Online news and (dis)information in the spotlight (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Disinformation may be the single greatest threat to American democracy, prosperity, and even our health. Without a common set of facts, it is nearly impossible to find agreement on our common destiny.
Disinformation permeates and poisons public discourse. Donald Trump’s Big Lie has undermined confidence in our elections; Facebook fuels climate denialism; and misinformation about vaccines has prolonged and exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is not a coincidence that the spread of disinformation has accelerated as independent news media has declined. Newspapers are now shutting down at the rate of two per week.
However, as much as I still love reading an honest broadsheet or a spicy tabloid, the solution to disinformation does not lie in traditional print media. The cost-efficiency and publishing speed of online journalism, combined with the comparative advantage of digital advertising, has permanently disrupted the media industry.
Many projects and experiments are underway to find ways to combat the disinformation crisis. Notably, independent digital platforms have demonstrated the ability to report the news with the same vigor as legacy media. Some of the strongest are nonprofits. In New York City, we have been blessed by the coverage of The City, Gothamist, and, of course, Gotham Gazette, among others. Elsewhere, MinnPost, the Texas Tribune, CTMirror, and dozens of other news sites have inherited journalism’s mission of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
These nonprofits depend on a mix of private philanthropy and low-dollar individual contributions. Private support is welcome but won’t scale to match the need for independent community-based media across the country.
Public goods require public support. It is past time that we expand the mission, and the budget, of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to support digital platforms. Since Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, the CPB has sustained public television and literally invented National Public Radio. And despite controversy (e.g., the recurrent “Big Bird” hearings), we are much the better for it.
As proposed by the Federation of American Scientists, the Knight Foundation, and others, Congress should recast CPB as the Corporation for Public Media. Give it the funding to catalyze robust online local news media platforms, and then steer clear of political interference by empowering local governance.
Disinformation is not the only cost of the decline of independent nonpartisan news media. It has also widened the window for government corruption.
Of course, supporting local independent news media, by itself, will not disrupt the damage disinformation causes. Congress must also regulate social media platforms in order promote transparency and restrain the spread of false and dangerous information. False speech about election administration should be made a crime. And foreign actors should be held accountable for interference in American elections.
But as Jefferson said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.” So does our health, our planet, and our democracy.
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Dan Goldman is a candidate for Congress in New York’s 10th Congressional District, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, and was chief House counsel in the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump. On Twitter @danielsgoldman.
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Oscar Garcia Rivera in 1937, the year he took office (photo: The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College)
Tuesday, June 28, 2022, marked an important shift in Latino politics in New York, represented in part by Assemblymember Jose Rivera’s Democratic primary loss to George Alvarez. The significance of Rivera’s defeat goes beyond an election loss by someone who has been in office for four decades. Rivera represents the last of what can be deemed a third generation of Puerto Rican Latino elected officials, someone who was part of a generation that paved the way for the younger generation of current Latino political leaders.
Many of these younger leaders and members of the city’s broader Latino communities may have little understanding of the significance of Rivera’s life and career. This lack of historical perspective, important for understanding the trajectory of Latino politics in New York, one filled with long and difficult struggle, was made evident to me in a conversation I had with one leader who expressed bewilderment when I mentioned that Fernando Ferrer was the first Latino to win the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty in New York. The young leader had no idea who Ferrer was.
Rivera’s loss represents yet another confirmation of a gargantuan historical and demographic shift taking place in Latino politics in New York. To understand how we, as Latinos, have arrived at this point, we must have perspective on, and appreciation of, the events and people that led us here.
The need to tell our political story as Latinos has been burning inside me for years and has only intensified since that conversation with the young leader last year, in light of Dianne Morales’ run for the mayoralty, debate over representation at the statewide level amid two lieutenant governor vacancies, and other recent developments.
The following presents an outline of what has become a book I am writing on the history of Latino politics in New York. Rivera’s defeat, like his victory over an Irish incumbent 40 years ago, has a history. And it must be told. Here’s a snapshot of it.
Puerto Rican Migration, Cigar Makers, and Numbers Runners, Oh My!
The history of Latino politics in New York is largely the history of Puerto Rican politics in New York. Though a new chapter in this history has been emerging, the fact remains that up until 1991, when Guillermo Linares became the first Dominican elected in the history of New York, almost all Latino elected officials in New York were Puerto Ricans.
