Keeping Tabs on the Madhouse — Part One

LES ARCS, France — Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, a mad monarch with a parental problem, poked out his own eyes. Donald Trump, a power-obsessed wannabe, is trying to blind everyone else. And he is getting way too much help.

One despotic or despicable act follows another so rapidly that no one can possibly keep track. Far too many Americans simply tune out, which is his plan. But now he has made things dead clear.

A tax-funded "public service announcement" about to blanket airwaves shows him walking up a dark hallway. "This is the final battle," he says. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all."

By villains, he means Democrats, independents and all left-wing "communists" not in step with his own insanity. His over-armed zealots are ready to "fight like hell."

More than a dog whistle, that is a blaring siren no one with a heart, brain or family to protect can ignore. Yet on a CNN newscast last night, it was mentioned briefly after 35 minutes of small-bore stories and two four-minute commercial breaks.

Nothing is more urgent for Americans than sustained support for national reporters and foreign correspondents who are committed to hard facts. Without them, voters are not only blind but also deaf and dumb in a smoldering world.

Trump's drumbeat mantra of "FAKE NEWS!" undercuts faith in even trustworthy news organizations. Eligible voters turn to social media opinionators, clueless "influencers" and blatant propaganda. Reality is blurred beyond all recognition.

Democrats are likely to dominate the Nov. 3 midterms as Trump's Iran folly hits hard. But Republicans keep the White House, with billionaire donors bent on mangling truth and defying the courts.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat who had past high-level jobs at the CIA and the Defense Department, recently warned a Republican majority could rig the 2028 presidential elections or even create an excuse to suspend them.

Stopping him depends on the remnants of an American press corps that used to be the world's standard. News organizations are uniting to defend the First Amendment. But he is doubling down with help from faux journalists who echo his lunacies.

Averting what looms ahead — climate collapse, AI, authoritarian rule, widening conflicts, rising migrant tides, runaway pathogens — demands intrepid young reporters at home and abroad along with old ones to pass on vital skills learned the hard way.

A month remains before the Nov. 3 midterms, which may be the last free and fair elections in the United States. As always, the apathetic and ignorant won't bother to vote. Given what is at stake, no election in history has mattered more.

Here in France and in democracies across the world, just the mention of Trump evokes fear and loathing. People follow his daily depredations with a wide range of daily papers, TV channels and weekly magazines that cover global news in depth and detail.

A growing number see a forbidding America as a self-contained galaxy of its own, obsessed with itself. Governments are finding new trading partners. And families plan holiday travel elsewhere.

For irrefutable evidence of an unraveling U.S. president afflicted with a bad case of despot envy, consider the past week back across the Atlantic.

Trump stunned global leaders at the U.N. General Assembly. He told them only the big dogs rule. Everyone knows the old dictum about spoils belonging to the victor, he said. But he inserted a twist: "all the spoils."

Pedro Sanchez, Spain's enlightened prime minister, caught the irony in a conversation with Jon Stewart. Last year, Trump demanded the Nobel Peace Prize. This year, he threatened to annihilate Iran in a senseless war that impacts every part of the planet.

Sanchez is a suave 6-foot-4 ex-soccer star, head-turning handsome and a committed feminist who believes migrants enrich his country when treated fairly. Trump wants all countries to boycott Spain because it resists giving 5 percent of its GDP to NATO.

Spain is active in NATO and squarely behind Ukraine. But it is far from the front. Sanchez says his tight budget is better spent on alleviating societal injustice. He urges effective, persistent diplomacy rather than starting unwinnable wars.

An agreement with NATO commits Spain to capping its defense spending at 2.1 percent of its GDP.

Trump skipped all U.N. speeches. He returned to Washington where he kowtowed to Xi Jinping at a state visit. He had agreed beforehand not to mention human rights or Taiwan, and he mocked past presidents who curbed China with lowkey statecraft.

His assault on CNN meant no U.S. pool cameras followed the three-day summit, with all the trappings of a comic-opera extravaganza — choreographed pomp worthy of the Sun King at Versailles. But Chinese TV caught every detail, firing up national pride.

