by traffic and clicks or where reporters and editors were expected to come up with revenue-producing ideas.” “She believed,” Nagourney explained, “in guarding the sanctity of the newsroom because that had been her life and career in newspapers.”

It would take Abramson’s successor (after her dismissal in 2014), Dean Baquet, to act as a bridge between the editorial and business side of the paper, and embrace the new technologies in order to increase revenue in the midst of declining print circulation. Unlike Abramson, Baquet never saw the digital side of the Times as a threat to the quality of the product.

On May 5, 2015, for the first time since 1946, Baquet eliminated the page one print edition meeting among editors of different desks in order to devote more time and energy to the digital product. He did this for a good reason. Weekday print circulation was 603, 700 in 2015, down from 648,900 the year before. Paid digital circulation, by comparison, leaped from 1,094 in 2015, up from 910,000 the year before.

Nagourney ends his book with the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45^th U.S. President, winning the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to 227 votes for Hillary Clinton. 

It was a red wave stunner, to be sure, so much so that the Times had a headline all ready to go on the anticipated election of Hillary Clinton: “MADAME PRESIDENT!”

As soon as it was clear Trump captured the presidency, Times’ staffers were caught back on their heels, scrambling, and trying to piece together a biographical profile of the controversial real estate mogul to post on the Times’ website.

With the election of Trump, politics was becoming more divisive and polarized.  

Readers, and even Times’ employees, were pushing for the paper to step away from “detachment,” and embrace a more “adversarial” brand of journalism, which would better reflect the polarized times the country was living in.

Such thinking was utterly at odds with what Abe Rosenthal believed in.

Nagourney recalls that in 1968, Rosenthal was bothered at the stories being filed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention by the Times’ staff writers. He felt the reporting was too slanted, the tone of the reporting appeared overwhelmingly to side with the peace demonstrators, while condemning the brutality of the police amidst the mayhem and chaos on the streets of Chicago.

“Do we become part of this movement, or do we report this movement?” Rosenthal asked.

Maybe such a critical question posed by Abe Rosenthal over 50 years ago is something the Times in 2023 should ponder more often in an age of extremism, divisiveness, and as more and more news organizations push an agenda.

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

November 4, 2023

 

NOTE: When researching and compiling a New York Times chronology, back in 2001, on the paper’s 150-year anniversary, I consulted the following resources.

Bibliography

Andriote, John-Manuel. Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco. New York: Harper Entertainment, 2001.

Berger, Meyer. The Story of The New York Times, 1851-1921 New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951.

Dates, Jannette L. and Barlow, William. Split Image: African Americans In The Mass Media. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1990.

Davis, Elmer History of The New York Times, 1851-1921. New York: The New York Times, 1921.

Diamond, Edwin. Behind the Times: Inside The New York Times. New York: Villard Books, 1994.

Goulden, Joseph C. Fit to Print: A.M. Rosenthal and His Times. Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1998.

Kahn, Roger. "The House of Adolph Ochs." Saturday Evening Post. October 9, 1965.

Kane, Joseph Nathan. Famous First Facts: A Record of First Happenings, Discoveries, and Inventions in American History. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1997.

Kass, Stephen L. and McCarroll, Jean M. "Westway Redux?" New York Law Journal. June 23, 2000.

Kihss, Peter. "Harlem Riots Spread Over 3 Decades" The New York Times, July 20, 1964.

Kirkpatrick, David D. "Publishers Set To Remove Older Articles From Files." The New York Times June 26, 2001.

Meadow, Charles T. "Online Database Industry Timeline." Database. October, 1988.

Mencken, H.L. The American Language: An Inquiry Into The Development of English In The United States. New York: Alfred-A-Knopf, 1963.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Salisbury, Harrison E. Without Fear or Favor: An Uncompromising Look at The New York Times. New York: Times Books, 1980.

Shepard, Richard F. The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey Through the Archives of The New York Times. New York: Times Books, 1996.

Talese, Gay The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World, World Publishing Co. 1969

Tifft, Susan E. and Jones, Alex S. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. Boston: Little Brown, 1999.

Recommended References

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Johnson, Gerald W. An Honorable Titan: A Biographical Study of Adolph S. Ochs. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

Ostrander, Stephen J. "All the News That's Fit to Print: Adolph Ochs and The New York Times." Timeline (a publication of the Ohio Historical Society), 10, no 1 (Jan./Feb.1993).

"150th Anniversary 1851-2001: From The Newspaper To The Information Age" (A special section published November 14, 2001). The New York Times.

Gelb, Arthur. City Room. G.P Putnam's Sons, 2003.

Frankel, Max. The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times. Dell Publishing, 1999.

The One That Got Away:  A Memoir by Howell Raines. A Lisa Drew Book, 2006.

  

God Save the Monarchy!

The Royal Family during the Trooping the Colour

Photo Credit: Rex Features

***

The reports of the British Monarchy’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

That became abundantly clear over the past two weeks while the world (especially Britain) was in mourning over the death of their beloved Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in British history. She was on the throne for 70 years, from February 6, 1952 until September 8, 2022.

