On Truth and "Paid Content"
PARIS — At 5 a.m., pastel hues reflect off the Seine. Stately stone buildings emerge against an Eiffel Tower backdrop. Just upriver, Notre Dame stands tall again, ready for 1,000 more years. All things considered, Paris is a jewel in a world worth protecting,
Yet today will be hotter than hell, even more than Baja Arizona, baking the paint on my floating home. Our port's mama ducks and their ducklings have moved elsewhere for breakfast. They take some explaining, so I'll start with the big picture.
Donald Trump belongs in a padded cell, if not behind bars. Certainly not the White House. The problem is as much who he is as what he does. Everyone with a half-open mind ought to know this. And yet.
The Mort Report began in 2016 when I recognized the same sort of coup-plotting malignant narcissist I've reported on since Mobutu in the Congo during the 1960s. Trump has excelled at it in ways I never imagined were possible in America.
He seems unfathomably ignorant, but we underestimate him at our peril. He masters any despot's basic skill: savaging truth while hammering away at easily debunked lies. Steve Bannon, America's Rasputin, puts it simply: he floods the zone with shit.
Most people react to each outrage only until the next ones. Nothing stirs up a critical mass — not even nearly a million needless Covid deaths, insurrection at the Capitol, blatant graft climbing fast into the billions or jury rulings of sexual abuse.
For the outside world, his senseless assault on Iran was the last straw. It broke that figurative camel's back with a sound that echoes to every part of the planet. Headlines focus on America's humiliation, but it is far more than that.
A nuclear attack on America would be murder-suicide for any country that tried it. Yet if the world's richest country remains addicted to fossil fuels, climate collapse is certain.
Because of a pathological obsession with Barack Obama, Trump trashed not only the 2015 agreement to curb Iran's nuclear designs but also the 2015 U.N. climate accords, which 195 countries signed here in Paris. That is why we are sweltering today.
As for those ducks, a grand plan to clean up the Seine for the Olympics altered its ecological balance. Much less natural organic matter in the water ruptured the food chain. A small part of a very big problem.
We need to understand the overall threat and what decent people with families and friends they cherish can do about it. Starting now. November is four months away.
My wise wife frowned at this intro. "Can't you write about something besides Trump? I'm sick of reading about him." I'm sick of writing about him. But that's the problem.
Much of America's news media still covers Trump as if he were just another president, only quirkier and more colorful. None has come anywhere close.
Trump ended the Iran war as promised, with an unconditional surrender. His. Iran emerges stronger, richer and meaner. His "deal" gives hardliners nearly a half trillion dollars and control over a crucial strait that had been open international waters.
It is a Band-Aid already coming unstuck. Obama's was open-heart surgery, building on a decade of prep work by France and Germany. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Europeans saw the winners would be hardline Shiite mullahs in Iran.
An unchanged regime keeps enough enriched uranium for perhaps 10 dirty bombs as powerful as those Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was meant to bring an outcast rogue state back into the wider world. It returned about $50 billion of Iran's own blocked funds, half of what Trump is giving upfront.
Secretary of State John Kerry and his team of specialists brought in China, Russia and Europe. Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary and a nuclear scientist, pored over every detail in a 159-page book of text and technical data.
One provision was clear: "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons." International monitors made weekly inspections to enforce it.
Trump insisted he "obliterated" Iran's capacity to build a bomb during his 12-day onslaught last June. He didn't. But experts say that set their program back years. America was under no imminent threat. It is now from potential Iranian revenge.
Proxy militias still bedevil Israel from Lebanon. Benjamin Netanyahu's ultra-Zionist zealots want to move north to cripple a multiethnic nation. Before the 1970s, it was a Mediterranean playground like what Trump wants to build atop dead Gazans.
I came to Paris as Associated Press bureau chief in 1977. Then The Times and Post owners hired me as top editor of the International Herald Tribune. We started editions in Europe and Asia, turning the iconic Paris Herald into a must-read daily across the world.
Our first big story was a little-known cleric called an ayatollah who fled the Shah's Iran to settle in a village near Paris and send fiery cassette-tape sermons to Tehran. Changes in Ancient Persia since then have been far more complex than today's common wisdom.
A look through the archives shows how thoroughly correspondents reflected reality because publishers believed principle and public service were part of their purview.
Jeff Bezos is no Katharine Graham. The old Sulzbergers would have frowned on Wordle, profitable as it might have been. Both hired reporters and editors like major league sports back then, only after seasoning at farm clubs.
"Connecting the dots" is now a branders' cliche. But it is crucial for any understanding of what we now face today.
Trump's follies only worsen the crises he reviles. When he slashes foreign aid, people starve and die from simple diseases. Young men join terrorist groups to seek vengeance. Families that would rather stay home add to a rising tide of desperate migrants.
He rambles crazy talk, spewing vile insults and blood libel at monologue "press conferences." He thumbs out midnight calumny about "dumocrats" and radical leftist lunatics. It is bad enough at home. Last week in France, he stunned the G7 summit.
He showed up 45 minutes late for no particular reason, telling other world leaders: "I'm the boss." He stumbled through incoherent self-praise and fabulist drivel to heads of state and military strategists who know better.
Pete Hegseth, the vain, pumped-up Fox terrier "secretary of war," harangued allies as ungrateful slackers. Most at the summit saw him as a pitiless war criminal who acts as if innocent victims are inanimate figures in a video game.
Greg Dobbs, a road-wise ex-ABC correspondent, wrote. "We can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for the global leaders...to sing the praises of Donald Trump. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them spent half the night hanging over their toilets."
Everyone else wanted to talk about Ukraine, which Trump has abandoned to Vladimir Putin's tender mercies. He had vowed to end the war on Day One. Now he sells arms at a markup to Europeans who know from long experience why tyrants must be stopped.
