Doonesbury Goes Missing & It's No Joke
Dear Leader's Media Suppression in Progress
Readers of the Sunday Union-Tribune in San Diego might have wondered for a moment why the paper’s comics section led off with a recycled Doonesbury cartoon strip this week.
Even if you don’t wonder about or like this type of social commentary, you should know that the decision by the paper and others to not publish the Sunday satirizations by Gary Trudeau is yet another example of the press yielding to the White House view that praise of President Trump is the only news worth publishing.
The chickenshit way of rationalizing this sanitizing the Sunday comics will be some utterances about “fair and balanced.” I’ll believe that when anti-lasagna messages run alongside Garfield.
Let me state my thesis plainly: The United States Government is seeking to dictate the content of information and commentary across all media types. And the daily paper of record in San Diego has taken a first step down a slippery slope. I know Doonesbury is an easy target; that should be all the more reason not to mess with it.
The Trump administration is going after the big names first, but there should be no doubt this chilling effect will spread, based on how any type or source of unfavorable information is received and reacted to by the Trump administration, with insults, slander, threats, and sanctions.
The White House press corps now includes a collection of non-mainstream reporters that all have one thing in common: adoration of Donald Trump and his favored notions-of-the-moment.
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I watched the Alaska episode of a travel/food documentary on public television recently, and couldn’t help thinking about how many of the show’s segments would offend the arbiters of broadcasting in the current administration.
Coverage of the diversity of the state’s population would certainly be on the no-no list, as would evidence of climate change, the importance of indigenous culture, a segment on a Russian orthodox community, and discussion with an interviewee about the Alaskan LGBTQA+ community. Amazing visual coverage of the state’s landscape would remain, sans the effusive but “woke” host of the show. Maybe with no sound, or a song by the January 6th Choir.
I’m starting to look at just about everything these days in the context of what is slated to disappear. A recent visit to LA’s Broad museum exhibits on contemporary art had me thinking about the Hitler government’s systematic seizure of “degenerate art.” I doubt the anti-wokeness brigade will copy the Nazi exhibitions designed to shame artists, styles, and content; it’s more likely they’ll end up in the collections of our emergent tech-overlords.
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Today, National Public Radio filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the current administration, centering on a claim the president's executive order telling the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to defund NPR is a "clear violation of the Constitution."
It also says Trump's order violates both "the expressed will of Congress and the First Amendment's bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association." Moreover, it "threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information."
Via David Folkenflik at NPR:
"It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment. 'But this wolf comes as a wolf,'" states the legal brief for the public broadcasters. "The Order targets NPR and PBS expressly because, in the President's view, their news and other content is not 'fair, accurate, or unbiased'."
The line about the "wolf" was drawn from a 1988 dissent by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The lawsuit says the administration is usurping Congress' power to direct how federal money will be spent and to pass laws. It names President Trump, White House budget director Russell Vought, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, as defendants.
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Voice of America, the foreign facing broadcast network founded in 1942 to combat the Axis nations propaganda, was largely silenced in March when the Trump administration slashed its funding.
Taken together, VOA and its four sister networks used to reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week, according to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
A court order bringing back laid off employees was overturned by an appellate court, leading to widespread cuts in the number of employees. The Voice of America website hasn't posted new stories in more than two months.
Contracts for wire services from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse have been terminated, to be replaced by the far-right and pro-Trump One America News network. I’m not sure how OAN’s “The dangerous cost of woke ideology in K-12 education” will translate in Farsi, but that’s what’s coming.
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At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has booted mainstream media outlets from dedicated workspaces, bringing on right-wing content creators to increase DoD’s promotional efforts on social media.
Last week, a directive was issued requiring reporters to be accompanied at all times by an official escort in many sections of the Pentagon.
Via CNN:
Podcaster Graham Allen, who helped Hegseth full-time for several months and said Friday that he was moving into a part-time role, dismissed a CBS journalist’s objections to the new restrictions by saying, “you can cry harder.”
But Mike Balsamo, the president of the National Press Club, said independent coverage of the military is in everyone’s interest.
“It keeps voters informed, strengthens democratic oversight, and sends a clear message to the world that America stands for openness and accountability,” Balsamo said. “Restricting access doesn’t protect national security. It undermines public trust.”
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Media advocates at the Freedom of the Press Foundation have warned Paramount of a stockholder derivative lawsuit, should the company settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump against its subsidiary, CBS. This type of legal action allows people and organizations who own shares of a publicly traded company to recover damages when executives harm the company.
Via Wired:
Talks of a potential settlement had roiled CBS for months. Longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens abruptly resigned in April, and CBS News president and CEO Wendy McMahon resigned earlier this month. “It’s become clear the company and I do not agree on a path forward,” she wrote in a memo to staff at the time.
Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount isn’t an isolated attack on the media. He sued ABC News, owned by the Walt Disney Company, for defamation in March 2024 over comments from anchor George Stephanopoulos portraying the president as “liable for rape.” (A federal jury found President Trump liable for sexual assault in a 2023 civil case, but not rape.) The company settled the case in December. In late April, Trump posted comments on his social platform Truth Social that appeared to threaten The New York Times with the possibility of legal action in the future.
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The sad (to me at least) capitulation of much of the legacy media to the authoritarian type of governance that the US is becoming has already led to situations whereby news and commentary that might displease the Trump administration is either downplayed or ignored.
Much of the rest of print and broadcast media is now in the hands of private equity investors who share the president’s modus operandi of ignoring the public good in pursuit of profit.
There are publications who have thus far resisted the self-interest/self-censorship siren; among them are New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, New Yorker, The Guardian, and Wired, along with the investigative efforts of Propublica. For the time-being, at least, they are still trustworthy for me, even when I reject their conclusions/opinions. However, nearly all are subject to the whims of those who manipulate/monopolize capitalism to their own ends.
Much of the overtly left-leaning and/or alternative press is susceptible to the President’s drive to revoke non-profit status from organizations not to his liking.
Finally, there are the platforms. Unfortunately, the social media platforms with the most reach have all been corrupted in some fashion. My page for Words & Deeds has been banished from Facebook (for making a fuss about algorithmic suppression of political blogs) and the FB page for The Jumping Off Place is being overrun with soft porn. (Yes, I reset preferences and downgraded lots of posts, to no avail.)
I have hope for Bluesky, if only it can break out of echo chamber-ness without succumbing to the forces of trolls, spambots, and “concern freaks.”
This blog/commentary that you’re reading exists on Substack, a platform for practitioners of the language and (some) arts that promises user control and even the opportunity for some creator income not bound to algorithms. There are other places with similar opportunities, among them Ghost, Medium, and BeeHiv.
It’s not unlike the Soapboxes on street corners used by various advocates more than a century ago, The problem, from a free speech point of view, is building an audience sufficient to have an impact on various topics/foci. Repression/oppression from an authoritarian perspective is still possible by first taking out those with the biggest audiences or most (sanely) audacious ambitions.
Now, more than ever is the time to support and/or boost the voices of resistance to authoritarianism. We’re at the beginning of a historically proven process for brainwashing an entire population; it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment that everyone can be a part of. You could start by hitting the “like” button more often, or even subscribing.
How to kill 346 people and get away with it by Judd Legum at Popular Information
…Trump administration, which, without explanation, has allowed Boeing to withdraw its guilty plea. The deal is strongly opposed by the families of some of the crash victims. "I am absolutely stunned by the DOJ’s decision to grant Boeing an NPA [Non-Prosecution Agreement] despite all the evidence we have provided showing Boeing’s turpitude and repeated lies before the first crash, between the two crashes, and for more than six years since,” Catherine Berthet, whose daughter died on the Ethiopian Airlines flight, said. "This kind of non-prosecution deal is unprecedented and obviously wrong for the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history," attorney Paul Cassell, who represents at least 15 victims' families, said. "My families will object and hope to convince the court to reject it."
The DOJ claims that "[f]amily members, and counsel on their behalf, of over 110 crash victims advised the Government that they either support the Agreement specifically, support the Department’s efforts to resolve the case pre-trial more generally, or do not oppose the Agreement." This number represents less than one-third of the victims. The DOJ did not reveal the number of families that have contacted it to oppose the settlement, but says it "supports their right to be heard, and will confer with them and Boeing on a proposed briefing schedule."
The deal must still be approved by a federal judge.
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A Letter to Europe - You’re stronger than you think. Act like it. By Paul Krugman
Obviously lagging behind in the industries of the future is a big deal, and Europe needs to develop a strategy to catch up. But that catchup may be easier than expected given Trump administration’s determination to engage in self-mutilation, crippling the scientific research — and the research universities — that drove past U.S. success.
Of course, if Europe doesn’t rise to the occasion, leadership may move to China instead. But that’s a topic for another day.
For now, the message for Europe is to stand up for yourself. In trade, in GDP, even in everything but the most advanced technology, you are no more dependent on the United States than the US is on you. There is nothing compelling you to cater to the delusions of America’s mad king.
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The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site by Joseph Cox at 404 Media
Zach Edwards, an independent cybersecurity researcher, told 404 Media “The recent efforts to uncover the websites CIA used to communicate with their spies all over the world aligns with what I understood about this network. We’re now about 15 years past when these websites were being actively used, yet new information continues to drip out year after year.”
“The simplest way to put it—yes, the CIA absolutely had a Star Wars fan website with a secretly embedded communication system—and while I can’t account for everything included in the research from Ciro, his findings seem very sound,” Edwards added. “This whole episode is a reminder that developers make mistakes, and sometimes it takes years for someone to find those mistakes. But this is also not just your average ‘developer mistake’ type of scenario.”
About his research, Santilli said “At the very least the potential public benefit of enlightening history seems to be greater than that risk now. I really hope we're right about this.”
