About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

A pivot point

Posted on May 6, 2026 by Joe Weber

Germany’s shift a century ago offers troubling lessons about how democracies fall

Joseph Weber

As we stood outside the Reichstag building in Berlin recently, the well-schooled guide who showed us the city’s major WWII sites spelled out the way Adolf Hitler and his cronies came to power. Today, nearly a century on, their techniques sound all too distressingly familiar.

The Nazis’ key tactics in the 1930s included scapegoating immigrants, Jews, Communists and others for the nation’s economic woes. They invoked a mythical Aryanism, saying they wanted to keep pure the blood and soil of the German nation – racist terms they frequently used. They promised to end ravaging inflation. In short, they promised to make Germany great again.

The desperate German public, suffering acutely in the global Great Depression, ate it up. Over several elections, by mid-1932 they voted in a large minority of seats for the once-fringe Nazi Party. Then, in early 1933, Hitler pressed 85-year-old German President Paul von Hindenburg to name him Chancellor in a coalition government. Hitler sidelined then ultimately jailed his political opponents.

Of course, that wasn’t enough. So, after a mysterious fire in the Reichstag – the seat of the German legislature – Hitler persuaded von Hindenberg to sign the Reichstag Fire Degree, gutting the German constitution. “The decree permitted the restriction of the right to assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, among other rights, and it removed all restraints on police investigations,” as the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s encyclopedia records.

“With the decree in place, the regime was free to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without specific charge, dissolve political organizations, and suppress publications,” the account continues. “It also gave the central government the authority to overrule state and local laws and overthrow state and local governments. This law became a permanent feature of the Nazi police state.”

Through that, the monomaniacal Hitler assumed the power of a dictator, ending Germany’s short post-WWI experiment in democracy. As he sought to expand his empire far beyond its national boundaries, he led the country into a devastating war. And he wound up ending his life in 1945 in an underground Berlin bunker with his city in ruins.

So, today, we have another monomaniac determined to expand the reach of his country, the United States – either politically by acquiring Greenland or Canada or militarily à la Venezuela and Iran. Donald J. Trump has led us into a war that seems mostly to have blown up in his face. He has scapegoated immigrants, detaining or deporting tens of thousands and claiming they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And he is using techniques that echo Hitler’s.

History may not be repeating itself exactly, but it seems to be rhyming (to cite a comment often attributed to Mark Twain),

While bending such agencies as the Department of Justice to his will, Trump controls a submissive legislature and wields exceptional influence on the Supreme Court. He and his followers in state governments have sought electoral changes that could compromise elections for years. And he has tried – so far only partly successfully – to stifle the critical press, almost daily filling the airwaves with misinformation.

Trump’s war on the press has a long history, but he and his minions come up with fresh battlegrounds regularly. The president’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just sued The New York Times, for instance, claiming the paper had engaged in “unlawful employment practices” and had discriminated against a white male employee denied a promotion. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission on April 28 ordered a review of station licenses owned by ABC, saying it was prompted by an investigation into the network’s diversity and inclusion policies, though the action also followed calls by the president to fire Jimmy Kimmel after he took offense at a joke by the comedian.

Trump has repeatedly sued news outlets, sometimes extracting legal settlements. Encouragingly, he has lost several times, with courts dismissing his suits. That happened with The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and CNN, for instance. A judge also dismissed a $15 billion case the president brought against The New York Times, though gave him leave to refile, which he has done.

The president or his toadies have also barred reporters at times from areas such as the Oval Office and the Pentagon. Courts have ruled against such limits, however. Federal courts have also set back the Justice Department’s investigation of a Washington Post reporter whose home federal agents raided in January as they tried to ferret out her sources on stories about Venezuela.

Trump also has vindictively pursued political opponents, using the machinery of the state to advance his grudges. Latest case in point: James Comey’s seashellgate. “Is it plausible that … a former federal prosecutor, deputy attorney general, and FBI director, publicly threatened to murder President Donald Trump?,” asks libertarian Reason magazine. “No, it is not. But that is what W. Ellis Boyle, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, claims in an indictment filed on April 28.”

On our Berlin trip, a second well-schooled guide suggested that such efforts are textbook cases in how politicians manipulate the system. They do so, he argued, for self-enrichment — which Trump and his family are very much about, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories by The New York Times demonstrates — and to entrench their parties.

Some worried U.S. analysts agree:

“American democracy is gone—not under siege, not threatened, but vanquished, with a generous assist from a 2024 electorate that endorsed (wittingly or otherwise) the institution-wrecking that is on display every day in Washington,” Roosevelt University Professor David Faris argued last August in The Nation. Democrats, he adds, “need to understand that their task is not to defend an imperiled democracy but to prevent the GOP from further consolidating the autocracy that its craven politicians, reactionary intellectuals, complicit judges, and guileless voters have imagined for more than two decades and have finally put into practice …”

Discussing the “erosion” of American democracy, Brookings senior fellow Vanessa Williamson bemoaned a slide that she argued predates Trump. The anti-democratic moves have stretched from manipulative state legislatures to Washington.

“Since 2010, state legislatures have instituted laws intended to reduce voters’ access to the ballot, politicize election administration, and foreclose electoral competition via extreme gerrymandering,” the Brookings scholar maintains. “The United States has also seen substantial expansions of executive power and serious efforts to erode the independence of the civil service. Against these pressures, the gridlocked and hyperpartisan Congress is poorly equipped to provide unbiased oversight and accountability of the executive, and there are serious questions about the impartiality of the judiciary.”

But is the game really up yet? So far, many courts — short of the Supreme Court — have stood in the way of Trump’s overreaches.

And, even with all the manipulations and threats by Trump and his supporters in various states, the midterm elections in November could strip the president and his party of much of the power they have seized. As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has written, as of early May, the Polymarket prediction market gives the Democrats a 51 percent chance of winning the Senate and an 83 percent chance of taking the House.

Contrary to general impressions about Trump’s hold on much of the public, the president lately is proving to be an albatross on the neck of his party. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday found that just 37 percent of Americans approve of his performance and 62 percent disapprove. “The war on Iran and its effects on prices at home — particularly at the gas pump — are pushing Trump’s ratings down,” The Hill reported.

Other polls concur. “In the polling average maintained by The Hill’s data partner, Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ), Trump is 17 points underwater, with 56.9 percent disapproving and 39.7 percent approving of his job performance. Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin has Trump almost 19 points in negative territory — a deficit 8 points larger than where it stood at the start of the year. And, in the RealClearPolitics (RCP) average, Trump is 16 points underwater.

Of course, such general nationwide sentiments aren’t decisive. After all, Trump won with a minority of the popular vote, 49.8 percent, claiming a landslide by snaring 312 Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris’s 226. Great swaths of red cloud the Democrats’ prospects:

Map of House Districts, suggesting Democrats will prevail in the fall with 212 seats to the GOP’s 205. Source: 270 to Win

The Republican-dominated Supreme Court didn’t help the Democratic case with its recent further gutting of voting rights. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of self-styled “non-African American” voters had challenged. The move barred the state from using a map that had created a majority-Black district, and accelerated the gerrymandering war Trump launched months ago.

“The Republicans on the Supreme Court have put the final nail in the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” contends political scientist Fr. Thomas Reese. “Justices who claim to prize historical intent now interpret post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution as a defense of white rights.”

And yet, despite the all-too-real threats to democracy and the erosions we’ve seen, the Iran War debacle and its ability to hit Americans in their wallets could prove to be the undoing of the Trumpian forces. The election is six months away, so anything could happen, but some experts on authoritarianism are less dour than others.

Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, professors who fret about the “competitive authoritarianism” the U.S. has slipped into, hold that democracy hasn’t yet fallen. “The fact that the United States has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism does not mean that its democratic decline has reached a point of no return,” they argue in Foreign Affairs. “Trump’s authoritarian offensive is now unmistakable, but it is reversible.”

Yes, they say, it’s true that in 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany, or even Argentina are democracies. But “as the Democratic Party’s success in the November 2025 elections shows, multiple channels remain through which opposition forces can contest—and potentially defeat—Trump’s increasingly authoritarian government.”

Trump, already showing signs of dementia, will be 82 when his term ends in January 2029. So, even though he has made noises about seeking a third term, it’s unlikely he’ll carry his party’s mantle again.

But others — notably Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — seem hungry to do so. Their GOP backers certainly will try to cement the party’s control of Washington, whatever the cost.

It’s possible that Trump and his minions could be salvaged by some dramatic development akin to the Reichstag fire of 1933. It may be foolish to put staging something like that past them.

For now, though, we seem near a pivot point that either will prove the pessimists right or will bring American democracy back from the brink. The choice we all face six months hence is every bit as consequential as that Germans faced nearly a century ago.