His address was so ludicrous that an actress read his address on You Tube in a crisp British accent. (A link is below.) At one low point, his former staunch ally, Giorgia Meloni of Italy, fumed. He claimed that she had begged him for a photo with her.
Not nearly enough voters know these damning details. Partisan tycoons, fearful editors and faux-reporters on bended knee have destroyed much of America's world-standard system of newsgathering.
For me, the biggest problem is that large newspaper chains and broadcast companies buy up once well-staffed "properties" with solid reputations built up over decades. They slash staffs and plunder assets to maximize profits.
Skeleton crews with multiple jobs, often underpaid and untrained, have no time for careful editing, fact checks or thoughtful news judgment about what matters most.
Partly, that is the effect of changing habits. Fresh generations look for news online, brief and breaking. Classified ads and public notices no longer supply print dailies with steady income. But it is a race to the bottom.
Online sites and TV networks have few experienced reporters of their own in America, let alone abroad. They rely mostly on newspapers. When dailies cut back firsthand coverage, Americans are increasingly blind, deaf and dumb about the real world as it is.
The less they know, the less they want to know.
Americans' inward turn has been a long time coming. Many see the world through narrow lenses, largely sports events and places they'd like to visit. Foreign wars that don't affect gas prices, not so much.
From my bow, I can see Notre Dame's spires rising in new splendor. The roof burned in 2019, and donors gave a billion dollars within days to help France restore it. Americans mourned. Tucson's Arizona Daily Star splashed a piece I wrote across the frontpage.
The other day, a Russian explosive drone set fire to Kyiv's Dormition Cathedral, a magnificent church of golden domes, as old as Notre Dame and just as revered by the Eastern Orthodox. Not many Americans noticed.
This grates at old-time reporters who have spent lifetimes watching global realities up close. Many of us are still around because of survival skills or dumb luck. We write as "independents," eddies off the mainstream.
I started at the Star while finishing university. A fiercely principled publisher, smart editors and a deep bench of seasoned reporters taught me well. The paper was thick with AP dispatches from Washington and the world, along with local news.
AP hired me and dropped me into an Africa war in 1967. Since then, I can't even guess at how much money various employers have spent on my bouncing around the world, salaries aside. Over a million, counting airfares and the rest.
Editors trusted us. Accountants knew what we faced. I once expensed $50 for "buying life in street" when accosted by thugs. And $25 for dog treats. Odious Beast, my noble Belgian shepherd, woke me when a bomb blew up a Chilean general down the street.
The main lesson learned over time is that reporters must be there when news happens, or damn soon after, with some idea about why it did. If they write or read a script from anywhere else, they might as well be at a desk in New York or Atlanta.
But it is so much cheaper to close foreign bureaus and do it by smoke and mirrors, calling whichever unknown stringers or sources who answer the phone.
Now this gets personal — neither a complaint nor a defense but rather an example of a troubling trend. I cite my own case because it's the one I know best.
As the Star began to wane along with so many American dailies, I defended it whenever I could. The Pulitzer family sold it to Lee Enterprises. Meantime, Gannett killed the afternoon Tucson Citizen to make more money by exploiting shared assets.
In 2019, Alden Global Capital, a rapacious vulture hedge fund, began circling over the Star. I wrote a Report, "A Little Respect for the Daily Doormat," which stirred interest among potential local buyers. But a Lee insider told me it was too profitable to sell.
A year ago, a new editor of the Star asked me to write a twice-monthly column linking Tucson to global affairs. I'd known and respected him for a lot of years.
He knew I'd have done it for free, but he believed in paying professionals. We settled on a modest amount squeezed from a tight budget. I reciprocated by taking days to report each piece, at times spending more on expenses than I was paid. No big deal.
He moved on to a reporting job at Lee, replaced by a new editor from headquarters. She wrote a kind letter about my work and the value of an outside perspective.
A day after I sent the next one, she emailed a note to say Lee was dropping all "paid content," but she'd be happy to carry my column as "guest comment." Lee had already cancelled AP, the Star's main source of reliable news since its founding in 1879.
I'd have been fine with "your stuff is crap" or "you're a pain in the ass." But paid content? I flashed back to friends and colleagues we've buried after taking risks to get close to truth. For some, it was a mission. For all, it was a profession and a livelihood.
I wrote a different farewell column, unbilled. The headline added injury to insult: "Veteran columnist signs off after decades of reporting." I was never a columnist, just an op-ed news analyst for 12 months at my hometown paper. And I'm hardly signing off.
Among a flood of emails, some readers wished me a comfortable old age. Like hell. I'll just make better use of the time.
Greater Tucson tops a million inhabitants in a blue-tinged county near the Mexican border. It needs a solid daily even more than a public library. Citizens need up-to-date briefings on what is happening beyond their line of sight.
The Star still has some excellent reporters who hope no new shoe drops. But its national and "foreign" news is mostly a pastiche of free "content providers" and stories from the Phoenix paper. That would have provoked aneurism among editors I once knew.
One email from a distinguished professor and her lawyer husband said they were moved to tears. "We need you now more than ever to help keep our heads above water," they wrote.
Others can do that better than me. But Lee would have to spend at least what its new big investor spends on a day's lunch.
When Scott Pelley was fired from "60 Minutes," he choked up describing the hard work in dangerous places of colleagues who had been let go for not bending stories to their new boss's biases. But it is not about us.
It comes down to what I tell audiences in occasional speeches. Make sure foreign correspondents are out doing their jobs. If we're not there, neither are you. These days, that has never been more important.
————
With Apologies to Winslow Homer cartoon contributed by Jeff Danziger