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Let Us Now Figure Out Who to Blame for Brexit

by NorineAlison Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brexit has passed, and now it’s time to find someone to blame. Sure, you can go with the pack and blame David Cameron or Nigel Farage, but that’s not much fun. Here are four plausible but not entirely obvious choices:

Ed Milliband

In order to keep peace within his own party, Prime Minister David Cameron promised a vote on Brexit in 2013. It seemed fairly harmless at the time: Cameron’s Conservative Party was about 20 seats short of an outright majority in Parliament, so he was governing in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems opposed the referendum, and as long as they remained in the coalition, there would most likely have been no vote. To maintain this status quo, neither the Lib Dems nor the opposition Labor Party even had to gain any seats in the 2015 election. They just had to hold their own.

But Ed Milliband proved to be such a hapless leader of the Labor Party that he lost 26 seats in the election. This was just enough to give the Tories a bare majority, and that paved the way for Brexit.

Alternatively, you could blame Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who managed his party’s coalition with Cameron poorly and lost an astounding 49 of its 57 seats in the 2015 election. But Labor was the primary opposition party and should have been able to pick up most of those seats, so let’s stick with Milliband on this one.

Angela Merkel

For all the praise she gets, Angela Merkel has been one of the most disastrous European leaders in my lifetime. She’s as responsible for Brexit as anyone I can think of, thanks to two catastrophic decisions she made.

The first was her insistence on punishing Greece following its collapse after the Great Recession. There’s plenty of blame to go around on all sides for the Greece debacle, but as the continent’s economic leader Germany held most of the high cards during negotiations over Greece’s fate. Merkel had a choice: (a) punish Greece for running up unsustainable debts and lying about them, or (b) accept that Germany bore much of the blame itself for the crisis and that Greece had no way of rescuing itself thanks to the straitjacket of the common currency. The former was a crowd pleaser. The latter was unpopular and would have required sustained, iron-spined leadership. In the event, Merkel chose to play to the crowds, and Greece has been a basket case ever since—with no end in sight. It hardly went unnoticed in Britain how Europe treated a country that was too entangled with the EU to either fight back or exit, and it made Britain’s decision to forego the common currency look prescient. And if that had been a good choice, maybe all the rest of “ever closer union” wasn’t such a great idea either.

Merkel’s second bad decision was more recent. Here is David Frum: “If any one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African migrants, with uncountable millions more to come.” It’s hard to fault Merkel for this on a humanitarian basis, but on a political basis it was a disaster. The barely-controlled wave of refugees Merkel encouraged has caused resentment and more all over Europe, and it unquestionably played a big role in the immigrant backlash in Britain that powered the Leave vote.

Paul Dacre

Paul Dacre is the longtime editor of the Daily Mail, and he’s standing in here for the entire conservative tabloid press, which has spent decades lying about the EU and scaring the hell out of its readership about every grisly murder ever committed by an immigrant. In a journalistic style pioneered by Boris Johnson—who we’ll get to next—the Mail and other tabloids have run hundreds of sensational stories about allegedly idiotic EU regulations and how they’re destroying not just Britain’s way of life, but its very sovereignty as well. These stories range from deliberately exaggerated to outright false, and they’re so relentless that the EU has an entire website dedicated to debunking British tabloid myths from A (abattoirs) to Z (zoos). The chart below, from the Economist, tots up all the lies, and the Mail is the clear leader.

The EU is hardly a finely-tuned watch when it comes to regulations, but the vast majority of the outrage over its rulings is based almost literally on nothing. Nonetheless, the outrage is real, and it was fueled largely by Dacre’s Daily Mail and its fellow tabloids.

Boris Johnson

Why Boris? After all, it was Nigel Farage, the odious leader of the openly xenophobic UKIP party, who led the charge to leave the EU. This is, perhaps, a judgment call, but I’ve long had a stronger disgust for those who tolerate racism than for the open racists themselves. The latter are always going to be around, and sometimes I even have a little sympathy for them. They’ve often spent their entire lives marinating in racist communities and are as much a victim of their upbringing as any of us.

But then there are those who should know better, and Boris Johnson is very much one of them. The usual caveat is in order here: I can’t look into Johnson’s heart and know what he really thinks. But he’s had a long journalistic career, and an equally long history of tolerating racist sentiments. As a longtime Euroskeptic—though probably more an opportunistic one rather than a true believer—it’s no surprise that he campaigned for Brexit, but in doing so he knowingly joined hands with Farage and his UKIP zealots, providing them with a respectability they wouldn’t have had without him. He knew perfectly well that the Leave campaign would be based primarily on exploiting fear of immigrants, but he joined up anyway.

