This time it was in a Connecticut elementary school, not very far from my home. The local and national news together are overwhelmingly depressing. I feel despair and powerless: such brutality, and Americans have kept on arming themselves, with support for gun control diminishing.

Why? Perhaps it is because too many of us confuse fictions with facts? On this issue the NRA view of the world seems to dominate. Consider this blast from Deliberately Considered’s past, the story of a preteen sharpshooter defending her home in Butte Montana. Gun advocates make up there own facts to justify their position that guns yield personal and public safety.

A fact free world provides the grounds upon which outrageous judgments are made. Charles Blow cited one today:

“Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, wasted no time trying to pin Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates. ThinkProgress quoted a statement of his that read, in part: ‘Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.’ ”

How is it possible for someone to imagine let alone utter such words? Following their logic, and the sort of pseudo-evidence it is based on, “the fictoid from out west,” perhaps the answer to school violence is arming kindergarten kids. David Frum, indeed, in a tweet sarcastically declared: “Shooting at CT elementary school. Obviously, we need to lower the age limit for concealed carry so toddlers can defend themselves.”

And then there is the magical power of prayer. Mike Huckabee: “We ask why there’s violence in our schools but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Gail Collins, my favorite columnist, turned off her sharp wit today to express bitter outrage, reflecting on this and other statements, “looking for America.” She didn’t like what she was seeing.

I want to believe that change is coming. I think there is an opportunity. I am convinced that the election results represented a change in American public opinion and commonsense. Yet, I know that the changing opinion has not included guns and a serious critical response to the violence in American life up to this point. Public discussion has shifted in the past twenty years from gun violence and control to the second amendment and gun rights.

I think that it is in this context that President Obama’s moving response yesterday should be judged. Heartfelt and sincere, he expressed the nation’s grief, but he also promised a change. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” I wonder whether this is a real opening to a renewed public debate.

There are good reasons to be skeptical. Since Gore v. Bush in 2000, Democrats, including Obama, have been increasingly reluctant to take up gun control. But Obama suggested that he may move against this reluctance, pointing to the hard facts of atrocity.

Now is an opportunity for leadership. If Obama in fact does address the issue of gun violence and control in the coming days, it will matter. It will start a serious accounting, providing the opportunity for citizens and their leadership to think beyond fictoids and nutty opinion. I hope this will include both Republicans and Democrats. News flash – Rupert Murdoch just tweeted for gun controls. People are pushing as I write this post. (See this and this, I am sure there are other important efforts.) Obama has had good political reasons to be cautious in the recent past, but elections matter only if and when they are acted upon.

I am now in Wroclaw, Poland, having just arrived from Paris – at home abroad, to borrow from one of my favorite New York Times columnist of the past, Anthony Lewis. I find following American politics and culture from afar particularly illuminating. I enjoy being in the middle of things at home, sometimes in the middle of politics, and then moving out for a while and looking back. Special insights result. With regular teaching and lecturing in Europe, I have been doing this for over thirty years. Being away has offered special critical insights, even as it has sometimes obscured important political and cultural details.

This was most dramatically the case when I lived in Communist Poland in 1973-4, when I was doing my research on independent politics in culture there, while the Watergate scandal raged in the U.S. I got my news from old issues of The New Yorker (given to me by a junior officer at the American Embassy in Warsaw) and from the Voice of America. Access to western news was severely restricted. The New Yorker supply was a prize, which I passed on to my Polish friends. Voice of America came in with some irregularity thanks to jamming by the Polish authorities. Yet, even when it got through, it was not reliable. Part of the Watergate revelations was that VOA was heavily censored back then. Long articles by Elizabeth Drew provided my basic information and perspective. I read accurate updates, a bit delayed. Because of distance and time I didn’t really appreciate how severe the constitutional crisis of that time was.

But on the other hand, by living in a truly undemocratic society, I came to appreciate the way democratic norms and values persisted in American life even in a crisis. There was Nixon, but there was also the Watergate hearings and the eventual forced resignation of the President. The way “high crimes and misdemeanors,” democratic ideals, propaganda, skepticism and cynicism interacted and defined the American experience helped this then young New Leftist to learn about political complexity and its importance.

This lesson was the starting point for my much later study of American political culture, The Cynical Society. I carry its perspective as I view the American political scene now, as revealed in recent posts on Chief Justice Roberts, Mitt Romney and his party and in  a review post concerning the politics of emotions, political developments in Middle East and in Peru and the crazy politics of the U.S. that for a moment took Donald Trump seriously. These and much more of my observations of the American political scene are informed by the sensibility of thinking about home while abroad.

I am planning to publish a series of at home abroad posts, written while I am on the road and looking back at American political and cultural developments. A report about the relationship between Rupert Murdock and his Media Empire and Mitt Romney his campaign stimulated me to do this. The report was formulated around the theme of election prospects. How Murdoch’s reticence about Romney may affect the chances of the Republican ticket. The main idea: anyone but Romney has replaced anyone but Obama, but without much enthusiasm.

