American readers at home ©ludovic balland low 7

Philadelphia September 11—16, 2016

Dr. Barry Vacker Associate Professor

What is the earliest news you remember?

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Dr. Barry Vacker

[The Google News reader] is a catalog of the antics of the human species.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

P. 48

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

Philip Brandt

That’s me, word for word; he must have tape-recorded everything I said, without my permission.

BUSINESS LAWYER

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

Christopher DiGeorge

P. 53

They used to call my dad Google before Google existed.

REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER

The Apollo moon landings.

Do you remember a headline?

Something like “Man Walks on Moon.” There was a lot of awe and the feeling that something spectacular had happened; that it wasn’t just an American thing, that it was a human event that I think we’re still coming to grips with.

How old were you at the time?

I guess I would’ve been six or seven.

Did you believe the news?

Well, I believed the event happened.

I don’t think they faked it. I know that the astronauts left mirrors on the moon and that observatories bounce lasers off of them. I also know the Russians tracked the lunar modules that went up there, and they picked up the television signals coming back, so if it was fake, the Russians would’ve exposed the United States.

What news story did you discuss with your students yesterday?

I didn’t discuss a news story with the students yesterday. I think that we were talking about the concept of the idea of the spectacle, as in Guy Debord and the society of the spectacle: the idea that the electronic screen has converted our culture into a society in the endless pursuit of spectacular events for daily life. I think if we mentioned anything about the news, it might have been the presidential elections and how the presidential elections reflect a culture of television.

Our reality now imitates media, not the other way around.

What’s your favorite source of news?

The Google News reader. [It’s] a catalog of the antics of the human species as it tries to find meaning in a universe in which it’s rendered insignificant. We’re not in a postmodern culture; we’re really in a postApollo culture. We went out to the moon, and looked back at Earth, and saw that we were a planet floating in this vast cosmic void.

I think that the effect of having instant access and screens everywhere is retribalization as a counter to globalization. In other words, satellites have gone around the planet, and we’ve globalized our entire technological structure, but within that we’ve gone more tribal—in response to the fact that we’re not sitting out there as the Hubble Space Telescope works across a hundred billion layers of space and time with no apparent significance for human existence.

What would you cover as a journalist of the future?

If I was a journalist of the future, and had a utopian, planetary view, the masthead on the newspaper would be a picture of earth in space. It would not be a local name, it would be a planetary name.

I really believe that we have to get outside of our nationalist and tribal and gender and sexist prejudices to really understand the possibility of building a planetary civilization that our technology and sciences are 45

Philadelphia September 11—16, 2016

Dr. Barry Vacker Associate Professor

What is the earliest news you remember?

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Dr. Barry Vacker

[The Google News reader] is a catalog of the antics of the human species.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

P. 48

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

Philip Brandt

That’s me, word for word; he must have tape-recorded everything I said, without my permission.

BUSINESS LAWYER

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

Christopher DiGeorge

P. 53

They used to call my dad Google before Google existed.

REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER

The Apollo moon landings.

Do you remember a headline?

Something like “Man Walks on Moon.” There was a lot of awe and the feeling that something spectacular had happened; that it wasn’t just an American thing, that it was a human event that I think we’re still coming to grips with.

How old were you at the time?

I guess I would’ve been six or seven.

Did you believe the news?

Well, I believed the event happened.

I don’t think they faked it. I know that the astronauts left mirrors on the moon and that observatories bounce lasers off of them. I also know the Russians tracked the lunar modules that went up there, and they picked up the television signals coming back, so if it was fake, the Russians would’ve exposed the United States.

What news story did you discuss with your students yesterday?

I didn’t discuss a news story with the students yesterday. I think that we were talking about the concept of the idea of the spectacle, as in Guy Debord and the society of the spectacle: the idea that the electronic screen has converted our culture into a society in the endless pursuit of spectacular events for daily life. I think if we mentioned anything about the news, it might have been the presidential elections and how the presidential elections reflect a culture of television.

Our reality now imitates media, not the other way around.

What’s your favorite source of news?

The Google News reader. [It’s] a catalog of the antics of the human species as it tries to find meaning in a universe in which it’s rendered insignificant. We’re not in a postmodern culture; we’re really in a postApollo culture. We went out to the moon, and looked back at Earth, and saw that we were a planet floating in this vast cosmic void.

I think that the effect of having instant access and screens everywhere is retribalization as a counter to globalization. In other words, satellites have gone around the planet, and we’ve globalized our entire technological structure, but within that we’ve gone more tribal—in response to the fact that we’re not sitting out there as the Hubble Space Telescope works across a hundred billion layers of space and time with no apparent significance for human existence.

What would you cover as a journalist of the future?

If I was a journalist of the future, and had a utopian, planetary view, the masthead on the newspaper would be a picture of earth in space. It would not be a local name, it would be a planetary name.

I really believe that we have to get outside of our nationalist and tribal and gender and sexist prejudices to really understand the possibility of building a planetary civilization that our technology and sciences are 45

To Santa Fe

Anita D. served as White House Communications Director under President Obama and acted as his senior adviser during presidential campaigns.

286

ANITA DUNN

WASHINGTON DC

NOVEMBER 4—13, 2016

To Santa Fe

Anita D. served as White House Communications Director under President Obama and acted as his senior adviser during presidential campaigns.

