A Crying Need For Objective Journalism. Clapper Dis-Information. Proud Family Legacy. More.

                                           Biden Snaps at Reporter Over Questions Regarding His Family's Ties to China

By Sarah Arnold

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Bring Back Objective Journalism

Too many editors are responding to a crisis of public trust by abandoning traditional news values.

By Walter Hussman Jr.

Beyond objectivity or back to objectivity? That seems to be an essential question for American journalism.

Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication recently released a survey of some 75 journalists titled “Beyond Objectivity.” Many of them argued that objectivity should no longer be the standard in news reporting.

“I never understood what ‘objectivity’ meant,” Prof. Leonard Downie Jr., a co-author of the report and a former executive editor of the Washington Post, wrote in a Post op-ed. “My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.” Much of the public would regard that as far more objective than what they read, hear and view now.

Stephen Engelberg, editor in chief of ProPublica, echoed Mr. Downie’s mystification: “I don’t know what it means.” While they may not understand objectivity, the public certainly does. A Gallup/Knight Foundation survey released in 2020 found that 68% of Americans “say they see too much bias in the reporting of news that is supposed to be objective as ‘a major problem.’ ” The Gallup poll, which questioned 20,000 Americans in all 50 states, also found “a majority of Americans currently see a ‘great deal’ (46%) or a ‘fair amount’ (37%) of political bias in news coverage”—a total of 83%. In 2021, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University surveyed 92,000 people in 46 countries. One question was “Do you trust the news media in your country?” Finland had the highest positive response, at 65%. The U.S. was dead last, at 29%.

Gallup has been polling trust in American institutions for more than 40 years. In 1979, 51% said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, more than triple the 2022 figure of 16%. In 1979 objectivity was much more accepted as a standard in news reporting. When editors like Emilio Garcia-Ruiz of the San Francisco Chronicle say “objectivity has got to go,” it further erodes public trust.

While journalists argue over semantics, and Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee calls the word objectivity “a political football,” the public understands objectivity, which a dictionary defines as “not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased.” You will never get politics out of opinion commentary, nor should you. But politics shouldn’t influence news reporting.

Comments from some editors help, like this from Ms. Buzbee: “We stress the value of news reporting, so you (the reader) can make up your own mind.” And her New York Times counterpart, Joseph Kahn: “You can’t be an activist and be a Times journalist at the same time.” It is also encouraging to see Chris Licht, now head of CNN, trying to move the network back toward the center to regain trust.

One recommendation from the ASU survey was to “define your newsroom’s core values.” My company has some experience with that. In 2017 our 11 daily newspapers began publishing a “Statement of Core Values” on page 2 every day. You can find it at CoreValues.news. The public response was immediate and very favorable.

One of those values is a complete separation of news and opinion and labeling opinion both in print and on our websites. We label not only political columnists, but any opinion, from restaurant reviews to sports columns.

Today media has more opinions than ever. More opinions, especially contrasting opinions, are good. What is bad, and erodes the public trust, is blurring opinions with news reporting. Why does this happen? Human nature explains why we want others to think like we do and agree with us. But that isn’t what the public wants from news reporting. They want the who, what, when, where, how and why without any personal bias. The best reporters don’t want popularity for what they write. They want respect. In my 48 years as a newspaper publisher, our readers gave the most respect to those reporters whose political views were impossible to tell from their work. Readers want the reporter to give them the facts straight so they can make up their own minds.

How to restore trust in the media? With a significant loss of advertising mostly to Google and Facebook online, subscribers today have more influence than ever, as many newspapers and websites are highly dependent on circulation revenue. Those considering buying subscriptions could request that statement of core journalism values. You could also write letters to the editor or use social media to advocate for impartial news reporting at your local newspaper, television station or news website. You could ask your college or university, if it has a journalism school or department, what its core journalistic values are. If your local high school offers journalism courses, ask the same of the teachers. Since the public needs more trust in news reporting, the public needs to get more involved.

Our core values begin: “To give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” That’s a quote from Adolph Ochs (1858-1935), publisher of the Chattanooga Times and later the New York Times. We think those nine words are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century. Ochs helped steer American news reporting away from partisanship toward impartiality, fairness and, yes, objectivity. Moving news reporting in that direction again would help restore the public trust in the Fourth Estate, which is essential to our democracy.

Mr. Hussman is chairman of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and was the newspaper’s publisher, 1974-2022.

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James Clapper’s Disinformation
Politico ‘distorted’ the 2020 letter signed by 51 ex-intel officials? Now he tells us.
By Kimberley A. Strassel

Whether or not GOP House oversight yields answers about 2020 election meddling, it is at least producing some fantastical squirming and finger pointing. See this week’s incredulous Clapper defense.

That would be James Clapper, the Obama director of national intelligence, one of 51 former intelligence officials who in October 2020 issued a highly consequential letter. The New York Post had revealed contents of a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The information raised ugly questions about his use of the Biden family name in his foreign business dealings and the extent to which his father knew about them. With weeks to go in a close presidential campaign, the laptop bomb might have derailed Joe Biden’s White House bid.

