Personal Account of Journalist or Professor, Miscellaneous

My Father’s Paradise

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The Book of the Week is “My Father’s Paradise, A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq” by Ariel Sabar, published in 2008. In this sloppily edited volume, the author recounts the experiences of his father (named Yona) in Kurdistan, Israel and the United States, and his own generation– in America.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Ashkenazi Jews considered themselves superior to Sephardic Jews living in Palestine, and Kurdistan, a northern region of Iraq. The Ashkenazis had their own “old-boy” network, who subjected the Sephardics to institutional racism.

An oppressed group such as the Kurds are more likely than a dominant group to have impostor syndrome; as a society constantly smears a scapegoated group through social contagion, the victims begin to lose confidence in themselves and question their own competence. Ever since the Holocaust, the Jews, after centuries of passive acceptance of victimhood, decided enough was enough, and have fought back, releasing centuries of pent-up rage. Over the course of eighty years, they have gone from one extreme to the other. They have become ideologically stubborn and militarily aggressive.

Especially after WWII with the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine, the Iraqi government stepped up its anti-Semitism. But in the first quarter of 1950, the Iraqi government allowed Jews to relinquish their citizenship, and move to another country with just the clothes on their backs, never to return. About four thousand Jews did so.

One consequence was that Iraq experienced brain drain. Israel continued to take in skilled and talented people (and other refugees in the previous decade) who considered themselves Zionists (For a description of the different aspects of Zionism, type “Zionism” in the search bar on the upper right side of this blog; the term “Zionism” like “feminism” and “global warming” was hijacked for emotionally-charged propaganda purposes.).

A January 1951 terrorist attack against Jews in a Baghdad synagogue that left three dead, prompted Israel to accept thousands more Iraqi Jews by 1952. Yona’s family left Kurdistan for Israel in April 1951.

Yona learned the languages of Hebrew and English, foreign to him. For, he was one of the dwindling native speakers of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ. With that language, he built a career researching its history, and creating a dictionary to preserve it. The author rebelled against his father, but their relationship began to thaw as the son matured. He wrote, “The idea that workers in China could make a Passover plate with Hebrew letters that you could buy in Los Angeles for a grandson in Maine: This, for my father, was America.”

Read the book to learn much more about Yona’s life and times, and the author’s quest to find his long-lost aunt.

Chasing Hope

The Book of the Week is “Chasing Hope, A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas Kristof (not to be confused with Bill Kristol!), published in 2024.

In 1959 the author was born in a lower middle-class rural area in Oregon, where boys saw violence as an admirable trait to be used to used to achieve frontier justice. Although his neighborhood was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and crime, Kristof grew up in a stable, intellectual, loving home environment. That could be why, as a teenager, he chose to become a journalist who revealed the world’s ugliness– to try to reduce it.

Kristof witnessed martial law in Poland and China, and the nature of the heroin trade in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While in Congo (formerly Zaire) he heard firsthand about the atrocities and genocide in Rwanda. He wrote stories on the dictatorships and crushing oppression in North Korea, Venezuela, Turkmenistan and many other places.

After a few decades of reporting on human rights abuses, he took a break to run for office. Professionals told him to change his language, so that “gun control” became “gun safety” and “inequality” became “opportunity.” To be fair, he admitted that Portland had serious problems that were caused by Democrats because it was mostly Democrats who governed it.

But the bottom line for him was, “What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and that’s achieved not by waving fists and shouting slogans but by a painstaking process of following evidence, building coalitions and solving problems.”

Read the book to learn much more about Kristof’s life and global times.

The Crash of Flight 3804

The Book of the Week is “The Crash of Flight 3804, A Lost Spy, A Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil” by Charlotte Dennett, published in 2020. In this fact-filled, chronologically disorganized volume, the author (a journalist, not a historian) elaborated on the actions that specific nations took, despite their announced motives, in trying to gain access to fossil fuels around several, but not all, energy-rich regions of the world.

