JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

The home team has fallen apart, and a cold front is coming through. But that’s hardly the worst of it. I hate to ruin an otherwise nice Sunday for you, but sometimes we just have to take a long, cold look at where we are.

Here are three things to consider…

:: Joe Biden’s approval ratings are down in the low- to mid-40s, and the way things are going with his Build Back Better plan, the prospects for a turnaround in the near future are slim.

In a New York Times analysis this morning, reporter Nate Cohn said polls tend to indicate that the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is hanging like an albatross around Biden. Cohn wrote…

“Even weeks later, voters still say ‘Afghanistan’ is the negative thing they have most recently heard about Mr. Biden. And since the withdrawal, a majority of voters have routinely said that the Biden administration is incompetent. Perhaps in part as a result, voters now have little confidence in the administration’s ability to address other problems.”

Cohn said more than 60 percent of voters believe Biden is responsible for rising inflation and 52 percent of Americans expect the economy to get worse over the next 12 months.

The only thing that has been holding up pretty well is the stock market, and with inflation rising and the supply chain bogged down, that could tank at any time.

Here’s the grimmest part of Cohn’s analysis: A recent Grinnell College/Selzer poll showed Biden and Trump tied at 40 percent in a hypothetical election.

…I know a lot of things are out of Biden’s control — like bringing Kyrsten Synema down from her outer-space orbit — but it looks like Biden is just bumbling along and willing to abandon some of his biggest campaign promises in order to get a “technical” win. It’s hard to see how a technical win will go very far with already-disenchanted voters. And then there’s the incredibly large number of people who need the most help but who won’t bother with registering to vote and then voting for the person who is most committed to improving their lot.

:: The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear appeals from two libel cases on Friday, and, depending on the outcome, the First Amendment could take a big hit.

At stake is the 57-year-old precedent that for a public official or public figure to prove he or she was libeled, he or she must prove that a defamatory statement was made with “actual malice” and also “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

According to an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, the Supreme Court bestowed such broad protection on speech because the First Amendment embodied a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attack on government and public officials.”

Even English law does not offer such broad protection. Floyd Abrams, the legendary First Amendment lawyer who wrote The Times’ piece, said: “Inaccurate statements about even the most powerful individuals in society receive little legal protection in England; a defendant could be liable for a false statement even if he was unaware that it was false.”

Free speech has been a sacred right in the U.S., but with the Trump-tilting Supreme Court, the right could be in jeopardy. As it is, Abrams said, two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have indicated a willingness to rein in free speech. And you’ve got to wonder if justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh might not join those two.

If they did, it probably would come down to Justice Samuel Alito, who was nominated by President George W. Bush. In the past, he has been an advocate of free speech, and I certainly hope that continues. During an address to The Federalist Society in November 2020, Alito said: “We should all welcome rational, civil speech on important subjects even if we do not agree with what the speaker has to say.”

:: Closer to home, we Missouri residents are suffering under a governor who went to a new low recently by trying to capitalize on the unpopularity of “the press,” especially among conservatives.

In case you haven’t heard about this, here’s the gist…A tech-savvy reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered that Social Security numbers for Missouri teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible website operated by the state education department. (HTML code is the programming that tells the computer how to display a web page.)

Instead of rushing the story to press, the P-D took the responsible approach by informing state officials about the problem and promising not to publish a story until the problem was fixed.

But instead of commending the PD for its principled position and acknowledging there had been a problem, Gov. Mike Parson tore into the Post, calling the reporter “a hacker” and called on the Highway Patrol to investigate the incident for possible criminal prosecution.

Demonstrating true cowardice, Parson read his statement about the PD on Thursday, Oct. 14, and then walked away, refusing to take reporters’ questions.

Fortunately, Parson didn’t get any help from the Missouri National Education Association, which saw the situation for exactly what it was — a serious data breach. “It is important we take data security as seriously as physical security,” an association spokesman said.

What did all this really show? The ultimate hack is the governor.