History: Still Repeating After All These Years

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As soon as I saw that Garrett Graff had written an oral history of the Bear Stearns collapse, I bookmarked the Washington Post page, figuring it’d be a great thing to read when I got some time. Then I forgot about it for a few days—until the markets imploded earlier this week.

Graff has a way of eliciting you-are-there quotes, even about events that happened seventeen years ago. And sure enough, seeing how the titans of Wall Street and Washington watched as the financial system seemed to be crumbling is a sobering exercise. Reading it while our own economic foundations are shaking makes it doubly so. (Graff used the same techniques for his masterpiece about 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky.)

“Nobody knew where this was going and how bad it could get,” said Samuel Molinaro, the Bear Stearns CFO. He was right then, and it feels right now.

A couple of fine pieces out of Pennsylvania:

• Most of us think of Social Security as a program for retirees. But it also pays benefits to children—including those whose parents have died or become disabled. That money is supposed to be used to support the children while they’re growing up, or provide a nest egg when they turn eighteen. But for Pennsylvania kids in foster care, counties often take the money without telling the kids or their advocates. Spotlight PA reporters Julie Christie and Steve Volk dug through records and found that at least 1,300 children have had their benefits used this way, amounting to more than $15 million. Many of those counties couldn’t account for how the funds had been used, or prove that it actually benefited the kids who needed it. The most egregious appears to be Philadelphia, where officials “could not show how many children it collects money for or how it spends those funds.”
  
• A county commissioner in central Pennsylvania showed up late for a meeting recently. Usually that’s not a big deal, and his excuse was that he’d been at a flag-planting event. But people who saw him in the elevator before the meeting told PennLive that he was “slumped over and struggling to put on a belt.” After the meeting, PennLive reporters headed to the parking garage and noticed that the commissioner’s county-owned Ford Explorer was dented and scratched, and a chunk of its fender was on the ground. Good story, but what happened shortly thereafter was the maraschino on the sundae. Reporter Juliette Rihl went back to the county garage for another look. A security guard blocked her passage, claiming it now was “not a public place.” Rihl was persistent, even when a “chief of operations” official arrived to warn Rihl that this was now labeled an “infrastructure area.” Fortunately, Rihl’s colleague Megan Lavey-Heaton was there to capture the action. Their one-minute video is worth your time. And so is Rihl’s follow-up piece, on the many accidents this commissioner seems to get into.

Last weekend, more than a thousand protests popped up across the US, fueled by people angry about Trump’s economic, legal, and immigration moves. One of those occurred in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, where hundreds showed up. Local TV stations covered it closely, but the Dallas Morning News was nowhere to be found. There’s your Dart.

Managing editor Amy Hollyfield went on Facebook and apologized for the oversight. “We didn’t realize the protest was going on. I regret this is the answer because that’s a big miss for us.” When I asked her about that later, she told me that “this has prompted a stark examination in our newsroom about newsgathering, communication, and making it easier for people to send us news tips.” So Hollyfield gets a few Laurel feathers here for transparency, and for using this as a lever to get her newsroom more engaged.

News organizations have become especially cognizant of the need to find and track common voters’ sentiments ever since the surprise 2016 election. So perhaps it’s a noble endeavor to find and regularly circle back to people who represent the swath of public opinion, especially as we all tire of diner interviews.

Last week, the New York Times ran a panel of seven voters that gave the impression that most people welcome, or at least are willing to give a lot of credence to, Trump’s tariff plans. “Nobody is panicking,” said one man. “It’s a good idea to try,” said another.

But of these citizens, five voted for Trump, while just one voted for Kamala Harris, even though she won nearly half the popular vote. (The seventh voted for Jill Stein.)

Maybe we should just leave the vox pops to The Onion’s American Voices Q&As.

CNN bills Harry Enten as its “chief data analyst,” but on Tuesday he went from crunching numbers to gushing platitudes.

Enten started with this straw man: “I think there was this concern among some folks that Donald Trump would come in for a second term and kind of be a lame duck.” (Hmm, do you recall many Trump supporters, or opponents, saying he would twiddle his thumbs for four years?)

And then Enten, without even a trace of a Pyongyang accent, gushed that Trump “ain’t no lame duck. If anything he’s a soaring eagle.”

Enten followed that with the question that was likely on many viewers’ minds: “What am I talkin’ about here?”

It turns out he was talkin’ about Trump’s barrage of executive orders since Inauguration Day: “He’s already signed 111 so far. That is the MOST at this point in a presidency in at least 100 years!”

But here’s the thing about executive orders. Outside of taking a mulligan on the fourteenth hole, they’re the easiest thing for Trump (or any president) to do. Some of these orders are consequential; some are meaningless. But this isn’t like getting an ambitious piece of legislation through Congress, or negotiating a treaty to end a war. 

We know that CNN—the home of many top-notch journalists—is trying to climb out of its ratings slump. We hope it succeeds with something better than this.

Hat tips to Aaron Rupar and Matt Dempsey. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here.

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