Commentary: The Spectacle Of The Swastika
Why I'm losing my faith in the news as it is, but hopeful in what it can become
Community organizers stage a press conference in Austin on June 1 to voice their complaints about their treatment by Amazon and an alderwoman. | Paul Goyette
I have a confession to make.
You may have noticed that I’ve been relatively inactive for the last few weeks. That’s because I’m losing my faith in the news. I just don’t know what difference the news makes anymore in a culture that doesn’t seem to pay attention to much of anything for more than the time it takes to watch a 90-second Facebook Reel.
When everyone is a glutton for information and, beyond that, rendered helpless by our inability to soundly process most of the information that we consume, what good does more information do?
The late media critic Neil Postman wrote about our current predicament 30 years ago in “Technolopy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.”
“Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves,” Postman wrote.
Postman explained that institutions such as the family, church, school, university, political party, courts, and newspapers have all served as mechanisms for disciplining and ordering information. Today, in an era of systemic distrust, institutions are in disarray, infantilized from the inside out, rendered helpless and dependent on privateering consultants, hustlers, hacks and social climbers whose only purpose is power and profit.
Newspapers, for instance, have been hollowed out by private equity firms that bought them up and have cut vital local content and accountability reporting to maximize revenue. This is happening just as the institutions we’ve traditionally relied on to make sense of the world have become hijacked by bad-faith actors who have gigantic leverage (more money, more information and more power) over the forces that are ostensibly supposed to be holding them accountable.
In a world as complex and increasingly unstable as ours; that is governed by the laws of exponential growth that most people don’t understand; that is both globalized and de-globalizing; where what happens in China or Washington, D.C. affects life in, say, Chicago; where things happen fast and asymmetrically; where the path from cause to effect is often nonlinear; and where elite institutional gatekeepers often act in bad faith or don’t feel the slightest compunction about ignoring people who aren’t in their professional and social circles, what hope is there for a lone reporter to tell a story that matters or that credibly explains reality?
So, I haven’t done much local reporting or opinion writing on this Substack in what for me feels like quite a while because I’ve been disoriented. Last week, however, I had an epiphany that prompted me to start writing again. The way news is done now is woefully insufficient to meet human needs, but it doesn’t have to be.
A few weeks ago, I started a new business called John Wilk Communications LLC, a communications company named after one of the co-founders of Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the country.
Often, marginalized people and people engaged in marginalized and unglamorous issues don’t have the resources to pay for basic communications help. They can’t hire someone to think about messaging strategy or write press releases or work the press. That’s why I started John Wilk. To champion marginalized people and issues. To help folks on the sidelines get their point across. To do equity for real and not for fake (in much plainer parlance).
But this mission, I’m realizing, is incredibly difficult in the current media environment, where there’s a WeWork floor full of PR hacks (now, myself included) and digital “content curators” for every poor journalist creating original news; and where the news, once it's produced, gets thrown into the social media whirlwind. In this environment, news becomes less of a service than yet another cognitive burden.
And I’ve not even begun to discuss how the news is made.
On June 1, one of my first clients, a West Side labor organization called Black Workers Matter, held a press conference outside the office of 37th Ward Ald. Emma Mitts. They were demanding a meeting with the alderwoman about the status of a new Amazon facility in West Humboldt Park that has been built but hasn’t yet opened despite promises from the company that they’d open last year.
Black Workers Matter hosted the news conference alongside the West Humboldt Park Community Coalition (WHPCC), a group founded by residents in 2021 to make sure Amazon is responsive to their needs, and Get to Work, a jobs placement firm based in Austin. Neither Mitts nor Amazon has actively engaged with these groups, the organizers claim.
A cameraman from CBS 2 and two reporters from the Chicago Tribune and Block Club Chicago showed up to the press conference and soon met a quandary. There were competing messages, two different stories even.
The organizers claimed that the alderwoman has ignored their requests to hold town hall meetings about the Amazon development and hasn’t explained how Amazon was able to acquire West Side property through a “by right ordinance,” which allows developers to avoid the standard zoning and land use regulations, right before the City Council banned the ordinance.
