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Jane Braxton Little, Reporting from a Burned-Out Main Street

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Today, TomDispatch regular Jane Braxton Little writes about the “news deserts” spreading across rural parts of America. These are often the same regions hit hard by the unparalleled fires, floods, and fierce storms that are increasingly part of a world growing hotter and more violent by the year. Her own town, Greenville, was essentially burned out in 2021 by California’s single-largest blaze ever, the grim Dixie Fire (something she wrote about for TomDispatch). In response, as she notes today, she and some of her local friends and associates have bravely started a new community paper, The Plumas Sun, to fill in a bit of her own news desert in tough times.

Meanwhile, those deserts are only growing and not just in rural America either.  In a wild social-media world, the newspaper is, it seems, beginning to go down. Only recently, for instance, the LA Times laid off 20% of its newsroom, 115 journalists (especially young ones of color), not to speak of its executive editor, managing editor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington D.C. bureau chief. (And all of that came after a previous set of job slashes in June 2023.)

And the LA Times wasn’t exactly atypical. In 2023, the Washington Post also cut 240 jobs or 10% of its workforce, while Time magazine axed 15% of its editorial employees. All three were reportedly losing millions of dollars. (And keep in mind that the LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Post by billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Time by billionaire Marc Benioff.) Last year, there were at least 2,681 job cuts among news reporters across broadcast, digital, and print outfits and the numbers only seem to be growing.

So, as we head into the 2024 election season, news readers, whether in rural America or in some of its biggest cities, may find themselves in growing news deserts — as You Know Who once again takes center stage, a tweet at a time. Tom

Local Newspapers Are Lifelines for Climate-Disaster Communities

Can They Survive the News Desert?

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When wildfires began erupting in the Texas Panhandle in February, Laurie Ezzell Brown, the editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, was in Houston on a panel discussing ways in which losing local newspapers represents a danger to democracy. Running the once-a-week Record from the Panhandle town of Canadian, she certainly knew something about the rise of "news deserts" in this country. While she was meeting with other journalists concerned about disappearing local newspapers, Brown kept an eye on reports about ignitions sparking wildfires west of her town and posted updates from afar so that her readers would remain informed.

“Those fires never stay in the next county,” Brown said grimly. And indeed, as the flames galloped through fallow fields and approached her hometown, she began a desperate drive back to Canadian with a friend. In and out of cell coverage, traveling through black-ash smoke, she saw distinctly apocalyptic scenes of torched trees and powerlines dangling from still-burning poles. As she went, she posted every scrap of information she could get for the scattered and distraught readers of her paper. How else would they know about the houses that were being torched ever closer to their own homes?

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Norman Solomon, When Students Are a Shock to the System

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Once upon a time, in another era, maybe even another universe, the head of a university refused to call on the police, the National Guard, or even federal troops in the face of student and other protests. Instead, he opened the doors of his school to the demonstrators.

I’m thinking of Kingman Brewster, who was the president of Yale University on May 1, 1970, as peaceful protests over racial justice and against the Vietnam War were taking place in New Haven, Connecticut. It was just days before, thanks to the killing of four demonstrators by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, anti-Vietnam War protests would — rather like the present Gaza ones — spread across hundreds of college campuses nationwide. Yale avoided the worst of it, when Brewster, among other things, said: “I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States. In large part, the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against Panthers in many parts of the country. It is also one more inheritance from centuries of racial oppression.” I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew promptly and publicly called for Brewster’s ouster, while the students united behind him.

No such luck these days, of course. The police are being called onto ever more campuses, starting with Columbia University where the Gaza demonstrations were first launched. Had its president, under pressure from the Spiro Agnews of this day, not called in the police to arrest students, there might be no nationwide Gaza protest movement today. Instead, as I’m writing this, more than 2,000 students have been arrested across the country, including — yes! — 44 for “trespassing” at Yale.

Rare indeed has been Brown University, where “only” 61 were arrested after two sit-ins and a hunger strike before its president finally agreed to let its governing body vote this fall “on a proposal to divest the school’s $6.6 billion endowment from companies affiliated with Israel” and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment there ended peacefully. With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, fill you in on the ways in which American students have bravely risked their college careers and their futures to reject what he calls an all-American death culture amid a horrifying war in Gaza to which this country continues to supply the most devastating of weaponry. Tom

War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young

In the Thrall of a Dominant Death Culture

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Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people -- least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage -- are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.

I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel -- literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.

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Robert Lipsyte, America’s Existential Trials

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Despite the lack of televised coverage of Donald Trump in court, the trial of the century — or do I mean of the month, week, day, minute, or second? — has caught our attention. And yes, a crucial witness is indeed likely to be a porn star. But no matter, the real news is that, for the first time in memory, the former president has actually had to shut up. The man who can’t stop talking and hasn’t done so for years is now forbidden to say a word (unless he agrees to testify at the trial, in which case he could easily sink himself, word by word by word). All anyone could hear from him in court in these weeks was possibly (as TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte points out today) The Donald farting or, given that he’s dozed off more than once, perhaps snoring. (I’m not there, of course, so I can’t know or confirm anything.)

But isn’t it strange to have the old man who couldn’t stop yakking transformed into an overgrown child being disciplined? It’s hard to imagine that such a figure might once again, within the year, be — yes! — president of the United States and leave so many of the rest of us functionally all too silent and on trial in a courtroom presided over by Judge Trump and crew. Because, were he to return to the White House in 2025, for so many of us, not to speak of the planet itself where all he wants to do (other than talk at the top of his voice) is “drill, baby, drill,” he could prove to be the trial of the century. As he put it recently on the campaign trail, “When they start playing with your elections and trying to arrest their political opponent — I can do that, too! If I win — which I hope I do because we’re not going to have a country — but if I win, I could then say, I don’t know: ‘This guy, this Democrat is doing great. I don’t like the poll numbers. Attorney General come down, arrest that guy, will you, please? Give him a subpoena! Indict him! That’s the end of him.'”

With that in mind, let Lipsyte, a former sports correspondent and columnist for the New York Times and author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, consider what strange parallels exist between O.J. Simpson (who died just weeks ago) and Donald J. Trump — both of whom he knew as a reporter years ago. Tom

Donald Trump and O.J. Simpson

Testing the Limits of Justice

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It was the jokes about Trump’s rumored flatulence in the courtroom that pushed me toward despair. And don't think it was disgust with the subject matter either. After all, I’ve lived with teenagers and I wasn’t all that surprised by yet another Trump-inspired trivialization of a critical civic institution. What appalled me was the possibility that -- let's be clear here -- such stories would somehow humanize the monster, that his alleged farting and possible use of adult diapers would win him sympathy. I even wondered whether such rumors could be part of a scheme to win him votes.

So, yes, Trump can make you that crazy.

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