Reporting 2020

We all need to buckle up for an ugly ride in 2020. The US presidential campaign will surely plough new depths and make existing chasms wider. We had better enjoy this Thanksgiving with our divided families because the next one will surely be tougher still. But one group has a real challenge, and that is anybody trying to report the campaign. This will be brutal.

We have had a few trial runs. In Europe, the Brexit referendum, the current UK campaign and recent elections in Italy, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere have involved outside interference and manipulation of the truth and its guardians. In the US, the 2016 campaign established the ugliness and the Mueller and impeachment probes have followed the new pattern. But a perfect storm awaits in 2020.

The media has a bad habit of writing about itself, but I for one do not mind because I find the material fascinating. Just this year I have enjoyed two Broadway plays about newspapers, Network and Ink, and recently loved a British TV import to PBS called Press. In different ways, they all addressed the same basic challenges facing reporters – moneyed owners, ambitious and unscrupulous editors, a public seeking click bait, and competition from new channels. I will predict that the 2020 US election will spawn some tremendous plays for us to enjoy, though only long after it is all over.

At the centre of it all lies the pantomime villain Donald Trump. Trump has been the biggest boon for all media for a generation, because everybody loves to read about Trump. Circulations are up after decades of steady decline, TV news has found a new following and even election turnouts have risen (from disastrous to merely dismal). But Trump poses unique challenges to reporters, and so far few have managed to rise to meet them.

It starts with coverage, truth and balance. Trump has found a way to create his own coverage and pays no respect to truth, thus challenging balance. The biggest mistake we all make with Trump is to over-estimate him. I do not accept that he has a masterful strategy, simply a punchers gut. But that gut seems to have been enough so far, and poor reporting may be partly to blame.

Trump just makes things up, out of a desire to impress and an arrogant sense of impunity. If he says it himself or if it is complimentary, then it is true; otherwise it is fake news. If found out lying or committing any misdemeanour, first he denies, then distracts, then condemns the messenger, and finally simply defies anybody to do anything about it, claiming various presidential and personal privileges. It works. Everybody knows he is guilty of everything thrown at him in the impeachment hearings so far, and he more or less admits it, bullies his party into ignoring it and trusts his public to overlook or even to applaud his actions. Then he changes the subject, and the press and public duly follow his lead.

This creates all sorts of challenges for reporters. First, it is not simple for an organisation professing to be balanced and respected to accuse of the president of the US of lying, again and again. It can be seen as unpatriotic. It can lead to legal challenge.  And it doesn’t really create great copy, being rather technical and monotonous. So what do they do? The PBS news hour uses the expression “claims without evidence”, but that loses impact after a while. Newspapers try ridicule, and leave it to their opinion columns to defend the truth. Fact checkers are quoted against the most egregious claims.

It is tough for reporters to cover this, especially when writing for a publication that tries to retain some sense of balance. Most failed in 2016: Trump’s team love to stir up scandal, such as the Hillary Clinton e-mails. Even if the worst claims about these were true, they paled into insignificance compared with misdemeanours from Trump. Yet somehow the press report both equally, perhaps trying to be balanced, or perhaps lazily picking up what they are fed most avidly. The result is confusion among the public, or a reason to feed existing prejudice, or a conclusion that all politicians lie so all claims can be ignored equally.

Often I wish there was better reporting in the US. Certainly, the BBC, The Guardian and The Economist seem more thorough. Most US outlets have few foreign or investigative reporters these days. Where are the stories about the housing crisis, or monopoly abuse, or military abuse, or the absence of policy of most administration departments? Why do most reporters lazily equate the economic reality of most families to the stock market and jobs report statistics? Then again, part of me has come to believe that even excellent reporting would be largely lost in today’s echo chamber.

Another issue is the unresolved responsibilities of social media providers. It is too easy to blame Facebook and others for every falsehood – like blaming the electricity company for a cold snap. But the providers do need clear policies and regulation, and so far this is absent, or at best emerging and inconsistent. Trump will exploit this in 2020 by feeding off and bullying the providers at the same time.

We can be sure there will be plenty of foreign interference in the 2020 election cycle. Russia almost has carte blanche and will remain several steps ahead of any attempt to rein it in. China will join the party in 2020, though it is unclear on which side. Then there is improper domestic interference from those with the plenty of money and lots to gain or lose. Look out for two or three more outrageous pro-Israel policy announcements in the next twelve months, and be very cynical about their provenance.

We can be sure of wild cards in 2020. The caravans will reappear, along with stories of immigrant crime. Whoever is the Democratic candidate will have some skeleton unearthed, no matter how flimsy or unreasonable. But I can think of three or four likely wild cards that are even more dangerous.

