When did the media go wrong? A new book blames Robert Caro.
In a new book,, the author Marc Dunkelman goes a bit further into history to pinpoint where American media lost its way — and lands on the glorious summer of 1974, when the Washington Post took down Richard Nixon and the New Yorker published four parts of a monumental biography of New York's great builder, Robert Moses. And his media villain is a man Dunkelman described to me as 'Abbie Hoffman in a tweed suit': Robert Caro, the revered, now 89-year old author of The Power Broker who is now working on the fifth volume of his biography of President Lyndon Johnson.
The 1,246-page is a legend of American biography, and sits on the shelves of most journalists. (Mine, I noticed this week, was leaning dangerously toward the sofa, and so I moved it and weighed it — 3 pounds, 3 ounces by my kitchen scale.)
By the time I read it in the late 1990s, it was received wisdom — detached from any time and place, and from any sense that it advanced a political agenda. It was both a brilliant exploration of the inner workings of mid-20th century government power and a cautionary tale of how The Establishment used that power to drive highways through neighborhoods, replace 'slums' with apartment buildings, and, well, build a lot of very nice parks.
Dunkelman puts the book back into context: 'When, during the Watergate summer of 1974, Robert Caro published his voluminous takedown of Robert Moses, the spellbinding narrative mirrored what was, nay then, an entirely familiar worldview. Moses had been a progressive … a man who believed unerringly in the wisdom of experts,' he writes. The exposé, 'released within weeks of Nixon's resignation, was yet more evidence of power gone awry.'
Earlier journalists had 'made a practice of taking public officials at their word.' (Muckrakers, like the consequential Jack Anderson, who broke much of the Watergate story but has largely been erased from its high-minded history, were confined to the margins as problematic gossip-mongers.) But there had been a cultural change: 'Boomers entering the news business in the 1960s weren't inclined to accept government claims so uncritically, and for good reason.'
Dunkelman argues that Watergate, and embodied a new sort of negative naivete: a reflexive skepticism of the use of power. The role of journalism became, as you'll often hear, to hold power to account — hardly to celebrate its successes, or even to recognize them. 'The individual has to yield in matters of this kind to the entire country, to the advantages and needs of the majority of the people,' Moses protested, after people stopped listening to him. 'If not, we wouldn't build anything!'
Caro didn't respond to an email inquiry about Dunkelman's line on him, or the broader reconsideration of Moses.
Dunkelman's book captures a rising tide in Democratic politics that sometimes goes under the 'YIMBY' ('yes in my backyard') heading.
This pro-growth liberalism has been brewing for years. The blogger Matt Yglesias proposed in in 2020 that the United States dominate its global competitors by tripling its populationa premise that was (obviously) not immediately embraced by either political party. A wing of the Democratic Party, beginning in San Francisco, has made a crusade of killing restrictive zoning regulations, sometimes pushing conservatives skeptical of an influx of big buildings into opposing growth in favor of a regulatory state.
The case has continued to develop, though, and its proponents are trying out a new label: the 'abundance agenda.' Ezra Klein's and Derek Thompson's much-anticipated new book Abundance is likely to focus the conversation around these arguments this spring. They make the case that a successful Democratic Party — and its cities — must rally around an idea of a future in which the price and quality of housing falls the way it has for consumer goods like flatscreen TVs. And they argue that Democrats' doctrinaire insistence on restraining the private sector in the first instance — through a blind embrace of regulations on business and technology — has cost them the ability to govern.
Dunkelman came to this subject in a familiar way: reading as he took the train into New York City, and disembarked in Penn Station. 'I would close the book, gather my belongings, and climb up into the daylight through the dingy, fetid basement corridors that serve as the city's front door,' he recalls.
My weekly trips to Washington take me through the gorgeous, airy Moynihan Train Hall, jammed to completion by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (The media coverage of its opening was mixed. Architecture critics called it 'glorious' and 'stunning.' 'Homeless feel unwelcome' without benches to sleep on, The City reported. The New York Post broke the news that the pressure of finishing the project had contributed to an executive's suicide.)
New York's government is, again, at a low, and a mayor's race is underway. Cuomo is likely to run, and he's long expressed a theory of government that harkens back to the progressive era: that in an age of public distrust, the best way to restore faith is to build and fix big, literal, public works — Moynihan, La Guardia Airport, the former Tappan Zee Bridge, now named after his father. I asked him last week about whether New York should reclaim the title of the biggest building in the world: 'Al Smith, [in the] midst of the Depression, [built] the Empire State building in one year. Yes, we can.'
