Once in a while we pull back the curtain and take a peek at the sausage-making in the world of journalism. We think this is important, since the founders believed that the only thing that can save a democracy is a free press. That is true, assuming that the press is free, which it is not. In an interesting twist of fate, I have a master’s degree in journalism from one of the best schools in the States. This is relevant, since the media as it stands doesn’t think I am smart enough to be a critic, and it thinks the same of you. Have you abandoned your print newspaper for cause? “No problem,” the media says. “You are an idiot and we are going to digital, where nobody can count our responses.” 

So let’s take a peek at one current controversy the press has decided to rule as “decided.” Here is a quote from last week’s release from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)– one of the most-influential publications for the media by the media. In  this case, climate change. 

What we’ve learned from our week of climate coverage 
by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope 
 
Today marks the beginning of a global climate strike and Monday will bring the UN Climate Action Summit, so we’re dedicating this installment of our newsletter to media coverage of climate, and whether it’s getting any better. 
 
This spring, CJR and The Nation co-founded Covering Climate Now, an unprecedented journalistic collaboration aimed at strengthening news coverage of the defining story of our time. The project was embraced immediately by The Guardian, which became our lead media partner, and has since grown enormously: more than 300 news outlets from around the world—with a combined audience of more than 1 billion people—are now part of Covering Climate Now. More are joining by the day.  Each of these outlets—big and small, TV and radio, print and digital—committed to running a week of strong coverage in the lead-up to the UN climate summit, and they have delivered. 
 
A highlight was an exclusive on-camera interview with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres—conducted by Mark Hertsgaard of The Nation, Mark Phillips of CBS News, and Amanda Mars of El Pais and shared with all 300+ Covering Climate Now outlets—that reported for the first time the pre-conditions that countries had to meet for their leaders to address the summit on Monday. In the spirit of collaboration central to the Covering Climate Now project, Hertsgaard wrote a news story in English, Mars wrote one in Spanish, and CBS shared video and audio of the interview with all participating outlets. 

If that does not make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, it should. Irrespective of your personal stand on climate change, this is proof-positive that there is a massive, collective effort to skew the news. To create propaganda and overwhelm any remaining vestiges of independence in the media. 

In this brief quote, you are looking at the heartbeat of a movement that has similar programs and similarly well-defined positions on virtually every so-called controversy you see in the media. Are you interested in what you MUST believe in terms of gun control, gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion or euthanasia? I can tell you without looking. It’s all in the media, to include movies, television, newspapers and magazines, and is coming under control on Fakebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Google. In this new age, you are actually not welcome to your own opinion, or, if you are, you are welcome to keep it to yourself or get shamed, criticized, outed, shadow-banned or fired from your job.  

You may have seen the kerfuffle last week when Canada’s Prime Minister got discovered in an old photo wearing blackface and brownface at multiple parties in his past. I have no use for Justin Trudeau. He is an arrogant, selfie-enamored, petulant child of privilege, and he is the necessary result of letting people under 35 vote.  

So much for Justin. However, he is not a “racist.” Let’s establish that I have never personally participated in any event where I or any other person made up in blackface or brownface. When I have heard of it, I regarded it as tacky. Low-class. The product of an unimaginative mind.  

I still believe all those things, but if Trudeau is a racist, it will take more than an anachronistic pogrom of the ignorant self-righteous to convince me. By “an anachronistic pogrom of the ignorant self-righteous,” I mean the organized, partisan and hostile media. 

So back to climate change. They say human-influenced climate change is settled science. The thing is, if it’s settled science, why is the funding, reporters, ink and collaboration to force a point of view on the media’s audiences? I am not about to say there is no climate change or that whatever there is has not been caused by humans. However, wouldn’t the science be supported better if a bunch of ninnies were not promoting it? I mean, nobody is up in arms about whether water boils at 212F. Or why did the “scientists” at the University of East Anglia – the repository of climate data for the world – get caught falsifying their data? You can read about it on Wikidiot, here, and they have an explanation. But it doesn’t answer the question of why?  

“Why?” is a very important question, which my colleagues in the media should have discovered in JN101. People subscribe to newspapers because they want reliable information, not because they want to be a target for every new shoe salesman on the internet. 

Why, for example, is an essay like this important for the wood industry in the United States? There are a hundred reasons, but for starters, look at what’s happened since 2007. We lost Modern Woodworking, Wood Digest, Wood and Wood Products and spin-off publications associated with those titles, as well as other primary print publications. If that trend continues, all that will be left will be commercially directed digital efforts from the wealthiest or most aggressive suppliers. And they will say, as do the current mainstream media, “trust me.” 