Instead, the intel cabal neutralized the threat almost overnight. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared a Politico headline on Oct. 19, 2020. The Clapper & Co. letter explained that the supposed Hunter emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” making the signers “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” They had no evidence, but the letter served its purpose by providing the news media, Democrats and social-media censors the excuse to suppress the story.

But the laptop was real, and Republicans suddenly have subpoena power. Hence the remarkable sight this week of Mr. Clapper and fellow signatories resurfacing to blame their 2020 tradecraft on the press. The catalyst for this convenient claim is a batch of letters sent last week by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to 12 of the letter’s signers, demanding documents and interviews about their decision to issue a public statement that “falsely implied” the Hunter story was bogus.

This inspired the Washington Post’s “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, to provide the conspirators a favorable forum to make an early defense. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said,” Mr. Clapper complained, saying the writers were merely raising a “yellow” flag. “Journalists and politicians willfully or unintentionally misconstrue oral or written statements,” lamented Thomas Fingar, who protested the letter had been “carefully written to minimize” that likelihood. Several unnamed signers meanwhile told Mr. Kessler they believed at the time that a significant amount of the material the Post reported was true—since Russians tend to build disinformation campaigns on facts. That would seem a crucial point, yet the signers somehow omitted it from their letter.

As blame-shifting goes, the press is usually a solid dumping spot. Yet in this case, the signers’ claims are laughable. Start with the partisan motivations. Mr. Clapper and John Brennan, President Obama’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, were the most politicized officials to ever hold their posts, and were hip-deep in the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax. Most of the rest of the signers were Biden supporters or Never Trumpers. The press made hay of the “bipartisan” quality of the letter, but the conservative side featured folks like Mike Hayden, George W. Bush’s CIA director, who prior to signing the letter had cut an ad beseeching the country not to vote for Donald Trump.

Also consider the hand-picked messenger. Former Brennan aide Nick Shapiro didn’t approach any old Politico reporter with the letter: He chose Natasha Bertrand, who served as one of the key outlets for the outlandish Russia-collusion claims that opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and former Obama officials shopped four years earlier. The letter writers knew exactly what they were getting by going to this reporter—and more likely than not the headline reflected their intent. This was no press sandbagging; it was press cooperation.

And then there’s the silence. No signers complained about the Politico letter after its publication. None corrected the record as dozens of outlets repeated the supposed distortion. No one said a word when Joe Biden, in a presidential debate and a CBS interview, used the letter to declare definitively that the laptop story was “disinformation from the Russians,” “a bunch of garbage,” a “Russian plan” and a “smear campaign.”

As to the muteness, Mr. Clapper claimed to be “unaware” of how Mr. Biden described the letter. Did he and his 50 co-signers make a pact to skip the presidential debate, to tune out all subsequent coverage, and never to communicate again? Surely one would have noticed the “distorted” claim and felt compelled to alert the others. And surely a group capable of collaborating on the letter was capable of correcting the record.

They didn’t, because they didn’t want to. The letter served its purpose. It was written by an intel community that knows well how to manipulate a narrative. It was written by a group of officials who abused their titles—and the public’s belief that their backgrounds gave them unique insights—to peddle a claim for which they had no evidence. It was written to benefit Mr. Biden’s election bid

Any claims to the opposite are what you might call disinformation.

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My side of the family now numbers 30. We have a proud legacy.

The roots of our Birmingham office can be traced to the firm Abe Berkowitz founded in 1928 during the Great Depression.

In the late '50s and early '60s, Mr. Berkowitz was outspoken in his opposition to prevailing unfair laws and customs, embodied by Public Safety Commissioner "Bull" Connor. While this made him a target for anti-civil rights extremists, he ultimately contributed to changing Birmingham's form of government, unseating Connor from his position of control.

The firm grew tremendously in the ensuing decades, as Abe Berkowitz and original partner Arnold Lefkovits built a client-oriented culture of service which continued up until its combination with Baker Donelson in 2003 and is still alive today. As one of the top 100 law firms in the country, Baker Donelson now offers the skills and experience of more than 650 attorneys in 22 offices across the Southeast and Washington, D.C., providing a wide variety of legal services to clients in the financial services, real estate, construction, transportation and telecommunication industries, among many others.

We are known for our trial successes in complex, high-stakes litigation, as well as our management of complicated corporate transactions for public and private companies of all sizes. And the Firm's award-winning Legal Project Management office serves as a leader in the industry, offering systems that help clients manage their legal portfolios and expenditures more thoughtfully and efficiently.

And:

Abe Berkowitz inducted into Ala. Lawyers Hall of FameHome 

On May 6, Abe Berkowitz was inducted into the Alabama Lawyers’ Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building in Montgomery.

Berkowitz is remembered as one of Birmingham’s earliest progressive activists, promoting both economic expansion and social justice throughout his career. A child of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he was born in Meridian. The family ultimately settled in Birmingham, where his father ran a small retail business.

Berkowitz received his law degree in 1928 before reaching the age of 21 and began practicing immediately after the Alabama Legislature removed age restrictions.