The Queen was 96.

The very fact that her funeral had to take place at Westminster Abbey (the first funeral service at the Abbey for a British monarch since George II in 1760) instead of at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, attest to her popularity spanning the globe. St George’s Chapel can only hold 800 people; the Abbey’s capacity, on the other hand, is 2,000 and can hold as many as 8,000 if necessary. Ever since George III (1820), funerals of British kings and queens have been at St George’s Chapel.

Reportedly, about 500 guests from 200 countries and territories were present at the funeral for the Queen, including nearly 100 presidents and heads of government. In all, the funeral was attended by around 2,000 guests. The Queen’s funeral was additionally watched by 29.2 million people on television in the UK.

***

Across the Atlantic, solemnity wasn’t the order of the day; rather, it was pure venom.

Many leading news publications in the United States, especially the New York Times, did their best to rain on the Royal Families parade by linking the monarchy to oppressive colonialism and included one prickly opinion piece (written by a Harvard historian) which charged Queen Elizabeth II with vicious racism and “helping obscure a bloody history of decolonization.”

The New York Times editorial board, obviously, assembled after the death of the Queen and decided they were on a mission to bring down the monarchy.

“They will not succeed,” Nile Gardener of the Telegraph newspaper wrote. “The Monarchy is strong, robust and vital to Britain's future. It will remain at the heart of the British nation for centuries to come. The Queen has left a powerful legacy, and her life of service will continue to inspire the British people and the free world for generations to come.”

If you read newspapers from the United States over the last couple of weeks, readers can’t help but get the impression that the monarchy is an antiquated, crumbling relic and its citizens (fed up with all the pomp and circumstance) is aching for a Republic form of government.

The Commonwealth was first founded by George VI (the late queen’s father) in 1949 to maintain Britain’s links with the former colonies. They grew from seven to 54 countries, encompassing 2.5 billion people, during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, during a time when many of the countries of the once mighty British empire gained their independence.

What very few mention is that in June, Togo and Gabon (neither with colonial links to the UK) have joined the Commonwealth, becoming the 55^th and 56^th members to join. Both countries are former French colonies, which gained independence from France in the 1960s. Prior to that, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in 2009; and before that, Mozambique in 1995.

There is an additional swath of nations with a total population of some 40 million currently seeking membership.

You would think there are heaps of countries heading for the exits from the Commonwealth; when, in fact, the Republic of Ireland was the only country that left and did not rejoin.

Reportedly, 60 % of Australians want to keep the monarchy, rather than opt for an elected president under a republican form of government.

I found it laughable that newspapers like The New York Times were determined to dismantle the monarchy, at a time when the United States (if the polls are any guide) is on the brink of civil war with the electorate split down the middle on the right-wing leaning U.S. Supreme Court, pervasive racism (whether real or imagined), and the revolting violence which took place on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump supporters thundered through the Capitol building in Washington D.C. The insurrection culminated in five deaths with many injured, including 138 police officers.

A poll, recently conducted by the Economist and YouGov found that 55% of self-identified "strong" Republicans believed civil war is at least somewhat likely, while 40% of self-identified "strong" Democrats echoed that sentiment. 

Contrary to what The New York Times believes, residents in Britain would like to keep their form of government exactly the way it is.

According to the British Attitudes Survey, from 1983 to 2021, a majority strongly believe it’s important for Britain to continue to have a monarchy.

Between 1994 and 2021, for example, two-thirds (67%) of respondents in Britain have expressed this view. 

And why is it so important for the monarchy to stay in place?

Clement Attlee, former British Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, wrote an essay for the Observer on August 23, 1959 on the role of the monarchy in Britain. Many of the elements of the monarchy that Attlee highlighted 63 years ago is remarkably still significant today.

“The monarch,” Attlee wrote, “is the general representative of all the people and stands aloof from the party-political battle. A president, however popular, is bound to have been chosen as representative of some political trend, and as such is open to attack from those of a different view. A monarch is a kind of referee, although the occasions when he or she has to blow the whistle are nowadays very few.”

It's truly stunning that during her reign, Queen Elizabeth II visited 116 countries, on 261 official overseas visits, including 78 state visits, while meeting with 14 of the 15 sitting U.S. Presidents. And yet, Elizabeth rarely, if ever, tipped her hand on how she felt about certain hot-button issues. She greeted former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump with the same grace and decorum as she would any head of state.

British writer CS Lewis, summed it up perfectly: “Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

And what exactly has become of those few, those seemingly happy few countries, which have abolished monarchies during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign?

Of Afghanistan, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Iraq, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Rwanda, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Yemen, only Greece, as Daniel Hannan of The Telegraph shrewdly points out, “can be said to have made a successful change.”

It’s ironic that countries, living in monarchies, such as Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand sport the most open-minded and egalitarian forms of government and aren’t storming their Parliament buildings and demanding election results be overturned.