But reading the report in Europe reveals something else: the fundamental fissure of the right with short but also highly significant long-term impact, demonstrating a crisis on the right that will mirror the crisis on the left of the recent past. Politics based on an ethics of ultimate ends will destroy the politics based upon the ethics of responsibility in the language of Max Weber. In everyday language, the politics based on tea party sensibility will isolate and undermine conservative politics and the effectiveness of conservative social movements, even though they have been highly effective in frustrating the progress of the first term of the Obama administration.

For Murdoch and company, including the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, Paul Gigot. Romney is not sufficiently and clearly resolute in his political positions. He moves from right to far right as the immediate political winds blow. He confuses business management with political principle and leadership. For the general public this presents the question of who Romney really is. Is he the right wing ideologue who denounces Obamacare, would be tougher on China, more supportive of the extreme right in Israel, defends traditional marriage, works against “the gay agenda,” would build high fences to keep illegals out and urge self deportation for those who are here, or is he the pragmatic conservative who developed “Romneycare,” seeks expansion of American exports, be understanding of the complexities of immigration policy, follow compassionate conservative policies, foreign and domestic. “Who is the real Romney?” is the question for the electorate, especially for the independent undecided (a group that bewilders me). But for resolute conservatives the question has already been answered even as Romney desperately seeks their approval and support. He is not one of them.

FDR pushed the center left. He succeeded in this because of the crisis of the Great Depression and because the answers he proposed for the crisis made sense to the public and seemed to improve their lives. Ronald Reagan moved the center right. His  rugged individualism performance and expression of anti-government rhetoric made sense to the American public (to my dismay) and appeared to improve the lives of the middle class. These successes had to do with the leadership qualities of FDR and Reagan, but as well, were a consequence of the simple fact that their opposition made no sense. They didn’t provide cogent alternatives.

Romney and conservative Republicans more generally were for Obamacare until they were against it. They were against the corrupting effects of big money in politics, for conservation and environmental standards, for science, for understanding of modern economics, all, until they were against them. They challenge common sense.

A shift in political culture is evident on the horizon.  Obama’s task has been to move the center left, as I have argued here and in my book, Reinventing Political Culture. During his first term he has met concerted resistance. But as Murdoch expresses his dismay with Romney, the resistance is weakening. The prospects for Obama’s re-election are good, as are the prospects of a successful second term. Deep trends are more apparent when one looks back at home when one is abroad. This is how it looks to me as I begin teaching my course in Wroclaw on “The New “New Social Movements.” More to soon follow.

I did not have the time to prepare a post while teaching with Daniel Dayan “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” in Wroclaw, Poland. This was unfortunate because there were news events during the period of the course that seemed to be a series of case studies on our topic. As we were examining theoretical material, which illuminates the roles media play in such cases, media were playing important roles, from the Murdoch scandal, to the terrorist attack in Oslo. Today, I will reflect on Murdoch and, more broadly, the tasks of making distinctions and coming to actionable judgments in the media. Oslo will wait for another day. I draw on the ideas of Eviatar Zerubavel, a distinguished sociologist of cognition and student of Erving Goffman, to make sense of our ongoing seminar discussion and the debate between Daniel and me.

The Murdoch presence in America has long concerned me, particularly Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. While Fox is a strange mix of opinionated journalism and political mobilization instrument, as I have already examined here in an earlier post, the Journal has been a distinguished business newspaper with a conservative slant on the news, with the slant increasingly prevailing over the news in recent years with Murdoch’s ownership. I was struck by Joe Nocerra’s analysis in The New York Times. Concern with factual reality has diminished. Editors went beyond improving reporter’s copy from the stylistic point of view to ideological “improvement.” Political and business news reported was re-worked to confirm the political positions promoted on the editorial page. Note the problem in these cases is that strong distinctions between journalism as a vocation and other vocations are ignored became fuzzy, in the terms of Zerubavel.

Such willful ignorance is also present in The New York Post, another Murdoch enterprise that I see in my daily life. I read it only late at night, picking up a discarded copy on the train when I have nothing else to stimulate my eyes and pass the time. It is a tabloid, with very limited news value, a kissing cousin of The News of the World. The scandal of that scandal sheet broke out with the hacking of a murdered teenager’s phone which has rocked British public life, suggesting that Murdoch’s international media empire may very well melt into air, challenging the standing of many British public figures, including Prime Minister Cameron. An unserious business has become very serious, though it is not directly connected with my concerns about Fox and the WSJ. Yet, I see an important indirect connection, which is related to one of the central themes of our seminar, the relationship between media and public and private life.