Read all about it

Posted on May 5, 2026 by Joe Weber

A storied newspaper gets a lifeline

Joseph Weber

The Sunday, May 3, edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was supposed to be the 239-year-old paper’s last. But, since a Baltimore-based nonprofit came to the rescue, the PG has kept offering its regular mix of local, national and international news. It plans to do so, although mostly on its website, with print editions only on Sundays and Thursdays.

For Pittsburghers and anyone interested in seeing a well-informed public, that’s great news, of course.

Newspapers have been dying for decades, a trend accelerated by the onslaught of the Net and the advance of cellphones. Since 2005, the number of papers published in the United States has dropped from 7,325 to 4,490 now, according to the Medill State of Local News report. As AP reported, in the year leading up to October 2025 alone, some 136 papers shut down, with daily newspaper circulation now down to just over 15 million from an average of between 50 and 60 million people at the turn of the century.

And, not coincidentally, our politics have grown more demagogic and ill-informed. Donald J. Trump, a longtime hater of the press, seems to have persuaded millions of his followers that the news media is “the enemy of the American people,” as he famously started saying in 2017, mostly referring to broadcasters. He has escalated his attacks since, with his broadsides becoming “the tap water of his political rhetoric,” as The New York Times noted.

With such prominent assaults and declines in readership, is it any wonder that Americans’ confidence in the mass media has plummeted? That faith edged down to a new low last fall, with just 28 percent of those polled expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, according to Gallup. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.

So, it is encouraging that the Venetoulis Institute swept in to keep the Post-Gazette alive. The nonprofit also owns The Baltimore Banner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news site that – in contrast to other media outlets — has been expanding. Under the institute – named for former Baltimore County Executive and media champion Ted Venetoulis – the Banner has doubled its newsroom to about 80 journalists since 2022.

The Banner gives The Baltimore Sun a run for its money, offering readers a centrist alternative to the rightist environment now fostered at The Sun. The storied Sun, owned for a time by the media vultures at Alden Global Capital, in 2024 became a mouthpiece for the right-wing head of Sinclair Broadcast Group, David D. Smith, and Clarence Thomas chum Armstrong Williams.

As reported by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, The Sun now has no foreign bureaus and a far smaller newsroom. Local union officials pegged the number of journalists working there in 2024 at about 60, down from more than 300 when Folkenflik reported for the paper two decades earlier. Shortly before that, its newsroom topped 400 reporters.

And, according to Poynter, sentiment in the newsroom has dropped as the paper’s political tilt has shifted. “New ownership at the Sun has driven staff and some readers away. Since its former managing editor retired in June, at least 18 journalists have quit. Morale is low in the 56-person newsroom,” the journalism foundation reported early last year.

“Sinclair is known for forcing stories with a right-leaning agenda onto its more than 180 television stations across the country,” Poynter journalist Angela Fu reported. “Sinclair-acquired stations increase their coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, a 2019 study found, and coverage overall undergoes a significant rightward shift.’”

The Banner won a Pulitzer in 2025 for a series of pieces that likely would not have appeared in The Sun. As the Pulitzer folks described it, the package was a “compassionate investigative series that captured the breathtaking dimensions of Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate impact on older Black men, creating a sophisticated statistical model that The Banner shared with other newsrooms.”

Before the current owners took over, The Sun in a 2022 editorial apologized for having, “sharpened, preserved and furthered the structural racism that still subjugates Black Marylanders in our communities today.” The paper added that “Reporting that arises directly from sources in the region’s Black communities has long been lacking in The Sun, largely because the connection is lacking. We’re not out there enough, and we’re not trusted enough. We are working on that, and looking into an impression some hold that The Sun is harder on Black officials than white.”

Now, however, The Sun seems to be adopting the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach taken by Sinclair’s Baltimore TV station, WBFF, a Fox affiliate, the City Journal reported. That style appears to exploit Black community problems, rather than explore them.

“The Sun has moved closer to that sensibility, with a ‘Spotlight on Maryland’ TV–newspaper partnership that highlights stories such as police ignoring drug crimes even after mass overdoses,” the City Journal said. “The paper’s reporters have covered juveniles arrested and released with no oversight, ready to commit violent crimes again. Instead of glossing over those stories, the paper asks bluntly, ‘How did that happen?’”

A retired Sun reporter, Michael Hill, told NPR that the formula reflects a business judgment about who the paper serves. “They have picked an audience they want, which is a suburban audience, and they want to tell them how terrible the city is, and that they’re right to live in the suburbs,” Hill said. “And that, I think, is their sort of commercial approach that is reflected in their news business.”

A former staffer at the TV station put the approach this way: “You amplify the negativity.”

Regardless of a media outlet’s political slant, the question arises about whether its staffing gives it the firepower it needs to do its work well. Fifty-six journalists just can’t be in as many places as 400.

Despite the lifeline that Venetoulis has thrown the Post-Gazette, staffing has been hit hard. About 40 percent of the roughly 120-member news staff were recently told that their jobs are gone, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. “I don’t know how the Post-Gazette is going to cover a city the size of Pittsburgh, effectively, with half the staff,” a now-former PG reporter Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein told CJR.

The same can be said of cities all over the country.

The Los Angeles Times, which boasted more than 1,200 journalists just before the turn of the century, is down to perhaps 235 now. The Boston Globe gets by with less than half the 550 journalists it employed in 2002, while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s 200-member news staff is down from 700. The Denver Post makes do with a news staff that was cut in the last decade from above 300 to an estimated 75 or so, according to Westword.

Recall that in Denver, the Post’s longtime rival, the Rocky Mountain News, folded in 2009. (Full disclosure: I worked as a reporter at the Rocky in the first half of the 1980s, an exhilaratingly fierce newspaper war period.)

The problem with such reductions in forces, of course, is that readers don’t know what exactly they are missing – but they can see that the menu is smaller. It’s obvious that once-fat newspapers are thinner (and that their websites carry comparatively few articles).

But subscribers don’t know that, for instance, local town council meetings may not be followed closely unless there’s a major scandal. They may have a sense that feature pages are skimpier now, but there’s no real count on column inches that anyone can cite.

And, since newspapers are offering less, no one should be surprised that readership is down, along with credibility. Give people thin soup and they’ll look for something else – especially when their phones are packed with plenty to read and watch, even if much of it is trash.

To be sure, the technology changes have created enormous opportunities for news coverage, too. State governments, for instance, are well covered by online affiliates of the nonprofit States Newsroom. The Nebraska Examiner, one such affiliate, reshaped the state’s governor’s race in 2022 by reporting on sordid doings by the Trump-backed leading Republican., for instance.

And online operations such as Nebraska’s Flatwater Free Press and The Colorado Sun fill in some of the gaps created by the declines of The Omaha World-Herald and The Denver Post – even though the newcomers’ small staffs simply can’t be in as many places as sprawling reporting staffs once were.

It’s also clear that top-notch journalism is still getting done. Just check out the Pulitzer Prizes recently awarded.

The Washington Post, beleaguered by cuts imposed by owner Jeff Bezos, topped the list with its Public Service Pulitzer for reporting on the Trump Administration’s “chaotic overhaul of federal agencies and chronicling in rich detail the human impacts of the cuts and the consequences for the country.” The New York Times took the award for investigative reporting with “deeply reported stories that exposed how President Trump has shattered constraints on conflicts of interest and exploited the moneymaking opportunities that come with power, enriching his family and allies.” And Reuters won the national reporting prize for “documenting how the president used the U.S. government and the influence of his supporters to expand executive power and exact vengeance on his foes.”

None of the awards will endear Trump to those news outlets – and supporters of the president would likely look on them as proof of the media’s bias against their boy. But the fact-based journalism in those pieces also demonstrates how independent reporting can — indeed must — hold people in power to account.

Over its history, the Post-Gazette has won three Pulitzers, snaring its last one in 2019 for breaking news reporting on the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue. The Pulitzer judges saluted the paper’s “immersive, compassionate coverage of the massacre … that captured the anguish and resilience of a community thrust into grief.”

With Venetoulis behind it now – and the possibility that the PG’s shrunken staff could grow again – perhaps the paper will soon capture another such prize. Count it already as a victory that the paper won’t disappear.

Juiced in it

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Joe Weber

Does private schooling help or hurt one’s chances in life?

Joseph Weber

Dylan, source: San Francisco Art Exchange

A bit over a half-century ago, Bob Dylan debuted the extraordinary “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song that helped cement his standing in music and culture. Its scorching lyrics still resound:

Ahh you’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you’re gonna have to get used to it
You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

The song raises the question of whether going to “the finest schools” is really a plus. Do you get the best education – one that lets you deal with all the challenges of life – in elite schools? Or are you better off with a reasonably good public education at, say, Hibbing High School, where Dylan graduated, or the University of Minnesota, where he attended for just a year?

