Episode 26: Best Of

Off-Kilter is on a break this week so we’ve rounded up up some of our favorite conversations to hold you over in the meantime. We’ll be back with new content next week. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

In the inaugural episode, host Rebecca Vallas was joined by Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which examines resistance movements in the U.S. and how they have the power to reshape American politics. Next, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, joined us to break down Trump’s other war on the media playing out quietly at the FCC. And lastly, Joe Soss, a professor at the University of Minnesota, talked with us about how disability beneficiaries have become the new welfare queens.

This week’s guests:

• Sarah Jaffe, Nation Institute
• Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation
• Joe Soss, University of Minnesota

For more on this week’s topics:

• Everything Sarah Jaffe has ever written, ever.
• The other war on the media that President Trump is waging.

This program aired on September 1, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Hey Off Kilter listeners, the show is on a break this week so we’ve rounded up some of our favorite conversations to hold you over in the meantime. More good stuff after labor day.

It is up to those of us who have not yet taken action to decide if we want a more equal, a more just country. If we do, we may just have to make some trouble to bring it about. So writes Sarah Jaffe in “Necessary Trouble” which examines resistance movements in the U.S. and how they have the power to reshape American politics. Sarah joins me in studio, thanks so much for joining the show.

SARAH JAFFE: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So I think it’s fair to say that resistance is the word of the day.

JAFFE: Right.

VALLAS: I don’t know that any of our listeners are going to disagree with that. But you published this book, “Necessary Trouble” in April —

JAFFE: August.

VALLAS: Well thank you, a month that starts with “A”.

[LAUGHTER]

JAFFE: Yes.

VALLAS: But my point stands, which was that was before the presidential election and the subsequent inauguration that many people think of as spurring the wave of activism and protest that we’re watching grow by the day. And you point in your book to the 2008 financial crisis as what moved people from the so-called personal to the structural and frustration to action, as you put it. So did the financial crisis lay the groundwork in a manner of speaking for what we’re seeing today?

JAFFE: I mean I think the financial crisis definitely laid the groundwork for Trump. But also I think of these things are connected right. So when you look at the organizing that’s going on right now. Take the Women’s March. The massive Women’s March that happened in D.C., the group of people who took that over; it started as sort of nebulous calls on facebook for women’s march on D.C., and the group of women who took it over and really made this thing happen are people who started working together because of Black Lives Matter. Linda Sarsour, Tamika Malloy, these are people who knew each other and had been organizing as a group called The Justice League in New York and then brought together a bunch of people and put together this incredible speakers list in — that includes like Angela Davis, which is not somebody that normally gets asked to address sort of modern liberal feminist congregations. So it was wonderful to see that.

The organizing that’s going on around Resist Trump Tuesdays, the person who kicked that idea of is Nelini Stamp, who is in several chapters of my book actually. She was really central to Occupy Wall Street in New York and also was involved in the founding of the Dream Defenders in Florida after Trayvon Martin was killed. And so when you look at the new influx of people now who, as I keep saying, because that election related flow chart, have moved from the things are OK to oh my God, things are broken column, they’re being guided and helped by people who alot of the time cut their teeth on the movements of the last 8 years.

VALLAS: And so there’s the kind of people who as activists cut their teeth as you put it or learned the art and the work that they’re doing now, but is there also a case to be made that in some ways, the anger that was spurred in 2008 also laid the groundwork for people who maybe actually didn’t get involved in activism in any of the movements you just described until now?

JAFFE: Well I think what happened in 2008, and this is a global phenomenon we should point out, this is not just this country is when the financial crisis collapsed basically the center collapsed with it. Everyone keeps quoting that Yates poem for good reason, because it’s a wonderful poem but like what you see everywhere that the financial crisis hit hard, very particularly in places like Greece where the country was just completely devastated. We did not have it so bad. Most of us, although there were parts of this country that have it just as bad. What you saw in Greece rise was a literally Nazi party and Syriza which is a coalition party of the radical left which has, you know, we could talk forever about what happened to Syriza but the center basically collapsed. And what we saw in this election in 2016 was also that. The fact that on the one hand, Bernie Sanders who, you know, I have been following Bernie Sanders’ career forever, bless his heart, I thought he was going to get 10% of the vote, maybe. And —

VALLAS: And you’re not alone in thinking that.

JAFFE: And I thought that was going to be good and I was going to be stoked that that happened, that 10% of Democratic primary voters were going to vote for somebody and then I thought Martin O’Malley would get like 15% and Hillary Clinton would just walk away with it, even though I was writing articles saying please don’t talk about people as inevitable, that’s basically what I thought was going to happen, and Bernie Sanders got 40 something percent of the vote. For a period it looked like he could actually take it. And 13 million people voted for a guy who calls himself a socialist, and then on the other hand, we were talking before we turned the mics on about this panel I was on last night where one of the panelists, who is a conservative said basically this election proved that there is no real constituency at the grassroots for quote, unquote, “small government conservatism,” again is a term I would argue but that like the kind of slash the welfare state, destroy it all and give all the money to rich people conservatism is not what Donald Trump ran on. Notably, it is kind of what he’s doing now that he’s in charge but it’s not what he ran on. And so when you look at this election, you have these two polls of people who are basically mad about the same thing. That why that flow chart that I keep referring to was so relevant is that people are mad because the jobs are gone. The new jobs are bad. The everything feels insecure. America feels like it’s not great. And the question is whether you think America needs to be made great again which basically means going back to the 1950s era, nobody ever talks about the most significant thing about that era which was that union density was really high. But basically it’s we want to go back to this time where like white men had jobs and white women stayed home with the kids and this is somehow construed as making America great again.