First is Trump’s health. I would be surprised if he gets through 2020 in any sort of strong mental condition. That might lead to hushed up stories, or still wilder behaviour or a debate about his readiness to continue. That could get very ugly.

Next are foreign victories. Trump will have noticed that he has the power to move the stock market daily by making some noise about the China trade talks. The Chinese will have noticed too. Trump will engineer a drop at some point and try to suggest that a Democrat victory would lead to such drops each week. Elsewhere, for sure, Trump will try to engineer some photo ops in 2020 with China, or North Korea or others. These are all dangerous.

Next there is the Supreme Court. Imagine a scenario where Ruth Bader Ginsberg is on a life support machine next August or September, and one side wants her declared dead so they can rush a new judge through the Senate before November? It is not so unlikely.

Then there is out and out cheating. Russian interference or not, voting technology in the US is pretty vulnerable, and gerrymandering and small-scale voter suppression are already rife. The demographics also mean that lopsided results are possible where one side wins many more votes but still loses. And if Trump does lose, even by the biased system in place, don’t expect him to accept the result. 2000 could seem like a genteel discussion before 2020 is over.

I normally like to propose solutions to problems raised in my blogs and to find a cause for optimism, but in this case I find that difficult. For reporters, I don’t see easy answers. Perhaps for the duration of 2020 news outlets can be clearer about sources, claims, facts, lies and opinions, maybe via clear labelling conventions. But even if they did, I am not convinced it would make much difference, because most people will somehow be fed what they want to read anyway.

As for optimism, I suppose we can enjoy some of the theatre, especially if the tragic flawed hero really does get his comeuppance in the end. And, whatever happens, it will pass and humanity will slowly learn and improve. That may not be much comfort for people facing injustice today, nor for Americans who love their country and humans who love their planet.

So I offer no parting optimism today. This will be the ugly. Buckle up.        

Peace

I’ve been noticing recently how often the Christian mass refers to peace as an ideal personal state. We wish each other a sign of peace. The blessing talks of the peace which passes all understanding. Grant us peace is the final line of the Agnus Dei. In the last of these, singing or speaking, I always make sure to pronounce grant with a dark English ah vowel, as a one-man protest against my American co-worshippers, which of course is a singularly unpeaceful act.

Some homilies I have heard lately have helped me by expounding on the subject of peace. There are many readings and homilies about forgiveness, and especially about making sure we do not become estranged from anyone in our family. Less convincing was a homily trying to convince me that true peace only comes from God: indeed that homily made me consider a very worldly alternative, a life where peace is the only goal, or at least the dominant goal. I don’t think God is strictly necessary to achieve that.

Another trigger for this thought was observing the old people at the residential nursing home we often visit. The physical lives of residents are of necessity slow and repetitive and sometimes frustrating, but many are as busy mentally as when they were younger. The ones who are happy are most at peace mentally. They are not so anxious about what others think of them or about what services they deserve or are being cheated out of. The peaceful ones have reconciled themselves with their families and with their own former behaviour and actions. Crucially, they have also come to peace with the prospect of their own death; the nuns do a wonderful job in this regard. Those residents mentally at peace are also often the least frustrated physically, being more ready to accept their own limitations and the series of small defeats that the last phases of life entail.

I am not sure if there is any correlation between mental peace and a delay in the onset of dementia, though I would not be surprised if there were. But I do think I have noticed a correlation between peace and the sort of ways dementia afflicts residents. The ones who get angry or intensely frustrated behave as though in very anxious dream-like scenarios, often taken from their earlier life. What are coming back to them, again and again, are scenes of deep stress, and I believe that many of the scenes are sources of unreconciled anxiety. It is a small sample size, but the same residents that seem to suffer the most in later stage dementia seem to be ones that were the least at peace with their surroundings before dementia set in.

So peace might be a great objective in the last phases of life, when by necessity ambition is reduced, but isn’t it a bit of a pathetic goal for earlier? Well, perhaps not. Peace is not the same as idleness. In fact, idleness is the enemy of peace, since it engenders boredom and dissatisfaction. Being active in mind and body fulfils us and leads to feelings of peace.

The best symptom of a peaceful life is one where sleep comes easily. That is not the same as a life filled with sleep, though it will certainly include enough sleep to stay healthy. More, it is about how easily we can fall asleep. Unless we have a chronic medical condition, we should be able to find sleep when we seek it, without too much tossing and turning. If we cannot, there is something in our brain that is not at peace. So the fact that many studies are showing that, in the developed world, we are generally not getting enough sleep, and furthermore are finding it harder to fall asleep, is not a good indicator for society.

We can use our goal of a peaceful life to help us regulate our activities and behaviours. There are numerous possible examples.

