Donald Trump with Mob fixer Roy Cohn, lifelong friend of Si Newhouse: NAJ screen shot
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. – You never know when the day will come when the final piece of a big picture puzzle will show up, bringing higher knowledge into focus and taking you over a plateau in your thinking.
Like a guitar player or pianist who studies and practices for years, seeming to reach a plateau of talent and practice. Then one day the music just seems to flow from the instrument in an effortless crescendo. My friend Wayne Perkins knows what I’m talking about.
Reporting and writing is that way too. I just had one of those days. Let me tell you about it. Sorry, but it won’t fit in a Facebook meme, and I’m not inclined to aim the camera at myself to tell the story on YouTube either. The only way to tell this story is to write it and publish it on the web and share it on Facebook. That may seem like Old Hat, but by god, it is my old hat and I’m sticking to it.
I’ve long thought about journalism in terms of science, which is not how any of my colleagues ever approached this business. Which is why I call this “New American Journalism” or the New American Journal. In science things start with theories, from which hypotheses are developed. Experiments are designed to test the hypotheses, and the best science starts with the assumption that you are not trying to test things to prove your theories. You design the experiment to try to disprove them.
E.O. Wilson told Richard Dawkins this when Wilson’s work on human evolution surpassed Dawkins and became the dominant theory in evolution first pioneered by Charles Darwin, that is when multi-level group selection was proved as the way genes are passed on, not individual and kin selection theory as proposed by Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene.
My take on that in the social sciences and journalism: Can Altruism Trump Selfishness to Save Democracy and Planet Earth?
This is still very much an open question. It seemed the way things went in the 2020 election there was hope. Not so much after 2024.
News and journalism have long been based in economics, not real science, which is why so-called “objective” journalism was developed in the 20th century. It started out with the first science journalism, a term from science. But devolved from there. Covering both sides of every story was a way for mass circulation daily newspapers to expand their audiences and profits by selling papers and ads to “both sides.” Conservatives and liberals. Republicans and Democrats. Appealing to and profiting from Fascists, Communists, Libertarians and Anarchists all in one newspaper, and then one radio show and ultimately one television news operation.
This paradigm is now splintered beyond repair.
This era in American journalism began back during the Great Depression with the conglomeration of mass circulation daily newspaper chains and the rise of the Associated Press, and then began to unravel about the time “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart blasted the CNN show “Crossfire” and sent it into oblivion. The bad idea was that forcing every story into this “both sides” business, with a conservative and liberal side, a Republican and Democrat side, created a false narrative that just divided the public even more. Where are the stories without any sides, just the facts?
Then the bloggers came along, and then social media, then podcasters. You know the rest of that story in terms of where we are today.
But the point is, Trump triumphed in bringing fascism to America by exploiting this obsession with news organizations chasing profits by covering both sides. You may recall the head of CBS News saying back early in his first term that Trump was “good for CBS.” Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference in 2016, CBS Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said of Donald Trump’s presidential run: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Well, he’s long gone now, and that’s not working out so well for them anymore, as that news network is being blown out of the water as its parent company Paramount is now selling out to Skydance, cancelling the “Late Show” with Stephen Colbert and being mocked on “South Park.” This is not going to end well.
Roll Over Ed Murrow: Make Way for Fox News Two on CBS
If you get a chance to see it, you should watch the film “Hemingway & Gellhorn.” While Hemingway became a famous best selling author, Martha Gellhorn outlived him by 30 years, and she was still covering wars as a foreign correspondent, starting out with Collier’s magazine back in the days of the Spanish Civil War. Notice that several times in the film, she blasts the “objectivity” of the other journalists, including those working for the New York Times. She believed in writing passionate stories with a point of view, the bane of capitalist news CORPORATIONS everywhere.
Of course that war resulted in a disappointing victory by the fascists, or the so-called “Nationalists.” It ended in early 1939 – with no help or involvement from the U.S. – and resulted in the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain until his death in November 1975. Is this what Trump, JD Vance, Putin and Steve Bannon are really trying to create? A fascist dictatorship? They are certainly not interested at all in preserving democracy, although they won’t come right out and tell the MAGA faithful that.