286

ANITA DUNN

WASHINGTON DC

NOVEMBER 4—13, 2016

that we have, they’re able to work with US reporters or a reporter out in Europe, and get the information out that way, and still stay alive. That has actually happened. We found in our research that that’s a strategy that reporters in Mexico are using to get information out and still stay alive. The possibilities are really unprecedented right now.

Without putting anyone at risk, can you give an example of how that works?

Sure. Let’s say a journalist is working on the border covering a crime or the deaths of several people in a certain area. They can’t report the information because the people who control the media are not necessarily the people who own the media. They’re coming from outside and telling the editors what they can and can’t publish. But the editors or the writers of the reports can send information across the border and it’s published in a US media outlet. Then the newspaper in Mexico can publish that information attributing it to the US media outlet.

Fake news is nothing compared to what we’re going to have to deal with in the future.

How do you see us consuming the news in the future?

It’d be like a chip underneath our skin. It’ll just flash what we want to read.

Like a hologram?

Yeah! It’ll just be a hologram. Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report, where you press a button and the entire hologram will come up? That’s the way we’ll be consuming news. Or we won’t even have to see anything.

It’ll just be like a little chip underneath our skin and it’ll just go into our brainwaves.

What will the conversation about media ethics be in that same world?

I want to say there will still be ethics.

The ethical questions that we will have to deal with in the next fifty to a hundred years with respect to news and technology are going to be what we’re dealing with now. In Facebook, fake news is nothing compared to what we’re going to have to deal with in the future. We’re going to really need a lot of smart people in the news industry and people critical of the news. Now it’s: “How do we tell if a photograph has been Photoshopped?” But in the future it’s going to be much more complex.

We don’t even know the issues that we’re going to be dealing with.The technology hasn’t been invented yet.

Just thinking about how we tell if something’s been Photoshopped.

From a journalistic perspective, we need to know if that photograph is from a different part of the world, how it has been altered, if at all. If this information is now in a hologram, maybe it’s the same [ethical] question with an image to make it into a hologram. Do we have to alter it a certain way? As journalists, we’re going to stay as fair as we can to the story and be as accurate as possible.

376

Axel Holm Businessman

Do you see a point where language barriers will no longer be an issue in news reported in other languages?

It’s interesting. We went from imagery, as early humans, to a text-based society and now we’re moving back to a more image-based society. If we’re becoming a more graphic and more image-based global society, translation and text will not be as important.

But still, they’ll be other ethical questions. How are we presenting those images and what images are selected? Why is it that we show an entire body of somebody who could be identified in Afghanistan—who has been obviously killed in some sort of traumatic way—on the news or in the newspaper but we would never do that with a victim of a car accident in this country? We will still have to deal with those issues of how we’re portraying different people from far away lands and how we’re manipulating images.

I don’t think we need to fear the ideas so much as . . . the lack of ideas.

The absence. That’s what’s coming.

Will there be a point where active news and breaking news will be covered through the lens of history?

What did you do on election night?

Technology will help reporters and journalists cover subjects and be able to put them into a historical context much more readily than we can do now. Electronic communications, digital communications, and digital archives increase the possibilities and potential for putting subjects into historical context; that they didn’t just happen yesterday and are part of a longer process. As global citizens, if we understand that, we can make better informed decisions. Reliable news is supposed to help us understand the world.

I was asked by some friends go to an American hotel to watch the election returns. We’ve got a twenty-four-hour news cycle. You hear the same story over and over again. You’re waiting there with bated breath for some new change. You reach the point where you don’t care whether it’s good or bad, you don’t want to hear that same clip over and over and over again.

I thought, election night, that’s the night to do it. I have no cable at home.

I have Internet though so I’m not completely without. I sat down with a group, they were all Democrats and I’m a true red Republican but that doesn’t mean anything either. I began seeing these numbers. They were all chattering, eating hors d’œuvres, ordering drinks. I had a second scotch and began looking at the numbers.

They were very small numbers. Five percent. Six percent. I said, “Hillary’s going to lose.” And, “Ohh, how can you say that, what would make you say that?” “This thing is going down, it’s going south,” I said.

My instincts were formed when I was six years old and Harry Truman beat Tom Dewey. It was 1948. My father bought the newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, in the morning.

Truman had won and my mother saw it, flew into tears, ran into the bathroom, and cried. I knew that this presidential election thing had something to do with my family because it clearly had a very major effect on my mother.

That concerned me. She said, “Those goddamn Democrats!” For years that was one word [where] I was beginning to sense that there was some difference. I was six.

When you’re six and you’re looking wide-eyed at your parents, getting a feel for their reaction, it has an impact.

We had one radio station and there was no television. It all came from the newspaper. It was very clear that a change had taken place. I remember all of those early elections, and then in 1952, we had a very different situation. Dwight Eisenhower had accepted. I was ten. There was another major news event when Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur and the Korean War broke out in June of 1950. He had to be fired between January and July of 1951. My parents were furious. They thought that Truman was completely out of line. He was not, as it turns out.

What’s the best thing that can happen to news in the next five years?

That more people consume it and not just one outlet. It’s just an interesting time. I talked a lot about negative things that are going on and and the negative processes in place. There’s also great potential for great things to happen. We just need to be vigilant and try to create some of those opportunities. The Border Journalism Network is one of those things.