Certainly, Dylan’s modest schooling didn’t hold him back. His work is packed with literary and poetic allusions that seem to have come from either his self-education or dealings with writers such as Allen Ginsberg. It’s also heavily informed by his life as a struggling singer and then as a superstar.

This all occurs to me now as, over several days, my wife and I have dropped grandchildren off at a Department of Defense school on a U.S. military base in Germany. From the outside, the daily routine looks like what critics have dubbed “factory education,” with hundreds of kids filing off some 40 buses on cue to file into their K-12 classrooms.

Those arrivals are reminiscent of workers entering factories in films such as Chaplin’s 1936 classic, Modern Times. or the more troublesome Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s dystopian 1927 view of the future.

To be sure, order is important in such a system and the kids respond. At lunchtime, when a proctor hails them, otherwise lively and loud second-graders go silent, for instance. They raise their hands to count down a few seconds and then remain quiet for a few announcements. And lines are ubiquitous when they enter or leave classrooms.

But, unlike their parents (and differing from some private school systems), the students don’t wear uniforms. And their classrooms are colorful places, alive with lots of the imagery of education, just like most public schools back in the U.S. Yes, there’s regimentation, but there isn’t sterility.

Much as is the case in the U.S., moreover, the schooling the kids get depends a lot on the quality of a particular teacher. A good teacher makes all the difference, my daughter-in-law here – a teacher herself – tells me. Also, because their parents move around every couple years, the military kids often get shifted around among various schools, making continuity a challenge.

Still, as with Dylan, the chances for self-education are extraordinary for these kids. They can visit a bevy of European cities, getting varied cultural experiences their U.S. peers could find only in books. Whether it’s at the Louvre or in the Vatican, they can see first-hand the art that reflects the West. And in hearing the cacophony of languages or tasting so many different foods, they can sample immense variety.

I’m reminded of all this because of a discussion I had with another daughter-in-law in the States. We were debating the merits of private and public schooling.

This daughter-in-law, a neuroscience professor at Princeton, suggested that bright children will succeed whether they are in good public schools or good private ones. The cream rises to the top, she contended. In her view, it’s not necessary – and in some ways may be harmful – for kids to go to often-homogenous private religious day schools or other private academies.

This is a big contrast with the arguments a friend back in the States, a prof at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, makes for Jewish day school education. Yes, there may be a sameness about the kids, but they also typically are quite bright and their dual-language education gives them a lift, he argues.

This fellow, himself a product of such day schooling, wants his kids to have a richest possible Jewish cultural immersion. He also wants them to get the best secular training available.

His kids are getting educations similar to those a couple prominent folks have gotten. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania and a potential presidential candidate, and Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor, both are religious day-school system graduates – including in the high school they both attended.

They both went on to private universities. Shapiro attended the University of Rochester and Georgetown Law. Tapper graduated from Dartmouth.

Is either man poorer or better off for the exclusivity of their schooling, either early or later on? Certainly, the training didn’t hurt their careers. Whether it will help or hurt Shapiro’s chances for the White House is an open question.

Often, such Jewish day-school kids later move onto public high schools. There, my UNL friend argues, they get to experience more diversity among their fellow students than they did in the earlier years. That time, he suggests, makes up for any earlier shortcomings.

By contrast, here in the military system, the racial and cultural diversity among the families plays out in the schools from kindergarten on through. The rainbow of backgrounds gives kids a chance to mingle with others from all across the U.S. and beyond.

My U.S. daughter-in-law’s view in favor of public schools is an intriguing an understandable one. She is a very smart person who excelled in good public schools and later shone at a couple elite private universities, Brown and Harvard. And her view will bear on the education her daughters receive, of course. Her kids will start out at good public schools.

(As a proud grandpa, I must acknowledge that all eight of my second-generation progeny, of course, are brilliant, as well as delightful. They all already excel at everything they do.)

But I wonder about what the best route is for most students.

Throughout their K-12 years, two of our three kids experienced both private and public schooling; one had only public schooling, though very good public schooling. All wound up getting very good private university experiences later on (an interesting challenge for our finances). And all have done well professionally and personally and grew into intellectually and culturally intriguing people.

Was their schooling responsible for that? Were they examples of the cream rising to the top in any system?

Edie Sedgwick, the privileged socialite and Andy Warhol muse who may have inspired “Like a Rolling Stone,” may or may not have been intimately involved with Dylan (he denied reports of an intense relationship). She seems to have been the spark for a couple other Dylan standards, “Just Like a Woman” and “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat.”

Sedgwick, who came from a Massachusetts blueblood family, attended exclusive private elementary schools and went on to Radcliffe. Ironically, her acting credits included starring in “Poor Little Rich Girl.” But she had a host of psychological problems and died of a drug overdose at 28.

Certainly, Sedgwick’s exclusive schooling didn’t help her all that much. In the end, perhaps, we’re all responsible for our successes and failures. The training we get may be less important than who we are.

A tradition worth emulating

Posted on April 29, 2026 by Joe Weber

Unlike our military-mocking president, British royals serve

Joseph Weber

When King Charles III spoke before Congress, he noted how he had served “with immense pride” in the Royal Navy over a half-century ago. He added that he was “following in the naval footsteps of my father Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, my grandfather King George VI, my great uncle Lord Mountbatten, and my great grandfather King George V.”

The king actually shortened the list, probably in the interest of time. Other royal veterans include Prince Harry, who served 10 years in the British Army, including two tours in Afghanistan as a forward air controller and Apache pilot, as well as Prince William, a former platoon commander and rescue helicopter pilot. The many others included Queen Elizabeth II, who served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during WWII as a mechanic and truck driver.

This British royal tradition makes for an interesting counterpoint to the current would-be American royal family. During the Vietnam War, Donald J. Trump repeatedly ducked service in the U.S. military, getting a doctor’s note suggesting he had bone spurs in his feet. None of his children — Donald Jr., 48; Ivanka,44; Eric, 42; Tiffany, 32 or Barron, 20 –have served.

Apparently, the Trumps are above such service. Indeed, the president has a long history of disparaging those who served.

As The Atlantic reported, we all may recall Trump’s 2015 remarks about Senator John McCain, who was tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam: “He’s not a war hero,” Trump insisted. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

The following year, Trump publicly mocked and belittled Khzir and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a fallen U.S. Army officer, Humayun Khan, who had been killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004. (Trump is “devoid of feeling the pain of a mother who has sacrificed her son,” Khzir said at the time.)

Then, in 2020, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported instances in which Trump expressed disgust for America’s military dead. At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2017, Trump stood at the grave of Robert Kelly, a young Marine officer killed in Afghanistan. Trump was visiting the cemetery with his then–Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general and father to Robert. “Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’”

The year after, on a trip to France and facing a visit to another cemetery, this time to pay respects to service members killed in World War I, Trump complained: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” And, as Goldberg reported, “in a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.”

And in an extraordinary comparison – redolent of the family traits of egocentrism and a bizarre sense of victimization –Donald Trump Jr. in his 2019 book, “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us,” described a visit to the Arlington cemetery on the eve of his father’s inauguration.

“In that moment, I also thought of all the attacks we’d already suffered as a family, and about all the sacrifices we’d have to make to help my father succeed – voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were ‘profiting off of the office,’” the younger Trump wrote. “Frankly, it was a big sacrifice, costing us millions and millions of dollars annually. Of course, we didn’t get any credit whatsoever from the mainstream media, which now does not surprise me at all.”

“All the sacrifices?” Really? So far, the Trumps have made at least $1.4 billion on daddy’s presidency, a figure The New York Times says is surely an underestimate.

And not one of them has put on a uniform for his or her country.

As the BBC reported, then-Congressman and now Senator Ruben Gallego, who fought in Iraq, responded to the younger Trump on Twitter: “Eight men I served with are buried in Section 60 of Arlington…. I visit them monthly. Even if Donald Jr. lived 1,000 years, he will never even get close to being as good and honorable as they were.”

Author and former U.S. Army Captain Matt Gallagher wrote: “Imagine going to Arlington… and being moved to think about money…. You are a soup sandwich, @DonaldJTrumpJr, and my friends buried there would tell you the same thing.”

That’s military slang for something or someone who is nonsensical. Trying to fix someone like that is as futile as putting soup between slices of bread.

I’m reminded of this now, as we visit a U.S. military base in Germany. Each day here, my wife and I take a couple grandchildren to a base elementary school where hundreds of the children of many of our soldiers attend. As the kids run, laughing and playing like kids everywhere, large planes fly overhead, presumably ferrying personnel and supplies to duty stations, perhaps some involved in Trump’s war on Iran.