Trump broke state-visit protocol, personally welcoming a foreign leader as he emerged from his plane. He fawned over Xi, whose smile revealed nothing about what he was thinking. That was easy to guess. The world had best start learning to speak Mandarin.

A feckless president debased America at every turn. At his gallery of predecessors' portraits, he pointed out the autopen where Joe Biden's picture should be.

At the National Archives, he saw an original parchment Constitution ratified in 1788, which Trump blatantly ignores. He walked by carefully stored classified documents that detail how past presidents conducted the people's business.

The documents Trump tried to hide at Mar-a-Lago until FBI agents with warrants raided the compound include a "five-eyes" top secret brief, which laid out plans in case of war with China.

Afterward, David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, told Fox News: "President Trump continues to say, 'Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.' He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point.”

Meantime, Trump invited Vladimir Putin to the next G20 summit in Miami, despite intelligence reports that Russia was helping Iranians target U.S. bases in the Middle East. And he pressed Volodymyr Zelensky to stop strikes on Russian oil refineries.

Despite occasional tough talk, Trump is an obsequious Putin fanboy. In America's tower of media babble, neither the Mueller Report nor solidly documented news reports of election meddling sway his lockstep Republicans.

Everything that counters his twisted reality is a hoax, especially "Russia, Russia, Russia." Andy Burnham, Britain's new prime minister, shot holes in that at the General Assembly.

He said Russia's interference in Western democracies with sophisticated disinformation was "repulsive" but undeniable. Putin has spent billions to skew elections in Britain and its close allies, he said. In context, he did not need to specify America.

Burnham announced a new intelligence center will protect Britons from actual fake news. In contrast, Trump punishes anyone in his administration or Republican inner circles who suggests Putin helped him win.

The irony is almost laughable. Trump edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016 largely because of CNN. Trump was lucrative viewer bait. At one point, CNN focused on a two-hour screed at the evangelical Liberty University in Virginia flagged as "BREAKING NEWS."

Now it is the main target of his ire over "negative" (read, truthful) reporting. He banned it along with MS NOW and Politico from the people's White House and on aircraft taxpayers lent him for four years. A lawsuit got a two-week stay, but it is not over.

As I write, Russia is savaging Ukrainian civilians and power plants they need for a bitter winter. Iran holds Trump's feet to the fire as the war threatens to escalate out of control. But Trump is off on campaign appearances, and CNN is barred from coming along.

This is no internal "news media" problem. Those "fake news" journalists are our eyes and ears in a dizzyingly complex world.

Bill Gates, hardly a hair-on-fire Chicken Little, just said that AI in the wrong hands could wipe out one billion — one billion — people. Its developers mostly say it needs careful oversight. Trump disagrees. He says he is smart enough control it.

After Xi left Washington, BBC reported that a Chinese AI tool instructed researchers — and anyone else — on how to make biological weapons or carry out targeted assassinations.

But Trump insists he will compete with China rather than cooperate. He brought America AI developers to the White House and described them as "the biggest people in the world." And he laid out a plan that seems stark raving mad.

The AI kingpins signed a "morally binding" agreement to self-police and do no harm. Trump inexplicably likened it to the Constitution. Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta mogul, gave a vague explanation that boils down to two harrowing words: Trust us.

Trump exploits a news media decline that began decades ago. In earlier days, fearless factual reporting would have forced a faithless president out of office, as it did Richard Nixon after Watergate. He was neither impeached twice nor convicted of 34 felonies.

During the 1990s as big money politics moved Texas to the right, the much-missed Molly Ivins foreshadowed today's mediascape in one sentence: "I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying—it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off."

The "paper" in newspapers is now mostly figurative. Whether in print or delivered by electrons, they need to provide deep-digging investigations, first-hand dispatches and analyses by reporters who understand the societies they cover.

TV provides live images and captures human emotions in ways few written words can match. But it leaves out what its cameras don't catch. Crews that parachute in can get vital stories wrong at the speed of light. Networks rely heavily on newspapers.

The trend started among medium-sized dailies with proud pasts. Hedge fund vultures cut staffs to offer less while charging more. They pocketed profits, sold off assets and walked away. That left news deserts across much of America.

