N.E. Brigand

So what was the rumor?

Harsh.

The absolute biggest problem with journalism today, by far, is that there's too little of it. It's not even close. Particularly at the local level. A few big newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal are flourishing. But across the U.S., the local papers have been destroyed by the internet, and have shut down utterly or are bare shells of what they need to be and used to be. From the 1970s through the 1990s, local newspapers were bringing in so much advertising and subscription revenue that owning one was practically a license to print money. Accordingly, lots of local newspapers were bought up by national corporations, who often paid more than they should have, believing that their expenditures would be more than paid back in the long run. And then the internet happened, and there goes the advertising revenue (e.g., who needs to pay your paper for a classified ad if you've got Craigslist?), and also the public found they could get the content they wanted for "free," so there goes subscriptions. (But if a company is giving you something for free, that means you're the commodity.) On top of that, in the past decade, Google, Facebook, and a few other tech companies took over the advertising for those media companies that had found a way to survive on the internet. And then they began to squeeze those media companies. Facebook in particular destroyed a number of outlets by flat out lying to them. Facebook told media companies that their print work wasn't generating enough ad revenue and that customers were only interested in attaching ads to video content. So about five years ago, you saw a whole bunch of companies fire their print teams and announce that they were "pivoting to video," which is much more expensive to produce. As a result, not only did a lot of good reporters lose their jobs, but a number of companies went under or were permanently damaged. And then a few years later, Facebook admitted that wasn't true. The numbers were bogus. (Facebook is evil, the worst single force in public life in America and abroad.) As I've noted before, Cleveland's major newspaper, the Plain Dealer, went from having hundreds of reporters and editors in the 1990s to having a couple dozen today, and none of them actually work for the paper itself, which earlier this year eliminated all of its writing positions, and shifted all local content generation to cleveland.com, the online brand that their parent company set up about twenty years ago. Because the former were union employees and the latter were not. God forbid they have to pay someone a decent wage. What does all that mean? It means across this country, there's very few people to hold local wrongdoers to account, be they politicians or corporations or anyone else. You want to get away with a crime? Pay off your local mayor and sheriff and have at it, and no one will ever know. Thus my signature: "First they came for the journalists. ... We don't know what happened after that." That huge scandal that recently broke in Ohio, in which it turns out that the speaker of the state house was part of a $600 million bribery scheme? It would have been much harder to pull off with a robust local media. And I guarantee you that there are other schemes like that in other states. Yeah, there's still TV news. But local TV news has always been bad. There's never been any depth. It takes too much effort. The national outlets are better, but still superficial compared to what gets done in print. And notice how many stories on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC/MSNBC, etc. (all of whom do some original reporting and all of whom have some good reporters and anchors) are really just reports about news that was broken in print, followed by an interview with the print reporter who broke the story and a roundtable discussion with some commentators. - - - - - - - - - - It's a complete disaster, and anyone who complains that the real problem is some sort of new bias in the press is deluded. (So I assume you weren't doing that.) The press has been biased for as long as it's existed. The earliest newspapers, staring in the late 1600s, were nothing but bias. There was an overlap between news gathering and government intelligence gathering. An early word for "spy" was "intelligencer". There are still some newspapers called "The Intelligencer." Rival parties had rival papers. There are still traces of that today (New York Post vs. New York Daily News, to an extent), but it's nothing like it used to be. More than a century ago, publisher William Randolph Heart supposedly told a reporter, "You provide the stories; I'll provide the war." The most egregious work these days is the "catch and kill" stuff done by tabloids like the National Enquirer, in which they alert someone famous to a potentially damaging story, get that person to pay them off, and then use some of those extorted funds to arrange for the source's silence with a hush money payment and a non-disclosure agreement (this got them in trouble with the Dept. of Justice a couple years ago; there's also something odd about the Enquirer parent company's relationship with Saudi Arabia), but fortunately, that's mostly limited to "soft" news (with, it seems, one major exception). And the primary bias of journalism, now and always, is toward power. That's the whole point of The Post, the Steven Spielberg movie of a couple years back about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, that showed that the government, meaning administrations from both parties, had been covering up the truth about the Vietnam War -- and journalists had been letting them do it. Because who wants to risk losing all that juicy access? Plus the parties are swell. (As long as the powerful keep their crimes relatively discreet, the press often doesn't want to know. Plus those stories tend to be a lot of hard work to cover, and it's much easier to do a story about a poor person whose crimes are more straightforward.) The whole movie starts with the Post being told they won't be allowed into the White House because they published unflattering coverage of the president's daughter's wedding: you have to keep the important people happy. Over the course of the (mostly true but simplified) story, Hanks' character, the editor Ben Bradlee, and Meryl Streep's character, the paper's owner Katharine Graham, have to own up to their part in the cover-up and betray their powerful friends to bring the truth to light. Similarly Spotlight, in which one of the main characters is Bradlee's son, portrays the same dynamic thirty years later, except in that case, the powerful friends that nobody wants to betray are the leaders of the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic church. That's the bias we should always be suspecting. All the other biases that people complain about are as nothing compared to that.