Even Hunter S. Thompson blasted the same thing.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity,” he once wrote. He didn’t say it in a podcast. He wrote it.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he wrote: “Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
Knowing these things all too well, I’ve strived to find a better way, and found that grounding my work in some ways based in science and scientific objectivity was a better way. What’s left of “mainstream” or “legacy” news outlets are still struggling to make the 20th century “fair and balanced” model work, even as podcasters, YouTubers, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok “creators” are blowing them out of the water and taking their audiences and profits away. It’s a sad time as a result, but “it is what it is,” as they say.
And of course A.I. is coming for us all after stealing our words.
Sensationalism Is Here to Stay
The big problem is, the one thing that remains constant about all of this so-called journalism is that it is still grounded in one news value that never seems to go away: Sensationalism and celebrity worship. It’s the only thing that gets anyone enough attention to attract enough of an audience and traffic to still turn a profit. The tabloid model of sensationalism, what historians and critics derided in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as “Yellow Journalism,” is alive and well on the web. And it is doing its part to destroy our country and democracy.
Back 20 years ago, I envisioned creating something better, then began experimenting with it on the web with an internet connection. This has sustained me and paved my path down the road for two decades now. I’m wondering how far it will take me still.
Now Back to the Puzzle
Several things happened this week and culminated in a new understanding of what happened in the past, why the present is what it is, and how the future could proceed from here.
First I got an email, like I do every day, from someone pitching a story for the New American Journal. Many of these contain promises to pay me for this “sponsored content.” Most of these ideas are so stupid I just delete them or dismiss them as spam. But this one caught my attention. It was from Cristina Johnson, a Navy veteran advocate for Asbestos Ships Organization, a nonprofit whose primary mission is to raise awareness and educate veterans about the dangers of asbestos exposure on Navy ships and assist them in navigating the VA claims process.
I replied to this one, and said I would like to see the story and consider publishing it. She said she would get on it right away. She sent in the story on Monday, but I was up at the crack of dawn and had planned another day trip to the Catoctin Mountains, a place like Shenandoah where I find solace in nature and sometimes come away with good ideas seemingly inspired by the gods of the Earth and Journalism.
Secret Vistas: Visiting the Catoctin Mountains One Last Time
On Tuesday morning, I looked at her story and began working on it myself. It appeared to be written using a chat bot like ChatGPT (she later told me it wasn’t), and I had asked her to see if she could find the story about the Trump branded asbestos, which I had recently heard about from a friend. She said she didn’t find that, so I Googled it.
Sure enough there was a story about that from 2018 in the UK Guardian, a story that was apparently ignored by everybody else in the business. Believe it or not, this happens a lot. I never saw anything about it in the New York Times, or noticed anyone sharing stories about it from CNN, MSNBC, CBS News or NPR.
Meanwhile I had been listening to “Fresh Air” on NPR while riding in the NPS car around the campground and heard an interview with Michael M. Grynbaum, who just published a sensational book on the end of the heyday of magazine journalism, “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.”
On the show, and in an excerpt published in the Times, the story features a character I have taken on before, Si Newhouse. He was the mega wealthy publisher of not just Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker. He was also the owner of the book publisher Random House, as well as The Birmingham News in my home town and many other mass circulation daily newspapers, including the Mobile Press-Register and the Huntsville Times in my native state, as well as the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, which I wrote for briefly in Washington back in 2004.
NYT: The Concorde-and-Caviar Era of Condé Nast, When Magazines Ruled the Earth
NPR: Inside Condé Nast’s decline
Also while riding around in the car, I noticed two women at a table in the campground who walked in with two bottles of wine and some food. They were having a picnic, which is technically not allowed here unless you reserve a campsite. But since they were on foot, hiking through, I let it go, but told them to keep the wine on the lowdown so a park ranger would not call the U.S. Park Police on them.
They were still there a good while later, so I went over to talk to them and find out their story. One of them turned out to be Laura Sullivan, a special projects reporter for NPR, who lives somewhere south of here. Her friend also does special projects for CNN, and lives in Ellicott City north of here. They said they meet here in the middle often for picnics, and apparently discuss projects together. I didn’t catch her name, and I’m no fan of CNN anyway as you know.