The organizers said if Amazon doesn’t open the new facility, then the alderwoman should turn it into a community center. They also wanted a community benefits agreement that would guarantee a $27.50 hourly wage, that 60% of the facility’s workers live on the West Side and that Amazon conducts its hiring process through local job placement firms like Get to Work, which is owned by a Black woman, Edie Jacobs, instead of sending workers to suburban Skokie for processing.
They said the city and Amazon should share more details about why the facility hasn’t opened yet. The organizers said they’ve been in talks with a range of city and federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, about possible concerns related to the Amazon development.
“There’s an issue even about whether or not they properly cleaned the dirt the facility sits on because it was previously a chemical processing plant,” said Farrah Walker, a WHPCC member.
The organizers from those three organizations were joined by community activists from across the city and suburbs, including a Hispanic man with the Little Village Community Council who said Amazon’s corporate malfeasance is part of a broader pattern.
“Out in Little Village during the pandemic, Target built a big complex and they knocked down this chimney [releasing harmful chemicals]. They kill people. And then we gave them a tax incentive,” he said. They said we’re going to give you jobs. They only gave us 11 jobs.” The man also complained that there “are no Spanish speakers” in Ald. Mitts’ office despite many Hispanic residents in her ward.
Enter the swastika
And then there was the apparently crazed white man with the swastika. Walker said the man, reportedly a military veteran, had illegally occupied a building in West Humboldt Park in an area not far from the unopened Amazon facility, a school and the city’s new police and fire training center.
On the building’s roof, he erected a scaffolded tower on which hung five flags, including the American flag that was raised upside-down, and a yellow sign bearing a bright red swastika.
“This is an active shooter situation,” Walker said. “This man is on record firing shots in the vicinity of where schools, businesses and the Chicago police and fire academy are. This is not safe.”
Other witnesses said the man would often go onto the building’s roof to play loud music for hours, threatening passersby. “F– police” and “F– Joe Biden” he would say. He’d often be seen with guns and a flamethrower. He once pointed “an unknown object with a laser” in the direction of a police helicopter.
The organizers said on June 1 that they had tried contacting the alderwoman, the mayor, the governor and law enforcement authorities about the man but got no responses.
“If this was Lincoln Park or River West, that sign would’ve been taken down the day we reported it,” Walker said. If the Amazon facility were open, she added, the corporation’s mere presence would probably give government officials a sense of urgency to resolve the situation. The organizers said they hope the city gives the man mental health resources.
If I were a reporter, the quandary I would have is which aspect of this news conference I should cover. Amazon or the man with the swastika? The latter angle is more relevant and pressing; it’s also a public safety issue. But how does a reporter cover this angle without ignoring the former, which deals with very important structural inequities and the lack of corporate and government accountability?
How does one avoid covering the apparently crazed white man with the swastika terrorizing a Black community as a media spectacle? Perhaps it doesn’t matter how the story is covered because it will be posted on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. The words “swastika” and “flamethrower,” and the images of an armed white man on a roof will dominate whatever subtlety the story contains. The man, and the community members who are afraid of him and for him, will immediately cease to be flesh-and-blood by virtue of their pixelation.
The next day, I searched for coverage of the June 1 press conference. This is the title of the Chicago Tribune article: “West Humboldt Park residents seeking action after swastika displayed atop building.”
And the lede:
“Community members in West Humboldt Park shared concerns Thursday about a man prominently displaying a red and yellow swastika sign from scaffolding atop a building close to a school.”
The article doesn’t mention the organizer’s angst over Amazon until about a dozen grafs down.
“The community coalition members also discussed a so far unused Amazon facility in the neighborhood during the news conference,” the article points out.
This is the title of the Block Club Chicago article: “West Siders Want Answers About When Long-Delayed Amazon Warehouse Will Open — And Create Jobs It Promised.”
The lede:
“Neighbors are calling on Ald. Emma Mitts (37th) to turn Amazon’s massive — but vacant and long-delayed — warehouse in West Humboldt Park into a spot for the community if it’s not going to open.”