A Brooklyn state senator, Zellnor Myrie, is running as the YIMBY candidate, proposing that the city put 85,000 apartments in whole 'new neighborhoods,' part of a plan for a million new homes that could add millions in populationHe'd also like the height title back: 'We shouldn't be beat by Dubai,' he told the New York Editorial Board, of which I'm a member, Thursday. 'New Yorkers just like to be inspired.'
Is it the job of the media to cheerlead such things, which bring — as Moses said — terrible tradeoffs? Generations of journalists would tell you: absolutely not. I suppose that's why the tallest building in the world is in Dubai, where they don't have these problems.
Moses was the embodiment and the arm of The Establishment. We live at a moment when all politics is populism and the public consensus is to tear down the elites, the Niskanen Center's Soren Dayton notes, while the original progressives were focused on crushing urban machines and putting power in the hands of wiser leaders.
'In a re-celebration of Robert Moses and the [Tennessee Valley Authority], you blow past public participation and celebrate a technocratic depoliticization. And, again, these same people explicitly tried to drive down public participation,' he wrote on X. 'Does that sound like a match for today?'
to can be read online, with this epigraph from Sophocles: 'One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.'
'The author and publisher do not comprehend the obligations of leadership,' Caro wrote in his typewritten 23-page response to the book's four-part New Yorker excerpts.
Moses's legacy for City Journal, and found him a less sinister — and monumental — figure: 'Moses survived not through Machiavellian machinations to subvert political will but by smoothly delivering what the state and city's governing class, business leaders, and editorial boards wanted him to accomplish.'
What is American journalism if it isn't focused on holding power to account, our profession's loose and perhaps self-important mission in recent decades? President Theodore Roosevelt raised that question back in 1906. 'The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor,' he said.
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Los Angeles Times
34 minutes ago
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UPI
36 minutes ago
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State Department to burn birth control worth $9.7M meant for poor nations
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Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Trump boasts of deporting the ‘worst of the worst.' LA raids tell a far different story
LOS ANGELES - They called them the 'worst of the worst.' For more than a month and a half, the Trump administration has posted a barrage of mugshots of L.A. undocumented immigrants with long rap sheets. Officials have spotlighted Cuong Chanh Phan, a 49-year-old Vietnamese man convicted in 1997 of second-degree murder for his role in slaying two teens at a high school graduation party. They have shared blurry photos on Instagram of a slew of convicted criminals such as Rolando Veneracion-Enriquez, a 55-year-old Filipino man convicted in 1996 of sexual penetration with a foreign object with force and assault with intent to commit a felony. And Eswin Uriel Castro, a Mexican convicted in 2002 of child molestation and in 2021 of assault with a deadly weapon. But the immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security showcase in X posts and news releases do not represent the majority of immigrants swept up across Los Angeles. 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ICE data shows that about 31% of the immigrants arrested across the L.A. region from June 1 to June 26 had criminal convictions, 11% had pending criminal charges and 58% were classified as 'other immigration violator,' which ICE defines as 'individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action.' The L.A. region's surge in arrests of noncriminals has been more dramatic than the U.S. as a whole: Arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions climbed nationally from 57% in April to 69% in June. Federal raids here have also been more fiercely contested in Southern California - particularly in L.A. County, where more than 2 million residents are undocumented or living with undocumented family members. 'A core component of their messaging is that this is about public safety, that the people that they are arresting are threats to their communities,' said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. 'But it's hard to maintain that this is all about public safety when you're going out and arresting people who are just going about their lives and working.' Trump never said he would arrest only criminals. Almost as soon as he retook office on Jan. 20, Trump signed a stack of executive orders aimed at drastically curbing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants who posed a security threat to anyone who entered the country illegally. Yet while officials kept insisting they were focused on violent criminals, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a warning: 'That doesn't mean that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation's borders are off the table.' As White House chief adviser on border policy Tom Homan put it: 'If you're in the country illegally, you got a problem.' Still, things did not really pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered ICE's top field officials to shift to more aggressive tactics: arresting undocumented immigrants, whether or not they had a criminal record. Miller set a new goal: arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day, a quota that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing only on criminals. 'There aren't enough criminal immigrants in the United States to fill their arrest quotas and to get millions and millions of deportations, which is what the president has explicitly promised,' Bier said. 