And on the other hand there are people who are like hey, for most of us America was never great, and we have to really think about what actually creating an inclusive social safety net, welfare state, all of these old sort of again, sort of old terms but thinking about what an inclusive society would actually look like. But it’s important over and over again I keep saying this to stress that like people who voted for Trump and people who voted for Bernie are mad at the same things. They’re just blaming different people for it.

VALLAS: And one of the movements that you also look at and you make this point and I think it’s a really important point to make. As we look at the last few years of resistance and several resistance movements. Whether it’s Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter and we’ll get into some of those in a little bit more detail, you also point to the Tea Party as being a particularly important movement and one that in many ways is now actually being discussed more because of it as a model for the Indivisible movement that has sprung up around the country than anything. But your point is that the resistance and the growth in activism, it’s not limited to one side of the aisle, politically.

JAFFE: No, and it’s really interesting because, again, the Tea Party, I spoke with Debbie Dooley who’s from Atlanta and from the Tea Party Patriots. And she was like, you know, we were mad under Bush and we were mad about the bailouts and we were mad about this and that and like that got lost because we like to sort of declare things racist and as that is a totalizing identity which is a problem. Because racist is not the sum total of anybody’s thinking or beliefs or whatever, we live in a white supremacist society, we are all steeped in white supremacy. Racist ideas tend to peak at times of tension. So the more you feel like you’re losing the more you start to look around and see who you feel like is getting the thing you feel like you’re losing. And that is really, has always been, people are joking that like Godwin’s law is suspended with Trump because everyone keeps making the Hitler comparisons, and I don’t want to go that far but I do want to say that like Hitler was able to take over and take power and stoke this genocidal machine and get at least the grudging consent of most people in Germany because everything; the economy was falling apart, inflation was, you know, thousands of percentage which still shapes Germany’s approach to fiscal policy. This was a time where people were afraid and angry and losing and scrambling and looking for someone to blame. And that’s what happens. And so these things, you know, they always connect. The fact that we saw tensions and then we saw movements, again on both sides of this issue, in a moment of crisis is not at all surprising. This actually like how history shown us this always works.

The other thing about the Tea Party is as you were saying, the Indivisible movement is, the Indivisible guide was written by former congressional staffers who lived through the Tea Party and were like this is what they did that we saw work. And I think that’s great. I also want the urge the left to remember that when the Tea Party was studying, the Tea Party was reading Saul Alinsky and Francis Fox Piven. The Tea Party was then, was in turn taking it’s methods from the left.

VALLAS: How many mirrors can we look in at one time, right? Yeah.

JAFFE: Right it’s like these tactics, the tactics of bringing a bunch of people to disrupt and shut down a powerful person’s meeting, these are tactics of the left because they’re tactics of a group of people whose only power is people.

VALLAS: Now I want to back up for a minute because you’re sharing from of the key observations from your book but these observations did not occur all academically or from study of writings of resistance movements. You actually, you went out into the field and you sort of took a tour of America effectively as research for this book. Tell me a little bit about the experience researching this book and what you heard on the ground.

JAFFE: Yeah, so the interesting thing about my sort of career timing is that I finished graduate school in 2009. So I was in journalism school while the economy was exploding. And so while I was in journalism school I suddenly started trying to figure out what a credit default swap was and all that stuff. [LAUGHTER] And I’m still sort of aware. And so from the time that I started working as a journalist full time, there were all of these things happening all over the place. And sort of at first after the crisis I remember we were kind of looking around going where are the people in the streets? And I tried to get at some of that in the book too, especially with like George Gale and people who were trying to be in the streets. There was this you know, sort of steady flow of things that started happening and I wanted to write about labor which was, it was really hard. I should say, even to get places like the Nation to take my labor pitches in 2009, 2010, unless they had a really clear hook to something like the Employee Free Choice Act that was, well, not really moving in congress ever.

VALLAS: Often called card check.

JAFFE: Right yeah. If there was a national policy hook to it then we could talk about it. But writing about a local labor struggle, which now The Nation pays me to go to Indiana and write about this and they call me to write about it. But until Wisconsin in 2011, people were like uck, labor, it’s boring. Even on the left. And so I, what I was able to write about has been shaped by these movements and so thanks to Wisconsin, thanks to Occupy, thanks to certainly the Fight for 15, we see publications hiring labor reporters again. We see people wanting me to write for them and explain things to them and trying to figure out what’s a strike and how does this work? So all of those things that were happening, each successive round of protest allowed me to write about things that were fun. So a lot of this, the work that went into the book, the connections that went into the book, some of the reporting that is in the book, I did over years and years of working as a journalist who slowly made social movements my beat. And so I had a lot of connections to find people to go talk to when I was doing specific research for the book, but also I had things like I was there in Zuccotti Park when the cops were going to come in and evict it and then they didn’t because there were thousands of union members who came in to support it. So that was, it’s years and years of journalism. People ask me how long it took to write this book and it depends on what we count as writing this book.

