PARIS – A safety tip: Avoid catchall slurs about journalists near a reporter holding a sharp object. We’re a little touchy, having lost 1,000 colleagues in 15 years. Many of them, like ten just killed in Afghanistan, were dedicated to a calling that barely kept their kids in shoes.

Lots of “journalists” besmirch the name, but others don’t. As Earth faces endgame, despots muscle aside democrats, and amassed wealth is bent on keeping the meek from inheriting much of anything, this is no time for ignorance.

Webster calls news “a report of recent events.” That takes in, say, the doings of Kanye West, which interest a lot of people. But our children’s survival depends on a sharper definition: news is about events, recent but also in the past, around which the world turns.

This Mort Report, half Zapata and half Quixote, attempts to shovel aside bullshit down to what matters. Neither a blog nor a newsletter, it is fresh reporting with analysis based on trusted sources. It aims to fit fragments of “breaking news” together into wider framework.

For five decades I’ve watched global coverage evolve from small bands of correspondents spending half the night pecking out dispatches on antediluvian telexes to today’s free-for-all multimedia mob scenes around dramatic stories. In technical terms, jug fucks.

READ MORE

WILD OLIVES, France – Just back from America, I lit up the TV to hear a presidential president, in complete English sentences free of personal pronouns, tell Congress how the United States was destroying a world that badly needs its leadership.

Emmanuel Macron hit all the right notes, hammering away at every tenet of Donald Trump’s twisted us-first jingoism. He played French poodle for two days, lavishing faux-adulation and kissing cheeks. Then, when it mattered, he bit his host in the ass.

A tweet from Madelaine Albright caught the irony: “It has been too long since a President delivered a speech in Washington about the need to defend democracy and support international cooperation.”

Macron banged away at his central theme, linking the Iran deal, Syria, trade, desperate people on the move, and all the rest.

“Isolationism, withdrawal and nationalism” prevent common answers to global threats, he said. Without updated alliances the vital institutions America built -- the U.N. and NATO -- could collapse. Authoritarians would quickly fill the vacuum.

“Your role was decisive in creating and safeguarding the free world,” he added, “The United States…invented this multilateralism. You are the one who has to help to preserve and reinvent it.”

Macron’s zinger – “There is no Planet B” – brought all but partisan diehards to their feet…

READ MORE

Dear B.H.,

I know you’re no deplorable. You were kind when I visited Idaho in the ‘80s and saw the fruits of your successful life. You’ve taken pains to explain to me why you support Donald Trump. So I say this with all respect: You are the most dangerous man on earth.

Not actually, which is why I use the initials of a hapless character in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”: Benito Hoover. Uncork some Snake River Valley red, gaze upon your splendid ranch, and consider this note meant as news analysis, not insult.

You told me Trump wasn’t perfect, “just 100 times better than Hillary,” and sent me a link to a loony website that posited “the brain might be wired differently for liberals and conservatives to explain how they look at things so differently.”

Conservative and liberal? Two one-word labels for 320 million Americans? You’re smarter than that. A lot of honest reporters risk their lives out in a complex world so that voters like you can make nuanced, informed judgments based on hard reality.

READ MORE

ORACLE, Arizona - Okay, I stopped in this old settlement near Tucson just for the dateline. I wanted to reflect on some accidental Delphic prescience. Back in May 2016, I thought Hillary would be a shoo-in, but reporting out in the real world had me worried.

Here is what I wrote then:

“PARIS -- After five months back in America, I can't imagine any day in human history more fraught with peril than next November 8. Elections will weigh how much we have lost of our values and our good sense: a national referendumb.

“The world is scared witless. Wars flare. Climate chaos worsens. Desperate migrants are on the move. Youthful nihilism feeds a clash of civilizations. This is no time for America to retreat into hateful, us-first ignorance.

“Whatever Donald Trump isn't, he is good at selling snake oil. And far too many angry, confused Americans can't, or won't, separate fact from flimflam. Let's make no mistake here. He could win.

“When I left in November (2015), Europeans were laughing off our multibillion-dollar campaign spectacle. Now it seems about as funny as the Black Death.”

READ MORE

TUCSON – The torrent of head-spinning, heart-stopping news this week can be easily summarized: We are sooo screwed. It is not yet too late, but it will be soon if enough Americans cannot revive national integrity, sanity and basic common sense.

Before the storm, I talked with David Cay Johnston. His new book title has it right: “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” He sees Donald Trump’s snow job swaying too many uninformed voters while too many others opt out. The America we’ve known for 229 years may be over.

Adding in the global context and repercussions of this week’s fresh lunacy, we need a sequel: “It’s Even (Much) Worse Than Johnston Thinks.”

READ MORE