As Mathew Syed in The Times of London so beautifully wrote, “It wasn’t just her [Queen Elizabeth’s] status but her character that united us. In a world where politicians so often fall short, she rarely did.”

It’s also striking that within the British Parliament itself with all the rancor currently taking place among the political parties (Labour, Lib Dems, Conservative Party, etc.) with the awesome responsibilities the new PM, Liz Truss, inherits: a spiraling energy crisis, the falling of the pound to historic levels, and the overall financial well-being of the country up in the air, Britain and its political parties remained in harmony in their support for constitutional monarchy and the queen whose devotion to service and duty over seven decades was nothing less than spectacular.

Queen Elizabeth II bows in front of the Dublin Memorial Garden on May 17, 2011, in Ireland. Her visit was the first by a monarch since 1911.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

***

And for those who think Britain and its monarchy are wedded to a bygone era, just consider that during her reign, the queen in 2011 became the first monarch to visit Ireland in its 90 years since bloody independence, and 32 years after the IRA assassination of her husband’s (Prince Philip) uncle. When she bowed at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin for those who died fighting for Irish independence, she became a symbol of peace.

Prior to that, she travelled to West Germany in 1965 and Moscow in 1994 to renew Britain’s friendship with World War II allies, all during an age when many thought the Queen was just an insignificant figurehead.

Imagine, there are 29 billion British coins in circulation with Queen Elizabeth II’s face on them.

Far from the hostility, vindictiveness, and toxic nature of politics among voters and political rivals in the United States, the Queen (and now King Charles III) remove themselves from the fray and rancor of the political battles and turn their attention to uniting the country by displaying dignity, discretion, and duty—all important hallmarks of the British Monarchy—in ways few world leaders are able to.

Columnist Nick Timothy of The Telegraph captured the unifying mood holding the country together so well, when he wrote: “The respect we show for the Royals reflects esteem not only for them as individuals, but as symbols of the stable constitutional settlement their family provides for us.” “It reflects,” Timothy continued, “our acceptance of their status as the protectors – not the participants – of the democratic political system that sits beneath them. It may be paradoxical, but our parliamentary democracy depends on our hereditary monarchy.”

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

September 28, 2022

What to Know About Ukraine's History

Ukrainians desperately trying to board trains at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Central Station.

Photo Credit: Pete Kiehart/The Guardian/BuzzFeed

***

Over a week into Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, turmoil and bloodshed remains, with residents of Kyiv rushing to the train station in order to escape Russia’s wrath.

More than one million Ukrainians have been displaced, adding to the humanitarian crisis.

Russian troops, according to a Human Rights Watch report, have fired cluster munitions into at least three residential neighborhoods.

More threatening still, Russia has captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe after shelling part of the complex, raising fears of a nuclear disaster; others equate it to a “war crime.” For now, the power plant’s six reactors reportedly remain intact and undamaged.

The Associated Press reported that the head of Ukraine’s security council called on Russia to create humanitarian corridors to allow children, women and the elderly to escape the fighting. The United Nations has reported 752 civilian casualties across Ukraine, with 227 killed and 525 injured. Since February 24, 28 children have been killed.

In February 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered three thousand U.S. troops to position near Poland and Romania—NATO countries that border Ukraine—to counter Russian troops stationed near its border.

A Russian air strike on a rural residential area in Kyiv region killed at least seven people on Friday, including two children.

Photo Credit: Twitter/@rustem_umerov)

***

Since the Ukraine conflict continues to grow more ominous by the hour, I compiled some historical facts about the Eastern European country.

• Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was founded about 1,500 years ago by proto-Ukrainian Slavic tribes.
• Historically, in December 1922, Ukraine together with Russia and Belarus, and Trans-Caucasian Federation were the founding members of the Soviet Union.
• Ukraine is home to more than 100 different national or ethnic groups.
• Ukraine's population is overwhelmingly Christian; the vast majority - up to two thirds - identify themselves as Orthodox.
• Since the 17^th century, Ukraine was divided among three Empires - by Austrians in the West, by Turks in the South, and by Russians in the East.
• The Ukrainian national anthem is called ‘Shche ne vmerla Ukraina’ which translates in English to ‘Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished’
• Ukraine’s name derives from the Old East Slavic word "ukraina" meaning "borderland or march (militarized border region)" and began to be used extensively in the 19th century; originally Ukrainians referred to themselves as Rusyny (Rusyns, Ruthenians, or Ruthenes), an endonym derived from the medieval Rus state (Kyivan Rus)
• At the end of the World War I, Ukraine was divided into two: Western Ukraine became part of Poland and Eastern Ukraine, the larger part was absorbed by into the Soviet Union and renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both governments imposed their own language and government.
• The Second World War claimed the lives of 5.5 million Ukrainians, including at least one million Ukrainian Jews.
• Most Ukrainians live in cities (67.2 %). The largest metropolitan area in Ukraine is Kiev (3.2 million), Kharkiv (1.7 million), Donetsk (1.7 million), Dnipropetrovsk (1.5 million), and Odessa (1.1 million). The largest ethnic group are ethnic Ukrainians (78%) and ethnic Russians (17 %).
• The state language is Ukrainian, an east Slavic language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, composed of a mixture of Latin, Greek, and Slavic letters.
• The famous Carol of the Bells Christmas carol is based on a Ukrainian folk tune.
• In the 8th-10th centuries, parts of what is now Ukraine were ruled by the Khazars, a Turkic tribe which converted to Judaism.
• The territory of Ukraine became the site of almost constant warfare between Poles, Muscovites, Ottomans, Tatars, and Ukrainian Cossacks in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. According to Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark, “the subsequent incorporation of most Ukrainian territories into the Muscovite State and its successor, the Russian Empire, cut off Ukraine from its roots in Europe and had ruinous consequences for Ukrainian religion, language, and culture, which were progressively Russified or banned.”
• During the 16^th and 17^th centuries, tens of thousands of Ukrainians were captured annually and shipped to and sold in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire, as slaves.
• Ukraine experienced a major cultural, political, and economic revival in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, when the charismatic Ivan Mazepa served as leader of an autonomous Cossack polity known as the Hetmanate—until his defeat by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.
• Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was born a serf in 1814 in a small village south of Kyiv
• Ukraine was the birthplace of many prominent Jews—among many others the writers Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, Bruno Schulz, Sholom Aleichem, Vasily Grossman, Isaac Babel, and Shmuel Agnon. Zionist leader Vladimir Zhabotinsky and former Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir were also born in Ukraine, as was the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer.
• Twentieth-century Ukraine was the site of two genocides—the Holodomor of 1932-1933, during which millions of Ukrainians were mercilessly killed in an artificial famine engineered by Joseph Stalin and his henchmen, and the Holocaust, which took the lives of millions of Jews. Ukraine suffered 15 million “excess” deaths between 1914 and 1948, due to wars, genocides, and Stalin’s repressive policies.
• Ukrainians formed the majority of Soviet political prisoners; they staged revolts in the concentration camps of the Soviet Gulag; they fought bravely against Stalin and Hitler; they resisted Muscovite and Russian imperialism for centuries.
• The Ukrainian diaspora in the United States consists of about 1.25 million people, who, while concentrated in the formerly industrial Northeast and Midwest, are found in all 50 states.
• Prominent Americans of Ukrainian descent include astronaut Heide Marie Stefanyshyn-Piper, actors Jack Palance, Natalie Wood, Vera Farmiga, and Liev Schreiber, policymaker Paula Dobriansky, Metropolitan Opera singer Paul Plishka, football great Bronko Nagurski, economist Greg Mankiw, inventor Igor Sikorsky, journalist Mike Royko, and writer Chuck Palahniuk. 
• The first literary tradition of the Ukrainian language was created by Ivan Kotliarevskyi at the end of 18^th century and developed at the beginning of the 19^th century by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevechnko. According to Sergei Zhuk, Professor of History at Ball State University, since a publication of Shevchnko's collection of poetry Kobzar in 1940, Ukraine witnessed a rise of nationalist movement which eventually untied Western part (Austrian) and Eastern (Russian) part of Ukrainians in one large patriotic movement, resulting in an independent state in 1991.
• A peaceful mass protest, the "Orange Revolution" in 2004 forced the authorities to overturn a rigged presidential election and to allow a new internationally monitored vote that swept into power a reformist slate under Viktor YUSHCHENKO. 
• Ukraine celebrated its 30^th anniversary of independence in 2021.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

March 4, 2022

Source:  Congressional Research Service (CRS); Sergei Zhuk, professor of History at Ball State University; Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark; Monica White, Associate Professor of Russian & Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham; Robert W. Orttung Research Director, Sustainable George Washington University Research Professor of International Affairs (IERES); “A History of Ukraine: It’s Land and Peoples” by Paul R. Magocsi

Nominate Liz Cheney for JFK's Profile in Courage Award

Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the new select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Photo Credit: CNN

 ***

“The true democracy, living and growing and inspiring, puts its faith in the people — faith that the people will not simply elect men who will represent their views ably and faithfully, but will also elect men who will exercise their conscientious judgment — faith that the people will not condemn those whose devotion to principle leads them to unpopular courses, but will reward courage, respect honor, and ultimately recognize right.”

--John F. Kennedy

 

For the last several weeks, we’ve been witnessing a profile in courage—and haven’t paid much attention to it.

And it centers on Wyoming’s lone member of Congress: Liz Cheney.

The daughter of George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, was first elected in 2016 on a platform of restoring America’s prestige in foreign affairs, with an aggressive conservative agenda of cutting taxes and regulation, and expanding America’s energy, mining and agriculture industries. Cheney serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

In 1954, John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts, took a leave of absence from the Senate while recovering from back surgery and wrote “Profiles in Courage,” which focuses on eight U.S. Senators who showed enormous courage under pressure from peers, and whose actions, moreover, were at odds with popular opinion.

The one-volume book earned Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize.

The senators under consideration to be profiled by Kennedy met the following criteria.