One good example is how we vacation. It is telling that commercials for vacations tend to show intimate couples enjoying peaceful meals at sunset in beachside restaurants. The reason for that is that this is indeed what our brains seek from vacations and what healthy vacations look like. But think of your most recent vacations. They might indeed have contained such intimate moments, but what else did we inflict on ourselves to achieve them? How much did we spend? How many hours did we stress ourselves in airport lounges and bus depots and hire cars? How many days did we tick off some place off a bucket list but stress out getting there and fending off other tourists just to get the perfect instagram post? How much misery did we impose on our small kids from disrupting their routines, and ourselves from handling those same kids in their misery?

Now, bucket lists are good and family time is precious. But let us get our priorities in order here. If we start a vacation plan with the top priorities being recharging and intimacy then we might choose differently. Within an hour’s drive nearly all of us have plenty of beauty and nature, often for free. The instagram feed might not be as momentarily impressive as the one with the Taj Mahal in the background, but my guess is that the smiles will look less forced.

A year of vacations might look very different with these priorities. There might be a couple of extra short trips just for the kids, like days in local water parks, but there might also be a longer break where those same kids stay with grandparents. There might still be a Taj Mahal, but not a Machhu Pichu and Table Mountain as well, but instead some local weekends, easier transit and longer stays with simpler plans.

An even more obvious example is how we use our phones. Our phones are brilliant, and they can help us find peace by improving relationships, nurturing curiosity and saving time, for example time in traffic jams or getting lost. But they can also be the enemy of peace. Do we really need an app to measure our sleep? Surely that app will only stress us out and reduce our sleep hours. Meditation type apps might work for some of us, but real meditation and time spent in nature is probably better. And the quest for streaks and photos to share and likes and click bait is surely working against peace, especially late at night. We all know we need to self-regulate our phone use and we all struggle to do it. “Does this help me find peace?” might work as an acid test in this struggle.

More fundamentally, we can ask ourselves if our relationships help us in our search for peace. All forms of intimacy help us feel warm inside. We can achieve intimacy through generosity, acceptance, openness and vulnerability. We can use the prospect of this as a guide in seeking new relationships, as a way of working on our own behaviour, and as a way of improving existing relationships. Then we can enjoy our beachside meals (and what might follow) even more!

I often wonder why my wife and I are in such a great mood every time we return from our service at the residential home. I think peace is at the heart of it. By spending time in a place of peace, with lots of love and a slow pace, those benefits rub off on us. And service itself has a peaceful dividend.

When I watch TV commercials, they often seem to be promoting behaviour that it is opposite of anything that will create peace. They are all about competition, acquisition and ways to get into debt and stress. I guess I should not be surprised, since peace itself is usually free and nobody could pay much for a commercial that doesn’t lead to purchases.

TV commercials, mobile phones, social media and news feeds are usually the enemy of peace. It is no surprise that happiness is correlated first with a lack of war and danger, then with rising income security, but seemingly with an upper limit after which richer societies do not become happier ones. Wealth gives us more opportunities to succumb to the seven deadly sins, an antonym for all of which could be peace. Evolution makes sure that we usually enjoy plenty of the positive benefits of those sins, and we should accept them and even indulge them in moderation. If we choose inner peace as a primary life goal, we can find the antidote.

Writing about peace as a goal made me look up the goals that I set ten years ago for my fifties, but have largely forgotten. Next year I will refresh them for my sixties. But when I read the goals I was quite encouraged, because most of them were very consistent with a quest for peace. With a little good judgement and a lot of serendipity, I have been able to follow the goals quite closely, and a lot of peace has followed. Next time, peace will be at the forefront of the exercise and not just a fortunate side effect.       

The UK Election

I surprised myself with my last blog about UK politics back in May. At the time, fog surrounded all predictions, yet I scored something like nine out of ten by anticipating Boris as prime minister and most of his actions since, culminating in a general election as an active policy. At the time, I predicted a landslide win for Boris in that election. Has anything changed in the interim?

Boris has actually been even more cunning than I gave him credit for. Ignore all of the lost commons votes and apparent chaos – that has all been part of the plan. Where he has outperformed my expectation is that he has actually negotiated a brexit deal with the EU, so that he can go to the country with a clear and simple platform that nobody can claim is not deliverable. Securing this, yet also securing an election but no second referendum, has been a masterstroke. It carries just one risk – Nigel Farage – but I believe that will be overcome as well.

This is a fascinating election, if one can look beyond the tragic state of the country and its politicians and the prospects for both. Most elections are about a hundred or so marginal seats, with preordained results in up to 80% of the constituencies. That favours incumbent parties, and means that few elections transform the electoral map. In the 1920’s, Labour usurped the Liberals. In 1945, Labour became fully established. In 2010, the Scottish Nationalists usurped Labour in Scotland. That is about it really.