Daniel Dayan and I agree on the importance of making a strong distinction between public and private. Thus, for example, he and I were both highly critical in Deliberately Considered posts of the WikiLeaks dump, as was Elzbieta Matynia, a fellow teacher in our Democracy and Diversity Institute, and its director and organizer. This is not only a matter of political commitment, for the pubic good and private happiness, as Hannah Arendt illuminates in The Human Condition. It also is based on an understanding of a fundamental precondition of  almost all social endeavors, nicely explained by Erving Goffman in his investigations of the front stage and back stage of interaction. If diplomacy is understood as an alternative to war in international relations, revealing secrets must be revealed selectively, with specific critical issues in mind, not just “dumped.” To dump is to destroy. It is a nihilistic act, undermining the world of diplomacy, potentially making war more likely. In the terms of Eviatar Zerubavel, our minds are rigid on this matter.

While this is an important ground of agreement, Dayan and I disagree on how the distinction between public and private is applied in the media in specific circumstances. Our minds are flexible in Zerubavel’s terms, but in different ways.

In the Strauss-Kahn scandal, he worries about the compromise of the private life of a public official. He emphasizes the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and thinks the French press has compromised this principle. The invasion of the private life of public officials for my friend and colleague is a pressing concern.

I worry that the public standing of officials has enabled private abuses, and that hidden in the shadows, the high status of powerful men has supported a sexist public life. I think that the failure of the French press to report on “what everyone knew” about DSK may have compromised the private rights of some women, and has compromised the principle of equality in French public affairs. using public status to abuse people privately is no less serious than the invasion of the private life of public officials. The unfolding scandal in France has the potential for working against this. Thus, I think the struggle to respect the separation of the public and the private goes both ways.

Yet, I admit this presents significant problems, radically revealed by Murdoch and Company. Their aggressive lack of respect for the privacy of public officials, specifically “the royals” and various celebrities, was widely known and tolerated. It was on the profits generated by such journalism that Mr. Murdoch became a king maker in British political life, courted by both the Conservative and Labor Parties. But when Murdoch employees ignored the distinction between public and private in the hacking of a young murder victim, and perhaps even of the families of the victims of 9/11 terrorists, “unintentional public figures,” the media empire built on invasive journalism that ignored the public – private distinction almost as a matter of principle, began its collapse. Please note: I judge, and also hope, that Murdoch is finished. I believe those who saw the Mubarak analogy are correct.

This would present an opportunity to reassert journalistic standards that are clearly in retreat, applying not only to the necessary distinction between private and public, but also the distinction between news and opinion, revealed in The Wall Street Journal, and the distinction between news reporting and political mobilizing, pioneered on television by Fox News.

Dayan and I also disagree on the distinction between journalism and politics as it applies to Fox News. He thinks that Fox (and I imagine would think the same of the WSJ) is presenting a political position, as is inevitably the case. I think that important distinctions between the ethics of different related activities are being blurred. Here I am more rigid, he more fuzzy, reversing our positions on DSK.

Making distinctions in everyday practice is difficult and not straightforward, as Zerubavel demonstrates in his masterful book, The Fine Line.  He analyzes “the rigid mind” that insists upon clear and strongly enforced distinctions, the “fuzzy mind” that does not perceive or blurs socially constructed distinctions, and the “flexible mind” with elastic mental structures “which allow us to break away from the mental cages in which we so often lock ourselves, yet still avoid chaos.”  In these terms, Dayan and I agree that the media have become too fuzzy.  But I think his answer is rigid on Strauss-Kahn, too fuzzy on Fox and The Wall Street Journal. He, no doubt reverses my judgment. Our disagreements underscore that now is the time for an agile flexibility. We disagree with mutual respect in our seminar and personal discussions, revealing that the truth that lies between us. I think we agree that the same sort of interaction is the micro- infrastructure of democratic life.

President Obama offered a critique of Fox News in an interview published in an issue of Rolling Stone.    This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the evening of Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Tuesday.  They were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” providing the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media.  They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.  (link)

Their response is cynical.  They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise.  Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism?  Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows.

But actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America.  While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough.  Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects.  It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization.

In the case of the Tea Party protests, this is most clearly the case.  Glenn Beck announces a mass demonstration, the 9/12 rally.  On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration are reported, and their significance is discussed.  Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions bring the planned event to the attention of a large audience.  Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event now goes well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

The French media theorist and sociologist, and my friend, Daniel Dayan, who I hope will join us in a future post, highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration. ” In his research he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle moves beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of a broader public.  This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream.

Then the event happens.  Fox is there giving it full coverage. It is the major event of the day, the story that is given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tend to report it as one story among many.  The fact that only Fox “properly” reports on the event is said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.  The format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Fox is not just biased as it reports the news.  It produces the news from beginning to end.  Its competitors in broadcast and cable journalism may lean left, MSNBC, or center, CNN, but they are not in the news making business in the same sense as Fox, and to a greater extent, its parent company, News Corporation.

To be sure, this form of media organization makes money.  Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp makes money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.