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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 13, 2022)
A8 The BulleTin • Tuesday, decemBer 13, 2022 EDITORIALS & OPINIONS AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Heidi Wright Gerry O’Brien Richard Coe Publisher Editor Editorial Page Editor Radar cameras to catch speeders could be coming M ore streets in more towns in Oregon could have photo radar cameras perched to catch speeders under new proposed legislation in the Legislature. The change wouldn’t mean much to Bend, Eugene, Portland and some other larger towns in the state. Photo radar is already allowed there. The major change is that all Or- egon cities would be able to choose to install them. It doesn’t mean that they would. It would mean they could. The cameras would be prohibited on controlled access highways. The legislation also eliminates a requirement that the system could not be used more than four hours per day. Under the changes in the bill, a photo radar system could be operated 24-7. Do you think this is a good idea to help stop speeding? Is it excessive or inappropriate enforcement? Tell your legislator what you think. A city would be required to pay the cost of any system. There would have to be a sign announcing to drivers “Traffic Laws Photo En- forced” within 100 yards and 400 yards before the location of the photo radar. The city also would have to do a study to look at the effect of its photo radar system every two years, including public acceptance and explaining how the city adminis- trates it. The most important things about this proposed legislation are its lan- guage and what changes it would make. But there is another thing that continues to bother us session after session. That is accountability. There is no name of a legislator attached to this proposed bill. This proposed legislation we found in a list of possible “commit- tee bills” by the Legislature’s Joint Interim Committee on Transporta- tion. A committee bill is one intro- duced by, well, a committee. We believe every bill should have a clearly identified sponsor or spon- sors. Oregonians deserve to be able to know what their public officials are doing in office. That means our elected representatives should put their names on their work. If they don’t like that, perhaps Or- egonians should insist on legislators wearing body cams to capture when they introduce a new bill. If you would like to tell your leg- islator what you think of this pro- posed bill and want to find her or his contact information, look here: tinyurl.com/ORFindleg. Does Oregon need a state plan for the energy future? W e assume most people never get to Page 563 of the Oregon Department of Energy’s 2022 energy report – if they ever got to Page 1. The department as a state to ensure we There are trade- builds an argument make smart choices? offs and costs of on Page 563 that Some people may what Oregon needs is welcome the idea. decarbonization a comprehensive en- Others may be wor- ergy strategy. It sug- ried that it may mean and very real gests the state should more government consequences for come up with a plan intervention in the to line up state energy economy and govern- consumers and goals, policy, plan- ment may have the industry. ning and investment. wrong goals or get The state goals in the implementation recent years have been decarboniza- all wrong. tion — efficiency, more use of elec- During last week’s legislative tricity, less use of carbon in produc- meetings we caught at least one tion of electricity and low-carbon brief mention of the idea of Or- fuels. If that is the goal, should Ore- egon creating an energy strategy gon have a plan for getting there? and some references to the concern There are trade-offs and costs of about making energy decisions decarbonization and very real con- with inadequate information. sequences for consumers and in- What do you think? Should Or- dustry. What are they? What would egon develop one or would it plan make the transition easier? What for trouble? incentives should be put in place? You can find the energy report What more information do we need here: tinyurl.com/BER2022. █ Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe. Can you justify your news choices? BY DEAN HARRIS A recent Pew Research Center sur- vey of Americans and Europeans re- ports that three-quarters hold that following domestic political news is important and a habit of a “good member of society.” Not only is such consumption deemed important, it ranked below only voting and re- sponding to climate change. Though I was not surveyed, I also believe following domestic news is a sign of a “good member of society.” This is especially so in a democra- cy—a form of government that obli- gates citizens to political participation. However, the proliferation of news outlets since the advents of cable and social media makes the character of the news one consumes a serious civic consideration. So, informed citizen: Are you able to justify your news choices? Do your choices make you a “good member of society”? Here’s my justification. I subscribe to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Bend Bulletin, read Apple News feeds of Vox and Politico, and listen to pod- casts. I read the newspapers for de- scriptive news and opinion (Times is liberal; the Journal is conservative). The podcasts, Vox, and Politico pro- vide supplemental perspectives. Ac- cording to Pew, the large number and wide diversity of media outlets is typi- cal of a political liberal. Why The Bulletin? My early life was spent in L.A. suburbs and few such areas claim a local newspaper. Bend is the first city I’ve lived in with a local newspaper. Following local news in- vests me in the people, organizations, and institutions facilitating a life here. Why the Times and the Journal? Resources, reputation, and standards. They are the two largest U.S. news- papers, with 9 million and 3 million Bulletin file photo Conservatives will likely deny the claim of news impartiality, retorting that the “liberal media” is politically biased. Many major media outlets do skew left, especially their editorials and commentary. subscribers, respectively. That sig- nals to me that they have the finan- cial resources to support the massive undertaking quality reporting re- quires. They are also two of the most respected and decorated newspapers in America, winning dozens of Pulit- zer Prizes and attracting the best and brightest of journalists. And impor- tantly, both newspapers subscribe to a code of journalism ethics that de- mands news impartiality, fairness, ac- curacy, accountability, transparency, and verification, all in support of the public good (and profit). Conservatives will likely deny the claim of news impartiality, retorting that the “liberal media” is politically biased. Many major media outlets do skew left, especially their editorials and commentary. However, the general skew is less because journalists are covertly push- ing a political ideology and more be- cause journalism for a democracy is at heart a reformist project: identifying improvement as well as the human and organizational abuse, deficiency, exclusion, and interest that impede so- cial betterment efforts for all. How have conservatives responded to the “liberal media”? Pew found that conservatives did not supplement with politically opposing opinion fare, as I have. Nor did they choose a replacement located in the politi- cal “center” (e.g. Newsweek). Instead, conservatives restricted their news consumption to overt conservative fare (e.g. Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Breitbart), and primarily commen- tary rather than descriptive news. The narrow consumption of commentary is an additional worrisome decision as studies show that across the main- stream media descriptive news about major events is fairly homogeneous and factual. If commentary and ed- itorials, two interpretive forms that embrace political bias, are one’s only news fare, then identifying a set of basic facts necessary for shared deci- sion-making will be challenging. Lastly, many media observers are less worried about political bias in the media and more worried about two nettlesome sources of socio-cultural bias: newsrooms dominated by white, middle-class men and news content shaped for an audience dominated by white, urban, elites who can af- ford a monthly news bill of $75. I am a member of this privileged paying audience and am also concerned by identity, class, and geographical biases. As I am not in the news business, I don’t have a newsroom solution. My personal solution, however, has been to broaden my reading along the po- litical spectrum and seek out diverse perspectives foreign to my experience. And you? █ Dean Harris lives in Bend. Letters policy Guest columns How to submit We welcome your letters. letters should be limited to one issue, contain no more than 250 words and include the writer’s phone number and address for verifica- tion. We edit letters for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject poetry, personal attacks, form letters, letters submitted elsewhere and those appro- priate for other sections of The Bulletin. Writers are limited to one letter or guest column every 30 days. your submissions should be between 550 and 650 words and must include the writer’s phone number and address for verification. We edit submissions for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject those submitted elsewhere. locally submitted columns alternate with national columnists and commentaries. Writers are limited to one letter or guest column every 30 days. Please address your submission to either my nickel’s Worth or Guest column and mail, fax or email it to The Bulletin. email submissions are preferred. email: letters@bendbulletin.com Write: my nickel’s Worth/Guest column P.O. Box 6020 Bend, Or 97708 Fax: 541-385-5804 Ye’s unhinged words mean we have to talk about Adolf Hitler BY ANDREAS KLUTH Bloomberg We could try to just dismiss peo- ple such as Ye, the celebrity formerly known as Kanye West, as unhinged. After all, American talk shows — like the one on which Ye slavered his latest drivel from underneath the black ski mask he was wearing — teem with bigoted twaddle. Nobody takes that stuff seriously, right? But ask yourself how one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors would hear the words Ye uttered. Or, for that matter, how one of the many Holocaust deniers will now use them. No, we can’t just call Ye and his ilk deranged and move on. We’ve got a problem. Ye’s topic was Adolf Hitler. The rapper apparently sees the Fuehrer as yet another right-wing victim of the woke and lamestream media’s fake news. “Every human being has some- thing of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” Ye insisted. “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler, a lot of things.” He clari- fied: “I am a Nazi.” More generally, Ye added, “we got to stop dissing the Na- zis all the time.” A few days earlier, Ye and another anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, had dined with Donald Trump at the former U.S. president’s resort in Florida. But it’s not only the odious bully pulpit that comes with celebrity that makes these haters dan- gerous. It’s the way they simultane- ously propagate and embody a preex- isting trend toward general ignorance and bad faith, the preconditions for a resurgence in antisemitism, racism and hate. The ignorance alone is staggering. In the U.S., according to a survey, 63% of young adults don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, and 36% think the number was “two million or fewer.” About 1 in 10 isn’t sure whether the Shoah happened at all or denies that it did. Perhaps most shockingly, 19% of millennials and zoomers in New York State believe that it was the Jews who caused the Holocaust. How did we get to this point? Part of the answer has to do with a phenomenon the Germans, who should know something about the matter, call “Nazi porn” or “Hitler kitsch.” It’s a trend I’ve been watching with concern for years. The 1960s and ‘70s were decades when the general public in most countries learned the full extent of the Holocaust and therefore held its remembrance in awe. It began during the 1960s with high-profile Nazi tri- als in Jerusalem and Frankfurt that exposed the genocide in new detail and famously inspired the philoso- pher Hannah Arendt to opine on the “banality of evil.” It continued with ground-breaking biographies of Hit- ler in the 1970s and the American TV series “Holocaust,” which also jolted Germans into a new and har- rowing round of soul-searching. This line of documenting and commemo- rating the Shoah continues. Starting in the 1980s, however, an- other media phenomenon developed in parallel. It began when Stern, a German magazine, published what it alleged was Hitler’s diary. It was a sensation — and also turned out to be fake. A worrying precedent was set: the Fuehrer as clickbait to sell copies and, nowadays, to har- vest retweets. The fascination with the Nazis became prurient. German television, as I’ve written before, airs almost nightly documentaries on Hitler’s henchmen, women, ailments, table silver or German Shepherd Blondi. The phenomenon isn’t German but global. Hitler has become the raw ma- terial for memes. For example, there’s that scene in “Downfall” in which the dictator, played by Bruno Ganz, loses it. The clip keeps circling around the world, each time with new captions. Here the Fuehrer can’t find his favor- ite cupcakes on either the Upper East Side or the Upper West. Here he’s stuck with bitcoin when he should have invested in dogecoin. The phenomenon amounts to a re- verse Voldemort effect. In the Harry Potter novels, the personification of evil commanded such revulsion and awe that witches, wizards and war- locks referred to him only as “He Who Must Not Be Named” or “You- Know-Who.” With Hitler, it’s the op- posite: The Fuehrer is He Who Must Be Named All the Time, Whether It Fits or Not. As a result, he no longer seems evil, just cartoonish. This is the moral void we used to fear, the intellectual vacuum where hatred grows and eventually makes mass murder imaginable once again. The problem’s not just Kanye West. All of us have dumbed down mem- ory to the point of nihilism. █ Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg columnist covering European politics.