There’s ProPublica. There’s a lot of good things happening. It’s not all doom and gloom.

Do you ever dream about the news?

Yes, nightmares. I dream about having a better news landscape in the future. One of the things about being a journalism professor is that I see the potential in some of my students who are really inspired to do a better job.

They’re very critical too of what the landscape looks like. To me, it’s very rewarding and inspiring to see how they want to change things. I think they will.

Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante is assistant professor in the School of Journalism, and an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, where she received her PhD in history. Her research interests include the history of news media in Mexico, Brazil, and the US-Mexico borderlands. Prior to entering the academy, she reported and produced commercial and public television for over sixteen years, covering politics and the US-Mexico border.

Age: 51 Resident of Tucson for: Twenty-two years Daily news consumption: N/A Media used regularly: The New York Times, LA Times, Vice, NPR, and NPR podcasts, the Guardian, El País, newspapers in Mexico City, La Jornada, Reforma

DR. CELESTE GONZÁLEZ

TUCSON

NOVEMBER 20—25, 2016

The way it’s portrayed in the film, Truman asked General George Marshall, who the leading military figure [at the time] really was. We’ve probably had three in American history: George Washington, General “Blackjack” Pershing, and George Marshall.

Marshall won World War II. He is the one who I think should be given the most honor and the most credit for the US military defeat of Hitler. Marshall wanted to leave the D-Day base and asked Roosevelt if he could. Roosevelt said, “General, if you weren’t here in Washington with me all the time, I don’t think I could sleep at night.” He knew he wasn’t going to get it and then selected Eisenhower. Eisenhower came back. He was secretary of NATO from January of 1951 until the spring of 1952.

Eisenhower was persuaded by Jacqueline Cochran to create a women’s air service pilot. She was a pilot.

She was much more of a flyer in a way than Amelia Earhart. Earhart was a great flyer, but Jackie Cochran had command of all of these women who were flying planes cause we’d run out of male pilots in World War II. They would go to the battlefields, pick up the beaten-up aircraft, and fly them back to the US for repairs. They would then deliver new planes.

I learned about Jackie Cochran because my English teacher at the University of Arizona was one of her pilots. She flew a B-25 into Tucson and landed it, a consolidated aircraft, they made it. She said, “I’d lost all my oil pressure, I was having engine problems, and my gear dropped down.” She said, “I circled and saw the Catalina mountains and for a minute I forgot about my airplane and just looked at those beautiful mountains.” Finally she said, “I came in for my landing at Davis Mountain and there was this young airman out there giving me instructions and I had no breaks.” Her name was Byrd Granger. You’ll know her book, it’s called Arizona Place Names. She gives the origins of all the names in the state of Arizona. She was also a specialist in witchcraft.

Back to Eisenhower: in 1948, the election went completely the opposite way. In 1952, the US was on the verge of going isolationist. We had developed the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) in April of 1949. Then it became clear because of the Soviet Union that the US, at the behest of Europe, needed to militarize the North Atlantic Treaty. It had to exist as a military and political body in Europe. I think the French were pushing it the most.

Harry Truman picked Dwight Eisenhower, president of Columbia University, to go over and become the first secular Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Their headquarters were called SHAPE, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.

It was right in Paris, maybe a little bit outside. Eisenhower was so well respected in Europe because this was only six years after the end of the war.

He was the first one opening the national discussion?

Truman himself pressured Ike and said, “If you run as president I’m happy to run as your vice president.”

He was willing to step down a notch just to get Ike to go. Ike would have none of it. He wasn’t doing anything until Jackie Cochran was one of them.

They held a big rally at Madison Square Garden in New York to support Ike. This is a very crucial time in the United States because it was on the verge of going isolationist and that might have shut down the Marshall Plan. It might have shut down NATO. Those are the two big entities. Eisenhower was adamant that those continued, and because it was his duty to preserve them, he said, “Alright, I’ll run.” So he returned to the United States and began his campaign.

I like the BBC. . . .

I think the news from Europe has a lot of views of the US that we need to keep in mind.

How did you experience the news back then, around those stories?

We were getting it on the radio. We had one radio station and the newspaper. My parents were disappointed because they liked Robert Taft, and were like, “Why are we spending all this money in Europe? The Europeans are the ones getting themselves into trouble all the time and the reason the US exists is because everybody came over here to get the hell out of there.” That was clearly the first major act, apart from the wars themselves, of the US getting into globalism. We had to do it. They had that obligation. It still has those obligations.

The issue is alive again. In a matter of a few days, my own memory went from a surprise change in the presidential election to the question of the role of the US in the world. Is it going to take a role of leadership or is it going to withdraw? I think it’s going to be alright but not without some difficulty.

On election night, how did your intuition of the past influence your reaction to your friends?

I left the hotel, I left very early. It hadn’t been decided. I could see what was happening as some television news people from Phoenix arrived and wanted to get a border perspective. It’s always a border perspective.

They asked me and I said, “I have nothing to say. I don’t want to speak.”

I was very upset. I went home and I had another scotch and I watched a murder mystery.

I noticed from Facebook posts how many people turned out to vote down here. I think that was your last post?

