007: Working Without a Net: On Air in the Age of Trump
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
Release Date: 11/12/2019
The American Dream: A Dying Myth
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
The American dream, rooted in the belief that hard work leads to success, is the very soul of the nation, and perhaps the most widely shared expression of what the country represents. In recent decades, however, progress for many has stagnated while income and wealth inequality have surged. The data is irrefutable: With a backsliding labor movement, a growing housing crisis, flatlining wages, uneven wealth distribution, and stalled social mobility, the once-bright promise of the American Dream is fading. This episode of Common Ground with Jane Whitney explores the far-reaching...
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Saving the Shining City On the Hill
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
When the Soviet Union dissolved, the triumph of liberal democracy seemed so assured that some political scientists famously dubbed it “the end of history.” Yet, three decades later, history marches on while many of our political institutions have remained moored in place, creating a disjuncture that threatens the future of democracy. In this episode of Common Ground with Jane Whitney, we feature a panel of preeminent thinkers who discuss the battle between autocracy and democracy, analyze the evolving landscape, and offer strategies for Americans to safeguard our Republic.
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Game Over: Politics and Sports
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
The long-time voice of sports, ABC’s iconic commentator Howard Cosell, dubbed it the first rule of “jockocracy” – sports and politics don’t mix. The last thing a nation of couch potatoes wanted to see was a political hot potato on their fields of dreams. Sports, for most Americans, were the sacrosanct refuge where we went to get away from it all, to escape the tension and drama and conflict that colors daily life. But now many of our most divisive debates about class, race, religion, sex and the raw quest for political power are played out on the field. From the Pee Wee...
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Fury: America's Uncivil War
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
The legendary anchorman of the classic film "Network," Howard Beale, became a cultural icon for the axiom "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." We're all Howard Beales now, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy. If the country has a national mood, it's mad. The fury has become so intense that it has fractured our national psyche and has provoked daily speculation from even the most blasé pundits about whether America is on the verge of another civil war. But what are the roots of the intemperate disunion that pervades almost every aspect of daily life? Where did all this anger come...
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The Soul of America
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
Often referred to as “the conscience of America,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian Jon Meacham joins Jane Whitney to talk about how America’s history of overcoming crises makes him confident and hopeful that the country once again will prevail over these tumultuous times.
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LGBTQ Rights: The Next Frontier
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
Former mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg headlines a panel of leading activists, including Jonathan Capehart, Sharice Davids and Danica Roem, to talk with Jane Whitney about the landmark successes of the LGBTQ rights movement and the remaining hurdles of the movement.
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America and The World: U.S. Foreign Policy Update
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
Three renowned experts on international affairs discuss America’s standing in the world and the impact of President Trump’s relegation of the country’s traditional allies and alliances. In the face of the country’s most consequential foreign policy election in the post-war era, the trio of preeminent panelists also will debate how to project American power and how to protect the country from foreign threats.
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Prescient Predictions
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
Don’t wait until November to find out who won the 2020 presidential campaign! Or if Republicans maintained their Senate majority. Or what happened in the House. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki will tune up his big board with other nationally recognized prognosticators to explain the election’s dominant forces and how they will determine the outcome. The panel, also including Rachel Bitecofer and David Axelrod, will explain how the major campaigns are assembling their coalitions, which states are key and what voting groups will tip the outcome. But be forewarned: the show carries a spoiler alert.
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Democracy in Color
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
Three nationally known voices - Maya Wiley, Joy Reid, and Dr. Jason Johnson - come together in Conversations On the Green's third event of the season to discuss the role of race in American politics and how identity issues will shape the 2020 campaign for the presidency and Congress.
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The Politics of Justice
Common Ground with Jane Whitney
The second Conversation of our 2020 season, brings together a panel of renowned legal scholars to discuss the threats to the rule of law, which contains the furious competition among the Federal government's three branches.
info_outlineSince the time of the Roman Empire, the fourth estate has been celebrated as a pillar of democracy, a guardian of the separation of powers and a systemic counterbalance of the natural propensity of power to corrupt.
But in a challenge to the American system of checks and balances, it has become a recurrent theme of the daily news cycle for President Trump and his allies to marshal their base under the banner of “Fake News” and to accuse journalists of being “enemies of the people,” a phrase with grim historical roots dating to Joseph Stalin and The Terror of the Jacobin dictatorship of the 1700s.
All presidents spar with the press. Richard Nixon pioneered the depiction of the media as liberal bogeymen, “nattering nabobs of negativism” in immortal phrase of William Safire, an administration speech writer who later became famous as a New York Times columnist. But a president schooled in the ways of entertainment sleight-of-hand has mutated what was an accepted parlor trick to rally conservatives into a full-blown assault on the American press.
The administration has stopped holding regular press briefings and when it does pass out information, it frequently lies; Trump himself has been documented telling more than 10,000 lies, reporters now do their jobs in an unprecedented climate of intimidation and fear. Many are bullied or harassed — online or in real life. And in Annapolis, a man with a gun walked into a newsroom and slaughtered five staffers.
In response, the Main Stream Media has galvanized a range of norm shattering strategies as the spearhead of civil society. Once defined by its fierce independence, the press has banded together in collective solidarity, publishing mass editorials. Breaking with tradition, it has done away with diplomatic double speak in calling out mendacity and tries to confront falsehoods with an army of fact-checkers charged with defending delegitimized facts.
Jim Acosta, one of President Trump's chief whipping boys in his war against the press, is joining MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle to discuss the trials, tribulations and constitutional imperatives of covering The White House as a headliner of the October 27 Conversations On the Green, "Working Without A Net: On Air In The Age Of Trump."