• pressure to be liked
• pressure to be re-elected, and
• pressure of the constituency and interest groups.

Since 1990, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation have presented “Profile in Courage” awards to individuals (often elected officials) who exhibited an exemplary act of courage based on the criteria outlined in Kennedy’s prize-winning book.

Past winners have included: John McCain, Gerald Ford, Edward M. Kennedy, Gabby Giffords, Barrack Obama, George H.W. Bush, and Mitt Romney.

Interestingly, as I was browsing through the JFK Library and Museum website a week or so ago, I immediately thought of Congresswoman Cheney when I glanced at the Profile of Courage Awards.

A few days later, I was listening to the Politics War Room podcast and co-host Al Hunt described Liz Cheney’s actions (as co-chair) on the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol, as bold and a “profile in courage” in pursuing the truth of what happened on that horrific day despite being banished within the Republican Party and quite possibly seeing her political career burst into flames.

Liz Cheney will be challenged in the Wyoming primary by Harriet Hageman, who unsurprisingly, has been endorsed by Donald Trump. At the beginning of the month, a poll by SoCo Strategies, shows Cheney is running about 18 points behind Hageman.

Because Cheney believes that “each of us swears an oath before God to uphold our Constitution,” she never bought into the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. She was only one of ten Republicans who voted that Donald Trump should be impeached during his second impeachment trial for inciting an insurrection by urging his supporters to march on the Capitol building.

Consenting to Trump’s false assertion that the election was stolen from him quickly became a loyalty test within the Republican Party. Because she voted to impeach Trump, Liz Cheney was removed from her No. 3 post as Chair of the House Republican Conference and replaced with Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, (surprise! surprise!) a loyal supporter of Trump.

But that didn’t silence Liz Cheney, the “Iron Lady’’ of U.S. politics.

In September, she was selected as vice chair of the January 6 Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol. She has settled into her new position like a pit bull. Two loyal disciples of Trump, Mark Meadows (Trump’s former Chief of Staff) and Steve Bannon (Trump’s former chief strategist) have been held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with its investigation into the Jan. 6 attack.

Not only is Cheney only one of two Republicans on the commission, but she’s distinguished herself for her combative style in questioning witnesses. She’s skilled in interpreting the criminal code for the prosecution of violations.  In particular, Cheney has set her sights on  18 U.S. Code § 1512. The language of the statute states that whoever corruptly … “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”  The statute has represented the backbone of a federal abuse, which Donald Trump may have violated.

 What’s particularly fascinating about Cheney’s dogged pursuit of the truth of what happened on January 6 and her daring criticism of Donald Trump (with instigating the riot) is that this isn’t a personal vendetta she has harbored against the former U.S. President.

In fact, before the insurrection, she was a loyal supporter of Donald Trump’s agenda. In 2019, she was reportedly feuding with Rand Paul over who was the “Trumpier.”  She voted in line with Trump's position 92.9% of the time, supporting him “more consistently in House votes than even his former chief of staff Mark Meadows."

And it’s not as if Cheney is a moderate, out of sync with the ideals of the rest of the Republican Party. She has a 98% positivity rating from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which rates lawmakers based on their voting records.

What is driving Liz Cheney is not GOP talking points or being tethered to the party mantra: “to get along you have to go along.”

Cheney’s oath of office means more to her than being in with the in-crowd.

She refuses to acquiesce to the “Big Lie” and being relegated to one of Donald Trump’s loyal servants out of fear of being banished. In addition to speaking out in public, Cheney has tweeted the false claim is “poisoning our democratic system.” She additionally warned against falling victim to the “Trump cult of personality.”

Though she is considered a pariah within her own party, she does have a smattering of supporters within the Republican Party. Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, depicted Cheney as an “important leader" with the "courage" to act on her convictions.  Likewise, Senator Sue Collins, (R-Maine), has publicly stated that "Liz Cheney is a woman of strength and consciences…she did what she felt was right, and I salute her for that.”

Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough and co-host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, gave her a ringing endorsement, when he said that “she doesn’t back away from unpopular positions.”

The whole point of the writing of Profiles in Courage for John Kennedy was to show his admiration for the courage exhibited by elected officials in “the face of adverse factions like their electorates, popular opinion, and political action committees that pull these elected men in different directions.” “This book,” Kennedy wrote 67 years ago was “a book about that most admirable of human virtues – courage. ‘Grace under pressure,’ Ernest Hemingway defined it.”

Liz Cheney’s political career is most likely over for not bowing to political pressure and joining the other Republican mouseketeers in showering praise on Donald Trump despite his obvious culpability with inciting a riot.

For that Cheney paid a heavy price.

As she stated on January 12, “none of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution."

Because of her devotion to the Constitution and the values it embodies, Liz Cheney was willing to exchange her political career for the truth of what happened on January 6 at the Capitol Building, which resulted in the death of five people with scores of injuries, including 138 police officers.

If that’s not a profile in courage; I don’t know what is.