It was my last post. I had a number Yes and no. He would be accepted of things I wanted to say. I get my by every nation. His credentials were news today from the Wall Street Jourimpeccable. nal. My sister sends me a few things He was Republican? from the New York Times and the EconAt that time nobody knew. He would omist. I get some blips here and there not state his political preference like on Google News. I think you get the most military men. The Democrats best insight into things from the Econwere wooing, they wanted him to run omist. It’s a more liberal magazine. I as a Democrat. Remember, Harry am probably a very tiny bit right-ofTruman’s popularity was crashing. center if there is a center anymore.

377

AXEL HOLM

There was a device used in small airplanes called an omni, it’s a radio beacon thing. When I got my pilot’s license, one of the things you had to do was learn how to use the omni and keep the needle straight. You knew you were on course. This damn needle now, we just don’t know.

Mitt Romney was invited to that club that Mr. T. owns in New Jersey.

He may be the next secretary of state.

Now that was a very good piece of news to me. I voted for Romney. I like Obama, but I voted for Romney. I thought he was more practical. I don’t think we would be in this situation if he would have won. The country would have taken a very different stand. My concerns are foreign affairs. I got my master’s in international relations. I was always interested because of my parents. I remember every presidential election.

How do you remember the 1980s? When did the media start to become more influential in people’s daily lives?

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, we still had three television networks: CBS, ABC, and NBC. At home we received the Wall Street Journal and you couldn’t get the New York Times down there. I don’t know why, because the Arizona Republic is a Republican right-wing paper.

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson is to the left. I don’t know who founded the Star, but the Ellenwood family owned it. Old Man Ellenwood bought the paper for his son, but he didn’t want his son to have control and he gave him 49 percent of the shares. Then he found a professional, William R. Matthews, because his son knew nothing about newspapers.

They gave him 49 percent. That left 2 percent, which was given to Lewis Douglas, who was a very prominent southern Arizonan. He was a US Ambassador to Britain from 1948 to 1952.

When Ellenwood and Matthews got into fights over newspaper policy, Douglas had to use his 2 percent and decide, because he could swing it.

What are your favorite news sources? Can you divide it into decades?

As a boy it was the radio. In the 1950s, it was still radio with the newspaper.

We had local newspapers and our local newspaper was an Associated Press paper. Then we had some television and I wasn’t used to television.

In the 1960s it became television, almost exclusively, and whatever daily newspaper was where I happened to be. More of the same in the 1970s and 1980s. I began to rely on television and I began to lose interest in television when the networks became so specialized by party or particular sentiment. I was no longer getting objective news and I began turning back to papers.

Then finally I cut television news off entirely. My number one today would be the Economist, the second is the Wall Street Journal, the third would be Google News, which could be any one of the other news sources, the BBC or local news. I periodically examine the Mexican newspapers. My father was very loyal. He would read Mexican newspapers and American newspapers, watch American news and Mexican news. I’m not as good about Mexican news, though I should be.

I like the BBC. You get an objective view, it’s a good source. I think the news from Europe has a lot a views of the US that we need to keep in mind.

Tell me about the word “great.”

TUCSON

The word “great” was always a very ordinary word. Our president-elect said he was going to “make America great again.” I thought it was already.

To me, his vocabulary is fairly limited.

He relies a lot on repetition.

If you put Donald Trump alongside Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, you can see an enormous difference. He’s got a limited vocabulary. He’s got a limited train of thought.

He picks a few words at a time and then hammers away at them. “Great” is one of them. English is a very rich language, with 750,000 words in its vocabulary. It even passes German which has 600,000. Spanish has a quarter of a million. I don’t know what French has. With a language so rich in words, with so many adjectives, why just “great,” “great,” “great”?

“Peter the Great”—I can understand things of that sort. But this nonsense, it’s a very vacuous word. It means that the user doesn’t have a clear idea of what it means. He can’t use a word that will describe a function or an action or an idea more richly. So he says, “Great,” and that appeals to a lot of people.

Maybe the great thing will be his departure. I can understand that if you use language that is too complicated, you lose people. That’s where Churchill was so good. He used very simple language. But he used double subjects, double verbs, double objects. He would compound things and then give it a lot of force instead of just very simple declarative sentences. Roosevelt would put enormous charm into something by telling a story in almost a childlike fashion. It’d be very entertaining. One of the best stories he ever told was when he was accused of having sent a destroyer to pick up his dog Fala. He used that in his last election in 1944.

Using language is very important.

To come up with just ten adjectives means that you really don’t have anything to say. Our current president­elect doesn’t have a whole lot to say because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do yet. I don’t think we need to fear the ideas so much as we need to fear the lack of ideas. The absence.

That’s what’s coming.

Sessions wanted to build the wall.

The idea comes from Senator Sessions, . . . and he is now . . . in the administration.

This is a horror.

Can you tell me a little bit about when the border started to become news, when it started to become politicized?

Well, it has always been a political issue. The idea of purchasing this whole piece of land was that of a man named Jefferson Davis. He was president of the Confederacy, which caused the Civil War. This was 1861.

Prior to that, he served as secretary of war under the president whose name escapes me for just a second. The country was still united at the time.

Jefferson Davis is a Southerner.