VALLAS: You close with a theme, or no actually this is earlier in the book, you have a reflection that I find particularly personal and particularly interesting. And especially hearing you describe how this came out of years of really shoe leather reporting on the ground studying movements in person rather than academically. You write “This book is not about me, and yet I have to admit that reporting and writing it changed me. Every person I spoke with, marched with, stood with as they were arrested changed my understanding of how the world works.” How are you different today than when you started out doing this work?

JAFFE: There are so many ways, right. I’ve been joking that like after the inauguration I’m just like angry but one of the things that I learned was to have a lot of respect for people who don’t get treated with any in society and that is again, on both sides. Most of the book I should say is about movements on the left because other than the Tea Party there sort of wasn’t another significant thing. But the way that most people in politics talk about voters, working people, like anybody who isn’t in congress or in the media drives me bonkers. And it was just driven home over and over again by talking to people that like people know what’s going on in the world, and they know about it in deep, visceral ways, which doesn’t mean they read the Washington Post everyday and follow whether a bill is moving through congress but they know what’s going on in their life. And they know what the conditions of their life are, and so that kind of willingness to listen to people and trust them to tell their own stories is still so rare and it just I think more and more, like the more time I spent doing this work the more it became the only work I wanted to do and so that’s the lesson right, is to have faith that people actually should and can shape politics. Like I know that that’s some sort of American cliche that the power should be with the people except we don’t actually as a political culture believe that at all.

VALLAS: And it’s certainly a phrase we’ve heard from Trump over and again, including in his inaugural remarks, giving power back to the people.

JAFFE: But by putting Stephen Schwarzman in charge of the economy.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Among many, many other things that we could list and then that would be the whole episode.

JAFFE: Right but it’s that at least lip service. This summer I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana and I was talking with Tom Lewandowski who’s an organizer, used to be with the — runs an organization called the Worker’s Project. And what he was saying, he’s like you know, it’s like when people aren’t being represented at all then emotional representation that Trump is giving them is better than nothing. And that emotional representation is saying like, “You’re mad and I understand why you’re mad. And you’re right to be mad.”

VALLAS: So in the last few minutes that I have with you there are two kind of big themes I want to get at that you explore throughout your book. And one of them is something you call horizontalism. And another is intersectionality. And horizontalism, you describe and throughout movements spreading and also being structured horizontally as opposed to sort of having a movement elite that is running them and you observe that this is in many ways sort of a 21st century phenomenon and something that really describes 21st century movements. But we’ve also seen and since you’ve raised Occupy Wall Street, tremendous limits that horizontalism can carry with it. But I’m curious as we seek to learn lessons from movements like Occupy that some of their own creators have referred to as constructive failures. And as we think about the future of the resistance movement that we are seeing gain momentum by the day in response to Trump and his agenda, how can we tap into both the pros, rather than the cons, or horizontalism while also acknowledging and trying to harness intersectionality?

JAFFE: So the thing about horizontalism is that it’s the structure of the internet. And so when we talk about, if we’re talking about Indivisible, the Indivisible guide was this thing that some people got together and wrote and put up on the internet as a google document and it went viral. And it not only went viral as like people passed it around and clicked on it a lot but it went viral as in there are Indivisible groups all over the country that are calling themselves Indivisible groups and that’s the perfect example of how this stuff spreads. You don’t have to wait to like, you don’t have to call the people who wrote the guide and say we’re going to be an Indivisible group in Arizona and we’re going to call ourselves, you just do it because the information is there and you’re sharing that information and you might get on a conference call that’s hosted by the Indivisible people and MoveOn and the Working Families Party or you might not. You might just look at the guide and say we’re out. And that is incredible powerful, one of the things that we talk about a lot in this country is how this comes together around electoral politics. And that’s a more complicated question because there’s sort of open questions about whether the leadership of the Democratic party is going to be open to these kinds of things or really afraid of them and run away from them.

There’s questions about how you sort of shape what is it that we stand for because the Indivisible framing is very specifically like “we resist Trump”, fine but what are we for? Because when it comes time to again try to defeat Trump you’ve got to tell people that you’re going to do something. Being not him, we’ve seen that that failed. It failed not by massive numbers but it failed. And so that kind of thing is the questions of organization because organizations are the kind of thing that can run a kind of grinding kind of political campaign rather than just saying like put up a Facebook post and everybody’s going to come to this town hall. But that, since Occupy, I don’t think anybody who went through Occupy except for very small groups of people really wants to sit around doing 100% consensus process with twinkly fingers anymore. And when you’ve seen the groups that come out of Black Lives Matter, most of them do have leadership. Most of them do have, this is the director, this is the president, this is the policy chief, they do have positions and structures. That doesn’t mean again, that they’re not networked and that they’re not, their work doesn’t spread the same way across the internet but that they are thinking about structure and what makes organizations last and notably groups like the Dream Defenders have been around since 2012. In fact I’m getting emails about their fifth anniversary which is great to see that this group has lasted.