The author described in great detail, certain historical events (perhaps those from sources to which she had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on a huge number of others that were equally important. The book’s subhead should have specified, “…Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil and Gas around the Middle East, Mediterranean Sea, and Central Asia.”

The author could not possibly comprehensively cover the global history of fossil-fuels exploration in this one book. For, she also recounted her investigation into her father’s death, beginning in 1975. He was supposedly employed by an oil company, but was killed in a plane crash in 1947. He was actually working for the predecessor to the CIA.

Dennett wrote that in the 1800’s, budding empires sought to control the railroad industry, then in its infancy, in order to travel to faraway, uncharted or unclaimed territories sooner than otherwise. Most Americans have always been clueless as to the secret-goings-on of alleged religious movements that are part of America’s foreign-policy initiatives. Such operations aren’t covered in the media, except for kidnappings or murders. Through the decades, beginning in the twentieth century, spies acting on half of governments or international corporations, have masqueraded as missionaries around the world.

In the United States especially, think tanks produce reports that turn into propaganda campaigns that get leaked to the media. The “news” stories include calls to action, whose ulterior motive is helping America meet its energy needs. By the way, the Qatari publication, al-Jazeera is funded (possibly indirectly) by the United States, subject to the whims of the diplomatic community.

In the 1990’s, building oil pipelines in Central Asia became all the rage. Actually. After secretly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, in August 1998, the United States changed its tune because Osama Bin Laden masterminded the bomb-attacks on the United States embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania. Bin Laden was incensed that Saudi Arabia was friendly with the United States. But how else was America supposed to meet its energy needs?

According to the author,”neoliberals” believe in providing economic aid to developing nations in order to bribe them to stop acting in ways that empower them, such as making WMD’s, or drilling for oil and gas in their own territories to meet their own energy needs. So when the United States’ neoliberals send aid, they are actually giving recipients fish instead of teaching them to fish. They rely on loans from the IMF and the World Bank, so unsurprisingly, they can’t break their cycle of dictatorship.

According to the author, “neocons” believe in providing military-related aid, and imposing their culture on the peoples in developing nations. As is well known, in the 1990’s and again in the single-digit 2000’s, the United States sent its troops into Iraq to maintain its access to and grab additional oil, and produce economic devastation while claiming to bring democracy to Iraq.

Thanks to globalization and the Internet, the world now knows who the major neoliberal and neocon offenders are. It’s not just the United States.

The author made inflammatory but factual statements about Israel. The reader would think she would fear getting smeared as “unpatriotic” and / or be the victim of retaliation from numerous people who have a vested interest in defending Israel.

As is extremely well-known, the least criticism of Israel (even if there is ample evidence the statements are true) elicits a knee-jerk, emotionally charged accusation of antisemitism from the Israel-defenders. Sure, there is plenty of hatred against Jews, but not all of the accusations of antisemitism are true.

One other propaganda-related issue: from 2022 into 2024, in America, media stories smeared gas-powered stove / oven units, arguing they were hazardous to one’s health. Could it be they were actually hazardous to the health of the strategic interests of the United States, in connection with the access-to-natural-gas-related mess in Syria of recent decades?

Anyway, read the book to learn (and become more cynical by the minute) about: a few different oil and gas pipelines whose actual construction was stalled; the secondary motive of the drafters of the Balfour Declaration (the first of course, was to establish a Jewish homeland; hint: in 1918, the U.S. figured out what the British were really doing in Palestine); why America arms and finances Saudi Arabia and Israel more than all of its other allies; why Gaza is such a valuable piece of real property; numerous rounds of “Curious things will happen when there’s dishonor among thieves” and other violence-inducing shenanigans plaguing certain energy-rich regions of the world.

Outrageous Acts / The Fifth Risk

Since nonfiction books on discrimination and software are all political these days, here’s a double post, although admittedly, the connection between them is tenuous.