Johnson is hardly the only British politician to act this way, of course. But he’s the most prominent one, so he gets to stand in for all of them.

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Let Us Now Figure Out Who to Blame for Brexit

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Pop Goes The Digital Media Bubble

by NorineAlison Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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You don’t always hear the bubble burst. Often, it’s more a gradual escaping of air, signaled by nothing more than the occasional queasy feeling you bat away: One house for sale on the block, oh well. Two, three—maybe just a robust market? Five, six, seven—and suddenly everyone’s underwater and the sheriff is at your door.

That’s kind of how it’s feeling in the digital media business. For a few years now, investors have been pouring money into online news with the kind of fervor that once fueled the minimansion boom. But in the past year, the boarded-up windows have started showing up: The Guardian, which bet heavily on expanding its digital presence in the United States, announced it needed to cut costs by 20 percent. The tech news site Gigaom shut down suddenly, with its founder warning that “it is a very dangerous time” to be in digital media. Mobile-first Circa put itself on “indefinite hiatus.” Al Jazeera America, once hailed as the hottest thing in bringing together cable news and digital publishing, shut down and laid off hundreds of journalists.

Pop.

And it’s been getting worse. As the New York Times’ John Herrman put it, “in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic.” Mashable, which had made a big investment in news and current affairs, laid off dozens of journalists and pivoted to a new, video-heavy strategy. Investor darling BuzzFeed fought reports that it had slashed earnings projections by nearly 50 percent. Salon laid off a string of veteran staffers. Yahoo put its core business, including its news and search features, up for sale.

Pop. Pop.

Here’s the thing: It was not hard to see this coming. For years now, smooth-talking guys (yes, mostly guys) with PowerPoint decks have offered up one magic formula after another to save the business of news. Citizen journalism—all the reporting done by users, for free, with newsrooms simply curating it all. “Brand You”—each journo out there on her own, drawing legions of followers to her personal output. (Even Andrew Sullivan couldn’t make that work.) Viral headlines—every news shop Upworthy-ing its way into the Facebook swarm. Aggregation, curation, explainer journalism, explainer video, branded content, text bots, video, branded video, branded virtual reality video…each fueling the hope that here, at last, was the way to make news profitable again. A whole class of future-of-news pundits made a living pontificating about how “legacy media” were getting their lunch eaten by digital-native startups.

And the investor money kept coming. BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Fusion, Mic (not to mention their 1stGen cousins Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, and Gawker)—for a while they all were too fast to fail, hiring Twitter-famous names out of established newsrooms, rolling out sexy technology systems, and exploding watermelons on live video. As Josh Topolsky, a veteran of digital media (most recently at Bloomberg) wrote the other day, “I can tell you from personal experience over the last several months, having met with countless investors and leaders of media companies and editors and writers and technologists in the media world that there is a desperate belief that The Problem can be solved with the New Thing. And goddammit someone must have it in their pitch deck.”

But while a ton of great work has come (and continues to come) out of all the New Things, none of them have answered the burning question of how to pay for journalism—especially the public-interest, watchdog, feet-to-the-fire kind that democracy needs to function. For one thing, all the big new digital shops today employ, between them, a few thousand journalists—compared with the ten-thousand-plus laid off in the great retrenchment of 2007 to 2010. For another, like virtually every other hot property across the internet, digital media startups are better at growing than at showing a profit. And since a profit is what the people supplying those giant piles of cash are ultimately looking for…

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit—precisely to avoid this fate. Tax-deductible donations from readers give us stability.

Remember when Chris Hughes put The New Republic up for sale earlier this year? His letter to TNR staff subtly blamed the very same people it was addressed to: “I will be the first to admit that when I took on this challenge nearly four years ago, I underestimated the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate.”

Bullshit. “Transitioning” was not The New Republic‘s main challenge. Refusing to work on, with, and for the internet was once a pervasive problem in news organizations, but while vestiges of that still linger, it is no longer what keeps publications from succeeding financially.

What keeps them from making money now is that online advertising pays pennies. (Actually, a penny per reader is pretty good these days—CPM, or “cost per thousand” ads, is often far less than half that.) And there are a ton of people competing for those fractions of a penny—including Google and Facebook, which collectively pulled in a whopping 85 percent of new ad spending in the first quarter of this year. The only way to make ends meet in that environment is to turn up the fire hose of fast and cheap content or rent your pages out to native advertising (sorry, branded content).