And so that’s my question, and the Dream Defenders are the perfect group to talk about when we’re talking about intersectionality because they started as a multiracial group of people of color who were marching around Trayvon Martin. But their analysis has really grown to be a really structural one about the economy and the world and the way that capitalism actually exploits people of color and it’s a really global analysis because one of their founders is Palestinian and so they were one of the groups that led the connections between the Black Lives Matter movement here and Palestinian rights over there. And so when you think about intersectional, it’s not just about that we say we have to talk about all of these different groups but it’s actually understanding the way that capitalism and white supremacy are things that interact and that they shape the entire world that we live in.

VALLAS: Been speaking with Sarah Jaffe and I wish I could keep speaking with Sarah Jaffe for another hour or two hours, three hours. She’s the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt” and thank you so much for joining Off Kilter.

JAFFE: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: Hey Off Kilter listeners, the show is on a break this week so we’ve rounded up some of our favorite conversations to hold you over in the meantime. More good stuff after labor day.

As Trump continues to wage his war against the media, he’s declared criticism of him to be ‘fake news’ while naming journalists “the enemy of the people.” Meanwhile, getting far less attention is a quiet war on the media taking place at the FCC. To discuss the role of the media in Trump’s America and as part of the resistance, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of ‘The Nation’, joins Off Kilter. Katrina, thanks so much for joining the show.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you very much, it’s very good to be with you.

VALLAS: So, war on the media. It feels like a phrase that barely has any meaning anymore because it’s getting bandied about so much in really what has become an almost unreal feeling discussion and set of coverage on how this president is behaving and in an unprecedented way towards the press. I’m curious, your perspective at an outlet that isn’t quite the mainstream media and in many ways was founded not to be that.

VANDEN HEUVEL: So, my sense Rebecca, is we’re at a crossroads. And it has to do with politics, with culture, with economics. And it engages and touches and factors into all areas. I’m thinking of the work you’re doing. So the media collides with an administration which is intent, as part of a calculated strategy, to delegitimize accountability, public interest, truth telling journalism. At a time when the news media is in pretty dire financial straits in many areas of this country. Newsrooms are being hollowed out just when statehouses need more scrutiny. I think that to go back, if I could, to the not so back far off history, media malpractices as I call it fueled the election of Donald Trump. The 24/7 unfiltered coverage of those rallies, the lack of attention to serious issues in the campaign.

An issue we’ve covered over the years, Rebecca, is the kind of obliteration of the line between news and entertainment. So that politics and political coverage is so often, not every, but a spectacle. And who triumphed when it was a spectacle? Donald Trump. We just published a special issue on the media, Trump’s war on the media. How journalism can prevail. And it grapples with the consequences of this historic failure. This epic fail of a media which didn’t elect Donald Trump but it abetted the rise of Donald Trump. And the issue offers a roadmap to recovering journalistic integrity and independence. And we can talk more about that but some of it, I would just say, we need more deep reporting on issues. I mean I think what’s exciting about your work and it’s synced with ‘The Nation’, is lifting up issues and voices that aren’t getting enough attention in the mainstream. And policy ideas that aren’t getting enough attention from political figures. I think the mainstream media is being redefined in this Trump era because it’s becoming more adversarial, it’s understanding that objectivity doesn’t work.

Truth, rigor, verifiable data always needed, but one thing that we still miss in the quote, mainstream, which I think ‘The Nation’ provides is giving voice to those who are voiceless, a home for dissenters, for activists, coverage of movements in a real, genuine, deep way. I think that the mainstream, and I’ll stop here, continues to police the parameters of what’s possible in our society and politics. What do I mean by that? Sort of tells us what’s viable and what’s viable doesn’t fully engage with the full range we could explore as a country. If we had a politics and a media that didn’t traffick in what I call the kind of politics of downsides, excluded alternatives. So I think the work we do has real synergy, Rebecca. Because it’s really hard, particularly where you sit, you’re in the bubble of D.C., to break out of it. To keep talking to real people who are on the ground. And we hope to and have started with what we call a ‘resistance beat’, ‘bearing witness beat’, ensuring that those who are feeling the direct dangerous impact of Trump and Republican policies, that we cover them with humanity, with journalistic rigor, with just an understanding of the importance of attention being paid to those communities.

VALLAS: And to that end, you raise the importance of the media really dedicating or rededicating itself to covering actual issues as opposed to kind of obsessing over the side show and the drama which so easy to do particularly in the era of clickbait being kind of the goal that it seems media so often are seeking. But you also have written extensively and you actually referenced this just now in the ‘resistance beat’ that you guys have started. You have written that media need to be focused on not just the issues, but specifically more on the ground reporting that actually looks at local issues which are so often overlooked. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about why that’s important and how that connects to the resistance.