We are surrounded by men and women sporting the green and tan combat fatigues of their daily work here – labors that are essential for our country and the world. They are white, Black, Asian, Hispanic, gay, straight. And they are dedicated to their work and to supporting the democracy that is America’s tradition.

At a time when that democracy is under threat at home by our government’s rapacious self-dealers, it takes a British king to gently remind us of our values.

“Distinguished members of the 119th Congress, it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s founders is present in every session and every vote cast not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States in both of our countries,” Charles said. “It is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength, including to support victims of some of the ills that so tragically exist in both our societies today.”

Such terms as “liberty,” “diverse and free” and the democracy implicit in the phrase “deliberation of many” likely don’t resound with the Trumps or their minions in that Congress. Chances are that such language just rolls off their backs, backs that know little of carrying real burdens for one’s nation.

Unlike our current national leader, 31 U.S. presidents have been military veterans. The group famously includes both Democrats, such as Jimmy Carter and John F. Kennedy, and Republicans, such as Dwight Eisenhower and both George Bushes. None of them disparaged our service members as “losers.”

As always, the British king waxed eloquent, clear and rational in his remarks — a stark contrast to our rarely articulate American leader.

“Today, thousands of U.S. service personnel, defense officials and their families are stationed in the United Kingdom, as British personnel serve with equal pride across 30 American states,” he said. “We do not embark on these remarkable endeavors together out of sentiment. We do so because they build greater shared resilience for the future, so making our citizens safer for generations to come.”

His reprimands were subtle, but unmistakeable. “America’s words carry weight and meaning, as they have since independence,” Charles said in the well of the House of Representatives. “The actions of this great nation matter even more.”

“Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity,” he said. “The rule of law, the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary, resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice: these features created the conditions for centuries of unmatched economic growth in our two countries.”

Tragically, with such qualities now in jeopardy from a pretend monarch and military shirker, a real king reminded us of them with gentility and wit. Ah, if only we let his words sink in.

About that pot and kettle

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Joe Weber

“Projection” abounds in the Trump era

Joseph Weber

Anna and Sigmund Freud, source: Deutschlandfunk

In the mid-1890s, Sigmund Freud pioneered the psychological insight of “projection.” His daughter, Anna, refined the concept in the 1930s. But, with what seems to be the third attempt on Donald J. Trump’s life, their understanding couldn’t be more relevant than ever today.

The Freuds’s notion was that people sometimes defend their own egos by projecting their unacceptable views or urges onto others. For instance, a married man attracted to a female coworker might accuse her of flirting with him. Or a woman wrestling with the urge to steal convinces herself that others are trying to break into her home.

In the Trump era, projection abounds, it seems. It’s not self-dealing by the Trump family that is corrupt, but rather the Joseph Biden “crime family.” The GOP efforts to restrict voting don’t threaten democracy, but rather “mail-in cheating” and other alleged election flaws are at fault.

Nowadays, such projection in Trump’s Washington is so common as to rarely draw comment. But it is disappointing when the phenomenon appears in reputable publications, especially those that often otherwise provide substantial critical reporting about the White House.

Consider, sadly, The Wall Street Journal. Amid the instant analyses of the shootings at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a few comments on the paper’s editorial page stand out. Violent actions and extreme rhetoric by Trump are not at fault in the fever swamp that is the mind of the self-styled “friendly federal assassin,” the paper suggests. Rather, it’s the fault of unnamed politicians and journalists.

Referring to “the poison that too often passes for American political discourse these days,” the Journal takes to task the “life or death terms” in which it suggests politics are miscast now. In such a heated environment, the editorialists hold, “the mentally unstable convince themselves of their own righteous cause.”

And the solution? “We need our political and media classes to stop talking and writing in apocalyptic terms and restore reason to political debates,” the WSJ contends. “We need to revive the traditional moral line that violence is unacceptable.”

No one would argue with the latter sentiment, of course. The attempts on Trump’s life — and this one appears to be the third, even as this shooter’s targets remain murky — are just as reprehensible as earlier assaults on Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. They are just as loathsome as the tragically successful assassination of John F. Kennedy and several occupants of the White House long before him — assaults that occurred in eras far less polarized than today.

But is the problem really media overstatement? This at a time when American forces are being deployed abroad ostensibly to forestall nuclear war? When they grab up foreign leaders and kill alleged but unproven drug dealers? When domestic forces murder American protesters while rounding up and warehousing tens of thousands of immigrants?

And who, after all, is responsible for talking in apocalyptic and violent terms? Who, more than anyone, has corrupted our political discourse for the last decade? Who has debased the language of Washington more than any president in recent history?

Just consider a few of Trump’s comments:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social on April 5. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

At an October 2024 campaign event, Trump said of former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it … when the guns are trained on her face.”

A short time before, at a September rally, he proposed a crackdown by police to deal with crime. “If you had one really violent day … one rough hour—and I mean real rough—the word will get out, and it will end immediately,” he argued.

A bit more than a year earlier, at a March 2023 gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee, he said: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

In June 2020, with protesters outside the White House, he said: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” This appears in a memoir by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

And all those are consistent with other comments by Trump. “I would bring back waterboarding,” he said in a 2016 Republican primary debate. And I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” And, when a protester disrupted a Las Vegas rally of his that year, Trump said: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

As The Atlantic noted in a long 2024 compendium of Trump’s most inflammatory comments, Trump accused his opponents of inspiring the attacks against him with their rhetoric. “The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record—singular among American presidents of the modern era—of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition,” the outlet remarked.

Classic projection, it seems. And, of course, his incendiary comments have had results. Just look at the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, something his administration is busily trying to rewrite.

In a 2020 edition of Perspectives on Terrorism, a respected peer-reviewed academic journal, three scholars dissected Trump’s language during his first term. Political discourse in the period “became more hateful and divisive,” they noted.

And they laid the fault at the feet of the president, saying his enemies were those most often victimized.

“Threats and actual violence against groups and individuals singled out and demonized by Trump increased,” the scholars wrote. “The targets of his verbal attacks were most of all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the news media collectively and individual journalists, and well-known politicians, mostly Democrats…. We found that contrary to an old children’s rhyme (‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’) Trump’s aggressive, divisive, and dehumanizing language was seconded by his followers and inflicted directly or indirectly psychological and physical harm to Trump’s declared enemies.”

Of course, this has continued during Trump II and has moved far beyond language.

“There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers,” Robert Reich, a former official in the administrations of Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, noted in a Substack. “Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington.”

Another former government official, David Rothkopf, did not hold back in delivering his own heated language about Trump in his Substack. Like Reich, Rothkopf has bipartisan cred. He served in the Clinton Administration and also worked as a managing director of Kissinger Associates.

Dissecting the president’s press performance after the aborted dinner, Rothkopf argued that “the con man, serial sex abuser, war criminal, racist, misogynist, immoral, most corrupt president in U.S. history became Saint Donald, the MAGA martyr.”

Arguing that no president in modern history has done more the promote division or violence in the U.S. than Trump, he laid the blame for today’s corrosive atmosphere at the president’s feet. “If America has a culture of violence, he is this country’s principle [sic] Apostle of Violence—a promoter of gun culture, hate and lawlessness,” he wrote. “What is more, we all know it. We know it. We can see it. It is woven into the fabric of our daily lives.”

There’s no doubt that the political atmosphere has coarsened and grown superheated ever since Trump descended his escalator in 2015 and defamed immigrants as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. And there’s no question that under Trump’s provocations, critics respond with strident language – one might even say “apocalyptic terms,” per the WSJ.

But put the blame where it belongs. It’s not the media, which serves as Trump’s messenger, albeit however critically. It’s the message.

Moreover, a deranged man who seems to have grown unhinged by Trump’s policies and sexual history is at fault here. Was he motivated by our vile political atmosphere? In time, we may learn more about what drove him and whether the Net-driven nastiness in the zeitgeist contributed.

If we want to change that atmosphere, though, the best place to start may be in the November midterm elections. Following up with a more civil alternative to Trump in the presidential vote two years later could also help.

Certainly, it is long beyond time for the projection practiced by Trump and his minions — and bought by too many in the press and outside — to end.

Alex P. Keaton was delightful …

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Joe Weber

… but Nebraska’s version isn’t quite so endearing

Joseph Weber

Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton, source: Instagram

In the 1980s, Michael J. Fox earned his acting spurs in “Family Ties,” a sitcom in which he played Alex P. Keaton, the right-wing young son of a pair of ex-hippies. Throughout the show’s seven-season run, the buttoned-down tie-wearing character clung to Reagan-style conservatism.