The long and difficult struggle for Latino political representation begins 100 years ago with an unlikely cast of characters: cigar makers and numbers runners. By the mid-1920s, a large number of Puerto Ricans began to arrive on the shores of Gotham City. This first spurt of Puerto Rican migration was a direct result of the passage of the Jones Act in 1917, which forced on the island of Puerto Rico economic consequences that are still being felt today. Eight years after the Jones Act, an additional 40,000 Puerto Ricans arrived in New York, drastically increasing the community’s overall population from a mere 2,000 just a little over a decade before.
Most workers in the early Puerto Rican labor force were cigar-makers populating factories all over the city, including those like El Morito on 86th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, a location now surrounded by luxury high-rises and about a half-mile from East Harlem, which would become one of the early hubs of the Puerto Rican community.
The cigar-makers (tabaqueros) were a learned bunch. Bernardo Vega, one of the first to chronicle his life as a Puerto Rican migrant in New York post-1917, describes the type of colleagues he encountered at El Morito. There was Juan Hernandez, director of the workers’ paper, and Enrique Rosario Ortiz, Tomas Perez, and Matias Nieves, whom he describes as people active in the worker cause and in the wider Latino community. With such outstanding workers, it is no surprise to read from Vega that they hired lectors to read to all the workers for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Morning reading sessions were devoted to the latest news of the day. Afternoon readings were headier and included political and literary tomes.
The tabaqueros were not only learned, they were also extremely organized. These organizational abilities and structures are what eventually led to political recognition. The tabaqueros were instrumental in fighting for workers’ rights, fair wages, and fair labor practices. They organized a number of small strikes, which culminated in a bigger strike in 1919.
While the 1919 strike did not necessarily lead to improved conditions, employers and others could not ignore the tabaqueros—these Latino men (overwhelmingly Puerto Rican) were brilliant, conscious of their own value (as Puerto Ricans and as a labor force) and highly organized. Many took notice, including an Italian-American politician who would eventually become mayor of New York City, Fiorello LaGuardia.
Interestingly, many of these tabaqueros were socialists, including Bernardo Vega and Jesus Colon, another key figure in early Latino politics in New York. The workers’ cause became an impetus for embracing socialist principles, which Puerto Ricans in New York had brought with them from the island.
All this led Bernardo Vega to initiate the first Puerto Rican chapter of the Socialist Party in New York. Other prominent early groups, like the Alianza Obrera Puertorriqueña, became hubs for the gathering of Puerto Rican socialists. One fascinating fact about the early Puerto Rican socialists is that they believed in the necessity of coalition-building for the cause of economic justice. Thus these same groups invited over 200 Jewish socialists to partake in conversations around workers’ struggles both in Puerto Rico and New York.
Indeed, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist background has deep roots in early Puerto Rican politics in New York.
Puerto Ricans arriving in New York began to realize that in New York they would also face poor economic conditions, though perhaps not as severe as the conditions they had left behind. The economic struggles made early efforts to organize politically a daunting task. Effective organizing meant proper funding. Where would an economically struggling community turn?
Besides the tabaqueros, numbers runners (boliteros) were pivotal in what would become the early efforts in Latino politics in New York. The boliteros were among the early financial backers of the first Puerto Rican political clubs and organizations. One of these boliteros was Carlos Tapia, whom Nestor David Pastor would describe as the Puerto Rican Luke Cage. Tapia, with his linebacker size, was instrumental in the struggle for political empowerment and in defending Puerto Ricans against racism and police brutality. He would go on to co-found one of the very early Puerto Rican Democratic clubs in New York, the Betances Democratic Club in Brooklyn.
Tapia owned his own bodegas and restaurants and would go on to push these same clubs and organizations to cease receiving funding from the boliteros. By that point, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Puerto Rican political organizations had garnered enough experience and channeled enough energy to gain the attention and support of some of the Democratic County organizations in the city.
Right alongside, and often in front of, these men were pioneering Puerto Rican women who also dedicated their lives to the social and political empowerment of Puerto Ricans. Noteworthy among these women is Antonia Denis. Unfortunately, not much information remains about Denis’ life and work.
All of the early pioneers are gone and very little documentation remains of the efforts of Denis and others. What we do know is that Denis was instrumental in the start of the Betances club as well as other political and cultural organizations and that she was known to be a one-woman voter registration and voter turnout champion.
Denis also was a pivotal figure in the early efforts to commemorate Puerto Rican culture and contributions through cultural festivities like the Puerto Rican Day parade. Fortunately, some audio recordings of interviews exist at the Center for Brooklyn History; they document Denis’ work, and she can be deemed the first instrumental Puerto Rican woman in Latino politics in New York.