[One sidenote: Trump has recently stolen yet another Reaganism but put a new twist on it. Trump used the word “bloodbath.” Reagan said during the Vietnam-Era anti-war protests, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”]

The first Book of the Week is “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” by Gloria Steinem, published in 1983. This volume consisted of a compilation of the author’s columns on discrimination, politics and her personal life.

In a summer 1969 column, Steinem wrote of “Feminist Realization”– when American women became aware of how deeply political their position was. She volunteered to help with the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and George McGovern in 1968, but because she was a female, their personnel cut her down. She refrained from working on important matters, lest people spread the rumor that she was sleeping with the candidate.

In October 1968, Nixon remarked, “Well, I had my staff count up all the issues I’ve made statements on, and it came to one hundred and sixty-seven issues. Of course, Hubert [Humphrey]’s been on both sides of every question, so he has twice as many.”

In 1972, in Steinem’s eyes, unlike Richard Nixon– McGovern inspired hope. Nixon therefore not only lacked charisma, but spurred emotional trouble and anger against McGovern.

Read the book to learn much more about the tenor of the times for Steinem and other American females, when the Women’s Movement began to really gather steam.

The second Book of the Week is “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis, published 2018.

In this short volume, the author wrote about how software has been revolutionizing various areas of Americans’ lives by assessing risk. It used to be called “Big Data” but it’s now called AI. The author stuck to a few subjects in which analysts processed scads and scads of data that were public, for instance, to contain dangerous nuclear waste, make farming more efficient, and warn people about life-threatening weather conditions.

However, the government argues that all that number-crunching of personal data (by which Big Brother is violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) is the cost of keeping Americans safe.

Anyway, at the time of the book’s writing, the author wrote that people in hazmat suits at the nine nuclear facilities (which closed in 1987) called Hanford in the state of Washington, were still continuing to clean up the substances that cause cancer, birth-defects and genetic-disorders: strontium 90, uranium, plutonium, chromium, tritium, cesium, carbon tetrachloride, and iodine 129, among others. These substances account for two-thirds of all the toxic waste contained in toxic-waste sties in the United States.

In 2017, a profit-seeking organization called AccuWeather was trying to get taxpayers to pay again to get their weather updates. They were already paying for public information provided by the government-owned National Weather Service. AccuWeather dispensed that public information to its own paying customers.

Read the book to learn more about how AI is doing great things in a few select areas.

Brave New Weed

The Book of the Week is “Brave New Weed, Adventures into the Uncharted World of Cannabis” by Joe Dolce, published in 2016. The author interviewed several individuals in various places associated with growing, using and /or selling parts of the marijuana (or cannabis) plant in the medicinal, recreational and entrepreneurial realms, and related his own personal experiences with it. The terms “marijuana” and “cannabis” will be used interchangeably hereinafter, to refer to the whole plant but other terms will be used to refer to specific parts, such as buds.

At the book’s writing, many American states had yet to pass laws decriminalizing or regulating cannabis. Dolce spoke with people who dispensed it for medicinal purposes, legally and illegally. On the latter score, some Americans dispense marijuana to treat medical conditions without proper licensing or credentials. But they aren’t just out to make a buck. They truly care about their patients. They do their homework, experimenting with the chemicals in cannabis, and consulting with others in Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Czech Republic.

Anecdotally, Dolce was told that cannabis contains double the carcinogen benzopyrene that tobacco does, yet cannabis can be used to allow easier breathing in treating COPD in the short term. He also related that preliminary studies showed that people who were potheads in their youth are turning out to have lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease in their old age, than those who weren’t.

There is still so much secrecy and false information that is disseminated accidentally and / or intentionally about cannabis, that Americans have had difficulty in learning the truth about it. The author attempted to state facts when he found a reliable source of them. One such fact is that cannabis-related scientific research on mice cannot be perfectly extrapolated to humans because humans are an infinitely more complicated life-form than mice. Israel is one place whose laws have allowed extensive marijuana research on humans.