Some big papers were next. In one egregious case, Sam Zell, a foul-mouthed real estate magnate, gutted the Chicago Tribune and its corporate sibling, the Los Angeles Times. Both had kept correspondents around the world for generations.

Top editors quit in disgust, refusing to cripple the newsroom. After a bankruptcy, Alden Global Capital bought the Tribune but not the Times. Alden then increased its vast empire with the Baltimore Sun, which also once had a solid stable of correspondents.

In 2024, Alden sold the Sun to the chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, an arch-conservative octopus that blankets the nation's airwaves. The Times belongs to a biotech tycoon who makes news decisions. Big stories are often from news agencies, credited only at the bottom.

Finding reliable news was hard enough before AI, which has no sentient humans to assess its choice of sources.

I asked AI on Google for the wording of a Mark Twain quote that AP treasures: "There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe — only two — the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here."

The first hit called that apocryphal, citing several historians who could not find it anywhere. It was from the Washington Times, a rightwing rag run by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The 2021 piece was behind a paywall I declined to scale.

The headline was enough: "Here's Why You Can Never Trust the U.S. News Media." Whether Twain wrote that or not, a weird little hit piece is hardly an inclusive dismissal of AP, let alone all American news organizations.

I have promised a Mort Report Guide to News Media, but that is a nearly hopeless pursuit. Even the stalwart New York Times takes too much explaining. The redoubtable Gray Lady now tries to be too many things for too many people.

The Sulzberger clan's Times is as credible as you get, free of outside pressure and effectively the last U.S. paper of record. But finding its most important offerings can be like panning for gold in a rushing river.

Jeff Bezos crippled the Washington Post, but good reporters still do outstanding work. They exposed Trump's disgraceful response to a suspected Iranian threat. He sneaked off to an unmarked plane, leaving reporters and aides as sitting ducks on Air Force One.

This is the first of a series in the coming days. In general, choosing news sources is akin to electing presidents and other politicians. Pick those with proven integrity and a continuing effort to do the right thing. That is no easy challenge.

The next piece will focus on CNN, which its branders call "the most trusted name in news." It once had a claim to that, along with what the AP used to be. Today, trust is more about specific reporters and analysts rather than their employers.

Christiane Amanpour and media critic Brian Stelter recently bantered about how Ted Turner's visionary network has just kept on trucking for 46 years. True, it is still around. But Turner would likely drink hemlock if he watched it today.

Some of it is excellent. Much of it is execrable. At its worst, it is a travesty of basic journalistic principles, which draw a clear line between news and "paid content." There is much more to say in the next Report.

I've lost too much of my waning lifespan monitoring its present state, dumbed down by Warner Bros. Discovery and soon to be swallowed by David Ellison's Paramount Skydance with funding from his father, Larry. Both are tight with Trump.

Turner set up CNN in 1980 and hired AP reporters, including special correspondent Peter Arnett. I replaced him, based in Paris, and covered top stories around the world. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, I hurried to Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.

Soon after Desert Storm began, a black-haired tornedo burst into the AP office at the International Hotel fulminating in a plummy British accent. Amanpour, on her first international assignment, was seriously pissed. Work stopped, and a crowd gathered.

She was aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier and watched jets deliver the first salvos of the war. But officers refused to let correspondents file a pool report. From then to now, she has fiercely defended the people's right to know.

In Bosnia, she responded to critics who called her reporting judgmental:

"There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral, you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing."

Not long ago, Marty Baron summed up his similar view: objectivity is the rigorous, open-minded pursuit of truth through thorough investigation, fact-finding, verification and placing facts in proper context. It is not "both-sides" false equivalence.

That is no job for amateurs. Hairstyling, makeup and wardrobe might be a plus, but they don't replace the essential knowledge to ask the right questions and push back hard on the answers.

At the Boston Globe, then the Washington Post, Baron was an editors' editor: mild-mannered, deeply principled and astonishingly well-read. His reporters, imbued with respect, delivered. They cut no corners and spared no effort to get close to ground truth.

When Trump called journalists the enemy of the people, Baron echoed Adolph Ochs' 19th century credo for the New York Times: without fear or favor. "We're not at war with the administration," he said, "we're at work."