But Fox in 2020 said Keaton would have shunned Donald J. Trump. George W. Bush or Mitt Romney might have flown, perhaps, but not Trump.

I’m reminded of this because Robert B. “Bob” Evnen, a fellow we knew in Lincoln, Nebraska, was something of a Keaton-like figure to his family. While Bob’s family consisted mostly of liberal Jews, he took a different path. An attorney schooled at the liberal-leaning Gould School of Law at USC, he became a fire-breathing MAGA-backing rightist who got quite active in Nebraska Republican politics.

One longtime friend of his family once bemoaned Bob’s turn from his family’s values. How could this black sheep have gone so far astray, she wondered?

But Bob’s shift certainly paid off for him professionally. He won election as Nebraska’s Secretary of State first in 2018 and again in 2022. He’s now seeking a third term, with three candidates – one Republican and two Democrats – vying to take his job in a May 12 primary. He recently emailed me, seeking my vote, even though, as a resident of Colorado now, I no longer vote in Nebraska.

Not that he’d get my vote anyway.

Bob is a fascinating study in how enablers of Donald J. Trump – often otherwise bright people – contort themselves so they can ride on the coattails of the president and other highly placed Trump toadies. They do so despite facts and logic, sometimes despite their own experiences.

They do so, perhaps, because opportunism pays off.

For instance, Bob won the state post in 2018 championing requirements that voters in Nebraska show identification in order to vote. Never mind that the numbers on voter fraud in the state – and nationally for that matter – were and continue to be minuscule.

One group that tracks such voter fraud cases listed just two Nebraska men who voted twice in 2016, each once by mail and once in person. No cases were listed for any other year except 2020, when three members of one family voted in one county while living in another.

In that 2020 Nebraska case, prosecutors said the family patriarch had become angry with the village board in a nearby community where he owned several properties but didn’t live. The board had passed an ordinance pertaining to junk on lots and nuisance properties. The man, who presumably voted against the board candidates, was fined $10,000 while his son and daughter-in-law got probation.

Voter ID, which Nebraskans endorsed by ballot question in 2022 and which was enacted into law in mid-2023, may have prevented the man from voting. Indeed, on its face, voter ID seems as reasonable as requiring a driver’s license or some other photo identification to buy booze or fly.

Bob claims he wrote the state’s voter ID law, by the way, though it appears that a few more folks were involved. His staff and a legislative committee, for instance, had their hands in.

Of course, facts are slippery things with MAGA folks. More important, as the League of Women Voters noted, the issue is that time and time again, voter photo ID laws have proven ineffective in fighting voter fraud — in the rare instances it does take place.

“While voter photo ID laws aim to prevent in-person voter impersonation, an almost non-existent form of voter fraud, other types of voter impersonation are similarly rare and not cause for significant concern,” the league reported. “According to the Brennan Center, the rate of in-person voter impersonation is extremely low: only 0.00004% of all ballots cast. It’s worth noting that this rate is even significantly lower than other rare forms of voter fraud, such as absentee ballot fraud, which voter photo ID laws do not address.”

Indeed, the league traced the history of such efforts as voter ID laws back to the Jim Crow era in the South. That was “when many states employed various tactics — including literacy tests, poll taxes, and extralegal measures such as violence and intimidation — to prevent Black Americans from voting. Following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, many of these tactics were outlawed, but efforts to restrict voting access persisted, including implementing voter ID laws.”

Voter ID measures also restrict voting by Native American communities, low-income, elderly, and rural voters, according to the league. “This is partially because photo IDs aren’t as common as many people assume: 18 percent of all citizens over the age of 65, 16 percent of Latino voters, 25 percent of Black voters, and 15 percent of low-income Americans lack acceptable photo ID.”

But, on the right, fraudulent voting remains a hot-button issue. That’s chiefly because Trump – egomaniac that he is – could not believe that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Even today, he espouses the lie that really he won.

In a laughable case of “how far right can I be?,” Bob Evnen faced a couple Republican opponents in the 2022 primary who attacked the integrity of the vote in Nebraska in 2020. His state post then included ensuring an honest election.

Both of Bob’s opponents had based their campaigns on claims that the state’s vote-counting machines had been compromised, the Nebraska Examiner reported. They argued that fraudulent voting had occurred on Bob’s watch. Both questioned whether Biden had truly won an electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where he outpolled Trump by more than 22,000 votes.

But Bob, a former general counsel for the Nebraska Republican Party, maintained that he had fully investigated all the claims by the two and by a group called the Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project and found no validity to any of them, the news outlet reported.

Had Bob faced just one of the other GOP primary contenders, it’s an open question whether he would have won. Together, the two garnered just over 56 percent of the party vote, though they split the voting with smaller shares each, of course, leaving Bob to prevail with just under 44 percent of his party’s support.

Ah, the delicious irony. What goes around comes around, eh Bob? Of course, he coasted to success in the fall 2022 general election in heavily red Nebraska with no opposition from Democrats or others.

But this is a drum that even today Bob keeps beating, usually as he marches in lockstep with Trump. For instance, he praised a presidential executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” as opening “a new and hopeful chapter.”

Trump signed the executive order in late March of last year, aligning it with a House Republican priority to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship in federal elections. While the House passed that act, it is expected to die in the Senate.

Election watchdogs have said that some MAGA Republicans base their contentions about fraud at the ballot box on the “myth” of widespread voting by non-citizens. That’s so even though the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, analyzed election conduct from 2000 to 2025 and found just 99 instances nationally of noncitizens voting out of hundreds of millions of votes cast.

Still, this bogeyman remains one Bob is happy to raise, even as he lets in just a smidge of daylight between himself and Trump. “It’s very important that we assure ourselves that non-citizens are not voting,” Bob recently said. “But we don’t need to nationalize elections to do it.”

Apparently concerned about that sliver of daylight seeming too bright, in his email he assured me – and others he sent the note to – that “The President and I are Completely In-Sync on Mail-In Voting,” another of Trump’s hobbyhorses. Trump rode that pony with a second executive order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

Bob likes this one a lot. He said it would “require each state to send the Postal Service a list of those who have requested early ballots. As soon as the Postal Service is ready to put this into effect, we will immediately provide the list of Nebraska early voters, which already is publicly available under Nebraska state law. The Postal Service will then be responsible for making sure that it returns early ballots only for those voters on that list.”

Imagine how efficiently that all would work.

But you don’t have to imagine that, since the Brennan Center at NYU’s School of Law did so already: “If implemented, the executive order would inject chaos into our elections, block eligible American citizens from voting, undermine voter privacy, and expose election officials and others to criminal prosecution simply for doing their jobs,” the center reported.

Oh, and recall that Trump has himself voted by mail, including just recently. Still, he calls it “mail-in cheating.”

But such measures all fall under what a former journalist and longtime observer of Nebraska politics, Steve Smith, calls “the Integrity Narrative.” Smith, who directs communications for The Good Life Institute, writes that this narrative “opens with a claim that the system needs protection. It then builds a tool to measure risk. Finally, it closes with a report that appears to confirm the original concern. Each step feels reasonable; all told, they shape how voters are treated in real time.”

Of course, the ultimate game is to drive down voter participation in a bid to help Republicans.

“It helps to ask a simple question,” Smith adds. “What problem is this system solving? Claims about widespread illegal voting always end up being debunked, overblown, or downright fictional.”

Still, such issues offer opportunists their chances to shine and to cozy up to people in power. A decade ago, Bob distinguished himself in Nebraska politics — and won over the heart of then-Gov. and now Sen. Pete Ricketts — by co-founding and leading a 2016 drive that successfully reinstated the death penalty in the state. The state legislature had abolished it.

“Capital punishment is the only penalty that is repeated in all five of the Books of Moses,” Bob told a group of Omaha Republicans. “The Old Testament is composed of three parts. The five Books of Moses, the Prophets and the Writings. The Five Books of Moses, in each of those five books you’ll find capital punishment is prescribed for certain crimes. And so we begin with capital punishment is morally required.”

“Required?” Never mind that a famous passage in the Mishnah, an early collection of traditional writings, cites a religious court’s view that one execution in 70 years was considered destructive. Or that the rabbis in the Talmud fashioned legal hurdles that made the death penalty exceedingly rare — something Bob as a knowledgeable Jewish person should have known.

Sounds a bit like JD Vance, the Catholic convert, telling the pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Ah, the hubris of MAGA, from the top on down.

Since Bob’s death-penalty effort paid off, Nebraska has executed one man, Carey Dean Moore. Moore killed two Omaha cab drivers in 1979, when he was 21. He was sentenced to die, but the decree was twice reversed and then stayed in 2007, when Nebraska’s Supreme Court had reservations about electrocution, and again in 2011, that time over concerns about lethal injections. After 38 years on death row, Moore was killed by injection in 2018.