Dolce tried a concentrated cannabis oil illegally dispensed from an individual in California. It made him so ultra-sensitive to all the stimuli around him– the lights, road, sidewalk, other cars, the sky, the car radio, etc.– he was having trouble driving. On a related note, in 2023, in Boca Raton, Florida near State Road 441, drivers would know they were similarly overstimulated when they saw the wording and graphics of a certain billboard. Without explanation, the billboard disappeared in a few weeks.

On a negative note, the places that grow cannabis-buds are extreme electricity hogs– their bills can run into the thousands of dollars monthly after a Colorado state discount is subtracted. All business is done in cash, and the IRS collects a large amount of tax revenue. Further, high-volume consumers of cannabis lose their ability to dream while sleeping.

Nonetheless, the author’s ideal vision for the future of cannabis is one in which Americans spurn Big Agriculture, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma in favor of toxin-free, contaminant-free, and environmentally-friendly products they can use to relieve their suffering; with the profits of such an industry reinvested in the local community. Good luck with that.

It still remains to be seen what kinds of regulation various states will impose, given their current political climates, and how much of a role the federal government will continue to play– given the nature of political donors and lobbyists, voter-demographics, and propaganda wars.

Read the book to learn about: how hemp is different from marijuana; the best way to store buds to extract optimal medicinal benefit; Colorado’s decriminalization of cannabis that began in 2009 and the legalization of dispensing it that began in January 2014; various dispensing businesses there; marijuana’s different forms including oils, sprays and vaporizers; what transpired when, in 2015, Dolce quit cannabis for sixty days; the lingo, the etiquette, dosing, strains, forms, biological effects, and interesting medical factoids including, “Cannabis is so dose specific that large and small amounts create opposite effects.”

Why We Did It

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Interesting Sidenote: FDR, Truman and Nixon switched vice-presidents when they began new presidential terms, for different reasons. George H.W. Bush was thought to have lost in his reelection bid partly because he failed to replace his first-term vice-president, Dan Quayle. This shows that American voters care about a presidential candidate’s running mate.

Many Americans thought vice-president Dick Cheney exerted more influence in leading the country than president George W. Bush did. Given the current concerns about the mental competence of the two main presidential candidates, the nation might be ready for another unduly influential vice-president.

The Book of the Week is “Why We Did It, A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell” by Tim Miller, published in 2022.

In this wordy and redundant volume, the author explained that in recent decades, style has become more important than substance in “The Game” of American politics. He named tens, and interviewed a few, of the Republican workers who fell under Donald Trump’s spell upon Trump’s election to the presidency. Those whose views and behavior have been consistently anti-Trump, can’t understand how such suck-ups can endure their own cognitive dissonance.

Bertrand Russell has aptly described the extreme insecurity of the above individuals– who lie to themselves: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” Yet another way of putting it is “hubris syndrome.”

There have been a few extreme times in U.S. history in which an intimidating presence has made politically-invested Americans, sell out like this; the most prominent of which include:

The McCarthy Era forced government, media and other kinds of workers to take the Loyalty Oath. If Americans were accused of membership in the Communist party, expressing Communist views, or even associating with Communists, they were forced to name names of “fellow travelers” — or they wouldn’t have a career. If they weren’t accused, and in order not to get accused, they kept their heads down and their mouths shut. Opportunists went the opposite direction and acquired outrageous power through doing the accusing. [Please note: it appears the author has not acquired outrageous power by doing the accusing in this book, as there is ample evidence for his claims.]
Into the 1960’s, political candidates in states in the South were forced to join the KKK or they wouldn’t get elected to office. There, most blacks and whites kept their heads down and their mouths shut regarding racial issues.
Aiders and abetters– mostly government officials– of Nixon (just like with Trump, concocting numerous rationalizations for why they supported him) got caught up in his spiteful activities in order to harass his enemies; this included matters related to Vietnam.
Aiders and abetters– mostly government officials– of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, behaved largely similarly to those of Nixon and Trump in concocting numerous rationalizations for why they supported them, but for some, their motive was greed as much as spite.