There is an army marching against you, both in your consumer hat and in your industry. Worse, you have very few troops left of your own. We keep tweaking the self-proclaimed “voices of the people,” hoping that we can draw them into a debate. 

So far, that has not gone particularly well. For example, I scolded a few on a media site about using made-up, foolish pronouns to try and show their self-emasculation. They got mad and said that the fake pronouns are the new reality. I remarked that in j-school they should have learned that the media should be the preserver of Standard Edited English (SEE), and that we can let the popular culture ebb and flow as it will, yet provide a sensible, understandable communications medium. Journalists are supposed to be the conservators of culture, not the destroyers of it.  

Crickets. 

I would love to learn who says I need to use their pronouns or not wear blackface if I choose. So far, all I see is monkeys in a circle, all fingers pointing left. 

Would you like to do something? For one thing, contact your industry suppliers and tell them you read this column and would like them to support independent voices that stand up for the industry. For another, send a copy to your local newspaper and your favorite remaining magazines, along with your federal and state representatives. We are relatively certain it will have no effect, but if you rattle their cages enough, they eventually have to listen. 

If you don’t, then we have to be content to hear from CJR next month that marijuana edibles make you intellectual. 

A tip o’ the hat to the American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance (AKCA) for its role in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s recent assessment of duties on cabinets from Chinese entities, including the People’s (sic) Republic of China, the government asserts is slowly wiping out our industry. Good on AKCA, listed by the Department of Commerce as the Petitioner. On the government, ‘bout time. 

You don’t have to go far in life before it’s obvious that, while money is certainly how you keep score in this game, when it becomes the sole objective, everything around it suffers. As we have noted before, this is as clear in the magazine sector as it is in cabinetry. Professional work is substituted by copying or relying in digital replication instead of original, independent work. Mass marketing substitutes for individual accountability. When you look at the current “meaning” of the words artificial and intelligence stuck together, you are amazed that they at least got that right. It’s like you can substitute Sodastream Grape for Château Lafite Rothschild, and by the time it gets opened, the seller is gone and the buyer is a jackass. So much for Instagram. 

The AKCA is an example of what can happen when an industry association rolls up its sleeves and takes on an issue of critical importance to its constituents instead of sucking up to its pushiest advertisers. 

This idea of commercial speech dominating and suppressing its own customer base is horrible, and it costs. It not only costs the suckered customer, but it costs the offender’s honest competitors because they simply won’t play ball. Some of you may recall that I went to China a decade back, when the housing and magazine industries in North America were taking a bath, courtesy of a special-interest-generated housing crash. Sure enough, there were Homag and Biesse, courting the Asian market so the mounting assault on North American production by Chinese cabinetry could be led by brands viewed by Asia as “important.”  

It’s like this, Homag and Biesse saw the Chinese attack coming, decided to bet it all on China, pulled their U.S. magazine and trade show involvement (as well as boycotting Xylexpo that year in Italy) and determined to build the world’s cabinets anywhere, irrespective of how tawdry, trashy or illegal. 

I can pick on Homag and Biesse, because they are picking on you. Neither will advertise with W.I. Media and haven’t for over a decade because we don’t do as we are told. We can take that for decade, and we have, because it is also true, and at some point a magazine has to stand with its readers or kneel and cry.  

The Chinese issue simply got out of control. I assume most of us are big supporters of free trade and competition, but in our naivete we also assumed people would play by the rules, and we were angry when that did not happen. So we saw baby formula adulterated with melamine, we saw 15 percent price supports provided to Chinese suppliers every time 15 percent duties were applied on the back end. We saw raw materials shipped to Asia at a price, and the finished goods coming back for less than the cost of the materials….  

It was bloody, and it made us angry, but it did not matter. To a rapacious predator, it does not matter whether the prey is dead or living, angry or at peace, as it goes down. 

Unfortunately for us, the same attitude toward guile and deception has permeated our culture from top to bottom, or so it seems. Parents are being told by labor unions what their kids need to learn in school, and we have all heard the stories. Competitive sports where competition is evil. Math where the right answers are wrong. Newscasters that insist they can’t tell a girl from a boy…. I can hear old Mr. Schwartz even now: “Hrumph, hrumph. Mr. Knudsen, I suggest you check the DNA.” Except I don’t need to. I can almost always make the right call at 400 yards. 

We need to think before we act. Let’s go out on a limb and talk about random murder.  

As things stand, nobody knows how to address a growing problem with random murder. The media has decided it all has to do with gun control, and everybody dutifully takes sides. 