VANDEN HEUVEL: So, you know, I was just talking about what I call media malpractice. And we can’t afford a repeat of that, I mean, when the three major nightly newscasts devoted barely half an hour of their combined election coverage to actual policy issues. So yes, issues, the coverage of how actual Americans get sick, suffer if their health insurance is taken away. How workers are abused if labor protections are eviscerated. But the deep reporting from the heartland and inner cities alike shouldn’t be limited to coverage of the policies coming out of Washington. The importance of bringing attention to local issues, as I said earlier, it’s more critical now because the gutting of local newsrooms has resulted in too many Americans who are misinformed, uninformed about what’s happening in their communities. And also important, many political commentators are disconnected from ordinary citizens. So I think it becomes, it’s critical for journalists to get out and do on the ground reporting.

You know, there was a story just a few weeks ago, one way that journalists might win back trust, journalism, too much of the journalism on cable TV for example, is one Republican operative talking to another, to a Democratic operative. Why, or Rebecca you mentioned the FCC at the beginning, I mean some of it is because as ‘The Nation’ reported as early as 1996, a lot of these newsrooms are cogs in big conglomerates. And it’s cheaper to have one Democratic operative talking to another operative. But what we need is the kind of work where we get out into the country and you know, telling, you know, telling the story of activists, we’re talking about the resistance, telling the story of grassroots protest movements of all times. I mean, I call it, I like to say transpartisan. I’m not just talking about progressives, but to get a feel of why did people vote for Donald Trump? Not all of them are racists, white nationalists.

What’s going on in this country where there is such anger and discontent? How is it, and we did this story a few weeks ago, how is the opioid epidemic? I believe the governor of Maryland declared a state of emergency the other day because of the epidemic in his state. But, you know it correlates in some ways with parts of this country which voted for Donald Trump. How has quote, free trade, ravaged communities? What is being done? How are people living in places where factories have shut down? What are the new jobs? What happens in coal communities, where coal isn’t going to come back. Now even a action president like Donald Trump is going to bring that back. But what are the alternatives? How are people thinking? So I think it’s critical to be on the ground and to be in all kinds of communities. But that takes editors who understand, that takes newsrooms which are willing to pay for people to be out and not just parachute in. I mean, we have a reporter in Lordstown, Ohio, we’ve had someone there for three weeks. Wish we could have someone longer. But to really live in the community for that period. Talk to people across a range of issues.

VALLAS: So you mention the FCC and I want to come back to that, I mentioned it in my intro because I think it’s an incredibly important story that really isn’t being told nearly enough. But before we come back to the FCC, I also really would love to get your thoughts on the lack of trust in the media which Donald Trump references as often as he can, trying to highlight and really elevate himself as the person, in true authoritarian style, that the American people supposedly should trust instead, as he advances alternative facts. But that low level of trust in the media is actually real. And you have written that part of what we need to be addressing, and what the media needs to be addressing is the fact that in many ways, many outlets and particularly national outlets have become a quote, “pundit class” that is profoundly out of touch. How can outlets address that perception as well as that reality and particularly in a time where in many ways they have, as you describe, evolved not to even have on the ground reporters anymore in a meaningful way.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Yeah, it’s a very important question and no one, I mean if I said to you I had all the answers, you know, you should get me off the phone. [LAUGHTER] But how to begin? I think as I said earlier, first of all, too often journalists present themselves as apart, as privileged, as a privileged class. Now, the media, at it’s best, is the fourth estate. It holds other branches accountable. I would make a few suggestions. One is, emphasize the watchdog role. Do your job, you know, that means holding people accountable for abuses, rectifying abuses. All kinds of guys, people, government, corporate power. Think of the story, the journalist who broke the Flint story. That story helped a community understand what was at stake, what was at risk. So I think a community comes around a journalism like that. I do think the public is fed up with you know, these endless panels, pundit on pundit and less opining and punditry.

But I think as I said about Flint, as an example, people appreciate the investigating that the best reporters can do. They appreciate reporting that, you know, shows banks are pilfering accounts. And so I think it’s almost a nonpartisan mission. Follow the money, that’s what journalists must do better than ever. Represent the interest of all citizens. Again, I come back, you know, why did people vote for Trump? What’s going on in parts of this country where, you know, people are angry. They don’t know what their future means, their family’s future. And recognizing that those voters felt angry, humiliated or invisible, not heard. So I think those are things. And factual authority. You know, former Senator Moynihan had a line you may have heard, “Everyone has a right to their own opinion but not to their own facts.” Now we are living in a time of alternative facts. ‘The Nation’, in fact in I believe it was 1996, coined the term ‘post-truth’. The screenwriter Steve Tesich who wrote the screenplay for the film “Breaking Away” used it in an article in ‘The Nation’, Webster’s cRettits us with that. So it’s easy for me to say truth, but truth is a contested term these days. So it’s even tougher for the media to gain trust but I think some of the things I said are important. Beginning to regain the trust of people and doing so with deep, fearless reporting.