Moore’s death drew the ire of death-penalty opponents.

They included Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun whose novel about a Louisiana execution was made into the movie “Dead Man Walking.” Prejean pilloried Ricketts over his championing of the death penalty. “‘An important tool,’ Gov. Ricketts calls it,” Prejean said. “A tool for what? To show that we’re capable as a state of imitating the worst possible violence under the worst possible conditions, the most pre-meditated death of a human being you can imagine?”

“What’s going to happen after the execution … is anybody really safer? Has it really helped the state? All these things come to mind when I think of this and what’s about to happen in Nebraska,” she said. “Nothing will be accomplished by it, and that’s hardly what you call pro-life.”

By the way, Bob proudly claims to be pro-life, too. Never mind the moral and intellectual inconsistency – as one might politely call it – of advocating state-sponsored killing while calling oneself pro-life.

Inconsistency – perhaps we might call it hypocrisy — isn’t a problem for many MAGA Republicans, though. They claim they are furthering democracy with their efforts to restrict voting. They argue that gerrymandering is fine in Texas, but not in blue states. And they back a philandering felon’s invocations of law and order when his minions murder protesters in Minnesota.

So, Bob, Alex P. Keaton was entertaining and appealing in the 1980s. But your version of him just isn’t all that charming. I won’t be voting for you, volunteering or donating to your reelection bid. As your president might say, thank you for your attention to this matter.

Troubled by illiberality

Posted on April 17, 2026 by Joe Weber

Education in the liberal arts is at risk

Joseph Weber

More decades ago than I’d care to count, I was scouting about for colleges to attend. Recall that this was in the spring of 1971 or thereabouts, when the counterculture was still in blossom. One school that crossed my radar was Hampshire College, “an experimental, alternative” institution in Amherst, Mass., that had admitted its first class just a year earlier.

The place seemed like a great blast of fresh air. No grades, but narrative assessments. Self-designed curricula. No required classes. Time described it as a “model of well-planned radicalism.” A dorm even permitted pets.

Little wonder that Hampshire attracted talented folks. Grads include mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer, actor Liev Schreiber (of “Spotlight” fame) and filmmaker Ken Burns. Of course, hanging with such talent wouldn’t have come cheap, with annual all-in tabs now topping $77,000 (though it was likely far less in its early days).

For various reasons, Hampshire fell by the wayside for me and affordable public education proved plenty useful (along with a still-affordable — then — private grad school). The routes I took were eminently practical, even for a dreamy English major infatuated with 18^th century writers.

So it was distressing to hear that Hampshire will shut its doors after the fall semester. “It was dedicated to a transformational education, in an era when higher education has been hijacked by the transactional,” Burns told The New York Times.

The documentarian, who made his first movie at the college, has been a prominent donor and a past board member for a school that changed his life. “It was just transforming,” he said. “I literally learned everything there — everything.”

But, as the Times reported, a multiyear effort to refinance debt, raise funds, pursue land development and increase enrollment failed to produce a viable path to saving the 56-year-old college. It will join an epidemic of college closures over the past two decades. More than 300 U.S. colleges and universities closed from 2008 to 2024, according to an analysis by The Hechinger Report.

Many of the schools listed by Hechinger scarcely deserved the title of college. A good number focused on such things as cosmetology, beauty and massage and could well have been examples of for-profit institutions that have long ripped off students.

But the ranks also included Goddard College, whose grads include playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy, and such schools as Judson College, a Baptist school for women in Alabama.

From a hard-headed economic standpoint, the shutdowns merely reflect changes in the marketplace for education. As the costs of schooling have soared, perhaps especially at niche-oriented private schools, the pay scales that most grads can expect have not kept anywhere near that pace. So, the risk-reward curve has tilted against such institutions.

Education, after all, is an investment in the future. If it doesn’t pay off in marketable skills, how can it be justified? One might argue that the shutdowns are little more than an example of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” with obsolete educational enterprises giving way to those that better serve the modern day.

Hampshire’s enrollment has dipped to just about 625 students, about half the enrollment of the early 2000s. Students, it might be said, have been voting with their feet.

But the problem is that education is more than just training, more than just the honing of practical skills. It’s also designed to teach one how to think and, in many areas, to provide insights – and the ability to develop insights – that just aren’t easily available elsewhere. And, at its best, it provides settings where smart people rub shoulders to share such insights and maybe even change worldviews.

As John Locke argued in 1693, “nine parts of ten” of a person’s character are shaped by education, not nature.

Yes, the practical skills one gets in schools of business, medicine, law and journalism (even in these tough times for the field) are invaluable. Such specialties — especially at the graduate level — are essential both for individuals and society.

And yet, should there not be venues for talents such as Burns, Mamet and so many others to flourish? Should even those who go on to practice medicine, accounting or law, or to establish businesses, not be given opportunities – or perhaps be required – to develop parts of their character and their minds that go beyond the sometimes narrow limits of those fields?

Hampshire’s president, Jennifer Chrisler, told the Times that part of the school’s downfall may relate to “public discussion in this country about the value of a liberal arts education … Some of it is a persistent and ill informed, I think, belief at the federal level that the only value of an education is what you earn four years after your graduation.”

Earnings, of course, are important barometers of the value of schooling. If education doesn’t help one make a living – yielding enough of a payoff to justify the costs – it has failed.

And yet, the value of a liberal arts education is tough, perhaps impossible, to quantify. The ROI may be there, but just be hard to tote up.

Gayle Greene, source: Johns Hopkins University Press

In “Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm,” Scripps College Professor Emerita Gayle Greene offers a blistering attack on the language of those who devalue the humanities. “Hyphenated words have a special pizzazz—value added, capacity building, performance-based, high-performance—especially when one of the words is data: data driven, data-based, benchmarked-data,” she writes. “Wait a minute, I thought getting students to understand, feel, learn, appreciate, grasp the significance of, enjoy—was sort of the point.”

Can STEM courses exist alongside Shakespeare (or Locke, Swift, Defoe, Pope and Johnson)? Perhaps their programs should require at least an acquaintance with such folks.

Thankfully, many public universities demand at least a modest blend of humanities in schooling for such things as accounting in order for someone to get a degree. The so-called “gen-eds” required at the school where I taught, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, include areas such as English courses, for instance.

The loss of entire schools devoted to the less practical realms, such as Hampshire, is to be mourned. But we lose even more if we don’t demand at least a touch of the things such schools teach in all our higher-ed programs, a dash of the atmospheres such institutions foster.

A 10-professor committee at Yale recently released a report on declining trust in higher education. One of its recommendations, particularly focused on Yale but applicable more broadly, notes that the demands of the job market – over the long haul – are difficult to predict. It suggests that the intellectual skills delivered by the liberal arts may well be essential in some areas.

“Yale must recognize the epochal advances in technology and artificial intelligence, and ensure that graduates are prepared to deploy, design, and improve these tools,” the report says. “The evolving nature of the job market is also an argument for the broad, flexible, and time-tested form of education known as the liberal arts.”

The authors contend that a liberal arts education that includes the sciences and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities “equips students with foundational wisdom and critical skills that will serve them throughout their lives.” They urged that Yale – and, by implication, other schools — “work actively to help students translate a liberal arts education into successful professional and civic life.”

Bravo to Yale. And, sadly for Hampshire, RIP.

Divinely ordained?

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

In a flap between Trump and the pope, guess who takes the high road

Joseph Weber

Henry VIII meets Anne Boleyn, source: World History Encyclopedia

Popes and kings have often rubbed one another the wrong way.

Consider Henry VIII. When Catherine of Aragon couldn’t produce a male heir for the obese British king, he grew infatuated with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII stalled for years on granting a divorce. So, the monarch broke with the Roman church, appointed a Protestant clergyman as the Archbishop of Canterbury, got his divorce from him and married the heavily pregnant Anne.

Then, in 1534, Parliament passed a law making Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England. The randy ruler also soon had Boleyn beheaded and married four more times. The fates of the six were not happy: “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” For his sins, Clement’s successor excommunicated Henry in 1538 and the king died nine years later.

Three centuries earlier, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II went to war twice against papal armies, battling them in 1229 and 1230 and again in the 1240s. Pope Gregory IX had excommunicated Frederick a couple times and taken his lands in Italy while the king was off on crusades. His successor, Pope Innocent IV, later again excommunicated the emperor. In their war of words, the popes called Frederick “the antichrist,” and he, in turn, labeled Innocent the same, adding that the pope’s name was “the mark of the beast,” arguing that his initials equaled the Roman letters for the Satanic 666.

