RIP, the profession of journalism.

The worst part of taking a week off from blogging last weekend is that I had a great topic for a post but no oomph to write it. So I'm gonna write it this week, even though it's old news by now. Then I'll put a little bit of new news at the end.

gunaonedesign | Deposit Photos

The day the news broke early this month that the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, had sent his minions to decimate the remaining staff, leaving one of the nation's greatest newspapers a hollowed-out shell, I had a conversation online about it with a good friend. It started me thinking about the history of journalism, and specifically how very short a time it has been a respectable profession. Because it was respectable, for a hundred years or so. Now it's devolving into what it was before the muckrakers helped turn it into the Fourth Estate.

When the movie version of All the President's Men was released in the spring of 1976, I was in my freshman year of college. I'd pretty recently (after spending a semester discovering that I did not have what it took to be a professional musician) declared journalism as my major, and the movie sure made it seem like it had been the right decision. Discovering the grain of a big story, pursuing the facts to the truth, bringing down bad actors in the highest of high places -- that was the sort of thing I could see myself doing, or at least the sort of thing I wanted to be associated with. Now, with 50 years of hindsight, it's clear to me that Watergate was pretty much journalism's pinnacle. And it's been coasting downhill ever since. 

My memory of the journalism history course I took that semester is hazy, but I recall that while the press played a role in the Founding Fathers spreading their views throughout the colonies, journalism ethics weren't yet a thing. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher and sorta-kinda reporter, but he wasn't always honest about when he was fictionalizing details; he reported his own famous experiment involving a kite and a key in the third person, as if somebody else had done it. That sort of thing would never fly today (pardon the pun). 

The profession of journalism began to hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when muckraking reporters dug into corruption in political and corporate institutions of the time. A couple of famous muckrakers come to mind: Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to an insane asylum in New York City to find out how deplorable the conditions there were; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed corruption in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The work of these and other reporters, though often melodramatic, caused enough of a stir that laws were passed to relieve some of the worst conditions.

Alongside these crusaders ran an attempt to set an informal code of ethics for journalists. Among the standards was that journalists should be objective. Everybody's got an opinion, but a journalist's should not be readily discernible from his or her work; a reporter should be fair to all sides. Also, a reporter should never make the story about him or her (which is why Ben Franklin would have gotten into trouble if he'd been writing 150 years later).

That all worked fine, more or less, until the moneyed classes realized they could buy up the papers (and the radio stations and TV stations) and exert pressure on the journalists who worked there to bury stories that would hurt business. Journalistic independence has been eroding ever since.

In a column in Slate published on February 5th, Alex Kirshner talked about Bezos' gutting of the Post as almost inevitable. He says the cause of the Post's death is "that one of the richest people in human history staged a controlled burn to turn it into ash. Bezos wanted the Post to die, because a vigorous, well-resourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his own bottom line." Kirshner makes the point that the paper's net worth is little more than a rounding error in Bezos' vast wealth, and reporting that angers the Trump administration can have a big impact on Bezos' other companies, particularly when we're talking about federal contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin: "Bezos' external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside."

We can see a similar thing happening at CBS, the former home of famed journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, where the new owner's attempts to placate Trump prompted Anderson Cooper to resign from his 60 Minutes gig just this week.

Journalism has been descending toward infotainment for decades, but real reporting has always coexisted with the fluffy stuff. I assumed it always would. Now I begin to think it won't. 

RIP, the profession of journalism, 1900-2026. It's been a good run. 

***

This weekend, Trump made a cockamamie post on his social media outlet that the US was sending a "hospital boat" to Greenland to provide medical care to Greenlanders. I could not make heads or tails of his rambling until I did a little research. It looks like what set him off was a humanitarian incident in which a sailor aboard a US Navy submarine took ill while the boat was off the coast of Greenland and was airlifted to a hospital in Nuuk for treatment. Greenland reportedly has six hospitals for its population of fewer than 60,000 people and, like the rest of the civilized world, has free, universal healthcare. So the prime minister of Greenland says they don't need our help. Besides, both of our hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, are in drydock for repairs, so neither one of them will be steaming toward Greenland any time soon.