I don’t think journalists should treat, this is maybe controversial, should treat Trump as an enemy, demonize Trump. I think what you want to do is demonize, not demonize, but to look carefully at policies. For example, why demonize Trump about this dastardly $56 billion dollar defense increase? Don’t, I mean, there is systemic nature to that. Democrats and Republicans have contributed to increases in defense spending. But look carefully at what the Trump administration proposes to do. I mean, cut food stamps, cut the social safety net programs which have been the hallmark of the civilizing reforms of this country, cut the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? I mean these are ideological issues for many Republicans but they will hurt the very rural communities and other communities which helped elect Trump. So I think you want to look at that. The last thing I’d say is the access journalism. Too often journalists look like they are cozying up to those in power. Because they believe, too many, that they need access to do their job. Well, the great journalists of our country, like I.F. Stone, who was the Washington correspondent for ‘The Nation’ in the 30s and 40s, or you know, others use documents, or do the work, the ferreting out in the trenches, the shoe leather reporting. And that is not access journalism.

VALLAS: So back to the FCC, you wrote a column actually a few weeks back and it’s one of the only sets of coverage that I’ve seen looking at what is effectively a quiet war on net neutrality playing out at the FCC. And really with very little sunlight actually shining on it. Tell me a little bit about what is net neutrality, why is it important and how is it at risk and being undermined as we speak?

VANDEN HEUVEL: So let me just step back and say that over the years, ‘The Nation’, particularly John Nichols, our national affairs correspondent, has done an enormous amount on the role of the FCC in media politics in this country. In fact, John and his colleague Robert McChesney’s work helped create Free Press, which your listeners should get out, a great media democracy reform consumer advocacy group. But net neutrality, the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally. That there not be a fast lane with those for more money. That there be a level playing field where good ideas can prosper no matter who or where they come from. And great former FCC commissioner Michael Copps has argued that net neutrality is a civil rights issue. He’s right. I mean, it’s an open and free internet place in our civic dialogue. The new head of the FCC, who comes out of Verizon, he was an associate general counsel at Verizon has quite quickly started to dismantle some of the rules of the road which were put in place under the Obama administration as a result of a lot of grassroots activism. So you know, if we begin to dismantle net neutrality, and end the reclassification of the internet as a public utility, which happened in 2015, we’re going to see a kind of digital inequality. The digital divide between wealthy and poor Americans will grow. And I think you know, the work you do, Rebecca, where you know, low income families have had access to broadband, discounted broadband through the FCC, now that program, the Lifeline Program is beginning to be dismantled. So it’s a declaration on low income Americans, it’s a declaration on consumers.

One of the things I find particularly cruel is the new FCC commissioner is abandoning an effort to limit the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls that often force inmate’s families to pay upward of a dollar a minute. I mean that’s just, in my mind, criminal. Some people are fighting back. I mean, Bernie Sanders has been a long time champion of media democracy, net neutrality, media reform. Al Franken. But, you know, what I call a transpartisan people powered movement several years ago. I mean you had Trent Lott and Code Pink, they were working to demand an open and free internet. They were fighting against these cross ownership rollbacks that lead to like, one corporation owning media in one town. So it may seem boring to some people, agencies don’t get the coverage that sexier topics do, but I recommend that people really check out what I call the other war on the media. And John Nichols had a very good companion piece, he really is someone who’s followed this so carefully as part of our special issue which I mentioned earlier.

VALLAS: Katrina Vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of ‘The Nation’ magazine. Katrina, thank you so much for joining the show and I look forward to having you back.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you so much Rebecca, I’m sorry I rattled on too much. [LAUGHTER] I care deeply about these issues.

VALLAS: Never too much, I learn something every time I hear you speak. Thanks again.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

Hey Off Kilter listeners, the show is on a break this week so we’ve rounded up some of our favorite conversations to hold you over in the meantime. More good stuff after labor day.

Because the Washington Post decided to open up yet another dumpster fire that is myth-based media coverage of social security disability benefits, I wanted to bring in my friend Joe Soss would is a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the role of media in shaping public opinion and even public policy to talk about why this matters. And Jeremy Slevin, you get to be here too. So folks may have seen, folks may not have seen the front page, above the fold Sunday story that was in the Washington Post about Social Security disability insurance. But it was yet another anecdote based, myth fueled celebration of all of the stereotypes about people with disabilities, and in particular, disability beneficiaries. People who have turned to social security disability insurance or supplemental security income because they have a serious health condition or disability that keeps them from being able to support themselves through work.

We could walk through all the things that the Post left out, all the things it got wrong like how hard it is to qualify, like how more than 6 in 10 applicants for benefits end up being denied, like how the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, actually has said time and again that the United States has the strictest standard of disability in the entire developed world, I’ll stop there because Jeremy is already making a face at me for going through these things. But I thought that it would be more interesting, Joe, to talk about why this kind of myth based myth matters and this is a lot of what you’ve studied going back to the 1990s, when we saw this play out with Reagan’s welfare queens. So tell us the story about what happened in the ’90s and what role media played in driving that policy?