The author discussed the reasons the aforementioned Trump flip-floppers behave the way they do. “Republican politics was their identity, career and social circle all wrapped up in one.” They get attention, money, power and ego satisfaction in releasing their misdirected rage at their political enemies.

Influential political rhetoric hijacked their vulnerable brains when they were searching for their social identities; perhaps in their teenage or college years. Around that time, they learned to drink alcohol and might also have willfully engaged in severe sleep deprivation. Their judgment was compromised.

Besides, as Ben Hecht wrote, worshipers of an icon are hindered from becoming themselves. The ones who successfully attain celebrity status don’t know how to be themselves, because they have been acting the way the world wants them to, letting the world tell them who they are. Lastly, human nature is such that when one constantly receives calls, texts and emails, one feels important.

Read the book to learn the names of these claques, flacks and sycophants whose lack of self-awareness will eventually cause them to let slip an utterance they will regret, or have an emotional breakdown; and learn of their rationalizations and behaviors.

Red China Blues

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The Book of the Week is “Red China Blues, My Long March From Mao to Now” by Jan Wong, published in 1996.

Born in 1952, Wong grew up in Montreal. Since her parents were originally from China, she went to search for her roots there, beginning when she was in college. She spent her three-month 1972 summer vacation in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked temples and burned books, painted walls red, and posted Mao’s quotations. Chinese natives had severe shortages of consumer goods, which were exported for hard currency.

The author was assigned a minder (supervisor / spy) and a driver. The unwashed masses were squashed into noisy trams while top government officials rode around in red-flagged limousines whose windows were covered in gauze.

Wong was taken somewhere different every day, such as the Canton zoo, or the countryside. The latter was ninety miles away from Beijing. To get there, she had to take an overcrowded bus with live chickens, plus a six-hour ride on three ferries.

Fresh-faced, earnest, brainwashed cultists (Chinese youths) put on a show for Wong (a special foreign visitor). She had arrived fresh-faced and earnest, and became a brainwashed cultist herself. The most prominently featured book at the bookstore was Selected Works of Mao Zedong in various languages.

Wong became a lucky beneficiary of Mao’s campaign to open up China economically and culturally. As is well known, American president Nixon opened the door for economic benefits. The author got permission to study the Mandarin language at Beijing University. She and her dorm-mate, another foreigner, were treated like princesses rather than common Chinese peasants.

Even so, the author acquired the martyr complex of true Mao worshippers– she was eager to go to the countryside to do hard manual labor. She did, but she saw that her fellow workers had gotten tired of the leaders’ hypocrisy, and the deprivation suffered by, and oppression of ordinary Chinese people.

Mao’s latest nationwide political program was winding down. His anti-education mandate was changing. His minions began to encourage school attendance, but there was rote learning, which still put the kibosh on independent thinking. The goal of the Communists was to produce blindly obedient robots who could recite Marx, Engels , Lenin, Stalin and of course Mao, verbatim.

In the early 1980’s with a new leader, China caught the capitalism bug. But there was still loads of corruption. The government still oppressed ordinary Chinese people. Even though the author was a Canadian expatriate, she looked Chinese, so this actually gave her a distinct advantage as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper. She was able to gain the trust of the people she questioned.

Nevertheless, even the author suffered an outrageous incident: “The police not only didn’t apologize, they announced they would keep our car another month… on June 5, 1990, we got our Toyota back, a year less a day after the police had stolen it. The gas tank was empty, the odometer was broken, the cigarette lighter was gone, and cigarette butts and popsicle sticks littered the interior.”

The author acquired direct experience in two economically and politically diverse environments over the course of decades– Canada and China. By the end of the 1970’s, she had become disillusioned with the workers’ paradise, but didn’t regret the education she got.

Wong saw how, into the 1990’s, Beijing’s roads became clogged with luxury vehicles, as the new rich sought to keep up with the Joneses. At the book’s writing, she could identify dogma and hated it. She believed in dignity and building resilience through experiencing hardship. She contended that rational thought should be sufficiently simple to explain to a five-year old.