But this election might be different. Outside of Scotland and Northern Ireland, almost all the seats are potentially up for grabs. The main immediate cause is Brexit, but the more fundamental shifts may be about the secular decline of Labour, the nationalist takeover of the Conservatives, and the rise of the Greens.

In a gross simplification of English and Welsh constituencies, most are either natural Conservative or natural Labour. The former comprises the whole south except the grittier parts of London and the most rural parts of the north; the latter gritty London, the whole of Wales and the rest of the north. What is interesting is that the centrist party, the liberals, tend to come second in Conservative seats, and have been most competitive in rural areas where the establishment is feared. In most natural Labour seats, it is the Conservatives who have come second, often a very distant second.

As a result the effect of Brexit and nationalism is skewed. Brexit is a nationalist urge strongest in poorer areas. In natural Labour seats a nationalist Tory party suddenly becomes competitive. In natural Conservative seats, the Liberals may become more competitive, but only where the remain vote was really strong such as around London and in posh university cities like Cambridge.

So in this election it is conceivable that the Conservatives might be competitive in almost every seat in England (and almost no seat outside England, which may not worry them too much because that is only about 12% of the total). It is even possible that they become more successful in traditional Labour seats than their own, achieving a reversal never seen in Britain before.

This is the context for an election where strange things might happen. Boris has a simple platform. He has his party committed to his Brexit deal, he has offered his bribes, and he can hint about a post-Brexit economy of low deregulation and parasitic finance, an attractive proposition for the wealthy and plenty of opinion formers, probably including Trump’s acolytes and the Russians. There will be some trumped up incident relating to immigrants to enable plenty of dog whistling. This is a formidable force.

Labour is offering a new referendum after a further negotiation, and otherwise a highly progressive agenda full of nationalisation and punishment of the rich, from a party obviously divided internally and trying to straddle its traditional voter base and radical London-centred young voters too. This is a tough challenge, made more so by a volatile leadership. Somehow in 2017 Labour outperformed, but that was against Theresa May. Now they have a cynical and aggressive Boris and all his vocal support against them. A total collapse is not impossible: it happened in Scotland (where the SNP will sweep the board again), so why not in England too?

The Liberals would cancel Brexit altogether, though they are smart enough to allow for a referendum if they are forced into coalition. This is also a clear and attractive platform, and they have just about recovered their brand after the battering from being in coalition (tough for what was historically a protest movement), but they have an untried new leader who might implode. The Greens are still small in the UK, but will partner with the Liberals to the benefit of both groups. The poor souls who departed the Tories or Labour on principle have no choice but to run as Liberals, unless they fancy trying their luck as independents. 

The fly in the ointment is Nigel Farage and his Brexit party. Farage today is the most powerful man in Britain, and he knows it. Trump and Putin know it too, and so does Boris. Maybe 25% of the electorate will follow his lead. If his party were to stand in open opposition to the Tories, the north would probably stay Labour and the south may turn Liberal. If he does a deal with Boris, both could become Conservative.

So I predict Boris will do a deal with him. Before I thought this would come before the election, but Boris has taken the risk of dealing with the EU first to create his simple platform and hand Farage his bargaining power. What will be the price? I shudder to think. It might involve criminal wealth, honours and titles, and further distancing over time from the EU. It will be mainly covert, and involve many foreigners. But I guess we can step back for a moment and admire Nigel Farage, who has somehow made himself the powerful Brit since Churchill.

Hence I predict a Tory landslide, but with plenty of uncertainty. Farage might become too greedy for even Boris to stomach, or may be vulnerable to a scandal. Boris might struggle to keep his party together, especially if Farage’s price is high, and Boris is a walking scandal who might score many own goals. Labour could surprise in either direction. I don’t see it (they are too dumb and arrogant), but they might even deal with the Liberals and Greens.

In this situation, if I were a betting man, I’d be scanning some outside bets, because this could just be the election to create extreme outcomes. I wonder what the odds are on the Tories winning 500 seats or Labour less than 50, or of Jo Swinson, or Phillip Hammond, or Ben Watson becoming prime minister. I can see paths for all these outcomes and think all are great bets at 100 to one.

One positive in all this will be a focus on individual politicians. If Labour is almost annihilated, the survivors will be good constituency MP’s in union cities. A few rebel independents may win. There will be great opportunities for talented young Liberals and Greens to emerge.

Despite all this, the two most likely outcomes are clear. We might get the nightmare of a repeat of the current parliament and current mess, and recycle the last two years as a result. Or we might get the other nightmare of Boris winning a landslide. The Irish will be sold down the river, the parasites will take over the city, the oligarchs will celebrate and the Scots will secede. Oh happy day.

But even then, we should not despair, because humanity will win out. Just as in the US, whether in 2020 or 2024 or even later, the pendulum will swing, and the longer the wait, the bigger the swing will be. In the UK, next time or the time after, the Greens might even win.