NOVEMBER 20—25, 2016

The United States defeated Mexico in 1849, in what was essentially an unfair war. President Polk declared war on Mexico over financial matters, money owed to the United States, and then we invaded Mexico. The desire to go to war was fairly universal, but there was a group of fourteen congressmen—I think they were called the Magnificent Fourteen—which included two very interesting men. One was John Quincy Adams, a former president from Massachusetts, and the other was a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln. They both voted against the war. Lincoln thought it was immoral to go after this country, so he was defeated in the next election. He served one term and it cost him his congressional seat.

Mexico started getting beaten up with the invasion of the Spaniards in 1521. Cortés arrived. Then the Americans came in in 1846 and the French invaded in 1861. This made Mexico a very xenophobic nation.

The US did pay for it—you couldn’t get the New England moralists to go along with just taking it. It was not reparations, it was money owed the US, taken in settlement—so they cleared the debt and then paid some fifteen million bucks.

Jefferson Davis said, “Well, now we’ve got this great thing, we need one more piece because we should run a railroad from South Carolina clear across the country.” The subject of this transcontinental railroad had been going on for a long time.

Do you remember when they built the fence?

I don’t remember when there was no fence, but my parents did. There was always a certain contention here.

There was always a certain doubt. The doubt in the time of Jefferson Davis was that they might use that railroad to extend slavery to the West Coast.

Why does Trump say he wants to build a wall if it already exists?

The first advisor that agreed to support him was Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama. Sessions was elected in 1986. He is known for a certain degree of racism. He’s anti-immigration.

He’s a very skilled lawyer.

Ronald Reagan appointed him to be a federal judge somewhere and the judiciary committee voted against Sessions. Sessions wanted to build the wall. The idea comes from Senator Sessions and since he was the first senator to support Trump, he is now very close in the administration.

This is a horror. He may be the attorney general of the United States. That would be a nightmare. I doubt the wall will get built because the US is essentially broke.

What does it mean to build a wall if there’s already a fence?

Is it just a matter of structure?

That’s the answer I would have given to you had you asked me the question. What needs to be done is being done and it’s being done almost to excess. There’s some other factors.

The net flow in Mexico is south, not north. There are more returning to Mexico are coming into the US. The largest national group immigrating to the are Chinese. Number two are Indians. Number three are Mexicans. The greatest number of so-called illegals or undocumented at the US-Mexico border are from Central America.

They’re having a pretty serious crime wave down there. Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras have banded together in a cooperative

that we have, they’re able to work with US reporters or a reporter out in Europe, and get the information out that way, and still stay alive. That has actually happened. We found in our research that that’s a strategy that reporters in Mexico are using to get information out and still stay alive. The possibilities are really unprecedented right now.

Without putting anyone at risk, can you give an example of how that works?

Sure. Let’s say a journalist is working on the border covering a crime or the deaths of several people in a certain area. They can’t report the information because the people who control the media are not necessarily the people who own the media. They’re coming from outside and telling the editors what they can and can’t publish. But the editors or the writers of the reports can send information across the border and it’s published in a US media outlet. Then the newspaper in Mexico can publish that information attributing it to the US media outlet.

Fake news is nothing compared to what we’re going to have to deal with in the future.

How do you see us consuming the news in the future?

It’d be like a chip underneath our skin. It’ll just flash what we want to read.

Like a hologram?

Yeah! It’ll just be a hologram. Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report, where you press a button and the entire hologram will come up? That’s the way we’ll be consuming news. Or we won’t even have to see anything.

It’ll just be like a little chip underneath our skin and it’ll just go into our brainwaves.

What will the conversation about media ethics be in that same world?

I want to say there will still be ethics.

The ethical questions that we will have to deal with in the next fifty to a hundred years with respect to news and technology are going to be what we’re dealing with now. In Facebook, fake news is nothing compared to what we’re going to have to deal with in the future. We’re going to really need a lot of smart people in the news industry and people critical of the news. Now it’s: “How do we tell if a photograph has been Photoshopped?” But in the future it’s going to be much more complex.

We don’t even know the issues that we’re going to be dealing with.The technology hasn’t been invented yet.

Just thinking about how we tell if something’s been Photoshopped.

From a journalistic perspective, we need to know if that photograph is from a different part of the world, how it has been altered, if at all. If this information is now in a hologram, maybe it’s the same [ethical] question with an image to make it into a hologram. Do we have to alter it a certain way? As journalists, we’re going to stay as fair as we can to the story and be as accurate as possible.

376

Axel Holm Businessman

Do you see a point where language barriers will no longer be an issue in news reported in other languages?

It’s interesting. We went from imagery, as early humans, to a text-based society and now we’re moving back to a more image-based society. If we’re becoming a more graphic and more image-based global society, translation and text will not be as important.

But still, they’ll be other ethical questions. How are we presenting those images and what images are selected? Why is it that we show an entire body of somebody who could be identified in Afghanistan—who has been obviously killed in some sort of traumatic way—on the news or in the newspaper but we would never do that with a victim of a car accident in this country? We will still have to deal with those issues of how we’re portraying different people from far away lands and how we’re manipulating images.

I don’t think we need to fear the ideas so much as . . . the lack of ideas.

The absence. That’s what’s coming.

Will there be a point where active news and breaking news will be covered through the lens of history?

What did you do on election night?

Technology will help reporters and journalists cover subjects and be able to put them into a historical context much more readily than we can do now. Electronic communications, digital communications, and digital archives increase the possibilities and potential for putting subjects into historical context; that they didn’t just happen yesterday and are part of a longer process. As global citizens, if we understand that, we can make better informed decisions. Reliable news is supposed to help us understand the world.

