News with Nuance: June 9, 2023

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hi Readers - and hello to all new subscribers,

Welcome to this week’s News - with Nuance. As I’ve looked back over the news articles I wanted to share with you this week, I found them following a similar pattern that often comes to light in this particular newsletter.

We’ll start with some gloomy pieces, steeped in the sometimes-bleak reality of a world that conspires to treat human beings as commodities or units of capital, and deemphasizes the toll that such dehumanization takes on all of us, even those of us who ostensibly benefit from our greedy economic system.

But every week - I can’t help myself - I seem to find my way through the bad news to reach for some hope. Maybe that’s a symptom of my theological leanings (death and resurrection is a recurrent framing), but I think it’s also a function of the choice we all have to make, day in and day out, to keep on going in the world. As I wrote at the end of this past Tuesday’s Substack:

We’re alive.

We hold life. We hold death. We breathe it in. We let it go.

We forge on, together.

Thanks for being here with me for all of it. Let’s get to the news … with nuance,

Angela

P.S.: The news about former President Trump’s indictment on federal charges broke after I wrote this week’s edition of News with Nuance. I think you’ll see, though, how the following two arguments fit a similar theme, on both the impunity with which powerful and wealthy Americans (most of them white men) flout the rules of law and morality only to take full advantage of the constitutional protections of a high-priced legal system, as well as the challenge it is to hold them accountable when so many of their peers are doing the same. Viewing this news through the lens of Christian Nationalism - it is doubly difficult to hold these men accountable when they have cloaked themselves in the power and inerrancy of the Christian God, or at least the image of God that Christian Nationalists model themselves after.

PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, shown in 2022, announced that his tour was partnering with LIV Golf

Photo by Seth Wenig, Associated Press

The Headline: The PGA Tour is calling this a victory, but something doesn’t smell right

The main reason I was drawn into sportswriting when I first began my career as a journalist was not the touchdowns or the home runs, but instead because sportswriting offers journalists the opportunity to take a niche issue and use it to comment more broadly on a major social problem or facet of broader American culture.

Because much of sportswriting is about observation and analysis, even beat writers have the opportunity to expound and pontificate in a way that ordinary news journalists do not. The best of these sportswriters further enhance those skills as they become sports columnists, alas, a somewhat dying job opportunity for non-ex-professional athletes.

Sally Jenkins, of the Washington Post, is among the best in her craft at doing exactly this. While much of sports journalism has become complicit in access journalist culture, working first to appease team executives and PR handlers, Jenkins never pulls any punches, from covering the Washington football team’s scandals, to Wednesday’s report on the PGA merger with LIV Golf, a professional golf tour financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. By the way, don’t miss the political connections here. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (like his father-in-law), is a big booster of LIV Golf, and in April the New York Times reported on Kushner’s connections to the Tour, including a $2 billion investment from the Saudi wealth fund into a company controlled by Kushner.

What do American conservative politicians, real estate scammers and grifters, and professional golfers and their administrators all have in common?

Money. They all like money, above all else.

Jenkins, in her characteristically biting and blunt tone, brings to light the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of this deal, which, as is typical in American professional sports, benefits the non-athlete owners and administrators at the cost of the athletes’ well-being and integrity.

Many PGA tour golfers had stood boldly against LIV, and against the Saudi corruption and human rights offenders and religious fundamentalists who finance it. They stepped out onto a ledge, and the PGA tour grifters cut out that ledge underneath them.

You can imagine a different America, where our principles aren’t up for sale. But that America is under attack.

The Quote:

What’s the going rate to turn an American executive into a boot boy for a despotic torturer such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Just how worn out are the knees of PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan’s pants legs?

But let’s start with this simple question first: Why would the PGA Tour join forces with a vermin-populated fourth-rate start-up such as LIV Golf, a comedic failure that can’t command any ratings, headed by that king of the white mice, Greg Norman?

Bought. That’s the only word for Monahan and his henchies on the PGA Tour policy board, who have made an otherwise inexplicable — and still vague — deal to work with LIV and the European tour to form a new global enterprise, funded by the Saudis. They were bought. The only question is for how many bills.

Story by Sally Jenkins, Washington Post

The Headline: Revenge served ice cold? Top L.A. law firm outs former partners’ racist, sexist emails

During a news week filled with major global stories, like wildfire smoke caused by climate-change-induced Canadians fires making outdoor life unlivable across the East Coast; and a potential long-awaited counteroffensive kicking off amidst Russian-induced flooding in Ukraine - you might wonder why I’m featuring two relatively smaller stories, first of the PGA/LIV merger and then this one, about the demise of a newly launched elite L.A. law firm after the release of its partners’ racist, sexist, and (my addition) gross emails.