JOE SOSS: Well, I think that, you know, part of the problem here is that there are many things in our lives that we can experience very directly. For example, with crime, we can be victimized by crime, we can perpetrate a crime, we can witness one, but what we can’t experience is the crime rate. That’s something that sort of describes this aggregate of things out there in society. And when it comes to policy debates, most of the facts that matter, most of what we believe, are closer to that thing, that crime rate, than to the personal experience of it. And so we can’t reality test the claims about what policies are doing, about who’s on the policy, all of these sort of general claims, we can’t reality test them against our own experiences. So, really to the extent that we know anything about them, it’s always going to be filtered through facts and stories and ideas that are constructed for us by media and various actors that speak to the media.

And so in that sense, in the 1980s and in the 1990s, we got the rise of this set of arguments about a whole collection of underclass pathologies that had to do with crime and personal irresponsibility and within this broader narrative there was this image that arose, starting in the Reagan era and then gathering steam in the 1990s of the welfare queen as sort of the quintessential taker who was having children to get more welfare benefits, who was committing fraud, who didn’t want to work and so was living off the dollars of hard earned taxpayers, the hard earned dollars of taxpayers. In a sense, almost victimizing the good citizens of the country. And that fueled a great deal of rage, eventually sort of whipped up and channeled in the direction that we got quite draconian policy changes.

VALLAS: And you have a specific theory, sort of a way of thinking about this stuff. That there are two main factors that drive how we experience a lot of these kinds of things, and so your example is helpful. But to sort of break it down in the way that you do, there is proximity, there’s our closeness to an issue, whether we have experiences in our daily lives with it, but then there is also visibility, and how salient something is, how visible it is to us. And that where an issue is not super close to you, or you don’t have a lot of personal experience, but then also it’s not super visible to you, there is sort of a breach that media can step in and fill. Explain how that works.

SOSS: Well, I think it’s in that kind of quadrant where you have these more distant, these policy activities that are more distant from our lives, from some of our lives at least. But are quite visible in the sense that they are talked about a lot by politicians and by the media. It’s really in that space that you have the greatest potential for kind of these mythical beliefs to be constructed which are extremely resistant to just the basic facts of the matter. And so the image of the welfare queen, or beliefs about the state giving hand outs in some way, I mean, it’s been over 20 years now since welfare reform, since we turned what was the AFDC program into the TANF program for parents with children, what most people mean when they say welfare. And we created this incredibly tough program with work requirements, requirements in order to get aid, limits of various sorts and penalties for not showing up, all kinds of, it’s a very very tough program that offers very little. Yet, the myth still soldiers on, we have continued to believe that there is this program out there that’s just showering benefits in the form of handouts on to undeserving people who really are not having to do anything for them. And so, and part of that has to do with this very visible story about the state. It’s a rumor about what the state is doing somewhere else that doesn’t touch people’s lives directly in many cases.

JEREMY SLEVIN: So, what I found really interesting about this piece, is that —

VALLAS: Meaning the Washington Post.

SLEVIN: In the Washington Post piece, and for those following at home, it’s called “Disabled or Just Desperate”, as if desperation is something that should be minimized. But they don’t, they don’t even, we don’t even find out in this piece whether this man, who they follow throughout the piece, I don’t know have his name in front of me, even accesses —

VALLAS: Desmond Spencer.

SLEVIN: Spencer, even accesses disability insurance. They paint this picture of joblessness, he’s fallen on hard times, he actually is in a lot of pain according to the story, but they don’t, there’s not really a clear connection between this man actually taking advantage of the system. And I’m just wondering, like, how much does just the narrative of these people alone, like is that sufficient to convince people or, is that more powerful than any data about the programs and how do the two interact?

SOSS: Well, I think the two do interact, but I think in many ways stories are more powerful than just the facts alone. And when we sort of say, “But a certain percentage of people, most people don’t look like that. Here are these statistics.” It’s very hard for those sort of facts to just overcome these powerful stories because the stories resonate with a kind of truth to people.

SLEVIN: Right.

SOSS: And they’re memorable, you relate to them, it’s not like they’re convincing because of their logical connections or because of their verifiable sources. They resonate. And I think that what happens is oftentimes those people who are trying to put forward the facts forget that they need construct good stories around them. To get other people to understand and relate to them. And so I think in this case, the idea that here is this person who struggling in various ways, but is presented as, in some way, some difficulties, some pain, but not being authentically disabled. Is just turning to the program because it’s a way out. I think that resonates with a broader underlying narrative about, that associates turning to social supports, which from my perspective are sort a basic element of citizenship, right, that in some way turning to those social supports are a sign of personal failure and giving up.

VALLAS: So, I’m interested, not just in diagnosing the problem but in figuring out how we actually start to solve this. As you said, with in the case of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or people often call it welfare, there’s, the myths still drown out the facts. There’s still this widespread misperception that we have a quote, welfare state. That we have all of these people who are somehow, quote, on welfare, and that’s something people overwhelmingly believe, even if they’re presented with facts to the contrary. When it comes to the social security disability programs, I would argue that the myths drown out the facts, no matter how many times misleading media accounts like the Washington Post’s piece are debunked. And even by, incredibly, well, incredibly credible sources, such as former commissioners of the Social Security Administration. Eight of whom, banded together to explain what National Public Radio got wrong several years ago when they said very similar things were claimed, similar things to what the Post has now drudged up and repeated here in this piece. So how can we get to a place where people actually know the facts instead of the myths.