The reporter did not mention the swastika in the Amazon story, perhaps to avoid forcing that angle to compete with the spectacle. The article also makes readers aware that “neighbors were refused entry to Mitts’ office, 4924 W. Chicago Ave., and told to submit their complaints in writing to a mailbox.”
“In a statement, Mitts said she has never intentionally steered away constituents or ignored their questions, citing “health complications” as the reason she was unable to talk with protesters,” the article explains. The piece also links to previous reporting on the organizers’ issues with Amazon, demonstrating continuity in coverage that provides more background information and context for readers than the Tribune article does.
The only CBS 2 story on the matter I could find ran 25 seconds before the scheduled press conference. The segment includes old footage of Black Workers Matter protestors (even though a CBS 2 cameraman was at the June 1 news conference) and only mentions that “protestors on the West Side are back out today, standing together against Amazon after it’s delayed opening of its new facility.”
The spectacle of the Black Workers Matter press conference was swallowed up by the bigger spectacle of the swastika. Howard Ray Jr., the founder of WHPCC, uploaded videos of the June 1 press conference to Facebook. Ray’s videos are the fullest representation of the concerns the groups expressed on Thursday that are out there in the media. As of Friday afternoon, they had less than 60 views combined. Do they exist?
This is why I’ve lost faith in the news as it is. But I’ve not completely lost faith in what the news, reconsidered and perhaps revolutionized, can be.
The news should be done differently
In the days since that June 1 press conference, I’ve been thinking about how I would have covered it if I were still at Austin Weekly News. Honestly, without the perspective I’m gaining now, I probably would not have written a much better story than the Block Club Chicago reporter, who I think made a sound news decision to avoid mentioning the swastika altogether, saving it for an altogether different article.
I believe that was a better decision than the Chicago Tribune reporter’s decision to lead with the flamethrower and not mention the Amazon issues until the last quarter of the article. To the Tribune reporter’s credit, he at least incorporated the workers’ complaints into that story dominated by the spectacle of the swastika and the reporting of that angle was pretty thorough.
Both stories were better by spades than the CBS 2 coverage of the workers’ complaints, which was virtually nonexistent.
With some distance, though, I’m realizing that conventional news, even if it’s local, rarely does any good for marginalized people who are fighting to be heard and to hold the powerful accountable. The white veteran possibly suffering from mental illness was not served by the media and neither were the Black workers who can’t even get a meeting with their local alderperson.
I created the following accountability chart to map most of the specific demands and claims that were made by the organizers and which ones were addressed in the media coverage. As the table suggests, the gaps were rather large.
If I were a reporter on the phone or in an email exchange with an Amazon spokesperson, I’d lean into the assumption that I can’t take their word for granted and that they’re probably not used to being questioned.
The first thing I’d ask is why are they communicating with me and not directly with the organizers when one of the organizer’s basic demands is a clear line of communication? And I’m not talking about donating to select nonprofits and holding ceremonial, one-off town halls. I mean having regular communication with people who are clearly concerned about the status of a facility Amazon has built in their community. Amazon has an army of PR hacks but nobody who can regularly liaison with concerned citizens? Why does Amazon think it’s entitled to secrecy?
And I’d pose incredibly specific questions to that Amazon spokesperson, not settling for canned responses like the facility is not open because of “business reasons.” What’s going to be the process for hiring local workers? How much are you going to pay them? Why won’t you pay the $27.50 hourly wage that Black Workers Matter and WHPCC are calling for? Is it true that all the people you hire at that West Humboldt Park facility, once it opens, will have to go to Skokie to be processed? Why can’t you do your hiring through a local, Black-owned jobs placement firm like Get to Work?
If I were a reporter on the phone or in an email exchange with Ald. Mitts, I’d ask her why she’s communicating with me and not directly with the organizers when one of their most basic demands is a clear line of communication? Is it true that organizers asked you to host town hall meetings about the Amazon development and you refused? Is it true that the city waited to outlaw its “by right ordinance” until the Amazon deal was done? Does an alderman have the power or authority to turn an already built Amazon facility into a community center? How would that work?
And if the officials refused to answer questions, I’d note that in the reporting, specifically pointing out their refusal.