Back in the early 1990s, I was interviewed for an associate producer position there in the CNN Headquarters building in Atlanta by Peter Dykstra, the head producer of CNN’s crack environmental team back then when Ted Turner was still in charge. He had been picking up many of my stories from the Gulf Coast off the UPI wire and running them on CNN. That was before Time Inc. bought Turner out, making him a billionaire, but booting him from the board and forcing him into retirement on his Z Bar Buffalo Ranch in Montana. He suffers with Alzheimer’s now, in recent years interviewed by Ted Koppel for “60 Minutes.”
What a character he was. I got to hang with him a few times, mainly at the bar during meetings of the Society of Environmental Journalists in places like Chattanooga.
Dykstra didn’t offer me the job in 1993, probably because of the conservative suit and shoes I wore that day, and I was headed back to grad school in Tuscaloosa anyway. Dykstra died recently, I saw on Facebook. Turner plucked him from Greenpeace to run his team.
After Time Inc. took it over in the merger, CNN dropped many associate producers, the staff members who researched and wrote the stories before, and started sending out two person teams on stories instead, just a camera operator and the on air talent. Their journalism suffered as a result, and it just devolved into celebrity news talk shows after that. A total waste of my time and a distraction from practicing real journalism.
Of course watching it became a crutch for other reporters, even in the Senate and House Press Galleries in the U.S. Capitol building, along with C-SPAN. When I applied for press credentials to cover congress a few years ago when Doug Jones of Alabama was elected to the Senate – mainly in the end because of the story I broke about Roy Moore being banned from the Gadsden Mall – and visited the place, it was obvious no reporters actually sit in the galleries with pens and reporters pads to cover the news anymore. They sit in the press room with laptops watching CNN and C-SPAN and write their stories to get the dateline there, and send them in via email.
Then Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gave me gallery passes at the time, and I was there the day Senator John McCain did his thumbs down and cast the deciding vote against the Republican bill to kill Obamacare by repealing the Affordable Care Act.
Republicans Fail to Repeal Obamacare: Where Do We Go From Here
What a world we’ve created, eh?
Back to the Asbestos Story
Meanwhile I was putting the asbestos story together. Rather than a straight story on the dangers of asbestos, which I figured very few people would read or share anyway, I included the Trump conflict of interest and the dangers it posed for members of the military and veterans. Some people on Facebook complained, but I could not let Newhouse off the hook either, since he is the one who created the myth of Trump’s glorious fake business acumen in the first place.
Si Newhouse who gave us Trump, childhood friend of Roy Cohn, the mob fixer who also advised Trump: NAJ screen shot
It also became clear that Trump and Putin had created the fake summit about peace in Ukraine as a pretext to get together in person to talk about something else. Everything Trump says is a distraction to hide what he really cares about, MONEY! Putin needed to remind Trump of his debt to the Russian Mob, while at the same time giving him a photo op to boost his ratings and remain president-dictator-king of America, for whatever life he has left. So I wrote this:
“Do you wonder what they talked about in the limo? Could it have been Russian possession of a Trump-Epstein pedophile tape? Maybe they discussed how Trump was going to continue paying his debt to the Russian Mob for bailing out his Atlantic City casinos when no American bank would loan him money? Maybe they discussed their partnership in the only company left in the world selling asbestos, and how to get rid of those pesky E.P.A. regulations so they can sell it in the U.S. market? In the old world, before Trump, this would have been impeachable. Not with this Congress, on recess in August hiding from the Epstein files.”
Trump E.P.A. to Reconsider Biden’s Ban on Asbestos: Does Trump Have a Conflict of Interest?
Theory. Hypothesis. Experiment. Test. Publish results.
Get it or not, you won’t see it in the New York Times or on CNN or CBS News. You won’t hear on NPR either.