I was asked by some friends go to an American hotel to watch the election returns. We’ve got a twenty-four-hour news cycle. You hear the same story over and over again. You’re waiting there with bated breath for some new change. You reach the point where you don’t care whether it’s good or bad, you don’t want to hear that same clip over and over and over again.

I thought, election night, that’s the night to do it. I have no cable at home.

I have Internet though so I’m not completely without. I sat down with a group, they were all Democrats and I’m a true red Republican but that doesn’t mean anything either. I began seeing these numbers. They were all chattering, eating hors d’œuvres, ordering drinks. I had a second scotch and began looking at the numbers.

They were very small numbers. Five percent. Six percent. I said, “Hillary’s going to lose.” And, “Ohh, how can you say that, what would make you say that?” “This thing is going down, it’s going south,” I said.

My instincts were formed when I was six years old and Harry Truman beat Tom Dewey. It was 1948. My father bought the newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, in the morning.

Truman had won and my mother saw it, flew into tears, ran into the bathroom, and cried. I knew that this presidential election thing had something to do with my family because it clearly had a very major effect on my mother.

That concerned me. She said, “Those goddamn Democrats!” For years that was one word [where] I was beginning to sense that there was some difference. I was six.

When you’re six and you’re looking wide-eyed at your parents, getting a feel for their reaction, it has an impact.

We had one radio station and there was no television. It all came from the newspaper. It was very clear that a change had taken place. I remember all of those early elections, and then in 1952, we had a very different situation. Dwight Eisenhower had accepted. I was ten. There was another major news event when Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur and the Korean War broke out in June of 1950. He had to be fired between January and July of 1951. My parents were furious. They thought that Truman was completely out of line. He was not, as it turns out.

What’s the best thing that can happen to news in the next five years?

That more people consume it and not just one outlet. It’s just an interesting time. I talked a lot about negative things that are going on and and the negative processes in place. There’s also great potential for great things to happen. We just need to be vigilant and try to create some of those opportunities. The Border Journalism Network is one of those things.

There’s ProPublica. There’s a lot of good things happening. It’s not all doom and gloom.

Do you ever dream about the news?

Yes, nightmares. I dream about having a better news landscape in the future. One of the things about being a journalism professor is that I see the potential in some of my students who are really inspired to do a better job.

They’re very critical too of what the landscape looks like. To me, it’s very rewarding and inspiring to see how they want to change things. I think they will.

Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante is assistant professor in the School of Journalism, and an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, where she received her PhD in history. Her research interests include the history of news media in Mexico, Brazil, and the US-Mexico borderlands. Prior to entering the academy, she reported and produced commercial and public television for over sixteen years, covering politics and the US-Mexico border.

Age: 51 Resident of Tucson for: Twenty-two years Daily news consumption: N/A Media used regularly: The New York Times, LA Times, Vice, NPR, and NPR podcasts, the Guardian, El País, newspapers in Mexico City, La Jornada, Reforma

DR. CELESTE GONZÁLEZ

TUCSON

NOVEMBER 20—25, 2016

The way it’s portrayed in the film, Truman asked General George Marshall, who the leading military figure [at the time] really was. We’ve probably had three in American history: George Washington, General “Blackjack” Pershing, and George Marshall.

Marshall won World War II. He is the one who I think should be given the most honor and the most credit for the US military defeat of Hitler. Marshall wanted to leave the D-Day base and asked Roosevelt if he could. Roosevelt said, “General, if you weren’t here in Washington with me all the time, I don’t think I could sleep at night.” He knew he wasn’t going to get it and then selected Eisenhower. Eisenhower came back. He was secretary of NATO from January of 1951 until the spring of 1952.

Eisenhower was persuaded by Jacqueline Cochran to create a women’s air service pilot. She was a pilot.

She was much more of a flyer in a way than Amelia Earhart. Earhart was a great flyer, but Jackie Cochran had command of all of these women who were flying planes cause we’d run out of male pilots in World War II. They would go to the battlefields, pick up the beaten-up aircraft, and fly them back to the US for repairs. They would then deliver new planes.

I learned about Jackie Cochran because my English teacher at the University of Arizona was one of her pilots. She flew a B-25 into Tucson and landed it, a consolidated aircraft, they made it. She said, “I’d lost all my oil pressure, I was having engine problems, and my gear dropped down.” She said, “I circled and saw the Catalina mountains and for a minute I forgot about my airplane and just looked at those beautiful mountains.” Finally she said, “I came in for my landing at Davis Mountain and there was this young airman out there giving me instructions and I had no breaks.” Her name was Byrd Granger. You’ll know her book, it’s called Arizona Place Names. She gives the origins of all the names in the state of Arizona. She was also a specialist in witchcraft.

Back to Eisenhower: in 1948, the election went completely the opposite way. In 1952, the US was on the verge of going isolationist. We had developed the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) in April of 1949. Then it became clear because of the Soviet Union that the US, at the behest of Europe, needed to militarize the North Atlantic Treaty. It had to exist as a military and political body in Europe. I think the French were pushing it the most.

Harry Truman picked Dwight Eisenhower, president of Columbia University, to go over and become the first secular Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Their headquarters were called SHAPE, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.