So, in comparison, the contretemps between the obese would-be monarch, Donald J. Trump, and Pope Leo XIV seems like small beer. Certainly, it’s as paltry and petty as Trump himself, who demonstrated his anger, irrationality and knack for non-sequiturs as he took on the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics in a Truth Social post.

While Trump hurled personal insults, calling Leo “WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and accusing him of “catering to the Radical Left,” the pope preferred to take a higher road. Speaking to reporters at the beginning of a 10-day tour to four African nations, Leo said: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel. And that’s what I believe I am called here to do.”

Leo said he had “no intention to debate” Trump. “I am not a politician,” he told reporters, as he defended his earlier remarks asking the world to end “the madness of war.” He added: “The message is the same: to promote peace.”

The pope did offer a slight jab, however. When he was asked specifically about Trump’s comments on Truth Social, Leo said: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

For all the small-mindedness in Trump’s blast, though, what is astonishing – if consistent – is his egocentrism. It’s all – and always – about him, of course.

Leo, the first American-born pope, was chosen by the global College of Cardinals last May not because he headed the worldwide Augustinian order of priests or because he is an expert on canon law who taught as a seminary professor while ministering in Peru for a decade. No, according to Trump, the now-70-year-old was “a shocking surprise” who owes his appointment to Trump.

“He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump,” the president posted. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

The pope, Trump added, should be “thankful” to him – though this randy and often-philandering royal wannabe made it clear he doesn’t “want” the Chicago-born pontiff leading the Church (as if he has the say-so).

“And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

Never mind that Trump was elected his second time with less than half the popular vote, 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent for Kamala Harris, a margin of less than 2.3 million votes. And just what crime and stock markets have to do with the pope is a mystery, one perhaps clear only in Trump’s unsettled mind.

Leo, for his part, has avoided direct criticism of Trump in most of his admonitions about the president’s military adventurism.

In his opening months as pontiff, he quietly dodged an early invitation from Trump to visit Washington. But in January, Leo delivered a speech voicing concern about the Trump administration’s capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

As The New York Times reported, his admonishments on the war in Iran have grown more pointed as the conflict has continued, and as Trump administration officials began invoking theology to justify the war that Trump ordered up.

First, he appeared sour on efforts by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to portray the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran as a Christian mission. Hegseth, a supporter of a peculiar Christian sect, asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

The pope saw things differently. In a homily during a Mass on the Thursday morning before Easter, the pope said that the Christian mission had often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”

Then, on Easter Sunday, he renewed his call for peace. “On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars,” Leo told tens of thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

“We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared,” the pope said at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the bishop of Rome. “God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.”

In late March the pope warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

After Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran, the pope said that “this threat against the whole population of Iran” was “really not acceptable.” He urged citizens to contact their political leaders to ask them to “to work for peace and to reject war always.”

As the Times noted, Trump’s angry reaction to the soft-spoken Leo, who was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, showed “how differently two of the world’s most powerful Americans handle conflict.” The paper noted: “One pleads for resolution, while the other reflexively increases the temperature.”

While the pope mostly kept his comments focused on issues, Trump has preferred to make them personal.

“I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA,” the president posted. “He gets it, and Leo doesn’t!”

Lou Prevost, the eldest brother of the pope, has repeatedly praised Trump in online posts, applauding his attacks on the trans community and the Democratic Party, and once even shared a video that referred to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “c–t.”

“These f—ing liberals crying about tariffs is just unreal,” read the caption under the video, posted by someone else and reported on by the Daily Beast. “Do they not know that there is a thing called video? Just listen to what this drunk c— has to say in the mid-90’s long before her husband had grindr dates.”

Prevost’s efforts, first noted by the Daily Beast last May 2025, quickly earned him an invitation to the White House, and to a Mar-a-Lago bash hosted by the president in December.

But today some of Trump’s latest postings are not sitting well with others in the MAGA base, as The Washington Post reported. Several were offended by Trump’s post of an image depicting him in Christ-like robes, holding a glowing orb and blessing an ailing man.

“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” wrote Megan Basham, a prominent conservative Protestant Christian writer and commentator. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”

The president has since had the image removed.

Isabel Brown, a Catholic podcaster with the Daily Wire outlet and a conservative influencer allied with the Trump White House, also spoke out against it. “This post is, frankly, disgusting and unacceptable, but also a profound misreading of the American people experiencing a true and beautiful revival of faith in Christ in the midst of our broken culture,” Brown wrote.

David Brody, an evangelical journalist with the Christian Broadcasting Network, blasted the image, as the Times reported. “This goes too far. It crosses the line,” Brody wrote on social media. “A supporter can back the mission AND reject this simultaneously.”

The newspaper also noted that Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Catholic Democrat from the Detroit suburbs, called the image “deeply offensive and disrespectful.” She added: “This is not a matter of politics or humor — it touches the core of our faith. Our Lord represents humility, sacrifice, compassion, empathy and truth. Everything he is not.”

After Pope Francis died last spring, Trump kicked up similar dust when he posted an image of himself as pontiff. He had a ready answer when reporters asked who he would like to take the job in Rome, according to the Times. “I’d like to be pope,” he joked to reporters at the White House. “That would be my number one choice.”

Source: Truth Social, via The New York Times

For the notoriously humorless Trump – now clearly stung by Pope Leo — the joke was likely more than half-serious.

Do we need hope and change again?

Posted on April 8, 2026 by Joe Weber

With Trump’s rage going too far, Americans could be ready for something better

Joseph Weber

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he was a fresh face offering “hope and change,” his signature campaign message. He vowed to help the middle class, then struggling in one of the nation’s worst modern recessions, promised an end to the Iraq War, and pledged to install ethical government.

Obama pioneered the use of social media, data-driven voter targeting, and grassroots, small-dollar fundraising. Using platforms such as MyBarackObama.com, his team mobilized 2.2 million volunteers for ground-level organizing and personal outreach. The “campaign team used social media and technology as an integral part of their campaign strategy, not only to raise money, but also more importantly, to develop a groundswell of empowered volunteers who felt that they could make a difference,” academics at Stanford reported.

The technology allowed the junior Illinois senator to deliver an upbeat message, one surprisingly like Ronald Reagan’s “shining upon city on a hill,” his 1980 campaign theme.

“Yes, we can” – a phrase Obama borrowed from the Spanish version used by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers – became his rallying cry. It worked at a time when Americans craved hope and optimism, successful enough to give Obama two terms.

But when Donald J. Trump came to power – in his two successful presidential campaigns – much of the electorate wanted something far different. They were angry and feeling unheard. White voters, in particular, seemed to feel like they were losing their grip on the country, a message Trump delivered with no embarrassment. The undereducated, especially, felt sidelined economically.

Trump reflected, channeled and ultimately rode to power on their rage at a system that seemed to leave many of them out.

But now that we’re seeing the effects of rage as a governing principle, are many Americans feeling differently? With murderous attacks on alleged drug dealers, followed by military raids on foreign countries and war in the Middle East, as well as masked and armed federal agents rounding up tens of thousands within our borders (and killing some), are growing numbers of Americans appalled by their choice?

And, starting with the midterms and then in the presidential contest of 2028, will they seek a different message?

Will they want that delivered, moreover, in less conventional ways than the old techniques of position papers, local media tours and debates? Perhaps a daily “permanent show” distributed on “traditional TV, connected TV, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, podcasts, Snapchat, radio, video games, community events, door-to-door canvassing, phone calls and texting,” as former Obama political adviser David Plouffe contends in a New York Times commentary.

And will they respond once again to upbeat messaging or something else?

Plouffe, backed by some academic research, holds that anger will carry the day once again – this time disgust at Trump’s legacy. “The messaging must focus squarely on making vulnerable G.O.P. candidates, not the president, the face of the things voters are angry about: higher prices, local businesses closing, farm community devastation,” he argues.

At least one presidential hopeful, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, has embraced both some of the technology and some of Trump’s messaging style. He has gotten a lot of ink with constant posts on social media that troll the president. Newsom has used what Politico called “an inescapable, smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account” to counter Trumpism.

“There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore,” the news outlet reported last year. “There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led ‘MANY’ people to call him ‘GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.’”

But I wonder. Do we really want a Trump-style alternative to the president, especially someone who strikes many as just a bit too slick?

Maybe we’re better off with a cooler head, a less everywhere candidate such as Josh Shapiro, perhaps. “He doesn’t host a podcast or spend much time on cable news,” The Atlantic reported. “Even as he engages in regular skirmishes with the White House over policy matters, the governor goes out of his way to not antagonize the MAGA base. Shapiro, who is expected to run for president in 2028, believes that his party’s prospects of regaining power depend less on combatting Donald Trump than on courting the president’s supporters.”