He was an outspoken opponent of the Ku Klux Klan and sought to establish equality under the law, with frequent letters to local newspapers. He supported an anti-masking bill that was aimed at the Klan, and opposed Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor.

In a speech at Miles College, he recounted two incidents from 1913, when he was in first grade, that shaped him — the railroading of Leo Frank in Georgia for the murder of a girl and his father urging him to write a letter to Georgia’s governor on his behalf; and how he cried after seeing a trusted caretaker of his humiliate a young black girl who was on her way to the store by using the n-word at her.

Son Richard Berkowitz spoke at the ceremony, He said his father earned the recognition “because he was willing, along with others, to speak out when doing so was not popular, but that was who he was.”

In the midst of the city’s racial turmoil in 1962, Berkowitz was a leading member of the Birmingham Bar Committee that recommended a change in the form of Birmingham’s city government from its three-member Commission to a Mayor-Council system, organizing a surprise petition drive. The vote was successful, bouncing Connor from office.

A passionate Zionist, Berkowitz spearheaded the famous 1943 Alabama resolution that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, working with Rep. Sid Smyer and Sen. James Simpson.

Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, in announcing the induction during Knesset Deputy Speaker Hilik Bar’s visit to Montgomery in April, noted that “Simpson was Bull Connor’s attorney, and Simpson wrote some of the segregation resolutions. Berkowitz was on the other side — but those two could come together on the important issue of Israel.”

Berkowitz was also asked to be in the secretive Sonneborn Institute, a group of 17 Americans who met with David Ben-Gurion in New York and then fanned out across the country on clandestine efforts to aid the Jewish fighters working toward Israel’s independence.

In his book “In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War and the Holocaust,” Dan Puckett notes that Berkowitz organized Birmingham’s Zionists. “They raised funds and ‘collected all manner of goods from truck loads of helmets to a contribution of 3,000 forks from Isadore Mazer.’ Mark Elovitz notes that ‘the Kimerling family lent a truck with a driver to the cause. The truck was loaded with tires and the tires’ inner-tubes were stuffed with guns and pistols and shipped to New York to see that the ‘cargo’ would not be apprehended’.”

In 1967, Israel awarded Berkowitz the Israeli Freedom Medal “because of his services to the ZOA and Israel.”

Berkowitz also helped establish the Birmingham Bar Association Aid Trust, which set up a fund for lawyers in distress and for which he served as a trustee for more than 30 years.

Richard Berkowitz said he thinks his father, who died in 1985, “would be saddened to see how we have regressed in terms of black-white relationships, and the radicalization of campus life, because dad was a great admirer of Hugo Black ‘s views on free speech” and helped Black’s son become a prominent labor attorney.

Also inducted were Reuben Chapman, Martin Leigh Harrison, Holland McTyeire Smith and Frank Edward Spain. Each inductee must have been deceased at least two years at the time of their selection. The first class was inducted in 2004; there are now 55 members.

“Each of these inductees has played a pivotal role in the history and legacy that we as attorneys leave behind,” said Alabama State Bar President Lee H. Copeland of Copeland, Franco, Screws & Gill of Montgomery. “It’s an honor to pay tribute to their lives and the work they did.”

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I say keep the tree and get rid of the board.

Dear Friends. Many of you are aware that the Palmetto Golf Course is being renovated beginning at the end of February. The architect of the renovation has recommended the removal of a number of trees, one of them being the Live Oak on Hole #17 by the 100 yard marker. The reason given is that the tree prevents fairway turf from growing. The recommendation went to the Club Board and they approved it.

What do we know about the tree:

Live Oak Quercus Virginiana (Southern Oak) - State Tree of Georgia 

Based on its circumference of 12’ 9”, we estimate the tree to be 194 years old (there is a formula to calculate age based on circumference)

Recognition: “Noble” Oak after 150-200 yrs of age; “Veteran” after 150-300 yrs of age.

Bottom Line: This Tree is Worth Saving!!

As an FYI, the removal of this tree was brought before the Board once before. It was turned down. We don’t know what has changed to make this particular Board change its mind.

A group of us are trying to rally support to have the Board reconsider its decision before the Tree is removed in the Fall.

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Nice things do happen:

Two Choices

What would you do? You make the choice. Don't look for a punch line, there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fund-raising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that will never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its Dedicated staff, he offered a question:

'When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does, is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?'

The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. 'I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.'

Then he told the following story:

Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, 'Do you think they'll let me play?' I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

I approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, 'We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team, and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.'

Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. The boys saw my joy at my son being accepted.

In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three.

In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as I waved to him from the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again.

Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base, and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game?

Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

However, as Shay stepped up to the Plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact.

The first pitch came, and Shay swung clumsily and missed.

The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over.

The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all teammates.

Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, 'Shay, run to first! Run to first!'

Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, 'Run to second, run to second!'

Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base.

By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball. The smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team.

He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head.

Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, 'Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay'

Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, 'Run to third!

Shay, run to third!'

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, 'Shay, run home! Run home!'

Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team

'That day', said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, 'the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world'.

Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and seeing his mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

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