Whoever has the power, please nominate Liz Cheney for a “Profile in Courage” award.

 

---Bill Lucey

[email protected]

December 21, 2021

Most Viewed Online Stories of 2021

A mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump climb through a window they broke as they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Photo Credit: Leah Millis/Reuters

***

Remarkably, most of us made it through 2021 in one piece with our Republic still intact despite an unprecedented Capitol Hill insurrection, which some equate to 9/11.

On January 6, a mob of protesters leaving a Donald Trump rally, upset from the results of the 2020 presidential election, which resulted in a Joe Biden victory, stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., the cradle of democracy, and assaulted law enforcement officers, vandalized property and occupied the building for several hours. Five people died, including several being injured before order was restored.

Two days after the insurrection, Twitter suspended Donald Trump’s account in order to prevent any “further incitement of violence. "

Just when we thought we licked Covid-19 after getting our miraculous vaccine shots (the acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus), a Delta variant emerged threatening more lives and leading to more restrictions and safeguarding, including wearing more masks.

Combined with last year’s fatalities, the U.S. is nearing 800,000 deaths from Covid.

“Seventy-five percent of people,” The New York Times recently reported "who have died of the virus in the United States — or about 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 who have perished so far — have been 65 or older. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus.”

Soon after President Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46^th U.S. President, he made good on his pledge to completely pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan after 20 years, a senseless engagement (to many) which cost the U.S. $2 trillion (Afghanistan and Iraq combined), with 2,461 U.S. service members killed, 20,000 injured, and another 3,846 U.S. contractors killed.

Despite the cancelling of the Tokyo Olympics last year due to the global pandemic, the Olympics finally took place in Tokyo (July 23-August 8) with the United States earning the most medals: 39 gold medals, 113 in total, while China finished second with 38 gold medals, 88 altogether.

The most disappointing blemish on the Summer Games was that no international guests (including spectators) were permitted to attend the Games, due to COVID travel restrictions.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, right, prepares to board a helicopter with his daughter Michaela Cuomo after announcing his resignation, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, in New York.

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

***

Unquestionably, one of the most scandalous stories of the year that splashed across many page one headlines was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigning his office (August 10) soon after New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report that found that the New York Governor sexually harassed 11 women, and according to the damning report, created a "hostile  work environment.” 

Before recessing for the Thanksgiving holiday, President Biden witnessed the successful passage of his ambitious infrastructure bill (“Build Back Better”) in Congress, which he described as a “once-in-generation investment in America.”

After a razor thin vote in the House of Representatives on November 5 (228-206) the infrastructure bill will invest hundreds of dollars to upgrade physical infrastructure, including roads and bridges, railways, airports, and water systems. The plan additionally invests tens of billions of dollars to modernize the U.S. electrical grid, aggressively embrace electric vehicles, and significantly expand broadband internet access.

The great Tom Brady clearly proved he’s the Eveready Battery of professional sports, who at age 43, won his seventh Super Bowl ring, leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a convincing 31-9 pounding  of the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV (55) at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, Florida. It was the first time in Super Bowl history a team has won in its home stadium.

So, those are just a brief assortment of the most dominating stories of the year.

To get an idea what stories interested readers the most in 2021, I checked in with some major news organizations to see what articles drove the most traffic to their home pages.

Here’s the list of news organizations who responded to my email.

CNN: January 6 Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

CNN’s Top Video: Surfside, Florida Building Collapse

Los Angeles Times: Tracking the Coronavirus in California 

Fox News: Democrat Jon Ossoff Projected to win Georgia Senate Runoff Election over Republican David Perdue

Open Secrets: Trump’s Political Operation Paid More than $3.5 million to January 6 Organizers

ProPublica: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

The Marshall Project: The Controversial Version of the U.S. Flag has been Hailed as a Sign of Police Solidarity and Criticized as a Symbol of White Supremacy

Fortune: A Shock is Headed for the U.S. Housing Market

ESPN: Tiger Woods Recovering from Lengthy Surgery to Repair Significant Injuries to Right Leg

Weather Channel: Hurricane Ida: New Orleans to New Jersey

Texas Freeze

Hurricane Elsa

Western Wildfires

Megadrought in the West

Yahoo News: Trump Supporters Storm Congress, Halting Electoral Vote Certification Debate

Google: Year in Searches

Google: Top Trending News and Searches for the U.S. and Globally

GLOBAL: 

Searches 

1. Australia vs India
2. India vs England
3. IPL
4. NBA
5. Euro 2021
6. Copa América
7. India vs New Zealand
8. T20 World Cup
9. Squid Game
10. DMX

News: 

1. Afghanistan
2. AMC Stock
3. COVID Vaccine
4. Dogecoin
5. GME Stock
6. Stimulus Check
7. Georgia Senate Race
8. Hurricane Ida
9. COVID
10. Ethereum Price

U.S. Searches

1. NBA
2. DMX
3. Gabby Petito
4. Kyle Rittenhouse
5. Brian Laundrie
6. Mega Millions
7. AMC Stock
8. Stimulus Check
9. Georgia Senate Race
10. Squid Game