'Immigration and Customs Enforcement says there's half a million removable noncitizens who have criminal convictions in the United States. Most of those are nonviolent: traffic, immigration offenses. It's not millions and millions.' By the time Trump celebrated six months in office, DHS boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants. '70% of ICE arrests,' the agency said in a news release, 'are individuals with criminal convictions or charges.' But that claim no longer appeared to be true. While 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested across the U.S. in April had a criminal conviction or faced a pending charge, that number had plummeted to 57% in June. In L.A., the difference between what Trump officials said and the reality on the ground was more stark: Only 43% of those arrested across the L.A. region had criminal convictions or faced a pending charge. Still, ICE kept insisting it was 'putting the worst first.' As stories circulate across communities about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are signs that support for Trump's deportation agenda is falling. A CBS/YouGov poll published July 20 shows about 56% of those surveyed approved of Trump's handling of immigration in March, but that dropped to 50% in June and 46% in July. About 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration is prioritizing for deporting, only 44% said 'dangerous criminals.' California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles. 'The federal government is using California as a playground to test their indiscriminate actions that fulfill unsafe arrest quotas and mass detention goals,' Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom told The Times. 'They are going after every single immigrant, regardless of whether they have a criminal background and without care that they are American citizens, legal status holders and foreign-born, and even targeting native-born U.S. citizens.' When pressed on why ICE is arresting immigrants who have not been convicted or are not facing pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people have violated immigration law. 'ICE agents are going to arrest people for being in the country illegally,' Homan told CBS News earlier this month. 'We still focus on public safety threats and national security threats, but if we find an illegal alien in the process of doing that, they're going to be arrested too.' Immigration experts say that undermines their message that they are ridding communities of people who threaten public safety. 'It's a big backtracking from 'These people are out killing people, raping people, harming them in demonstrable ways,' to 'This person broke immigration law in this way or that way,'' Bier said. The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target criminals in California. It has threatened to withhold federal funds to California due to its 'sanctuary state' law, which limits county jails from coordinating with ICE except in cases involving immigrants convicted of a serious crime or felonies such as murder, rape, robbery or arson. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department requested California counties, including L.A., provide data on all jail inmates who are not U.S. citizens in an effort to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who have committed crimes. 'Although every illegal alien by definition violates federal law,' the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release, 'those who go on to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a heightened risk to our Nation's safety and security.' As Americans are bombarded with dueling narratives of good vs. bad immigrants, Kocher believes the question we have to grapple with is not 'What does the data say?' Instead, we should ask: 'How do we meaningfully distinguish between immigrants with serious criminal convictions and immigrants who are peacefully living their lives?' 'I don't think it's reasonable, or helpful, to represent everyone as criminals - or everyone as saints,' Kocher said. 'Probably the fundamental question, which is also a question that plagues our criminal justice system, is whether our legal system is capable of distinguishing between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in the bureaucracy.' The data, Kocher said, show that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction. 'If we don't like the way that the system is working, we might want to rethink whether we want a system where people who are simply living in the country following laws, working in their economy, should actually have a pathway to stay,' Kocher said. 'And the only way to do that is actually to change the laws.' In the rush to blast out mugshots of some of the most criminal L.A. immigrants, the Trump administration left out a key part of the story. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, its staff notified ICE on May 5 of Veneracion's pending release after he had served nearly 30 years in prison for the crimes of assault with intent to commit rape and sexual penetration with a foreign object with force. But ICE failed to pick up Veneracion and canceled its hold on him May 19, a day before he was released on parole. A few weeks later, as ICE amped up its raids, federal agents arrested Veneracion on June 7 at the ICE office in L.A. The very next day, DHS shared his mugshot in a news release titled 'President Trump is Stepping Up Where Democrats Won't.' The same document celebrated the capture of Phan, who served nearly 25 years in prison after he was convicted of second-degree murder. CDCR said the Board of Parole Hearings coordinated with ICE after Phan was granted parole in 2022. Phan was released that year to ICE custody. But those details did not stop Trump officials from taking credit for his arrest and blaming California leaders for letting Phan loose. 'It is sickening that Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass continue to protect violent criminal illegal aliens at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.