It was right in Paris, maybe a little bit outside. Eisenhower was so well respected in Europe because this was only six years after the end of the war.

He was the first one opening the national discussion?

Truman himself pressured Ike and said, “If you run as president I’m happy to run as your vice president.”

He was willing to step down a notch just to get Ike to go. Ike would have none of it. He wasn’t doing anything until Jackie Cochran was one of them.

They held a big rally at Madison Square Garden in New York to support Ike. This is a very crucial time in the United States because it was on the verge of going isolationist and that might have shut down the Marshall Plan. It might have shut down NATO. Those are the two big entities. Eisenhower was adamant that those continued, and because it was his duty to preserve them, he said, “Alright, I’ll run.” So he returned to the United States and began his campaign.

I like the BBC. . . .

I think the news from Europe has a lot of views of the US that we need to keep in mind.

How did you experience the news back then, around those stories?

We were getting it on the radio. We had one radio station and the newspaper. My parents were disappointed because they liked Robert Taft, and were like, “Why are we spending all this money in Europe? The Europeans are the ones getting themselves into trouble all the time and the reason the US exists is because everybody came over here to get the hell out of there.” That was clearly the first major act, apart from the wars themselves, of the US getting into globalism. We had to do it. They had that obligation. It still has those obligations.

The issue is alive again. In a matter of a few days, my own memory went from a surprise change in the presidential election to the question of the role of the US in the world. Is it going to take a role of leadership or is it going to withdraw? I think it’s going to be alright but not without some difficulty.

On election night, how did your intuition of the past influence your reaction to your friends?

I left the hotel, I left very early. It hadn’t been decided. I could see what was happening as some television news people from Phoenix arrived and wanted to get a border perspective. It’s always a border perspective.

They asked me and I said, “I have nothing to say. I don’t want to speak.”

I was very upset. I went home and I had another scotch and I watched a murder mystery.

I noticed from Facebook posts how many people turned out to vote down here. I think that was your last post?

It was my last post. I had a number Yes and no. He would be accepted of things I wanted to say. I get my by every nation. His credentials were news today from the Wall Street Jourimpeccable. nal. My sister sends me a few things He was Republican? from the New York Times and the EconAt that time nobody knew. He would omist. I get some blips here and there not state his political preference like on Google News. I think you get the most military men. The Democrats best insight into things from the Econwere wooing, they wanted him to run omist. It’s a more liberal magazine. I as a Democrat. Remember, Harry am probably a very tiny bit right-ofTruman’s popularity was crashing. center if there is a center anymore.

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AXEL HOLM

There was a device used in small airplanes called an omni, it’s a radio beacon thing. When I got my pilot’s license, one of the things you had to do was learn how to use the omni and keep the needle straight. You knew you were on course. This damn needle now, we just don’t know.

Mitt Romney was invited to that club that Mr. T. owns in New Jersey.

He may be the next secretary of state.

Now that was a very good piece of news to me. I voted for Romney. I like Obama, but I voted for Romney. I thought he was more practical. I don’t think we would be in this situation if he would have won. The country would have taken a very different stand. My concerns are foreign affairs. I got my master’s in international relations. I was always interested because of my parents. I remember every presidential election.

How do you remember the 1980s? When did the media start to become more influential in people’s daily lives?

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, we still had three television networks: CBS, ABC, and NBC. At home we received the Wall Street Journal and you couldn’t get the New York Times down there. I don’t know why, because the Arizona Republic is a Republican right-wing paper.

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson is to the left. I don’t know who founded the Star, but the Ellenwood family owned it. Old Man Ellenwood bought the paper for his son, but he didn’t want his son to have control and he gave him 49 percent of the shares. Then he found a professional, William R. Matthews, because his son knew nothing about newspapers.

They gave him 49 percent. That left 2 percent, which was given to Lewis Douglas, who was a very prominent southern Arizonan. He was a US Ambassador to Britain from 1948 to 1952.

When Ellenwood and Matthews got into fights over newspaper policy, Douglas had to use his 2 percent and decide, because he could swing it.

What are your favorite news sources? Can you divide it into decades?

As a boy it was the radio. In the 1950s, it was still radio with the newspaper.

We had local newspapers and our local newspaper was an Associated Press paper. Then we had some television and I wasn’t used to television.

In the 1960s it became television, almost exclusively, and whatever daily newspaper was where I happened to be. More of the same in the 1970s and 1980s. I began to rely on television and I began to lose interest in television when the networks became so specialized by party or particular sentiment. I was no longer getting objective news and I began turning back to papers.

Then finally I cut television news off entirely. My number one today would be the Economist, the second is the Wall Street Journal, the third would be Google News, which could be any one of the other news sources, the BBC or local news. I periodically examine the Mexican newspapers. My father was very loyal. He would read Mexican newspapers and American newspapers, watch American news and Mexican news. I’m not as good about Mexican news, though I should be.

I like the BBC. You get an objective view, it’s a good source. I think the news from Europe has a lot a views of the US that we need to keep in mind.

Tell me about the word “great.”

TUCSON

The word “great” was always a very ordinary word. Our president-elect said he was going to “make America great again.” I thought it was already.

To me, his vocabulary is fairly limited.

He relies a lot on repetition.

If you put Donald Trump alongside Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, you can see an enormous difference. He’s got a limited vocabulary. He’s got a limited train of thought.

