What Happened: June 25, 2021

The Big Story

More evidence that the American journalism establishment is collapsing: The United States comes in dead last for media trust in a massive new study that surveyed 92,000 people in 46 countries about their attitudes toward news sources. The annual Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that trust in media grew globally by an average of 6 percentage points over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. But the United States is the major exception to that trend, with only 29% of U.S. respondents showing trust in their country’s news, compared to the global average of 44%. The study suggests that the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, the contested election, the Capitol riots, and the intensifying polarization all likely contributed to the collapse in trust. Other likely causes include the industry’s investment in subsequently debunked claims of collusion between the Trump administration and Russia, and the dramatic reversals over the past year in reporting on mask mandates and other matters of public health policy that seemed to reflect political agendas shaping news coverage. The loss of trust in the news occurs as the journalism industry is shrinking dramatically, with massive layoffs affecting newsrooms across the country and hitting local new outlets hardest. The downsizing disproportionately affects field reporting and “straight news,” which makes the media more reliant on the kind of opinion and narrative journalism that can generate strong reactions but appears to erode trust over the longer term.

Read it here: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2021

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

Surging home prices are hitting record highs in the United States as home sales fall for a fourth straight month. The median existing house price reached $350,300 in May, up 24% from the same time last year, according to data released this week by the National Association of Realtors. Housing experts think the rise is being driven by material and labor shortages and logistical bottlenecks, but the situation in the housing market—dubbed “Hyperinflation” by real estate analyst Ivy Zelman—mirrors parallel price surges in other areas of the economy, such as the booming market for used cars.
Read more here: https://asiatimes.com/2021/06/now-its-home-price-hyperinflation/

Four people have now been confirmed dead after a 12-story condo partially collapsed in Surfside, an area just north of Miami Beach. The number of residents still missing had risen to 159 as of Friday afternoon.

In April, Georgia’s new election law inspired 100 of the United States’ top CEOs to join forces, like the Legion of Doom, in a first-of-its-kind alliance of corporate power formed to lobby against the legislation—and now the federal government is getting in on the act. Friday, the Justice Department announced that it was suing the State of Georgia for violating the federal Voting Rights Act by enacting laws “with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color.”

Retirements among police officers in the United States are up 45% and resignations up 18% over the past year amid a nationwide spike in violent crime, according to a survey of almost 200 police departments cited in an in-depth report in The New York Times.
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/us/police-resignations-protests-asheville.html

President Joe Biden won a political victory by reaching a bipartisan deal on a massive infrastructure bill Thursday worth around $1.2 trillion, but it isn’t sealed yet. Less than two hours after announcing the compromise, Biden said that he wouldn’t sign the original legislation unless it came with an additional reconciliation bill to fund the expansive list of social programs that the White House is calling “human infrastructure”—a move that South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called “extortion.”

A sobering report in Bloomberg documents how millions of people fell through the cracks of government relief programs over the past year. Out of 64.3 million people who applied for regular unemployment benefits during the coronavirus pandemic, half were either rejected or never received payments, while 9 million people who lost work due to the pandemic were unable to receive unemployment benefits “despite the largest deployment of economic aid in U.S. history.” The failure to distribute funds varied state to state, with reasons including bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency, and misdirected efforts to combat fraud.
Read it here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-25/u-s-unemployment-at-least-9-million-americans-didn-t-receive-any-benefits

As the military approaches the final stages in its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration is detailing its plans to relocate as many as 100,000 Afghans who worked alongside U.S. personnel and are likely targets for attacks by resurgent Taliban forces.

The Back Pages

Ben Judah thinks that young American Jews are bored with the story of their own lives. For third and fourth generation Jews raised in comfortable suburbs and urban enclaves, there’s no longer any great drama in being a Jew in the new world; no teeming tenements and desperate striving, no hostile world to overcome or oppressive family expectations to rebel against. Thus they look to Israel, where existence remains an unsettled conflict, as their source of meaning and historical struggle. It hardly matters whether they want to damn Israel or praise it. The point is that they find the United States too settled and safe to provoke their passions—and look to Zion instead. Judah—who’s British, for the record—lays this out in the course of a bracing review essay of the new novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. Judah’s argument, agree with it or not, resonates too deeply to be ignored:

I sometimes marvel, on nights out in Brooklyn, that friends on the new Jewish Left know more about whatever crimes the Israeli army are committing at whatever checkpoints than my cousins who actually refused to serve in the IDF. I meet colleagues in DC who are more militant and seemingly intransigently up-to-date on the security situation in Gaza than my relatives who actually occupied it. It’s almost like we’ve lost interest in ourselves, out here, in America, as a culture.

 Read it here: https://unherd.com/2021/06/how-american-jews-lost-themselves/

A beautiful fossilized skull is rediscovered 85 years after it was first uncovered by a Chinese laborer who left it behind in an abandoned well. “The skull belonged to a mature male who had a huge brain, massive brow ridges, deep set eyes and a bulbous nose.” But maybe not a man, exactly. On Friday, a team of scientists announced that the skull may have come from a different species of ancient human whom we are just discovering. That claim is disputed by other scientists, and so the origins of the skull—nicknamed “Dragon Man” because it was found along China’s Dragon River—remains a mystery.

Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/science/dragon-man-skull-china.html

Now take a break from reading and watch something. Here we have the full 1961 debate in Montreal between Israel’s Irish-born ambassador to Canada—and late uncle of Israel’s new president—Ya’acov Herzog and the famed British historian Arnold Toynbee. It’s worth watching for Herzog’s erudition and the force of his argument, but also as a lesson in how the debates over Israel and Zionism seem to cycle endlessly through the same first principles, with the right to existence always on the line in 1961 as in 1948 as in today.

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2zp9iZk8wg