SOSS: Well, I’m not sure that we can expect to get to a place where all Americans somehow become knowledgeable about the facts of all of the policy areas where we have debates and where the issues arise. I mean, it’s very hard even for us, those of us who follow these issues pretty closely to keep all the facts straight in a couple of areas, right? And so that’s probably too much to ask but I think that changing the frame in which people understand these issues and changing the storylines is possible. And that can be done in ways that align more effectively with the facts. I mean, in this case, I think it’s really important to recognize that for all of it’s problems which are many, and you’ve described quite well, the Washington Post story can be read also as a fairly effective portrayal of the desperate social and economic times in much of rural America. And I think if we were to switch from their sort of, very stereotypical opposition of, is it really a disability or is it just about being desperate economically in terms of jobs, if were to move away from that classic misleading opposition and talk instead of that about how desperate times are for so many Americans now, and how desperate they are because so many other options have been closely off that, you know, a disability in many ways is actually about the condition you have and how that relates to your environment.

So my nearsightedness would be quite disabling if I didn’t live in a time and place with my glasses being available to me in the same way so many people with physical and mental conditions are classified as disabled. It’s partially about how accommodating are the jobs available to them. In some way, or what are the other conditions around them. We’re going through a period right now in which the labor market conditions have gotten so bad, and crucially, the other social supports have been pared back so much that the kinds of supports for people who simply have employment problems or simply don’t confront jobs that are accommodating to them, being a single parent, or having a particular physical ailment or whatever it is, that they’re in a situation now where in some cases, people who would not have turned to the disability program before but have a condition that is quite painful on a regular basis or limits them in terms of what they can do, they have very few options left at this time. And so I think that a narrative that shifts the attention to the closing off of so many other options and supports in some ways would put the discussion on better grounds. One that is actually closer to the facts of the matter.

VALLAS: And you make a point very similar to what I found myself thinking while I was reading the piece. Which is man, this could have been such a different and such an important and timely article if the so what had not been, oh it’s everyone’s on disability that must be a problem —

SLEVIN: Where does this guy turn? What does he need? How do we help these people in these rural communities who voted for Trump?

VALLAS: The main guy who is profiled in the piece, Desmond Spencer, he says, “I’ve never had health insurance in my entire life.” Right? Why not focus on the fact that Alabama, where he lives, is one of the states that refuses to expand Medicaid? And what that would mean if they were to actualy change their minds on that policy position. Or, as you point out, what if we were to actually have meaningful long term services and supports for people who are not poor in this country and who don’t qualify for Medicaid but who have disabilities and who need that in order to work. We could go on and on with the kinds of policy solutions that actually would make sense and be solving real problems as opposed to blaming the life boat for the flood.

SOSS: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. You know my very first book that I wrote was based on in-depth interviews and community ethnographic research with people who had applied to cash welfare programs and to disability insurance. And one of the moments that never went away for me, there were a lot of them, but one that always stuck with me was this woman who fought, we’ve talked about how difficult it is to get on disability insurance and she fought for years through levels of appeals to get on. And she finally got the letter in the mail that she had been admitted to the program and she’s telling me all of this in her living room as we’re talking, she said “I went into the house with my letter of acceptance and I tried to kill myself.” And she said, “I tried to kill myself because that letter seemed to say that my life was over in some sort of way. That I was, you know, permanently disabled and would never be able to work again. It hit me like a ton of bricks, even though I’d been pursuing this in some way.” Now that’s a very dramatic story in some way and not the norm, but what it speaks to is that people have to remember that how deeply stigmatized disability can be, how deeply stigmatized social supports and getting help from government can be in this country. And how deeply people resist turning to these programs in many cases. And actually, as I read that article, part of what could have been powerful about it is how this man, who is in so much pain and who so deeply resist this idea that he’s going to go on disability, even though a lot of people he knows are already in the program in one way or another. How everywhere he turns, there are no other options. And how for many people, a program like this is literally the last thing standing. It’s the only door that isn’t locked. And I think that sort of in that sense, the story of this person could have been a very powerful way for us to reflect on both why are we not making options available and also why are we stigmatizing this action when for so many people, there are so few other opportunities.

VALLAS: We’ve been speaking with Joe Soss, he’s a professor at the University of Minnesota, he studies, among other things, the role of media in shaping public opinion and public policy. If you want to get the facts on the social security disability programs go to TalkPoverty.org, where you can find an article called “What the Washington Post Missed on Disability”, and we’d love to hear from you, if you have personal experiences or if you work in this space, tell us what you think about SSDI. You can tweet at us @OffKilterShow. Joe Soss, thank you so much for joining Off-Kilter.

SOSS: Thanks a lot for having me, I appreciate it.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced each week by Will Urquhart . Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.