All The Non-News That's Not Fit to Print

 Last night, I ended one of the very longest relationships in my life: I unsubscribed from the NY Times.  My family will gasp while progressives will wonder why it took me so long.  The short answer to that: recipes and identity.  I will explain why it took a while and then I will explain why and why now.

Lately, I have been mostly using my NYT subscription to check out new recipes and find old ones that worked well for me.  

More importantly, the NYT has been a part of my life since I was a little kid.  My parents, as New Yorkers, subscribed wherever they lived, and getting the paper each morning and especially the mammoth Sunday paper was just a part of our lives. When we moved away from my parents, their visits to us, especially in Lubbock, involved quests for the NYT.  It simply must reading.  I read the news, the op-eds, the minimal sports, entertainment, and mostly skipped the business stuff.  When my mother died recently, my family was quite intent on getting her obituary in the NYT, where you can also found marriage announcements and my uncle's obituary as well.  My sister Ellen had several letters to the editor published there, and, yes, just one time, I got quoted there.  I am pretty sure my family was thrilled more by that than any other media appearance. 

Why drop my subscription and why be so loud about it?  Because this paper, the newspaper of record, with the credo "All the News That's Fit to Print" has thoroughly betrayed itself.  My displeasure started with so much false equivalence that I made a meme about it, treating in 2016 Hillary Clinton's flaws as equivalent to Trump's.  I got into the habit of ranting on twitter when I saw a tweeted headline that was problematic.

Worse, the imbalance in much of the coverage. They didn't pursue his obvious and thorough corruption pre-presidency because it was too easy?  Instead, it was all about her emails.  And then it was the trend for its reporters to hold onto key bits of news for their books years after the news was relevant--so not all the news that was fit to print made it into print in the paper until it was promoting Maggie Haberman's book or my freshman year roomie's (Peter Baker) book.  But I kept on subscribing.

Then the paper became obsessed with trans people, repeatedly amping up a moral panic about what be happening to those kids who transition too soon.  Given how vulnerable the trans folks are, especially the kids, one might think that caution would be in order.  Instead, it was really punching down.  Why?  Damned if I know, but it certainly was not "fit to print," at least at the volume and tilt of the stories.  

I stopped reading its op-ed page as they ended up using not just "conservatives" but truly awful people to put out disinformation.  Yes, the NYT became a vector of disinformation, which I am pretty sure is the opposite of its mission.  

Its coverage of the current presidential race is maddening where it has been essentially pro-Trump, so focused on Biden's flaws and not spending that much page space on Trump's criminality.  It is replay of 2016 but with personal animus: the publisher is miffed that Biden didn't do an interview with the NYT.

The paper has embraced the era of bad faith.  The exemplar that finally got me to drop the paper was an op-ed written by a guy trying to discourage people to vote despite the fact that, yes, the shithead votes.  On the Fourth of July?  On that day, how about focusing on an imperial Supreme Court that is gutting not just the Constitution, but the entire revolutionary project?  The end of the rule of law?  How about that?  Nope, instead, they encourage folks not to vote in the most pivotal election in American history.  [I was talking with a smart pal last night, and she helped me realize that the Civil War might have ended the Union if the South had seceded, but it would not have ended American democracy.  This election?  The whole enchilada is at stake]

I have been arguing lately that the paper is pro-Trump despite its long dated reputation as a liberal paper, and the idea of not voting cinches it.  Who is that message for? Biden voters.  So, I am done.  As many folks online pointed out, I can get recipes elsewhere.  And, no, this is not a matter of me retreating into a left wing bubble, as I will not be reading left-wing outlets more.  I will just try to get my news from as many non-disinformation sources as possible.  The NY Times?  Until it revises its current approach, it is dead to me.

Mission Accomplished? Um, Maybe More So than Bush

Today is not only Canada Day, but it is also the first day "back" for folks on sabbatical in many places.  Yes, my penultimate sabbatical ended in rain and cinnamon rolls as I was touristing around Stockholm before the start of the ERGOMAS (European Research Group on Military and Society).  I had a great year as last summer involved two intense months of finishing the book with Dave and Phil on parliamentary oversight over the armed forces (more on that in a second), the fall mean a week in South Korea asking about their civil-military relations, the winter involved awesome skiing in Utah, Japan, and Austria, and then heaps of fieldwork in Germany and Finland and presentations in Germany and Austria, and the spring meant more fieldwork in Germany and some touristing on the roads of central Germany and in northern Italy.  But did I do what I set out to do?