The fruitful efforts of the early political organizing efforts, coupled with the continued increase in the Puerto Rican population of New York, would lead to actual political representation. It was a slow and gradual process, but by 1937 these efforts would lead to the election of the first Latino elected in the history of New York, Puerto Rican Oscar Garcia Rivera.
Garcia Rivera, a St. John’s Law School graduate, would go on to serve in the State Assembly, representing the 17th Assembly District in East Harlem, now the 68th District.
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Eli Valentin is a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @EliValentinNY.
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Clinton Correctional (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Starting July 18, 2022, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) has implemented a new statewide policy restricting the rights of incarcerated individuals to receive packages from loved ones. The revised policy – Directive #4911A – requires that all packages be shipped directly from vendors, and in-person visitors will no longer be allowed to ship or bring packages from home. This measure will further isolate incarcerated individuals from loved ones and curtail their access to fresh foods, homemade goods, and religious necessities.
Our offices strongly oppose this directive, as we did with a similar pilot program in 2017-2018. It is our shared belief that Directive #4911A will not stop the smuggling of contraband and will instead impose unnecessary financial burdens on the families of the incarcerated and result in hazardous disruptions to the incarcerated population.
DOCCS began trial implementation of Directive #4911A within the Wende Hub of western New York this May. In a memorandum dated April 25, 2022, this policy is described as a necessary step to "make the system safer and aid in reducing overdoses, violence and overall rehabilitation of the population." The Prison Violence Task Force cites contraband as a leading cause of violence, however, these findings have not been made available to the public or to us, the committee Chairs overseeing corrections in the State Legislature.
According to current regulations, all packages that enter a correctional facility are subject to search by x-ray, scanners, and physical inspection. We cannot verify that the “solution” DOCCS has implemented will stop contraband or decrease facility violence. The Correctional Association of New York (CANY), an independent state-authorized oversight body, has informed us that multiple FOIL requests for data regarding facility violence have been delayed. This lack of transparency leads us to the concerning suspicion that DOCCS is using the package policy punitively against the incarcerated population and their loved ones.
Directive #4911A limits the number of food packages that incarcerated individuals may receive to three per month. This arbitrary limit fails to account for the varied shipping methods that different vendors use. If a vendor splits a single package into three shipments, this will max out the monthly allotted packages for that incarcerated individual. Commissaries are not sufficient at most facilities and many incarcerated individuals rely on food packages.
We are deeply concerned that vendors' lack of standardization and regulation will increase tension and stress in correctional facilities. The further destabilization of routines, already exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, may in fact lead to an increase in violence, which this directive purportedly aims to decrease.
Before the implementation of Directive #4911A, our offices received dozens of concerned letters, emails, and phone calls from incarcerated individuals and their families. Families expressed financial, mental, and emotional apprehension. Where previously they could pack and deliver care packages within their means, they are now forced to factor in new and ever-increasing vendor fees and shipping costs. Families of the incarcerated already face heavy financial burdens in travel and must now budget to afford vendors’ charges. Since the test implementation in the Wende hub, we have continued to hear from individuals and families distraught over the added burdens this policy creates.
Vendors are an unnecessary go-between, and any delivery delays may result in spoiled fruits, vegetables, and other food items. Incarcerated individuals with religious diets (e.g., Halal, Kosher, or vegetarian) may not have timely access to their specialized foods in accordance with their practices. Additionally, specific religious articles may be difficult to access through vendors – or may never be in stock. Directive #4911A creates obstacles for incarcerated individuals to freely practice their religious beliefs.
As the Chairs of the Senate and Assembly committees overseeing our corrections system, we sent a joint letter to DOCCS Acting Commissioner Anthony Annucci in early June requesting clarification on our wide-ranging concerns regarding Directive #4911A. No response has been received by either office.
Any solution to the issues of contraband must reflect a more holistic approach, not one that serves primarily to penalize families and disrupt a crucial point of connection between the incarcerated population and their loved ones. Our policies must make the burdens of incarceration less onerous. We are happy to work with DOCCS on developing real solutions.
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Assemblymember David Weprin represents parts of Queens and is Chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Correction. Senator Julia Salazar represents parts of Brooklyn and is Chair of the Senate’s Committee on Crime and Correction. On Twitter @DavidWeprin & @JuliaCarmel_.
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