"'Varsity has free rein,' Kimberly Archie, founder of the National Cheer Safety Foundation, said. Archie said she has tried to loosen Varsity’s grip on cheerleading by assisting plaintiff teams during personal injury claims and even attempting to bring antitrust lawsuits against Varsity. But she said she has been unable to get any current gym owners or cheerleaders to testify against Varsity because they fear possible retaliation. 'Varsity has control over cheerleading at every level in the U.S. and abroad,' she said. 'There is no resistance.'" If the article is correct, this sounds like maybe a company that DCI shouldn't partner with.

Interesting. Cheerleading as a monopoly. Who knew? (Also this was news to me: "The sport causes more than half the catastrophic injuries for female athletes in America, including skull fractures.") I'd be curious to see a list of the companies who supply drum corps and marching bands.

Who is this for? A huge number of schools already have marching bands in the fall. What gap is this supposed to be filling?

I totally agree with you that experts' understanding and guidance has shifted, but on this particular point, whatever they may be saying about evidence, the CDC is certainly recommending masks at this time: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/about-face-coverings.html That page was last updated on August 6. It was back in the late winter and early spring when mask wearing was not being actively recommended by the CDC and other authorities. That was due to an understandable fear that there would be a run on N-95 masks (desperately needed by hospitals), but to the discredit of those authorities, they didn't say that explicitly and instead indicated that masks were ineffective for the general public. Many people criticized those agencies for those statements, pointing to the heavy use of masks in Asia, among other things. At some point in March, I linked from here to a study showing that even homemade cloth masks could offer some protection. The CDC started advising mask wearing on April 3. Anyway, it's interesting to learn how and why some protocols exist. Here's some new information on distancing:

For you:

The problems with the latter were the acoustics of the stadium, right?

Also I did name one name:

This line of discussion goes back to you claiming that we can't beat disease. And here you are offering a link which says, very clearly, that there has been no polio in the U.S. since the 1970s. Because we beat it. With a vaccine.

I love how the design had that narrow slot for the DM to run across the field at the end -- and Cavs apparently didn't tell the video team before that year's "Big, Loud & Live" prelims cinema show, because the cameras only focused on the upside down conductor after the show ended and he was righting himself.

It's true that A LOT of people have conditions that put them at higher risk of complications from Covid-19.