Read the book to learn of many other experiences in the author’s life, and of the major late-1980’s historical event the author witnessed, that showed that China was still not ready to join the modern nations of the world that practiced democracy and rule of law.

Crazy Like Us

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The Book of the Week is “Crazy Like Us, The Globalization of the American Psyche” by Ethan Watters, published in 2010.

After the December 2004 mega-tsunami hit the Sri-Lanka region, Western-trained mental health professionals from the United States, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand rushed over there, with little understanding of the culture they were “trying to help.” They knew the populations would suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and therefore, would need psychotherapy. The arrogance and snobbishness of most of the counselors were versions of “white savior complex” and “white man’s burden.”

Few looked before they leaped. Most had no clue about the victims’ local languages, religious beliefs, mourning practices or tribal-warfare history. They were under the impression that the whole world thought the same way they themselves did, about how to recover from a traumatic event.

American-style capitalists that they were, “Within days, bitter rivalries broke out between counseling groups over which populations would receive which services.” Further, the Sri Lankans were a fresh crop of guinea pigs for trauma researchers.

Some explicitly corrupt researchers collected data unrelated to the PTSD presumed to be caused by the tsunami, such as data on domestic violence and sexual harassment. The Asians were unsophisticated, so they freely answered questions. They were eager to please their interviewers– wrongly thinking they’d receive disaster aid by doing so. There was bias galore in all the studies; especially confirmation bias. Unsurprisingly, all the different studies widely used by elitist, mostly American institutions (such as UCLA and Harvard) reported significant rates of PTSD in the selected populations of Thailand, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Indonesia and India. Never mind that there was so much lost in translation.

Interestingly, the aid workers offering medicine, food and shelter, cooperated with the local community to provide what was truly needed, doing it in a way that jived with the Asians’ culture.

Read the book to learn more about PTSD situations– other aspects of the counselors’ approach involving power of suggestion, self-fulfilling prophecy, social contagion, and profiteering in Hong Kong, Zanzibar and Japan.

The Line Becomes A River

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The Book of the Week is “The Line Becomes A River, Dispatches From the Border” by Francisco Cantu, published in 2018. A border control agent wrote this account after personally experiencing the conditions in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. For anyone not sociopathic, the moral dilemmas that law enforcement face are traumatic.

The border between the United States and Mexico runs six hundred seventy-five miles from the Rio Grande to the Pacific coast. In the single-digit 2000’s, the U.S. government launched a campaign to try to increase the number of arrests and deportations or punishments it imposed on people crossing the border illegally. There are checkpoints where people can begin a process of legal immigration. Illegal border-crossing involves criminal law, but the processes of immigration and obtaining citizenship are civil law.

When politicians decided to get “tough on immigration” there was a surge in drug-smugglers and people-smugglers. Rival gangs are fighting. The result is more illegality than ever. The smugglers kidnap their customers who have relatives in the United States, corral them in temporary structures in southwestern cities and towns, and demand ransom money from the relatives.

After spending some time combing the desert for illegals, the author was transferred to a couple of different air-conditioned offices. He generated intelligence reports on drug traffickers, and watched video feeds from surveillance towers. If he saw, for instance, people cutting a hole in a pedestrian fence to go through, he notified officers via radio in the field to chase after them and arrest them. The officers might request help from tribal police, if the incident involved people from or on an Indian reservation.

Border patrol offices keep a database on all sorts of statistics on the nature of the border-crossers. The author surfed the Internet for “news” stories on kidnappings and was continually depressed by the steady stream of deaths of illegals from various countries in Central and South America. The language in the stories was slanted either to incite hatred against immigrants, or arouse sympathy for them.

The author befriended a Mexican-born man at a coffeehouse in the United States near the border. In a legal case that came to pass in connection therewith, the man’s boss claimed when she hired him, he filled in the paperwork properly, and he had a Social Security Number. But she gave him 1099 status (meaning, independent contractor– not a regular employee). She claimed she had no clue about his immigration status.