News 

1. Mega Millions
2. AMC Stock
3. Stimulus Check
4. Georgia Senate Race
5. GME
6. Dogecoin
7. Hurricane Ida
8. Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict
9. Afghanistan
10. Ethereum Price

Source: Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google

Twitter: Year-in-Review:

Tik-Tok Year-in-Review 

Meta (formerly Facebook): Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook

Linkedin Year-in-Review: Data Facts

Spotify Year-in-Review

---Bill Lucey

[email protected]

December 13, 2021

 

Winston Churchill's Iconic Status Questioned in New Book

***

British statesman, writer, historian, and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945), Winston Churchill, once famously said, “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

Well, history hasn’t been very kind to Winston Churchill lately, because a trend is in progress with revisionists and other commentators looking back on history with a 21^st century progressive and moral lens—on a mission to shame history’s most decorated historical figures. Knowing a rebuttal for those accused won’t be coming because they’re no longer around to defend themselves, makes their case appear even stronger.

Most recently, journalist and historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft has taken to a public flogging of Churchill in broad daylight in his new book, “Churchill’s Shadow,” hoping to shatter all the hero worshiping and adulations given to the “British Bulldog” for most of the 20^th century and spilling over into the 21^st century.

Wheatcroft challenges readers to widen their net when looking at Churchill’s life by taking a sharper, more critical look at some of his unseemly characteristics which have largely been swept under the rug.

Readers are going to have to decide for themselves whether his account is a character assassination or an objective, non-partisan look at arguably one of the most worshiped figures of the 20^th century.

Peter Baker, Chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, recently reviewed Wheatcroft’s book, writing that “on both sides of the Atlantic, we are living in an era when history is being re-examined, a time when monuments are coming down and illusions about onetime heroes are being shattered.”

Between the covers, Wheatcroft, according to Baker’s account, underscores Churchill’s perceived racism, narcissism, heavy drinking, his unabashed imperialist tendencies, neglecting his own children, along with being a horrible judge of character, and, naturally, a shameless mythmaker.

In Wheatcroft’s book, he becomes the prosecutor, judge and jury of Churchill’s life and career without the former prime minister ever appearing on the witness stand.

While Baker might not be in perfect agreement with Wheatcroft demolishing the iconic status of Churchill, he does concede that Wheatcroft makes a compelling argument in unpacking the complicated features of Churchill, just not the ones we selectively choose to remember.

“History is not one-dimensional,” Baker wrote. “Churchill was indeed a complicated figure, one whose stirring defense of Britain at its moment of maximum peril — and by extension that of Western civilization — overshadows fewer worthy parts of his record.”

Roger Louis, an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and editor-in-chief of “The Oxford History of the British Empire” thinks “Churchill’s Shadow” was a book that needed to be written and according to him, an accurate reassessment. “It makes clear,” Louis told me, “what most authorities on Churchill would recognize as a long overdue account and concludes with a fair judgment: “he saved his country and saved freedom.”

Will Wheatcroft’s book significantly reshape Churchill’s legacy?

Not according to Richard M. Langworth, Senior Fellow at Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project.

“I think there is scarcely a dent in Churchill's legacy: first because most of the charges are false, and second because they ignore what really matters. Only a small fraction of people believes such things,” Langworth observed.

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has been making “the case for the defense” against blatant inaccuracies written about Churchill for years-- such as its “Truths and Heresies," department.

The Churchill Project additionally documents a selection of popular quotes wrongly attributed to Churchill. Followers of Winnie, for example, might be surprised to learn he never said: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: what counts is the courage to continue.” Nor did he say, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

In addition to Peter Baker, “Churchill’s Shadow’’ was reviewed by British historian and biographer Richard Aldous in the Wall Street Journal in which he praises Wheatcroft for the first part of his book, but takes him to task for the second part in which he belittles historian Andrew Roberts (author of “Churchill: Walking With Destiny,” 2018), along with other historians for their "Churchillolatry.”

“That’s a shame,” Aldous wrote, “not least because Mr. Roberts’s is a much better book—deeply researched in the archives and the product of decades of Churchill study.”

 Aldous is additionally puzzled that Wheatcroft questions the wisdom of the British state paying £12.5 million for the Churchill papers. “Those papers are now available digitally, though Mr. Wheatcroft seems not to have made much use of them,” Aldous wrote.

 Aldous contends Wheatcroft was correct in suggesting that so much of what Churchill believed in and championed has “withered away” as Britain lost its leadership prominence as the 20^th century came to a close. But Aldous is just as quick to point out that while Britain is no longer a superpower, it still maintains the fifth largest economy in the world, has a permanent seat on the United Nations Council, is a leading member of NATO, and is now part of the Aukus security alliance (with Australia and the United States).

“All these elements of status and power,” Aldous argues, “have their origins in the late 1940s and 1950s, a period Mr. Wheatcroft views so balefully. “

Chris Waters, professor of Modern European History at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts) agrees with Wheatcroft that the cult surrounding Churchill since World War II emphasizing his “finest hour” speech too often dominates the “more problematic side Churchill’s character and politics,’’ which should be more thoroughly scrutinized.