Trump also mentioned the governor of Louisiana, who I guess he promoted to "special envoy" to Greenland back in December to help negotiate whatever Trump thinks he can get out of Greenland's government, which is not going to be ownership of the island. Or a Nobel Peace Prize, either.

The whole thing is a fantasy from Trump's fevered brain. But what pissed me off -- and what every US sailor should also be pissed off about -- is that the commander-in-chief of our military does not know the difference between a ship and a boat. I know the difference because a) I was married to a sailor, and b) I covered the Sixth Fleet when I worked as a reporter in Norfolk, VA. A boat is small enough to fit on a ship. A submarine is a boat; our floating hospitals are ships.

If he's too far gone to understand that, what business does he have running the country?

***

These moments of bloggy sadness and disgust have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Of course the "hospital boat" thing is a distraction from the Epstein files. Here's hoping the fallout from that investigation brings the whole facade tumbling down sooner rather than later.

Taking a week off.

I fully intended to blog every Sunday during this session. And I have -- so far. But then this weekend happened. I was originally scheduled to work eleven hours over two days, seven hours yesterday and four today. But it turned into 14 hours over the two days, 7.5 yesterday and 6.5 today, following a Friday on which our department handled 51 rush documents.

Or so I was told. I maintained the total was closer to 857 rushes.

Anyway, in short, this final weekend of session has kicked my ass. 

This graphic is from a YouTube video that started making the rounds in 2003. The dialogue naturally came up this week at work.

You can watch the whole cartoon here. 

It turns out that the guy who made that video in 2003 made a sequel in 2018. There's an article about it here where you can watch the new(ish) video. Sadly, it's still relevant. Maybe even more so now.

Anyway, yes, I am le tired, and I will have a nap -- after noon on Thursday. But next weekend, I'll be back here, doing my regular thing. See y'all then.

***

These moments of less-than-animated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there!

To sleep (an extra 15 minutes at least).

I know most of y'all are watching the big sportsball thing tonight. Since I don't care about either team (if I followed football at all, I'd root for the Broncos) or the commercials, I'm going to do a little personal whining tonight.

We are a titch over halfway through this year's legislative session here in New Mexico (it's a 30-day session and ends on the 19th at noon). This year I've drawn the short straw and have been working the 7:30 am-4:30 pm shift during the week (the hours are a little different on the weekends). This is when my alarm has been going off: 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

All I can say is: Ugh (yawn).

***

I have been a night owl for as long as I can remember. All those novels I churned out? Most of the time, I was writing them into the wee hours. (My mother said when I was a tiny child, I would wake up with the birds, but I think she was lying.) 

Of course, as a productive member of society (aka a cog in the machine of commerce), I have worked all kinds of crazy shifts, necessitating a sleep schedule all over the clock. For example, the most desirable shift in radio is morning drive time, which means you have to be on the air, sounding coherent, at 6:00 am. And that means you have to be there earlier than that to call the cop shops for any news overnight and write your first newscast. For my first job in radio, I was still living with my parents, driving 35 miles each way to the radio station. I started working there in January. In northern Indiana. Sometimes I followed the snowplows down US 35, and sometimes they followed me.

The weirdest shift I ever had was probably when I wrote for the morning show for the Fox TV affiliate in DC; I had to be in at midnight and left work around 8:00 am or 9:00 am (which was No Fun with Small Children -- try finding a babysitter to come and sleep at your house, just in case the place starts burning down or something).

My favorite shift was always 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. I could sleep in 'til 8 or 8:30, get in a full workday, and have a life after I got off work.

Then I made the move to the legal world. The big law firm had a pretty sweet policy for staff: You could name your own start time (within a certain window), as long as the lawyers you supported were cool with it. The big-picture reason was to help with DC's legendary traffic congestion, but it was helpful for staff, too. When the girls were in school, I started earlier; when they went away to college, I switched to 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. When we lived in Potomac Yard, I could sleep 'til 7:00 am, have breakfast at home, and still get to work on time.

Then I retired, and my schedule was my own... until I started working for the legislature.

During the interim, we work 8:00 am to 5:00 pm; the 6:15 am alarm for that is bad enough when my body clock is telling me to stay up past midnight. But for this session, I'm working the dreaded 7:30 am shift.

