Your To Do List
Keeping the Darkness at Bay
It is time to stop writing letters to your members of Congress. No one there is going to change their position.
The first order of business must be reversing the anti-Biden bias in the liberal-leaning media. As Robert Hubbell noted, even the formerly venerable Washington Post has descended into incredibly shoddy reporting. 12 Please read Hubbell’s post in its entirety before you read the WaPo article.
https://roberthubbell.substack.com/p/brief-post-thanksgiving-update
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/22/biden-ceasefire-youth-voters-2024/
The Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”3 Here is a bit of history about how it came to be in 2017.
Woodward, who has used the phrase in reference to President Nixon for years, said he didn’t coin it; he read it some years earlier in a judicial opinion in a First Amendment case. He couldn’t recall the specifics of the case or the name of the judge who wrote the opinion.
“It goes way back,” he said. “It’s definitely not directed at Trump. It’s about the dangers of secrecy in government, which is what I worry about most. The judge who said it got it right.”
Woodward's source appears to be Judge Damon J. Keith, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, who ruled in a pre-Watergate era case that the government couldn't wiretap individuals without a warrant. In his decision, Keith apparently coined a variation on The Post's motto, writing that "Democracy dies in the dark."The goal of the paper’s slogan, the document said, would be to communicate that The Post “has a long-standing reputation for providing news and information with unparalleled analysis and insight. . . . Our position must be conveyed ‘disruptively’ so we can shake consumers out of their news-as-commodity mindset.”
It added that any slogan “must be memorable and may be slightly uncomfortable for us at first.” It also had to be “lofty, positive [and] not bossy” and pithy enough to fit on a T-shirt.The group brainstormed more than 500 would-be slogans. The choices ranged from the heroic (“Dauntless Defenders of the Truth”) to the clunky (“American democracy lives down the street. No one keeps closer watch.”) to the Zen-like (“Yes. Know.”).
The group ultimately ended up where it started — with “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Which means that the slogan, which will be added to print copies of the paper next week, could be among the most famous four words that Woodward has ever contributed to The Post. In time, the phrase might even rival "All the President's Men," the memorable title of the bestseller Woodward wrote with Carl Bernstein about Nixon's fall.
“Well,” Woodward said, “it’s better than ‘Follow the money,’ ” the famous movie line that Woodward’s character got from his anonymous Watergate source, Deep Throat.
I believe that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But it is absolutely clear to me that darkness is starting to steal over even the more traditionally unbiased and left-leaning media. I believe that a free, accurate press is an absolute requirement for a functioning democracy. The WaPo article is just the latest and particularly egregious example of bias and invalid interpretation. This is the kind of stuff that any decent editor would have rejected out of hand.
It’s time for us everyday people to start writing “letters to the editor” to every news outlet we subscribe to every time we see biased reportage like this. Many of the responses I read on the substacks I subscribe to are well-written, well-researched, thoughtful, and nuanced. They can be a powerful force, but they need to reach a broader audience.
Instead of writing long responses to your favorite substack writer, including me, write your response as a letter to the editor first, and then copy it as a response to the substack.
I will post my letter to the New York Times later today after I do some more work on my “follow the money” deep dive on Trump’s campaign financing.
Enjoy your leftovers!
Thank you, Georgia. I agree a wad of letters to the editor from different subscribers, may do the trick
Letters to your Congressperson and Senators usually get a form letter reply. State representative even less because they don’t have the staff. I’ve once had one letter published in a national magazine.