There is another curious parallel between the two cases,* which again maybe just serves to show how all such situations are grounded in the same basic patterns. There have been rumors swirling about that CEO engaging in sexual shenanigans for some time (at least since late 2018). The particular non-profit he helmed is large enough that such rumors could get the attention of the national media, who did some investigating. One news article about the allegations was published late last summer. And that led to the organization tweeting out a response eleven months ago. But it was a curious response in that it wasn't a statement from the organization but instead was a quote from a journalist at a smaller outlet that specializes on reporting in the non-profit's field, in which he is well respected. This was the organization's tweet (I redact the specific names to keep the discussion on track): "'Sorry, but [the outlet's] long expose on [the CEO] lacks adequate named sources to be taken seriously. I'm not [CEO] fan myself [but] the writer relies almost entirely on anonymous sources. - [journalist's name]" And the organization only deleted that particular tweet today. *I used the word "cases," but I should probably emphasize that at this time, there is no criminal case in this situation. The behavior by the CEO is outre enough that its exposure practically demanded he resign because of the nature of the organization he led and the appearance of hypocrisy, and in particular because he apparently lied about it to the his board of directors (although they also seem to have engaged in some willful blindness), but in itself is not criminal (at many organizations, it wouldn't even be a violation of company policy). There are, however, some intimations of ancillary crimes: the CEO himself now claims he was being blackmailed because of the behavior -- the specific nature of which he still disputes -- and there are questions to be asked about whether or not he ever succumbed to such extortion attempts by providing something of value, possibly including contracts awarded by his organization or official statements of support, in exchange for secrecy. (If you're going to behave indiscreetly, you need to be prepared to follow David Letterman's lead should evidence of those indiscretions fall into others' hands.) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - So obviously the first thing that occurred to me was the response of YEA's board of directors when a group of alumni approached them late in 2017 with their concerns. I think it's now widely agreed in the drum corps community that the board didn't exercise their responsibility of due diligence, and that's why they too resigned soon after the news broke in the Philadelphia Inquirer. On the one hand, they were presented with anonymous claims of potentially criminal behavior and needed to be held to a higher standard; they also received the claims in private and thus had the opportunity to do the right thing without public/media pressure. On the other hand, they were presented with very limited information and perhaps lacked the tools to deal with it (i.e., their actions were incompetent not malicious). And I think this other organization's actions over the past year show that it could have been handled even worse. It's not a perfect analogy, but the equivalent in drum corps might be as if Cadets, upon reading Tricia Nadolny's first story in spring 2018, had issued a statement quoting Kevin Gamin, respected drum corps reporter, saying he had doubts about Nadolny's work.

There have been attempts before to unionize some NCAA athletes.

Yes, the virus will still exist in 2023. But if most people have been vaccinated, then there won't be a need for shutdowns. Mask wearing is probably going to become more regular, though.

I'm not on Facebook, so I only know Hopkins's post-Cadets self-aggrandizing comments there from the occasional description here, but I thought of them today when reading about the CEO of a large non-profit organization who has resigned following a sexual misconduct scandal (and after the organization's board of directors made it clear last night that he needed to step down). The man told a reporter today, "It’s a relief. The quote that keeps going through my mind this morning is Martin Luther Ling Jr: ‘free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I’m free at last." He added that he was moving on: "I see a role in other areas, I don’t know what it is yet but I’m not done. This happened for a reason." It seems to be a pattern for people in such situations to see themselves as victims.

Some news on this front:

Pennsylvania rocks! That's not a compliment. Just saying it makes my feet ache.

Yep. The Trail passes north through the Cumberland Valley to the east of Carlisle, then turns east and passes right through Duncannon, possibly the longest "city" portion in its whole length.

Who was it who used to post here about how drum corps should directly involve members in the design process?

Just today I saw reference to the claim that 20% of students presented with Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," the famous 1729 satirical tract from the author of Gulliver's Travels, in which he argued that the solution to starvation and overpopulation in Ireland was for the Irish to eat their babies, not only don't recognize it as satire, but when confronted with that explanation, reject it: they simply cannot comprehend that one could joke about such things. (Mind you, I'm not sure how rigorously tested that 20% figure is.)

That's the one. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as married actors in Warsaw, with a young Robert Stack as her would-be lover.* Remade in 1983 by Mel Brooks (although directed by his longtime collaborator Alan Johnson) and starring Brooks and Anne Bancroft, with Tim Matheson in the Stack role. *I hadn't thought of this at all when referencing this movie earlier, but in light of recent events ... ...nah, better not. Google News will make it clear what I'm thinking of.

Some jokes from a 1942 movie: "They named a brandy after Napoleon, they made a herring out of Bismarck, and the Fuhrer is going to end up as a piece of cheese!" "What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland." "They call you 'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.'" -- "Yes, we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." "Heil myself." - - - - - - - - - - Some people objected to those at the time! But most people laughed. Pretty much anything can be the subject of a good joke.

Gallows humor.