Nor will you read it in a Condé Nast magazine owned by the Newhouse family, or even the Columbia Journalism Review. They just published a piece still grappling with how to save “objective” journalism, asking newsroom leaders and ethicists “what they’re keeping or changing in an era of Trump, ‘fake news,’ AI, and industry decline.”
Thirteen Journalists on How They Are Rethinking Ethics
Notice I’m not on the list, even though I’ve been writing about this longer than any of them.
Why is that do you think?
Is it because I’m a talentless trailer park trash writer from the shit hole state of Alabama? That can’t be it. I was raised in a house in the suburbs.
It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll But I Like It: Wayne Perkins, The Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd
But is this still somehow offensive to the Ivy Leaguers who think they are better than everybody else, including all those who just got ran off at the Jeff Bezos Washington Post?
The Last of the Great American Newspapers and the End of History
Or could it be because I long ago sued a corrupt newspaper for blatant long term violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act in federal court and won, and was blackballed by Newhouse and other traditional publishers because of that?
Or maybe it is because I once sued a Newhouse owned Random House author for stealing my Bush AWOL story used as the lynchpin of her case against George W. Bush in Kitty Kelly’s $8 million book?
The Last of the Great American Newspapers and the End of History
The Mob
A few years ago I talked to Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power about the Times and other New Journalism books. He had attended the University of Alabama and covered sports for The Crimson White, and we appeared in a picture together on the 100th anniversary of the paper back in the early 1990s. I had also interviewed him back in the late 1990s for an issue of The Southerner magazine on Willie Morris, who had saved his career at Harper’s Magazine.
Audio: Gay Talese on Willie Morris
He offered to help me find an agent and help with my writing career. But the last time I called his number at his office apartment in Manhattan when I was in New York, his wife Nan Talese answered the phone. She blew me off and said her last client was to be Margaret Atwood before she retired. She edited The Handmaid’s Tale. I knew of her before for being the editor of Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, a brilliant book.
I figured she blew me off because Gay had by then developed dementia or something. But could it be that Double Day was also a Newhouse owned Random House publisher? I just checked and it’s true.
Double Day – Knopf Publishing Group – Penguin Random House
Of course Talese was Italian. His father was a tailor in New Jersey. Was he connected to the Mob too?
And guess what? He’s also Rick Bragg’s publisher. Well, he always did know how to keep his mouth shut, even after being fired from the Birmingham News in the 1980s – by the same editor who orchestrated my firing at the Decatur Daily, a dickhead named Paul Foreman – and after he quit the New York Times during the Jayson Blair scandal when editor Howell Raines of Alabama was forced to resign early, no doubt with a golden parachute of a deal from his seven year contract cut short.
Now we know from Michael Grynbaum’s book that Newhouse was mob connected through Roy Cohn, growing up with him as a childhood friend and even sitting in on his trial every day when he was tried for taking a bribe from a Vegas gambler.
From the New York Times archives:
The Government opened its case against Roy M. Cohn yesterday by contending that Mr. Cohn received a $50,000 bribe from a Las Vegas gambler. It charged that the payment was made to keep the gambler and three of his friends from being named in an indictment in the $5 million United Dye and Chemical Corporation stock fraud case.
A Federal prosecutor told a jury that Mr. Cohn, chief aide to the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during the controversial hunt for Communists in government a decade ago, also tried to thwart justice by lying to a grand jury and by getting witnesses to change their testimony.
Newhouse probably introduced Trump to the mob fixer who first gained fame as a prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954. Cohn had been assisting McCarthy’s investigations of suspected communists. In the 1970s and during the 1980s, he became a prominent legal and political fixer in New York City. He represented and mentored Donald Trump during Trump’s early business career, even according to his Wikipedia page.
So I guess in the end, the fact is I have offended the Mob by being straight up and telling it like it is all my life and career.
Well, very soon I may get around to making this story complete. There is one more story I’ve never told in writing. I’ve told a few close friends about it. Maybe before I go, I will write the story and publish it.
A good working title could be: When I Almost Married Into the Mob.
My friends who have heard me tell the funeral story will know what I’m talking about.
See you down the dusty trail, as they used to say on “Yellowstone” – a show on Peacock I never liked.
___
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