Waters argues as Britain has lost its prominent status on the world stage, there’s a tendency to fall prey to nostalgia, especially about Churchill going to eyeball-to-eyeball with Adolf Hitler and standing tall after the Luftwaffe sprayed bombs on London for 57 consecutive nights between September and November 1940.

Waters believes, strongly, that we should “demolish the myth that has grown up around Churchill since the War, but we should not demolish the statues or fail to respect his many triumphs and contributions to the nation either!”

Since the main thrust of “Churchill’s Shadow” was to smash what Wheatcroft considered the blatant idolatry of Churchill in historian Andrew Robert’s 2018 masterpiece, “Churchill Walking with Destiny,” (published in 2018), it didn’t take long for Roberts to answer back.

In an article published by The Churchill Project , the biographer and historian highlighted some weaknesses or inaccuracies in Wheatcroft’s work.

Wheatcroft stated Churchill was not a well-travelled man. Quite the contrary, Roberts fired back. “Churchill visited America 16 times and Canada nine times, crossing both from coast to coast. He served for years in India and Afghanistan, fought in Cuba, South Africa, the Sudan and on the Franco-Belgian border, honeymooned in Italy, holidayed in France, Italy, Florida, Monaco, Madeira, Morocco, Bahamas and Spain, mountaineered in Switzerland, twice visited Stalin in Moscow, held conferences in Cairo and Tehran, watched army maneuvers with the Kaiser in Germany, cruised the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and also visited Palestine, Iceland, Turkey, Cyprus, Uganda, Belgium, Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania), Mozambique, Kenya, Bermuda, Monaco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Malta, Holland, Trinidad, Jamaica and Greece.”

In another part of the book, Wheatcroft argues that Churchill’s judgement was strategically flawed. “Yet,” Roberts answers, it was Churchill and “Alan Brooke (senior officer of the British army) who not only came up with the Mediterranean strategy that liberated North Africa and Italy but also sold it to the Americans, and ensured no over-hasty return in force to the European continent before D-Day.”

In addition, charges that Churchill cultivated fascist leanings in the 1920’s isn’t supported by any reputable sources, Roberts claims, except political enemies of the “British Bulldog.”

Roberts argues, among other weaknesses of the book, that many of Wheatcroft’s sources are dubious, including the use of internet articles by the former journalist Johann Hari, who later had to return a journalism prize for inventing quotes.

In summing up Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s book, Roberts wrote that “never in the field of Churchill revisionism have so many punches been thrown in so many pages with so few hitting home.”

Winston Churchill addresses the House of Commons of Canada in 1941. 

Photo Credit: CP Archive

***

Admittedly, one of the biggest problems in assessing the life and times of Winston Churchill, much like Abraham Lincoln, is that he endured many failures and hardships before rising to the top when his country needed him most, during its darkest hour.

Churchill spent sixty years of his political life in the House of Commons. Taking a broad brush to Churchill’s accomplishments and failures over so many decades of service, isn’t fair. He entered the House of Commons in 1900, and over 19 contested elections, he was successful in 14 of them.

He failed miserably in 1915 as First Lord of the Admiralty in orchestrating the disastrous Dardanelles naval campaign, which resulted in the loss of thousands of British lives. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasurer) he blundered badly by restoring Britain to the gold standard, which resulted in unemployment, deflation, and a general strike. He also voted against self-rule for India, unable to let go of the romanticism associated with Britain’s imperial history. And much like Lincoln, he succumbed to severe bouts of depression, “The Black Dog’’ as he called it.

Imagine, Churchill was 65 years old when he became PM in 1940, about the time most are retiring.

Prior to leading Britain out of the dark storm, Churchill served in every important cabinet post except for Foreign Minister.

So, all those setbacks and failures he experienced may very well have prepared him for a time when the country needed a strong, resolute leader to face the menace of Nazi Germany. Churchill undoubtedly met the challenge as PM and as head of the Ministry of Defense.

“I felt as if I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour," he would later write.

While all of us may fall prey to Churchill idolatry now and again, it’s hard to imagine how Britain and Western Europe could have survived World War II had not Churchill been in the right place at the right time, with decades and decades of experience under his belt.

I’m not reading many books that focus on Abraham Lincoln being defeated for the state legislature in 1832, his abysmal failings in business, being defeated for the U.S. Senate, not once (1854) but twice (1858), and being defeated in the nomination for the Vice Presidency in 1856.

But we do remember Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (November 19, 1863) in which he famously said: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

 Churchill, to be sure, possessed heaps of flaws, prejudices, and undoubtedly exercised poor judgement at times in his career, but do we honor Churchill today for his personality qualities and boorish behavior, or do we honor him for his indomitable courage and leadership in rallying the nation during arguably one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, when FDR and the United States was nowhere to be found.

 

--Bill Lucey

November 3, 2021

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