Look at it this way: A reporter doing even modestly original work might produce five stories a week (and that’s not allowing for anything more than a few phone calls and a couple of rounds of editing per piece). If each of those stories gets, on average, 50,000 readers, and each of those page views generates 0.01 cents (again, a very generous rate), you’ll end up grossing $2,500 a week, or $130,000 a year, with which you’ll have to pay the reporter and her editor, their benefits, web tech, sales and ops staff, taxes, insurance, electricity, rent, laptops, phones…

And this calculus assumes a brutal pace of hour-by-hour filing and publishing, with journalists constantly looking over their shoulder at the traffic numbers. (When a New York Daily News editor was fired last week for dropping attributions from columnist Shaun King’s stories, he noted that he was expected to process 20 stories from five reporters each day.) And the kind of digging that an investigative story requires—months of research and reporting, plus fact-checking, editing, and maybe multimedia production—forget it. The math just doesn’t work.

So what does? At MoJo, the answer is: You.

From the very beginning, 40 years ago this year, our newsroom has been built on the belief that journalism needs to be untethered from corporate interests or deep-pocketed funders—that the only way a free press can be paid for is by its readers. This can take a few different forms: subscriptions, donations, micropayments, all of which we’re experimenting with. It can be something the audience is forced to do (via the paywalls you’ll find at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal) or something they choose to do, as in public radio.

At Mother Jones, we’ve gone the latter route: Our mission is to make our journalism accessible to as many people as possible. Instead of requiring you to pay, we bet on trust: We trust you’ll recognize the value of the reporting and pitch in what you can. And you trust us to put that money to work—by going out there and kicking ass.

Because of your trust, we can choose which stories we go after, rather than chasing the spin du jour. We can look where others in the media do not. We can, as our colleague David Corn puts it, get off the spinning hamster wheel and dig deep.

And we can do it without fearing that some corporate overlord will pull the plug. Remember what happened when casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson bought Nevada’s largest daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal: as the sale was being negotiated, reporters were mysteriously tasked with digging up dirt on a judge who’d antagonized Adelson. Then the newsroom was told to back off covering the biggest story in town—their boss. This was a paper where a columnist had already been hounded into bankruptcy by Adelson over a few words. (We faced a similar attack recently from another billionaire upset about our critical coverage of his past.) Your support is what keeps Mother Jones‘ journalists from having to fear that kind of intimidation and control.

If you’re a regular reader of Mother Jones, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been in the equivalent of a pledge drive this month: We need to bring in $175,000 by Saturday to stay on track. This is something we do three times a year, and it’s the most important way we raise money to pay for everything we do.

But we’re not crazy about these monthlong fundraisers, and maybe you aren’t either. So we’re looking at ways to make it easier (“frictionless,” as they say in the tech world) for you to support the journalism you believe in. One of our big initiatives is an online sustainer program, where readers agree to give us a bit of money every month. That could make a big difference for our stability: Just 1,200 more readers who value our reporting enough to pitch in $20 a month would get our “sustaining” revenue up to $50,000 a month, or $600,000 every year. If that’s an option for you, it would be a big help.

Become a monthly donor.

Make a one-time gift.

Meanwhile, that $175,000 by the end of the month? It’s not some arbitrary goal, but the cold, hard number required in our budget to keep our reporters on the beat. In the first 26 days of this month we’ve raised about 75 percent of that, so we need $45,000 in the next four days. But that’s how these campaigns typically work: Everyone waits until the last minute to pitch in.

If that’s you, remember that ultimately this is about something bigger than MoJo. If we’re going to have a functioning democracy, we’ll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close. The new moguls are in the technology business, not the journalism business. And while some of them say wonderful things about journalism, money talks—and right now, the money is saying “pop.”

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Pop Goes The Digital Media Bubble

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This Supreme Court Case Show the Perils of Appointing Prosecutors as Judges

by NorineAlison Posted on March 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Supreme Court heard arguments last week as to whether Ronald D. Castille, former chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, should have stepped aside from considering the appeal of a death penalty case he personally greenlighted when he was Philadelphia’s district attorney.

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? “He made the most important decision that could be made in this case,” Justice Elena Kagan commented during oral arguments.

