Russia coup exposed a weak U.S. media | Will Bunch Newsletter

Just like Airplane!’s Steve McCroskey picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue, I probably picked the wrong month to a) focus on my longform story about Atlanta’s Cop City and b) take a roughly two-week vacation, starting now. From mascots crossing the quickly reopened I-95 to mutineers crossing Russia’s main interstates, it’s been quite a summer solstice. Pray for peace until my next newsletter, July 11.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly at inquirer.com/bunch, because there’s always an insurrection somewhere, it seems.

📮 My June 13 question about a go-to summer getaway for Philadelphians elicited a range of responses, including Brigantine down the Jersey Shore (Bill Dreitlein), Duck, N.C. (Brian Murphy), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s fabulous Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania (Jo Parker). The most intriguing was John Finnegan’s suggestion of Knoebel’s Amusement Resort in Elysburg, Pa. “Always great to get up to that mountain and spend the day exploring that park!,” he enthused. “Plus, just pay as you go rides!!” OK, you’ve convinced me!

This week’s question: In conjunction with a future column I’m planning on President Joe Biden — old age, or ageism? — I was wondering: Would you favor an upper age limit for the presidency? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

Not long after dinner time here on the Eastern Seaboard last Friday night, Americans — at least the kind of Americans who spend their weekend on social media instead of going out and having fun — started to see that something was up on the other side of the world in Russia.

The leader of mercenary forces fighting for Russia inside Ukraine, the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin, had posted a statement blaming the Russian military for an attack on his troops that day, called the generals in Moscow who’d been sponsoring him “evil,” and vowed to lead 25,000 of his troops across the border into Vladimir Putin’s Russia in a “march for justice.”

It sounded like an insurrection, or a coup — but in those frantic early hours it was difficult to trust, let alone verify, anything. Several Twitter users in Moscow posted shocking videos of tanks and other military vehicles rolling to protect the Kremlin. The column of Wagner troops was actually reported heading for the southern city of Rostov — but the early online pictures made it unclear who was actually in control. Some sketchy reports — like one suggesting a military base near Moscow was ablaze — came and then disappeared.

It wasn’t clear if this was a real threat to the power of one of the world’s worst dictators in Putin — one with nuclear weapons, no less — or an overblown hoax. For clarity, most turned quickly on their favorite cable TV news network, assuming the mainstream media would be all over the story.

But at 8 p.m. Friday night, finding TV news coverage was still like looking for a needle in a haystack. In 2023, it seems, changing the prearranged narrative on cable is a lot like turning around an aircraft carrier. On CNN, that was all Titanic sub, all the time — the middle-of-the-road network’s dream story, with mystery, wealth, death, and no politics to offend anyone, much like that lost Malaysian jet a decade ago. MSNBC had a short report on Russia, but the liberal-leaning channel quickly returned to its O.J. Simpson of the 2020s — Donald Trump’s legal woes. Forget Fox News: It would probably take World War III to consider bumping Hunter Biden.

As midnight approached, the cable networks finally pivoted to Russia, albeit mostly with talking-head experts here at home as TV scrambled to get any boots on the ground overseas. Still, the episode posed the question: If we’ve been living in an Information Age since the last third of the 20th century, why does it feel like information is actually harder to come by, not easier? Can we depend on our media for the stories that actually matter?

“This situation in Russia makes it that much more noticeable the dearth of foreign affairs/international reporting here in the States,” Jemele Hill, the former ESPN host who now writes for The Atlantic, posted on Twitter. “Lot of media outlets either eliminated or seriously downsized their foreign desks, which is why a lot of Americans right now aren’t able to fully grasp what’s happening.”

Two worlds collided here — one decades in the making, the other from recent months.

“Networks Cutting Back on Foreign Coverage” blared a headline from the New York Times ... in June 1992. Actually, international reporting had begun to decline even before that; ABC closed its Moscow bureau in the 1980s, and by the 21st century, generally the major TV networks had fewer than half the number of foreign bureaus they’d had during the Cold War. Today, newsroom profits ebb and flow, but last year the Hollywood Reporter said a new wave of cuts had producers telling foreign reporters to travel less and report more stories over Zoom.

Boosters of internet-age communication argue that the rise of social-media sites like Twitter means that citizen journalism can not only replace the gaps in mainstream media, but maybe even improve on it. And some tweets from Russian cities like Rostov were indeed helpful, and even ahead of the curve, in tracking the movement of Prigozhin’s mercenaries.

But that’s been downgraded by the decision by Twitter’s newish owner Elon Musk to trash the old system of blue-check verification — which certified certain users based on their actual resume and expertise — and replace it with a system where any yahoo willing to pay Team Musk $8 a month can get that once-coveted blue check. The change makes it a lot harder for people thirsting for real-time information about a crisis like the one in Russia to know if they’re hearing from a professor in European history, a seasoned reporter — or just someone willing to make mischief for eight bucks.