For weeks, maybe months, I've been dozing off in the afternoons and falling asleep in front of the TV in the evenings. I thought maybe it was sleep apnea or something worse. Then one evening recently, I crashed. Just could not keep my eyes open any longer. Went to bed at 8-ish and slept almost ten hours. The next day I wasn't sleepy at all.

I wasn't sick. I was sleep-deprived.

Well, fuck.

So now I'm making a concerted effort to get in bed before 10, so that when the 5:45 am alarm goes off, it's not too painful to get up right away. And I guess when session is over, I'll have to give up my post-midnight lifestyle. Damn it.

Someday I will be retired again. I am looking forward to it.

***

These moments of early-to-bed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Less than two weeks to go...

It's Brigid's Day; and how kids learn racism.

Several years' worth of Brigid's crosses. 
Lynne Cantwell | 2025

Blessed Imbolc! Today is the first day of spring in Ireland, and it's one of those Pagan sabbats where Americans wonder why folks in the UK are rushing the seasons. Because it's still definitely winter here, no matter what that Pennsylvania groundhog will say tomorrow; my daughters still haven't finished digging their car out from under the freakish ice storm that DC experienced last week. But the daylight hours are perceptibly lengthening, and within a few weeks, spring will be here for us, too.

Imbolc is the day to celebrate Brigid, the Irish goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft. (It's also a day to honor the Christian saint of the same name, but I'm talking about Paganism here.) I saw a post on Facebook over the past couple of days in which the author tried to argue that Brigid was also a goddess of conflict. Don't bother asking Google's A.I. -- you'll get the usual conflation of Brigid the Irish goddess with both St. Brigid and Brigantia, a goddess of Celtic Britain who's also linked to Boudica, a queen of Icenic tribe who managed to hold off the Romans for a while in CE 61 or so. Maybe that's where the idea originates of a link between Brigid and conflict.

But Brigid is not the Morrigan. Hers is instead the gentler art of conflict resolution -- of poetry and healing, and of lamenting the dead (she's credited with inventing keening). If She carries a hammer, it's because She uses it at Her forge. Making weaponry is not the same as wielding it. And iron can be shaped into more than just swords.

That's my experience of it, anyway.

***

I guess you could say that conflict is a theme of both halves of this post.

Earlier today, I read a remembrance by someone who's about my age. She said that when she was in elementary school, she made friends with another girl and invited her home one day -- and her mother ordered the friend to leave, then beat the crap out of the daughter because the friend was Black and she'd brought her into their house and don't ever do that again.

Which reminded me of a similar incident in my own childhood. Although mine was, thankfully, less violent.

This would have been in the mid to late '60s. Our neighborhood was white, but there were some houses along the railroad tracks where some Black families lived. Of course we all went to school together (and our neighborhood got shifted from one elementary school to another, depending on which school needed more Black kids that year, but I digress). I knew the kids by sight -- we all rode the same bus, after all -- although I didn't hang around with them. 

One day, one of the little Black girls ventured into our neighborhood. We ended up playing together in my yard, and at one point we decided to go inside. And my mother threw a fit. She told the girl to leave and told me I was never to bring any Black kids home again, ever.

Well, she didn't use the word "Black". This was the '60s, after all.

Anyway, the girl was nice, and I didn't understand what the color of her skin had to do with anything. I was too young then to give voice to my thoughts, and of course I was a good girl and obeyed my parents. But my belief that we are all human, and therefore worthy of respect, may have been born that day.

The hell of it is that my father had built our house with help from my uncle John, who was a carpenter, and Mr. Farmer, a Black man who lived in one of those houses along the railroad tracks.

A Black man was good enough to build our house, but a little Black girl couldn't be allowed inside to play? How crazy is that?

***

Later on, when my own kids went to school and learned about Black History Month, they practically yelled at me: "Why didn't you tell us any of this?"

What, that Black folks were different from white folks? It never occurred to me. When I was a kid, I'd learned that "different" meant bad. I thought the idea was to treat everybody the same, because we are all the same. We're all human beings. 

That's what equality means to me still. I want to learn about our differences, sure, but I want to celebrate them. I want to honor everyone's stories and all the heroes from every culture. I want us all to be proud of each other.

Pie in the sky? Maybe so. But we can't get there if we don't dream it first.

***

These moments of bloggy conflict resolution have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Blessed Imbolc and happy Black History Month, too.