Or would Pete Buttigieg, Rahm Emanuel, J.B. Pritzker, Chris Murphy, Mark Kelly, Andy Beshear or someone else be best? The pundits are split, of course, and both the messenger and the message will be crucial.

Do Trump and MAGA make us more angry or just more exhausted by ugliness, self-dealing and rampant institutional disrespect in the top reaches of government? It seems likely that many of us — perhaps most – are offended by such unhinged and unpresidential messages as “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

In time, polls will help us get a handle on public reaction. But, for now, we have the disparate responses of politicians.

For instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former staunch ally turned Trump critic, said everyone in the Trump administration who claims to be a Christian needed to “beg forgiveness from God” and intervene in the president’s “madness,” as The Guardian reported. In a lengthy post on X, the former Republican congresswoman wrote: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”

Bernie Sanders, an independent senator, said on X: “One month after starting the war in Iran, this is the statement of the President of the United States on Easter Sunday. These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual. Congress has got to act NOW. End this war.”

And Democratic Senator Chris Murphy also called it completely unhinged. He wrote on X: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”

Even some Republicans have been appalled by Trump’s rhetoric, especially his so-far delayed threat to destroy Iranian civilization. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) also criticized Trump’s latest threat, arguing on X that “This type of rhetoric is an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250 years.”

Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), who recently switched from a Republican to an independent, wrote on X that the U.S. “does not destroy civilizations… Nor do we threaten to do so as some sort of negotiating tactic. We should all desire a future of freedom, security, and prosperity for the people of Iran.”

It’s an open question whether Trumpism will in time burn out, its rage spent. Economic disenfranchisement, especially among the undereducated, seems likely to grow as income inequality widens. And racial strains may be an ever-present reality in our politics (see Kamala Harris’s fall).

But, given the lurches between extremes that now define our system, the time may be ripe in the coming couple years for candidates who embrace and eloquently deliver more positive messages. As Plouffe suggests, they’ll have to tap into all the many channels available now. Forget detailed policy papers and gauzy ads celebrating commitments to family and country. Surely, modern voters will need plenty of sizzle, along with the steak.

Still, decency, morality, a sense of presidential propriety and a promise akin to Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” or Obama’s “hope and change” — two eminently successful pitches — may offer a much-needed alternative to the anger-driven, self-dealing and self-deluding politics of the moment.

When do editors say “wait a minute?”

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Joe Weber

Iran war coverage raises tough questions

Joseph Weber

Eons ago, Fred Friendly, who worked as a reporter for an Army newspaper during WWII and later rose to serve as president of CBS News, posed a few interesting questions in a seminar in my journalism graduate program.

Should journalists withhold news during a war? Or, are they obliged to abide by the ethic that a reporter must air even difficult facts — if they are important — as soon as possible, wherever they may lead?

Friendly, who died in 1998, then told of a real-life case where a reporter learned of plans to sneak endangered children out of a European war zone. The journalist held back on reporting on the effort until the mission was complete. Releasing any word beforehand could have cost the children their lives, he reasoned.

Of course, the journalist was right to stay mum.

With that example it became apparent to us all that when lives are at stake, a journalist’s first responsibility is not to his or her audience, but rather to preserve life. This idea was demonstrated repeatedly in WWII, when news organizations withheld information they knew about the Manhattan Project, as well as on troop and ship movements, so as not to tip off enemies about sensitive matters.

The Manhattan Project, source: Arcadia Publishing

But does this principle mean, as Donald J. Trump has argued, that reporters broke the law – and their own sense of ethics, though Trump didn’t mention that – when they disclosed that an F-15 fighter had been shot down in Iran? When they learned that one aviator had been rescued while another remained unaccounted for?

As matters of life and death, the questions multiply.

Should the outlets have kept quiet on that, as the government did for more than 24 hours after the shootdown? Should journalists have withheld the news from their audiences until the second airman was rescued? Did they jeopardize his life—and those of his rescuers—by alerting Iranian authorities about the search-and-rescue mission?

And, now, as Trump has threatened, should journalists be interrogated and jailed if they refuse to disclose sources that tipped them to the details?

Trump blamed an unknown “leaker” for sharing the information, vowing to haul in reporters to find the source. “We’re going to go to the media company that released it and we’re going to say, ‘national security, give it up or go to jail,’” Trump said. He added that whoever shared the information is “a sick person.”

But this may not be easy, which may be why Trump refused to point his finger at a single news outlet. Multiple news organizations had reported on the crash, including the Israeli TV outlet N12, Axios, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC News and Reuters. Several referred to unnamed “U.S. officials” – plural — as sources.

And just which media outlet broke the news first is not clear, though a few Israeli journalists appear to have gotten the news out before any the others.

Ariel Kahana of Israel Hayom and Haaretz columnist Amir Oren appear to have posted the news on Telegram before their rivals, according to another Israeli journalist who jumped on the story, Amit Segal. Segal and Axios’s Barak Ravid had both posted early on about the shootdown, the New York Post reported.

The Military Times credited Israel’s Channel 12 with being the first to report that a second American pilot was missing, according to the New York newspaper. But Segal and Ravid were among the earliest to post the information to Telegram and X, respectively.

“An American fighter jet was shot down by Iranian fire. A search is underway to locate the two crew members, according to a source familiar with the details. Read my article at @axios,” Ravid wrote at 8:54 a.m. on Friday. Similar posts by Kahana and Oren appeared a half-hour earlier, Segal told the Post.

It is also possible, however, that Iranian state media beat them all on the news. Iranian media circulated photographs and video footage on Friday that purportedly depicted debris from the downed aircraft, Israel Hayom reported.

Images of debris from Tasnim, source: Israel Hayom

The Tasnim news agency, affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, reported that at least one pilot apparently ejected. It incorrectly claimed he was captured by Iranian forces following a failed American rescue attempt. The agency also published an image of an ejection seat.

So, the responsibilities and ethical challenges of the American and Israeli media are not clear here, not to mention their legal risks, despite Trump’s certainty about the irresponsibility of their actions. If it was just a matter of preserving an American’s airman’s safety by keeping quiet, that would have been an easy call: of course, you hold back, just as the reporter in Friendly’s case study did.

But this all was far murkier.

First, did the Israeli reporters, who seem to have gotten the first word out on the F-15 shootdown, get their tipoff just by monitoring Tasnim? Had Tasnim really gotten the information first, even if incorrectly so? And, if so, did the Israelis just get confirmation from the Israeli military with the crucial detail that no one had been captured?

But then, when American media outlets got confirmation of various details, should they have withheld all of that, even though the others had released fragmentary or flawed information on Net? Did the U.S.-based outlets, in fact, do the public – if not the military — a service by providing correct information, even if only from anonymous sources?

Or was that the tipoff that, as Trump claimed, told “the entire country of Iran” that a pilot was “somewhere on their land,” making it “much more difficult for the pilots and the people going into search for him? Did they “put this mission at great risk,” as he insisted?

While lots of questions remain, we do know that the Net, with its power to instantly share information – and misinformation – has changed the calculation for media. They now must add a key element to decisions on publishing sensitive information – what if bad information is out there? Is there not a responsibility to set things right, and quickly?

Government leaders always want war information to serve their interests, not necessarily the larger public interest. Certainly, when journalists reported on the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968, U.S. authorities were unhappy. But that savagery prompted a rethinking of the war and of the behavior expected of American soldiers, alike.

And now, with Trump threatening to bomb every bridge and power plant across Iran, accurate reporting is essential.

The media need to cover the president’s statements, ranging from the recent Truth Social post saying “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will” to his earlier one: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

To the extent possible, journalists must report in detail on the destruction in Iran, should that occur. Already, they are covering the moral and legal questions involved in Trump’s threats.

“Such seemingly unrestrained statements have alarmed legal experts and former military officials, who argue that the president’s threat to conduct broad attacks on civilian infrastructure — ‘very little is off-limits,’ he said Monday — could undermine America’s aims in Iran and create legal jeopardy for military leadership,” The Washington Post reported.

As the newspaper reported, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has long supported U.S. military members accused or convicted of war crimes. He has claimed that the U.S. would take its “gloves off” in military conflict and show “no quarter” to its enemies, alarming some legal experts.

For American generals and even lower-level service members, who have the right to refuse to follow illegal orders, the orders that may come from both men are particularly problematic. All that needs to be covered by the press.

Trump, of course, has long been at war with the press, usually for covering him accurately. In his blinkered and hostile world view, the media just complicated a search-and-rescue operation, endangering hundreds of people involved. But for the news outlets interested in reporting thoroughly and correctly, as well as doing things ethically and properly, the issues are anything but simple.

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber

About Joe Weber

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With Trump’s rage going too far, Americans could be ready for something better

When do editors say “wait a minute?”

Iran war coverage raises tough questions