But what if that’s not it? Let’s assume it doesn’t, since guns have been around for hundreds of years, and mass shooting by a lone individual seems recent. 

To my mind, a random murder requires five elements. It needs a murderer, a weapon, a victim or victims, an opportunity and a motive. This should be fairly agreeable, since it’s right out of Sherlock Holmes. 

Now, what if we remove the word motive, and just incorporate the motive into the murderer? After all, we know at law the murderer is not a murderer before he kills somebody. However, the law is not exactly foolproof. This is especially true, where people trained and tainted as judges and lawyers sit around and make up new definitions for old words and then make it illegal to question them. 

What if the murderer is not a murderer until some trigger flips in his mind? That is, what if there may be anger, intent, a plan, a weapon and everything else, but the trigger doesn’t flip? In that case, all you have is a Twitter Warrior working on a case of hemorrhoids. 

But something flips, and the idea is a done deal, requiring only the final act.  

At this point, you can argue the weapon does not matter. If the murderer lacks an assault rifle, he may use a plane, a truck, a machete or, I suppose, ricin or radioactive waste. 

The same is true of the victim. Particularly in the case of random, mass murder, it seems as if any victim will do, or any class of victim.  

Similarly, opportunity does not appear to be too closely defined. 

So all we have left is the mind of the murderer. 

We can continue to throw up our hands if we wish, and say, “there is no way to know when somebody is in danger of flipping.”  

But should we? We know already that virtually all of these cases are committed by young males. That’s an item.  

There is an old saying that idle hands are Satan’s workshop. I wonder if it would be constructive to research how busy each random murderer has been, other than his preparations for murder?  

How about envy? Have the random murderers been in despair because “all the good jobs are taken,” “there is nothing left for me,” or “I’ll never find a girl?” The Catholics (not me) say envy is the second deadly sin. I wonder why. 

The first deadly sin is pride. Do the random murderers have an ego problem? I understand the distance between being king of the world and being clinically paranoid is not spacious. The other five Deadlies are anger, laziness, greed, gluttony and lust.  

What do they watch or listen to? My son thought he was Superman when he was three, based solely on having seen the movie and put on a cape. This is expected of a three-year-old. 

I know the media is fastest to pooh-pooh this idea of all, but the same media is a willing propaganda tool in countless other ways. One might ask, “If these young, male minds are not affected by what they are watching, why does the same media use the phrase, ‘copycat’?” You can’t have it both ways. 

Of course, this line of questioning might lead to such ideas as work and responsibility and forcing people that want to eat to work for it, especially if they are unattached young males with a lot of idle time and untested fantasies. They would be shocked to hear the Constitution does not guarantee food stamps, rental assistance or that the taxpayers will be compelled to pay their six-year college edu-vacation loans. 

I am not advocating for mandatory military service or indentured servitude or barring video games or television fantasy problem-solving. I am, however, saying that throwing out the huge, irretrievably polarized media role-playing game over gun ownership as a side issue and focusing the same energy and debate on the murderers’ mind would, at minimum, be a refreshing break. In addition, it might, as with the AKCA’s rejection of new production methods or annual golf games in favor of grabbing a threat by the neck, get action. 

What if a reasoned debate on keeping kids off the street corners, virtual or otherwise, actually stopped the killing? Even once? What if educating young men to be men instead of characters works? It used to. 

So how did we get from Chinese duties to gun duties? I guess the best answer has to do with original writing and independent thought. As I see it, magazines and associations have as much right to think and speak on their own as to parrot some commercial party line, and let the readers, not a few arrogant suppliers, decide. 

Although each issue of Wood Industry US is currently digital only, we have the capacity to bring real research and real business reporting on such topics as labor, costs of compliance, environmental movements, lawyer-generated foolishness, energy and import/export in print form. Your suppliers want to know what you think about that. Print ads cost money. After the crash, the U.S. pretty much lost all its magazines in this field but one. Competition is great, but there has to be an interest on the parts of the suppliers. That interest is in whether you read, notice and respond. 

Homag and Biesse won’t advertise, but their competitors will if the market is there. Talk to them.  

In the alternative, we will continue to do this commentary each month, along with Paul Epp’s design ideas and other news, and your favorite suppliers can advertise here for $500 and get the digital market. If you do e-mail them, add us as a cc: so we know who you are, and so they will know we will call. As the now-defunct Mad magazine proudly displayed on its covers for over 66 years: CHEAP. 

Homag and Biesse will tell you that we write too long and nobody reads past 200 words. I guess it depends on what you’re reading, as you just hit 1,619.