For the organizers, I’d want to know how they’d feasibly turn a 140,000-square-foot Amazon delivery station into another use. How much would that cost? Who has the authority to do that and what would the process look like?
In a globalized world, local news has a responsibility to help readers make connections, to bring them into a larger dialogue that we’ve been brainwashed into thinking is too hard to comprehend or that doesn’t concern or affect us.
For instance, I would have taken the license of mentioning two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that hamper the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to enforce federal environmental laws and hamper the National Labor Relations Board’s ability to protect a worker’s right to strike.
These are relevant given Walker’s statements that she’s contacted the EPA about the possible environmental impact of the Amazon facility and given the nature of Black Workers Matter’s labor organizing. It would also have been relevant due to the presence of a Teamsters attorney at the press event.
On June 1, the same day as the press conference, the Supreme Court ruled that striking Teamsters in Washington State could be sued by a concrete company that claimed the striking workers caused the concrete to spoil. The Court’s decision will undoubtedly affect these labor organizers and West Side workers because it provides any company with an opening to sue striking workers for causing economic harm, which is the point of a strike. The decision means that Amazon could technically sue striking workers for spoiled milk.
I would have taken the license to explore the workers’ narrative that, however loosely, links a flame-throwing military veteran’s illegal occupation of a building to an empty Amazon facility in the same neighborhood. After all, these are two issues related to zoning and land use and how both Amazon and the flame-throwing man may or may not have exploited loopholes in the city’s zoning and permitting enforcement.
Perhaps this is one way to make the story less of a media spectacle. Couch the event that’s coming at you fast and hard within the context of the slow and structural — and do it over and over and over again. Make it standard operating procedure.
For instance, every single time the Chicago Tribune reports on yet another ‘deadly weekend of gun violence,’ it should remind readers that the country still doesn’t have a federal gun ban and show them the powerful people and organizations blocking it. Every mass shooting story should be accompanied by the logo of the National Rifle Association. Every single CBS 2 story about fentanyl overdoses should be accompanied by a photo of somebody from the Sackler family that profited billions from the crisis they manufactured.
The news status quo bombards people with incrementalism and spectacle, which only feeds into our tendency to confuse the symptoms of social dysfunction and decay with its causes. By making the least powerful the face of social structures and phenomena, the news only obscures and mystifies how our complex and increasingly erratic world really works. This is, in part, how the mainstream news, despite its emphasis on objectivity and truth, has made itself susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. And this is why you can be a savvy consumer of even news outlets of record (i.e., the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune) and still be the least bit informed about why the news you just saw or read or heard really happened.
The news should help people make sense of the world and how to navigate it with agency. People should feel empowered by the news, not mystified by it. The news should also be de-siloed. There’s breaking news, investigative news, human interest news, accountability news, solutions news, analysis, local news, national news, political news, government news, labor news, business news, etc. Like much else in our managerial culture, the news has specialized itself out of much relevance when it comes to meeting real human needs.
I can list more ways I would have covered the June 1 press conference, but producing news is not the most important aspect of news production. The news is nothing without an audience, more importantly a public sphere in which it is processed. Unfortunately, the public sphere and the institutions that encompass it are under assault.
Alongside other mediating institutions mentioned earlier, newspapers helped create the public sphere, “an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A ‘public’ is ‘of or concerning the people as a whole.’”
Even historically marginalized and excluded people used newspapers as tools to build what media scholars call alternative public spheres. If the Chicago Tribune helped create the city’s largely white public sphere, the Chicago Defender helped the city’s Blacks forge an alternative one.
This is not the case with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google. It is not even the case with the internet, in general. Twitter is not the new Tribune and Black Twitter is not the new Chicago Defender. The digital news that is rapidly replacing the print-dominated news is up against a media landscape that is increasingly filtering, paywalling and screening the public sphere out of existence.
Moreover, a public sphere cannot be formed without public space (not in the metaverse but in unmediated reality) and without public institutions. A news that meets human needs must grapple with the dilemma of forming a public in a hostile digital media environment that is tailor-made for private corporations.
The dilemma so far stumps me, but there’s no way of getting around it. In the meantime, I scroll.