He picks a few words at a time and then hammers away at them. “Great” is one of them. English is a very rich language, with 750,000 words in its vocabulary. It even passes German which has 600,000. Spanish has a quarter of a million. I don’t know what French has. With a language so rich in words, with so many adjectives, why just “great,” “great,” “great”?

“Peter the Great”—I can understand things of that sort. But this nonsense, it’s a very vacuous word. It means that the user doesn’t have a clear idea of what it means. He can’t use a word that will describe a function or an action or an idea more richly. So he says, “Great,” and that appeals to a lot of people.

Maybe the great thing will be his departure. I can understand that if you use language that is too complicated, you lose people. That’s where Churchill was so good. He used very simple language. But he used double subjects, double verbs, double objects. He would compound things and then give it a lot of force instead of just very simple declarative sentences. Roosevelt would put enormous charm into something by telling a story in almost a childlike fashion. It’d be very entertaining. One of the best stories he ever told was when he was accused of having sent a destroyer to pick up his dog Fala. He used that in his last election in 1944.

Using language is very important.

To come up with just ten adjectives means that you really don’t have anything to say. Our current president­elect doesn’t have a whole lot to say because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do yet. I don’t think we need to fear the ideas so much as we need to fear the lack of ideas. The absence.

That’s what’s coming.

Sessions wanted to build the wall.

The idea comes from Senator Sessions, . . . and he is now . . . in the administration.

This is a horror.

Can you tell me a little bit about when the border started to become news, when it started to become politicized?

Well, it has always been a political issue. The idea of purchasing this whole piece of land was that of a man named Jefferson Davis. He was president of the Confederacy, which caused the Civil War. This was 1861.

Prior to that, he served as secretary of war under the president whose name escapes me for just a second. The country was still united at the time.

Jefferson Davis is a Southerner.

NOVEMBER 20—25, 2016

The United States defeated Mexico in 1849, in what was essentially an unfair war. President Polk declared war on Mexico over financial matters, money owed to the United States, and then we invaded Mexico. The desire to go to war was fairly universal, but there was a group of fourteen congressmen—I think they were called the Magnificent Fourteen—which included two very interesting men. One was John Quincy Adams, a former president from Massachusetts, and the other was a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln. They both voted against the war. Lincoln thought it was immoral to go after this country, so he was defeated in the next election. He served one term and it cost him his congressional seat.

Mexico started getting beaten up with the invasion of the Spaniards in 1521. Cortés arrived. Then the Americans came in in 1846 and the French invaded in 1861. This made Mexico a very xenophobic nation.

The US did pay for it—you couldn’t get the New England moralists to go along with just taking it. It was not reparations, it was money owed the US, taken in settlement—so they cleared the debt and then paid some fifteen million bucks.

Jefferson Davis said, “Well, now we’ve got this great thing, we need one more piece because we should run a railroad from South Carolina clear across the country.” The subject of this transcontinental railroad had been going on for a long time.

Do you remember when they built the fence?

I don’t remember when there was no fence, but my parents did. There was always a certain contention here.

There was always a certain doubt. The doubt in the time of Jefferson Davis was that they might use that railroad to extend slavery to the West Coast.

Why does Trump say he wants to build a wall if it already exists?

The first advisor that agreed to support him was Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama. Sessions was elected in 1986. He is known for a certain degree of racism. He’s anti-immigration.

He’s a very skilled lawyer.

Ronald Reagan appointed him to be a federal judge somewhere and the judiciary committee voted against Sessions. Sessions wanted to build the wall. The idea comes from Senator Sessions and since he was the first senator to support Trump, he is now very close in the administration.

This is a horror. He may be the attorney general of the United States. That would be a nightmare. I doubt the wall will get built because the US is essentially broke.

What does it mean to build a wall if there’s already a fence?

Is it just a matter of structure?

That’s the answer I would have given to you had you asked me the question. What needs to be done is being done and it’s being done almost to excess. There’s some other factors.

The net flow in Mexico is south, not north. There are more returning to Mexico are coming into the US. The largest national group immigrating to the are Chinese. Number two are Indians. Number three are Mexicans. The greatest number of so-called illegals or undocumented at the US-Mexico border are from Central America.

They’re having a pretty serious crime wave down there. Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras have banded together in a cooperative

Do I dream about the news myself?

I don’t think so. My dreams are always grounded in reality. The things I experience and absorb during the day are recalled in my dreams. Perhaps I dream about the context in which I was watching or listening to the news.

But what I do find fascinating about dreams is that their content is determined by an unseen editorial process over which I have no control. I wonder who edits my dreams. I’m pretty sure I don’t, so there must be a private newsroom somewhere in my brain where decisions are made about what gets published from the database of my memory. This happens in my absence, while I’m asleep. Dreams exist on the borderline between fiction and nonfiction. The editing process generates connections I could never imagine, a fiction that is nevertheless real.

Our personal memory editors are the most powerful algorithms of our time. Perhaps our dreams will be enlisted as editorial tools someday. In three days’ time I’ll be driving to the printers to watch as the news-related memories of my American readers are printed in deep black ink on paper.

This is the anonymous, unheard, personal voice of America made legible.

Turn the page.

Start listening.

Inauguration Night, Washington DC, Jan. 20, 2017

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