“It is so hard to follow news on Twitter now and I genuinely want to know what’s happening in Moscow,” tweeted Lara Cohen, a former top executive with the site, pre-Musk. “Taking away badges from journalists the all time stupidest decision of all time.”

The problem is that these dangerous, intersecting trend lines — the decline of traditional reporting and the increased ease of online disinformation — pose risks beyond our understanding of Russia. Here at home, the 2024 presidential election is already underway, and it looks like the power of unchecked false claims in the race is going to make 2016′s wild, Trump-fried contest look like the sober Lincoln-Douglas debates.

One especially pernicious early development is the rise of Robert Kennedy Jr. as a Democratic primary challenger to President Biden, in a campaign where demonstrably false information — a debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, lies about his dealings with prominent journalists — isn’t a bug but a main feature. And the bottom feeders of the new disinformation economy — like Musk, or the popular podcaster Joe Rogan — are boosting RFK Jr., maybe for clicks or maybe to take down Biden. They see Biden’s steady first term as a relic of the 20th century — much like foreign correspondents, or facts. God help us.

Question: My question re Russia is “huh?”. Seriously, has anyone made sense of what went down over the weekend? — (Via @dragool6 on Twitter)

Answer: I have the same question, and general sense of bewilderment over what happened this weekend on the road from Rostov to Moscow, and why an insurrection ended as quickly as it started. There is so much that remains so mysterious about the event — including Vladimir Putin’s whereabouts during the critical hours, and more recently about plot leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s slow journey to Minsk — that I’d be willing to entertain the conspiracy theory that it was all staged. Except why would Putin stage an event that made this dictator look so weak? I suspect we’ll look back on this not as the end of Putin, but a key stop on the road to the end, in a vast land that can’t abide democracy yet can’t find any other way to manage its affairs.

It was the best of Josh, it was the worst of Josh. Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, has been on the job for less than six months, and he’s mostly getting rave reviews to the point where at least local folks are wondering if he’s on a trajectory toward the 2028 presidential race. That’s spiked with the state’s handling of the I-95 overpass collapse in Northeast Philadelphia, where forecasts of even a temporary fix for the Northeast Corridor’s main interstate went from months to weeks to days, thanks to some deft emergency management, clever engineering, and blue-collar grit. The Chinese word for crisis is said to contain the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” The governor clearly grabbed for the latter.

Shapiro’s underlying messages were powerful ones. From his first act as governor, which removed the college-degree requirement for many state jobs, the pol from Montgomery County has strived to repair the Democrats’ relationship with the working-class folks whose labors he celebrated on I-95. Perhaps more importantly, Shapiro used the I-95 disaster to make the case that government can work and do big things for the people. His stunning success with that mission makes the blind spots of Shapiro’s administration even more baffling.

While the press and public were fixated on I-95, Shapiro stunned education advocates when his administration endorsed a school-voucher program known as “Lifeline Scholarships,” in which Pennsylvania for the first time would offer money for parents in low-performing districts for their children to attend private schools. It’s not clear exactly how much Harrisburg would allot for this — although the idea may have enough bipartisan support, especially from Republicans, to pass — and Shapiro insists it won’t take away from public-school dollars. But critics don’t believe that and wonder why the Democratic governor isn’t more focused on implementing the landmark court decision for better funded, more egalitarian public schools. “Funding private schools will not move the Commonwealth a single dollar closer to its constitutional mandate,” posted Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center.

The irony is here is that in the 1950s, there were two things that best highlighted what a government that cares about the middle class can do: The construction of America’s interstates, including I-95, and our well-funded and thriving public schools. Both have suffered since from neglect. Just imagine if the governor took the dynamism he brought to the highway reconstruction as a public good and applied it to rebuilding our schools — including the estimated $9 billion that’s needed to fix Philadelphia’s crumbling, asbestos-plagued buildings. Heck, if Josh Shapiro could show that a caring government can work for lower-income students the way it works for middle-class motorists, even a lefty like me might jump on the 2028 campaign bandwagon.

I’m pretty sure that in 2012, I didn’t know or didn’t use the term “woke,” either seriously or ironically. But if you look back at my writings from the early 2010s, you can see a lifelong privileged white dude becoming more aware of the abuses of an ascendant U.S. police state — even before the mass awakening that occurred in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. On this date 11 years ago, I blogged for the first time about “stop-and-frisk” policing, praising an investigation of the practice in New York City written by my good friend Wendy Ruderman for the Times.

I wrote: “The events, unfortunate and otherwise, of Occupy Wall Street last fall were a real eye-opener for me in terms of how far the pendulum on civil liberties has swung in the wrong direction since the turmoil of the 1960s, fueled by the seemingly unconnected accelerant of 9/11.” Please read my June 27, 2012 post, with a headline that epitomizes the blogging era: “Yo! Hold it. Hold it. You got some ID? What are you doing here? I need to see some ID to verify that you live here.”