Castille didn’t think so. Back in 2012, public defenders for Terrence Williams—who was convicted and sentenced to death at age 18 for murdering a 56-year-old named Amos Norwood—asked Castille to step aside because he oversaw the prosecutors who handled the case. The judge explained to the New York Times that he was merely functioning as an administrator. “I didn’t try the case,” he said, according to the paper. “I wasn’t really involved in the case except as the leader of the office.”

But Castille had additional baggage that raise questions about his involvement.

An appeals judge found that Andrea Foulkes, the prosecutor who tried Williams on Castille’s watch, had deliberately withheld key evidence from the defense—and thereby the jury. Norwood, the victim, had started a relationship with Williams when the boy was 13, and abused him, sexually and otherwise, for years. Although the details weren’t known at the time, the prosecution suppressed trial evidence suggesting that Norwood had an unnatural interest in underage boys.

Williams had previously killed another older man he’d been having sex with—51-year-old Herbert Hamilton. (Williams was 17 at the time of the crime.) The jury in that case, presented with evidence of their relationship, voted against the death penalty and convicted Williams of third-degree murder, a lesser charge. But Foulkes, who prosecuted both cases, told the Norwood jury that Williams had killed Norwood “for no other reason but that a kind man offered him a ride home.”

So there’s that. And then, as death penalty appeals lawyer Marc Bookman points out in an in-depth examination of the Williams prosecutions for Mother Jones, Castille was a big fan of the death penalty:

In the five years before the Williams case came onto its docket, the court, led by Chief Justice Ronald Castille, had ruled in favor of the death penalty 90 percent of the time. This wasn’t too surprising, given that Castille had been elected to his judgeship in 1993 as the law-and-order alternative to a candidate he labeled soft on crime…

“Castille and his prosecutors sent 45 people to death row during their tenure, accounting for more than a quarter of the state’s death row population,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted in 1993. “Castille wears the statistic as a badge. And he is running for the high court as if it were exclusively the state’s chief criminal court rather than a forum for a broad range of legal issues.” Castille was pretty clear about where he stood: “You ask people to vote for you, they want to know where you stand on the death penalty,” he told the Legal Intelligencer, a law journal. “I can certainly say I sent 45 people to death row as District Attorney of Philadelphia. They sort of get the hint.”

Castille also had it out for Williams’ defenders, with whom his old office was at odds. Bookman again:

Castille had a fraught relationship with the Federal Community Defender Office, a group of lawyers who represent numerous death row inmates, including Williams. Castille claimed that federal lawyers had no business appearing in state courts. He complained bitterly over the years about their “prolix and abusive pleadings” and about all the resources they dedicated to defending death row inmates—”something one would expect in major litigation involving large law firms.”

The defenders, for their part, routinely filed motions arguing that Castille had no business ruling on the appeals of prisoners whose prosecutions he had approved—particularly not in a case in which his office was found to have suppressed evidence helpful to the defense. But as chief justice, Castille had the last word. He denied all such motions, and accused the federal defenders of writing “scurrilously,” making “scandalous misrepresentations,” and having a “perverse worldview.”

It’s not too hard to predict which way the Supreme Court will rule—although whether their decision helps Williams get a resentencing is another matter. America’s justice system makes it unbelievably hard to get a second chance once you are convicted of a serious crime.

But all of this brings up a broader, question: Prosecutors like Castille are appointed to the bench in far greater numbers than former defenders—even President Obama has perpetuated this trend. Which is why it was so worthy of note that California Gov. Jerry Brown, under federal pressure to reduce incarceration in the Golden State, has broken with his predecessors and moved in the other direction. Northern California public station KQED recently pointed out that more than a quarter of Brown’s 309 judicial appointments have been former public defenders, whereas only 14 percent were once DAs (31 percent had some prosecutorial experience). From that report:

“We never had a tradition that said to be a judge you had to be a district attorney. That developed probably in the ’90s,” Brown said. “The judges are supposed to be independent. You want judges that have a commercial background, you want judges that have a prosecutorial background, city attorneys, or county counsel, or small practice, plaintiffs’ practice—you want a diversity, instead of kind of a one note fits all.”

When it comes down to it, politicians are still eager to appear tough on crime. But is it really good policy—financially or ethically—to stack the bench with judges who are accustomed to being rated according to the number of people they lock away?

“Most district attorney judges that I’ve experienced are unable to divorce themselves from their background once they become a judge,” Michael Ogul, president of the California Public Defenders Association, told KQED. “They are still trying to help the prosecution, they are still trying to move the case towards conviction or towards a harsher punishment.”

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This Supreme Court Case Show the Perils of Appointing Prosecutors as Judges

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