Let's check the plan, remembering that no plan survives contact with the adversary (which probably refers to myself in this case[blue for plan kept, red for plan not kept, purple in between]):

1. With the legislature book project winding down, I am hoping to make progress on the Steve, Phil, and Ora project: comparing defence agencies around the world.  What roles do ministries and departments of defense see for themselves?  How are they viewed by the militaries they interact with?  This project will merge with the aforementioned bureaucracies project--what is the nature of each democracy's policy marketplace? [Turns out the first step in this two step project is more ambitious/harder so I don't think we will complete the second step]
   
1.  This fall, I am probably headed for shorter trips to South Korea and Denmark, but that could change.
2. I do plan to spend much of the winter somewhere, with the contenders right now being Rome, Berlin, and Taipei. 
   
2. I plan to do a better job of keeping my promise re smaller projects.
1. There is the aforementioned policy relevance piece that will have new data soon. [Nope, no data]
   
2. There are a few surveys of the Canadian public I am working on with JC Boucher, and we hope to push out those results this year.
3. Start the work to organize a workshop on the uses and abuses, pro's and con's of using principal-agent theory in Canadian defence/security stuff on Canadian civil-military relations.  I took over editing a volume on CA civ-mil due to expected happenings.  We held the workshop a few weeks ago, and I am very psyched to have it come together with submission in the fall.
   
4. A few other things that are on the edges of my attention right now.  This turned out to mostly be the aforementioned parliamentary oversight book, which did not find much favor from the first press/reviewers.  So, a hunk of this winter was spent revising it and preparing for resubmission elsewhere.  We are now awaiting word of that.
   
3. CDSN-ing!  We have a variety of new and continuing stuff to execute--the Summer Institute, the Year Ahead, the Capstone, the various other opportunities plus a Meeting of the MINDS workshop for the leaders, project directors, and students associated with the nine MINDS networks.  Oh, and I will start prepping the next big grant application to keep us going beyond the first seven years [This involved drafting the very first draft of the main doc and heaps of networking to get individual scholars and partner organizations to share their ideas and to ready themselves for the SSHRC webwork ahead]..
4. 
   
   Read!  This time, I mean it.  I have a stack of great civ-mil books that I want to catch up on.  I am going to try to set aside one day each week just for reading.  Let's see if that is a pie crust promise!  Some progress (awesome books by Feaver, Robinson, Fazal, MacKenzie, a couple of ed volumes and some articles) but the stack is still very tall.
5. What else?  Since I didn't know last July where I was headed, I couldn't say what would be the other stuff I would do wherever I ended up. But ending up in Berlin meant, in addition to doing much of the work on the German case and traveling to at least one other spot in Europe (turned out to be Finland) for another case study, getting a sense of how Germans and other Europeans have been thinking about the twin perils facing them--Russia in the East and Trump in one possible future.  I should have asked more about China, but will rectify that next year when I go back for another three months.

I would have liked to have researched another case study done, but the Humboldt award included a time commitment to hang out in Bamberg and the talk in Vienna was just to talk, not to add Austria to our list of cases. I would have liked to have completely written up the South Korean case study and made progress on the writing of the Finland and Germany cases.  And, damn, I would have loved not to have had to revise the parliamentary oversight book.  But has the song goes, we can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you get what you need.

The sabbatical was just what I needed after six years of heaps of grant-writing, administrating, teaching, and researching. I am looking forward to the next one already, which might involve far less research and far more teaching... if I can find a good place to squat.  But those are plans to work on after the current set of plans and the set beyond those.  And, yes, I will be spending three more months in Berlin next winter as part of the Humboldt award, which will probably mean two additional cases--Sweden and perhaps the Netherlands.

Yes, I am lucky, and I love my job. These sabbaticals make it easier to love the job not just because I get a cool year every seven years, but it does help recharge for the years in between.  Woot!