Read the book to learn the full story on the above, plus much more about the author’s experiences.

Newsroom Confidential / An Atheist in the FOXhole

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The First Book of the Week is “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life” by Margaret Sullivan, published in 2022.

The author survived a decades-long career as a journalist and editor. Ironically, her writing was slightly less than perfect. The word “being” was used awkwardly in the middle of sentences throughout the book. Also, she spent a bunch of pages describing the problems with “anonymous sources” but her (presumably nonfiction) book lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, or Bibliography and an index (!) She did say some of her information was taken from articles she wrote for her employers. This, from a seasoned journalist.

Born in 1957, Sullivan grew up in Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo, in northwestern New York State. By her early thirties, she was supervising six journalists in the politics and government division of the Buffalo Evening News newspaper. In autumn 2012, as an ombudsman, she began penning articles critiquing her employer, the New York Times. Her position was that of watchdog– she helped with quality control of its product.

The author described her take on how journalism has changed over the decades with respect to truth, trust and objectivity. As is well known, technology now allows the world to communicate at the speed of light. Especially during political campaigns, many journalists have begun to behave the same way as political workers: workaholics who act like extremely self-absorbed, socially manipulative teenagers who think they’re starring in their own reality show; and they are– it’s called social media.

They feel obligated to interact with their readers by inviting their comments and responding to them; the author included. Inevitably, haters express their opinions offensively and meanly. Everyone wastes untold amounts of time dealing with them, instead of changing the world for the better.

AND, people in the media and political realms aren’t as influential as they’d like to believe they are. Ordinary Americans who don’t work in the media or politics, cannot possibly affix their eyes to all of the infinite writings, photos and videos “out there” in entertainment land 24/7. Some have to work, and others are actually engaged in other activities.

Anyway, in 2017, as a columnist for the Washington Post, the author considered herself an “independent-minded journalist” but came to the rude awakening that, when she asked people from all-walks-of-life about politics, she could no longer find common ground with them on basic issues.

Although the author discussed the legal issues of “anonymous sources” and “equal time” she didn’t cite any legal cases. She did write that in three different instances, media outlets courageously chose to give more time to the truth than to falsity in their 2020 election coverage– by not giving equal time to people who were screaming voter fraud and that Trump had won the election. She hopes there will be more media space devoted to the truth in the future. Good luck with that, all.

Read the book to learn a boatload more about the author’s career trials, tribulations and triumphs, and her recommendations for helping to reverse the current awful trends in journalism so as to save modern civilization.

The Second Book of the Week is “An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media” by Joe Muto, published in 2013.

The author was born in early 1982 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His first job out of college was at Fox News. He detailed the working conditions there from summer 2004 into spring 2012. In October 2004, a story broke about a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill O’Reilly. The main source of evidence consisted of O’Reilly’s voice on audio recordings.

Thereafter, Fox News gave its employees sensitivity training in order to stave off more lawsuits. The two lawyers teaching the classes said that the Fox bosses could legally tell on-air talent what to wear– even mini-skirts and strappy, cleavage-revealing blouses(!)– because they had a right to creatively control their “product.”

As time went on, the author’s employer’s product became more and more inflammatory, cringeworthy, and offensive. As is well known, Fox has toned down its rhetoric due to lawsuits. The number of parties who have the clout and money to sue have finally reached critical mass on the sexual harassment and defamation fronts.

In connection therewith, in the last decade, several obnoxious public figures have disappeared from the American-influence scene. This has help foster a kinder social environment. Nevertheless, hate-spewers and laws favoring them wax and wane in history.

Too, in the last few decades, the entertainment industry has seen a trend of lazy (or untalented) creators, evinced by a boatload of unnecessarily juvenile, expletive-laden, disgusting content. Controversy over free speech has also been ignited by people on each extreme: those who feel they should have the right to say anything they want, and those who take offense at everything that is said, with accusations of discrimination or inappropriateness.

Anyway, read the book to learn about the author’s employment experiences and his fate at the time of the book’s writing.